STORIES: Alda Merini

Alda Merini is a point of reference as a woman. As a poet and writer. As a person.

Her sensitivity has something magical and otherworldly about it, and at the same time something extremely concrete and close to everyone's life. She had the enormous ability to write poems that spoke a universal language, able to touch deeply the soul even of those who are not familiar with these forms of expression. And for me this is her first and immense strength.

Poetry doesn't always arrive directly; sometimes it drifts away from feeling to reach more intellectual and cerebral spheres. Very often the use of complex language makes everything cryptic and not easy to understand. And even more than understanding, not always easy to feel.

Her poems, for me, are exactly the opposite. You feel them in the body that holds its breath, on the skin that welcomes goosebumps, in eyes that grow moist with tears. This is because Alda had this immense capacity to make her own story universal. Her lived experience, her pain, the incredible hardships she went through in life did not distance her, but on the contrary brought her closer to the rest of humanity, at the highest peak of a natural, living, powerful empathy.

Psychiatric illness is a real hell. Like many other illnesses, but with some peculiar aspects that make everything extremely painful and dark, in which it is so easy to get lost in loneliness and isolation. Psychiatric hospitals are extremely difficult places, and she spent about 18 years in them, going in and out at different moments of her life. The superficial and rather silly belief that the mentally ill person is really a great artist or a misunderstood genius is often just a little story we tell ourselves to try to feel better, first of all with ourselves. It happens, but for every case like that there are thousands and thousands in which the illness simply takes hold of you. With no real happy ending. And it is far more likely that certain extreme and negative experiences will leave you furious with the world around you, and that these experiences will dehumanise you, making you cynical, hopeless, without light, without strength. It is something we never want to tell ourselves; we always have to believe that suffering makes us better, in order to feel better, to overcome difficulties and to get back up after a fall. But it isn't so. Certain pains, certain traumas, just happen. They improve absolutely nothing. They don't make you better, they weaken you, they sink you, sometimes they kill you. And that is where people like Alda are beside you, helping you back up. That is where having a female role model like her can lead you to improve yourself.

This is one of the aspects of Alda that for me is among the most important: she transformed into something precious, immense, eternal experiences that would have derailed anyone, towards a darkness of no return. And not only that, she is also the hope of getting back up and continuing to believe in life for many people who find in her words the strength to try to feel well for one more day, and then one more.

Her light was so strong that it illuminates and will continue to illuminate all of us. It was not extinguished by war, psychiatric hospitals, family problems, bipolar disorder and depression, nor by the lack of recognition of her work, which came very late, after a life lived with far less consideration than she deserved. She had several mystical crises at various times, and this doesn't surprise me, because she truly seems to be, in some way, beyond this world.

And, dear Alda, that you were always beyond, even when you walked on this earth, is shown by every aspect of your life and your poetry. And in the universality of your infinite humanity, your words will always echo.

Alice K.

I need feelings by Alda Merini

I don't need money.

I need feelings,
words, words wisely chosen,
flowers called thoughts,
roses called presences,
dreams that dwell in the trees,
songs that make statues dance,
stars that murmur in lovers' ears.
I need poetry,
this magic that burns away the heaviness of words,
that awakens emotions and gives new colours.

My poetry is brisk as fire,
it runs through my fingers like a rosary.
I do not pray, because I am a poet of misfortune
who sometimes keeps silent the pangs of a birth within the hours,
I am the poet who cries out and plays with her cries,
I am the poet who sings and finds no words,
I am the dry straw on which sound beats,
I am the lullaby that makes children cry,
I am the vainglory that lets itself fall,
the metal mantle of a long prayer
of past grief that does not see the light.

STORIES is a column dedicated to great stories from the past that can inspire your present.