Today’s Writing Music: “Holland, 1945” by Neutral Milk Hotel
Today’s Reading: Two poems: “A Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert & “Waking Early New Year's Day Without a Hangover” by Tom Disch.
[The following is adapted from introductory remarks I gave this past week at the SUNY New Paltz English Department’s annual Graduate Symposium, The Literature of the New Millennium.]
When I was a Freshman in college, I took a course called Introduction to Fiction and Poetry II, and one of the books we were assigned to read that semester was called Six Memos for the New Millennium by Italo Calvino. Written in 1985, the famed Italian writer was originally to deliver the memos as the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University. In each, he highlighted a “literary value” that he viewed as foundational to the literature of the future:
Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity.
If you’re keeping count, and saying, “But that’s only five,” you’re not wrong.
Perhaps guilty of a little procrastination, as creative types are wont to do, Calvino intended to write the sixth memo once he was settled in Cambridge for the lecture series.
Unfortunately, he passed away just before departing for the United States. His wife, Esther, writes in the preface to my edition that she found the five existing memos “all in perfect order, in the Italian original, on his writing desk ready to be put into his suitcase.” There were no notes at all about the final memo, just a picture of his list of the six titles, with the final title, “Consistency” still in lighter pencil than the others.
(Sidenote: Last year, Andrei Codrescu at the LA Review of Books wrote a speculative version of the sixth memo, and it is really terrific: Consistency.)
The fatefulness and mystique of this story about this unfinished work appealed to me immensely, but when I sat down to look at the first memo, Lightness, I regret to report that my 17-year-old brain found it almost completely impenetrable.
At that point I was fairly new to the concept of literary criticism, and didn’t especially like having to engage with it in what was supposed to be a creative writing class. I just want to write my own stories, I must have muttered. Leave it to other people to interpret them if they want.
But when I began to read some of Calvino’s stories in a strange book called Cosmicomics, I had second thoughts. I kept wondering how he was able to do what he did—to imagine possibilities in the kinds of ways that he could.
In one story, “All At One Point,” something named Qfwfq, possibly a subatomic particle, narrates the moment of the Big Bang, explaining what it was like to once be uncomfortably jammed into one single point with all the other matter in the universe. Everything we know today was created, according to him, after the first generous thought occurs: a big-bosomed (particle?) named Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0 wishes she had the room to make noodles for everyone and in a flash they are all separated by lightyears. At the time of the telling, Qfwfq, confesses that he sometimes misses them all and that moment where everyone was still together. (How do you make someone sad over a… particle? If that’s what they are?)
In another, “The Distance to the Moon,” Qfwfq relates the story of a time when the moon was so close to the Earth that you could climb to it with a big ladder, which they often did in order to mine its surface for cream cheese-like “Moon-milk.” There’s a love triangle that ends badly, as someone gets stuck on the moon just as it begins to drift out of reach.
Who thinks of that?
Were these fables? Science fiction? Whatever it was, I’d never encountered anything like it before, and so I begrudgingly found myself returning to Calvino’s slim volume of memos and reading it more carefully to find some explanation as to how he’d managed to come up with such incredible magic in his stories.
Calvino begins the first memo, Lightness, by reflecting on his own writing process of the previous forty years.
“More often than not,” he realizes, it involves “the subtraction of weight.” He counts as seeming equals, the removal of structural weight over the span of entire stories and books, and the removal of actual weight: from bodies, cities, and even heavenly bodies. As if shaving fifteen pounds off a shopkeeper on page 31 is somehow the same as cutting a dense descriptive paragraph on page 187. As if lifting a teeming metropolis up into the air is the same as trimming thirty pages of unneeded subplot from section three. It all goes to the same end, somehow.
As a young man growing up in a war-torn Italy, Calvino says he desired to write about weighty things. He felt it was a “categorical imperative” to dissect the “ruthless energies” and “frantic spectacles” of his age—and yet he intuited a kind of tension between those subjects and an “adventurous, picaresque inner rhythm” actually prompting him to write. How can a writer reconcile the weightiness of the real world outside, which morally must be confronted, with the lightness they feel inside? At times, Calvino wrote, he felt as if, “the entire world was turning into stone.”
Contemplating this “slow petrification,” Calvino considered the gorgon Medusa from ancient Greek myths, a woman with a snake-covered head whose gaze could transmute a man’s warm, living bodies into a cold, dead statue. She is defeated by the hero Perseus, who flits through the air using magical sandals with tiny wings on the sides. He cleverly uses a polished shield to protect himself from Medusa’s gaze, and then by looking only at her reflection in it, is Perseus able to behead her. The severed head then becomes a favored weapon, and he keeps it in a special bag, producing it whenever he needs to take some new monster out by turning them into heavy stone.
The metaphor, for Calvino, is clear. To face off directly against the monster of weightiness is to be turned, yourself, into lifeless rock. But a poet, approaching more lightly through “indirect vision” can observe these weighty things more safely, as reflected in a mirror. Only then can we hope to sever it at the root and to come to use weight as our own weapon. In this metaphor, lightness in storytelling doesn’t just work in opposition to the dangerous weight of the world, it provides us with a way to co-opt it. Importantly, Calvino explains, Perseus does not hide from reality behind his shield. He avoids looking at it straight-on, but he also “carries the reality with him, and accepts it as his particular burden.”
Calvino offers this advice, which I think applies so well to our current moment in life, and in literature:
“Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space.” He makes a distinction between what he calls “lightness of thought” and “lightness of frivolity” to clarify that he does not mean that we should simply avoid that which disturbs us or brings discomfort. He continues, “I don’t mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective…”
Calvino says his best way of illustrating this notion is by sharing a scene from the Bocaccio’s Decameron where the real-life poet Guido Cavalcanti appears. He describes the poet as “austere” and walking “meditatively among marble tombs near a church.”
Soon he is set upon by a crowd of fashionable and wealthy people of Florence, riding their horses to a lavish party. Cavalcanti has not been invited because of his philosophical “impiety” against God. The partygoers come into the churchyard and surround Cavalcanti, jeering, claiming that it is he who refuses to join with them (because he holds his separate beliefs).
Calvino sees this moment in the story as a standoff between weight and lightness. Weight seeks always to oppress lightness, growing its power by use of its terrible gravity.
The crowd of Tuscan partygoers are the benighted of their society, affluent and successful not in spite of this boorishness, but because of their “noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring.”
They seek to badger the poet into a kind of submission and conformity. They’re out to test his resolve as an outsider and a freethinker. “Guido,” they taunt, “you refuse to be of our company; but look, when you have proved there is no God, what will you have accomplished?”
What is the point of taking an unpopular position? they’re asking. What is accomplished by leading a private life of deep thought and creativity? It will only preclude you from the prosperity and acceptance of our empowered world.
Why wander alone among the tombstones, lost in thought, when you could be riding a powerful horse through the streets—on to finery and fun?
Join us in the 1%, I hear them saying. Put those silly books away and get real. You tried this poetry thing and had your laughs but now it’s time to get your MBA and launch a start-up that sells people’s private information to corporate advertisers and spreads deadly misinformation around the globe faster than ever before… or whatever the 13th century version of that in Tuscany might have been.
And I joke, but—it’s a hard thing to say no to. Power and privilege, security, prominence. In a society that not just respects these things, but worships them—much more than it worships art, most times.
How can a measly poem stand up to all of that?
Calvino said that he faced “ruthless energies” and “frantic spectacles” during his days as a young writer. In 1943, he was a student in Florence studying agriculture when the Germans occupied Liguria and Mussolini established a fascist republic in Northern Italy. He hid to avoid compulsory military service and eventually joined with the a Communist group within the Italian Resistance known as the Garibaldi Brigades. As punishment his own parents were held hostage by the Nazis. According to Calvino, the blackshirts pretended to shoot his father dead in front of her on three different occasions. After the war he published a collection of realist stories, Ultimo viene il corvo (The Crow Comes Last) based on his experiences. These were met with acclaim but he struggled to write a follow-up.
Finally in 1950, he had a breakthrough. “I began doing what came most naturally to me—that is, following the memory of the things I had loved best since boyhood. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write […] I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic.”
It took him just 30 days then to produce Il visconte dimezzato (The Cloven Viscount), about a soldier who is split in half on the battlefield by a cannonball and then magically stitched by field doctors into two men: Gramo and Buono who eventually must fight one another over who should be the true Viscount of their lands. From there on, Calvino would embrace this direction, writing strange masterpieces, The Baron in the Trees and The Nonexistent Knight in quick succession.
I’ve written previously on the Fun, and how it lies in returning to our roots in childlike wonder and imagination. Here it becomes closely allied with Calvino’s conception of Lightness—but let’s return to Cavalcanti in the church graveyard for a moment.
Calvino finds inspiration in the way that Cavalcanti responds to the crowd of wealthy bullies surrounding him—lightly, in both words and actions. According to Calvino, the answer is both “spirited” and “quick.”
Cavalcanti replies, “Gentlemen, you may say anything you wish to me in your own home.” Then he rests his hand on one of the marble tombs, and, “being very nimble” leaps over it to freedom.
Calvino reads this retort as a reminder—that the home of these brutes is the tomb itself. That with all their money and power and privilege, they are the weight of the world. For all the pleasures they surround themselves with, it is they who “belong to the realm of death,” whereas Cavalcanti, with his poetry and his melancholia—later, Calvino refers to melancholy as “sadness that has taken on lightness”—this “austere” philosopher can simply take to the skies, at the speed of thought.
“Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium,” Calvino writes, “I would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with his gravity he has the secret of lightness.”
The freshman writer I was didn’t get all of this, or even most of it. But these ideas continued to hang out in my brain somewhere, so that a decade later when at last I picked up the memos again, I was happy to find myself connecting to these scenes as if they had been instructive all along. When I’ve tried to think about what the Fun is in writing, and why it needs to be there in order to make something come fully alive for me on the page… I turn again and again to Lightness.
What are the “ruthless energies” and “frantic spectacles” of our own age? I awake seemingly every morning to news of another headline about a Black man, or woman, or child who has been murdered by the police. Then, an Asian-American woman attacked in broad daylight while no one helped. That, just above an op-ed about Climate Change and our failure to deal with it. Which resonates nicely with the article about an overpaid podcaster who told his followers not to bother getting vaccinated. And then, oh right, there was also a mass shooting—
“Look at the map and tell me where / A conscious mind would not despair / In Poland? Palestine? Peru? / In Angkor Wat? In Timbuktu?”
This is the beginning of a poem that I read every year on January 1st, called “Waking Early New Years Day Without a Hangover” by Tom Disch, and in its lyrical and sometimes humorous way it is, appropriately, sobering. And yet, I return to it each year with some sense of joy, because there is also a lightness to the rhythm and the scope of it. I can meditate, for a moment, on the mess we’re in, without losing myself to that mess. The poem lifts me up above it just enough to see it all better.
Humanity is heavy. History is heavy. Their default position is to pull us down, and that’s why we must hold onto lightness; to agility, and to spontaneity, to rise up and defy the world’s gravity. If we do then we too can free ourselves with a leap.
Writing Towards Fun #3 - What sort of things did you enjoy reading as a child? Make a list of all the books you remember loving the most back then—what similarities do you find among them? (For me, I’d note that most were about magic, adventure, and children discovering worlds hidden from adults, such as Narnia.) What, if any, of these elements do you still find in your writing today? What, if any, would you want to include if you could? Take something, anything, you remember from a book you loved when you were younger and try it out now, just to see how it feels.
Here are a few prompts flowing from my childhood bookshelf, just as an example:
Orphaned siblings must go on some kind of quest to a place they truly belong.
A closet door opens into a strange, secret world.
Your narrator has been shrunken down to the size of an ant—or an atom.
A person discovers they have a strange superhuman ability, though perhaps it comes at some cost or is somehow inconvenient.
Remember Calvino: conjure up the book you would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic.
Have fun!
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