"Those Encounters of Theirs the five last DIALOGUES WITH LEUCÒ of Cesare Pavese" "He's gone and is walking among the humans." "He's taken the valley road, and stops in vineyards or along the coast." "Sometimes he goes to the gates of a city." "No one would say that he is Father and Lord." "I wonder sometimes what he wants, what he's looking for." "After struggling so hard to put the world - fields, mountains, clouds - in his hands!" "He could sit up there and relax." "But no." "He goes walking." "What's strange about that?" "He who is Lord follows his caprices." "Far from The Mountain and us, right?" "And he owes it to us, his slaves, that he's Lord." "He should be content the world fears and prays to him." "What use to him are these little humans?" "They're part of the world, they too, my dear." "I don't know, something's not the way it used to be." "Our mother said:" ""He will come like a storm, and the seasons will change."" "This son of The Mountain who commands with a nod is not like the old lords" " Night, Earth, Old Sky or Chaos." "It's as though the world is divided." "Once things happened." "Everything came to an end, and it was the whole that lived." "Now instead there's a law and there's a mind - one only." "He's made himself immortal, and along with him us his slaves." "Even the little humans think about us;" "they know they have to die, and they contemplate us." "And this part I understand, it's why we fought the Titans." "But that he, the celestial who on The Mountain promised us these gifts, that he should leave the peaks and indulge his every caprice," "that he becomes a human among the humans, this I don't like." "Do you like it, sister?" "He wouldn't be Lord, if the law he made he couldn't break." "But does he really break them?" "I don't understand him, that's the fact." "When we attacked on the mountains, he was smiling as though he'd already won." "He fought with nods and few words." "He never expressed" "disdain; his enemy was already defeated and he was still smiling." "That's how he crushed Titans and humans." "Then I liked him;" "he had no pity." "And he smiled like that another time, when he thought of giving humans the woman Pandora," "to punish them for stealing fire." "How can he be satisfied now with vineyards and cities?" "Maybe the woman, Pandora, isn't just a curse." "Why don't you want him to like her, if she was his gift?" "But do you know what humans are like?" "Miserable things that have to die," "more miserable than worms or last year's leaves that are dead without knowing it." "Humans instead know it and say it," "and never stop invoking us, trying to extract a favor or glance, and are always lighting fires to us," "those very fires they stole inside the reed." "And with women, offerings, songs and pretty words, they've gotten" "one of us immortals," "to descend among them, to look on them kindly, to have children with them." "Do you see their calculation, their miserable, brazen trick?" "Do you see why I'm so angry?" "Mother said it, and you as well: the world has changed." "Today's not the first time the Lord of the mountains went down among humans." "Maybe you forget he was once a fugitive on an island in the sea, died and was buried there as used to happen to gods them?" "This is known." "But it doesn't follow that his nod has lost its power." "Those who lost power instead are the lords of Chaos who once ruled without law." "Before humans, the beast and even the stone was god." "Everything happened without name, without law." "It required the flight of the god, the gross impiety of his imprisonment with humans when he was still a baby suckling on a goat," "and then his growth in the mountain forests, the humans' words and the peoples' laws," "and the pain of death and regret, it took all this to make the son of Kronos into the good Judge, the immortal and restless Mind." "You think you helped him crush the Titans?" "You said yourself he fought as though he'd already won." "The reborn child became Lord while living among the humans." "And so be it." "Law was worth the pain." "But why insist on going back down there, now that he's king of us all?" "Brother, brother, won't you understand that the world, even if it's no longer divine, for this very reason is always new and always rich, for those who go down there from The Mountain?" "The words of the humans, who know they suffer, who worry, who possess the earth, reveal wonders to those who hear them." "The young gods, come after the lords of Chaos, all walk the earth among the humans." "And if they preserve their love for the mountain places, the caves, the savage skies, they do so" "because now humans have reached even here and their voice loves to violate those silences." "If he were just strolling around, this son of Kronos!" "Just listening and punishing, according to the law." "But how does he convince himself to enjoy humans and be enjoyed by them?" "to steal women and children from these mortals?" "If you had known humans, you'd understand." "They're poor worms, but everything with them is unexpected and a discovery." "One can know the beast, one can know the god, but no one not even we, knows the depth of their hearts." "There are even some among them who pit themselves against destiny." "Only by living with them and for them does one taste the world." "Or the women, the daughters of Pandora, those beasts?" "Women or beasts, it's the same." "What do you think you're saying?" "They're the richest fruit of mortal life." "But does Zeus accost them as beast or as god?" "Silly, he accosts them as human." "That's the point." "These mortals are really fun." "We know things and they do them." "Without them" "I wonder what our days would be like." "What would we Olympians be?" "They call out to us with their small voices and give us names." "I existed before they did, and I can tell you" "we were alone." "The earth was forest, snakes, turtles." "We were the earth, the air, the water." "What could one do?" "It was then we got the habit of being eternal." "This doesn't happen with humans." "True." "Everything they touch becomes time." "Becomes action." "Waiting and hoping." "Even their dying is something." "They have a way of naming themselves and things and us" "that enriches life." "Like the little vineyards they managed to plant on these hills." "Wheh I brought the first vine shoot to Eleusis, I never thought they'd make these ugly rocky slopes into so sweet a land." "And wheat fields and gardens too." "Wherever they employ labor and words is born a rhythm, a meaning, a peace." "And the stories they tell about us?" "Sometimes I wonder if I am really the Gaia, Rhea, Cybele" "or Great Mother they say I am." "They're able to give us names, that reveal us to ourselves, Iacchus, and they tear us from the heavy eternity of destiny" "to paint us colorfully in the times and lands where we are now." "For us you are always Deo." "Who would think that in their poverty they could have so much richness?" "For them" "I am a wild, forested mountain." "I am cloud and cave." "I am lady lord of lions, fodder and bulls, walled fortresses," "cradle and tomb, and mother of Kore." "Everything I am I owe to them." "They're always talking about me, too." "And shouldn't we help them more, Iacchus?" "Compensate them somehow?" "Be beside them in the short day they enjoy?" "You've given them grain, I've given them vines, Deo." "Let them be." "What else do they need?" "I don't know why, but whatever comes from our hands is always ambiguous - an ax with two blades." "My [son] Triptolemus nearly got his throat cut by the Scythian guest he brought wheat to." "And you too," "I hear, cause their innocent blood to flow." "They wouldn't be humans, if they weren't sad." "Their life must die, however." "All their richness is death, which forces them to work all they can, to remember and look ahead." "And so don't believe, Deo, that their blood is worth more than the wheat or wine we nourish them with." "Blood is vile, dirty, worthless." "You are young, Iacchus, and don't know that" "it's in blood that they found us." "You run around the world restlessly, and death for you is like wine that excites." "But you don't realise that the mortals have themselves suffered everything they recount of us." "How many mortal mothers have lost their Kore and never seen her again!" "Still today the richest homage they can make to us is to spill blood." "But is it a homage, Deo?" "You know better than I that by killing the victim they thought they were killing us." "And can you blame them?" "This is why I tell you they found us in blood." "If for them death is the end and beginning, they had to kill us in order to see us reborn." "They are very unhappy, Iacchus." "You think so?" "To me they seem stupid." "Or maybe not." "Given they're so mortal, they give life meaning by killing themselves." "They have to live and die their own stories." "Take the case of Icarius..." "That poor Erigone!" "Yes, but Icarius got himself killed because he wanted to." "Perhaps he thought his blood was wine." "He picked grapes, pressed them and drew off the wine like crazy." "It was the first time that anyone saw must foaming in a farmyard." "They splattered hedges, walls and shovels with it." "Even Erigone put his hands into it." "They why did the old idiot go into the fields and make the shepherds drink it?" "They, drunk, poisoned, enraged, tore him to pieces on the hedge like a goat and then buried him so there'd be more wine." "He knew this would happen and wanted it to." "Should it have surprised his daughter, who had tasted the wine?" "She too knew what would happen." "What else could she do, to complete the story," "than hang herself in the sun like a bunch of grapes?" "There's nothing sad about it." "Mortals tell their stories with blood." "And you think this is worthy of us?" "You were wondering what we'd be without them." "You know that some day" "they may tire of us gods." "So you see that blood, this worthless blood, is important to you." "But what do you want to give them?" "Whatever it is, they'll always make blood out of it." "There's only one way, and you know it." "Tell me." "Give meaning to their dying." "How?" "Teach them the happy life." "But that's tempting destiny," "Deo." "They are mortals." "Listen." "The day will come when they'll think of it themselves." "And they'll do it without us, with a story." "They'll talk about humans who've conquered death." "Already they've put one of themselves in heaven, and someone goes down to hell every six months." "One of them fought with Death and snatched a creature from her." "Understand me, Iacchus." "They'll do it alone." "And then we'll go back to being what we used to be:" "air, water, and earth." "They won't live longer, that way." "Silly boy, of course not." "But dying will have meaning." "They too will die to be reborn, and they won't need us anymore." "What do you want to do, Deo?" "Teach them they can equal us beyond pain and death." "But let it be we who tell them." "As wheat and vines descend to Hades to be reborn, so teach them that death also for them is new life." "Give them this story." "Lead them by means of this story." "Teach them a destiny which is entwined with our own." "They'll die just the same." "They'll die and will have conquered death." "They'll see something beyond blood, they'll see the two of us." "They won't fear death anymore and won't need to go on placating it by spilling more blood." "It can be done, Deo, it can be done." "It'll be the story of life eternal." "I almost envy them." "They won't know destiny and will be immortal." "But don't hope that the blood will stop flowing." "They'll think only of eternity." "There's even the danger they'll neglect this rich countryside." "For a while." "But once wheat and vine have the meaning of eternal life, you know what the humans will see in bread and wine?" "Flesh and blood, like now, like always." "And flesh and blood will flow, no longer to placate death," "but to gain the eternity awaiting them." "One might say you see the future." "How can you tell?" "It's enough to have seen the past, Deo." "Believe me." "But I think your idea's good." "It will be a story forever." "I wonder what the mortals are saying about this water." "What do they know?" "They accept it." "Some even hope for a bigger harvest from it." "At this hour the flooding rivers have started to uproot the plants." "Now the rain falls everywhere on water." "They're huddling in caves and mountain hovels." "They're listening to the rain." "They're thinking about the valley people who're fighting the water," "and they're deluding themsleves." "All night long they'll delude themselves." "But tomorrow, in the fearful light, when they see one single sea stretching to the horizon, and the mountains shrunk, they won't go back inside the caves." "They'll look around." "They'll throw a sack on their head and look around." "You confuse them with wild beasts." "No mortal can understand he's dying and look at death." "They need to run, think, talk," "to speak with those who are left." "But this time no one's left." "So how will they manage?" "I expect them here." "When they know they're all condemned, all of them, they'll devote themselves to celebrating, you'll see." "They'll even come looking for us." "Us?" "How're we involved?" "A lot." "We're the celebration." "We're life for them." "They'll seek life with us up to the last second." "I don't understand what life we can give them." "We can't even die." "All we can do is watch." "Watch and know." "But you say they don't watch and can't resign themselves." "What else can they ask of us?" "Many things, little goat." "For them we are like wild beasts." "Beasts are born and die like leaves." "Us they see vanishing among branches and so they think we're sort of divine - that when we flee and hide" "we're the life that endures in the woods - a life like theirs but everlasting, richer." "They'll search for us, I tell you." "It'll be the last hope they have." "With this water?" "And what will they do?" "Don't you know what hope is?" "They'll think a woods where we are can't be submerged." "They'll tell themselves that all, all humans can't disappear, otherwise what sense is there in being born and knowing us?" "They'll know that the great ones, the Olympians, want them dead, but that we, like them, like the little beasts," "are ultimately life, earth, the real thing that matters." "They'll turn the seasons into celebrations, and we are the celebrations." "It's convenient." "For them the hope, for us the destiny." "But it's stupid." "Not entirely." "They'll save something." "Yes, but who provoked the great gods?" "Who created all this disorder, that even the sun hides its face?" "It's their doing, I think." "It serves them right." "Come on, little goat, do you really believe such things?" "Don't you think that if they'd really violated life, it'd be enough for life itself to punish them," "with no need for the Olympians to get involved with the flood?" "If someone has violated something, believe me, it's not they." "Meanwhile they're doing the dying." "How will they feel tomorrow, when they know what's happening?" "Feel the torrent, little one." "Tomorrow we'll be under water too." "You'll see ugly things, you who love to watch." "Luckily we can't die." "Sometimes I'm not so sure about that." "I ask myself what it would be like to die." "This is the one thing we're really missing." "We know everything and don't know this simple thing." "I'd like to try it," "and then wake up, of course." "Listen to her!" "But dying is precisely that - not knowing you're dead." "And that's what this flood is :" "so many dying that no one's left to know it." "So they'll come looking for us and will tell us to save them and they'll want to be like us, like plants, like rocks   like things without feelings, things that are mere destiny." "In them they'll be saved." "As the water recedes, rocks and tree trunks will reappear, like it used to be." "And the mortals ask only for what used to be." "Strange people!" "They treat destiny and the future as though they're the past." "This is what hope means." "To give destiny a name to remember it by." "And you really think they'll turn themselves into tree trunks and rocks?" "They know how to tell tales, the mortals!" "They'll live in the future, according to which the terror of tonight and tomorrow will have become fantasies for them." "They'll be wild beasts and rocks and plants." "They'll be gods." "They'll dare to kill the gods to see them born again." "They'll give themselves a past, to escape death." "There's nothing but these two things - hope or destiny." "If this is so, I can't pity them." "It must be wonderful to turn yourself into anything you want" "capriciously." "Yes, it's wonderful." "But don't think they can do it capriciously." "The most extraordinary things they find blindly, when they're already in destiny's crushing claws." "They don't have time to indulge in caprice." "They only know how to to pay with themselves." "This they can do." "At least this flood may serve to teach them what games and celebrations are." "Our capriciousness is imposed on us immortals by destiny, and we know it." "Why can't humans learn to live caprice like an eternal instant in their misery?" "Why don't they understand that it's precisely their ephemeralness that makes them precious?" "One can't have everything, little one." "We who know how don't have preferences." "And those who live unexpected, unique instants don't know their value." "They'd like to have our eternity." "Such is the world." "Tomorrow they'll know something, even they." "And the stones and clods of earth which will one day turn to the light will not live in hope alone or in anguish." "You'll see that the new world" "will have a spark of divinity in even its most ephemeral mortals." "God willing, little goat." "I'd like that too." "In conclusion, you're not happy." "I tell you that, if I think about something past, like the seasons just finished it seems to me I was happy." "But day by day it's different." "I get bored by things and work, the way a drunk does." "So then I stop and climb here on the mountain." "But then, thinking back, again it seems to me that I was happy." "It'll always be like that." "You who know the name of everything, what's the name of this state of mine?" "You can call it by my name, or yours." "My name as a man, Milete, is nothing." "But you, how do you want to be called?" "Every time, the word that summons you is different." "You're like a mother whose name gets lost over the years." "In houses and on paths one can see the mountain from, people talk a lot about you." "They say that once you lived on the most inaccessible mountain, with snow, black trees and monsters," "in Thrace or Thessaly, and people called you Muse." "Others called you Calliope or Clio." "What is your real name?" "In fact, I come from there." "And I have many names." "I'll have others when I come down again" " Aglaia, Hegemony, Phaenna, according to the whim of the place." "Does boredom drive you, too, from place to place?" "So you're not a goddess?" "Neither bored nor goddess, my dear." "Today I like this mountain, Helicon, maybe because you frequent it." "I love to be where humans are, but a little apart." "I never seek out anyone, and I can talk with those who know how to talk." "O Melete," "I don't know how to talk." "And I only think I know anything when I'm with you." "In your voice and in your names is the past, every season I remember." "In Thessaly my name is Mneme." "Some who speak of you say you're as old as the tortoise, decrepit and hard." "Others make you an unripe nymph, like a bud or cloud." "What do you say?" "I don't know." "You're Calliope and you're Mneme." "You have an immortal voice and look." "You're like a hill or a stream - we don't wonder if they're young or old, because for them there's no time." "They exist." "That's all we know." "But even you, dear, exist, and for you existence means boredom and unhappiness." "What do you imagine life is like for us immortals?" "I don't imagine it, Melete," "I venerate it, as I can, with a pure heart." "Go on, I like what you say." "I've said everything." "I know you, you humans, you speak with tight lips." "We can't do anything in front of the gods, except bow." "Never mind the gods." "I existed when there weren't any gods." "You can talk to me." "Humans tell me everything." "Adore us if you want, but tell me how you imagine I live." "How could I know?" "No goddess has found me worthy of her bed." "Stupid, the world has seasons, and that time is finished." "I only know the land I've worked." "You're proud, shepherd." "Proud like mortals." "But it shall be your destiny to know other things." "Tell me why do you feel happy when you talk with me?" "This I can answer." "The things you say don't have the boredom of everyday things." "You give names to things which make them different, undreamt of, yet familiar like a voice that's been silent awhile." "Or like seeing one's reflection unexpectedly in water, and saying, "Who is this man?"" "My dear, has it never happened to you to see a plant, a stone, a gesture, and to feel the same passion?" "Yes, it's happened." "And have you figured out why?" "It happens in an instant, Melete." "How can I grasp it?" "Haven't you wondered why one instant, similar to so many in the past, suddenly make you happy, happy as a god?" "You were looking at the olive tree, the olive tree on the path that you take every day for years, and one day your boredom goes away," "and you caress the old trunk with your eyes, as though it were a refound friend who said to you just the one word" "your heart was waiting for." "Other time it's the glance of some passer-by." "Other times the rain that goes on for days." "Or the sharp cry of a bird." "Or a cloud you thought you'd already seen." "For an instant time stops, and you feel the banal thing in your heart as though before and after no longer exist." "Have you not wondered why?" "You say so yourself." "That instant has made the thing into a memory, a model." "Can you not imagine an existence made entirely of these instants?" "I can." "yes." "Then you know how I live." "I believe you, Melete, because you say everything with your eyes." "And the name Euterpe which many people give you no longer surprises me." "But mortal instants are not a life." "If I wanted to repeat them, they'd lose their bloom." "Boredom always returns." "Yet you said this instant is a memory." "And what else is memory if not passion repeated?" "Do understand me well." "What do you mean?" "I mean that you know what immortal life is like." "When I speak with you, it's difficult to resist you." "You've seen things from the very beginning." "You are the olive tree, the glance, and the cloud." "You say a name, and the thing exists forever." "Hesiod, every day I find you up here." "Others before you" "I found on these mountains, on the dried-up rivers of Thrace and Pieria." "I like you more than them." "You know that the immortal things are all around you." "It's not difficult to know it." "Touching them, that's what's difficult." "You have to live for them, Hesiod, which means, with a pure heart." "Listening to you, sure." "But the life of a human goes on down there mid houses and fields." "In front of the fire and in a bed." "And every day that dawns confronts you with the same tolls and the same needs." "It's ultimately a pain, Melete." "There's a storm which renews the fields - neither death nor great sorrows are discouraging." "But the interminable toil, the effort to stay live hour by hour, the recognition of evil in others, of evil that's petty, boring like summer flies - this is the aspect of life" "that cripples us, Melete." "I come from places more barren, from cruel foggy gorges where nevertheless life has appeared." "Among these olive trees and under this sky, you don't know this destiny." "Have you ever heard about the Boibeide swamp?" "No." "It's a foggy swamp of mud and reeds, as it was when time began, in a frothy silence." "It has spawned monsters and gods of excrement and blood." "Still today the Thessalians hardly speak of it." "Neither time nor seasons change it." "No voice reaches there." "But you talk about it, Melete, and have made a divine destiny for it." "Your voice has reached there." "Now it's a terrible and holy place." "The olive trees and sky of Helicon are not all that life is." "But neither is boredom, nor going back home." "Don't you understand that humans, every human, is born in that swamp of blood?" "and that the sacred and divine accompany you also, in bed, in the field, in front of the fire?" "Every gesture you make repeats a divine model." "Day and night you haven't an instant, not even the most trifling, that does not gush from the silence of its source." "You speak, Melete, and I can't resist you." "Just let me venerate you." "There's another way, my dear." "Which is?" "Try to tell mortals these things you know." "The mountain is uncultivated, friend." "On last winter's red grass are patches of snow." "It looks like the centaur's coat." "These heights are all like this." "It takes nothing to make the country go back to being the same as when those things happened." "I wonder if it's true they saw them." "Who can say?" "But yes, they saw them." "They have recounted their names and nothing more - which is all the difference between fables and truth." ""It was this one of that one." "He did this, he said that." Someone telling the truth" "is satisfied." "He doesn't even suspect people might not believe him." "The liars are people like us who have never seen these things, yet know in detail what coat the centaur had, or what color the grapes were in Icarius's farmyard." "All that's needed is a hill, a peak, a seacoast." "A solitary place where your eyes look up and stop in the sky." "The incredible way things stand out in the air still touches the heart today." "I for my part believe that a tree or a rock, profiled against the sky, were gods from the start." "Not always have things been on the mountains." "I understand." "Before these, there were the voices of the earth   the springs, the roots, the snakes." "If the daemon links the earth with the sky, the daemon has to come out into light from the darkness of the ground." "I don't know." "Those people knew too many things." "With just a name, they told the stories of the cloud, the woods, the destinies." "They saw surely what we know barely." "They had neither time nor taste to lose themselves in dreams." "They saw tremendous, incredible things," "and weren't even surprised." "They knew what things were." "If those people lied, then you too now, when you say "It's morning" or "It looks like rain,"" "have lost your head." "They spoke names, yes." "So much so that at times I wonder which came first, things or those names." "They came together, believe me." "And it happened here, in these uncultivated and solitary places." "It is surprising that they came up here?" "What else could those people seek here, except encounter with the gods." "Who can say why they came here?" "But in every deserted place there's still an emptiness, a sense of waiting." "Up here it's impossible to think of anything else." "These places have their names forever." "Only the grass under the sky is left, yet in memory the wind's breath make a louder roar than a storm in the forest." "There's neither emptiness nor waiting." "What has been, is so forever." "But they're dead and buried." "Now the places are as they were before them." "I'll concede what they said was true." "What else is left?" "You'll admit that on the path one no longer encounters gods." "When I say "It's morning" or "It looks like rain,"" "I'm not talking about them." "Last night we talked about them." "Yesterday you were talking about summer and the desire you feel to inhale its warm evening air." "Other times you discourse on humanity, on people who were with you, of your tastes then, on unexpected encounters." "All things which once existed." "I, I assure you, listened to you the way I listen again in my mind to those ancient names." "When you recount what you know," "I don't reply, "What's left?"" "or whether words or things came first." "I live with you and I feel alive." "It's not easy to live as though what happened in other times were true." "Yesterday when fog caught us in the wild and some rocks rolled down the hill at our feet, we didn't think" "about divine things or some incredible encounter, but only" "about the night and rabbits running away." "Who we are and what we believe in comes out during distress, at the moment of danger." "About last night and the rabbits it'll be nice to talk, with friends, when we're home." "About our fear, though, we should smile, when we think of the anguish of people in past times," "for whom everything they touched was deadly." "People for whom the air was full of night fears, mysterious threats, frightening memories." "Consider just storms and earthquakes." "And if this distress was real, as it indisputably was, also real was the courage, the hope, the happy discovery of powers, of promises, of encounters." "I, for my part, never tire of hearing them talk about their terrors of the night, and the things they hoped in." "So do you believe in monsters?" "in bodies turned into beasts?" "in live rocks?" "in divine smiles?" "In words which could annihilate?" "I believe in what every human has hoped for and suffered." "If at one time they climbed these stony heights or sought deadly swamps under the sky, it was because they found something here which we don't know." "It wasn't bread, or pleasure, or precious health." "These things we know where they are." "Not here." "And we who live far away along the coast or in the fields, that other thing we have lost." "Tell what is was, then." "You already know." "Those encounters of theirs."