The Intermission before the Third Act

The Second Act of my Swan Opera has come to an end. So why don’t we take five, shall we?

We are leaving the Mansion of Litera(p)ture to have a quick smoke. We slip outside through the back door. The night is young, starless and chilly. On the stairs – a discarded book. We pick it up. There’s a crescent-shaped stain of the front cover and several pages suffer from dog ears. Upon seeing author’s name, we raise our eyebrows in brief disbelief, then squint our eyes out of suspenseful suspicion. Robert Bresson was a movie director, not a writer. But then again, how can we be sure. After all, the world is a permanent surprise, isn’t it?

I admitted two weeks ago that I am a movie buff light. So it’s pretty obvious how my light movie buffness became awestruck, completely ineffable as a matter of fact, when I turned over the last page of Notes on Cinematography. Or Notes on the Cinematograph, or Notes on the Cinematographer. Why three slightly alternate titles? I don’t know. And, frankly, I don’t care. Because no one should care about the title when they have the book of such firepower in front of them. And what a book this is, indeed!

Written in a vein of curt aphorisms, it presents Bresson’s philosophy of movie making. The book not only covers Frenchman’s thoughts and ideas about various aspects of cinematography (NOT cinema – Bresson clarifies and distinguishes the difference between these two terms – the former having rather specific meaning, far from the one commonly associated with it) such as music, models (again, Bresson’s own terminology here), automatism, truth and falsity of images, etc., but also illustrates, albeit very intuitively, how they all might have been formed. At least my imagination rocked really hard with mental images of Bresson implementing his own take on cinematography while orchestrating a movie set, shooting on location, or simply stooping in front of his desk over yet another entry in his notebook. All in all, it is truly a fast break read, ending with not one but many stupendous slam dunks of thought. Also, never have I ever called something “philosophy” with less doubt than Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography. If you love movies, it is a must, just like Hitchcock/Truffaut or Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky.

That’s all I am willing to give you away. They are chiming for the Third act, anyway…

Amonne Purity

How could a pain follow a pleasure if a thousand tiny pains or, rather, half-pains were not already dispersed in pleasure, which will then be united in conscious pain?

Gilles Deleuze

My fantasies
Have turned to madness
And all my goodness
Has turned to badness
My need to possess you
has consumed my soul
My life is trembling
I have no control

Animotion

The Litera(p)ture of Ontological Obsession

Here we are, delving deeper into the Mansion of Litera(p)ture, alcoves accelerating, its interior intermingling with the possible intrinsic dimensionality. So far we have checked out its enchanting Vestibule as well as Kitchen/Home Cinema full of dreamy desires. We shrug off the grogginess, the aftermath of potential overstimulation, for it’s no time for a break yet. The corridors are getting darker, they are almost pitch-black now. Where do they lead? Intuitively, we outstretch our arms, resembling tentative tentacles of a blind octopus, groping around for a remote determinant of direction or our whereabouts. Let’s hope we find a light switch fast and don’t crash into anything along the treacherous way. Or perhaps we should crash, after all?

Some novels are extremely approachable yet highly uncooperative. They welcome you with open arms only to dodge, duck, and finally flee from your reading embrace afterwards, snapping their vicious jaws of avoidance, simpering slyly. J. G. Ballard’s Crash is one of them. In the first half of the 70’s, when it first came out, its bizarre, perverse, electrifying charge must have been absolutely gnarly. I can see pulverized imaginations and overheated emotions of then readers left behind to rot in awe. But does the novel hold its own today? And, more importantly, what part of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture does it constitute?

The Slaughter of Infinities

A warm-up question: how come it’s so easy to discard countless factors of a given phenomenon just to deem it “graspable” by naming it? Why is it almost obligatory to hack through the halo of infinities radiating from any given thing in the world? An economy of thought? A safety mechanism preventing our brains from charring like a skin of an overdone pig on a roast? A necessity of being able to function in a hyperactive everyday environment? This slaughter of infinities always seemed to me as far too zealous. As if unintentional mindless eagerness, with which it has been perpetrated, took shape of a superfluous layer, as if addition meant subtracting not adding things together. Surprisingly, it is almost always the underlying reason for every obsession – we add by subtracting. For the sake of object of our infatuation, for which we are able to create unimaginable wonders, we loose touch with everything else. The constituents of our perceptions seem altered. The images are superimposed, the patterns of behavior – iterated, and, last but not least, our moral judgments – overlaid with doubtless self-assuredness, contradictory only to our previous assessments. We are literally someone else.

This is exactly the case with the protagonist and the antagonist of Crash – the obsessed duo of novel’s Great Attractors, if I may borrow the term from a more stellar domain. The former is James Ballard (I guess no disguises were used in the making of the narrator) – a producer of TV commercials – who miraculously survives a head-on collision, killing a man in the process. In spite of the fact that he has totaled his car, he gets out of it relatively unscathed – smashed kneecaps, a gargantuan bruise on the abdomen from impacting a steering wheel and a deep laceration on the scalp are the only injuries he sustains. On the other hand, the antagonist – Robert Vaughan, PhD. – an ex-computer scientist whose area of expertise comprised the implementation of computerized processes to administer all international traffic systems – is a walking map of car crash injuries. But it’s not his scarred body what fascinates the most – it’s who he has become: automobile accidents fetishist, to put it mildly. I don’t want to reveal too much plot. Let me just say, that Vaughan is totally consumed by his obsession to die in a car crash with a famous movie star Elizabeth Taylor. And Ballard becomes more and more obsessed with Vaughan…

The Crawlspace with Translucent Walls

The most fascinating thing about obsession is its creative part. As both Ballard and Vaughan are spiraling down into the bloated world of perverse, the latter serving as a mentor to the former, the ceiling of their worldview gets lower and lower. The height of the first floor of their own baroque houses is being set. It consists solely of an overbearing crawlspace – stuffy, crummy and dusty, yet transfixing, absorbing and bewitching. With their minds altered and hell-bent on making their exploratory visions come true, they begin to add. Just as the not-so-innocent trinity of protagonists from The Dreamers reduced themselves to the minute and dark perceptions, their modus operandi being debauchery in their own triangular circle (now, that’s one resplendent imaginary competition to squaring the circle!), Ballard and Vaughan push the limits of darkness and minuteness even further. They shut themselves off so thoroughly form other infinities offered by the outside world, they are bound to engage in it on their own alternate terms. After all, the nature of things hates vacuum; its folds are – surprise, surprise! – infinite. Ballard and Vaughan’s excesses are sparking new infinities, but due to the fact they are born by obsession, their “geometry” is different. I don’t want to say flat, but it is the first adjective that comes to mind. For example, when Ballard’s wife Catherine ends up having sex on the backseat of Vaughan’s Lincoln Continental (the same generation in which Kennedy was shot) with its scarified owner, and Ballard is peeping them in the rear-view mirror, the latter’s sensations and perceptions of Vaughan’s scars in geometrical relation to the various instruments of the car interior, which allegedly create new possible designs of pleasure, don’t seem too convincing. Then again, I am not obsessed with car crashes, so what do I know, right? Lucky for me, the walls of their crawlspace are diaphanous, so at least I can sense what it may seem to mean.

So what’s with this murky idea of translucency of walls of their crawlspace, of their technosexually motorized obsession? It’s as simple as it gets. Obsession doesn’t give a shit about anything anymore. It’s as blatantly evident as two plus two equals four. It never resorts to any social masquerades, isn’t subjugated to some fanciful behavioral smokescreens. One wears it on one’s sleeve. However, the walls might be translucent, but are not permeable. You cannot (and almost always simply don’t want to) join this flat universe of extreme extravagance. Unless you fall for obsession of your own, whose premises are identical to those which founded the circle of infatuation you are, by then, bound to join. For obsessed individuals find each other unwillingly, almost miraculously, just like artists who leave a lasting impact on culture do. That’s all there is to it, really.

The Obsession of the Outside

Deleuze writes:

For Leibniz, to the contrary, monads exclude only universes that are incompossible with their world, and all those that exist express the same world without exclusion. As this world does not exist outside of the monads that express it, the latter are not in contact and have no horizontal relations among them, no intraworldly connections, but only an indirect harmonic contact to the extent they share the same expression: they express one another without harnessing each other.

But what about the “revenge” of incompossible worlds? Are obsessed individuals free to do whatever they will, all conveniently nestled within the realm of their flat infinities? Near the end of Crash, Ballard and Vaughan are very far from not harnessing each other. As if something outside of the monads is to have the last laugh. Now, that sentence is something which would make Leibniz tear his wig out. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t forget that Ballard and Vaughan, just as Isabelle, Théo and Matthew, are not monads anymore. They are demonadized modes of obsessive expression, wayward explorers of the frantic flat infinities of future technological desires. Their obsessions add so much, by subtracting all there has ever been, that their minute and dark perceptions project new configuration of separate reality. Their crawlspace breaks free from them and suddenly expands, self-sustained and imponderable, looming large, totally out of spatial control, incompossible with its postmonadic origin of convoluted obsessions. Nevertheless, thanks to its transparent walls, we, who aren’t obsessed (or whose own private infatuations lie elsewhere), may witness the tingling sensations Ballard and Vaughan are conjuring up before our very eyes. Their obsessive crawlspace is situated perfectly outside of us, yet we are able to remain within its apparition – the Crawlspace of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture.

Spanking in Tongues?

All thanks to Ballard’s (the author, not the protagonist this time) literary style. The narration consists of descriptive dryness, terse and virtually nonexistent dialogues and an overwhelming sensation of inexplicable, alienating, foreboding oddity. Everything seems singular in Crash, visually eviscerated, metaphysically separated. The impending drives of technosexuality are a jarring, jagged premonition of postmodern landscape. Traffic congestion, overpasses, hard shoulders, perimeter fences, flyovers, median strips are all too material to become truly substantial and, thus, unable to convey any meaning, to constitute palpable surroundings other than a gruesome dehumanized stage for horrific roll-over or fatal pile-up collisions. No wonder one of the most convenient books used as an interpreting tool on Crash is Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. However insightful Baudrillard’s work may be, I am going to skip it. One Frenchman at a time. Especially, when the one I have been quoting all along, heartily refers to individuals from other countries:

For with Leibniz the question surges forth in philosophy that will continue to haunt Whitehead and Bergson: not how to attain eternity, but in what conditions does the objective world allow for a subjective production of novelty, that is, of creation? The best of all worlds had no other meaning: it was neither the least abominable nor the least ugly, but the one whose All granted a production of novelty, a liberation of true quanta of “private”subjectivity (…).The best of all worlds is not the one that reproduces the eternal, but the one in which new creations are produced, the one endowed with a capacity for innovation or creativity.

Ballard (again, the author, not the protagonist), by sheer coincidence, hits the bullseye with narration. However, its novelty doesn’t lie within itself. Crash doesn’t strut with a gait of bombastic form. There are no narrative loops, nor double or triple twist endings. The characters are groomed with conventional literary utensils of moderation and plot utilitarianism (excluding their obsession, that is). The novelty lies outside Crash. In sensations which the book ignites within the reader. Naturally, not in every reader, just as not everyone is prone to obsession. But those of you who are, brace yourselves, should you choose to hitch a ride with Ballard and Vaughan. The expressways meandering through the Crawlspace of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture – robust and vast, twisted and irresistible, infatuating and fateful – await! Just don’t forget to fasten your seatbelts.

Amonne Purity

Relevant no matter the era—that’s how many would describe the Jack Finney-penned novel about pod people replacing humans and substituting individual consciousness with collective thought. It’s probably why there’s been four official adaptations.  Countless science fiction movies and television shows also have taken ideas from the original work. While some have fallen flat, Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1978 is probably one of the best adaptations. There are some that believe it surpasses the original adaptation from 1956. Even if one does not subscribe to that view, one can’t doubt that it’s one of the best remakes in cinematic history.

In the current Hollywood environment, where it seems remakes are being greenlit either to just cash in on fondly remembered properties, or to make superficial changes by changing the race or sex of characters without looking at the story from another angle, the word remake can leave a bad taste in the mouth. However, when Philip Kaufman directed this version of Invasion in 1978, he led the way in a decade of re-imaginings of other 1950s science fiction films. The Thing, The Fly, Invaders from Mars, and The Blob probably would not have been produced without the critical and commercial success of this film.

What makes this movie work? First, look to the director. Philip Kaufman is probably not a name on the tongue of most movie watchers. He though has writing credits on Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Outlaw Josey Wales. He later directed The Right Stuff. Then there is the cast; their quirks and interactions with each other turn the science fiction into a human drama piece. Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Leonard Nimoy come across as people of interest. The main characters struggle to understand what’s happening, then desperately try to escape the danger. The audience feels the loss that would occur if such individuals became the blank slates that the aliens want to turn them into.

The film begins with an amazing visual of the pods assimilating themselves into the fauna of San Francisco. There’s then imagery of an emotionless priest  swinging in a playground while staring blankly. This puts you ill at ease and shows you that things are already askew.

The main characters then enter the story. There’s Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland), an uptight health inspector, who seems to be only at ease at home and in the company of Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), a co-worker and close friend, who worries about her relationship with her boyfriend. The second couple is composed of Jack (Jeff Goldblum) and Nancy (Veronica Cartwright) Bellicec, who are bathhouse owners with an artistic bent. Added to the mix is Dr. David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), a psychiatrist who believes that the turmoil of the modern age is fueling the increasing paranoia and distrust of loved ones. Is he correct? Or have the aliens already replaced him?

There are two additional factors that stand out about the film: The cinematography and the score. San Francisco, when shot well is a city that has as much personality as the characters living there. Michael Chapman does a good job revealing the city as quirky as the characters. And when he films the characters, you can sense the emotions on their faces even when little dialogue is spoken. If there is some light criticism, it revolves around some of the extravagant camera work. I appreciate some of the Dutch angles he uses to convey the strange nature of the situation. However, some shots seem too self-conscious, especially when they linger when there are no characters on the screen.

The score composed by Danny Zeitlin is varied as well. There’s three basic styles: Traditional mid-twentieth century scoring, as exemplified by the “Main Title/Flight Theme,” melancholic jazz in the “Love Theme,” and harsh synthesized soundscapes, appearing when the pods/aliens are on the screen. Innovative sound design mixes with the score to push the impression that the alien takeover is at hand. It’s strange that Zeitlin never scored another movie. Maybe he felt more comfortable in the jazz world from where he came. Likely, he felt that he had composed a unique score that he might never top. Whatever. Despite it being nontraditional, it suits the film, neither overwhelming nor underwhelming the scenes.

Living in today’s special effects driven movie climate, even science fiction fans of recent years might have neglected this film. It does feature stunning effects, particularly concerning the transformation of the pods into human duplicates. However, the film is a very human story. In the late 1970s, western society felt confused. Many felt let down by traditional organizations, dealt with the increased family breakdown, and observed the communist advance across the globe. This caused many individuals to search for “the authentic self.” It makes perfect sense that Kibner is at the center of the characters’ world, treating people for their broken psyches.

As the film progresses, you feel for the characters. You hope that whatever time is left, they can connect with their fellow humans. Thus, not only science fiction fans will take an interest in the film. People interested in human drama should take a look. It’s likely that such an experience will reveal to science fiction skeptics that there’s more than to the genre than the shine of spaceships and laser beams.

The writing of a novel is a form of the loss of creative liberty…. In turn, the reviewing of books is a servitude still less noble. Of the writer one can at least say that he has enslaved himself – by the theme selected. The critic is in a worse position: as the convict is chained to his wheelbarrow, so the reviewer is chained to the work reviewed. The writer loses his freedom in his own book, the critic in another’s.

Stanisław Lem

As it has been ultimately established by this brief excerpt who exactly I am, there is nothing left for me to do but fling my collection of balls and chains onto the bruised, hunched back of mine and commit yet another deliberate act of self-enslavement. My 18^th Sisyphean illusion… My maturation as a hardened captive… I feel ecstatically enthralled to finally be able to transform myself into a genuine thrall by subduing to this very bondage, this utterly flabbergasting pillory whose adjective-defying profundity and supreme dominance has become a milestone in showing the possibility of freedom more boundless and carefree than conditions found inside a literal perfect vacuum. The possibility of freedom which sets all prisoners of letters loose through immobilization outside of time. How? Come along…

You know me. Not even the tiniest fraction of a second will I spent giving you an insight into Stanisław Lem’s life. However, it may be that for the first time I will experience flaying-like pangs of conscience about such a deliberate omission. For during his lifetime spanning 84 years (have I just contradicted myself?), Lem has blessed us – minions of the alphabet – with more than 20 books in total (excluding his heavily philosophical Sci-Fi novels), whose plethora of themes, threads and topics e.g. frontiers of futurology, in-depth Sci-Fi analysis as a literary genre, theory of literature per se, evolution of technology, etc., are still sweeping off one’s feet each and every daredevil who decides to give Lem’s prose a shot (and ‘slaying’ it isn’t a piece of cake, mark my words). To alleviate the unknown tormenting sensation of renouncing my own possibility to introduce him via more down-to-earth, substantial exposure, I am going to resort to the following hypothetical situation. If some sort of a doomsday event were to wipe out not only all cellular life on Earth, but also the very existence of the Earth itself as a planet, and, by some miraculous coincidence, of all the books written throughout the ‘reign’ of humanity, ten were to survive the apocalypse and afterwards gave evidence to a random, otherworldly flyer-by of how remarkably worthwhile and truly stellar us Earthlings once were – doubtless A Perfect Vacuum should be among the lucky 10.

Why such an indelible distinction? Does it really deserve to be put on a pedestal of immortalization? Contrary to what A Perfect Vacuum is and how it ‘beyonds’ within the reader (I had to coin this puzzling verb out of preposition which highlights distance between two objects in order to prepare you for a relentless separation Lem’s tour de force distillates among all day-to-day relations and, by the way, to show you how easily it dissipates between magnificence of pure wit and raw intellectual conceptualization so as to ground and nestle itself inside its own sphere of post-discernibles), I will try and stick to the bare minimum of not hopping into the pool of mush and avoid beating about the bush. Yet, we cut our coat according to our cloth, even if we have the fanciest shears in the world at our disposal, straight from Edward Scissorhands’ spare parts shack (this tailored dictum applies especially to those prisoners of literature who have been locked up inside their own Châeau d’Ifs without the possibility of parole or even the tiniest bit of hope left at the bottom of their souls [Knock it off! How much longer could one possibly count these elusive allusions anyway…]).

Stanisław Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum is a compilation of reviews of nonexistent books. Combining an astounding amount of literary self-awareness – grand yet light and therefore having so extensive a span it could hover gracefully for hours fueled by a single fugacious glimpse – with general polymathic knowledge and exhibiting Lem’s unassuming capriciousness of a sophisticated taunter, this volume of 16 texts is a testimony to what exemplary directions literature has grown its branches into, how gorgeously could postmodernism smile at it’s own kaleidoscopic reflection and what does it take to really rivet someone to a book. From downright not-so-blatant jeers (Gigamesh, Rien du tout, ou la conséquence – splendidly crafted puns on haughty, ultra-highbrow modernistic referentiality to everything and everyone à la Joyce and unconveyable extravaganza of over(ly/-)linguistic Nouveau Roman, respectively) and something which looks like hung up gloves (Sexplosion – a flaccid and frigid result of tampering with far too much consumerism and the basic instinct of dropping our drawers to do you-know-what, Gruppenführer Louis XVI – sociological implications of staying too long in an environment consisting solely of simulacra), through pieces based on ideas wonderfully turned inside out (Pericalipsis) as well as genuinely brilliant (Odysseus of Ithaca) to materials for some exuberant Sci-Fi novels (Being Inc.). Everything then ascends to the area of sui generis, the pinnacle of literary beast mode which harbors the Holy Quaternity of impetuous speculation, refined philosophy, absolute delight and exceptional profundity (Die Kultur als Fehler, De Impossibilitate Vitae and The Impossibilitate Prognoscendi, Non Serviam, The New Cosmogony – not so respectively this time). And now your personal peon o’ letters will pen a sentence or two about them.

Or perhaps I will not. Instead, I am going to tell you that it is of the utmost importance that you should be kidnapped by Lem (with Michael Kandel – his masterly translator – as an accomplice) at some point in your life. What for? For one thing, to experience what the well-known phrase “time out of joint” really means. For another, to see what happens when you are being “teleported” outside of it. Just as we remain immovable riding anywhere but along the tracks of the fastest moving hand of the neverland-like clock in Kensington Gardens (albeit we stick to the rules of staying within the tic-tock routine), here we disappear into more other-ish “outer rims” of timeless separateness, where a heavy-handed yet light-winged imagination makes friends with the purest forms of impossible congruity, only to leave you speechlessly light-headed and prone to long-winded lightheartedness. From the very first review – curiously, of A Perfect Vacuum itself – Polish author executes a remarkably time-consuming (taken very literally here) set of literary gambits and you cannot help but fall for them all. You simply cannot resist their sheer ontological insubordination! The novel is just so different (to fully highlight its state of being different, you would have to use another, as of yet nonexistent substitute of a verb “to be”) and addictive that all you are able to do is cry for more, gasping, bedazzled, astounded, dumbfounded, even slightly dilapidated. Thank Lem there is more. It’s called Imaginary Magnitude and this time it’s a compilation of introductions to nonexistent books. But where does it lead to? Does it ‘beyond’ with reader, too? You would have to see for yourself. My almost mature back hurts like hell from heaving these burdensome balls and chains…

Anyway, if you plan to burrow yourself in a cushy nook of your room or lie prone on some forgotten meadow (not everywhere February means snow!) in the not too distant future in order to read, let Lem burrow and lie beside you. Allow his unmistakable charm to leave a permanent imprint on your letter-seeking eyes. It does not disfigure and most certainly won’t blind you. Quite the contrary, it will polish your lenses and enable you to feast upon images your new hawk-eyed sight would spot, among them only the most powerful genies (or should I write ‘djinnies’?) at your command. Thanks to their magical powers, one day you might get a chance to see or even create something which would outshine the universe-famous “Let there be light” or “In the beginning was the Word”. Hubris? I would say relentless curiosity. “Icarus…” some might languidly retort. Before you snap back at this truly void word and patronizing ellipsis, imagine Sam B. is sitting next to your right whispering calmly in your ear his mercilessly hackneyed “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. Besides, there’s nothing more refreshing and liberating than plummeting form the unimaginable heights of perfect vacuums and taking a skinny-dip in the cold waves of another blank piece of paper… Who claims otherwise, well… he/she is just a mere acolyte of imperfect fullness without the slightest chance to immobilize him/herself neither inside nor outside of time. Shame on them! Lucky for us!

Amonne Purity

Lautréamont once came up with a comparison of beauty – extremely prophetic for the shape of things to come in the field of art and literature of the 20th century – which says that it is the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table. Nowadays, almost 150 years later, in the epoch of titillating multitudes of accelerations, you are reaping the harvest of what this quotation has sowed: the rye of innumerable chimeric theories, the oats of rhetorical fusions and divisions, and the barley of socio-economical constructions, deconstructions, reconstructions as well as many other cultivars of combinatory relations, which names begin with “multi”, “neo” and “post” prefixes. Struggling inside this hectic jungle, your imagination is bound to long for something completely different during those unique and sudden outbursts of its – let’s say – ‘self-awareness’ even more feverishly, ferociously, fiercely than in the era of the author of Songs of Maldoror. In those moments, so much similar to micro-sleep, or rather – micro-awakening, with your eyes purer than the newborn child’s innocence, you dream about ‘deontologizing’ yourself even more to achieve a state of maximum openness, a plasticity of blank slate to imbibe at least one single flicker of The New (you cannot say “something new”, because you would be automatically ‘anchored’ in the being again), which would leave you stunned beyond comprehension. My very own eyes have recently stumbled upon the above mentioned flicker, and now, ultimately enthralled by its unearthly other-worldliness (taken positively here), I am going to try and recreate a symbolic fraction of its magic for you.

Let’s imagine a book which ceases to be a book. Of course it possesses all the physical characteristics a so-called “typical novel” – a spatial object from within the world – should possess: a cover, pages, a spine, a gutter, a flyleaf, a table of contents, a dust jacket, etc. – palpable guarantees of a whole bunch of concrete percepts inside our head. A body of text – this paradoxical, part tangible, part invisible edifice of evanescence – is also there with many magnificent wonders waiting to be discovered, uncovered, recovered by a sharpness of your hawk-eyed sight. However, by means of the unknown, due to the ultimately abstract whatchamacallit from the outside of the outside, thanks to something that transcends even the ‘from-beyondful’ area of sheer speculation, you find yourself more and more absent, imperceptible, non-existent from the ontological point of view, when you are entering the ever-increasing ‘gravitational field’ of If on a winter’s night a traveler. Calvino leads you through his ‘rabbit hole’ where letters literally (‘sentencially’ and ‘paragraphically’ too!) take over the potential of reality to exist per se. No ordinary ‘rabbit hole’ indeed! It is like a combination of Cheshire Cat’s grin, a wormhole, squaring the circle and a dump truck full of the highest possible metaphysical intensity. No sweat, I will show you around!

At first glance (the one that the book allows you to perceive while you are still within your everyday reality), you are nesting yourself inside a story of a bibliophilistic investigation. From the very first page, a certain meta-level narrative, changing swiftly from the second-person to the first-person perspective, somehow splits you into two versions of yourself. The first one is going along the plot and blending in with the body of the novel, while the second is staying outside this freshly conjured inter-dimensional inside (outside?) of you #1 and the book. At the same time, Calvino is hazing you #2 with his dashing reflectivity and smashing vagaries so effectively that it ends up soaring high up into the no man’s land of the unknown, the fresh, The New. Meanwhile, as you #1 is getting upset by the seemingly random set of occurrences, which prevent it from finishing the book it began reading in the opening, you all (the you – the protagonist – from the novel, the you #1 who is reading the novel, and the you #2 who is outside both of you – all three mixed together!) are gradually transforming into a bookworm-ish sleuth, who is entering a ‘reality’ where even calling its arché “something that appears in our universe as if it were ‘oozing’ from letters” simply won’t do any justice at all. What is this ‘reality’ then? Under the circumstances, is it even possible to ask any questions at all?

Trying to whisk off from the obscurity of thought (and of multilocated you’s) as far as I can, I am going to go with the flow of Calvino’s arché. The ‘beyondness’ of ephemeral phenomena emerges when you – an aggregate of replications – are being more and more absorbed in futile attempts to read the novel, which repetitively turns out to be not the one it seems to have been in the first place (as a result of supposed printing flaw, publisher’s alleged red tape, purported takeover of literature due to war turmoil, etc.). The above ‘beyondness’ must have been probably grounded in… the indescribability of silence! The moment you (still as a bunch of reproductions, each one on a different level of the novel, yet somehow intertwined together!) succumb to machinations performed by some elusive, spy-like fanatic, whose aim is to overflow the world with double-bogus novels in which a fake artificiality doesn’t reveal the truth – it just squares the falsehood, leaves you speechless owing to the pristine quality of ‘primordial’ experience all three of you’s combined together are exposed to. It seems almost like you have been permitted to witness God’s breath preceding one of the most symbolically powerful utterances of all time: “In the Beginning was the Word.” Your simultaneous outburst of sudden awareness, enlightening consciousness, transcendental revelation of how many more possibilities are condensed in the…hmm… ‘spatiality-to-be’ of letters in general, what kind of potential relations can they conceive as a wild variety of functions, means, meanings, interactions, intersections, etc. – all of this, taken as some kind of new, unnamable ‘poli-wholeness’, enters a circulatory system of your spirit. Shortly after this infusion, you know, without the slightest trace of uncertainty or doubt, that you have just set out on an astonishing journey throughout the kaleidoscope of endless phantasmagorical alternatives and portmanteau qualities!

Coming back to our good old universe, Calvino’s diamond, being the novel about reading a novel, presents a characteristic cut of self-reference that reacts with The New in a spectacular combustion, leaving you hungry for answers to loads of intriguing questions. In what way apocrypha can broaden the sense of writer’s identity? What can be distinguished as an essence of a difference between a negative fact and a positive fact? To what extent a heteronymous mode of writing can alter concepts of difference and multiplication? Are we able to detail a mutual inspiration of philosophy and literature? These and many more brain-racking issues await all of you out there, whose eyes are sparkling with the yearning for the ultimate escape during those scarce moments of the micro-awakening I mentioned in the first paragraph. Personally, I have never been taken so far away by any other book of such a conceptual charge. What’s more, I have never roamed around the outback of the metaphysical speculation regarding a ternary association “writing-language-reality” that long. Only Nabokov’s Pale Fire was inflammable enough to set me off in quite a similar manner inside this boundless realm, however it is a whole different story…

If on a winter’s night a traveler, which in virtually no time has become my personal favorite to win the “What book would you take with you on a desert island?” contest, is truly a jewel in the crown, which has been richly incrusted with many precious, postmodern stones, mainly during the second half of the XX century. The jewel so brilliant, it would outshine even those of Lautréamont’s abstract comparisons of beauty, which he had never managed to pen. You should feel lucky that the gemstone mine called “Literature” still not only gives evidence that its deposits are far from depletion, but also sets up new directions for all sorts of miners to boldly dig, drill and sift where no prospector has dug, drilled and sifted before. So you’d better pack your pick into the bag, steal some drills from the nearby DIY store and retrieve a sieve from your neighbor’s tool shed – the mine is waiting. But first, don’t forget to fuel your safety lamp with the beautiful, everlasting shine of Calvino’s grandest ornament!

Amonne Purity