Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Vintage International) by Calvino Italo

Author:Calvino, Italo [Calvino, Italo]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2009-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

In our century Paul Valery is the one who has best defined poetry as a straining toward exactitude. I am speaking chiefly of his work as a critic and essayist, in which the poetics of exactitude may be traced in a straight line through Mallarme to Baudelaire and from Baudelaire to Edgar Allan Poe.

In Poe—the Poe of Baudelaire and Mallarme—Valery sees “le demon de la lucidite, le genie de Panalyse, et Pinventeur des combinaisons les plus neuves et les plus seduisantes de la logique avec Pimagination, de la mysticite avec le calcul, le psychologue de Pexception, Pingenieur litteraire qui approfondit et utilise toutes les ressources de Part” (the demon of lucidity, the genius of analysis, and the inventor of the newest, most seductive combinations of logic and imagination, of mysticism and calculation; the psychologist of the exceptional; the literary engineer who studied and utilized all the resources of art). Valery writes this in his essay “Situation de Baudelaire,” which for me has the value of a poetic manifesto, together with another essay of his on Poe and cosmogony, in which he deals with Eureka.

In the essay on Poe's Eureka, Valery questions himself on cosmogony as a literary genre rather than as scientific speculation and achieves a brilliant refutation of the idea of “universe,” which is also a reaffirmation of the mythic force that every image of “universe” carries with it. Here too, as in Leopardi, we find both attraction and repulsion with regard to the infinite. And here too we find cosmological conjectures as a literary genre, such as Leopardi amused himself with in certain “apocryphal” prose pieces: “Frammento apocrifo di Stratone da Lampsaco” (Apocryphal Fragment of Strato of Lampsacus), on the beginning and particularly the end of the terrestrial globe, which flattens and empties out like the rings of Saturn and is dispersed until it burns up in the sun; or his translation of an apocryphal Talmudic text, “Can-tico del gallo silvestre” (Song of the Great Wild Rooster), where the entire universe is extinguished and disappears: “un silenzio nudo, e una quiete altissima, empieranno lo spazio immenso. Cosi questo arcano mirabile e spaventoso delPesistenza univer-sale, innanzi di essere dichiarato ne inteso, si dileguera e perder-assi” (a naked silence and a most profound quiet will fill the immensity of space. So this marvelous and frightening mystery of universal existence, before being declared or understood, will fade away and be lost). Here we see that what is terrifying and inconceivable is not the infinite void, but existence.

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 writ ten 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

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