Poetry as Resurrection

Alda Merini (Milan, March 21, 1931 – November 1, 2009) was an Italian poet, and one of the greatest. From 1964 to 1972, she was interned in a psychiatric hospital; thereafter, the periods of wellbeing and illness came and went, which was likely due to the bipolar disorder she was diagnosed with in 1967. Her experience gave rise to intense works, including her masterpiece: La Terra Santa [The Holy Land]. Marco Campedelli, known as “Don Chiodo” to her, who was her friend and received many of her poems dictated over the phone, tells her story in the book Il Vangelo secondo Alda Merini [The Gospel According to Alda Merini] (Claudiana).

On the table of the mortuary, where they dissect the words of poets, they no longer found the poetry of Alda Merini. As if in some kind of divine combustion, only burn marks remained on the shroud. Of the words, there was no trace. This is how I imagine the resurrection of this impertinent poetry, the flight of the bird “from the gentle white belly” that escapes the traps of criticism and religion. Some have unleashed the hounds to track down the fleeing poetry. They turned Alda’s medical files upside down, eager to find in her psychiatric illness the secret code of her fingerprints. However, they are on the wrong path. It would be better if they looked for clues in the ancient tragedies, where others like her have left divine burns. It is the same “madness” that afflicts the women of myth: the Cassandra of Aeschylus, the Antigone of Sophocles, and the Medea of Euripides. Alternatively, in the depths of the Gospel, where Jesus is called the “fool”, the “out of himself” (ex-stasis), as written in the oldest of the Gospel stories, that of Mark.

What generates astonishment and even fear is the boundlessness of the verse that comes at the reader and could crush them. The words that rebel against the bureaucracy of the line, the square, and jump, so as to escape control.

It is the bourgeois illness that has struck the words, under the rigid control of power. No earthquake, no disruption, no “catastrophe”, as she believed Christ was for the mediocre calculators, can disturb the false calm of indifference. Alda Merini’s poetry, however, escaped this true madhouse of social and academic control. She rejected the measure of the possible in favor of the boundlessness of the impossible. Only this allowed her to tune into the “outside”, into the “exceeding divine”, into the landscape of the invisible. Thus, with this risky pursuit, she arrived in Mary’s secret room, to see the blue of an angel’s wing and the rumble of its divine engine. There, Alda met “the Mother, / the one who with me /ate the earth of the asylum / believing it to be divine fodder / the one who bound herself at the feet of the son/ to be dragged with him on the cross...”.

The apparent paradox is that Merini reached the heights, not by renouncing the body, but through its “divine keyboards” (David Maria Turoldo). It is indeed the control of the body that generates control over the word. Nevertheless, it is precisely through the body that Alda Merini escapes from prison, from the high walls of control, from the fences of “political correctness”.

Only in this way does Alda enter Magdalene’s body, on a plane of overlapping axes, which link her to the sinner: “I know, you would have held me to your heart /and all the wounds /
that these rapists inflicted / have closed [...] How my wounds burned, Lord. / [...] I was so untouched, Lord, / before your gaze / that you saw and chose the first disciple” (from Cantico dei Vangeli [Song of the Gospels]).

This guilty overlap, from a patriarchal vision in which the sinner would have undermined Magdalene’s authority, becomes in Merini’s work there  a sort of poetic and political rehabilitation of women, who have been humiliated and violated by power, hence there’s a definitive inclusion of women in the space of the divine.

From here, I imagine Merini could launch her invective against the bourgeois habit of confining feelings and evicting love from the home. “But you, Pharisees, with your insults [...] You will never understand what a madness of love is”, because “I think that all lovers are martyrs, all lovers are in Christ, all lovers are in God”.

In the daytime and nighttime hours, for many years I received Alda Merini’s poetic dictations. It was that celestial measure that mixed unease with a kind of euphoria. It was each time a leap beyond the fence that return to the origin of poetry or to the poetry of the origin. That word out of control, akin to the divine word.

It was the divine strength of women. I realized this when I accompanied a young Iranian woman to Merini who was writing her thesis on “The Poetry of Alda Merini and Sufi Mysticism” (this story is told in a broader reflection of mine dedicated to Alda’s poetry, The Gospel According to Alda Merini, published by Claudiana, Turin). It was May 21, 2008. The girl’s name was Mahtab Ali Mohammadi Malaieri, who was both deaf and blind. To communicate with her, one had to write on the palm of her hand. In the dialogue between these two women, I witnessed the divine combustion of poetry, which burns the hands, of her rotating body, of that “Jesus with a woman’s heart” that Alda would draw on Mathan’s palm, that divine teacher who “dragged his long bridal train”.

When my father died, Alda dictated a poem to me in which death and love chased each other.
“Father, my greatest sin/ was to pray to God/ so that you wouldn’t die/ (…) I can no longer speak to you/ I will no longer have anyone to tell my secrets. / I have returned to being a child. / How giant death is/ in front of a child-man” (August 17, 2005).

In front of the “giantness” of death, I felt all the disproportion of the child, his tin sword facing the immeasurable. From there, I too chose between the “small, small bourgeois” and the “minimal and immense” measure of poetry, between staying inside the enclosure of “common sense” and the “ex-stasis”, the divine outside, the wild dance of Alda. I have not regretted it yet.

by Marco Campedelli
Theologian, writer, and friend of Alda Merini