Poetry is thought but it is not phylosophy.

On: Bruno Di Pietro, Ἐλέα.

Les fláneurs edizioni, Bari, 2024

                                                     They are dancing the one and the many

                                                     Around the round moon

It is common domain that one should not try to explain poetry but that it is pertinent to talk of it in accordance with the suggestions it inspires.

If “suggestion” simply means a phantasm of the mind, poetry is therefore likely to find itself relegated to the domain of volatile “fantasies” and “imaginations” since, precisely, they would be vain and useless.

However, this is not the sense in which I would understand poetry in general, much less that of Di Pietro's book.

The word “suggestion,” rather than connecting it to，sometimes somewhat discredited， sphere of “suggestive” (sometimes used with irony) or to that of “suggesting,” I would refer it, as per the dictionary, to “suggest” as “”to bring under,“ compound of sub-e gerĕre，i.e. ‘’to bring,” call to someone's mind, provide,” as also in the English word ‘suggestion’ which can translate the Italian “suggerimento.”

Poetry is a path of knowledge: in this sense it can be understood to be psychagogy, in the positive sense of suggesting by pointing in directions. If so, it seems to me that this new book by Di Pietro also offers a moment to dwell on the relationship between poetry, philosophy and thought.

So here I proceed for a “second navigation” which can also be that of suggestions and which depends on the text of the book, with some clarifications on the relationship between poetry, thought and philosophy.

I believe Di Pietro's is poetry (nor do I believe he means anything else in the end) that nevertheless implies work on documents for the purpose of an interpretation of Parmenides' poem. Therefore, here Parmenides is “converted to becoming” (p. 11).

This proposition in Ἐλέα by Di Pietro, a poem in free as well as guarded verse, implies a singular view of the Eleatic landscape, because being here is considered is not the immutable, never-born, imperishable one but as being in many ways as and differently occurs throughout Plato's dialectic and in Aristotle: being is said in many ways - (“πολλαχῶς λέγεται τὸ ὄν”) thus in Plato as a dialectic of ideas, in Aristotle as categories, what or how many they are, and in the cd. metaphysics[1] .

Here in Di Pietro's book some elements present in the accounts on the Parmenidean poem (περὶ φύσηως, on nature), particularly received in the passage of Simplicio, are taken up, bringing them back not only to being but also to existence. This is not the core followed in the tradition of philosophy to understand Parmenides, albeit to distinguish itself.

The centrality here in Simplicio's passage lies in the logico-ontological construction, in the firm, truthful value of being. That part is very well known and for brevity's sake I will not quote it. But Simplicio in closing quotes:

(…) Henceforward learn the beliefs of mortals, giving ear to the deceptive ordering of my words.

Mortals have made up their minds to name two forms, one of which they should not name, and that is where they go astray from the truth. 

They have distinguished them as opposite in form, and have assigned to them marks distinct from one another. To the one they allot the fire of heaven, gentle, very light, in every direction the same as itself, but not the same as the other. The other is just the opposite to it, dark night, a compact and heavy body. Of these I tell thee the whole arrangement as it seems likely; for so no thought of mortals will ever outstrip thee..

(English Transl. by John Burnet)

What does Di Pietro do in Ἐλέα? When Ventre speaks, in his detailed afterword to the book (pp.79-108), of a verse “far from lyricism” , in his opinion here “One finds ... the attempt, moreover successful in itself, to construct an other poetics, connected to the actual nature of the original fragment¬es of the Orphic foils and the papyrus frustules of the lyricists.” Di Pietro seems to center the book on Elea but offers another image of it, and he does so in poetry.

He opposes to the established image of Eleaticism, that is, the one that seemed central to Simplicio, the other, this one on reported moon-night that is found there as in the margin. The “well-rounded truth” instead of (or rather, in addition to) that of the full light seems then to become also that of the moon, by definition participated in by the sublunar world. Di Pietro posits the ontological unity being-being, whereby the immobile eternity of being, while being, mostly does not concern us: indeed, we read “How much eternity surrounds me!/And it does not belong to me” (p. 42).

Rather, we humans have to deal with impermanence (using a term that seems to come from another tradition of thought) - while the dimension of immobile eternity “we carry it within us,” Ventre says with Di Pietro, e.g. in the idea of the eternity of the moment (already Wittgenstein wrote “he who lives in the present lives eternally” - Tractatus 6. 4311, and this in a certain sense can be understood) or in that of the “structural nature of the return” (referring to the image of time understood as a spiral or “cochlear” structure, a way of thinking by virtue of which one can say that “the past will come” or that “the past/is yet to come” (p. 20); or that “Arrived at the top/we met/the childhood of the earth” (p. 15). It can be thought and said, as long as it is made clear that even if one admits a structural return (somewhat like the wheel of births, from the Hindu-Buddhist tradition), it will not be I individual who returns.

Di Pietro, it is said, and it may be, he identifies with Parmenides himself: the poet's ego, the first person, often seems to identify with the third person, used when dealing with the philosopher of Elea. The poet's vision with respect to the Eleatic alter ego cannot but be projective – as ours always is, and as it is inevitable that it should be, because we re-identify ourselves in what we see or seem to see, and on this condition we know him. We read in the poem hints or implicit references to the author of this poem, his idiosyncrasies and his everyday life, starting with the assumption that it is the night/moon, not the sun, that rules “ ... men and gods” (p. 17); “The stars will make night/(and I with them)”, on p. 16; thus, at the famous Gate, “he,” the now “aged Parmenides arrives ‘weary’; but again an ‘I’ takes over, when we read that ”With difficulty/the age allows me/to go down to the navy/...I have met as an old man/the time. /And it humbles me“ (p. 38); ‘My eyes count how much I have left’ (p. 62); one reads the pride in foreshadowing the imminence of the end – “It would annoy me to die in my sleep./I must have eyes wide open/while I climb the road of Night” (p. 75). It seems to trigger identification with the philosopher-poet founder of ontology, then; thus, I said, we may have the fortune to approach things, sometimes perhaps to know them.

Things are eternal, if only because they do not ask the question we ask around being, beingness, time. Time, change, has a decisive and deadly meaning for us, not for things. We read in the poem, as noted above, of an Elea declined rather in the guise of existence than being. Along with the figure of Parmenides, Ventre writes, that of Heraclitus appears; the difference between Heraclitus and Parmenides is made here not as decisive as it may seem; but also, I repeat, the Plato of the great dialogues on Eleatism is present.

Assuming, then, that Di Pietro makes poetry, can it be said that he even designs in poetry an alternative thought to Eleatism, as it has been commonly understood? No, of course: somehow poetry is poetry.

Poetry is poetry, but it implies thought, even in its most avant-garde manifestations: then we say it is conceptual poetry, so a fortiori, as conceptual, poetry will be thought.

But is thought philosophy?

Transitivity applies only under certain conditions. If poetry is thought and thought is philosophy, we need to specify: in what sense?

Poetry as a literary genre has historically determined its properties (and different, multiple areas) of poetry. Poetry is many things.

While philosophy is also a literary genre (to some extent it can be considered as such) it too has its own realms of argumentation, modes of saying and writing, quite different from poetry. This is in general.

In Di Pietro then there can be no philosophy stricto sensu but another poetics, as I quoted from Ventre, and everyone sees for himself how alien a poetics can be from elements of thought. Poetry implies thought like philosophy.

But then thought only under certain conditions unites poetry and philosophy.

This of Ἐλέα is the poetry of the moon and the night but it is certainly not the night, in which all cows are black.

If thought is philosophy, not all thought nevertheless coincides with philosophy: no, if by philosophy is to be understood that of the universities, from the Middle Ages onward, and if each manifestation of poetry reveals a character of its own, which must be distinguished in some way from the distinguished works of philosophy.

But while it perhaps concerns the mode, the distinction does not concern the matter of thinking: in the manner of verse, an ontology may well be formulated. The fathers of thought did so – although it is in this case, discussed here, a thought, though clear, rendered through writing sometimes bewildering in its minimality, in its icastic enunciation, in any case of a verse-making quite different from the powerful and assertive breath of Parmenides, as it has reached us after twenty-five centuries.

And in such a poetic mode a thesis of the questionable, uncertain truth, yet endowed with its own verisimilitude, doxa certainly, as a portrait of the world of becoming that here is reconsidered (with good reason) con-fused as one with the dimension of the intransmutable. Di Pietro has interpreted in verse, just as it was born, the Eleatic position: if being is, it cannot but be so – in this case thinking being must come to terms with perceiving-thinking-saying becoming and with contemporary philosophy and physics (cosmology).

If Plato had already considered the dimension of non-being and becoming as unity-and-distinct from that of being, what difference will this poem from Elea make to thinking, in the midst of the twenty-first century? Here: in my opinion, precisely the fact that, while Plato with all evidence moves with unsurpassed greatness into the dimension of pure thought, Di Pietro poetically employs, with firm underlying thought, with more and less evident theoretical subtlety, the images-symbols, seemingly marginal to the origin, of night and the sublunar phenomenal world and maintains them, insists on them throughout the duration of his book. So that Ventre can say that the resulting being is “murky, nocturnal, chthonic and celestial together.” I would add: if, in the repeated nods to the beauty of the world before one's eyes, one can juxtapose these verses with the great post-Parmenian thought, one must think of certain passages in Platonic Timaeus. Moreover, it seems to return to the never forgotten Scienza nuova of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, who argued for the importance of images for knowledge and for thinking about origin[2]:

I watch the fleeing shadows

at dusk.

My face a wrinkle.

The moon is halfway across

the tide low.

A glare the eternal present

the hour that does not go. (p. 40)

Poetry claims its very ancient and fundamental position in the sphere of knowledge, prior to the great religions themselves, not to mention philosophy.

The means proper to poetry are here in Di Pietro very present and active: the thought that makes use of 'image and symbol instead of the claim that one thinks only through explanation and argumentation; the word that uses lightning – fast illumination, sparse, icastic writing – what Horace had already codified two millennia ago – , which carefully avoids all unnecessary expression and sniffs with suspicion any presence of rhetoric for its own sake. True poetry can be an excellent form of thought, poetic thought and not song for its own sake.

Confirming a series of indications present in the history of thought, that sort of suggestion, proper to poetry.

[1] Cf. Metaphysics, V, 7, 1017 a 9; VI, 2, 1026 a 32-b 2.

[2] To say, however, that “From the horizon (of colorful, sonorous, perceived multiplicity, ed.) /Word has disappeared” (p. 26), and that put in front of this wondrous spectacle of nature “(the word, ed.) has no sound” (p. 51) is understandable but cannot be everything. Agreed, “Thought comes late” (p. 66) but it is necessary to add (as Di Pietro does) that thought-word gives voice to wordless things. This implies the distinction, consolidated apparently well after Parmenides (but it was already there in Sophistics!), between being (and, in this case, together, becoming), thought and word. If it is asserted, as Di Pietro does, that thought-word gives voice to silent things, and so obtains for them the Dike, then it is admitted that the thought of being and silence itself, if said, if become effatum, cannot do without the word. “The word is nothing” (p. 64), of course, can be given in certain cases; but said and unsaid must also be understood as a foundational pair, as co-present, in mutual tension-action. Otherwise how else to understand “It calls for justice/and with respect to my hands/the world that has no word” (p. 33).

It is a state of mind, this one in which “I would do without thought” (p. 71): but if thought comes late (cit., p. 66), and in some respects can be equated with the petulance of cicadas (p. 68), one cannot help but think and say, again, in the same brief manner as Di Pietro, that “The norm of the moon/is becoming” (p. 70) while being will be “cradled in the world” (p. 64).