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III.
Georges Didi-Huberman, in 2009, wrote a treatise on fireflies. In classically Benjaminian fashion, Didi-Huberman describes the ephemeral grace of nature’s most delicate flashlights, visible only in the absence of light and destroyed by overexposure. Lucciole, in Italian, the language of Dante and Pasolini, both of whom had a preoccupation with fireflies as creatures of hell and euphoria, the former dying from a mosquito bite and the latter horribly maimed and murdered by the mouth of the Tyrrhenian sea. “No surprise that one may suspect,” Didi-Huberman writes, “in the uncertain flight of fireflies in the night, something like a meeting of miniature phantoms, strange beings whose intentions may or may not be good.”
The text, titled Survival of the Fireflies, surfaces a letter Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote as a student in 1941, against the backdrop of dictators clashing–flashing–across Europe. Pasolini recounts dancing in the moonlight on the cliffs of Bologna, drunk and naked and in love in spite of Italy’s hopelessly accelerating fascisms. In attending to the letter, Didi-Huberman imagines Pasolini as a “glowing worm” (a firefly pupa), soft and white and wriggling on silk, incandescent in the night. He describes Pasolini’s exuberant joy as a momentary scene of exception–a site of secrecy and resistance amid everyday anguish, emblemized by the interrogating rays of two anti-aircraft searchlights sweeping the cliffs below.
The night itself is the first witness to Pasolini’s clandestine act. Beyond the night, it takes a medium–the letter, the recipient–to produce a secondary witness, and the same to enable Didi-Huberman and his readers to be witnesses in the third- and fourth- degrees. These elliptical witnesses view Pasolini’s “firefly dance” across a stream of time and the events that mark it, from the filmmaker's twirling, erotic flight in 1941 to the future memory of his mutilated corpse on the beach in Ostia. In spectatorial retrospect, the spirals of these two historic events are mutually enmeshed: the image of Pasolini’s ebullient, coiling body in Bologna only emerges within or against that of his catastrophic demise, within or against the image of his extinguished f/light by the sea.
Didi-Huberman writes, “[T]he fireflies’ dance, this moment of grace that resists in the world of terror, is the most fleeting, the most fragile thing there is.” Pasolini, the glowing worm, returns to the night. It is only the night–the seamless abyss–that witnesses his clandestine act as unadulterated desire, that sees his infinitely, rhythmically beating heart through layers of pupa skin, rendered momentarily translucent.
Georges Didi-Huberman, trans. Lia Swope Mitchell, Survival of the Fireflies. Univocal, 2018, pp. 2-10.
Image: Nitrate film vault tests, 1949. Reproduced courtesy of U.S. National Archives.