Writing as therapy: Don’t tell me I loved the wind
Goodbye El Beih
Best describing the therapeutic power of the word, Isabelle Allende writes in her autobiography, Paula: «my life is made in narrating it and my memory is fixed with writing; what I don’t put into words on paper is erased by time. But the story had gripped me and I could no longer stop, other voices spoke through me, I wrote in a trance, with the sensation of unraveling a ball of wool, and with the same urgency with which I write now. By the end of the year, 500 pages had accumulated in a canvas bag and I realized it was no longer a letter; I then timidly announced to the family that I had written a book. That book saved my life. Writing is a long introspection, it is a journey towards the darkest caves of consciousness, a slow meditation.” And these words give us a magical key to interpret the work of Liuzzo, the writer who does not present herself in her autobiographical guise, but as a voice that tells of a life that oscillates between past and present, between reality and vision.
In Don’t tell me that I loved the wind, the act of writing manages to break the tragic circle of the life of the protagonist, Mary, the young girl «torn between euthanasia e utopialost in the platonic ray of a titanic space, in the cross-eyed eye of a medallion”, and the actor’s figure. Writing saves Mary’s innocence, purifies her soul, brings back her human dignity, protects her in a cube world made up of difficult ancestral relationships. The ‘salvation’ power of writing which seems to have the ability to suspend pain and tame ferocious thoughts is occasionally opposed by the family environment, but in vain: «Mary’s writing for her mother had become her worst nightmare, so much so that wish death on her and her children. The conspirators have rotten blood under their skin, but they will never be able to extinguish the light of the torch.” The binomial Scripture-Light, coined by the narrator, teaches us to overcome the darkness and overcome evil. Here, as in Baudelaire’s work “The flowers of evil”there is the concept according to which, although the individual finds himself in a degraded society that does not belong to him, there is always a beauty to be sought, to be discovered and to be experienced, and sometimes it is precisely necessary to go through evil to understand the importance and beauty of life. Within this framework, we can understand what value the past has in Mary’s life, or rather what value it should have; the past serves to learn how to live the present and the future. I take up a reflection by Umberto Galimberti on the human condition so permeated by contrasting effects: «Both Judas and Peter, in fact, betrayed Jesus, but while Judas, by committing suicide, assigned to the past the task of expressing the whole meaning of his life, Peter known the difficulty of summarizing his past while depriving him of the honor of saying the last word on the meaning of his life. This is the space where hope or the suicidal gesture is played out. Hoping, in fact, does not only mean looking forward with optimism, but above all looking back to see how it is possible to configure that past that lives in us, to play it into possibilities to come. To commit suicide, on the other hand, is to decide that our past contains the ultimate and definitive meaning of our life, so it is no longer the case to summarize it, but only to simply put an end to it.” It’s like this for Mary: in hope there is the freedom to give the past the custody of further meanings, there is the choice to move forward leaving hatred and blind violence behind.
And Mary’s words are not lost in the void: the morality and religiosity of the young protagonist find echoes in Raf, the inner companion, and Delma, the faithful friend. Raf, the Daimon of Mary, the guardian angel inhabitant of the darkness but also of the light: «Raf went to Mary saying to her:- When we met we were bodies of fresh clay, we had green branches for arms, our myriads of roots were intertwined, born from dark terrain of blood and placed inside a prism of stars, until a gasp of Light delivered us to freedom and a new kingdom. It was our secret Temple, which we kept just for ourselves, remaining guardians of non-knowledge.”
The therapeutic function that writing performs is also evident through the omniscient narrative voice that weaves the plot by skillfully moving between the environments of Greek tragedy and those of modern drama, between the rhythms of prose and poetic ones. Maria Teresa Liuzzo proceeds between dialogue, monologue and stream of consciousness, finds her way between Svevo and Joyce; once you feel the logical control of the writer behind the thoughts and stimuli of the protagonist, which develop freely and spontaneously, and once less. But we are certain of one thing: the flow of consciousness in Liuzzo is not a simple narrative technique, in turn conditioned, but it is the voice of the soul, and the only free way of genuine expression of the individual.
Goodbye El Beih
