After reading a book, whether it is a poetic collection, essay, novel or philosophical text, I wonder if during the reading I have processed my own thoughts or I let myself be kidnapped by the author’s thought, from his feelings, from his life to forget mine and assume his.
In short, if I have reflected or have entrusted myself to him deceiving me to reflect.
I wonder because often, rereading nothing of mine returns, nothing that has changed my way of seeing life. And then I realize that what I felt at first reading was a passing from him to me, without him upsetting my life but had deposited his being inside mine, as a suitcase of a loved one in a song and there remains closed. In short, a clutter that remains extraneous if not for the volume it occupies and for that familiar air, often affective, that surrounds it and overflows through the leather that enclosed its contents.
In the same way, looking at the cover I tell myself that I read it and I can still smell it and the thread that leads me back to the author’s soul and the subject. Opening the book and starting to read again, I return to feel the strangeness with my life and that process of penetration that I already felt at first reading. Now I am more aware that he is talking and not I, I observe the form of it I measure the appropriateness and appropriateness of the subject, I start to evaluate it critically, with the awareness that each evaluation is subjective.
But at this point I am terrified to notice that this is exactly what I do with my writings.
At first, I seem to have written the masterpiece of my life, but rereading it, I examine the form, I compare it with the content and since I wrote it, I realize, or I have the presumption to notice, which is inadequate to the strength of the feelings from which it was aroused.
I try to touch up here and there, to correct certain expressions, to make them more significant.
But it stays me like a wave of despair at my inability to fully express myself. A wave created by the immediacy of the verses written.
Reflecting subsequently on what I have written, I realize that there is an equality between feeling and the written word, that form and essence are indivisible, that through my words it is possible to know my essence, that of reality and of human feeling .
I will not wonder if my writing will be judged by the reader but if a relationship between him and my feelings will be established in the reader, between the reality of his life and mine. This is not the judgment I pay attention to. Every judgment can only be wrong. To judge a poet it is not even enough to know the person.
That’s why I can’t stand literary critics, whether traditional, revolutionary or reactionary. They should be prophets to be able to assess the validity or not of a poet beyond the present. Instead, they believe they possess timeless culture and knowledge. Which allows them to separate, by trade, the form from the content and to fill the former with their own thoughts, thus finding in the poet subjected to examination (because it is an examination: passed or rejected) what they expect from every poet. The training does not allow them to abandon themselves to the possibility of accepting or rejecting the inseparable relationship between the inner feeling and the written word. Critics know the accusations that are made against them and protect themselves by practicing their profession only on poets they know personally, who are part of their circle, who therefore will not accuse them.
I noticed in my readers, the condition that allows them to accept or reject but not to judge, because in order to judge, as already mentioned, a deep knowledge of the person is not enough either.
In the past, some readers have judged and condemned me, feeling offended by my way of thinking. They had the good sense to exile themselves from my world. I am happy about it and, years later, I still thank them.
Needless to say, I extend my most sincere thanks to all those who follow me, who don’t judge me, who share my “feeling” of the world, even if it is different from theirs.
Gobblers & Masticadores 