The Crazy Woman Next Door – Conversation with Alda Merini
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Unfortunately, the soul, which by the way is what then writes and survives […], is the part that flies over matter and is the one that’s the most attentive and the most painful: namely, seeing the deterioration of the body, this soul distress itself, it… above all, it loses its way.
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Okay, for example, speaking of poetry and husbands, let’s say that every time I had a husband I put poetry aside because for me the man was more important, who then would become the inspiration for my verses. I’ve had twenty-seven hospitalizations, twenty-six times I fell in love and relapsed. When I was happy, I was so happy that I didn’t have anything to say, you know… That is to say, we complain, we discuss unhappy things only. Have you ever heard of someone who, I don’t know, has found a treasure and goes to tell everyone? She doesn’t tell anyone, if anything because of the fear that it will be taken away from her; she keeps it to herself.
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Two bodies making love is gross; because I’m not interested in you: you could excite me but you could also… Physiologically it’s not a very nice thing, isn’t it? This is precisely what fantasy is: ignoring the fact that you have a body like this and the other one has a phallus like that; but… there, together, they really make you laugh, right? Think how many ordeals arise from laughter…
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Love is a weakness, young lady, it’s not like you could make a specific study on love: love is a weakness of man. We complain about love because we complain about our weakness. We complain about it in the same way that we complain about a sore foot, or a leg that’s hurting.
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No, no, the body IS thought. I don’t understand why people work and don’t think, and I can’t understand how there aren’t tons of eyes in all the parts of the body, you know. People only see with two eyes and don’t feel, they don’t have the vision, the physical vision, really, of what they touch, what they feel, what they perceive. It’s only in the eyes, it’s not enough.
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They were talking about a sexual block, and so they talk about it in psychiatry. Instead, I speak of a block about love that, no longer finding its adequacy, no longer wants to love life.
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I once told him that it was useless to blame evil or anyone. He was of the same opinion: he said that fate was the only architect. My doctor later told me that only one medicine can heal, and that is life. But life for me doesn’t want to become a good doctor, and when life doesn’t enter this perspective, it can only kill you. All of us at the core are “lifesick”, nostalgic for life. Lack of money, love, sex…
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These are the poets: they want to leave this society, they have nothing more to say.
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And this is wealth already: not having creditors, you know…
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But then the general chaos ended up dragging me along too. I mean, I’ve noted that people are very confused, they don’t know what they want; as a result, even what were once my values, I lost them along the way.
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After all, society was not prepared to accept people like us who had different life needs, who wanted to be in company but wanted to be alone, who wanted money but didn’t want it, who were a total contradiction, of life, of their Id.
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There are women who have been devoted to knowledge, to poetry, for a lifetime, sacrificing indeed ephemeral pleasures such as the good house, the good love, the Ganymede, the good meal, the good drink, and yet there are those states of frenzy while reading that truly takes you so high, that they’re really worth it… how can I say it, a physical orgasm and beyond; never experienced those? Never tried? Ah, it’s to be experienced, right? It is.