A poetic response to Italo Calvino’s essay ‘Lightness’ from Six Memos for the next Millennium. Made in April, 2019 as part of the ‘Monday Readings’ project with Trevor Brown.
{an analogue collage + a poem on a string, sent as a letter, to hang lightly from your ceiling}
Remove weight from things.
Strip them from the weight of intellect.
From the need to ‘understand’.
So we confront ‘reality’.
Which we tend to fear.
Can art take us there?
Plato was apprehensive.
He saw art as removing us from reality - an illusion (a mirror) of reality.
Art attempts to show the real but it also removes us (if one step only) from it.
Perhaps it is nearest we can get to it. Is it?
Maybe the fact that art has a capacity to evade ‘reality’ is a good thing.
So we can/could see otherwise.
So we can imagine unimaginable.
But are ‘otherwise’ and ‘unimaginable’ not reality?...
“Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space.”
(Italo Calvino)
Because ‘change’ is the only truth.
The reality.
“It is in changing that things find repose.” (Heraclitus)
In recognizing every moment as unique, as new.
In opening ourselves to new possibilities.
In forgiving (and forgetting).
Perhaps “lightness” is in forgetting - in (a)freshness.
To overthink is the weight.
It killed Nietzsche - drew him to madness.
But understanding comforts us.
Knowledge is our retreat.
This is how we deal with our fear of reality...
Knowledge is an illusion.
More so than art?
“We don’t know, we believe.” (Duchamp)
Calvino says that knowledge dissolves solidity.
Is it not the opposite?
Knowledge = solidity.
Solidifying.
Hardening rather than softening.
Enclosing rather than opening.
Unless he speaks of a different kind of knowledge.
The one that is not arrogant but aware of not knowing.
Knowing of not knowing.
Duchamp knows that way.
“Lightness of thoughtfulness” (Italo Calvino)
Knowledge as lightness.
Lightness of knowledge.
“Lightness for me goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard.” (Italo Calvino)
Lightness has clarity.
Function.
Conviction.
Confidence.
To take the weight out of an artwork (out of a language) – what does that mean? What does it look / sound like?