A Visit from the Future: Giuseppe Penone and David of Dinant.

I was in my kitchen, reading Giuseppe Penone’s texts on my laptop and browsing through the images of his works in a pile of books that crowded the table, when a gust of wind brushed my neck and made me jolt. I turned toward the window, to see if I had left it open on this cold February day. It was perfectly sealed.

I must have imagined it, I thought, and I went back to following Penone’s sensuous explorations of the forest, where trees and hands, brambles and feet caress each other and almost mix to become one sole substance. I was moving my eyes across a beautiful paragraph on breathing, for Penone the primordial form of sculpture, when a second gust, this time sharper and accompanied by a hissing sound, almost had me fall off the chair.

“Anybody there?” I shouted to scare intruders, but mostly to give myself courage. A few birds were singing outside, an ambulance was passing through the road, the boiler continued its usual humming: nothing else.

“As long as I don’t give in to an intrusive thought,” I told myself, “everything will remain under control.”

It took me a while to regain focus, but Penone’s prose helped me, once again, to let my mind flow between sculptures and vegetable roots, mountain skies and swirling leaves.

“I see, you found me…” I heard, somewhere behind my left ear. I did not move, I pretended not to hear. As long as I don’t give in to an intrusive thought…

“You do know who I am,” continued the voice, with a soft, lulling tone, like a father whispering a nighttime story to his children.

“I don’t know who you are, but I know that you are just a thought inside my head”, I blurted out.

The voice chuckled. “Well, indeed, inside, outside… Inside the wood of the table where you’re resting your elbows, and in the thoughts that run through your mind. What is the difference?”

That sounded familiar.

“Giuseppe… is that you?” I said, sheepishly.

“Not at all,” the voice replied. “I was once known as David. David of Dinant. But that was long ago. Now, I believe, I am just a footnote in your books on Medieval philosophy.”

Ah yes, David of Dinant! The great philosopher of the 13^th century, whose works were banned by the Church and lost to posterity – except for a few fragments, which I had read a couple of years back. A good kind of ghost to appear uninvited in one’s kitchen.

“So, you are a spirit!” I said, turning my head towards the empty space on my left.

“I see, you haven’t read my books” he replied,

“Oh no, I have! At least, the little that has arrived to us,” I hurriedly retorted. “I know that you believe,” I continued, like a student taking an oral exam, “that the whole universe is composed only of three things: mind, body, and the eternal substance of God. But that, in fact, these three substances are one and the same. Every object, every thought, and every instant of eternity are equally made of matter, thought, and divinity.”

The voice remained silent a few seconds, then replied with a hint of disappointment: “Mm, that’s not quite correct, but I guess that it comes close to what I actually said.”

“But, didn’t you say… let me read it…” I jumped off the chair, lunged to the bookshelf just outside the kitchen door and grabbed a slim book off the shelves. Incredibly, I recalled exactly where to find the passage. “Here it is:

Si ergo mundus est deus preter se ipsum perceptibile sensui, yle igitur mundi est ipse deus, forma vero adveniens yle nil aliud quam id, quod facit deus sensibile se ipsum. … Manifesto est unam solam substanciam esse non tantum omnium corporum, sed etiam animarum omnium et eam nichil aliud esse quam ipsum deum. Substancia vero ex qua sunt omnia corpora dicitur yle, substancia vero ex qua sunt omnes anime diciturracio sive mens. Manifestum est ergo deum esse racionem omnium animarum et ylen omnium corporum.[1]

Isn’t that what I just said?”

“Yes, yes, my child, more or less… That’s just a fragment, though,” David replied condescendingly, “and it seems that your little booklet contains nothing more than fragments.”

“Well, all the copies of your work were burned a long time ago, it is a miracle we have at least this much left. But you already know that, don’t you?”

David did not reply, but in his silence I could almost hear him smiling.

“For what I know, you are a pantheist. You believe that the hard distinctions we make between matter, form, thought, and the invisible divine realm, are just provisional ideas that help us navigate the world – while, in themselves, they are fundamentally unreal. So, a gesture, or a thought, is fundamentally one with a rock or a cloud, with the flight of the angels and the silence of God. Isn’t that correct? And look!” I continued excitedly, without letting David respond, “Look at what I am reading now! You can see what I see, right?”

“Indeed, I can,” David replied, laconically.

I pointed to Penone’s text still lighting my laptop’s screen, to the images of his works arranged over the table like a scattered mosaic.

“I think that you would like this artist. You don’t quite say the exact same things – at least, for what I can understand of both your thoughts – but there is certainly an air of familiarity between you two. Take this passage for example”.

I read from Penone’s texts:

Breathing is the automatic, involuntary sculpture that brings us closest to osmosis with things. It is the action that erases the envelope, the identity given by the skin. Every breath contains within it the principle of fertilisation; it is an element that penetrates another body, and the exhalation, the breath, testifies to this through its form.

“Or this one:

Tightening a bolt, screwing it, is a cosmic, extreme, mythical action within the banality of our everyday existence. A falling leaf twists and turns in a spiral movement. The spiral is flow, movement, life, and it is found in all flows of matter.

Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I was embarrassed to realise that I was out of breath with excitement, talking to the void.

“Yes yes, my child” replied David, with that condescending tone that was starting to get on my nerves.

“Well then, tell me, why have you come here?”

The emptiness in the kitchen that was David seemed taken aback for a moment. But then his answer arrived, in the usual tone.

“You see, it is a long story, and you probably would not understand much of it. Let us just say that in the condition in which I am, as a ‘spirit’ as you say, I am granted vision of the past, the present and the future, in the same way that you can read the beginning, the middle, and the end of a book. And in the future, or so I saw when I looked ahead of your time, something strange is going to happen.”

I thought I heard him smacking his lips – if only the idea of a lip-smacking ghost wasn’t utter nonsense.

“In the future,” he continued, “a long time from now, terrible and wonderful things will have happened. Things you cannot even imagine. Empires will have come and gone, the Earth will be different, and all that you can now see around yourself will be just the trace of a ruin, the shadow of a past dream. Like my writing has come to you only in fragments, so, by then, also the legacy of your world will be only splinters and shards of what it is today. And it will happen that, one day, the people of the future will find a good number of Penone’s works, almost intact, in a place that by chance will sit near a library whose every book will have been reduced to ashes – all of them, except one: that slim booklet of my writings that you are holding in your hands. And those clever explorers of the future will come to the wild conclusion, based on what they will be able to read and to see, that the artworks, and the text, must have been produced by the same hand: that Penone and I were in fact the same person, who lived sometime in the very distant past. For them, the similarities between us will be stronger than our obvious differences. And then, for many centuries to come, the two of us, Penone and I, will be known together under the vague names of ‘The Anonymous of the Trees’, or ‘The Anonymous of Matter, Mind, and God’”.

The piercing howl of another ambulance rushing through the street awoke me from my stupefied torpor at having received such unexpected revelations about the time to come.

“But why are you here?” I dare ask.

“You see, because by that point in the future, Penone’s texts will have become almost impossible to find. And since I will be made to share so much with him, I wanted to hear from his voice, or from his pen, what he was thinking when he was producing his, or I’d better say ‘our’, artworks.”

“Ah, that’s why… Well, you’re lucky then. It’s a beautiful body of writing …” I mumbled before David cut me off.

“Yes yes. That’s why I’m here. To read what you were just reading. But now, my child, please move away from the screen, you are covering the words. I see that your house has another room, why don’t you go there, and perhaps read again my fragments, so to digest them a little better? I won’t be long, and you will profit as much from your reading as I will do from mine.”

I lifted myself from the chair, looking dejectedly at the door. My slippers shuffled on the floor as I left the kitchen to that emptiness of matter, thought and God, that called itself David of Dinant.

“Please close the door behind you, my child, so that we won’t disturb each other, will you?”

“Yes, sir.”

[1] “Thus, if the world is God Itself, in a state in which it is concealed from the senses, it follows that the world’s matter is God Itself, and the form that occurs to matter is nothing but God that makes Itself visible. … It is clear that there is only one substance, not only of all bodies, but also of all souls, and that such a substance is God Itself. The substance from which all bodies draw their existence is called matter; that from which all souls draw their own existence us called reason, that is, mind. Thus, it is clear that God is the reason of all souls and the matter of all bodies” D. of Dinant, unnumbered fragments in, Mente Materia Dio – Mens Hyle Deus, edited by E. Dattilo, bilingual edition, Genova, Il Melangolo, 2022, p. 48 and 50. My translation from the original Medieval Latin.