Pier Paolo Pasolini, director and poet of international fame, was killed in 1975 on the Ostia shore - a few kilometres outside of Rome - on the night between All Saints’ Day and All Souls’. The assassin, a "boy of the world" , a mere seventeen-year old at the time, had confessed to have at first clubbed him savagely and then ending it all by rolling over his chest with the car stolen at the same Pasolini. According to the autopsy report his death was reportedly caused by "the tearing up of the chest". This would be, inconsonantly enough, the radix of the onslaught. But among the multifarious questions with their sheaf of possible clues still not answered one may prod at vital queries of axiomatic rank: had the boy taken action independently? Did other persons give him a hand? If so, had the assault been prepared in advance? And with whom? The answer to these four questions would provide the clue to this thriller. Meanwhile, despite continuous denials, the death of the writer has approached the penumbral concept edges of Conundrum sloping onto the Sacred. The Conundrum might be the "Mysterion" announced by Passolini in Petrolio , the Mysterion as "mystical, resolute, vital, thoroughly positive and orgiastic, the requisite epigraph" of his entire work, now a spectral likeness billowing in front of our eyes. Howbeit, in a society as agnostic as ours, the epiphany of the sacred is sparse and nearly all abstruse deed glossed over. Fathomable enough, therefore, the perception by the media of the death of the author of Salo and Le centoventi giornate di Sodoma,( The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom)--a scandalous, clamorous death, predictable enough for a homosexual, sadomasochistic proviso, suicide per catchpole, political transgression. This last version seems to be also the most trustworthy one considering the flickering incriminations he was proffering against the Christian Democrat government on the front pages of the most important daily papers. Still and all, everybody, whether enemies or friends, television spokespersons or literary critics, were at length prone on pinpointing the odd circumstances of his death to the overall opus of the artist and thus doomed to become the slagheap of general oblivion. A punctilious scrutiny of Pasolini’s literary corpus conveys, on the whole, the tally of prefatory and conclusive facts about his tragic end--its timing, wording and mode--all coherently outlined in minute alignment: the day, the year, the football yard, the shores of the sea of Ostia, ultimately the Sunday (that corresponds once every six years to All Saints’ Day); everything had been punctiliously delineated like a strange urge to impart the unutterable to the world. The Manifesto per un nuovo teatro(Manifesto for a New Theatre), Manifestar, Bestia da Stile( A Beast with Style), Coccodrili(Crocodiles), The Editor’s Note in La divina Mimesis(The Divine Mimesis), the ebullient contamination with verse of Giovanni in Patmos, together with some poems called Communicato all’Ansa bear witness to it. Since the writer’s countless anticipations on his behaviour cannot be discarded as sheer coincidence, neither could the outlandish terminology used as means of communication (which reveal the author’s anxiety to reveal something) be tagged as nuncupative opulence, but rather be considered as a design aiming at a discerning of the Before from the After. Not a Before separated from the After, but rather an amalgamation of the two, an interface (as René Berger would put it) between what is ending and what is beginning. From precisely this semantic perspective would Pasolini announce his death "on the seashores / where life originates again". After the author’s death, a desisting conclusion seems prevalent–superposing his death onto a premeditated performance. Trasumanar e organizzar (Transhumanizing and Organisation), the unsettling title of a poetry collection, is the kernel of meaning – it sums up a streak of thought not at all emptied of its sense of humour. Attaching the two verbs creates a semantical sphere–quoting Passolini who suggests to his interviewer that « the transgression is the other facet of organisation»--and thus we get Transgression and Organisation, where «trasumanar», i.e. «transhumanizing» is the Italian intransitive verb which actually means acquiring an experience of a highly spiritual value–see St.Paul on Damascus Street–and joins the root of the verb «organise». Pasolini’s violent death would thus appear to have been rather «organised» than fortuitous: organised, planned the way an artist is shaping out and experimenting his own language. From this perspective, it would appear very much like a contumely-oozing onslaught and definitely not a retreat-in-combat scheme. Performance, not lassitude. Cultural, as opposed to natural death. If thus that End is also a Beginning, it cannot be defined any other way but « atoning ». Following the pattern of the human oblations offered by the ancient farmers in the hope of better crops ( see the film Medea ), the self-sacrifice in Pasolini’s case seems to pledge for his « true life to be » : the cultural life in people’s memory. A death with a value as such – the author says it himself in Petrolio -- has its value at the pinnacle of the work of art, at the very cross-roads of unfolding overall truth. « It’s sense – he says [ the sense of his work of art illuminated by the sacramental act ] is acrimonious, scathing, beguiling ( yet not less sacred for that matter ). Pasolini highlights the cultural purpose of death (his own) with the following aphorism: « The phoneme without the feat is a wholly different semanteme » ; a phrase that seems to obviously evince the sequential significance of the phoneme (the symbol of the whole, the written and spoken work of art and implicitly the audio-visual) completed by the feat (completed by death)is a wholly different semanteme (attains a different significance). It is calamitous to conclude, by using an approach as ambiguous as such, that for Pasolini death (his own) is a « sign », likewise the very sign of an expressive functionality. He finds the metaphor for this function via the film editing. Editing a motion picture is the act of abridging the miles of impregnated negative to the essential and significant bits. Death, retrospectively, carries out the same procedure: restrict the amount of gestures, words and deeds of a certain person to a minimum that would « transform a life into a story ». In this light, the action inflicted by Pasolini’s death to his work-of-art-life should be considered as a stylistic and therefore expressive act–analogous to editing a motion picture. The result designates the film director. This belief is the framework to Pasolini’s theorising on his death as an act of oblation of the director to the effect of self-resolution, as supremely revealing, also as the «ultimate linguistic-existential communication », in the sense that death, when premeditated, is nevertheless a mere digression of the need to endure in life, a « semantic transsubstantion » of the opus, the one that positions it–as Pasolini says—at the core of a manifold meaning, a very accretion of significants. Nevertheless, if a death endorsed by such cultural value speaks, allowing the director to express himself (« The saints even converse silently with their bodies and their blood ») should therefore be able to coalesce into a « Semiology generated from reality as language ». This is the general semiology that Pasolini thinks and invokes in Empirismo cretico. In one of his writings of 1970, The Unpopular Cinema, the poet-director gives substance to his idea of death while canvassing over the meaning of the word « liberty » : « Liberty. After having really and thoroughly pondered over this mysterious word I understood that that it doesn’t mean anything else, in the long run, but the liberty to choose death. [...] A liberty as such cannot be manifest in any other way but through a great or small martyrdom. And each martyr is being martyred via this conserving onslaught ». Hence the term « conserving » with its sense of social and cultural survival attached to it. « Liberty is therefore–as Pasolini puts it—a self-destructive endeavour for conservation ». Now, should we want to restore the whole meaning of the word « exhibition », a quotation (from A Beast with Style, a highly autobiographical playwright) fully mirroring Pasolini’s anticipation comes in handy: « Especially because ‘tis holiday[the poet was killed on a Sunday]/ Thus as a protest I want to die from abatement/ I want them to find me with my sex out/ my socks stained with white semen, among/ the shreds stained with the liquid colour blood. » The writer’s corpse was found exactly in this condition. It is therefore obvious that the «crave to die» had in him the same necessity as that of being a poet « more modern than all moderns ». Thus the two cadences managed to commingle to the extent of forming a (dual) force that irresistibly carried him towards the most ignominious proceeding of linguistic-existential dictum. A wholly new creative act, so new that it would make «look wan any other already-experienced idea of novelty». His thoughts riveted towards the future, his staunch decision already taken, Pasolini declaims this act on one of the pages in Petrolio: « While I was mapping out and writing my novel, I also tried to grasp the sense of reality and take possession of it, yet at the very core of the creative act that all this insinuated I was trying to liberate myself from it all, therefore to die. To die inside my creation: to die as you die of dissolution...» To die of dissolution means, in this case, expiring while creating, pass away while throwing light on something, cease to exist by expressing oneself. «Either express oneself and die or remain unexpressed and immortal» is the «self-exhortation towards the infinite» that sums up all «Pasolini». A self-exhortation –to be determined—where the «immortal» end (which would put Freud in rapture) does not allude to the immortality of Dante or Shakespeare, but simply means «not dying». The director makes known this archaic and hallowed idea of death-rebirth –in this case the necessity to die in order to express oneself—in the epigraph to the poem The Day of My Death (1974) while quoting St. John: «If the grain of wheat fallen on the ground shall not die, it shall endure by itself, but if it dies it shall bear fruit.» Pasolini finds the force to bring his project to an end in the Myth. Pasolini was a staunch believer in the power and efficacy of the myth, just as a Catholic believes in the miracle of the Eucharist. «Everything realistic is mythical and vice versa». This is the answer he used to give to Jean Duflot while accused by the latter of opening the doors to the myth and turning his back to any form of reality. Now, the very idiosyncrasy of the myth lies in its unveiling as reality, not as a fable or narration of the impossible – and this is the way it is also perceived from the interior in Pasolini’s case. Should I have to delineate Pier Paolo’s manner of thinking, I would say that the technical-rational-empirical method tends to overlap with the symbolical-mythological-magical. Nevertheless, his extreme modernity lies in this very overlapping. «I am a force of the past –he was saying—yet more modern than anything modern.» It is exactly in this sense that the whole of the director-poet’s work is an unrelenting mythological account--set up on the particular, the actual as opposed to the general and the abstract. It is always himself that provides the mould, sets the example; just like he is the only character in his theatre, films or poems to accomplish any pragmatic acts or create a story. But this hero –needless to say—is, invariably enough, a mythical figure: the Christ in The Evangile According to Matthew or Ciappelletto in the Decameron. Even with regard to Kennedy’s death he has a nearly Socratic aphorism: «By dying, Kennedy expressed himself via his extreme action». Again, when he talks about death on a theoretical level, he does not voice out philosophical standpoints but rather the poet’s specific work of testifying. Pasolini accordingly thinks that by elaborating his expressive technique with a thorough faith in the efficacy of the myth actually makes him run a mortal peril. «Will I have to account for my diabolical discernment of the attractions identified in the structure of the myth in the valley of Josaphath?» Technique and myth identify themselves jointly in him. Thinking of celebration, of the myth of creation (the cosmological myth that foreruns all creations, including the artistic creation), Pasolini is awaiting a miracle, or an illness – or, for that matter, a car accident–that could sustain his accomplishment of the Progetti/Projects in due time and respecting all the minute details he had cast. In a ditty entitled Project of Future Works he ponders: «What if the Chaos should shape itself all of a sudden into impressionable clarity...». The impressionable clarity is the one typical of the barely created Universe. And the progress from Chaos to the Universe is remembered by humans via a cosmogony–hence the ritual oration and the Repetition. The poet talks to himself nearly dreaming and then concludes: «If then, by chance, a cancer would make me kick off, it would mean that I would have vanquished that reality of things [the fact]». Confronted with such a peril, Pasolini knows how to play everything for everything: by using, obviously enough, the means of «action, irrationalism, pragmatism, religion» which are, as he puts it, «the most negative and perilous bequests of my civility». Nevertheless, his name shall endure like a light in «the only true life to come», i.e. ceaselessly. «During the first half of my life I had sown the Plant of Passion[...], during the second one the Plant of Play». In March 1969, while fully into his «headlong vitality», he makes the following asseverations: «The sacred is always dangerous, one knows/ for the one who enters its confines without a preparation: / without having accomplished the movements of approach. / I have accomplished all these movements myself, / a stalwart cleric, then a student of theology./ Of all their derision I only have a poetic vague idea. / Nevertheless I have contrived some verse / for praying in these sacred space / (where, to be honest, I do not pace barefoot)». The verb «entrust» needs no clarification, and the «verses» are to be put in a relation with this prophecy: «I shall fade away in a verse». Which means: «I shall die while making poetry» («Or to express oneself and die or endure unexpressed and immortal»). The very verse we are talking about are Iago’s last words: «Demand me nothing : what you know, you know :/ From this time forth I never will speak word». It is –as Pasolini says – an «ontological knowledge: the knowledge of being». After which comes only the «candent sheen» of death. The fact that Pasolini subsequently did not walk with his bare feet in the «sacred demesne» of the football grounds of Ostia is known by everyone: judges, solicitors, and journalists. Still, none of the above have given any attention to the fact that Ostia means «consecrated victim».

Cervignano del Friuli, 14 maggio 1996
Translated from Italian by Simone Kuhn

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