Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Sex, Consolation For Misery

Sex, consolation for misery!
The whore is queen, her throne a ruin,
her land a piece of shitty field,
her sceptre a purse of red patent leather:
She barks in the night,
dirty and ferocious as an ancient mother:
she defends her possessions and her life.
The pimps are swarming around
bloated and beat
with their Brindisi or Slavic moustaches
are leaders, rulers:
in the dark they make their hundred lire deals,
winking in silence, exchanging passwords,
the world, excluded,remains silent
about those who have excluded themselves,
silent carcasses of predators.

But from the world's trash
a new world is born,
new laws are born
in which honor is dishonor,
a ferocious nobility and power is born
in the piles of hovels
in the open spaces
where one thinks the city ends
and where instead it begins, again, hostile,
begins again a thousand times,
with bridges and labyrinths,
foundations and diggings,
behind a surge of skyscrapers
covering whole horizons.

In the ease of love
the wretch feels himself a man,
builds up faith in life,
ands despising all who have a different life.
The sons throw themselves into adventure
secure in a world which fears them and their sex.
Their piety is in being pitiless,
their strength is their lightness,
their hope is having no hope.

Sesso, Consolazione Della Miseria, Pier Paolo Pasolini

4 comments:

Alok said...

nice, the common opinion at least with the poets seems to be that it is actually a source of misery... :)
nice poem by the way...

Have you read Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles? He writes on the same subject, sex as a consolation and also source of lot of misery in the world.

Kubla Khan said...

Yes, it is a nice poem. i don't know if you agree, but there is rage in this poem softened by this thought of conquering that who robs.it is typical of pasolini, who uses brutal images in his movies too. you wrote once on Salo......the same idea of combating and showing evil, of dispossession through a future liberation, as when he says here of a future city, a new dream. this poem, typically shows Pasolini as a committed artist, welding mythic socialistic utopias and showing clearly where his sympathies lie.
i like this poem because it liberates too in the end.
No, i haven't read Houellebecq at all!
which book do you recommend?

Alok said...

I agree with what you say about him. A utopian political project wedded to deeply personal and subjective worldview.. this is what I find so interesting in his works. Also the way his films and poetry reconcile conflicting worldviews and theories... sexuality, marxism, religion, struggle against injustice and deprivation, rage against the emptiness and smugness of affluent lives.. and so many other things.

I don't know if you will like Houellebecq... I remain non-committal myself but will concede happily that he has a lot of interesting things to says about the life in modern and advanced western societies. anyway his most famous and the best book is The Elementary Particles. In England it was published as Atomised.

Some more links and reviews here.

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