Il Sogno di Campaldino
Illustrated film and theater screenplay
By Giovanni Enrico Arrighini
Associazione Città Infinite - Via delle Conce, 10 - lucca 55100 C.F. / P.IVA 02250360464 - info@ilsognodicampaldino.it
When poetry becomes the most plausible hypothesis
A small critical note on Il Sogno di Campaldino
by Giuseppe Cordoni
Love thou thy dream
All base love scorning,
Love thou the wind
And here take warning
That dreams alone can truly be,
For 'tis in dream I come to thee.
(Ezra Pound)
That in every age human intelligence has applied most of its best talents to the techniques of war remains a mystery of iniquity on evil power. Even more disconcerting is a paradox of meaning that it has even come to define it as an art. An oxymoron: the Art of War! Since it is always devoted to causing death and destruction, completely irreconcilable with the other Arts, all destined to the service of life.
Generating the consciousness of Beauty, healing infirmities and laying the necessary foundations for every harmonious relationship between individuals and between states. This is why this improper art (war) and Poetry have always been in conflict, in a perennial clash with no way out.
And this is precisely the Leitmotiv that feeds and runs through this very singular stage adaptation of Giovanni Enrico Arrighini's Il Sogno di Campaldino, according to which they, the poets, are the irreducible resisters to the demolishing evidence of inexplicable Evil: 'So they invent their stories / to live and die a thousand times'. And perhaps they can succeed in their intent, since for each of them what Pierre Reverdy asserts about their specific spiritual condition applies: 'The poet finds himself in a difficult and often dangerous position, at the crossroads of two cruelly sharp planes, that of the dream and that of reality'. Hungry for being and dismayed by Nothingness, he cannot but prefigure through dreamlike means the slightest opening of freedom that would lead us beyond the obtuse wall of that 'truth', for which war continues to be an inestimable calamity, as if it were an almost natural occurrence and therefore, without scandal, acceptable.
Moreover, he understands his life is nothing more than a perpetual dream: he is called to nothing other than to dream reality and to make its perception actionable. That reality which, unfortunately, remains invisible to the multitudes but which then imposes itself as the most unequivocal and profound. So, it is not his own and individual salvation that he looks to, but rather to enter the furrow of the great common dream to which, despite themselves, all men aspire confusedly or even without their knowledge. He accepts the reality of the dream of those who precede him to hand over the baton in his race to the other dreamer who comes along. So, that, even when the battle rages, mercy may not be lacking; and on the field, the incurable dreamer, someone may wander with the signs of the human: the medical art that soothes, the prayer that consoles, the hope of a song that frees us.
These are the indisputable effects of what poetry, understood in its broadest sense, humbly knows how to give us. And Arrighini here makes them effectively palpable, by virtue of his concise symbolic vision that gives the stage action a flexibility free from any anchorage to the contingency of truth. Suspended as it is in this volatile dreamlike dimension, it proceeds by waves of memory that chase each other or, if you like, by pictures that, at first sight, seem to appear and dissolve without a precise link. But then, precisely in their apparent wandering from one era to another, from one war to another, from one character to another, they investigate the same underlying sense: that of wanting to reveal to us the essence and authenticity of the dream with which we place ourselves as a barrier to the devastation of Nothingness: 'Love thou thy dream / all base love scorning'. Because, with the loss of its inspiration, men lose all preconception of what Paradise is and end up being content with and accustomed to the horrid Hell into which they are badly dragged.
The keystone is therefore the figure of the poet himself, humiliated and in chains, pointed at as an enemy, passed off as a madman (Ezra Pound), reduced to the anonymity of a number: Patient 11011972 and interned in the Washington asylum. It is he who, having to imagine a thousand lives in order not to die, as an extreme gesture of freedom, dives into an infinity ocean of all that is still dreamable; and thus triggers that chain reaction that overcomes space-time and arrives at the idea of a Paradise of saved beauty. To an immortal Venice suspended on the echo of all the music that has enveloped it: 'Until is its loveliness become unto me/a thing of tears'¹.
From the lazy black fumes that spew the chimneys in front of the asylum in which he is imprisoned to the storm clouds that envelop the battle of Campaldino in which the young Dante is called upon to risk “damning himself” by becoming a soldier. Here he is, the Ezra Pound of the Night Litany to a Venice emblem of all the threatened beauty of the world, transmigrating and incarnating himself in each of the main characters of this play. Or, to put it better, here he is, crossing their war-torn conscience: so much so that he foresees (he, who seems to have already lived, felt and suffered everything) to what mortal risk, even before their very lives, their dream of salvation is now exposed; and how what was their vision of vital fullness is instead becoming a thing of tears.
For the author, the price of fidelity and coherence with one's own salvific dream always implies a mortgage on the soul. And, in order not to be damned, it is necessary to be able to accept the fluidity of our earthly existence and not expect us to impose any domination on creatures and things.
Thus, woe to the guy, a boatman on the Arno, who barters his soul with the devil in exchange for the vigour of eternal youth. Woe to Buonconte da Montefeltro who has 'lived only one life / always with weapons in his fist'. Woe to Vieri dei Cerchi who imposes himself on everyone while he is unable to command that vanity of his that reduces him, unchangeable, forever a prisoner of himself.
On the contrary, these are the characters that an innate poetic grace sets free. As mobile as they are, permeable, open and ready to change their existence and transfer what they feel with the feelings of those they cross on their path (while the armoured ones in their presumed identity blindly continue to make war on themselves). These are the people who trust in the possible: like Eliseo with his many lives and Dante and Cecco Angiolieri and the old woman who searches for magic herbs and the little girl who dreams in front of the moon and even her cat, whose fur changes colour all the time.
Finally, Arrighini enhances this contrast between rigidity and movement, death and life, violence and harmony with a complex and singular stylistic result. In fact, the structural originality of this play is all played out in an agile synthesis of multiple expressive registers overlapping and harmonized: the corporeity of the actor, the plasticity of a poetic word almost set to music' metrically, the concomitant fleetingness of the projected image. With a decidedly synaesthetic effect on the spectator, who is also dragged through the concreteness and evanescence of an elusive dream.
Pietrasanta, 15 February 2021
Giuseppe Cordoni
¹EZRA POUND, Night litany (1908),