Patrick Farmer
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dr.patrickfarmer@protonmail.com
In Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium he writes about idea of forms evoking idea of endlessness, how whilst trying to concentrate on who he would like to write, he realises who interests him is someone else entirely, a feeling I’m sure many of you have picked up on during this series. Following from this, Calvino (Saturn dreaming of being Mercury) writes that precision does not compels him, but everyone who does not fit in, a matter of being pulled into details’ vertiginous abundance, hair’s width between liquid crystalline and bulk water, ions who drift back and forth through permeable barriers.
Calvino relates this to Giordano Bruno‘s philosoph. Bruno is an Hermetic cosmologist who understands universe to be infinite (though Bruno would not necessarily call universe totally infinite due to his feeling that worlds composing infinite universe are themselves finite), another kind of dissolving and reversing, we might say entangling, of infinite extensions and infinitesimal density.
Calvino believes that bonds between formal choices of literary composition and need for cosmological models / mythological framework, is omnipresent, like imagination, a seeming contrast of order and disorder, for example, wherein works of literature in whom existent crystallises into form, acquires meaning, not fixed, not definitive, not hardened into mineral immobility, but alive as organism. He works with crystal as emblem to distinguish such constellating points, especially because certain properties of birth and growth of crystals resemble those of biological creatures, forming bridges between minerals and other beings of living matter, bridges who are living weaves of inter-relations.