By Brock Henry Allen

In his adaptation of The Canterbury Tales, Pier Paolo Pasolini appears only a handful of times as the medieval poet of the tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, and in these few moments I feel reproached and hopeful. Slotted between stories of deception, lust, and retribution, the bodies and souls of Chaucer’s characters bared before the camera, Pasolini-as-Chaucer sits in his chair, or late at night lounges in his bed with a quill in hand, and in these brief depictions his face glows in the reflection of a mind skittering through the imagination. As he writes, head in hand and eyes cast upward, he smiles. I had forgotten this feeling, and I wanted it again.

Pasolini’s film maintains an amateurish quality befitting a man who saw himself foremost as a writer, as he sought a “poetry of cinema.” His editing in particular cuts hard between close-ups and establishing shots, with this viewer often unable to understand what or where is being established. The Canterbury Tales was shot in English, dubbed in Italian, and then redubbed in English (I think I got that right), and this also lends the film a quality of mis-timing between the characters, the pauses between lines regularly too long as if each person understands little of what the other has said. In particular, Pasolini likes to linger on smiling faces, of angels or devils or his beloved Ninetto Davoli, until these smiles stiffen toward grimace. It all creates a feeling particular to Pasolini that I’ve only experienced while watching his other films—The Gospel According to St. Matthew, The Decameron, or Arabian Nights (I have not seen his most infamous film, Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom; it frightens me), and in these smiles, and in the spaces between the characters’ words, I feel peculiarly entranced. At times, I feel bored, but never detached. It’s an unusual sensation, because unlike other hypnotic stylists of his country, like Fellini, Antonioni, or Bertolucci, whose painstaking productions heavily wear the appearance of masterpiece, Pasolini’s appear as a charming accident, off-handed, like something he nearly scrapped, a sketch that has against the odds lived.

Both Pasolini’s portrayal of Chaucer and the lightness of his style reminded me that writing can be fun. I can’t remember the last time writing felt this way. This essay itself emerged from hand-wringing insecurity, as all my writing in recent years has, but there were moments, flashes that have given me hope. Sure, I talk about the joys of writing, often speaking against writerly self-pity, probably too often; methinks I protest too much as one with broken faith attacks the vocal doubters. For the last five years, I’ve taught students in both rhetoric and creative writing classes that writing can be a joyful act, that it doesn’t have to be drudgery, that as that tired old idiom goes, the best part of writing isn’t only having written (which is also an exceptional feeling). The opportunity to sit with oneself and put thoughts on paper is rare in this world, to play around with words and phrases, or the structure of sentences, organize ideas until they fall into place with a nearly audible click. This puzzle-making is fun, engaging, and difficult. It never gets old. This writing never gets old. I could do this forever, and yet, I haven’t done it for years

I first got hooked on writing, hooked in a way that felt like I could do this and nothing else and be happy, in my first creative writing workshop as a sophomore in college. Early in the semester we responded to a writing prompt that asked us to describe a rusty bicycle. I can remember the exact evening I did the assignment, sitting at my desk in my apartment, my roommate behind me, flipping through his notecards, grumbling his way towards memorizing all the bones in a foot. As I sat playing around with words and descriptions, playing them in a sentence in my head, choosing colors and feelings, I thought, This is simply the best thing I’ve ever done.

One of my favorite depictions of a poet captures this elemental spark. In the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, Harriet Hayward, the sister of Donna, is shown late at night sitting in her bed with a pencil in one hand and a notebook in the other. Earlier that day, Donna’s best friend Laura Palmer was found dead, and Donna is about to ask Harriet if she can borrow her bike to investigate, when Harriet asks, “Donna, which do you like better, ‘The blossom of the evening,’ or ‘The full flower of the evening’?” Donna ignores her question, and says, “Listen to me, this is serious,” and broken from her reverie, Harriet responds with the only acceptable response, “Well, this is serious, too.” And it is serious. Writing the right word is serious, because it’s rare. It touches something numinous. When Donna leaves, Harriet says, “Actually, now that some time has passed, I like, ‘The full blossom of the evening.’” This isn’t a depiction of the poet turning from the world to live blissfully in the full blossom of their imagination. Later in the season, Harriet shares a poem about Laura that provides clarity, warmth, and healing to her family and friends. If you’re reading this, I probably don’t need to talk about the power of art, but I do want to say that finding joy in the right phrase might allow one to later share that art with someone who needs it.

On the way to Canterbury, as the other travellers sleep, Pasolini’s Chaucer sits on his bed, like Harriet, and writes the tales. Lit by candles that cast deep shadows below his sharp cheekbones, he wears a white tunic and a white hat that covers his ears, and he gazes into the dark, smiling and dreaming. He always looks taken away by dreams. When we first meet him, Chaucer has just run into a large, bald man, presumably because he was lost in his tales. Later, he sits below his large wooden desk at home in a well-lit room lined with books and windows alongside his famous cat as he reads Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Most scholars agree that Chaucer was influenced by Boccaccio, with at least one biographer positing that the two had met when Chaucer visited Italy. It’s easy to see how each of these works (along with Arabian Nights) captivated Pasolini at a purely literary level, the ways they play with the frame story, but Pasolini was just as besotted by the content of their times. During an interview when he was asked why he kept returning to classic works from the distant past, Pasolini said they were his most ideological films because they showed life “before the body had become merchandise.” They offered an alternative life to the one that had corrupted the twentieth century. What he sought in his films is distilled I believe in his intentions for making The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Alone one night in a hotel while travelling, Pasolini, an atheist, read the four Gospels straight through, and he decided then to make a film based on the first Gospel. His stipulations to make it:

I will faithfully translate, in images, without omission to or deletion from the story. Even the dialogue must be strictly that of Saint Matthew, without even a line of explanation or feeder lines: because no images or words inserted can ever be of the poetic height of the text. It is this poetic height which, with some anxiety, inspires me, I want to make a work of poetry.

Naturally, Pasolini first thought of a poet to play his Jesus, considering Allen Ginsberg and Luis Goytisolo, and he even wrote a letter to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, which in part said, “For Christ, a ‘man off the street’ will not suffice: to the innocent expressivity of nature must be added the light of reason. And so, I thought of poets. And thinking of poets, I thought first of you.” Innocent expressivity of nature matched with reason: I love this definition of the poet.

In the introduction to Jorge Luis Borges’ The Sonnets, translator Stephen Kessler writes how Borges (a great frame story lover and writer himself) would like his readers to experience his poems: “For pleasure.” Reading for pleasure and writing for someone else’s pleasure are of course two different things, as Borges himself knew well. On the same page, Kessler quotes from a lecture Borges gave at Harvard, saying, “I think the happiness of a reader is beyond that of a writer, for a reader need feel no trouble, no anxiety: he is merely out for happiness.” Trouble and anxiety will always, for me anyways, be a part of my experience with writing. This trouble of figuring out how to stack words has been there for the beginning—if there was no trouble or difficulty I would have gotten bored of this whole thing a long time ago—but somewhere along the way, trouble and anxiety were all I felt while writing.

Last spring, I began feeling nauseated when I sat down to write. And then I began having panic attacks. In the third year of my PhD, I found I could write no more. Depression’s a funny thing. The way it creeps in almost without notice. A bit of sadness here and there until it has dulled into something all consuming. “I have a black dog,” Dr. Samuel Johnson told James Boswell, “and am afraid he will bite me.” I got bit. I wondered if I’d kept writing only because I couldn’t picture a different life.

Since that creative writing workshop over ten years ago I’ve held a daily writing practice, or at least a practice in which I sit before a computer “writing.” This practice structures my days and life, but most importantly it gives me a rich opportunity to nearly always feel like shit. A not small part of me that is always seeking to despise myself finds endless reasons during this process. Whether it’s never writing enough, or writing enough and never liking what I’ve written, being embarrassed about not publishing enough, being embarrassed about what I’ve published, being worried that I won’t publish enough to find a job, that I’ll never publish enough to keep a job, that I’m spent and I haven’t even begun. If only I published, graduated, and found the job, I could write freely again, I tell myself.

And then I read Borges’ sonnet, “Emerson.” It begins with Emerson just having finished reading Montaigne, as he walks “into an evening which exalts the fields.” The sun is falling and gilding the edges of the landscape. He moves through this land, and then, “He thinks: I have read the essential books / And written others which oblivion / Will not efface. I have been allowed / That which is given mortal man to know. / The whole continent knows my name. / I have not lived. I want to be someone else.” Borges turned to the sonnet form after losing his sight. Formal verse allowed him to memorize his poems as he worked on them in his mind. He wrote, “Regular verse is, so to speak, portable. One can walk down the street or be riding the subway while composing and polishing a sonnet, for rhyme and meter have mnemonic virtues.” I like to envision this: creation made portable and free. Borges in the world with beautiful, tragic words dancing in his mind.

Watching The Canterbury Tales, I wondered if Pasolini’s depiction of Chaucer’s artistic practice was a reflection of his own, or a kind of wish fulfillment, as out of reach for Pasolini as it was for me. I found a clue in the biography, Pasolini Requiem, when during production of the film Pasolini learned his lover Ninetto intended to marry someone else. Pasolini was heartbroken and distraught, and he wrote, “I was very unhappy when I made the film. To make a film full of vitality and sex, when one’s spirit is anguished, is difficult.” But he made it, as the making offered a respite. To face his struggles, he turned to his art, not just in film, but in poetry and letters, writing many poems about his heartbreak and probably too many letters to friends grappling with his new reality. Unlike Pasolini I confused my depression with my writing. I have seen writing as both the cause and my way out, but it is neither. I was burnt-out from the academic world, my past, present, and future within it, but I mistook this world for writing, this world that, to borrow Pasolini’s term, creates merchandise of the student body.

The last vignette in Passolini’s film is an adaptation of “The Friar’s Tale,” in which a corrupt friar who uses his power to cheat and steal is taken on a tour through Hell by an angel. The raucous, bawdy scene that follows fits the director who famously said, “To scandalize is a right, to be scandalized is a pleasure.” Men are chained and led through the volcanic landscape, where their screams are matched by devils’ laughter. Beside the chained men, four devils play rock, paper, scissors, presumably to see who will perform the next tortures. In the distance, men are hanged, some are whipped, others sodomized or run through with pitchforks or boiled in large pots. After the tour, the angel yells to a bent over, bright red devil, “Hey, Satan! Lift up your tail! Show us where you keep the friars in Hell.” And in a hail of farts that ring throughout Hell, evil friars are expelled from the anuses of devils. It’s a horrible, outrageous scene that I couldn’t help but smile at, laugh at, and love. Pasolini hard-cuts to himself as Chaucer, writing the story down, smiling, looking wistful and amused, before he writes, “Amen.” I feel hope in this soft smile. I feel hope in the glimpse of this imagination. I don’t know what it’s changed for me, but I was scandalized, and I was glad.

---

Brock Henry Allen is an essayist from Montana. He is currently a PhD candidate in creative writing at Texas Tech University, and his essays can be found at Nimrod, Shenandoah, Short Reads, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere