Experiments in Other Dimensions 3

11 April 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Italo Calvino, the writer, was now becoming clear to me. He was forming games around a number of laws he inscribed in the reality of a book. That was his way, apparently.

And it made me think of me. I was this type of writer once upon a time. That is why he was interesting me so much now. I was an adept of Calvino’s systems many years before I had ever heard of Calvino. Perhaps launching off the ideas philosophy had granted me when I was avidly studying to be an artist (which is a set of ludicrous rules if I ever heard of one). I went about recording tenets and running experiments.

I was living abroad when these systems of rules were first coming to me in my own writing. This hunger for the sordid experiment in my work might have originated by the many wonders another country can offer the open-eyed foreigner. I continued years after this, delving deeper into ever more specific rules, and I knew that these further deepening tenets had fewer and fewer possibilities for anyone to understand and furthermore, enjoy. I wonder if I had never returned home, would I not have become my own brand of Italo Calvino. It sounds senseless to say such a thing, but the stubborn path that I made for myself was an Italo Calvino quest. I was not writing for anyone but myself, and though many people read Calvino, I am positive that he wrote for just one person.

It was testing writing against a wall of patterns — a grid of bricks, for instance. Any pattern would do. As children we ask ourselves what if everyone in the world were not real or what if the buildings became vehicles that floated into space or what if the world started spinning in the other direction? As a writer, I wanted to subject my readers to the same philosophical nonsense. With enough years and travails, I abandoned the search for stupidity in logic, but it still lingers, somehow invested in my work though I don’t know where this gold dust now lingers in my system.

One day, I discovered Borges. He was someone I had always meant to read but never did. Until that moment when I did. And it was a far nobler, wiser, and more astute version of my younger self looking right back at me. It seems he had asked the same questions not just as a kid, but with more importance, as an adult. I was staring at visions his stories raised in me and recognizing powerful versions of elementary questions, about eternity wrapped in a room or the making of a book copied verbatim from another book and it still being a different book. These were the ideas something like philosophy gave us, but Borges delivered it to us within the trappings of high art.

When I reached Calvino, it slowly occurred to me that here was a student of Borges going into his own directions, catering words to thought that built itself off rules. They weren’t the same, but I have grouped them as a pair I need to further study.

But I am not concerned with that brand of infinity and its rules anymore, and especially now that I know that better minds have already crystalized portions of that reality. And yet there is still room, I think, for more. Even though I am no longer an acolyte of philosophical specks ad infinitum, I can now see my next step. There it is going back to what led me to Calvino, which made me go further back to Borges, in a sense, and that is poetry, which allows just one poem to model rules and exact results off of experiments on those rules. A single poem can hold the rules by which it is expected to be read, the thing it is saying within those rules, and sometimes something else.

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Experiments in Other Dimensions 2

04 April 2021 by Rey Armenteros

The next two books I read of Italo Calvino’s were Mr. Palomar and The Castle of Crossed Destinies. He mentions both of these books in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which is not a book of fiction or poetry but one on craft, laid out as lectures he was going to give at a prestigious American university but which alas, never came to be —he died right before taking the trip from Italy to the United States, his lectures remaining unfinished (five memos instead of six, as the title promises).

The actual event of his demise seemed like another juxtaposition incongruously placed alongside with all of the literary concepts he instilled in his books, and if his books each revolved around a conceptual experiment, Calvino’s sudden death even forced a misnomer on the Six Memos. And it was because of what was mentioned in the Six Memos that I was intrigued by Mr. Palomar and The Castle of Crossed Destinies.

In the former book, we have the ill-fated attempt of describing phenomena to the very last detail. Calvino admits in his lectures that this book tries hard to make words shape an object or circumstance as if it were right there in front of us. The question I was asking myself is how many words would you need to completely describe this chair I am sitting on or the window next to me, which opens up to a wide world of infinite detail? Where would one stop?

A more practical question would be how could something like this be interesting to a reader? As I was in the middle of reading Mr. Palomar, I felt that the title character, who is the intellect that is going through these long bouts of description is not just a tool with which to place all these descriptions together. He is also a character. You don’t get anything about him from dialogue or actions that supposedly show character in a novel. Actually, I would never call this book a novel, though I am sure that is how the publishing company sold it to the public. Even though it is not a novel by my definition, it seems to allude to a narrative arc. The book is divided into three parts: Mr. Palomar’s Vacation, Mr. Palomar in the City, and The Silences  of Mr. Palomar. In the last one, we seem to go into the interior spaces of the brain, spirit, what-have-you.

As might have been guessed, Mr. Palomar is an inquisitive fellow, always probing phenomena. You go through a set of rules for each chapter that lines up the thoughts in what seems to be a certain order. As I was reading, I harkened back to every philosophy book I had ever read. This commendably does (without succeeding, mind you) what no philosophy book could ever do. In fact, this is how all philosophy books should be written. He blends the facts with that flow of style that I was now starting to recognize as Calvino’s.

(In mentioning his style, I am aware that this was translated from the Italian. But I have always felt that if the translator did the job well, that tone and technique a writer creates will still be there, even if the details of a certain language are disintegrated in the process.)

When you read enough of Mr. Palomar, you find that there is a pattern. Each of the three parts has three subsections, and each subsection has three chapters. That makes twenty-seven chapters. The book is symmetrical, and as I was reading along, I was starting to wonder if there were a reason for this. When you get to the end, you find the notes to this book which explain the logic of these numbers. In this book, Calvino was playing a game wherein anything that fell in the first subsection derived from one sphere of human interest, the second fell into another, and the third fell into another. Once again, we had rules set across this book that made me feel that Calvino’s writing was based on premises from which he journeyed to find interesting endings.

This was instantly clear in the second of this group of books, The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Mention of working with the Tarot in his Six Memos was enough to make me seek this book. The narrator finds himself in a castle that is acting like a tavern. Perhaps because of exhaustion, the travelers in this place of rest, sharing food and table space cannot actually utter a word. When anyone in this establishment needs for someone to pass the salt, that person gestures for it. A deck of Tarot cards is produced, and one of the travelers begins to tell a story using the pictures on the cards instead of words. The first card is the Knight of Clubs, and the man on the card has a resemblance to the current tell-taller as if he were saying, “This is me.”

He tells the story by laying out the cards in rows, and the narrator of the actual book is making guesses as to what they really narrate. “It seems that he did this,” or “it is obvious that the woman in the next card is the one he loved.” It is never clear if the guesses are actually the intended story of each silent storyteller.

When one person finishes a story, someone else starts their story by placing cards on the table next to the cards already on the table. So, depending on how the spreads cross each other, the cards used by a previous tale-teller might make an appearance in a later story, and what is interesting is that the meaning of the card might remain the same, and if it does, there are slight changes in it. But the card from this perspective of another narrator might mean something completely different.

The stories themselves are ridiculous fairy tales that involve outlandish situations, including monstrosities and magic. The text is accompanied with illustrations of Tarot cards, and if you pay close attention, you notice that they are presented in fragments of a few cards here and a few cards there, mostly on the margins of the page, and in the same configurations the narrator describes in the story. So, if you trace the placement of the cards in the text, the illustrations follow along. This is an important visual aid, because by the end of the first half of the book, you will find all the cards mentioned in one large tapestry, as it had been mapped out in the story.

The conceptual glue to all of this is that the story of one person crosses in this tapestry into the story of someone else, sometimes contradicting the former narrative. Conclusions are unburied in order for the present narrator to destroy them. And you find that the situation that they find themselves in in this castle-tavern where no one can speak is somehow explained in their disparate stories, and that they all know each other from these circumstances, even though they are acting as if they didn’t.

At the end of the first half, the hostess shuffles the cards, and everything starts anew. Only, when you start the second half of the book, it is as if the travelers stuck in this strange microcosm of hotel and fellow strangers, where no one has the power of speech, are actually in some nightmare or cruel dimension that has sapped everyone of their memory. A new deck of cards is supplied, but curiously, these cards are from a different version of the Tarot (the Marseilles deck), and because of this the digressing details in the cards shape the new stories in different ways.

I was gripped by the ideas behind the narrative being put on a grid of cards that took you somewhere else if you turned right at a card rather than going straight up a column or left in the other direction. But I found that I was reading the words as sounding boards to other ideas that this work manifested in my mind. I was not initially getting the details of the story because after I understood what was happening, I felt they needed too much concentration to understand the relationships. By the second half, I picked up the actual events in the stories with better understanding but had no idea how they tied to the first half, if at all.

I kept going without looking back. And do you know why? Because I was going to buy these two books too, and I was going to have a wonderful opportunity to revisit this insanity now that I had understood the landscape as it was partitioned from the outset by Calvino’s preset laws.

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Experiments in Other Dimensions 1

28 March 2021 by Rey Armenteros

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler rolls right off the tongue. A compelling title if ever I read one, it is a delightful placement of words I like to recall, playing it again and again in my mental voice box.

The title belongs to a book. This one book contains the beginnings of ten hypothetical books. It only offers these ten starts, meandering around these textual premises without promising anything more. Was there more to it than just ten beginnings? I was curious to find out. If the thing readers most look forward to is the first pages of a book because it is that first moment that pulls you into the rest of the work, this book provided ten of these opportunities.

I had discovered Italo Calvino in a prose poetry book that held some of his Invisible Cities. I read those six or eight poems over and over and developed an idea of what kind of poet Calvino must be. They were long, baroque, almost morbid descriptions of fantasy cities that must have nevertheless existed on an actual dimensional plane outside of what most of us were even aware of.

I had to own the book, and so one day, I did exactly that, and with it, I bought a companion piece titled Cosmicomics, whose blurb description enticed me by its weird and intellectual light. This other book by Calvino was a series of short stories (or more prose poems, perhaps?). Each piece purportedly started with a physical law from which it branched out. It sounded like science distorted by dream play. I fell in love with the idea, mostly because it was something I would have liked to work on myself. From the potentials of these works, Calvino was delving into fantasy, yes, but he was not going about it without being armed with the highest tools of philosophical thought.

The two books came in, but I had other things to read at the moment, and so they went into the secret place I hold my favorite poetry. And there they waited, until one day, I was looking around for books I’d like to read next, thought about these Calvino books, and rather than reading the ones I had already bought, I was curious about the ones I didn’t own. At the library, I checked out two other Calvino books that were in my wishlist as followups to the first two. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler was one of these books.

It was a “you” book which was a hard thing to pull off, since stories in the second person were inevitably tiresome. It started with you buying the Italo Calvino book, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and how you brought the book home to read. That was the first chapter. The second chapter begins the actual book you bought at the bookstore. We are at a train station where the main figure (for lack of being a character since we are not quite sure yet if he is or not) is standing around as if waiting. And it goes on from there.

As promised in the back of the book, the story stops at the end of that chapter. In the next one, we find out that the book that you were reading had a printing error. You want to take it back to the bookstore to get an intact copy if not your money back. But you find out that apparently all copies of the book had this error. This adventure leads you to meet a woman who was also reading the same book and also complaining about the same thing. You exchange numbers in the hopes of discovering what happens in the rest of the book, if one of you happens to get your hands on a good copy before the other. Your real intentions are to get to know this woman (which hints at the problem of an implied male character, even though it is a second-person perspective.)

The next chapter starts at the beginning of another book, and that gets dropped by the fifth chapter when you find out some other problem that this second book has. And so it goes. Every book has a beginning followed by an interlude that explains the new problem but that also furthers a greater story that traverses the beginnings of these ten books. It is the quest of these readers for the books they were not allowed to finish for various and sundry reasons, and it has a proper ending, though you could argue that the ending might have had nothing to do with the ten book beginnings. And regardless, the smaller narratives colored the main narrative with their different tones and conflicts.

A book like this gets annoying, and I will not deny that by the middle of it, Calvino was stretching my patience beyond what was comfortable. If this were not the same person that had written those six Invisible Cities that I so loved, I might have abandoned it.

But there was one other thing that kept me there to read on. It was Calvino’s knack for immersive style, that freewheeling manner he had with words that seemed to run right off the page, into your lap, and then all over you without granting you any mode of escape. I was enthralled not by what was happening but by how he strung sentences together that felt like they had always belonged there, as neighbors, right next to each other, a continuing cadence of ideas and images that ran on toward an ineluctable ending. And the ending came, and the damn thing still peeved because of the content, but it was one of those rare works of art, and I decided that I needed it in my life. By the time I started reading the second book I had taken out of the library, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, I bought both books without giving it another thought.

I still owned two books I had yet to read. What was my next move? Instead of reading the previous two books, as would have only been natural, I took out two more books from the library with the secret intentions of buying them if they also matched my growing expectations of Italo Calvino.

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