However, I have just noticed that as I was reading the book, I was taking notes too. And just by going briefly through them, geuss what? I feel myself already in it.
I think this is great content for anyone intrested in Literature and generally any other faculty in the 21st century arts. I have decided to post it here because well, it is for the thinkers! (Ok, I had a simple title for it- Melancholy... maybe because of my melancholic personality.)
Melancholy
1. Lightness
Jacques in As You Like
It (IV.i.15-18)
“but it is a melancholy of my own, compounded of many
simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my
travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.”
It is therefore not a dense, opaque melancholy, but a veil
of minute particles of humours and sensations, a fine dust of atoms, like
everything else that goes to make up the ultimate substance of the multiplicity
of things.
 |
| Italo Calvino |
2. Quickness
Festina lente hurry
slowly
...I have begun to understand something that i had only a
rather vague idea of before—something about myself, about how I am and how I
would like to be; about how i write and how i might be able to write. Vulcan’s
concentration and craftsmanship are needed to record Mercury’s adventures and
metamorphoses. Mercury’s swiftness and mobility are needed to make Vulcan’s
endless labors become bearers of meaning. And from the formless mineral matrix,
the god’s symbols of office acquire their forms: lyres or tridents, spears or
diadems.
A writer’s work has to take account of many rythms: Vulcan’s
and Mercury’s, a message of urgency obtained by dint of patient and meticulous
adjustments and an intuition so instantaneous that, when formulated, it
acquires the finality of something that could never have been otherwise. But it
is also the rythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings
and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral
contigency.
...Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert
draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed
five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing
was still not begun. “I need another five years,” said Chuang-tzu. The king
granted them. At the end of these years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in
an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever
seen.
3. Exactitude
..the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute
space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.
Leopardi therefore starts with the rigorous abstraction of a mathematical
notion of space and time, and compares this to the vague, undefined flux of
sensations.
This talk is refusing to be led in the direction i set
myself. I began by speaking of exactitude, not of the infinite and the cosmos.
I wanted to tell you of my fondness for geometrical forms, for symmetries, for
numerical series, for all that is combinatory, for numerical proportions; i
wanted to explain the things i had written in terms of my fidelity to the idea
of limits, of measure... but perhaps it is precisely this idea of forms that
evokes the idea of the endless: the sequence of whole numbers, Euclid’s
straight lines... Rather than speak to you of what i have written, perhaps it
would be more interesting to tell you about the problems that I have not yet
resolved, that I don’t know how to resolve, and what these will cause me to
write: Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write, and I
realize that what interests me is something else entirely or, rather, not
anything precise but everything that does not fit in with that i ought to
write- the relationship between a given argument and all its possible variants
and alternatives, everything that can happen in time and space. This is a
devouring and destructive obsession, which is enough to render writing
impossible. In order to combat it, i try to limit the field of what I have to
say, divide it into still more limited fields, than subdivide these again, and
so on and so on. Then another kind of vertigo seizes me, that of the
detail of the detail of the detail, and
i am drawn to the infinitesimal, the infinitely small, just as I was previously
lost in the infinitely vast.
...this taste for geometrical composition, of which we could
trace a history in world literature starting with Mallarme, is based on the
contrast of order and disorder fundamental to contemporary science. The
universe disintegrates into a cloud of heat, it falls inevitably into a vortex
of entropy, but within this irreversible process there may be areas of order,
portions of the existent that tend toward a form, privileged points in which we
seem to discern a design or perspective. A work of literature is one of these
minimal portions in which the existent crystallizes into a form, acquires a
meaning- not fixed, not definitive, not hardened into a mineral immobility, but
alive as an organism. Poetry is the great enemy of chance, in spite of also
being a daughter of chance and knowing that, in the last resort, chance will
win the battle. Un coup de des n’abolira jamais le hassard One
throw of the dice will never annul chance.
The Game
The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it
was the game’s reason that eluded him. The end of every game is a gain or a
loss: but of what? What were the real stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of
the king, knocked aside by the winner’s hand, nothingness remains: a black
square, or a white one. By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the
essential, kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive
conquest, of which the empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes;
it was reduced to a square of planed wood.
Then Marco Polo spoke: “Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid
with two woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is
fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see
how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud
tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night’s frost forced it to
desist.”
Until then the Great Khan had not realized that the
foreigner knew how to express himself fluently in his language, but it was not
this fluency that amazed him.
“Here is a thicker pore: perhaps it was a larvum’s nest; not
a woodworm, because, once born, it would have begun to dig, but a caterpillar
that gnawed the leaves and was the cause of the tree’s being chosen for
chopping down... this edge was scored by the wood carver with his gouge so that
it would adhere to the next square, more protruding...”
The quantinty of things that could be read in a little piece
of smooth and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai; Polo was already talking about
ebony forests, about rafts laden with logs that come down the rivers, of docks,
of women at the windows...
4. Visibility
Think for instance, of a writer who is trying to convey
certain ideas which to him are contained in mental images. He isn’t quite sure
how those images fit togethere in his mind, and he experiments around,
expressing things first one way and then another, and finally settles on some
version. But does he know where it all came from? Only in a vague sense. Mush
of the source, like an iceberg, is deep underwater, unseen- and he knows that.
-Douglas Hofstadter Godel, Escher, Bach- Vintage edition,
1980:713
I have yet to explain what part the indirect imaginary has
in this gulf of the fantastic, by which I mean the images supplied by culture,
whether this be mass culture or any other kind of tradition. This leads to
another question: What will be the future of the individual imagination in what
is usually called the ‘civilization of the image’? Will the power of evoking
images of things that are not there continue to develop in a human race
increasingly inundated by a flood of prefabricated images? At one time the
visual memory of an individual was limited to the heritage os his direct
experiences and to a restricted repertory of images reflected in culture. The
possibility of giving form to personal myths arose from the way in which the
fragments of this memory came together in unexpected and evocative
combinations. We are bombarded today by such a quatinty of images that we can
no longer distinguish direct experience from what we have seen for a few
seconds on television. The memory is littered with bits and pieces of images,
like a rubbish dump, and it is more and more unlikely that any one form among
so many will succeed in standing out.
...Will the literature of the fantastic be possible in the
twenty-fisrt century, with the growing inflation of prefabricated images? Two
paths seem to be open from now on. (1) We could recycle used images in a new
context that changes their meaning. Post-modernism may be seen as the tendency
to make ironic use of the stock images of the mass media, or to inject the
taste for the marvelous inherited from literary tradition into narrative
mechanisms and accentuate its alienation. (2) We could wipe the slate clean and
start from scratch. Samuel Beckett has obtained the most extraordinary results
by reducing visual and linguistic elements to a minimum, as if in a world after
the end of the world.
...the artist’s imagination is a world of potentialities
that no work will succeed in realizing. What we experience by living is another
world, answering to other forms of order and disorder. The layers of words that
accumulate on the page, like the layers of colors on the canvas, are yet
another world, also infinite but more easily controlled, less refractory to
formulation. The link between the three worlds is the undefinable spoken of by
Balzac: or, rather, I would call it the undecidable, the paradox of an infinite
whole that contains other infinite wholes.
5. Multiplicity
..And I realised the impossibility which love comes up
against. We imagine that it has as its object a being that can be laid down in
front of us, enclosed within a body. Alas, it is the extension of that being to
all the points in space and time that has occupied and will occupy. If we do
not possess its contact with this or that place, this or that hour, we do not
possess that being. But we cannot touch all these points. If only they were
indicated to us, we might perhaps contrive to reach out to them. But we grope
for them without finding them. Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions. We waste
precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.
Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields,
but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves
immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and
writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature
continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general
explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand
challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various
branches of knowledge, the various ‘codes’, into a manifold and multifaceted
vision of the world.
...Among the values I would like passed on to the next
millenium, there is this above all: a literature that has absorbed the taste
for mental orderliness and exactitude, the intelligence of poetry but at the
same time that of science and of philosophy.\
....Another example of the hyper-novel is La vie
mode d’emploi (Life, Directions for Use) by Georges Perec. It is a
very long novel, made up of many intersecting stories, and it reawakens the
pleasure of reading the great nevelistic cycles of the sort Balzac wrote. In my
view, this book, published in paris in 1978, four years before the author died
at the early age of forty-six, is the last real ‘event’ in the history of the
novel so far. There are many reasons for this: the plan of the book, of
incredible scope but at the same time solidly finished; the novelty of its
rendering; the compendium of a narrative tradition and the encyclopedic summa
of things known that lend substance to a particular image of the past and the
vertigo of the void; the continual presence of anguish and irony together- in a
word, the manner in which the pursuit of a definite structural project and the
imponderable element of poetry become one and the same thing.
Raymond Queneau
-Another very wrong idea that is also going the rounds at
the moment is the equivalence that has been established between inspiration,
exploration of the subconscious, and liberation, between chance, automatism,
and freedom. Now this sort of inspiration, which consits in blindly obeying
every impulse, is in fact slavery. The classical author who wrote his tragedy
observing a certain number of known rules is freer than the poet who writes
down whatever comes into his head and is slave to other rules of which he knows
nothing.
...Think what it would be to have a work conceived from
outside the self, a work that would
let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter
into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to
the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree
in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic . . .
_six memos for the next millenium
Italo Calvino, 1988
These are excerpts from Six Memos For the Next Millenium. To download the full pdf click here.
©Simon21
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