Advice from Italo Calvino: Conjure the book you want to read

I am at my desk when a striking young Italian man, maybe in his late twenties, steps into the space. Dark-haired, nattily dressed in a beautiful suit with a contrasting vest. I know this is Italo Calvino. It does not occur to me that he is dead, because he is so vividly alive. Standing in front of me, on the other side of the desk, he tells me wants me to read something he has written about the afterlife.

    Waking, I start looking for the Calvino story. I own half a dozen of his books. Any of his Invisible Cities could be afterlife, as well as imaginal, locales. Clearly I must read the last part of Mr Palomar, in which the protagonist is "Learning to Be Dead". I chance upon a quote from his Marcovaldo: Chi ha l’occhio, trova quel che cerca anche a occhi chiusi. "He who has a sharp eye finds what he is looking for even with his eyes closed." Then it occurs to me that Calvino's literary production may not have ended with his death.     I can't find Mr Palomar in my personal library. But I find the text of "Learning to Be Dead" at an academic website. I am not enthused. It is about a man who performs thought experiments, seeking to number and name everything he chooses to bring into his field of perception: waves on the shore, the life in a patch of lawn and at last the state of being dead. "For Mr. Palomar being dead means resigning himself to remaining the same in a definitive state, which he can no longer hope to change."

    This leaves me cold. But on my computer screen, I find a message at the bottom of the last page of "Learning to be Dead":

This is a subliminal message. Go out and buy Mr. Palomar. Then learn how to be dead. Hurry.

     I comply. My favorite used bookstore is five doors from my house, a dire situation since its stock is constantly migrating to my overcrowded shelves. I find a copy of Mr Palomar, I also find Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the published edition of a series of lectures that Calvino never gave; he died before he could deliver them, leaving one of the texts unfinished. This is pure gold. In "Lightness", the first of the lectures , I read:

Faced with the precarious existence of tribal life - drought, sickness, evil influences - the shaman responded by ridding his body of weight and flying to another world, another level of perception, where he could find the strength to change the face of reality.

and this:

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space...The only hero able to cut off Medusa’s head is Perseus, who flies with winged sandals; Perseus, who does not turn his gaze upon the face of the Gorgon but only upon her image reflected in his bronze shield.

In the second of the lectures, titled "Quickness", he writes:

I dream of immense cosmologies, sagas and epics all reduced to the dimensions of an epigram.

We operate in this spirit in our Active Dreaming approach to dreamwork, by asking our voyagers to turn their dreams and visions (which can be personal epics) into a one-liner, a bumper sticker, a post-it note, a snapper, an aphorism.
    Now I have a dozen Calvino books beside me in my reading corner. I am relishing his mastery of short forms. Some of his Invisible Cities appear and vanish in half a page, yet we are haunted by what we found there. I am studying Calvino's writing habits, since I suspect that his appearance in my night study may have been arranged by my dream producers to remind me to do more short forms - with short and shorter stories and essays, epics condensed in an epigram.
    I throb with recognition when I find Calvino saying this about how he writes:

 "I write fast but I have huge blank periods. It’s a bit like the story of the great Chinese artist—the emperor asked him to draw a crab, and the artist answered, I need ten years, a great house, and twenty servants. The ten years went by, and the emperor asked him for the drawing of the crab. I need another two years, he said. Then he asked for a further week. And finally he picked up his pen and drew the crab in a moment, with a single, rapid gesture." (Interview on The Art of Fiction for The Paris Review, no.130.)

Yes, I am known to work this way too.
    Now I have found Calvino's statement about how he came to change genres radically, creating the "fabulist" short novels that freed him from the mold of socialist realism. In an introduction to Our Ancestors, a volume that gathers his "heraldic trilogy". Calvino reports:

"I began doing what came most naturally to me – that is, following the memory of the things I had loved best since boyhood. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic."

He was able to conjure the extraordinary short novel titled The Cloven Viscount (Il visconte dimezzato). He wrote it in 30 days over the summer and early fall of 1951 and it was published the following year. He was 29, about the age he appeared to be in my dream.
     When Calvino or his eidolon popped up in my study in the favorite hour for both birth and death, he prompted me to remember some essential things about writing practice.
     An epic can be condensed in an epigram.
     Write when you're hot.
     Don't force yourself to write what you ought to write. Conjure the book you want to read.
     Grazie, Italo.
     

Art: (c) Eda Akaltun. From Eda's wonderful personal work based on Invisible Cities. Used with permission.

Conjure the book you most want to read

"I began doing what came most naturally to me – that is, following the memory of the things I had loved best since boyhood. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic."
    The voice is that of Italo Calvino, describing how he found the mode of experimental, "fabulist" writing for which he is famed. He was talking about the choice he made after the disappointing reception of three novels he had written in realist style. The result was an extraordinary short novel titled The Cloven Viscount (Il visconte dimezzato). He wrote it in 30 days over the summer and early fall of 1951 and it was published the following year.His unlikely protagonist: a 17th century viscount whose body is cut in two by a cannonball.
    I recommend Calvino's example to any writer who wants to bring something brave and new into the world: conjure the book you would most like to read.

Source: The quote is from Italo Calvino's introduction to Our Ancestors translated by A. Colquhoun (London: Vintage, 1998) vii.

The Tarot of writers

Triumph of Death fresco (1480) at Oratorio dei Disciplini, Clusone

In an afterword to his novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Italo Calvino described Tarot as "a machine for constructing stories." In his two-part story, travelers who are trapped or stranded communicate through cards drawn from two early decks, the Visconti Tarot and the Tarot of Marseilles.
    In the time of the Renaissance, a Benedictine monk named Teofilo Folengo wrote poems in which the fortunes and characters of individuals are revealed by the Tarot cards that are dealt to them. His Tarot poems appear in his 1527 work Caos del Triperiuno, written under the pseudonym Merlini Cocai. In one of the sonnets, he finds room to mention all 22 of the major arcana in a bragging contest between Love (the name for the Lovers card at that time) and Death personified as female, as in the macabre and magnificent 1480 fresco by Giacomo Borlone de Buschis at Clusone, where all the powers of this world bow down before La Morte.


“What a Fool I am,” said Love, “my Fire, 
that can appear as an Angel or as a Devil 
can be Tempered by some others who live under my Star. 
You are the Empress of bodies. But you cannot kill hearts, 
you only Suspend them. You have a name of high Fame, 
but you are nothing but a Trickster.” *


The monkish author was a living testimony to the power of Love. He abandoned his monastery and roamed Italy with a lovely young woman of noble birth named Girolama, though he returned to the cloister, in Sicily, to seek a peaceful Death.
    Fr Teofilo's use of the cards to compose poetry started a literary craze among the sixteenth-century Italian nobility for a game that came to be known as Tarocchi appropriati, or "Appropriated Tarot". As described by Paul Huson in Mystical Origins of the Tarot (Destiny Books, Rochester VT, 2004), "Here trump cards were selected by one player and presented to another, who would interpret them thematically by a process of idea association to create verses about himself or herself, about another person, or most popularly, to praise certain well-known ladies around the court."
    Many writers have been inspired by Tarot. The Tower and the Hanged Man fascinated W.B.Yeats, whose magical diaries are filled with personal Tarot readings and was thoroughly familiar, as an adept, with the use of the major arcana in ceremonial magic and pathworking by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
    Leading Tarot authority and novelist Rachel Pollack published an anthology of Tarot Tales (co-edited with Caitlin Matthews) and more recently produced a strange and wonderful solo collection of Tarot stories, The Tarot of Perfection (Magic Realist Press, Prague, 2008). In her Introduction, she explains an exercise in "Tarot for Writers" that she developed for her students in a course at Goddard College in Vermont.
     In this spread, you draw seven cards in sequence with the idea that they will answer the following questions about the characters, themes, and plot development of a story:

Who is my character?

What situation does he or she face?

What is the outer motivation?

What is hidden?

What opposes her or him?

What helps?

What is at risk?

I tested this just now, with a deck I like a lot by rarely use for personal readings, the Tarot of the Spirit. My "character" proved to be a theme, presented here as the Three of Water (3 of Cups in other decks), Love abounding and overflowing, going beyond duality. The "situation" is the ultimate Three, the Empress, Trump III. Perhaps the "situation" my character faces is to encounter and claim (or be claimed by ) the Threefold Goddess. The "outer motivation", by a curious paradox, appears as the High Priestess, one of the most "inner" of the cards. Perhaps the "outer motivation" is the desire for initiation and admission to the Mysteries. 

    What is "hidden" is the Father of Wind (King of Swords elsewhere) shown here as a double being riding a rearing bull through a flaming sky. What "opposes" is the arcanum numbered I, here called the Magus; he is shown leaning over a cubical table where the four magical weapons are laid out, a whirling golden lemniscate (figure of 8) above his head. What "helps" is the Mother of Wind, shown here as a glamorous woman in a swirling marigold dress, weaving the reins of power the Father may or may not be able to hold into a larger figure of 8, a Möbius power strip.What is "at risk" is the Brother of Wind, the reckless, sometimes tormented Son of the family. 

    A family drama then, with greater forces in play. So many clues to follow. Who or what is the Magus that opposes? What is in the visual echo between the figures of 8 above his head and in the control of Wind Mother?
    Will I write from these cards? Maybe, but writing this reminds me that I have an unfinished Tarot novella that was first inspired by a dream, one of those dreams that haunts you - with its mystery and its invitation - down all the long corridors of the years.

*There is a complete translation of the sonnet, with all the attributions to the Greater Trumps, at Mary Greer's Tarot blog, an excellent resource on all things Tarot.