He brings with him (out of himself) places and characters, brings narratives and moments, brings a geography of the instable, a mosaic of times and places (but be careful: the mosaic moves and changes the change of the wind, the current, the gaze of the reader): today the writer and literary critic Silvio Perrella – Palermo by birth, southern sentiment, world traveler (between roads and pages) by inclination and choice – will be in one of the places that his last, beautiful book “Uncertain hours” (the knowledge) evokes and tells: the Messina of Scillecariddi, that place of metamorphosis and reveals that is the narrow.
A book beyond the essay or the novel, a Book-Book between places that are beings (Venice, Stockholm, Kyoto, Tangeri, any island …), creatures that are places (Ingrid Bergman, Miles Davis, Antoine Doinel-Jean-Pierre Léaud …), Neapolitan dawn and Palermo squares, water lines and paths on the vulcan. Each told in a special hour, “Certosina” or “in the balance”, “Sulfurea” or “round”, “cinerina” or “hypnotic”.
A multifaceted and on bookdotted with images of Odilon Redon (all variants of the “boat”, to which we readers have hailed, spoxates and happy, without a destination that is not navigating), with the labile trace of two characters no longer real of the reader who reads, of the writer who directs (after all, “a person is a changing portrait, a step that sorts”, a quote on the mouth of others). Hatem.
After a seminar-laboratory at the Dicam, as part of the methodology of the geographical research methodology of prof. Giovanni Messina, Perrella today will be at the Feltrinelli library (6 pm), together with the group of “inspections”, to meet readers-invaders.
I am a reader, I open his book and I come immediately, explicitly, invited to enter … what? A journey, a catalog, a “sofa” (in a Goethian sense), a map of emotions, an exploded mosaic, a metaphysical clock?
«In my book you enter and exit at the same time. We enter the opening of the page in the world of the alphabet, made of lines, of typographical characters, of allusive and often individual verses, of images that are forward as an oblion. We come out with the imagination in the polymorphic outside of geography, appearances, fake, headlights, coasts, seas. You enter and exit as a continuous pursuit; A chase that concerns Hatem and Suleika, the two-personal characters who measure every step of the narrator, who in turn is a person-person. It is also in these slippery coming and going that the uncertainty takes shape as a form of continuous metamorphosis, of exchanges of the parts, of fast changes of landscapes. Uncertainty as a feeling of today and at the same time uncertainty as openness to the time that always changes in space and lets itself be seen how an event is of the mind and the body. It is no coincidence that Hatem and Suleika, which I took from the pages of Goethe’s “Eastern Western western sofa”, are lovers and for them, as a verse of the poet plays, Bagdad is never far away ».
Why is the unit of (dis) measure is the hour, and each hour measures, does it count/sings a different time?
“I started from the books of hours that for centuries accompanied the days of the monasteries, from the morning to the completion, passing through the praise and vespers. It was eight certain hours, very certain, to be marked like a ritual. Mine instead are uncertain hours, not only because they multiply until they become fifty, but above all because they are the result of a perceptual polyphony. It is as if every place had his hour in store and you had to be able not only to capture it, but also to define it. Here we go from Leucian’s Leucian time to the oceanic hour of port, trying to give shape to a seismographer of feelings, always keeping in mind how much it would be necessary to rethink both the East and the West trying, in the wake of Goethe, a new alliance that would give breath to a world that incorces itself and there is an inscription in the front of the front of the wars, in the blood that tragically invaded the lands, by the agrume of our sea transformed into an immense liquid tomb ».
In his book we (the reader’s I-Tu) we return twice in the Strait, the double place that multiplies and transforms. In another of his books he speaks of bridges, and of what unites (and “pontto” par excellence is the sea). What bridge is already the strait?
«Both the time doubled and the Sunday hour are dedicated to the Strait. Not only because I was born in Sicily, in uncertain hours there is a lot of Sicily and I even imagine that Hatem and Suleika live at the Zisa of Palermo. But also because in Sicily there is one of the great slits of the land to which we give the name of the tight and that Stefano D’Arrigo called the Scillacariddi. I feel it as a sacred place, a place of dizzying verticality that since Homer has hypnotized the minds of the poets and that such it is necessary that it remains, without suffering unnecessary and very expensive torture. Every time I come back it is for me as a ritual to get to Capo Peloro, greet the friends and associates of Mesogea and the Orca Horcynus, and immerse myself with circumspection on the limit of the two seas; And being in water to know-attends that, as the Greeks said and as she remembers in her question, the truth, the only Pontos is the sea. In a formula: no bridge, yes pontos. There is no more metamorphic and uncertain object of the sea; And when the sea dialogues with coasts that embody different worlds we are in the presence of the infinite translation that is the basis of understanding each other, knowing how many times it will be necessary to rectify the phrase to approach the other, to its inevitable misunderstanding, to what in a poem of mine I call the purgatory of the living “.
What is now now, in the world?
«It is an hour that has lost the nutritious relationship with the sources; It is a schizophrenic hour that cannot say clear words or dark words. It is an hour without now, succubus of herself, without air, a sort of nauseating monad. It is for this reason that inspections are increasingly necessary, just as the Messina group means that meets in the study of Gianfranco Anastasio: mappings and adventures. It is therefore no coincidence that the presentation of uncertain hours will take place today. It will be an inspection from Fermi, where, however, it will enter the alphabet and go out into the world, as if we were all on the amazed boats of Odilon Redon who sail in my book ».
Good navigation to all of us.