dublinka

I've been giving some thought to Paolo Ruffilli's Joy and Mourning first published in Italian in 2001 and in translation by Dedalus in 2004. It's a beautiful homage to life and death, centred around the suffering of a young man dying from AIDS. It hooks you with an opening inscription, which you soon learn is not a statement of pessimism, despair, or negativity, but a truth born out of experiencing and witnessing suffering.

The truth is
whether in being born or dying
deep down there is not
my daughter said
weeping,
any respect for the dignity of life
in this world.

Having lifted the curtain by confronting us with this fact, the poem takes us through the socially hidden suffering and death of the young man, and onto the various thoughts of those who witness him die. Their speculations on subjects such as life and death, or being and consciousness, rise silently from the page, as if others are present, and nothing can be voiced aloud. It's intriguing stuff, and ought to be made into a play: unlike much of Beckett it resist the cheap gag.

There is no lost thought here, nor cold platitudes. Nameless voices speculate about the void, nothingness, and the absolute indifference of nature; and though some even find comfort in this unpleasant death, the possibility of an uncomfortable death for each of them (and the reader), refuses to disappear from the horizon. And yet, somehow, Ruffilli, through this considered meditation, manages to breath a little life into death, to give it face, expression, temperance. Not by illusion, but by stating the facts, as the seem, as they are, as they may well be.