Six Memos for the Next Millennium (11 page)

Dante speaks of the visions presented to him (that is, to Dante the actor in the poem) almost as if they were film projections or television images seen on a screen that is quite separate from the objective reality of his journey beyond the earth. But for Dante the poet as well, the entire journey of Dante the actor is of the same nature as these visions. The poet has to imagine visually both what his actor sees and what he thinks he sees, what he
dreams, what he remembers, what he sees represented, or what is told to him, just as he has to imagine the visual content of the metaphors he uses to facilitate this process of visual evocation. What Dante is attempting to define, therefore, is the role of the imagination in the
Commedia
, in particular the visual part of his fantasy, which precedes or is simultaneous with verbal imagination.

We may distinguish between two types of imaginative process: the one that starts with the word and arrives at the visual image, and the one that starts with the visual image and arrives at its verbal expression. The first process is the one that normally occurs when we read. For example, we read a scene in a novel or the report of some event in a newspaper and, according to the greater or lesser effectiveness of the text, we are brought to witness the scene as if it were taking place before our eyes, or at least to witness certain fragments or details of the scene that are singled out.

In the cinema the image we see on the screen has also passed through the stage of a written text, has then been “visualized” in the mind of the director, then physically reconstructed on the set, and finally fixed in the frames of the film itself. A film is therefore the outcome of a succession of phases, both material and otherwise, in the course of which the images acquire form. During this process, the “mental cinema” of the imagination has a function no less important than that of the actual creation of the sequences as they will be recorded by the camera and then put together on the moviola. This mental cinema is always at work in each one of us, and it always has been, even before the invention of the cinema. Nor does it ever stop projecting images before our mind's eye.

It is significant that great importance is given to the visual imagination in Ignatius of Loyola's
Ejercicios espirituales
(Spiritual
Exercises). At the beginning of his manual, Loyola prescribes the “composicion viendo el lugar” (visual composition of the place) in terms that might be instructions for the mise-en-scene of a theatrical performance: “en la contemplacion o meditacion visible, asi como contemplar a Christo nuestro Sefior, el qual es visible, la composicion sera ver con la vista de la imagination el lugar corporeo, donde se halla la cosa que quiero contemplar. Digo el lugar corporeo, asi como un templo o monte, donde se halla Jesu Christo o Nuestra Sefiora,” (in visual contemplation or meditation, especially in the contemplation of Christ our Lord insofar as he is visible, this composition will consist in seeing from the view of the imagination the physical place where the thing I wish to contemplate is to be found. I say the physical place, as for example a temple or a hill where Jesus Christ or Our Lady is). Loyola quickly hastens to make it clear that the contemplation of our own sins must not be visual, or else—if I have understood rightly—we must make use of visual imagination of a metaphorical sort (the soul imprisoned in the corruptible body).

Further on, in the first day of the second week, the spiritual exercise opens with a vast visionary panorama and with spectacular crowd scenes:

1° puncto.
El primer puncto es ver las personas, las unas y las otras; y primero las de la haz de la tierra, en tanta diversidad, asi en trajes como en gestos, unos blancos y otros negros, unos en paz y otros en guerra, unos Uorando y otros riendo, unos sanos, otros enfermos, unos nasciendo y otros muriendo, etc.

2°: ver y considerar las tres personas divinas, como en el su solio real o throno de la su divina majestad, como miran toda la haz y redondez de la tierra y todas las gentes en tanta ceguedad, y como mueren y descienden al infierno.

1st point.
The first point is to see people, of this and that kind; and first of all those on the face of the earth in all their variety of garments and gestures, some white and others black, some in peace and some at war, some weeping and others laughing, some healthy and others sick, some being born and others dying, etc.

2nd: to see and to consider the three divine persons as on the regal seat or throne of their divine majesty, how they look down on the whole face and rotundity of the earth and all the people who are in such blindness, and how they die and descend to hell.

The idea that the God of Moses does not tolerate being represented in visual images does not ever seem to have occurred to Ignatius of Loyola. On the contrary, one might say that he claims for each and every Christian the grandiose visionary gifts of Dante or Michelangelo—without even the restraint that Dante seems obliged to impose on his own visual imagination when face to face with the celestial visions of Paradise.

In Loyola's spiritual exercise for the following day (second meditation), the person meditating has to put himself into the scene and assume the role of an actor in the imaginary action:

Certainly Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation possessed a fundamental vehicle, in its ability to use visual communication: through the emotional stimuli of sacred art, the believer was supposed to grasp the meaning of the verbal teachings of the Church. But it was always a matter of starting from a given image, one proposed by the Church itself and not “imagined” by the believer. What I think distinguishes Loyola's procedure, even with regard to the forms of devotion of his own time, is the shift from the word to the visual image as a way of attaining knowledge of the most profound meaning. Here too the point of departure and the point of arrival are already established, but in the middle there opens up a field of infinite possibilities in the application of the individual imagination, in how one depicts characters, places, and scenes in motion. The believer is called upon personally to paint frescoes crowded with figures on the walls of his mind, starting out from the stimuli that his visual imagination succeeds in extracting from a theological proposition or a laconic verse from the gospels.

Let us return to purely literary problematics and ask ourselves about the genesis of the imaginary at a time when literature no longer refers back to an authority or a tradition as its origin or goal, but aims at novelty, originality, and invention. It seems to me that in this situation the question of the priority of the visual image or verbal expression (which is rather like the problem of the chicken and the egg) tends definitely to lean toward the side of the visual imagination.

Where do they come from, these images that rain down into the fantasy? Dante, justifiably, had a high opinion of himself, to the point of having no scruples about proclaiming the direct divine inspiration of his visions. Writers closer to us in time (with the exception of those few cases of prophetic vocation) establish their contacts through earthly transmitters, such as the individual or the collective unconscious; the time regained in feelings that reemerges from time lost; or “epiphanies,” concentrations of being in a single spot or point of time. In short, it is a question of processes that, even if they do not originate in the heavens, certainly go beyond our intentions and our control, acquiring— with respect to the individual—a kind of transcendence.

Nor is it only poets and novelists who deal with this problem. A specialist on the nature of intelligence, Douglas Hofstadter, does a similar thing in his famous book
Godel, Escher, Bach
, in which the real problem is the choice between various images that have rained down into the fantasy:

But perhaps we should first to take a look at how this problem has been posed in the past. The most exhaustive, comprehensive, and clear history of the idea of imagination I have found is an essay by Jean Starobinski, “The Empire of the Imaginary” (included in the volume
L· relation critique
, 1970). From the Renais-
sance magic of the neo-Platonists originates the idea of the imagination as a communication with the world soul, an idea that was to recur in romanticism and surrealism. This notion contrasts with that of the imagination as an instrument of knowledge, according to which the imagination, while following channels other than those of scientific knowledge, can coexist with the latter and even assist it, indeed be a phase the scientist needs in order to formulate his hypotheses. On the other hand, theories of the imagination as a depository of the truths of the universe can agree with a
Naturphilosophie
or with a kind of theosophical knowledge, but are incompatible with scientific knowledge—unless we divide what can be known into two parts, leaving the external world to science and isolating imaginative knowledge in the inner self of the individual. It is this second attitude that Starobinski recognizes as the method of Freudian analysis, while Jung's method, which bestows universal validity on archetypes and the collective unconscious, is linked to the idea of imagination as participation in the truth of the world.

At this point, there is a question I cannot evade: in which of the two tendencies outlined by Starobinski would I place my own idea of the imagination? To answer that question I am forced to look back at my own experience as a writer, and especially at the part that has to do with “fantastic” narrative writing. When I began to write fantastic stories, I did not yet consider theoretical questions; the only thing I knew was that there was a visual image at the source of all my stories. One of these images was a man cut in two halves, each of which went on living independently. Another example was a boy who climbs a tree and then makes his way from tree to tree without ever coming down to earth. Yet another was an empty suit of armor that moves and speaks as if someone were inside.

In devising a story, therefore, the first thing that comes to my
mind is an image that for some reason strikes me as charged with meaning, even if I cannot formulate this meaning in discursive or conceptual terms. As soon as the image has become sufficiently clear in my mind, I set about developing it into a story; or better yet, it is the images themselves that develop their own implicit potentialities, the story they carry within them. Around each image others come into being, forming a field of analogies, symmetries, confrontations. Into the organization of this material, which is no longer purely visual but also conceptual, there now enters my deliberate intent to give order and sense to the development of the story; or rather, what I do is try to establish which meanings might be compatible with the overall design I wish to give the story and which meanings are not compatible, always leaving a certain margin of possible alternatives. At the same time, the writing, the verbal product, acquires increasing importance. I would say that from the moment I start putting black on white, what really matters is the written word, first as a search for an equivalent of the visual image, then as a coherent development of the initial stylistic direction. Finally, the written word little by little comes to dominate the field. From now on it will be the writing that guides the story toward the most felicitous verbal expression, and the visual imagination has no choice but to tag along.

In
Cosmicomics
(1965) the procedure was a little different, since the point of departure was a statement taken from the language of science; the independent play of the visual images had to arise from this conceptual statement. My aim was to show that writing using images typical of myth can grow from any soil, even from language farthest away from any visual image, as the language of science is today. Even in reading the most technical scientific book or the most abstract book of philosophy, one can come across a phrase that unexpectedly stimulates the visual imagina-
tion. We are therefore in one of those situations where the image is determined by a preexistent written text (a page or a single sentence that I come across in my reading), and from this may spring an imaginative process that might either be in the spirit of the text or go off in a direction all its own.

The first cosmicomic I wrote, “The Distance of the Moon,” is possibly the most “surrealistic,” in the sense that the impulse, derived from gravitational physics, leaves the door open to a dreamlike fantasy In other cosmicomics the plot is guided by an idea more in keeping with the scientific point of departure, but always clad in a shell of imagination and feeling, and spoken by either one voice or two. In short, my procedure aims at uniting the spontaneous generation of images and the intentionality of discursive thought. Even when the opening gambit is played by the visual imagination, putting its own intrinsic logic to work, it finds itself sooner or later caught in a web where reasoning and verbal expression also impose their logic. Yet the visual solutions continue to be determining factors and sometimes unexpectedly come to decide situations that neither the conjectures of thought nor the resources of language would be capable of resolving.