Cristina Campo

Liturgical senses. On Cristina Campo’s Diario Bizantino (2026). by Gerardo Muñoz

Cristina Campo was a modern mystic who gravitated towards the liturgy of the poetic word. Now thanks to the scholarship of Victoria Cirlot, the Spanish reader is able to read her complete poetry in the bilingual edition Diario Bizantino: Poesía (1945-1977) (Siruela, 2026), which serves the missing companion to the essays collected in Los imperdonables (Siruela 2020). It is difficult not only to differentiate modern genres in Campo’s writing scene, given that both essays and poems (and also her letters, published in multiple volumes by Adelphi, but not yet collected in Spanish) revolve around the same concern around the liturgical depth of the word and the image as indispensable units of raising to the divine transcendence lodged in a treasure chest of secrets. For Campo modernity is the temporal movement that laceration this longing for the mystery, where language insofar it serves the purposes of justification never ceases to participate in the spectacle of imagery and the tradition of the rite that grants access to the experience of the senses. Hence, mutilation does not seem a harsh verb: to slash and separate becomes a misnomer for the closure of “this world”, which is not only the material world of immanence, but one in which the autonomy of imagery – and thus the passive act of imagining – enters into a terminal pauperization elevated by fictitious, at times melodramatic, ornamentation of meaning. 

To leave the reduction of meaning implies a sense of the liturgical. As Cirlot notes in her brief, yet lucid introduction to the volume, it is impossible to not read Campo’s poetic word within the coordinates of her understanding of the liturgical praxis as a mode of artistic development. In fact, in her essay “Note on the liturgy” (1966), Campo would claim that liturgy was a celebration of the divine mystery that is instantiated by the charity of language as an “ecstatic mirror of creation” [1]. If liturgy is a mode of an ongoing work of art in the shadow between the living, the dead, and language it is because, as Florensky also noted – another figure revered by the Italian writer – it is the abyss of a sense of freedom raises to the freedom of the senses beyond fixity of mimetic representation through objective spatial groundness. Around the same years that Campo was meditating on the need to alleviate modern poetics from the maladies and the self-inflicted wounds of the Ego, the Catholic poet Octavio Smith, a member of the Orígenes group, would also celebrate the liturgy as the condition of an image that carries forth folded in the vocative, the offices and rites made possible by pure charity [2]. The partition and participation of poetic language is not just an abstract entelechy of the koine for human language; but, more importantly, it is the charitas that saves language because it appeals to the extasis of beauty. Campo will write that the liturgical scene: “…as in poetry is a splendorous charity, more on the side of necessity than of the useful. It is regulated by harmonious forms and rites that, inspired by creation, surpasses itself in extasis” (Campo, 17). It is the excess of language beyond language that finds dwelling space in the abyss that enacts as witness of a comprehensive cosmic reality. 

And charity will be less than nothing if it would not carry in its interiority the nexus with the dead and the transmigration of the soul that are now joined with the living. The examples abound: “…se nel mio trachea / contemplarai di un’altra migrazione….nessun vincolo univa questi morti / nella necropoli deserta” (Campo 38). In Campo’s poetry the liturgical charitas is not an event of absolute faith overturning, but what is already occurring, a rhythm, that is both fixed and suspended between actual presence and the non-present, “the destiny between the hand and the flower” (como il destino tra la mano e il fiore)”, that has clear echoes of Coleridge romantic dream (Campo 48). And yet in Campo’s poetic liturgy there is no moment of awakening, but realization that existence is transnatural, never hidden in the order of the natural world, but in the “perfumed cloud of language” (nell’odorosa nube della lingua) (Campo 84). If language participates in the flaming and enduring rite of the living and the dead, it is because it keeps track of the pure absence and the negative of the voice, that is both present and absent in the mouthing of every prayer, and as the symbol that longs to devour language itself: “la Tigre Assenza, ha tutto divorato, di quetso volto rivolto a voi!” (Campo, 92). In the praxis of liturgy, the highest celebration through hymns and chants seem to permanently reveal – and perform its revelation – of the abyss that cross language towards its own rebirth and pulsating elucidation. This passion for absence that devours speech becomes the transport of Campo’s poetic dwelling from beginning to end. 

Obviously, the major poem in the collection is “Diario bizatino”, that is structured around four parts and published posthumously in 1977, and whose first verse can easily become the vortex of the poetic exploration: “Due modi – e io vengo dall’altro” (“Two worlds – and I come from the other one”) (Campo 94). The poetic word assumes the reality of the gnosis as a threshold that is no longer between the past and future time of salvation, but the very schism that allows the passage from the living and the dead to resurface. It is a threshold that cuts through the soul itself: “…è il taglio vivente ed efficace / più affilato della duplice lama / che affonda sino alla separazione dell’anima veemente dallo spirto delicato” (Campo 94-96). To come from “other world” and to transit into “this one” is perhaps to be a little bit dead or undead among the living in the whirlwind of the names. As Campo writes in a defining verse of the long poem: “…al centro del Sole là dove il Nome! Rapisce in vortice immoto alla vita del mondo, zampilla nuovi sensi dal mondo della morte” (Campo 96-98). To be with the dead is no theatrical imposture of a void ritual that questions the meaning of “this life” – perhaps the most commonplace Hamletian condition inherited by modernity – but it is the instance that allows the senses of the world of the dead to creep on us as an unexpected ambush.  

This is why the mirage of the Byzantine becomes the new Sun in the middle of the darkest Night, and the moon soon gives way to eventual coming of the Sun (Campo 99). The liturgical plane of the senses extends to what language can receive in both giving and receiving through the analogical being that is lacking in sequential time. Here Campo’s East is in sharp contrast with Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”, where all that lives is “caught in that sensual music / all neglect monuments of unageing intellect. An aged man is but a paltry thing” [3]. If for Yeats Byzantium is a site of alchemical rejuvenation and rebirth, Campo’s ageless Byzantinism nourishes the dead in which language finds beauty and pain as the supreme witness. In all accounts of what is invested in a language that cannot speak of the unfathomable revelation, for Campo the poetic word is weighted as a song to “testimonaire, a ferire / a insolibuilmente saldare / a inguaribilmente  separate” (Campo 118). The influx is the ultimate liturgy of separation, between language and being, the idea and reality is never completely lost. Or it could very well be lost, but only in what remains merely visible in this world.

This is why Campo never felt the need of the production of writing, not when the liturgy brings closer the excavated eyelids of pavid “gazes ingrained to the memories, to the ground, and to the dying psyche”, as she writes in the last verses of “Ràdonitza” (Campo, 120). In the way of “Burnt Norton” well-known bird – “human kind cannot bear very much reality”, and that is about right when it comes to what can be abandoned from the viewpoint of language. Between this world and its other – the triumph of Manichaeism outlives in the celebration of the fluvial depth of poetry – the divine apokatastasis of what remains unsaid, and yet well kept in the form of a diary. 

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Notes 

1. Cristina Campo. “Note sopra la liturgia” (1966), in Sotto falso nome (Adelphi, 1998), 129-135 

2. Octavio Smith. “Liturgia, Poesía, Mundo”, Islas, N.2, January-August, 1960, 485-492.

The soul of things. On Alice Rohrwacher’s Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

In the the long conversation Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (Edizioni e/o, 2023) conducted by Goffredo Fofi, the contemporary Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher offers a series of reflections about the possibilities of artistic creation in the abysmal time of integrated spectacle that has fully brought to bear the erosion of the human capacity for attention and outward experience. Can cinema and film do anything in the wake of such humiliating and crushing reality? At first glance the late modernist critique of the value-driven image seems insufficient and merely rhetorical as the valence of dialectics has been dissolved in the pressure of real subsumption.  In a certain sense,  Dopo il cinema: le domande di una regista (2023) is a reflection written after the ambivalent commitment of cinema to awaken the spectator from the slumber of the absorption in order regime of standardization where the utopia of self-design realizes the objective abstraction in the acceleration of optimized and contained expressiveness. At no moment does Rohrwacher affirm that we are, indeed, “after cinema”, but throughout the dialogue the tone is that of  immediacy in an epoch that seems to be saturated by looping, real-time, and the intensification of life-exposure spectacle. If film is reduced to telling stories, then it falls into vulgarity, while contributing to the gigantic sedative layout that veils the annihilation of social reproduction. In  the last decade, Alice Rohrwacher has done a series of important and highly original films (Le meraviglie, Lazzaro felice, or La chimera) that signal a way out from the numbness of sight, relocating the  moving image to the mythic dialogue with the invisible, the mysterious, and the old craft of the fable narrative. Rohrwacher’s cinema is only magical to the extent that it subtract itself from the historical overindulgence that the autonomous historical man had to endure in its separation from nature.  

Filmmaking is no privilege site of creation, but if Ruíz was right, there are plenty of chamanic energies circumventing the cinematic experience. This is a prehistoric residue that, in her own style, Rohrwacher wants to hold on to. In Dopo il cinema  (2023), she admits that  any attempt to organize a new “political” cinema is out of question, as it was always grounded in the idealism of ‘consciousness’, which is now realized in the self-narcissistic exposition of the free-floating subject of market equivalence. Political cinema could only be arrogant and superfluous pedagogy at the mercy of the furious chatter of “cultural wars”. Is there a higher poverty? And yet this is what appears as ‘necessary ideological critique’ in some circles. In this sense, cinema is not the leading instrument for the work of imagination and Rohrwacher insistence on ‘creation’ drives the point home. Citing Elsa Morante (and perhaps implicitly Cristina Campo) Rohwacher defends the creation as an ongoing effort of a common intelligence to grasp the invisible and allow the eruption of joy in the life of characters. Similar to Robert Bresson who wanted the characters of his films to have an outlook as if they were castaways from the time of the first Adam in the earthly paradise; for Rohrwacher the thicket of creativity for our times is rooted in a contemplative gaze through which the external elements of the world can hone the one and true destiny of the irreducibility of the human species [1]. Rohrwacher’s assertion that she wants creation to establish proximity with the outside – devoid of attachment to religion, political parties, or moral principles –  presupposes a sound critique of all forms of idolatry that have modeled aesthetic production at the service of abstract historical needs (Rohrwacher 33). 

As a creator Alice Rohrwacher’s own point departure is thoroughly subtractive. This means leaving behind the subject of consciousness (the internal and self-sufficient producer of images, which today appears with the empty label of content creator), while opening the cinematic possibilities to the luminosity of a collective imagination in which the contemplation touches, albeit for a moment, the thought of the world (‘pensieri del mundo’) (Rohwacher 36). Obviously, this is no longer an artifice of cinema in its industrial and technological capacities; rather, it is the impersonal general intellect that refuses the integral planning that forecloses the wayward route of imagination, discovery, happiness, and the uncharted land in which the characters and spectators are taken by the seduction of the possibility of events (Rohrwacher 39). Whenever film, like a fairy tale, touches the truth of a not-yet administered world (an inapprehensible excess that resembles prophecy), then visual pedagogy ceases to be a task of cinema; rather, the process of film is one of “ex-ducere, cioè portare fuori, educare” (Rohrwacher 52). And as Cristina Campo understood well, the fairy tale (analogous to cinema for Rohrwacher) has at the center of its making the “raw material of existence…this material is the mystery of character…which maintains its traits to the end, and only be transformed by repeating the same errors, suffering the same defeats. The nature of this mystery is sometimes suggested with enchanting ambiguity” [2]. It is this ambiguity what expresses the caesura between existence and world – their strange noncoincidence – that has colored the experiential texture of Rohrwacher’s poetical cinema. 

The central characters of Rohrwahcer’s films (Lazzaro felice, La chimera) are symbolic personifications of forms of life that are neither alive nor dead; neither mythic nor mundane; neither fictional nor historical determined (each of her films are also landscapes of specific territorial Italian communes); there are both things at once, and they maintain their musical tonality in their own symbolic protuberance, precisely because they cannot be divided and forced into the civilizational narrative at the expense of the exhaustion of the mystery of form (Rohrwacher 63). In fact, Rohrwacher, so attuned to Joseph Roth’s indictment of the Hollywood’s hollow gestalt announced in the The Antichrist (1933), reminds us that the word “devil” (diaballo) implies cut and division; whereas, the symbol, cultivates and renews the mysterious enchanted dimension of the world in which no reified image (any image that could be potentially any other) can hold the human species as hostage in the  cacophonous prison of senselessness. And is not this radical evil – an assumed and distributed morality of the active consumer, who always works “for his own interest” – the most basic unit of the transmission of the image-spectacle from which one has to flee from? The mythic or fairy-tale-like leveling in Rohrwacher is no metaphoric transport; it becomes the cinematic potential to see the world with a clear third eye. 

No easy task of course. Deposing the fictitious machine entails exerting a movement of exodus towards the outside, which Rohrwacher assuredly calls the invisible as that which restitutes the soul of things. The symbol is a passage against the seduction of the pleasure principle of self-enjoyment and parodic personal heroisms. And this is perhaps the most powerful and original testament of Rohrwacher aesthetic sensibility in Dopo il cinema (2023): “Ma nel memento in qui quella cose emanano – direi irradiano – un’anima, subito ne abbiamo più cura, e la cura come abbiamo detto è un atto eversivo. Un’azione poetica” (Rohrwacher 64). And poetry remains not only the dwelling place of human beings; but, fundamentally, the lacuna in a world that refuses to come to completion. Perhaps ‘cinema’ – or, rather, ‘cinema after cinema’ – in Rohrwacher’s view only emerges as a gnostic symbol that prepares the birth of a new earth, as if planting a seed for seasonal germination (Rohrwacher 64). In each character, image, symbol, and gesture, Rohrwacher’s filmmaking plunders into the position of redemption against the cruel reduction of the objective madhouse: restituting the soul in things dignifies the inheritance of terrestrial human species as if it is always coming into presence for the very first time. The eros of cinema becoming an enduring task — and is not ultimately what we feel in each of Rohrwacher’s films? The joyous spirit of the saltimbanca: in and outside the world’s reality, the symbol lives and outlives the fixation of this world.

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Notes 

1. Robert Bresson. Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983 (nyrb, 2013), 277.

2. Cristina Campo. “On Fairy Tales”, in The Unforgivable (nyrb, 2024), 33.