On February 1, 1941, in a dark era when war rages and anti-aircraft fire silences the skies, a young student at the Faculty of Letters in Bologna sends a letter to a childhood friend. He tells him of the shifting flashes of desire—erotic, joyful, innocent—that continue to ignite despite the disturbing shadows enveloping his present. Among other things, he writes: “On the night I told you about, we saw an immense number of fireflies, forming thickets of fire within thickets of bushes, and we envied them because they loved each other, because they sought each other with amorous flights and lights.” This student is Pier Paolo Pasolini. The fireflies he evokes represent, in his eyes, the ability to resist the darkest night: erratic luminescences pregnant with life, intermittent fragments of embodied poetry, elusive glimmers and, therefore, capable of surviving the darkness of reigning fascism.
On February 1, 1975, exactly 34 years after that message of hope entrusted to the splendor of fireflies, Pasolini published an article that explores the political situation and the devastating cultural homogenization of the era. It’s true, he states, that the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s had been defeated. But that same fascism was able to resurface in a radically and unpredictably new way. He’s referring to the conformism that was devastating values, souls, and languages: a new night so impenetrable that it would completely devour differences and the luminous dances of fireflies searching for love. This is the definitive theory of the “disappearance of fireflies.” Art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, however, does not believe this prophecy. He shares the anxiety that permeates Pasolini’s words, but maintains that it is impossible to surrender to the apocalyptic tone with which the triumph of darkness is sanctioned. There still exist luminous survivals, anachronisms, and luminous babblings that outline spaces of possibility. Naturally, these luminous traces are very faint. It is difficult to discern them.
“It takes almost five thousand fireflies to produce a light equal to that of a single candle” (G. Didi-Huberman).
It takes an eye still capable of imagination and desire. In this sense, the disappearance of the fireflies prophesied by Pasolini would be nothing other than the inability of an atrophied gaze to read some signs of hope in the darkness. The fireflies are not dead. Our ability to see them is dead.
We are no longer capable of “seeking and knowing how to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, is not inferno, and making them endure, and giving them space” (I. Calvino).
We must therefore disarm our eyes and rekindle our gaze. Only in this way can we understand how the darkness of our present is actually woven by subtle swarms of fireflies: clues that announce other worlds to come, traces of a beauty that resists standardization, sensitive epiphanies capable of reconnecting us to humanity. Fashion, in this sense, can become a precious ally. It is its task to illuminate what loves to hide, bringing timid hints of the future to the surface. It is its ability to desecrate the existing, unleashing sparks of enchantment and luminous signs full of grace. These are fleeting flashes in the darkness, constellations of fireflies capable of opening up avenues of possibility and politically nourishing the imagination.
ALESSANDRO
