Six Memos for the Next Millennium (3 page)

The most felicitous example of Cavalcanti's leveling of things
we find in a sonnet that begins with a list of images of beauty, all destined to be surpassed by the beauty of the beloved woman:

Bilta di donna e di saccente core
e cavalieri armati che sien genti;
cantar d'augelli e ragionar d'amore;
adorni legni n mar forte correnti;

aria serena quand'apar I'albore
e bianca neve scender senza venti;
rivera d'acqua e prato d'ogni fiore;
oro, argento, azzuro 'n ornamenti

Beauty of woman and of wise hearts, and gentle knights in armor; the song of birds and the discourse of love; bright ships moving swiftly on the sea; clear air when the dawn appears, and white snow falling without wind; stream of water and meadow with every flower; gold, silver, azure in ornaments.

The line “e bianca neve scender senza venti” is taken up with a few modifications by Dante in
Inferno
XIV 30: “Come di neve in alpe sanza vento” (As snow falls in the mountains without wind). The two lines are almost identical, but they express two completely different concepts. In both the snow on windless days suggests a light, silent movement. But here the resemblance ends. In Dante the line is dominated by the specification of the place (“in alpe”), which gives us a mountainous landscape, whereas in Cavalcanti the adjective “bianca,” which may seem pleonastic, together with the verb “fall”—also completely predictable—dissolve the landscape into an atmosphere of suspended abstraction. But it is chiefly the first word that determines the difference between the two lines. In Cavalcanti the conjunction
e
(and) puts the snow on the same level as the other visions that precede and
follow it: a series of images like a catalogue of the beauties of the world. In Dante the adverb
come
(as) encloses the entire scene in the frame of a metaphor, but within this frame it has a concrete reality of its own. No less concrete and dramatic is the landscape of hell under a rain of fire, which he illustrates by the simile of the snow. In Cavalcanti everything moves so swifdy that we are unaware of its consistency, only of its effects. In Dante everything acquires consistency and stability: the weight of things is precisely established. Even when he is speaking of light things, Dante seems to want to render the exact weight of this lightness: “come di neve in alpe sanza vento.” In another very similar line the weight of a body sinking into the water and disappearing is, as it were, held back and slowed down: “Come per acqua cupa cosa grave” (Like some heavy thing in deep water;
Paradiso
III. 123).

At this point we should remember that the idea of the world as composed of weighdess atoms is striking just because we know the weight of things so well. So, too, we would be unable to appreciate the lightness of language if we could not appreciate language that has some weight to it.

We might say that throughout the centuries two opposite tendencies have competed in literature: one tries to make language into a weighdess element that hovers above things like a cloud or better, perhaps, the finest dust or, better still, a field of magnetic impulses. The other tries to give language the weight, density, and concreteness of things, bodies, and sensations.

At the very beginnings of Italian, and indeed European, literature, the first tendency was initiated by Cavalcanti, the second by Dante. The contrast is generally valid but would need endless qualification, given Dante's enormous wealth of resources and his extraordinary versatility. It is not by chance that the sonnet of
Dante's instilled with the most felicitous lightness (“Guido, i' vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io”) is in fact addressed to Cavalcanti. In the
Vita nuova
Dante deals with the same material as his friend and master, and certain words, themes, and ideas are found in both poets. When Dante wants to express lightness, even in the
Dinna Commedia
, no one can do it better than he does, but his real genius lies in the opposite direction—in extracting all the possibilities of sound and emotion and feeling from the language, in capturing the world in verse at all its various levels, in all its forms and attributes, in transmitting the sense that the world is organized into a system, an order, or a hierarchy where everything has its place. To push this contrast perhaps too far, I might say that Dante gives solidity even to the most abstract intellectual speculation, whereas Cavalcanti dissolves the concreteness of tangible experience in lines of measured rhythm, syllable by syllable, as if thought were darting out of darkness in swift lightning flashes.

This discussion of Cavalcanti has served to clarify (at least to myself) what I mean by “lightness.” Lightness for me goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard. Paul Valery said: “II faut etre leger comme l'oiseau, et non comme la plume” (One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather). I have relied on Cavalcanti for examples of lightness in at least three different senses. First there is a lightening of language whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarefied consistency. I leave it to you to find other examples of this sort. Emily Dickinson, for instance, can supply as many as we might wish:

A sepal, petal and a thorn
Upon a common summer's morn—
A flask of Dew-A Bee or two-
A Breeze-a caper in the trees-
And I'm a Rose!

Second, there is the narration of a train of thought or psychological process in which subtle and imperceptible elements are at work, or any kind of description that involves a high degree of abstraction. To find a more modern example of this we may turn to Henry James, opening any of his books at random:

And third there is a visual image of lightness that acquires emblematic value, such as—in Boccaccio's story—Cavalcanti vaulting on nimble legs over a tombstone. Some literary inventions are impressed on our memories by their verbal implications rather than by their actual words. The scene in which Don Quixote drives his lance through the sail of a windmill and is hoisted up into the air takes only a few lines in Cervantes' novel. One might even say that the author put only a minimal fraction of his resources into the passage. In spite of this, it remains one of the most famous passages in all of literature.

I think that with these definitions I can begin to leaf through
the books in my library, seeking examples of lightness. In Shakespeare I look immediately for the point at which Mercutio arrives on the scene (I.iv.17—18): “You are a lover; borrow Cupid's wings / And soar with them above a common bound.” Mercutio immediately contradicts Romeo, who has just replied, “Under love's heavy burden do I sink.” Mercutio's way of moving about the world is plain enough from the very first verbs he uses: to dance, to soar, to prick. The human face is a mask, “a visor.” Scarcely has he come on stage when he feels the need to explain his philosophy, not with a theoretical discourse but by relating a dream. Queen Mab, the fairies' midwife, appears in a chariot made of “an empty hazelnut”:

Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
Her traces, of the smallest spider web;
Her collars, of the moonshine's wat'ry beams;
Her whip, of cricket's bone; the lash, of film

And let's not forget that this coach is “drawn with a team of little atomies”—in my opinion a vital detail that enables the dream of Queen Mab to combine Lucretian atomism, Renaissance neo-Platonism, and Celtic folklore.

I would also like Mercutio's dancing gait to come along with us across the threshold of the new millennium. The times that form a background to
Romeo and Juliet
are in many respects not unlike our own: cities bloodstained by violent struggles just as senseless as those of the Montagues and Capulets; sexual liberation, as preached by the Nurse, which does not succeed in becoming the model for universal love; ventures carried out in the generous optimism of “natural philosophy,” as preached by Friar Laurence, with unsure results that can yield death as much as life.

The age of Shakespeare recognized subtle forces connecting macrocosm and microcosm, ranging from those of the Neo-Platonic firmament to the spirits of metal transformed in the alchemist's crucible. Classical myths can provide their repertory of nymphs and dryads, but the Celtic mythologies are even richer in the imagery of the most delicate natural forces, with their elves and fairies. This cultural background—and I can't help thinking of Francis Yates's fascinating studies on the occult philosophy of the Renaissance and its echoes in literature—explains why Shakespeare provides the fullest exemplification of my thesis. And I am not thinking solely of Puck and the whole phantasmagoria of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
or of Ariel and those who “are such stuff/ As dreams are made on.” I am thinking above all of that particular and existential inflection that makes it possible for Shakespeare's characters to distance themselves from their own drama, thus dissolving it into melancholy and irony.

The weightless gravity I have spoken of with regard to Caval-canti reappears in the age of Cervantes and Shakespeare: it is that special connection between melancholy and humor studied by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl in
Saturn and Melancholy
(1964). As melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness, so humor is comedy that has lost its bodily weight (a dimension of human carnality that nonetheless constitutes the greatness of Boccaccio and Rabelais). It casts doubt on the self, on the world, and on the whole network of relationships that are at stake. Melancholy and humor, inextricably intermingled, characterize the accents of the Prince of Denmark, accents we have learned to recognize in nearly all Shakespeare's plays on the lips of so many avatars of Hamlet. One of these, Jacques in
As You Like It
(IVi. 15—18), defines melancholy in these terms: “but it is a melancholy of mine 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.

I confess that I am tempted to construct my own Shakespeare, a Lucretian atomist, but I realize that this would be arbitrary. The first writer in the modern world who explicitly professed an atomistic concept of the universe in its fantastic transfiguration is not found until some years later, in France: Cyrano de Ber-gerac.

An extraordinary writer, Cyrano, and one who deserves to be better known, not only as the first true forerunner of science fiction but for his intellectual and poetic qualities. A follower of Gassendi's “sensism” and the astronomy of Copernicus, but nourished above all by the natural philosophy of the Italian Renaissance—Cardano, Bruno, Campanella—Cyrano is the first poet of atomism in modern literature. In pages where his irony cannot conceal a genuine cosmic excitement, Cyrano extols the unity of all things, animate or inanimate, the combinatoria of elementary figures that determine the variety of living forms; and above all he conveys his sense of the precariousness of the processes behind them. That is, how nearly man missed being man, and life, life, and the world, the world.

Vous vous etonnez comme cette matiere, brouillee pele-mele, au gre du hasard, peut avoir constitue un homme, vu qu'il y avait tant de choses necessaires a la construction de son etre, mais vous ne savez pas que cent millions de fois cette matiere, s'acheminant au dessein d'un homme, s'est
arrêtée à former tantot une pierre, tantot du plomb, tantot du corail, tantot une fleur, tantot une comete, pour le trop ou le trop peu de certaines figures qu'il fallait ou ne fallait pas a designer un homme? Si bien que ce n'est pas merveille qu'entre une infinie quantite de matiere qui change et se remue incessamment, elle ait rencontre a faire le peu d'animaux, de vegetaux, de mineraux que nous voyons; non plus que ce n'est pas merveille qu'en cent coups de des il arrive un rafle. Aussi bien est-il impossible que de ce re-muement il ne se fasse quelque chose, et cette chose sera toujours admiree d'un etourdi qui ne saura pas combien peu s'en est fallu qu'elle n'ait pas ete faite.
{Voyage dans la lune
, 1661, Gamier-Flammarion edition, pp. 98-99)

You marvel that this matter, shuffled pell-mell at the whim of Chance, could have made a man, seeing that so much was needed for the construction of his being. But you must realize that a hundred million times this matter, on the way to human shape, has been stopped to form now a stone, now lead, now coral, now a flower, now a comet; and all because of more or fewer elements that were or were not necessary for designing a man. Little wonder if, within an infinite quantity of matter that ceaselessly changes and stirs, the few animals, vegetables, and minerals we see should happen to be made; no more wonder than getting a royal pair in a hundred casts of the dice. Indeed it is equally impossible for all this stirring not to lead to something; and yet this something will always be wondered at by some blockhead who will never realize how small a change would have made it into something else.

By this route Cyrano goes so far as to proclaim the brotherhood of men and cabbages, and thus imagines the protest of a
cabbage about to be beheaded: “Homme, mon cher frere, que t'ai-je fait qui merite la mort? … Je me leve de terre, je m'èpan-ouis, je te tends les bras, je t'offre mes enfants en graine, et pour recompense de ma courtoisie, tu me fais trancher la tete!” (Man, my dear brother, what have I done to you, to deserve death?… I rise from the earth, I blossom forth, I stretch out my arms to you, I offer you my children as seed; and as a reward for my courtesy you have my head cut off!).