Six Memos for the Next Millennium (9 page)

If Musil's Ulrich soon resigns himself to the defeats that the passion for exactitude is bound to suflFer, Paul Valery's Monsieur Teste, another great intellectual personage of this century, has no doubts about the fact that the human spirit can fulfill itself in the most exact and rigorous way. And if Leopardi, poet of life's sadness, shows the highest degree of exactitude in describing indefinite sensations that give pleasure, Valery, poet of impassive rigor of mind, shows the highest degree of exactitude in putting his Monsieur Teste face to face with pain, and making him combat physical suflfering by an exercise in abstract geometry.

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 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 what 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, then subdivide these again, and so on and on. Then another kind of vertigo seizes me, that of the detail of the detail
of the detail, and I am drawn into the infinitesimal, the infinitely small, just as I was previously lost in the infinitely vast.

“Le bon Dieu est dans le detail.” This statement of Flaubert's I would explain in the light of the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, that great visionary cosmologist, who sees the universe as infinite and composed of innumerable worlds but who cannot call it “totally infinite” because each of these worlds is finite. God, on the other hand,
is
totally infinite: “tutto lui e in tutto il mondo, ed in ciascuna sua parte infinitamente e totalmente” (the whole of him is in the whole world, and in each of his parts infinitely and totally).

Among the Italian books in the last few years which I have most often read, reread, and thought about is Paolo Zellini's
Breve storia dell' infinito
(Short History of the Infinite, 1980). It opens with Borges' famous invective against the infinite from “Avatares de la tortuga” (Avatars of the Tortoise)—it is the one concept that corrupts and confuses all others—and then goes on to review all arguments on the subject, with the result that it dissolves and reverses the extension of the infinite into the density of the infinitesimal.

I think that this bond between the formal choices of literary composition and the need for a cosmological model (or else for a general mythological framework) is present even in those authors who do not explicitly declare it. 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 hasard” (One throw of the dice will never annul chance).

It is in this context that we should view the reevaluation of logical, geometrical, and metaphysical procedures that prevailed in the figurative arts during the first decades of this century and thereafter in literature. The emblem of the crystal might be used to distinguish a whole constellation of poets and writers, very different from one another, such as Paul Valery in France, Wallace Stevens in the United States, Gottfried Benn in Germany, Fernando Pessoa in Portugal, Ramon Gomez de la Serna in Spain, Massimo Bontempelli in Italy, and Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina.

The crystal, with its precise faceting and its ability to refract light, is the model of perfection that I have always cherished as an emblem, and this predilection has become even more meaningful since we have learned that certain properties of the birth and growth of crystals resemble those of the most rudimentary biological creatures, forming a kind of bridge between the mineral world and living matter.

Among the scientific books into which I poke my nose in search of stimulus for the imagination, I recently happened to read that the models for the process of formation of living beings “are best visualized by the
crystal
on one side (invariance of specific structures) and
thefiame
on the other (constancy of external forms in spite of relentless internal agitation).” I am quoting from Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's introduction to the volume devoted to the debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky in
1975 at the Centre Royaumont
{Language and Uarning
, 1980, p. 6). The contrasting images of flame and crystal are used to make visible the alternatives offered to biology, and from this pass on to theories of language and the ability to learn. For the moment I will leave aside the implications for the philosophy of science embodied in the positions stated by Piaget, who is for the principle of “order out of noise”—the flame—and Chomsky, who is for the “self-organizing system,” the crystal.

What interests me here is the juxtaposition of these two symbols, as in one of those sixteenth-century emblems I mentioned in my last lecture. Crystal and flame: two forms of perfect beauty that we cannot tear our eyes away from, two modes of growth in time, of expenditure of the matter surrounding them, two moral symbols, two absolutes, two categories for classifying facts and ideas, styles and feelings. A short while ago I suggested a “Party of the Crystal” in twentieth-century literature, and I think one could draw up a similar list for a “Party of the Flame.” I have always considered myself a partisan of the crystal, but the passage just quoted teaches me not to forget the value of the flame as a way of being, as a mode of existence. In the same way, I would like those who think of themselves as disciples of the flame not to lose sight of the tranquil, arduous lesson of the crystal.

A more complex symbol, which has given me greater possibilities of expressing the tension between geometric rationality and the entanglements of human lives, is that of the city. The book in which I think I managed to say most remains
Invisible Cities
, because I was able to concentrate all my reflections, experiments, and conjectures on a single symbol; and also because I built up a many-faceted structure in which each brief text is close to the others in a series that does not imply logical sequence or a hierarchy, but a network in which one can follow multiple routes and draw multiple, ramified conclusions.

In my
Invisible Cities
every concept and value turns out to be double—even exactitude. At a certain point Kublai Khan personifies the intellectual tendency toward rationalization, geometry, and algebra, reducing knowledge of his empire to the combina-toria of pieces on a chessboard. The cities that Marco Polo describes to him with a wealth of detail Kublai represents with various arrangements of castles, bishops, knights, kings, queens, and pawns on black and white squares. The final conclusion to which this operation leads him is that the object of his conquest is nothing other than the block of wood on which each piece rests: an emblem of nothingness. But just at this moment comes a
coup de scene
, for Marco Polo requests Kublai to look more closely at what he sees as nothingness: