Chandra Livia Candiani’s Buddhism: Crossing Cultural and Species Boundaries to Become a Co-dividual

ABSTRACT

In La bambina pugile ovvero La precisione dell’amore (2014), Fatti vivo (2017), and Vista dalla luna (2019), Chandra Livia Candiani (b. 1952) evokes several traumatic experiences endured in her youth, which are here discussed in light of the poet’s later re-elaboration through concepts of Theravada Buddhism. In particular, Candiani’s early attempts to find solidarity in surrounding objects, animals, and plants is gradually inscribed within the Buddhist view of dependent co-arising of things; a discreet way of being alive, tuned in to the suffering of all beings, acquires the philosophical depth of the notion of no-self; and a certain familiarity with death develops into an acceptance of impermanence. This contribution also proposes to read Candiani’s Buddhism as encouraging the construction of the self as a co-dividual (Remotti): the process of coming-of-age thus emerges as a constant dialogue between the self and alterities of different kinds, spanning across cultures and species alike.

KEYWORDS:

• Chandra Livia Candiani
• Buddhism
• ecocriticism
• Co-dividuality

Introduction

To grow to like not growing; to identify oneself with a quasi- or non-identity; to individuate one’s own co-dividuality: paradoxes of this kind express effectively the life and creative path of Chandra Livia Candiani (b. 1952), a nomadic subject with roots in an inherited Russian ancestry and a wilfully chosen Indian one, whose branches flourish in the peripheries of Milan and beyond.¹ In order to make sense of such apparent antinomies, it is necessary to analyse carefully Candiani’s childhood, painful fragments of which she conjures in many of her poetry collections – among them La bambina pugile ovvero La precisione dell’amore (2014), Fatti vivo (2017), and Vista dalla luna (2019).² The aim of the present article is to discuss the extent to which the poet’s early traumas, as they are evoked in these collections, have allowed her to become acquainted with experiences and states of mind that she has later elaborated through the lens of Theravada Buddhism.³ An ever-expanding process of co-becoming with human and more-than-human beings emerges as essential for her idiosyncratic growth path, productively extending beyond the limits of her young age.⁴ This reading of Candiani’s poems avoids a view of youth as a transient state, as merely a step within a unidirectional, teleological trajectory towards a maturation to attain once and for all, preferring to regard youth as an open-ended process feeding on cross-cultural elaborations of experiences that, while being repeated and relived, inevitably change in meaning.

Solitude and silence, the attempt to find solidarity in surrounding objects and animals in order to escape destabilising and annihilating situations, but also the perceived imminence of death, are ambivalent conditions Candiani first faced as a child in their potentially destructive force, and then metabolised, vindicated, even sublimated in her mature work, thanks to her ever-growing Buddhist-oriented insight into the porous nature of things. Such conditions have counterparts in the ancient Buddhist concepts of dependent co-arising of all things (paticca samuppāda in Pali), no-self (anattā), and impermanence (anicca) – analysed in the three sections of this article. As David Bastow writes, ‘the Buddhist goal is the willed and purposeful adoption of a new set of values’, for ‘at the end of the path is a radically new way of living’.⁵ In Candiani’s case, it is perhaps more accurate to talk in terms of a radically new way of processing certain aspects of her life that date back to her problematic childhood and have accompanied the poet’s artistic and personal development ever since. Indeed, at the beginning of Il silenzio è cosa viva, the writer asks herself ‘Quando ho iniziato io a “meditare”? Forse intorno ai nove anni, chiusa in bagno in ginocchio, mentre fuori gli adulti si stanno massacrando?’.⁶ In order to support this point, I will detail Candiani’s Buddhist pathway in dialogue with material ecocritical and ecomystical conceptions, contextually testing Francesco Remotti’s anthropological proposition of replacing discourses of identity with the more hospitable category of co-dividuality.⁷

The sense of ontological unity with beings of all kinds, towards which Candiani’s interdependent growth path tends, emerges from a cosmological vision of circular causality that is central to Buddhist thought.⁸ William S. Waldron has investigated how such causality, expressed through patterns of relationships, ultimately informs the co-dependence of material objects and human cognitive awareness, as well as linguistic processes.⁹ Buddhist philosophy and biological modes of causality agree that ‘the human nervous system […] interacts with the environment by continually modulating its structure’, as Capra puts it, and simultaneously the environment influences and is influenced by cognitive processes.¹⁰ We are thus invited to approach the poetic output of Candiani, who has demonstrated a close awareness of these processes throughout her career, as ‘a representation of various nonhuman entities expressing agency by altering the subject consciousness’.¹¹ Therefore, while discussing the ontological and existential depth of Candiani’s Buddhism, and the social and moral potentialities of an ecocritical reading of her poems, this article will also develop a formal analysis of the stylistic choices reflecting the interdependence of beings, which her poetry thematises and embodies at the same time.

Dependent co-origination (paticca samuppāda)

‘La mia famiglia sono io’ (BP, 37), begins one of the poems in La bambina pugile. What might strike us on a first impression as a bold declaration of self-sufficiency, a few lines later acquires a delicate existential profundity that speaks of Candiani’s difficult relationship with her family, as well as of her sense of belonging to a wider lineage that exceeds her human genetics: ‘Mi sono marito mamma e cane | mi porto a passeggiare timida | in un gracile polveroso parco, | […]. | Sono la tazza di tè | preparata al mattino | vuoto che guarda il vuoto’ (BP, 37). Since the poet’s mother was affected by mental health disorders and represented an unstable presence (or rather, absence) in the young daughter’s life, Candiani was faced with the necessity of becoming her own mother figure, and even reclaiming the void that loomed over her childhood, while establishing an intrinsic solidarity with the animals (a dog, in this case) and the objects (a cup of tea) that kept her company in her early solitary years.¹² Family, for Candiani, thus acquires an expansive meaning that encompasses different forms of life, including but not limited to her own: ‘Ti sono famiglia | ti sono grembo | d’erba | ti sono maceria | ti sono scavo | ti sono cuccia | e anche spina’ (BP, 49). The pounding repetition of ‘ti sono’, while referring to a second person (of which more below), punctuates a list of things unified by their very materiality, equally comparable to the poet’s self.

Considering Candiani’s self-assessment that ‘siamo creature scheggia | d’infanzia’ (FV, 101), it is important to identify in the poet’s childhood the root of emotions that have remained central to her evolution over time. In one of the poems in the section of Fatti vivo entitled ‘Buio padre’ – where the author deals with her other parental figure, here and elsewhere delineated as violent and abusive – Candiani confesses: ‘Ho paura di tutto, padre | perché tutto è vivo | e mi accompagna’ (FV, 76).¹³ These lines bear witness to an etymological form of panic, defined by James Hillman as ‘a direct participation mystique in nature, a fundamental, even ontological experience of the world as alive and in dread’.¹⁴ An ‘all-pervasive interdependence’ of all things in the phenomenal world, seen as co-participating in an overarching cycle of life (and death), is indeed at the core of Buddhist non-dualism.¹⁵ In particular, the Buddhist notion of paticca samuppāda (Sanskrit: pratītyasamutpāda), or dependent co-origination, chimes with Candiani’s elaboration of the proximity to beings of every kind, which she often perceived as a source of fear in childhood.

Joanna Rogers Macy, a Western practitioner of Theravada Buddhism like Candiani, explains that ‘what is distinctive about Buddhist ethics is the view of the world and self which they express, and with which they are imbued […] – their rootedness in a vision of relativity, and the degree to which they are empowered by this relativity, that is, the dependent co-arising nature of reality’.¹⁶ This vision stresses the dynamism of the cosmos as a whole, the components of which are reciprocal causes and conditions for each other’s existence. Both Buddhism and recent developments in Western sciences (chiefly quantum physics, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology) encourage us to think of ourselves, other beings and the entire world ‘in terms of patterns of relationships rather than of reified essences or entities’.¹⁷ As mentioned above, Candiani gives shape to such patterns through repetitions that are like neat contours in a kaleidoscopic connection of figures interweaving with one another:

Qualche volta io | non ci sono e sono | tutta l’aria, sono | pulviscolo atmosferico | e vibro d’altri | di loro gesti e fiati. | Qualche volta io | sono lombrico e patata (BP, 119).

Sono famiglia con la neve | […] | Sono famiglia con la brina | […] || Sono famiglia con gli animali | […] E sono famiglia con i macellai | […] || Sono famiglia con le mosche | […] || Sono famiglia con tutto quello | che sta sotto terra e sul fondo | nelle crepe e nelle frane e | sotto il ghiaccio e non si eleva | sta basso basso quasi senza | fiato (BP, 120–21).

The principle of mutual co-dependence integrates individuals and species alike in a circular causality that is particularly important for Buddhist environmentalists. In Swearer’s view, ‘Buddhist environmentalists extend loving-kindness, compassion, and respect beyond people and animals to include plants and the earth itself’.¹⁸ The entire section ‘Il sonno della casa’, in Fatti vivo, extends such a compassion to any domestic object, each speaking in the first person and sometimes directly challenging the human reader. ‘Il sofà’, for example, starts with a call for intersubjective solidarity among beings, resting upon their communal solitude and suffering: ‘Tutti abbiamo un mondo dentro | e tutti sopportiamo la solitudine | dire che dentro di me | ci sono solo molle e legno | è come dire che dentro di voi | ci sono solo cuore fegato o polmoni’ (FV, 33). If the Buddhist Four Noble Truths deal with the universality of suffering among all sentient beings, Candiani extends their validity even to non-canonically-sentient things.¹⁹ This shared existential condition is, after all, unavoidable in a world-view where each thing conditions and is conditioned by any other event, decision, and material entity, in a web of inherently contingent and interconnected actions and states.

Candiani overtly thematises such a condition: ‘Perché è ancora tutto | da dire | e insieme | già tutto detto, | perché sappiamo insieme | e l’universo è tutto | tutto abitato | mirabilmente’ (BP, 107). If the choice to focus on the speech act foregrounds a form of distinctively human embodiment, with language being the ‘most influential source of human categorization and classification’, at the same time, the poet relativises this form of cognitive awareness.²⁰ Indeed, it is not only that anything human beings say about the world has already been said by the world itself (as in the citation above), but the very process of using words is made possible by a communal process of understanding (‘sappiamo insieme’), where speech, mind, and body of different beings mutually interact. The Pali Canon – foundational to Theravada traditions – has a word to refer to the person when seen as a complex, an organisation of body, mind, and speech: kāya, which can literally be translated as ‘assemblage’.²¹ This etymological consonance with a key term in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophy supports a number of cross-cultural dialogues between Buddhist dependent co-arising, on one hand, and, on the other, both systems theory (an essential source for Deleuze and Guattari) and agential realism (of Deleuzian influence).²²

In modern systems theory, a living system’s structure is considered to be inter-determinative with its behaviour or function. As far as human beings are concerned, each wilful decision (and even each change in the organism) develops in connection with previous experiences and in turn conditions future ones through recursive feedback processes, in a constantly developing epigenesis.²³ As Macy notices, ‘this interdetermination of structure and function is parallel to that which we see in the Buddhist scriptures between kāya and karma’, that is, between the body assemblage and action.²⁴ Many of Candiani’s poems give form to the interpenetration that brings together the world and its multiple different actors, contextually discarding any notion of human centrality: ‘È un grande paesaggio | il mondo, | ogni animale | lo conserva, gli dà sguardo’ (BP, 18–19); ‘ci consegniamo al paesaggio | come a un reciproco regalo, | […] e non posso fare a meno | di pensare: i fiori continuano | implacabili | a non vederci’ (BP, 74–75).

Similarly, in Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism ‘phenomena result from the intra-actions of material and discursive practices and agencies, which coemerge at once’;²⁵ therefore, nonhuman agency contributes to the world’s becoming as much as the complex of human body, mind, and speech. Buddhist monk and author Thich Nhat Hanh maintains that it is better to say that we ‘inter-are’, rather than that we simply ‘are’, since every being is a product of multifarious material interactions and of an expansive receptivity to the agency of other beings – including humans, animals, plants, and machines.²⁶ Furthermore, the condition Stacy Alaimo defines as ‘trans-corporeality’ – which ‘denies the human subject the sovereign, central position’ – is all the more appropriate when considering Buddhist eschatology, according to which a human being has been other than a human in previous lives and may be other than a human also in the future – and should thus be brought to perceive other beings as relatives.²⁷ Candiani thematises her familiarity and kinship with other beings both in an explicit fashion, as discussed above, and through an extensive use of personification of objects and objectification of human conditions.²⁸ The exchange between different realms is at the same time material and figurative, as in the following advice she gives to herself: ‘Dài da mangiare agli uccelli | non dimenticarlo mai: | sei una briciola’ (FV, 147).

The new materialist concept of the ‘entanglement’ of living and non-living matters, which has much in common with Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘assemblage’ and with Buddhist dependent co-origination, also finds a productive anthropological counterpart in Francesco Remotti’s view of a generalised interconnection of all beings, understood as ever-changing co-dividuals.²⁹ As suggested by the title of one of Remotti’s main pamphlets, Contro l’identità (2001), the Italian anthropologist is sceptical about the opportunity to inscribe human experiences into notions of identity.³⁰ Indeed, identity produces alterity, by no means a ‘natural’ concept, but rather the artificial, mental, social, and political effect of an equally artificial, rigid construction – identity itself. While identities sever connections among beings, similarities establish and foster such connections. Remotti thus invites us to acknowledge and celebrate similarities, as well as inevitable differences, running through all sorts of individuals (or better, co-dividuals).³¹ In the case of Candiani’s poems, interconnections emerge between co-dividuals and surrounding spaces,³² objects,³³ and even food;³⁴ but also, on a more traditionally inter-personal level, between the poetic self and her brother, through parallels and chiasmi that tend to blend the first- and the second-person singular into a first-person plural;³⁵ and, finally, through an extreme syntactic reduction that speaks of the inescapable convergence of the two siblings’ personal experiences.³⁶

No-self (Anattā)

The opening poem of Vista dalla luna is a conversation in italics that, akin to Marco Polo and Kublai Khan’s dialogues in Le città invisibili by Italo Calvino, contextualises the subsequent pages with vivid intensity.³⁷ Candiani here instantiates her absence from her mother’s memories, wishes, and thoughts: ‘“E io, mamma?” | “Non c’eri”. | “Dov’ero io, mamma?” | “Non c’eri”. | “Dov’ero?” | “Dov’eri?” | “Dov’ero”. | “Nel mondo della luna eri”’ (VL, 17). This sense of being unwelcome, which verges on a destabilising feeling of being excluded from life altogether, represents an original trauma later reclaimed by Candiani as the source of her ability to tune in to the suffering of all beings – a general condition that constitutes the first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.³⁸ Childhood thus stretches throughout her entire life as a posture that, by metabolising the precariousness of being alive, tries to understand others without imposing any fixed point of view, in agreement with the Buddhist doctrine of no-self, or anattā (Sanskrit: anātman).

A strong notion of self is indeed deliberately challenged by the main rhetorical strategy of Vista dalla luna, which emerges in its full potential when considering that ‘Chandra’ – Candiani’s Buddhist name – means precisely moon, ‘luna’.³⁹ In the book, the poet looks at herself from a lunar perspective that, far from introducing an alienating distance, represents a mirror image of sympathetic familiarity. She states:

[p]er essere nella presenza, devo coltivare a lungo uno sguardo sull’io, anziché guardare tutto dai suoi occhi. […] Nella presenza c’è discontinuità rispetto all’io. Per sentire la presenza, bisogna fare un passo fuori dall’io, dalle relazioni mentali di cui è fatto, dalle identificazioni che coprono la sua paura di essere nulla.⁴⁰

Candiani confronts her long-standing fear of being nothing – at least in the eyes of her mother – and creates a character called ‘Io’, which allows her to better understand and keep company with her own self. The presence of ‘Io’ in the third-person singular, in Vista dalla luna, actualises a defence mechanism granting the poet a degree of detachment from the physical and verbal forms of violence endured as a child. Despite the capital letter, ‘Io’ does not reinforce a notion of the self as a solid entity, but rather underlines and claims the self’s own fragility, in a labyrinthine triangulation involving the poet, her poetic voice, and ‘Io’ as a character.

‘Io è tanti’ (BP, 143) opens a poem in the section ‘La precisione dell’amore’ of La bambina pugile, which then concludes with ‘io è un abbraccio’ (BP, 144). By means of this ring composition, Candiani visually represents the embrace of the multifarious facets composing each being, described in the central part of the poem: ‘Ci sono tutti i tu | amati e quelli spintonati via | ci sono i noi cuciti | di lacrime e di labbra | riconoscenti. […] Ci sono tutti, tutti quanti, | non in fila, e nemmeno | in cerchio, | ma mescolati come farina e acqua | nel gesto caldo | che fa il pane’ (BP, 144). It can be said that the concept of dependent origination, if applied to human identity, generates a structural challenge to traditional ideas of individuality, replaced by the Buddhist notion of no-self.⁴¹ As Bastow insists, the concept of ‘self’ ‘is a mere thought-construct, a misguided synthesis into a seemingly long-lasting pseudo-entity of what are really nothing more than short-lived psychological states’.⁴² A mindful reflection on the embodied experience of the so-called ‘self’ reveals the plurality of experiences that such a self actually encompasses and goes through, as Candiani vividly sketches.

The truth of no-self illuminates a radical ontological change that once again converges with the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari: as they write in A Thousand Plateaus, ‘the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities’.⁴³ The dependent co-arising of beings in Buddhism implies a substantial expansion of such multiplicities: to say that there is no ‘self’ in its ordinary sense does not imply any nihilistic effacement of personal experiences, but rather the recognition of ‘an incessantly moving-changing stream of rapidly succeeding mental-physical items and moments of existence, flowing within the bounds of seeming identity’, as King puts it.⁴⁴ The all-pervasive interdependence of the self with any other being, as well as with the environment, fundamentally destroys the hierarchical dualism implicit in traditional Western epistemology, based on the alleged separation between an independent knower and the object of knowledge.⁴⁵

Even in the Western context, however, there have been attempts to liberate beings from misconceived notions of self. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, frames this challenge in the following terms:

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word ‘I’, particularly when it is used in representing immediate experience, as in ‘I can see a red patch’. It would be instructive to replace this way of speaking by another in which immediate experience would be represented without using the personal pronoun.⁴⁶

More recently, Timothy Morton has expressed a similar linguistic concern in relation to ecological discourses that try to include non-human forms of life within a radically interconnected view of the world – a model that coincides with the Buddhist notion of no-self, as Waldron points out.⁴⁷ In Morton’s words:

There is no pronoun entirely suitable to describe ecological beings. If I call them ‘I’, then I’m appropriating them to myself […]. If I call them ‘you’, I differentiate them from the kind of being that I am. If I call them ‘he’ or ‘she’, then I’m gendering them according to heteronormative concepts that are untenable on evolutionary terms. If I call them ‘it’, I don’t think they are people like me and I’m being blatantly anthropocentric. […] And heaven forbid I call them ‘we’, because of the state of polite scholarship. What am I doing speaking as if we all belong together without regard to cultural difference? What am I doing extending this belonging to nonhumans, like a hippie who never heard that doing so is appropriating the Other?⁴⁸

In a balanced and meaningful polyphony, Candiani manages to harmonise all these pronouns and to convey the interconnection of different persons, grammatical or otherwise.

As already discussed, the poet’s use of the first-person singular is plastic and far from imposing a strong individuality over the situations described. Rather, she gives form to a plural ‘Io’ that constitutes the light presence of her early collection Io con vestito leggero (2005), at times even allowing everyday objects to express themselves in the first person.⁴⁹ In her poems, Candiani also addresses various figures in the second-person singular, be they loved ones named in the epigraphs,⁵⁰ her mother,⁵¹ her own self,⁵² or even parts of her personality.⁵³ Furthermore, by using friendly forms of address (in Italian expressed by ‘dare del tu’), the author thematises level dialogues between human and non-human beings,⁵⁴ as much as an existential fusion of first- and second-person singular pronouns,⁵⁵ and of human and universal experiences.⁵⁶ If the third-person singular represents an expected, and indeed recurring, choice, less predictable is its use to refer to ‘Io’, which becomes a proper actant in the game of mirrors of Vista dalla luna detailed above.

More important is the concentric, expanding dynamics by means of which the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ merge in a ‘we’ that gradually includes the entire world: ‘Come il tu per l’io | come il noi per il mondo’ (BP, 26); ‘Non c’è io | senza noi | non c’è me. | […] Noi ospiti | di pianeta frusciante | noi con mondo | facciamo tutto’ (FV, 98–99). Harold Coward argues that Westerners should learn to envision the communal ‘we-self’ as the primary ethical agent, as opposed to an ‘I-self’.⁵⁷ In an inter-subjective process that is simultaneously an inter-cultural one, Candiani develops such a holistic perspective by merging her Russian and Buddhist backgrounds. In the epigraph of the section ‘Madre eretica’, in Bevendo il tè con i morti, she refers to Viktor Shklovsky’s view of the concept of ‘we’ as particularly strong in the Russian language and culture: ‘Noi vuol dire io e qualcun altro. In Russia “noi” è più forte’.⁵⁸ This view acquires a cosmic reach through Candiani’s embracing of Buddhist anattā, which underpins a universal condition of fraternity, openness, and commonality among every being. By interacting with the world in all its facets, the poet gradually appreciates not only her being with the world, but her being the world itself, and the world being in turn herself – a mutual implication that gives shape to her poetry as a collective dialogue, enabled by all-encompassing listening skills: ‘Di chi è la voce | che mi chiede di essere | asciutta risonanza’ (BP, 145).

Commenting on the radical view of anattā, Macy highlights that, ‘[p]ossessed of no “I” apart from what it feels, sees, thinks, does, the self does not have experience, it is its experience’.⁵⁹ By the same token, in Il silenzio è cosa viva, Candiani maintains: ‘[s]e davvero sono consapevole, non c’è più io, c’è solo puro conoscere senza proprietario’.⁶⁰ In Buddhism, only suffering grants an awareness that can do without its own agent: ‘Il dolore è una soglia che si apre piano piano su un luogo molto ampio, forse infinito. Laggiù o lassù non c’è più io e non ci sei più tu, né voi, né noi, né loro. È un luogo dove tutto ha il diritto di passare, di transitare e svanire. In quel luogo ci si scioglie’.⁶¹ Almost paradoxically, it is the embodied, material experience of suffering – which Candiani endured in her childhood and never tried to obliterate throughout her maturation process – that grants a definitive escape from the limitations of embodied individuality.⁶²

On the basis of the resulting understanding of embodiment as an expansive, rather than individual process, Candiani’s treatment of Buddhist anattā can be read as an appropriate illustration of Alaimo’s concept of ‘trans-corporeality’, involving ‘a recognition not just that everything is interconnected but that humans are the very stuff of the material, emergent world’, which engenders ‘a profound shift in subjectivity’.⁶³ A material ecocritical approach to Candiani’s oeuvre emphasises how even her books are assemblages of sections only loosely coherent, tangibly demonstrating the impracticality of strong structures. If the fallacious notion of a separate identity is in fact replaced by discrete but interconnected processes, then poems that are part of specific sections easily escape them and enter others, contributing to the construction of books whose very covers act as porous boundaries. For example, one of the poems of Bevendo il tè con i morti opens with a line – ‘Il silenzio è cosa viva’ – which later becomes the title of her 2018 pamphlet dedicated to the art of meditation.⁶⁴ Similarly, in Il silenzio è cosa viva, Candiani writes about ‘[la] responsabilità di stare svegli e sensibili in questo immenso non sapere’, and Questo immenso non sapere is the title of her 2021 book.⁶⁵ The intimate involvement of all beings in their universe, as well as poetry’s ability to give sense and dignity to a fractured self (without mending it), are pragmatically represented by the editorial journey of these lines, moving freely between books whose structure is ‘eternally formless and yet ever-forming’, to borrow King’s definition of the formless self in Zen.⁶⁶

Anthropology further sustains the intermingling nature of unity and diversity, which is at the core of Remotti’s conceptualisation of the co-dividual. In contrast to traditional notions of individuality, Remotti foregrounds a view of the human being as a plurality that constantly composes and de-composes itself, always in the process of becoming a co-dividuality (or rather, an ever-changing set of co-dividualities). Such an evolution inevitably intersects any form of life, in the direction of what Candiani describes as ‘umano | animale | vastissimo | non-io’ (FV, 103).⁶⁷ While the notion of no-self results from applying the view of a dependent origination of beings of all kinds to human identity, the idea of a co-dividuality results from individuating essential similarities between human and non-human beings. Buddhist and anthropological lines of thought thus converge in a constant movement to and from the human, towards the non-human and back. From a biological, social, but also psychological and philosophical point of view, every being is an assemblage that only a relational, incomplete, and malleable concept of selfhood can accommodate – whether under the name of no-self or of co-dividual.

From time to time, Candiani verbalises such dynamics in terms of affinity (or lack thereof): ‘io assomiglio | e non sono’ (BP, 95); ‘Ci provo a non assomigliare | a me’ (FV, 105). Once aware of the flow of co-identities that every being navigates, a co-dividual is left with the relieving possibility of embracing impersonality: ‘Avere amici animali e vegetali, praticare la vista meravigliata e meravigliosa introduce al sollievo dell’impersonalità. […] Impersonalità non è diventare invisibili e innocui, ma innocenti, consapevoli della propria fragilità’.⁶⁸ This even allows a radical appropriation and inversion of Derrida’s ethics of ‘unrecognisability’. If, in Derrida’s view, ethics is founded on ‘responsibility with respect to the most dissimilar […] the entirely other […] the unrecognizable other’, Candiani shifts the reference point away from the human altogether: ‘Accettare che la neve | non ci riconosca, | non ci riconosca l’albero, | accettare che ci salvino | senza proferire parola | senza cura’ (FV, 106).⁶⁹ In other words, doing without a recognisable self allows the Buddhist practitioner to participate, impersonally, in a bigger picture where the human is far from central and its material life far from permanent.

Impermanence (anicca)

In his analysis of the co-dividual, Remotti invites us to conceive of the prefix ‘co-’ as marking a spectrum encompassing greater individual cohesion at one end (with the risk for the co-dividual of reification into a traditional identity) and less cohesion at the other end (towards a potential dissolution).⁷⁰ The gradual construction of any co-dividuality must strike a balance between these two poles of the spectrum, at the same time accepting that the balance will eventually be compromised by the co-dividual’s inescapable mortality. It can even be said that the development of a co-dividual consciousness necessarily requires the awakening to the radical precariousness of its condition. Furthermore, by thinking in terms of co-dividuality, we are constantly reminded of our intrinsic similarity to every living (thus mortal) being, but also to every constructed entity, as confirmed by Candiani: ‘Vedi, tutto può crollare, | qui. Le facce come le case, | sono cinema, sono cenere’ (BP, 10).⁷¹

Candiani became acquainted with the looming omnipresence of death in her early childhood, when she saw it linger near her door (‘La bambina. | Ha visto la morte | sostare | alla porta’: VL, 115) and almost invoked it as an escape from her mother’s instability (‘Mamma Io dal lupo vuole | essere mangiata in un boccone, | data alla befana consegnata | all’uomo nero, perché è meglio | della tua gonna piovosa | a cui non si aggrappa senso’: VL, 37). As these examples show, poetry later allowed her to work on the ‘lunga ripetuta ferita’ (VL, 31) of her childhood, through the creation of a personal syntax and an original relationship between words that speak of her acquaintance with death. In particular, the poet’s use of punctuation and enjambment, at times separating even subject and verb, evokes a broken stride and conjures a silence through which death infiltrates the most everyday sentences.⁷² After all, Candiani is open to learning ‘altre grammatiche d’amore’ from animals and plants, and these grammars are instinctively connected to cycles of life and death.⁷³

In Buddhism, the fundamental insight into such dynamics revolves around the concept of impermanence, or anicca (Sanskrit: anitya), which often recurs in Candiani’s reflections.⁷⁴ Outlining the reception of Buddhism among its early-nineteenth-century Western commentators, Roger-Pol Droit identifies how the Buddhist acceptance of impermanence, as well as the cognate concept of emptiness (or śūnatā), have initially been confused with ‘the annihilation of any thinking principle […] a daze where consciousness is dissolved […] a desire for a death without return’.⁷⁵ The Buddhist rejection of categories such as ‘somethingness’ and ‘self’, and the non-attachment that the parallel acceptance of impermanence entails, are indeed hardly understandable while retaining the dualistic mindset that, as already discussed, characterises much Western thought. Going beyond dichotomous constructs like being/non-being, or existence/non-existence, Buddhist impermanence instead illuminates the possibility of an immanent transcendence of the coordinates of ordinary life.

Addressing her Buddhist master, Candiani projects the possibility of a re-birth into a differently principled life that is only possible by coming to terms with impermanence: ‘Ovvio Maestro, | cancellandomi | mi dài | alla luce’ (FV, 106).⁷⁶ This view is in line with new materialism in trying not to transcend materiality, but rather to rethink and enter even more deeply into it, although from a different perspective.⁷⁷ The new perspective finds permanence within impermanence and brings together many of the reflections so far discussed, being premised upon the elimination of the self’s structural unity (anattā), but also upon the encounter and interaction between disparate forms of life and death (paticca samuppāda).⁷⁸

La vita nuova | arriva taciturna | dentro la vecchia vita | arriva come una morte | uno schianto | qualcuno che spintona così forte | un crollo. | […] Non ci sono feriti | né annunci di sciagura | solo noi da convincere | a lasciar perdere il miraggio | di una via rettilinea, di un | orizzonte, lasciarsi curvare (BP, 41).

The curvilinear route that should replace the consistency of a logical horizon welcomes the interdependence of life and death, as well as of human and more-than-human voices: ‘I morti seminano canti | che sbocciano in uccelli | che seminano canti’.⁷⁹

Apparent contradictions, doubts, and open questions characterise with intensity the section of La bambina pugile dedicated to a late friend of Candiani (‘Pianissimo, per non svegliarti’). The author has once declared that the suspension of common sense is a pivotal feature of poetry as a genre and this takes on a particular force when poetry faces death.⁸⁰ In this case, the ‘via rettilinea’ is repeatedly interrupted by question marks that challenge the fictitious consistency of ordinary lives and their supposed separation from the afterlife. Addressing her friend, Candiani asks: ‘Sei uno sciame di nulla? | Semini luce? | Sei nella direzione dei gerani rossi? | Sei me? | […] | È subito il tempo della vita? | Cosa vuol dire mai?’ (BP, 77–78).⁸¹ In these lines, among many others from different collections (see, in particular, FV, 60–62), the poet expresses her view of death as a return into the materiality of things, seen as the source of everything: ‘Un giorno tutti gli elementi torneranno alla fonte. Cosa resterà di noi? Una bella domanda da tenere in tasca al cuore’.⁸²

At the source of life and death, even mathematics and dance coexist. In Fatti vivo, Candiani evokes a mathematical disappearance as a ‘zero nel grande zero’ (FV, 148), hoping to find at the end of her path, ‘Dopo tanta aritmetica, | la serenità dello zero’ (FV, 152). As Stalling summarises, an etymological connection unites the term ‘zero’ and the Buddhist concept of no-self:

the term ‘zero’ came via the Italian zefiro, from the Arabic çifr, meaning ‘empty, void’, which is in turn the Arabic translation of the Sanskrit term śūnatā. The term śūnatā is often translated into English as ‘emptiness’ […] but can be better understood in the sense that nothing possesses essential, autonomous, enduring identity, which is also often called anattā, or ‘not-self’.⁸³

Even at the core of what is commonly understood as an abstract scientific discipline (with the zero fulfilling a key role in the Hindu-Arabic numeral system), we find an opening towards the interconnection of all things, which the notion of no-self invites us to consider as contingent and dependent on one another. This interconnection, however, exceeds the rules of arithmetic and enters the flow of a dance: ‘il karma è come ci poniamo davanti agli eventi […]. Il modo in cui rispondiamo crea frequenze e risposte dalla vita stessa. Ma non è aritmetica, è danza’.⁸⁴

If even two apparently distant disciplines like mathematics and dance share certain elements of continuity, it is because anything pertaining to human culture is inevitably connected to the physical world, both affecting it and affected by it – an essential premise of ecocriticism, as framed by Cheryll Glotfelty.⁸⁵ In this context, death’s ability to destabilise our self-centred view of the world emerges as crucial, emphasising as it does the multifarious entangled networks uniting human and non-human realms.⁸⁶ Watling maintains that, in Buddhism, ‘separateness from nature is an illusion, […] one existence is no more important than another, […] respecting natural cycles, avoiding harm to nature, are needed to diminish destructive greed and create an ecologically respectful lifestyle’.⁸⁷ Candiani expresses this interconnection through an image of imponderable and ever-changing networking: ‘Siamo lì | buttati in una trama | di cambiamento incessante, | siamo un magazzino | di semi’ (FV, 107).

She also highlights that the ecological value of impermanence has been strategically neglected by capitalist growth:

La paura diffusa, sfondo costante della nostra epoca, di fine del futuro è tutt’uno con il concetto irresponsabile di crescita e di progresso che ha ridotto la natura a un fondo eternamente attingibile. Non è così, sappiamo che c’è una fine alle risorse, ora lo sappiamo. […] È il concetto di farcela che va riscritto in noi, non più la conquista, la sfida, la crescita all’infinito, ma il sintonizzarsi, l’ascolto umile e attento degli insegnamenti che bussano nei fili d’erba e negli astri, nelle zanzare e negli elefanti, nelle creature che stanno scomparendo e in tutto quello che resta.⁸⁸

In order to succeed (‘farcela’), we should dispense with the concept of survival, whose etymology implies someone’s dominance over another (the verb ‘survive’ comes from the Latin super-vivere, thus ‘to live over [something or someone]’), and rather embrace coexistence (in Latin cum-vivere, ‘to live with’)⁸⁹ – coexistence of human and more-than-human species, of diverse cultures, but also of living and non-living beings, as in Candiani’s multifarious poetic production.⁹⁰

To conclude, this article has sought to substantiate Candiani’s reflection, in Questo immenso non sapere, on the importance of preserving childhood’s magic throughout the incessant, life-long process of personal maturation, sustained by a listening attitude open to the voice of every alterity: ‘La fedeltà all’infanzia è il rifiuto e la lotta per non perdere l’incantesimo. Senza magia, morirei, morirebbero il mio sguardo e il mio ascolto, morirebbe la vita intorno e dentro di me’.⁹¹ As a child, she established an instinctive solidarity with trees and animals, based on a shared condition of constant danger: ‘lo so da sempre che finiva così con gli alberi e gli animali, lo sentivo da bambina il loro orlo del baratro, il loro abitare in costante pericolo’.⁹² Later, both Buddhist meditation and poetry have allowed her to move closer to, and eventually embrace, such a frightening but also stimulating condition.⁹³ In line with Gregory Bateson’s ‘ecology of mind’, Candiani has developed an attitude to meditation as an inherently ecological praxis, where learning how better to inhabit mind and heart goes hand in hand with acquiring a more complex perspective on the relative and relational position of the human vis-à-vis the environment.⁹⁴ Ultimately, Candiani’s literary output invites us to ponder the healing power of empathy towards others, but also towards previous versions of ourselves: to be is, after all, to be of, with, and for others, in an endless co-becoming of interconnected co-dividualities.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences [GOIPD/2022/218].

Notes

¹ See Vivian Lamarque, ‘Oh i sagrati disse il vento’, in Bevendo il tè con i morti (Milan: Viennepierre Edizioni, 2007; repr. Novara: Interlinea, 2018), pp. 5–8 (p. 7). The first page of Candiani’s Questo immenso non sapere: Conversazioni con alberi, animali e il cuore umano (Turin: Einaudi, 2021, p. 3), where the poet describes her place, offers a vivid image of the co-presence of Russian and Indian traditions in her life: ‘Sulle scale del soppalco dove sta il mio letto, un lupo ulula a gola spiegata, un elefante sovrasta e protegge un Buddha che si illumina, un altro lupo si incammina con al fianco una matrioska vestita di nero con rose sbocciate, piccolissima’. For many years, Candiani has run poetry seminars with children from multi-ethnic Milanese elementary schools; see Chandra Livia Candiani, ‘Dove abitano le parole? Esperienze di poesia a scuola’, La poesia e lo spirito, 10 May 2010, <https://www.lapoesiaelospirito.it/2010/05/10/vivalascuola-47/> [accessed 3 January 2023].

² Chandra Livia Candiani, La bambina pugile ovvero La precisione dell’amore (Turin: Einaudi, 2014); Fatti vivo (Turin: Einaudi, 2017); Vista dalla luna (Milan: Salani, 2019); further references will be indicated using, respectively, BP, FV, and VL.

³ Theravada and Mahayana are the most popular schools of Buddhism, both accepting Buddha as the Teacher, revolving around the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, and being premised on notions such as paticca samuppāda (dependent co-origination), anattā (no-self), and anicca (impermanence). The major point of difference between the two schools is connected to the ideal of Buddhahood, which in Mahayana is attainable by everyone, as opposed to the Theravada ideal of the Arahant, according to which enlightenment is only available to the Buddhist disciple: see Jinabodhi Bhikku, ‘Theravada and Mahayana: Parallels, Connections and Unifying Concepts’, in Unifying Buddhist Philosophical Views (Ayuttaya: The International Association of Buddhist Universities, 2012), pp. 49–54. In Theravada, in other words, greater emphasis is placed on arhat (liberation, or nirvana) to be gained through monastic practice, and bodhisattvas seek their enlightenment before they can help others stuck in samsara (the cycle of death and rebirth). According to estimates by the Center for Studies of New Religions (2022), there are currently about 217,000 Italian Buddhist practitioners, a significant portion of whom follow Theravada teachings, relatively widespread across the peninsula: see Massimo Introvigne and Pier Luigi Zoccatelli, ‘Il Buddhismo Theravada’, Le Religioni in Italia, <https://cesnur.com/il-buddhismo-in-italia/il-buddhismo-theravada/> [accessed 6 July 2023].

⁴ Bertoni specifies that Candiani ‘practices Theravada Buddhism, teaches Vipassana meditation, translates Buddhist texts, and writes poetry’: see Roberto Bertoni, ‘Aspects of Italian Buddhist Presence and Poetry’, The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies Official Conference Proceedings (2014). See also Cristoforo Andreoli, ‘Intervista a Livia Candiani’, Buddismo & Occidente (2014), <https://buddismoeoccidente.wordpress.com/archivio/interviste/intervista-a-livia-candiani/> [accessed 7 December 2022].

⁵ David Bastow, ‘An Example of Self-Change: The Buddhist Path’, Religious Studies, 24.2 (1988), 157–72 (p. 160).

⁶ Chandra Livia Candiani, Il silenzio è cosa viva: L’arte della meditazione (Turin: Einaudi, 2018), p. vii.

⁷ For an analysis of Buddhism in the light of material ecocriticism and new materialisms, see Greta Gaard, ‘Mindful New Materialisms. Buddhist Roots for Material Ecocriticism’s Flourishing’, in Material Ecocriticism, ed. by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 291–300. As far as ecomysticism is concerned, I endorse Tagnani’s view of the ‘subjective mystical experience’ as ‘part of a material interaction’: see David Tagnani, ‘Materialism, Mysticism, and Ecocriticism’, English Language Notes, 55.1–2 (2017), 23–31 (p. 24). For the notion of ‘co-dividuality’, see in particular Francesco Remotti, ‘Individui, dividui, condividui’, in Somiglianze: Una via per la convivenza (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2022), pp. 277–351.

⁸ See Donald K. Swearer, ‘Principles and Poetry, Places and Stories: The Resources of Buddhist Ecology’, Daedalus, 130.4 (2001), 225–41 (p. 230).

⁹ William S. Waldron, ‘Buddhist Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Thinking about “Thoughts without a Thinker”’, The Eastern Buddhist, 34.1 (2002), 1–52.

¹⁰ Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), p. 68.

¹¹ Tagnani, ‘Materialism, Mysticism, and Ecocriticism’, p. 28. Among many interviews where Candiani clarifies her view of human beings as (non-central) agents in a world which influences them, as much as they influence it, see Giorgio Morale, ‘Di guerrieri indifesi | ha bisogno il mondo, | di sacra ira | di occhi spalancati. Su Fatti vivo di Chandra Livia Candiani’, Carmilla, 29 September 2017, <https://www.carmillaonline.com/2017/09/29/guerrieri-indifesi-bisogno-mondo-sacra-ira-occhi-spalancati-fatti-vivo-chandra-livia-candiani/> [accessed 8 December 2022].

¹² On Candiani’s mother’s mental health condition, see Chandra Livia Candiani interviewed by Giorgio Morale, ‘Livia Candiani, “Come risolvere l’enigma / della presenza della poesia”’, Il primo amore, 10 March 2008, <https://www.ilprimoamore.com/livia-candiani-come-risolvere-lenigma-della-presenza-della-poesia-6812153493437305576/> [accessed 3 January 2023]; Chandra Livia Candiani interviewed by Cristoforo Andreoli, ‘Intervista a Livia Candiani’.

¹³ In Vista dalla luna, the poet’s father is referred to as ‘l’orco’ (FV, 19), and the reader is confronted with his aggressive outbursts against Candiani’s mother and Chandra herself: ‘Puttana vestita di nero | […] | Ti ammazzo di botte’ (VL, 18); ‘Ti spezzo in due | te ne do tante da levarti il fiato’ (VL, 23); ‘Spero per te che tu non l’abbia fatto | apposta’ (VL, 25).

¹⁴ James Hillman, ‘Panic’, in Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher and James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare, trans. by A. V. O’Brien (New York: Spring Publications, 1972), pp. xxvi–xxxi (p. xxxi).

¹⁵ Rita M. Gross, ‘Buddhism and Ecofeminism: Untangling the Threads of Buddhist Ecology and Western Thought’, Journal for the Study of Religion, 24.2 (2011), 17–32 (p. 27).

¹⁶ Joanna Rogers Macy, ‘Dependent Co-Arising: The Distinctiveness of Buddhist Ethics’, The Journal of Religious Ethics, 7.1 (1979), 38–52 (p. 38).

¹⁷ Waldron, p. 2.

¹⁸ Swearer, p. 227.

¹⁹ With reference to the Four Noble Truths, which constitute the Buddha’s first public teaching, see among others Swearer, p. 226.

²⁰ Waldron, p. 28.

²¹ Macy, p. 44.

²² See, in particular, A Thousand Plateaus, originally published in 1980 as the second volume of Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative work on Capitalism and Schizophrenia, following Anti-Oedipus (1972). In the opening pages of the volume, we can read that ‘an assemblage is [an] increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections’: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 8.

²³ See Waldron, p. 16.

²⁴ Macy, p. 45.

²⁵ Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, ‘Introduction. Stories Come to Matter’, in Material Ecocriticism, pp. 1–20 (p. 4).

²⁶ See Gaard, p. 293.

²⁷ Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 16. See also L. G. Regenstein, Replenish the Earth: A History of Organized Religion’s Treatment of Animals and Nature (London: SCM Press, 1991), p. 237.

²⁸ The entire section ‘Il sonno della casa’ in Fatti vivo (FV, 3–44) personifies objects speaking in the first-person singular, including ‘Il portone’, ‘La maniglia’, and ‘La scrivania’, among many others. Conversely, human beings are associated with diverse forms of life in passages like the following: ‘Sei chicco d’uva | di vigna grande’ (BP, 10); ‘tu […] sei, | buccia tesa che cammina | disperatamente sbocciata’ (BP, 12); ‘Dopo di te | sono spopolata, | una nuvola senza popolo delle nuvole, | […] | Un nòcciolo senza frutto. | […] e tocco muri con dita vegetali’ (BP, 13); ‘Sei finestra che si apre’ (BP, 102); ‘Guarda è Io | quel buco bianco che ti fa | sbattere il quaderno contro il muro | e urlare. O Io è la penna’ (VL, 43); ‘Io aspetto | come il melo | aspetta i fiori’ (FV, 48).

²⁹ Jane Bennett’s work on Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) is another influential source of inspiration for my approach to Candiani’s poetry.

³⁰ Francesco Remotti, Contro l’identità (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2001).

³¹ See Remotti’s analysis of the concept of ‘subjective SoDif’ (where SoDif stands for ‘Somiglianze/Differenze’ or Similarities/Differences) in Somiglianze, pp. 255–62.

³² ‘Amo lo spazio | che ti sta intorno, | scampato. | Come ti accoglie, | e lo attraversi’ (BP, 21).

³³ ‘Vedo prima di te, | tutto quello che ti anticipa | e ti circonda: l’amore della sedia | che ti regge, il tavolo che culla | la tua mano, lo sfondo appassionato | del muro nella sera’ (BP, 136–37).

³⁴ ‘Condividiamo il cibo del mondo | Misha | come gli uccelli il vento. | Senza saperlo’ (BP, 40).

³⁵ ‘Entro nella stanza | dove dormi male, | entri nella stanza | dove dormo male, | la tua acuminata tenerezza | la mia | acuminata tenerezza, | la nostra | follia che non fa rumore’ (BP, 7).

³⁶ ‘Estate | fratello costruisce | capanna | per sorella piccola | spina dorsale | delicata, | ballerina’ (BP, 54).

³⁷ See Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili (Turin: Einaudi, 1972).

³⁸ In Questo immenso non sapere, Candiani writes: ‘ho conosciuto proprio all’inizio il peggio dell’umano […] ho iniziato la vita con il non essere accolta. So grazie al dolore’ (pp. 151–52).

³⁹ See Ilaria Moretti, ‘“Sconfinato è solo il niente”. Le je entre fracture et recognition dans Vista dalla luna de Chandra Livia Candiani’, Studia UBB Philologia, 64.4 (2019), 271–87.

⁴⁰ Candiani, Il silenzio è cosa viva, p. 62.

⁴¹ With respect to poetry, Barthes has aptly connected a certain ‘lack of subject’ to the void in haiku: the poet is missing, s/he does not describe, nor does s/he comment on an event, but only takes note of it, as if her/his mind was a mirror, an empty surface open to meaning in a particularly serviceable way. See Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), pp. 69–70; Giangiorgio Pasqualotto, Estetica del vuoto. Arte e meditazione nelle culture d’oriente (Venice: Marsilio, 1992), p. 108.

⁴² Bastow, p. 160.

⁴³ Deleuze and Guattari, p. 249.

⁴⁴ Winston L. King, ‘Buddhist Self-World Theory and Buddhist Ethics’, The Eastern Buddhist, 22.2 (1989), 14–26 (p. 14).

⁴⁵ Gross, pp. 24–25.

⁴⁶ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), p. 88.

⁴⁷ See Waldron, p. 8.

⁴⁸ Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London: Verso, 2019), pp. 3–4.

⁴⁹ Candiani, Io con vestito leggero (Pasian di Prato: Campanotto Editore, 2005). See the section ‘Il sonno della casa’, in Fatti vivo.

⁵⁰ ‘[a Lupo in estate] Che tu possa strapparti via | e prenderti nel pugno, | abitarti | […] | Che la notte ti insegni | a lasciarti essere e parlare | […] | Che tu possa sentire il bene grande’ (BP, 139).

⁵¹ ‘Chiusa dietro i vetri al freddo Io | non ti degna di uno sguardo | mamma’ (VL, 36).

⁵² ‘Vai da sola. | Vai da sola nel mondo grande | abbi paura | portala con te | che ti tiene a terra | […] | tu mastica piano parole prime | abbi paura e stai in bilico | sul sorriso’ (FV, 146); ‘ma tu Io | dedicati alla sepoltura | delle croci del passato’ (VL, 35).

⁵³ ‘Io ti converto in fame | mio silenzio accattone, | […] | Ti converto in altro silenzio | – sovrano silenzio – | mio urlo sognato | in faccia a una faccia, | mio demone cattivo del bene’ (BP, 9).

⁵⁴ ‘C’è una tenerezza gigantesca | oggi | negli alberi, | […] | E arriva fino a qui | e mi affratella, | dice tu’ (FV, 87).

⁵⁵ ‘noi moriamo sai | noi moriamo | tu e io’ (BP, 58); ‘io e tu svaniscono | nell’identico urlo’ (VL, 48).

⁵⁶ ‘tra tu universo e tu mondo | non c’è che il corpo, questa || minuscola mollica di pane, | questa fucina di passione | e quiete, sipario | delicato tra vuoto | e vuoto’ (BP, 141–42).

⁵⁷ Harold Coward, ‘Self as Individual and Collective: Ethical Implications’, in Visions of a New Earth: Religious Perspectives on Population, Consumption, and Ecology, ed. by Harold Coward and Daniel C. Maguire (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 43–64.

⁵⁸ Candiani, Bevendo il tè con i morti, p. 69.

⁵⁹ Macy, p. 42.

⁶⁰ Candiani, Il silenzio è cosa viva, p. 40.

⁶¹ Candiani, Questo immenso non sapere, p. 141.

⁶² ‘Caro male, | non ti chiedo ragioni | è questa la legge di ospitalità, | […] | Ti do riparo | proprio a te che mi scoperchi. | […] | levigata smemorata | nasco da te | delicata come un sorso | feroce come un numero | in attesa | come la lavagna | a scuola. | Scrivimi’ (FV, 117).

⁶³ Alaimo, p. 20

⁶⁴ Candiani, Bevendo il tè con i morti, p. 78.

⁶⁵ Candiani, Il silenzio è cosa viva, p. 99.

⁶⁶ King, ‘Buddhist Self-World Theory and Buddhist Ethics’, p. 16. As for poetry as an important semantic tool for Candiani’s fractured self, see Moretti, ‘Sconfinato è solo il niente’, p. 276.

⁶⁷ See also Questo immenso non sapere, pp. 34–35: ‘Mettā [la gentilezza amorevole] ci porta così a una non ricercata, non insistita coralità. Piano piano viene da sé che il cerchio del canto si allarghi e raggiunga tutti gli esseri, senza distinzioni. […] Il cuore è di tutti, non c’è solo un cuore mio o tuo o suo: c’è un cuore che non appartiene a nessuno e risuona, è impersonale e fluido, è, senza proprietari’.

⁶⁸ Candiani, Questo immenso non sapere, p. 10. See also Il silenzio è cosa viva, pp. 54–55: ‘Il raccoglimento è vasto, accogliente, neutrale, impersonale’; p. 58: ‘La pratica della consapevolezza […] insegna a stare, a entrare in intimità con quello che ci accade, e il paradosso è che questa intimità è impersonale’.

⁶⁹ Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 108.

⁷⁰ See Remotti, Somiglianze, p. 340.

⁷¹ Ibid., p. xxiii.

⁷² See Candiani, Il silenzio è cosa viva, p. 90.

⁷³ See Candiani, Questo immenso non sapere, p. 29.

⁷⁴ ‘[o]ra la morta tace al paesaggio | gli aggettivi crudeli | distanti un corpo, | lenti dondolano impermanenti | i nomi’ (Bevendo il tè con i morti, p. 37); ‘La cura del cuore è l’affidamento alla legge dell’impermanenza e della causa-effetto, ovverosia del karma’ (Questo immenso non sapere, p. 72); ‘Upekkhā [l’equanimità] […] Nasce dalla profonda conoscenza del costante cambiamento, del flusso dell’impermanenza’ (Questo immenso non sapere, p. 106).

⁷⁵ Roger-Pol Droit, The Cult of Nothingness, trans. by David Streight and Pamela Vohnson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 9.

⁷⁶ As for the re-birth into a different attitude to life and its impermanence, see also the following examples: ‘Così pronta alla scomparsa | ero | così peso piuma | e scusarsi a fior di pelle | con ogni pulviscolo d’aria | per occupazione indebita, | […] | Poi | sono sgusciata fuori | in scorza dura | pelle di mondo’ (BP, 63); ‘Dunque non ti ho detto addio | amica mia mia amica | e ora visiti le stanze | con andatura lieve’ (BP, 73); ‘Dunque, sapiente | è il corpo, | che sa morire e consegnare | alla luce’ (BP, 141).

⁷⁷ See Kate Rigby, ‘Spirits That Matter. Pathways toward a Rematerialization of Religion and Spirituality’, in Material Ecocriticism, pp. 283–90 (p. 285). Rigby brings together new materialism and Freya Mathews’ panpsychist postmaterialism.

⁷⁸ ‘Se senti e sai nelle vene che la morte […] non è la fine se non dell’io e dei suoi timori [anattā] […] ti senti molto sola e molto in compagnia di tutti gli esseri che si abbandonano al flusso [paticca samuppāda]: foglie, rami, montagne, onde, e così tanti animali, bambini e alcuni adulti, sciupati oppure lucenti’ (Il silenzio è cosa viva, p. 117).

⁷⁹ Candiani, Bevendo il tè con i morti, p. 40.

⁸⁰ ‘la poesia sospende la parola e non ne garantisce il ritorno, non solo con gli a capo, ma anche con la sospensione del senso comune’ (Candiani, Il silenzio è cosa viva, p. 130).

⁸¹ ‘Sei la foglia appena nata | sul ramo in via san Vittore | o sei le briciole di ossa | dentro l’urna? Sei vita | volata via o uccello | che dal ramo guarda | l’altro uccello beccare | nel cuore del sogno?’ (BP, 81); ‘Cosa ti rende così | guancia a guancia | col mondo? […] | Cos’è per te il mio corpo | quando ti riversi | come tempesta di onde? | Di certo sei al mare | ma girata verso la sabbia, | dell’acqua non ti curi | è la sabbia che fissi, la conti? | La tieni insieme senza nomi | col tuo sorriso scucito | delicato e rapido come ala d’uccello | piccolo? Cosa manca | tra petto e aria | oggetti e mano? | […] | Sono Chandra, | mi sciogli?’ (BP, 86–87); ‘Hai il silenzio di un leone, | la parola non è eterna? | Hai il silenzio come un tuono, | in questo stato di bellezza | mi ricevi? […] | Mi capti?’ (BP, 88); ‘Mi illumini?’ (BP, 96); ‘Mi spegni? Mi spegni dunque | insieme a quella memoria | che sta diventando fragile?’ (BP, 97).

⁸² Candiani, Questo immenso non sapere, p. 13.

⁸³ Jonathan Stalling, Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), p. 14.

⁸⁴ Candiani, Questo immenso non sapere, p. 107.

⁸⁵ Cheryll Glotfelty, ‘Introduction’, in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), pp. xv-xxxvii (p. xix).

⁸⁶ See Candiani, Il silenzio è cosa viva, p. 7: ‘La morte scandalizza la nostra visione autocentrata […]. Ti prego morte, non lasciarti addomesticare, non diventare turistica, continua a farmi un assoluto male e dammi il mistero di te, di me, della non separatezza’.

⁸⁷ Tony Watling, ‘Buddhist Visions’, in Ecological Imaginations in the World Religions: An Ethnographic Analysis (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 105–22 (p. 106).

⁸⁸ Candiani, Il silenzio è cosa viva, pp. 98–99.

⁸⁹ See Antonia Anna Ferrante, Cosa può un compost: Fare con le ecologie femministe e queer (Milan: Luca Sossella Editore, 2022), p. 107. See also Donna J. Haraway’s sympoietic strategies for ‘making-with’, ‘worlding-with, in company’: Donna J. Haraway, ‘Sympoiesis: Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble’, in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 58–98 (p. 58).

⁹⁰ ‘Per me non è mai esistito solo il regno umano. È fondamentale nella mia vita, e quindi anche nella mia poesia, entrare in contatto con altri regni, come quello animale, vegetale, minerale, e quello dei morti’: Chandra Livia Candiani interviewed by Giorgio Morale, ‘Chandra Livia Candiani, La bambina pugile’, Nazione Indiana, 19 June 2014, <https://www.nazioneindiana.com/2014/06/19/chandra-livia-candiani-la-bambina-pugile/> [accessed 13 January 2023].

⁹¹ Candiani, Questo immenso non sapere, p. 144.

⁹² Ibid., p. 151.

⁹³ See Candiani, Il silenzio è cosa viva, p. 85.

⁹⁴ See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1972).