Introduction
"to be this only: among men a man"(1)
With a friend we have not only crossed little stone bridges between fushias and oleanders, paths of memory on which, approaching temples, we exchange smiles of summers spent in the country caressing adolesences dissolved on the skin of boys clouded in coming virility.
With Lillo we have also woken in bare clammy nooks of desire illuminated by a glimpse of that astonishment which makes you aware of yourself, warm shiny egg of the world, just when you lose your senses in wonder and dismay . This recalled the words of Anna Achamatova to her friend:".all was consumed after ravening anguish. Why, then, of a sudden, are we serene?"(2)
This feeling that pushes and holds back, with the sharp and tangy touch of custom, of that slightly acid feeling which rises in the kidneys to red in the eyes in a discotech, but also the leap on the running board of " an outskirts bus" which takes us to work, a prick of the spur in meadows where the captivated glance still pursues the "unknown impudent lad". So we enter a poem of his with detachment and the measure that makes of furnishings a gift, and in the sore of the oyster reverberates still the light of the pearl.
It is a poem that exists in language in solitude, secluded and composed, surface receptive, in offer of self, without scratching, harpooning, but almost yielding its sconsciousness; prodigal, girlfriend: "as a master craftsman spider I shall weave the web/silver threads/to adorn bare corners/of dark rooms". This solitude is like the bass of harmony, a sonorous hollow which sustains, makes loves vibrate, countryside, friendship.
Just because "slaves of silence " the two friends recognize each other and play on the real like "discrete observers" who launch "twinkling smiles" in a reciprocal pleasure with the boys.
Predilection for interiors of the soul where existence has a colour sparse, frosty, which keeps us on the threshold of subtle presentiment of the night when "because there is no longer silence / I feel a hubub of anguish". The time of the poet comes when "the days speak slow", it is that "silence, friend", where presence weakens in the cone of dust in the memory, where the miracle of the "nocturnal pearls" takes place, which climb the dark and "meet the sun/which shines in the space". Here, I think, it is exemplified the poetic credo of the friend who begins to undefine things going back to the significant striped of flesh, mentor memory garlanded with a hollow syntax predisposed to the velvet of sounds, - and it is always the life moment of silence, such that one could say that its epiphany is the silent instant -distended in brush strokes in gouache, with spatulas quick to echo; all the tissue, in the extreme concision of antithesis, contrived to keep a dissloving, until it stops in essence: "your pallor shines through/ timidly fascinated".
In the arena of this locus solus, porticos and esedra where the neoclassical eye at times tries the patience in the sketch, at times raises the perspective veil as far as the whitenees of the geometrical sign. Lillo also draws, and his frequenting of graphics seems to guide the period between engraving and gentle slope, the line like a thread of Ariadne for a modelled that is elsewhere (reality?) of which subtly he alludes with rascal irony. It is the moment of "irregular curves" which sustain (or to what are they clinging?) an unexpected greedy person, where the theory of attack receives sense just from this intrusion; or of easy-going scorn that allows him aureals of coral and silk an Egyptian baby penis, so relieved of desire that almost he goes beyond it, and has the need, to be cultured, of the pleonasm "Penis of prick/penis of penis."
It will therefore be amusement of the "kinds" which conduce him now to the virile portrait painter in a pose alla Ortis a little blasé ("face against sunset"); or that, in an Oasis of gold, distractedly like Gozzano, ("to be lost") with those "transatlantic liners of gold"); that have the affectionate enchantment of gondolas I remember in Venice; or still he accepts the prestige of a Greek twilight ("on a bed of yellow "leaves"; in "dishevelled hair""bound by the light") or the lustre alla Pascoli of "dishevelled hair" the funeral bells recall (The hour of Barga).
This line can enclose chromatic pastes on glass ("Moon, sliver carriage"); "Stars"where the irredescence of night is played on a mother-of- pearl register that makes of the firmament a pin-pointing velvetted where rain of diamonds of the eyes of the young boy sleeping.
In the definition of his poetics of which however he is reluctant and at the insistence offers an enigmatic smile Lillo tells me the words come, from throat or from Heart, with the fedelity of a shutter.
He diffide of hemispherical masses, cerebral or unconscious, where the sign yeasts without order: they are for him ill famed places, the elaboration, sounds anathema in this hortus conclusus irrigated by the fluid word. Beyond the expedient, the previration of who cannot accept oneself, the abuse of sterile decorations that hide defects of structure, and he says this with firmness for me a little too metallic, putting again the replica to the discriminating of taste, that he designs me it for my private malice- like a bigotted Calvinist, a Le Corbusier in the gazebo. But I know he will laugh again
also of this: our friendship has a marvellous pendant of dissent.
In the zones then, where memory opens its wardrobe, it seems to me that defects that memory which is casket and vibration, dissolves in the enumeration of the lived pressing around a telling like a song of fire, in a penumbra stagnant, opague.
How much more free and vivid, then, the look that i would call adriatic -- because waiting for the dome s that shine in Bizantium, not in view of any kind of Eneas as is the custom of credulous Tirennians which emits morning sonorities ("Oasis of gold"; "Listless yawns") or flutes to the blue of Prussia (Son of the moon").
This moon abat-jour in the sitting room of friends, when one comes out to the "uterine excitements" - so well described the right to exist in the ephemeral in "Shadows dance in the night" - here, more than in memory, it seems to me, lives that "greedy wood worm" which lights sex in articulo mortis, in that "dawn/on the wounds of famished insects" that has the ardour to lift the "negative of old poses/in the sack of solitude". It is here that tears errupt that press on the face of fear: "the sirens / in the grey mire of my extremity" recall the monstrous wounds of Penna; the "excrements of solitary men" when "angry sensations are spat against"; the "stink of hidden lives", the "streets without end/dirty with dry vomit", etc.
All that makes an integral part ot the neoclassical temple and the lyrical memory, indicates them as an aquatic reflex: the poet does not refuse to live, his "Manichini whites" inhabit the "mental edens", belong to the truth not to history, are voices that still come from trees and fountains, even if at the corner of the motorway or near luna park where, mixed in the parasistic game of antithesis and irony, huragans are the "chattering of old women".
I leave the friend on this curve that does not adhere to things unless like a boat on the water, his poem of contiguous places where one has the privilege of the light and is always that apparently unadorned, decentralised, a clearing too clear and supine perhaps that has the perfume of lacquered wood. But it is on the inside that, in times like these, which inite us to the prophylaxis of life, buds a neostilistic passion that exalts in man his amorous intelligence.
(Sandro Bartolucci)
1) SABA, Il Borgo, Ed, Einaldi, 1961
2) A. Achmatobva A.N. Rikova, Poems, Ed; Nuova Accademia, 1962
In silence. interlacing thoughts, 1981
1)Su un bus periferico
sorrisi e coriandoli
con me tra la gente
libero come un ubriaco
sul tuo respiro di cigno
fisso a contar ei tuoi sguardi
nel freddo mattino d'autunno inoltrato.
Oltre il giorno la sera
Alla fioca luce di una candela
Quasi alla fine il silenzio
Il pensiero di te sconosciuto
Fanciullo invadente
Che ancora cerco nei bus periferici
tra gente assonnata
1978
2)Seta ricopre il corpo
Coralli rossi ornano il collo
Del fanciullo principe
Bianco di pelle
E d'oro i capelli
Che nei sogni appare
A confortarmi il sonno
Da pene disturbato
Pene
Dio pene
Dio bambino
Che pene amare
Pene del cazzo
Pene di un pene
Pene egiziano
Dio enigmatico di sete coperto
E di coralli ornato
1976
3)Ombre danzano nella notte
E su prati di tristezza
Godono ai baci di compagni occasionali
1980
Enchantment , introduction
"Today poetry is not possible. It is only possible to do something for poetry. The poet lives in a desert, ferocious animals attack him, because it is not possible to charm them all with song."
(Christa Wolf)
Inspite of our awareness of the marginality of poetry, of its gratuity or "uselessness", some do write poetry, convinced that this is a necessity. They cannot resign themselves to silence.
It is this obstinacy that fascinates us because it means that, inspite of everything, there are still those confident enough, with a faith, almost a religion, so they can overcome the barriers that separate their emotions from the world, and start a dialogue of truth.
If those for whom poetry is written are unimportant and dispersed, and perhaps becoming fewer and fewer, it does not matter very much: the poetic word is there with all the weight of its "truth". However well hidden in the depth of its diversity, sooner or later it will be garnered.
This faith in the poetic word -- in its simplicity and complexity - seems to us to characterize in the first place the production of Lillo Di Mauro. Far from big cities, far from the perfidious mechanisms of the market, Lillo has gone to live his own time and "to build history" in ancient times and places "where every stone is yesterday", "where everything is quiet now as then". The medieval town of Sutri, in northern Lazio, has become a privileged place in a solitary exercise, that is ,cognitive practice, desire for poetry, emblematic place of a possible recovery of the "poetic" of life.
Here come to life the young boys of Penna who, illuminated by their thirst of spring, become a metaphor of lost innocence, possible flashes of the infinite, natural and privileged erotic objects.
Here"the flowers of autumn /with red and with gold/around them" come to life again.
But Sutri is not Eden and Lillo is not Adam;
In moments of ancient peace "among the oleanders and fuschias" or "through lanes of tufa/ of the ancient town" profound silences alternate, a need to break the barriers of centuries, to live "the other".
And then also nature, even the young boys blush with regret and live in a time that is already passed or has not yet come, when our poet goes round unquiet "full of erotic whims", "with desire to sin" to places where violence lies in ambush "in the lavatories of the night/to repress sex" or where "They sneer at the desires/ of a man covered /with sacred damasks".
And the poetic word becomes a rebellion and revolt "in strangled rage", "in murdered tomorrows", as elsewhere it is "balm for as much as is insatiable in life", to use again the words of Christa Wolf. Two opportunities, that seem, perhaps, contradictory but which in reality are two aspects of a unique utopian impulse towards livable worlds.
These are the most evident charactersistics to be seen, I believe, in these lines of Lillo, at times discontinuous perhaps, but always permeated by an anxiety to liberate and to love. When we participate in his anxiety, we share the immedacy of images and sounds that are the stuff of poetry of this anxiety we become participators for the immediacy of images and sounds and there is no need too describe or understand. A whole world is here in the simplicity and complexity of his truth like the timid young boy who "hides his nudity /but enjoys himself happy/in the love that it brings".
(Francesco Gnerre)
Enchantment, 1985
1)Il mio fanciullo timoroso
Nasconde le sue nudità
Ma gode felice
Dell'amore che gli porto.
2)Cappelli di villici anziani nel grigio mattino d'autunno
Pei vicoli di tufo dell'antico borgo
Ov'io fanciullo
Incontrai il fuoco d'un falegname timoroso
Che lacerava la mia carne
Col suo fiore già sbocciato.
Piansi perle
Su fredde gradinate
Piansi per peccati mai compiuti.
3)Polizia sui cavalcavia del cielo
Anche nel sole di gennaio
A picchiare uomini stanchi
Con verghe di potere
Nelle latrine della notte
A reprimere il sesso nelle pieghe dei jeans
Di teste libere
Nei sentimenti di odio
Nella rabbia soffocata
Nel mio culo di frocio
Nei domani uccisi nel timore del mattino
Quando al mio amico vado
Dopo giorni di neve.
4)Comunque andremo
Coi nostri sogni ovunque
E con le perle della gioia
Colane faremo
Per ornare i velluti del silenzio.
