Pasolini And The Permanent Present

Barry Schwabsky at The Point:

One of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s remarkable early accomplishments was the long poem that lent its title to his 1961 collection of poetry, La Religione del mio tempo, or “The Religion of My Time.” And while religion was many things to Pasolini, what he was most religiously devoted to might have been the idea of being of his time. His writing—whether in the form of poetry, fiction or polemic, among which he passionately blurred the distinctions—staked a great deal on immediacy. In this sense it was close to speech: an intervention in the moment as much as a message for futurity.

In Italy, it was Pasolini’s words that succeeded in cutting into the times like a knife. His seemingly insatiable need to play a public role through his art as well as beyond it was viewed with suspicion by many of his contemporaries, who saw a dangerous parallel with the early twentieth-century career of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the self-promoting inventor of a cult of action that prized immediacy. After the First World War, D’Annunzio organized a group of Italian nationalists and seized Fiume, formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and wrote a city charter that prefigured fascism.

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