Renzo Novatore

Spiritual Perversity

July 6, 1920

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from Nichilismo, Year I #7, Milan, July 6, 1920

I

A spasm... A palpitation...

The Dawn rises from the brown bed of shadow and unties her blond braids in the laughing green morning.

Beautiful Dawn!

May she rain golden light on the white buds of the mysterious morning...

A morning of Life and Death, of love and perversity...

Yesterday evening when dusk fell and the vagabond spirits left the earth of Death to enter through paths of Silence and meditate on the luminous mysterious of the night, I created from Nothing the perverse object of my purest Love.

Now I have killed the Woman I created.

And I killed her because I loved her too much...

Her corpse lies at my feet, hideously twisted, with an everlasting red wound in her snow-white breast, opened like an eternal flower of blood.

On her purple-blue lips, a violent contraction is stamped like sarcasm and the pang that lashes out and curses...

She is naked and pale.

Before long, the sun will dress her again in the moist purplish cloak of gold.

I will bend over this hidden meadow, I will make a green chalice with the poisonous leaves of bitter herbs, and I will make holy Communion with the purity of silver dewdrops.

When the sun has scattered the last traces of my baleful crime, I will play the litanies of Flowers and Death on the violin of sorrow.

II

The Night has returned.

That terrible black Night, populated by Ghosts...

Are they the phantoms of fear? Are they the shadows of remorse? Are they macabre dances of unknown truths?

O Light, why don’t you set me ablaze? O Shadow, why don’t you envelope me?

III

I am — like a reptile — crouching in the thorny hedge that surrounds the edge of the meadow. A toad and a serpent are my only companions.

A little ways away from me, a strange, solitary night bird sings a desperate song about the reasons for Laughter and Weeping.

But in these extreme expressions it sighs: FUTILITY!

But I can’t see this very strange bird. The night is too deep... But I hear it!

Ah! what tragic voices one hears, never silent...

But what does all this matter?

In the sky’s blue vault, myriads of stars dance merrily...

And so? And so what does it matter if here, a short distance from me, Crime dances with Remorse, and Love is embraced by Death? Aren’t the herbs of this meadow poisonous and bitter? Isn’t this the Valley where the ancient immortal Gods were born to live, enjoy and love in perversity and sin?

Then they joined the fated fishermen and raised their mortal rods.

This is why they are cursed...

IV

I hear the somber roar of two distinct sounds.

The weeping of Life and the laughter of Death. How eloquent they are!...

But why does Life weep? Why does Death laugh?

V

I tried to open my eyes wide in the sun, and it blinded me.

Now I am blind. Blind and cursed...

I have nothing but darkness and silence within.

I no longer have friends or lovers. I am alone.

The kingdom of Shadow and Death is my kingdom.

I howl desperately, but in vain. My unrecognized cry is dispersed in the endless desert. It roars, it thunders, but the only response is a mournful echo.

An anguished and heart-rending echo.

VI

Now I am the terrible Sinner riding the furious Centaur of Evil. I am the bridegroom of Eternity who laid himself down on a vast wave of darkness; I wager beakers of blood against the kisses of the dangerous children of Mystery.

My hands are impure because all that they have touched is impure, but in the luminous realm of my mind, flowers of the greatest purity and of an impeccable beauty have taken root.

...

A deep-sea diver, I have gone down into the deepest and most fearful chasms of the sea to rob it of its most secret treasures.

An eagle, I have soared to the highest flights of infinite space to rob it of the strangest, most ethereal mysteries.

A reptile, I have crawled on the moist earth to suck from the breasts of its infinite sweetness, the most bitter poisons.

Now I am the reckless maniacal swimmer lost in the murky waves of Life. I am the wayfarer, blaspheming and laughing, who wanders in a desert world where only the satanic howl of FUTILITY thunders.

And this is why I can heroically call myself — along with being a poet — “a truly, deeply unhappy individual.”

I know I am a luminous point that goes uselessly through the gloomy futility of all things.

And it is this, my conscious desperation, this my awareness of the futility of being, that makes me deeply love Life. But don’t you see, my friends, that my futile joy merges into your futile sorrow, so that later both will merge into the futility of Death?