Six Memos for the Next Millennium

by Italo Calvino

  I continually switch back and forth between these two paths, and when I feel I have fully explored the possibilities of one, I rush across to the other, and vice versa. Thus in the last few years I have alternated my exercises in the structure of the story with other exercises in description, today a very neglected art. Like a schoolboy whose homework is to “Describe a giraffe” or “Describe the starry sky,” I applied myself to filling a notebook with such exercises and made a book out of the material. This is Mr. Palomar, which was recently published in English translation (198S). It is a kind of diary dealing with minimal problems of knowledge, ways of establishing relationships with the world, and gratifications and frustrations in the use of both silence and words.

  In my quests of this sort I have always borne in mind the practice of poets. I think of William Carlos Williams, who describes the leaves of the cyclamen so minutely that we can visualize the flower poised above the leaves he has drawn for us, thereby giving the poem the delicacy of the plant. I think of Marianne Moore who, in depicting her scaly anteater and her nautilus and all the other animals in her bestiary, blends information from zoology books with symbolic and allegorical meanings that make each of her poems a moral fable. And I think also of Eugenio Montale, who may be said to sum up the achievement of both in his poem, “L'anguilla.” This is a poem consisting of a single very long sentence in the shape of an eel, following the entire life of the eel, and making the eel into a moral symbol.

  But above all I think of Francis Ponge because, with his little prose poems, he created a genre unique in contemporary literature: that schoolboy's “exercise book” in which he has to start by practicing arranging his words as an extension of the appearances of the world, and going through a series of tryouts, brouillons, approximations. Ponge for me is a peerless master because the brief texts of L· parti pris des choses (The Purpose of Things) and his other books on similar lines, speaking of a shrimp or a pebble or a cake of soap, give us the best example of a battle to force language to become the language of things, starting from things and returning to us changed, with all the humanity that we have invested in things. Ponge's declared intention was, by means of his brief texts and their elaborate variants, to compose a new De Rerum Natura. I believe that he may be the Lucretius of our time, reconstructing the physical nature of the world by means of the impalpable, powder-fine dust of words.

  It seems to me that Ponge's achievement is on the same level as Mallarme's, though in a divergent and complementary direction. In Mallarme the word attains the acme of exactitude by reaching the last degree of abstraction and by showing nothingness to be the ultimate substance of the world. In Ponge the world takes the form of the most humble, secondary, and asymmetrical things, and the word is what serves to make us aware of the infinite variety of these irregular, minutely complicated forms.

  There are those who hold that the word is the way of attaining the substance of the world, the final, unique, and absolute substance. Rather than representing this substance, the word identifies itself with it (so that it is wrong to call the word merely a means to an end): there is the word that knows only itself, and no other knowledge of the world is possible. There are others who regard the use of the word as an unceasing pursuit of things, an approach not to their substance but to their infinite variety, touching on their inexhaustibly multiform surface. As Hoff-mannsthal said: “Depth is hidden. Where? On the surface.” And Wittgenstein went even further than this: “For what is hidden … is of no interest to us.”

  I would not be so drastic. I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since the times of our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

  For this reason, the proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.

  Leonardo da Vinci offers a significant example of the battle with language to capture something that evaded his powers of expression. Leonardo's codices comprise an extraordinary documentation of struggle with language, a gnarled, spiky language, from which he seeks richer, more subtle, and more precise expression. The various phases in the treatment of an idea—like those of Francis Ponge, who ends by publishing them in sequence because the real work consists not in its definitive form, but in the series of approximations made to attain it—are, for Leonardo as writer, the proof of the eflFort he invested in writing as an instrument of knowledge; and also of the fact that, in the case of all the books he thought of writing, he was more interested in the process of inquiry than in the completion of a text for publication. From time to time, even the subjects are similar to Ponge's as in the series of short fables that Leonardo wrote about objects or animals.

  Let us take the fable about fire, for example. Leonardo gives us a rapid summary: the fire, offended because the water in the pan is above him, although he is the “higher” element, shoots his flames up and up until the water boils, overflows, and puts him out. Leonardo then elaborates this in three successive drafts, all of them incomplete, written in three parallel columns. Each time he adds some details, describing how, from a little piece of charcoal, a flame bursts through the gaps in the wood, crackling and swelling. But he soon breaks off, as if becoming aware that there is no limit to the minuteness of detail with which one can tell even the simplest story. Even a tale of wood catching fire in the kitchen fireplace can grow from within until it becomes infinite.

  Leonardo, “omo sanza lettere” (an unlettered man), as he described himself, had a difficult relationship with the written word. His knowledge was without equal in all the world, but his ignorance of Latin and grammar prevented him from communicating in writing with the learned men of his time. Certainly he thought he could set down much of his science more clearly in drawings than in words. “O scrittore, con quali lettere scriverai tu con tal perfezione la intera figurazione qual fa qui il disegno?” (O writer, with what letters can you convey the entire figuration with such perfection as drawing gives us here?), he wrote in his notebooks on anatomy. And not just in science but also in philosophy, he was confident he could communicate better by means of painting and drawing. Still he also felt an incessant need to write, to use writing to investigate the world in all its polymorphous manifestations and secrets, and also to give shape to his fantasies, emotions, and rancors—as when he inveighs against men of letters, who were able only to repeat what they had read in the books of others, unlike those who were among the “inven-tori e interpreti tra la natura e li omini” (inventors and interpreters between nature and men). He therefore wrote more and more. With the passing of the years, he gave up painting and expressed himself through writing and drawing, as if following the thread of a single discourse in drawings and in words, filling his notebooks with his left-handed mirror writing.

  On folio 265 of the Codex Atlanticus, Leonardo begins to jot down evidence to prove a theory of the growth of the earth. After giving examples of buried cities swallowed up by the soil, he goes on to the marine fossils found in the mountains and in particular to certain bones that he supposes must have belonged to an antediluvian sea monster. At this moment his imagination must have been caught by a vision of the immense animal as it was swimming among the waves. At any rate, he turns the page upside down and tries to capture the image of the animal, three times attempting a sentence that will convey all the wonder of that evocation.

  O quante volte ftisti tu veduto in fra Ponde del gonfiato e grande oceano, col setoluto e nero dosso, a guisa di mon-tagna e con grave e superbo andamento!

  O how many times were you seen among the waves of the grea
t swollen ocean, with your black and bristly back, looming like a mountain, and with grave and stately bearing!

  Then he tries to give more movement to the monster's progress by introducing the verb volteggiare (to whirl).

  E spesse volte eri veduto in fra Ponde del gonfiato e grande oceano, e col superbo e grave moto gir volteggiando in fra le marine acque. E con setoluto e nero dosso, a guisa di montagna, quelle vincere e sopraffare!

  And many times were you seen among the waves of the great swollen ocean, and with stately and grave bearing go swirling in the sea waters. And with your black and bristly back, looming like a mountain, defeating and overwhelming them!

  But the word volteggiare seems to him to have lessened the impression of grandeur and majesty that he wants to evoke. So he chooses the verb solcare (to furrow) and alters the whole construction of the passage, giving it compactness and rhythm with sure literary judgment:

  O quante volte fusti tu veduto in fra Ponde del gonfiato e grande oceano, a guisa di montagna quelle vincere e so-praffare, e col setoluto e nero dosso solcare le marine acque, e con superbo e grave andamento!

  O how many times were you seen among the waves of the great swollen ocean, looming like a mountain, defeating and overwhelming them, and with your black and bristly back furrowing the sea waters, and with stately and grave bearing!

  His pursuit of the apparition, which is presented almost as a symbol of the solemn force of nature, gives us an inkling of how Leonardo's imagination worked. I leave you this image at the very end of my talk so that you may carry it in your memories as long as possible, in all its transparency and its mystery.

  *Zibaldone di pensieri, 2 vols., ed. Francesco Flora (Milan: Mondadori, 1937), 1.1145, 1150, 1123-25.

  *Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 131-132.

  4

  VISIBILITY

  There is a line in Dante (Purgatorio XVII.25) that reads: “Poi piovve dentro a Palta fantasia” (Then rained down into the high fantasy …). I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

  Let us look at the context in which we find this line of the Purgatorio. We are in the circle of the Wrathful, and Dante is meditating on images that form directly in his mind, depicting classical and biblical examples of wrath chastised. He realizes that these images rain down from the heavens—that is, God sends them to him.

  In the various circles of Purgatory, besides the details of the landscape and the vault of the heavens, and in addition to his encounters with the souls of repentant sinners and with supernatural beings, Dante is presented with scenes that act as quotations or representations of examples of sins and virtues, at first as bas-reliefs that appear to move and to speak, then as visions projected before his eyes, then as voices reaching his ear, and finally as purely mental images. In a word, these visions turn progressively more inward, as if Dante realized that it is useless at every circle to invent a new form of metarepresentation, and that it is better to place the visions directly in the mind without making them pass through the senses.

  But before this it is necessary to define what the imagination is, and this Dante does in two terzinas (XVII. 13-18):

  O imaginativa che ne rube

  talvolta si di fuor, ch'om non s'accorge

  perche dintorno suonin mille tube,

  chi move te, se ? senso non ti porge?

  Moveti lume che nel ciel s'informa

  per se o per voler che giu lo scorge.

  It goes without saying that we are here concerned with “high fantasy”: that is, with the loftier part of the imagination as distinct from the corporeal imagination, such as is revealed in the chaos of dreams. With this point in mind, let us try to follow Dante's reasoning, which faithfully reproduces that of the philosophy of his time. I will paraphrase: O imagination, you who have the power to impose yourself on our faculties and our wills, stealing us away from the outer world and carrying us off into an inner one, so that even if a thousand trumpets were to sound we would not hear them, what is the source of the visual messages that you receive, if they are not formed from sensations deposited in the memory? “Moveti lume che nel ciel s'informa” (You are moved by a light that is formed in heaven): according to Dante— and also Thomas Aquinas—there is a kind of luminous source in the skies that transmits ideal images, which are formed either according to the intrinsic logic of the imaginary world (“per se”) or according to the will of God: “o per voler che giu lo scorge” (or by a will that guides it downward).

  Dante speaks of the visions presented to him (that is, to Dante the actor in the poem) almost as if they were film projections or television images seen on a screen that is quite separate from the objective reality of his journey beyond the earth. But for Dante the poet as well, the entire journey of Dante the actor is of the same nature as these visions. The poet has to imagine visually both what his actor sees and what he thinks he sees, what he dreams, what he remembers, what he sees represented, or what is told to him, just as he has to imagine the visual content of the metaphors he uses to facilitate this process of visual evocation. What Dante is attempting to define, therefore, is the role of the imagination in the Commedia, in particular the visual part of his fantasy, which precedes or is simultaneous with verbal imagination.

  We may distinguish between two types of imaginative process: the one that starts with the word and arrives at the visual image, and the one that starts with the visual image and arrives at its verbal expression. The first process is the one that normally occurs when we read. For example, we read a scene in a novel or the report of some event in a newspaper and, according to the greater or lesser effectiveness of the text, we are brought to witness the scene as if it were taking place before our eyes, or at least to witness certain fragments or details of the scene that are singled out.

  In the cinema the image we see on the screen has also passed through the stage of a written text, has then been “visualized” in the mind of the director, then physically reconstructed on the set, and finally fixed in the frames of the film itself. A film is therefore the outcome of a succession of phases, both material and otherwise, in the course of which the images acquire form. During this process, the “mental cinema” of the imagination has a function no less important than that of the actual creation of the sequences as they will be recorded by the camera and then put together on the moviola. This mental cinema is always at work in each one of us, and it always has been, even before the invention of the cinema. Nor does it ever stop projecting images before our mind's eye.

  It is significant that great importance is given to the visual imagination in Ignatius of Loyola's Ejercicios espirituales (Spiritual Exercises). At the beginning of his manual, Loyola prescribes the “composicion viendo el lugar” (visual composition of the place) in terms that might be instructions for the mise-en-scene of a theatrical performance: “en la contemplacion o meditacion visible, asi como contemplar a Christo nuestro Sefior, el qual es visible, la composicion sera ver con la vista de la imagination el lugar corporeo, donde se halla la cosa que quiero contemplar. Digo el lugar corporeo, asi como un templo o monte, donde se halla Jesu Christo o Nuestra Sefiora,” (in visual contemplation or meditation, especially in the contemplation of Christ our Lord insofar as he is visible, this composition will consist in seeing from the view of the imagination the physical place where the thing I wish to contemplate is to be found. I say the physical place, as for example a temple or a hill where Jesus Christ or Our Lady is). Loyola quickly hastens to make it clear that the contemplation of our own sins must not be visual, or else—if I have understood rightly—we must make use of visual imagination of a metaphorical sort (the soul imprisoned in the corruptible body).

  Further on, in the first day of the second week, the spiritual exercise opens with a vast visionary panorama and with spectacular crowd scenes:

  1° puncto. El primer puncto es ver las personas, las unas y las otras; y primero las
de la haz de la tierra, en tanta diversidad, asi en trajes como en gestos, unos blancos y otros negros, unos en paz y otros en guerra, unos Uorando y otros riendo, unos sanos, otros enfermos, unos nasciendo y otros muriendo, etc.

  2°: ver y considerar las tres personas divinas, como en el su solio real o throno de la su divina majestad, como miran toda la haz y redondez de la tierra y todas las gentes en tanta ceguedad, y como mueren y descienden al infierno.

  1st point. The first point is to see people, of this and that kind; and first of all those on the face of the earth in all their variety of garments and gestures, some white and others black, some in peace and some at war, some weeping and others laughing, some healthy and others sick, some being born and others dying, etc.

  2nd: to see and to consider the three divine persons as on the regal seat or throne of their divine majesty, how they look down on the whole face and rotundity of the earth and all the people who are in such blindness, and how they die and descend to hell.

  The idea that the God of Moses does not tolerate being represented in visual images does not ever seem to have occurred to Ignatius of Loyola. On the contrary, one might say that he claims for each and every Christian the grandiose visionary gifts of Dante or Michelangelo—without even the restraint that Dante seems obliged to impose on his own visual imagination when face to face with the celestial visions of Paradise.