Written for the friend Adelio Maronati in 1983
To Adelio
“A consumed gold, a cold glass: this nearby breath is a cloud.
It wants to last. The stone is absent. The man loved.”
Vícente Aleixandre
“Here the stone is solitary, with a vast and grey spirit
And you, you have walked without day’s arrival.”
Yves Bonnefoy
“Nothing is built on stone, everything on sand, but we should build as if the sand were stone.”
Jorge Luis Borges
Now that the stones have contracted, that the iron has stopped sculpting the other surface, that the enchantment has enveloped depths of light, I ask you where is the stone on which the gull rests, why do no brambles grow in these crevices or leaves lie on them, and the scorpion and the pomegranate are lost? Beyond this place where myth breathes – stone garden dedicated to the madness of Suibhne – you have also dreamed of big oaks, tormented olive trees, troubled vines, have eaten orchids, dried vats, kissed faces, caressed bosoms. You have imagined dim corridors with white and motionless ghosts, black dogs, tremblings of virgins among the anxieties of the flowers. Yours is the choice to believe that in the stone likes the heart of Adam, red and earthy, and that the sword of gold is not enclosed in the night.
So where did you banish the mirror that tied you to god? Nearby runs the river that accompanied your infancy – a thought complementarity?
It is true: colour does not befit the stone. It is the one who claims solitude, the one to whom the surroundings belong as the apprehension of the surface belongs to the earth. Its signs are hardness, roughness and eternity. The stone does not speak of symbols: it is sacred. Sculpture may tempt it – I love Romanesque – but it is only from impatience, from not wanting to wait – it would be eternity for man – to decompose like the leaf of the alchemist to become earth. It is a work that speaks only of space: positions without centre, directions without a way, surfaces without colour, the matter that fixes gravity, are its signs. Volumes and proportions, modulated as though they belonged to a long-gone ritual, anticipate an invisible line. But the line that the sword marks is akin to it and is the same one that unites the void to the grain of sand, to the sphere of granite, to infinity. Tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron are incidents of its transformation. A delicate sense of hearing cannot distinguish the time of a kiss.
After the meander of Brivio, in the old mill, there is still the ancient stone: move it elsewhere to make it a place of light as you have done here. Its presence will make the river become an image of memory, its form an unbounded cosmos, its hole an ear attentive to the sounds of things that the myths have removed. The amulet hanging from the neck, symbol of heaven and earth, although similar, conceals with that smooth colour the certainty that in that empty hole, between heaven and earth, there is a human face that watches the sea: it is not made of stone.
The tense dialogue of these stones – inside and outside, full and empty – reminds me of the story you told me in the tavern in via Magolfa: Ullikummi, the man of stone, born from the womb of a mountain, who grew to the vault of the sky to destroy it and cause the downfall of the gods. The river still bears the madness of Suibhne, the sea bears adrift heroic enterprises, the doors of the house speak of the return of the prodigal son. Only lightning stones fall from the sky, black stones, and it was not in a dream that Jacob erected one of them to the heaven: desire for separation, expectation, communion? In any case desire for hope. The line you wanted will be seen only by the man of the Seventh Seal. It is a presence that bears the gaze to the river, now that its flow, when the first mists of September mark the intervals between things, leads to a fuller resonance with the landscape. Intermittent images appear and dissolve without events, only a continuous weave of sensations. The woman ‘with the face of sculpted stone… who came from the sea’ would find her silence in these dawns.