The Kafkaesque quote – placed in epigraph to the works of art by Prisco De Vivo (figurative artist and brilliant poet and designer) and to the verses of Raffale Piazza (well-known poet and journalist) - reminds us of a certain predilection of the Prague writer Franz Kafka (Prague 1883 – Kierling, Vienna, 1924) for the night and for the dark. Indeed for black, which could potentially transform into white. Not yet, at first glance, the black of the imminent Nazism and Fascism and the darkness of the concentration and extermination camps, where Jews, children, madmen, gypsies and the different are massed, to typify them and study them through a medicine and a science that are obscurely bending to the Manifesto of Race. The Kafkaesque black – which Prisco De Vivo finds and takes up again today – is, rather, that of the covers of old elementary school notebooks, with their dark color and their squared pages, which awaited pencil strokes and pastel stains. Pencils and strokes that, now, transform the white pages with dark stains. Metamorphoses of white into dark and of shades of dark toward white, transformations of matter and of glances. After all, in the wheel of metamorphoses, of every metamorphosis, “the man sits in the eminent part, a beast lies at the bottom, a half man and half beast descends from the left, and a half beast and half man ascends from the right”, as in the dreamlike glances of Fra Giordano Bruno Nolano. And the mind, faced with this book given to us by De Vivo and Piazza, cannot help but go from Homer to Rowling, passing through the North African Apuleius (2nd century AD), up to Dante, Bruno, Pasolini and, above all, as now happens in this volume, which we are rereading, to Kafka.
In fact, before the eye of De Vivo there is not the blue of the eight “notebooks of words” by Kafka, published on the basis of what Max Brod offered. In those notebooks, the Prague writer had frescoed the room that is in each of us at night. Written between 1917 and 1919, shortly before writing that long revealing document, which will be the Letter to the Father, those small notebooks – in which the writer seems willing to give vent to even the most hidden and scabrous corners of his heart – open our eyes to the meaning of darkness and night. But did Kafka really like the night, the dark, the black? Josef K., the protagonist of The Trial (written by Kafka between 1914 and 1917 and published posthumously in 1925) finds himself subjected, following an unspecified accusation, to a trial: it takes place in the attic of an old, squalid, dark and labyrinthine apartment building. Here he also meets a painter, named Titorelli who, despite being very poor, works as a portraitist for the court, so he knows perfectly well how all the mechanisms of the court and the Law work, but then he will be evicted with his paintings anyway. In The Trial, closed, dark and asphyxiating places prevail, like the court. But the figure of Titorelli is precisely the one that can most entice the eye of Kafka, but also of De Vivo, to look, even at night. From Kafka’s papers – which were saved by his friend and executor Max Brod, who took them with him first to Turkey and then to Israel, fleeing the German invasion of Prague – this very short story was published (against the will of the Author, who had entrusted them to him with the clause not to edit). It is a work of writing-meditation that, like others, could have been developed in notebooks and notes. At night, in fact, the figure of an insomniac presents the caretaker, who reads and questions himself in the darkness of the night, almost watching over the questions of those who cannot or do not manage to sleep, and perhaps he is also guarding, that is, watching over the unconscious sleep of the sleepers: «And you are awake, you are one of the caretakers, you find the next one by shaking the burning wood in the pile of twigs next to you. Why do you keep watch? One must keep watch, they say. One must be present" (Franz Kafka 1920, Italian translation by E. Pocar).
If one must be present, here is the black and the light of our artist. However, all this must not happen now before our eyes of flesh and the eyes of our mind. Because, if we look closely, the dark and the shadows of the night are never pleasant for Kafka, but they happen because of insomnia, which does not let you sleep and, often, instead of calming and reassuring, instills fear. After dark pages, also in the volume by Prisco De Vivo and Raffaele Piazza, the first spot of color; indeed - as Manuela Gandini rightly notes on page 11 - here is the new "creation" of the artist: a face without features, but only with one open eye ((⏱️=400)) empty. It is the transfigured gaze of the artist, who thus undertakes his own peculiar metamorphosis of glances from darkness to light, from indistinct shadows to somatic features, not without always introducing new darkness, new nights, new scenarios, new metamorphoses ((⏱️=500)) in the pages that follow. Is it the impotence of man in the face of a reality that is anything but legible, or are there transformations of the gaze on reality, where the darkness is orienting the human gaze beyond night and darkness? Isn't this the true meaning of every metamorphosis, that is, the power to transform the gaze, which instead risks getting lost in the figure of a donkey that has no wings, or in the little squares of a notebook with a black cover. How can we recover that eye, that very clear gaze, present in some sections of De vivo, that make us rise from the dark bowels of matter and of pictorial and photographic materials, towards the clarity of truth? «What does this immense solitude mean?», the wandering shepherd of Asia in Leopardi already asked. In the second book of Ovid's Metamorphoses we read: «In the end, Mother Earth, surrounded as she was by the sea, between those waves and the consumed springs, which where there was room / tried to hide in her dark bowels» (lines 272-274). Here is the darkness of the dark bowels of the night. And yet, even in all this darkness, the eye, from today's Kafkaesque low, can still rise upwards: the hope of dawn is never lost, as Ovid already sang: «While I speak to you, the humid night has reached the goal set on the coasts of Hesperia. We are not allowed delay ((⏱️=400)) we are awaited; the darkness dispersed, the Dawn shines» (second book, lines 142-144). Yes, we are expected at the end of the darkness and the night, but also of the images and words of the book, of every book: «The following dawn had removed the fires of the night, the sun had melted the frost in the meadows with its rays and they/ found themselves in that place. With a soft whisper then, after having complained for a long time, they decided to elude the guards, to try to escape in the silence of the night and, once outside the house, leave the city itself» ((⏱️=400))(Book four, lines 81-86). The metamorphosis of Inachus' daughter into a heifer is also an attempt to escape out of the house, out of the city, out of the mere donkey ears, out of the darkness((⏱️=400))verse above: «The following dawn had removed the fires of the night, the sun had melted the frost in the meadows with its rays and they/ found themselves in that place. With a soft whisper then, after having complained for a long time, they decided to elude/ the guards, to try to escape in the silence of the night/ and, once out of the house, leave the city itself» (book one, lines 81-86). The Kafkaesque guard now seems to point to another figure, that of the artist and poet Camillo Capolongo ((⏱️=400))(Roccarainola, 25 September 1940 – Roccarainola, 21 July 2013)((⏱️=400)) who, as the captions of the volume tell us, gives us a glimpse of a “new Kafka((⏱️=500)) who lived in the Desert of dissent”. The desert of dissent, or rather every desert, is the alternative to the original garden of creation. It is still that of the people of Israel, who leave Egypt under the guidance of JHWH, who, according to the sacred story, does not fear not having "who will command him"; indeed, he himself chooses the guides (now Moses, now Joshua, whose Latin name - Iesus - in the eyes of the Fathers of the Church, prefigures another Iesus, the true one, who places himself at the head of the people of the Gentiles); he chooses the gestures, the steps and the itineraries, even the medicines against the poisons of the asps of the arid lands, as it appears in the biblical book of Numbers and Joshua. Capolongo's desert was not that of Canaan and the prelude to the promised land. It was that of dissent. Capolongo's collaborations with intellectuals of the European avant-garde such as Jean Jacques Lebel, Steve Lacy, Julien Blaine, led him to the avant-garde of Il sociale. A metamorphosis of the social, which is not the folkloric and the popular, but is precisely that "social" in which the artist immerses himself, not to seek inspiration or to bring comfortable moments of leisure, but to build a common political conscience.
Art in all its infinite declinations (poetry, theater, painting and sculpture, design and architecture), must be open to metamorphosis, that is, to be linked to the human sciences (sociology, anthropology, ecology((⏱️=400))), to create fair and balanced projects and models of collective life.
The Preface to the volume we are talking about (a set of brief judgments and glimpses of the lyrics, the dark and the colored figures) opens, therefore, with the lightning-fast lines of Rosaria Ragni Licinio, who sketches the contours of the “thing” by Prisco De vivo and Raffaele Piazza: «an artist's book and at the same time((⏱️=400)) a poetic anthology whose protagonist is the Prague writer Franz Kafka((⏱️=400)) starting from “The Metamorphosis”, “The Trial” and “The Castle”» ((⏱️=400))(page 9)((⏱️=400)). This is reiterated by a series of short posts by Gian Ruggero Manzoni, Giuseppe Conte, Manuela Gandini. But the book opens with the...