«Infandum, regina, iubes renovare Dolorem»: «Unspeakable pain, queen, you ask me to renew»: this is how Aeneas speaks to Dido, who welcomes him to Carthage after the shipwreck. Recounting the exploits of the Danaans at Troy and the painful results is to renew the pain, but also to spread, and even gain, knowledge. Adjective infantumNicola Gardini’s observations in his latest essay story, Echoes in the empty house, has a verb root headlights“talk,” which is similar to babysuperiority of the “non-speaker”: «Aeneas, here, in front of people he has just met, finds himself in the condition of a newborn baby. The story he will tell will be one of linguistic learning, the use of necessary words, and entry into the world of language. And the end of silence, of a gap.”
A silence that also surrounds the pain, which we do not know and do not want to talk about: removing the language of punishment “from the dominance of the inarticulable and only in personal memory, or even emotional censorship”, say pain, and understanding how to listen to it, is what Gardini wants to achieve with a book that reflects the evil felt by Nicolas, her beloved husband who died at the beginning of 2020 (the protagonist of the memoir of the same title). A text that is also a way to continue the dialogue with him and is one of the most colloquial works of the professor of Italian and comparative literature at Oxford University who is both a writer and an artist. In fact, his work continues to change form, exploring people and the world through poetry or painting, novels or essays, and so on Echoes in the empty houseseeing prose combined with painting for the first time. He uses his intense paintings to expand the spectrum of what can be communicated, to explain some thoughts in a different and richer way, more clarified by phrases that teach us to read reality, as well as the images depicted. The thoughts reflected by Gardini, himself a Latin and Greek scholar, in classical works, produce an interesting dialogue between millennia.
He was also moved by the observation that «toward the suffering of others there is a revulsion akin to racism, misogyny and homophobia. We see nothing but the selfish rejection of others, or rather knowing oneself, who is always the bearer of difference.” And again – words that have taken on an urgent political meaning in recent years – the fact that “by ignoring the difficult conditions of others, by pretending that nothing has happened, by cowardly silence and repressive prejudice, people prevent everyone’s life from getting better, if it is true that all living people, not only writers, have an obligation to improve it by making it more real and more familiar through language, that is, through diversity dialogue, the highest, only form – from Socrates onwards – of truth.”
«(…)/ Same difference. Nothing sleeps / in painting: it calls it / and it responds to it, like words / in verses, like birds / birds at dawn or the days of the year. // And by painting you erase them in large quantities. / Profit is emptiness. And, because everything touches / everything and contains, then a body will be a distance / between distances, not a presence: overflowing // in the self, but little of the blood of others, / in the brightest light it is much darkness” wrote Gardini in his collection of poetry Painting instructions (Garzanti, 2018). Ideas found in prose in Echoes in the empty house applied to listening to those experiencing pain and that was the basis of his proposal for a “literary science” course for medical students. A course that deals with the form of texts and analyzes the fabric of messages in which meaning is generated, which teaches them the “art of interpreting”, to find the momentary truth which is also the patient’s state of health: “Nothing in literature is literal, just as nothing is literal in life. This “more” must be discovered and understood in relation to the dynamic whole of the discourse. A speech like a box full of people chatting in the setting sun is exactly that: a “shadow of something else.”
A way of reading reality that becomes a paradigm of possible knowledge and is exemplified in the comparison between literature and painting: «Both, understood as mental dispositions, pursue hidden forms through the temporary arrangement of the visible. In fact, our eyes are only focused on something that will happen soon. No scenes were fixed. But we only deceive ourselves that we see things as they really are. Rather, everything is just a knot of temporary relationships. And this relationship continues to change. And the knots just untie to form other knots. This is why, I think, I love water painting. There is no moment when a river or a lake or a sea is the same river, the same lake, the same sea (…). It only takes one element to move for the overall configuration to change and become something else. But I claim that something is something that I see, as if my seeing were absolute and the object of my seeing was transitively absolute. For me, my vision and the existence of any object inevitably overlap; that is reality. And there must be truth in this momentary reality (…). I do not stop collecting images of things and from their summaries I draw a synthesis. Or just from a few people I believe I got the most honest picture. Harmony. So the moment of my vision (…) was forever. And in this unstable eternity, I end up forming opinions, judgments, expectations. I build my knowledge of the world.”
