To Transmit and Receive Vibrations and Waves
Jae Emerling · 2023
Calvino was nonetheless cautiously confident because he believed that "the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give the reader, by means specific to it." He devoted the "memos" to six "values" in order to transmit them to the new millennium. Memories that have been " transmitted to collective thought and culture". Transmitted neither as an autotelic history nor as a representational one. Calvino proposes a better solution than antiliterature, anti-aesthetics, or foreclosing on any vital role for art. Calvino focuses attention on the poetic "minute, luminous tracings" that Montale poses "in contrast to dark catastrophe" as a means of surviving "the precariousness of the world." Transmissibility betrays any and all tradition as well as any preconceived, determined future. To betray is an infinitive verb that remains untimely, never quite aligned with sequential, linear time, but always partaking of series of becomings that have their own oblique, immanent past-future temporality.