The article is written by Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist.
In the text called Resurrection of the Fireflies, Boris Gunjevic, a Protestant priest and theologian from Cambridge, recalls a detail from the 26th chant of “Hell”. Dante describes here, as Gunjevic puts it, “respectable citizens of proto-capitalist Florence in a delirium of darkness”. The people Dante places in the 8th circle of hell are insidious, corrupt political advisers, the equivalent of today’s spin doctors and war experts on social media. Their darkness is contrasted by Dante with the sight of peasants in fields sprinkled with fireflies, in the early evening of a summer day.
The dark fire of hell is not the only light that the inhabitants of the 8th circle of hell can see – unfortunately, cannot understand. There are, namely, fireflies. They are small lights, small signs of God’s Grace, which is infinite and reaches to the darkest depths of Hades.
In the second place, in the lecture entitled Poetic Militancy of Small Lights, Gunjevic quotes the text named Where Did the Fireflies Disappear? which, just before he was to be killed, was written by Pasolini.
Gunjevic states that Pasolini was a virtuous reader of Dante in his youth, and that the fireflies he talks about were intimately inspired by the 26th song of “Hell”. Pasolini applies the extended metaphor of Dante’s fireflies to the Italian politics of his time, in which fascism rose for the second time in Italy. According to Pasolini, Gunjevic states, “the new form of old fascism disguised itself as a strong political centrist discourse. The sophisticated fascism established by the Italian Christian Democrats is destroying all forms of social life”.
They turned off all the small lights, all the fireflies that Pasolini saw as the best in Italian society.
You want a prophetic speech: here it is. Speaking about the fascism of Christian Democrats in Italy, Pasolini talks about “demo-Christian” Montenegro, decades later.
But the fireflies, and with them the light, will always return. Because the small lights of the fireflies, I quote Gunjevic, symbolize “resistance to capitulation, the refusal to give up and end up in despair, which is always the easiest way out”. I have not read a more precise, truer text about Montenegro than the one that Gunjevic wrote about Dante and Pasolini.
What is happening to us might be instructive to tell in the form of a fable.
That fable would be about a forest ruled by bears, wolves and foxes for decades. Intoxicated by power and wealth, they did not notice that the ravens were gathering an army of rodents and snakes. To which even the most cautious among the foxes will join, always ready to change sides.
It’s night in the woods. Large, bloodthirsty beasts have been overthrown. The new rulers imposed their own laws, in the implementation of which the most zealous converts are. The bears fled to their dens, to protect with their own bodies the treasures they greedily collected, and for which new masters could come. The wolves are in exile, hiding behind centuries-old upright trees on which, while they ruled, they urinated neatly, thus marking the territory which, they thought in the madness of their power, they had conquered forever.
Most of the inhabitants of the forest are silently bawling in the dark, making sure to be silent, happy to be invisible. They think: power is to suffer. The previous ones have passed, so will these.
The only thing that glows in the woods are the fireflies. Hundreds, thousands of small lights resisting the darkness. They are the only thing that disturbs the kara-fear rule of the new rulers.
Their light irritates the chiefs, accustomed to the darkness of the underworld from which they emerged. Their light hints at the possibility of a forest ruled by neither these nor those, nor large nor small beasts, but virtue.
Therefore, the powerful, in the helplessness of their paranoia, through helpful political advisers and spin-doctors, who are patiently waiting for the 8th round of Hell, accuse fireflies of being agents of bears and wolves. For the pure, everything is pure – said St. Paul. For the unclean, everything is mud. Bears and wolves, on the other hand, fear that the fireflies could illuminate their tracks and uncover hiding places. The only cowardice in which they hide is the plane of arrogance with which they ruled.
Both of them, both current and former rulers, would eagerly crush the fireflies, and destroy the memory of the light.
So that nothing disturbs the night: black as a raven’s wing, black as a presidential limousine, black as Porfirije’s mantle.
It’s a deep forest, it’s a dark night.
But even there the Grace of God reaches.
It makes the fireflies invincible.
Because, as Steven Patrick Morrissey, the great British poet of the late 20th century, remarked: There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.
