Tommaso Lisa, born in Florence in 1977, as the founder of Re: view and contributor to the magazine Monster is considered one of the “noble fathers” of the vital Florentine literary scene; a fact, however, known only to insiders, given its editorial silence of over three decades, broken only by a book on running (Athletic Reflections, Zona 2016), his passion like poetry.
Go back to the bookshop now, for the refined Roman brand Exòrma, with an admirable prose text, including autobiography, novel and theory fiction dedicated to his third great passion: entomology. The title, with Dostoevskian echoes, is Memories from the undergrowth, and of all the insects loved and studied, Lisa speaks of a small and apparently anonymous beetle, the tenebrionid Diaperis boleti. “The interest in beetles – says Lisa – came when my parents took me to see an educational exhibition, at the Forte di Belvedere, in 1981: it was called, with effective title, Three quarters of terror and exhibited display cases and dioramas with spiders, scorpions, insects and butterflies. It was the latter that hit me first. The first entomological memory I have of me is of a child of about six who chases at breakneck speed a cabbage on a green lawn dotted with yellow dandelion flowers, among the olive trees, with a blue sky in the background, trying to catch it with a hat . This childish, archetypal image is emblematic of a certain vital impulse that accompanies my whole existence. Then my father gave me a book, a guide to insects. At the beginning, I collected everything in heterogeneous boxes. Grasshoppers, cicadas, butterflies, the grillotalpa, the carabus, the cerambice. But beetles are equipped with exoskeletons, they keep better over time, have hard and durable and colorful shapes. The astonishment for butterflies, especially for exotic ones, while lasting, has therefore given way to something more concrete, harder, difficult, less showy. Some beetles look like jewels. But if butterflies are aerial creatures, whose life takes place in the air and on plants, entering the kingdom of beetles meant confronting matter. Touching the earth, sawing wood, scratching in the dung “.
It strikes, reading the book, the choice, among many of such a small and inconspicuous beetle.
«I found Diaperis at the age of nine for the first time, in the quarries of Maiano, under Fiesole, digging under the bark of a rotten trunk. The image of that first discovery is a Proustian epiphany that comes back to visit me on a recurring basis. From the dark veins of the decaying wood, attacked by fungi, a colony of these tenebrionids appeared, unique in their kind because they are round, shiny, with black and orange knurled bands. It was unexpected. The same amazement that the predators of the Diaperis must feel, which warns them to be poisonous precisely with these colors. Nowadays it is enough for me to see anything with black and orange checkered lines that I think of Diaperis … Signs, road signs, advertisements. Diaperis, like other tenebrionids that eat mushrooms, then secretes a substance, partly toxic also for humans, Benzoquinone, which has a very strong scent of bitter anise. It stayed on my fingers all day. That fortuitous, seminal event ended up catalyzing a whole series of other meanings over time, in an avalanche, making it a knot of relationships and meaning “.
The book is interspersed with your drawings that suggest a meditative dimension.
«They are mandalas, images acting to transcend and at the same time to better understand that specific insect in every part, down to the hair, in the smallest details. When I am able to draw, to draw in pencil only in black and white, as during some rare sessions under the microscope, I am able to abstract myself, to enter another dimension, outside of me, meditative and transcendent. Looking at oneself, then, in an otherness like that of a tenebrionide, for me means having the alienating empirical proof of how fallacious human prejudice is and at the same time of how fragile the narration we tell ourselves is. It is my way of being antispecist, of asking myself questions about being there. The Diaperis reminds me that my human identity, to be honest with itself, must be aware of being relative “.
Not a random beetle but a mushroom beetle: symbiosis, interactions, exit from the ego paradigm …
«Diaperis lives in mushrooms and feeds on mushrooms. Compared to other beetles it is more significant also for this, because it was easier for me to find a web of relationships that linked it to the ecosystem and to other insects. The book was supposed to be titled In praise of the Diaperis Indiscreet beetle as a tribute to the Florentine magazine The Indiscreet ddirected by Francesco D’Isa, who closely follows all the philosophy that holds dear the themes of the strange and the dark: the Dark Ecology Capitalist realism by Mark Fisher, Among the ashes of this planet by Eugene Thacker and above all Chthulucene by Donna Haraway. This book comes from a very strong web of relationships with these authors, of “parallel minds”, to paraphrase the title of a beautiful book by Laura Tripaldi, grafted onto a classic, traditional scheme. The result is something that D’Isa called ‘super crazy’. We always tell ourselves in some way the sticky and uninterrupted web of our existence: as writers, we can render it by mimesis, like Gadda or Manganelli, or try to analyze it with rationality, like Levi or Calvino. Perhaps I prefer to graft certain stylistic instances of the former onto the solid framework of the latter. Many books today break out of the ego paradigm by writing without style things that could be written by anyone. I’m not looking for this. In my experience, the most honest way to “get out of the ego” without a suicide is to remind ourselves at every step that it is the language that speaks to us, we are not the ones who speak, who act, but we are acted upon by this psychotropic substance that are the words. What I have tried to do, leaning on another being with whom I have a deep bond, is to combine the material of poetry with the exact language of the scientific essay ».
April 10, 2021 | 09:49
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