卡尔维诺中文站 tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2010:/calvino//1 2010-02-13T19:37:19Z Italo Calvino in China Movable Type 3.33 黄杲炘译本 tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2010:/calvino//1.1033 2010-02-12T18:50:51Z 2010-02-13T19:37:19Z [整理者注：据上海译文出版社1982年版《柔巴依集》整理，原注释一并录出于后。] 1 醒醒吧！太阳已把满天的星斗 赶得纷纷飞离了黑夜的田畴， 叫夜也随着星星逃出了天庭； 阳光之箭已射上苏丹的塔楼。 2 在倏忽的晨曦幻影消失之前， 酒店里仿佛有谁在高声呼喊： “神殿里的一切都已准备齐全， 礼拜者为何在殿外合着睡眼？” 3 公鸡已在啼晓；在酒店的门外， 等着的人们喊道：“快把门打开！ 你知道，我们的逗留多么短暂—— 一旦离去，也许再也不能回来。” 4 新岁使旧时的愿望焕发生气，* 沉思的性灵退到孤寂中隐匿—— 摩西的素手缀满那里的枝头，** 耶稣在那里的地上发出叹息。*** 5 伊兰园同它的玫瑰荡然无存，* 杰姆西王的七环杯湮没无闻；** 但是葡萄藤间依旧绽红流丹， 多少傍水的园子中花开缤纷。 6 大卫的双唇紧锁；但是夜莺啊* 使血色涌上玫瑰萎黄的脸颊—— 她，操着神妙的佩雷维语尖叫：** “来！来呀！来酒！来红酒！来红酒啊！” 7 来，把杯儿斟满；往春天的火里， 抛去你悔恨交加的隆冬外衣； 时光之鸟只能飞短短的距离—— 现在，这鸟儿已经在振翅扑翼。 8 不管在内沙布尔或在巴比伦，* 不管杯中物是酸苦还是香醇， 生活之酒一滴滴不住地沥出，... 4 新岁使旧时的愿望焕发生气，* 沉思的性灵退到孤寂中隐匿—— 摩西的素手缀满那里的枝头，** 耶稣在那里的地上发出叹息。*** 5 伊兰园同它的玫瑰荡然无存，* 杰姆西王的七环杯湮没无闻；** 但是葡萄藤间依旧绽红流丹， 多少傍水的园子中花开缤纷。 6 大卫的双唇紧锁；但是夜莺啊* 使血色涌上玫瑰萎黄的脸颊—— 她，操着神妙的佩雷维语尖叫：** “来！来呀！来酒！来红酒！来红酒啊！” 7 来，把杯儿斟满；往春天的火里， 抛去你悔恨交加的隆冬外衣； 时光之鸟只能飞短短的距离—— 现在，这鸟儿已经在振翅扑翼。 8 不管在内沙布尔或在巴比伦，* 不管杯中物是酸苦还是香醇， 生活之酒一滴滴不住地沥出， 生命之叶一片片飘落在泥尘。 9 你说过，早晨会带来玫瑰千朵； 可哪儿又是昨天玫瑰的下落 就是这带来玫瑰的初夏月份 带着杰姆西、带着凯柯巴湮没。* 10 那就让他们湮没！凯柯巴大帝， 凯霍斯鲁，同我们有什么关系？* 让扎尔和鲁斯吐姆恣意咆哮，** 让哈蒂姆唤人入席：你别答理。*** 11 随我走走这狭长的牧草地带， 它把沙漠和下种的耕地隔开—— 奴隶、苏丹之称在此已被忘怀—— 愿马穆德在他的宝座上安泰！* 12 在枝干粗壮的树下，一卷诗抄， 一大杯葡萄美酒，加一个面包—— 你也在我身旁，在荒野中歌唱—— 啊，在荒野中，这天堂已够美好！* 13 有人追求人世间的荣耀风光， 有人把教祖许诺的天国巴望；* 啊，取下这现钱，别去管那契券—— 远处隆隆的鼓声别放在心上！** 14 瞧我们身旁盛开的玫瑰。她说： “看哪，我含笑来世上绽出花朵； 转眼，我香囊的丝穗断裂破碎， 囊中的珍宝就在园子里撒落。” 15 辛勤耕耘的，种出了金穗玉粒， 挥霍奢靡的，在风中撒粮如雨； 他们，都不会变成金色的沙泥—— 一朝埋下，再不会被重新掘起。 16 人们所心向神往的世俗企求 变成了灰烬或烈火烹油；尔后， 就象雪飘落灰封尘蒙的沙漠—— 辉映了一时半刻便化为乌有。 17 你想，在这门前便有日夜交替， 已经凋敝破败的队商客栈里， 一个个苏丹如何在荣华之中 守到他命定的时辰，就此别离。 18 人说杰姆西得意豪饮的宫廷，* 如今猛狮和蜥蜴在那儿巡行； 野驴也在巴拉姆的头上跺脚，** 但是没把这伟大的猎手惊醒。 19 有时我想：古往今来的玫瑰丛， 就数埋过恺撒血肉处的最红——* 朵朵招展的玉簪花儿，也都是 从春风一度的头上坠落园中。** 20 草儿苏醒，毛羽般的新翠嫩绿 铺满江漘，这儿我们靠下身躯；* 啊，轻轻地靠下吧！谁知道从前 多美的绛唇才把它暗中化育。** 21 啊，我亲爱的，斟满这今日之杯， 浇却那往日之悔和来日之畏； 明天哪！哎，到了明天连我自己 怕已归入昨天的七千年之内。* 22 因为我们所热爱的人间精粹—— 流光从它葡萄中榨出的汁水—— 都已喝干了他们的三杯两盏， 一个个无声无息地溜去安睡。 23 如今我们欣赏着新夏的花衫， 在前人留下的屋里作乐寻欢； 但我们也得躺在大地的床下—— 让自己变作床铺给谁来长眠？ 24 啊，把剩下的一切尽情地享用—— 趁我们还没沉沦于泥土之中； 尘土复归于尘土，长眠尘土下—— 无酒无歌无歌手，而且还无穷。 25 有些人为了今天而张罗奔忙， 有些人睁大眼睛把明天盼望； 司祷从黑暗之塔向他们叫喊：* “这儿和那里都没蠢人的报偿！” 26 对两个世界高谈阔论的圣贤， 全象是无聊先知，给推在一边； 那逗人笑骂的话语东飘西散， 连他们的嘴也已被泥土填满。 27 年青时，我也对那些学者圣人 热切地造访；谈生说死的宏论 也颇有所闻：但我出来时走的 无非还是进去时走的那道门。 28 我同他们播下的种子是智慧， 又亲手耕耘使种子抽芽吐穗； 这儿便是我得到的全部收获—— 我来时好比流水，去时象风吹。* 29 不知什么是根由、哪里是源头， 就象是流水，无奈地流进宇宙； 不知哪里是尽头、也不再勾留， 我象是风儿，无奈地吹过砂丘。 30 不问是什么从哪里赶来这里！ 不问是什么由这里奔向哪里！ 啊，得用这一杯杯给禁绝的酒 淹掉对这些无礼问题的记忆！ 31 从这大地的中心我腾身而起， 飞过七天门坐上了土星宝椅；* 一路上解出过多少巧结难题， 但没解出人生命运这大哑谜。 32 门儿紧锁，我没找到它的钥匙， 帐幕高张，我没法子洞察透视； 片言只语，你我被人谈及片时—— 而再往后，连你带我全将消逝。 33 大地没回答；漾着紫波的大海 哀悼被弃的主公，也说不明白； 天庭回旋，虽然把它的十二宫 日吞夜吐，这个谜却也没解开。 34 我请帷幕后的我中之你指点—— 在黑里摸索我中之你的灯盏； 一句话象是从身外传到耳中： “其实你中之我什么也看不见。” 35 于是，我举起粗笨的陶质酒杯 来探索生之奥秘。杯口刚沾嘴， 它就对着嘴咕哝：“活着就一醉！ 因为你一旦去世，再不能返回。” 36 如今酒杯的答话已飘忽难寻， 但我想，它曾有生命，也曾酣饮。 啊，我吻过的嘴唇多麻木不仁—— 它能接受多少、能给人多少吻！ 37 因为，我想起曾经在路旁站立， 看一个陶工使劲地捣着湿泥； 那泥用早已失传的语言低叫： “轻些，兄弟！请轻些，兄弟！求求你！” 38 正是用这种饱含水份的泥团， 造物主塑出了人的形体容颜；* 这样的故事还不是自古就有—— 靠人类绵延的世代往下流传？** 39 我们祭酹在地上的杯中醇酒， 一点一滴都悄悄地往下渗透， 渗进那久隐深藏的某只眼睛， 使眼中的痛苦之火化为乌有。 40 郁金香在地上仰起她的脸庞， 把清晨吸饮的天赐琼浆巴望； 你也该诚心地模仿，直到老天 把你象一只空杯覆倒在地上。 41 别再为人间和天上心神不宁， 明天的纷繁还是让风去理清； 那司酒的身材修长有如翠柏， 让你的手指在她发丝中忘情。 42 如果说，你喝的酒和你吻的唇 都要归于万物的归宿和根本； 你想想，今天你既是昨天的你， 那到了明天，你不会增损一分。 43 所以，到了最后，在那河的岸边， 当专管浓酒的天使把你发现， 向你的灵魂递上个他的酒杯 邀你一饮而尽：可别踌躇不前。 44 要是灵魂能把躯壳丢在一边， 无牵无挂地遨游于天地之间， 那么难道它竟然不感到羞惭—— 还留在无用的泥土遗骸里面？ 45 这个只是供苏丹小憩的篷帐—— 他奔赴冥国时在此歇息一晌。 那阴沉的管事只待苏丹起驾， 便收起篷帐：待后客来时用上。 46 别害怕你我的帐一被他勾销， 类似的事儿造化会就此忘掉； 我们这样的酒沫他舀过千万—— 那永恒的酒保还会不断地舀。 47 当你和我消失在帷幕的后边， 这世界还将长久地往前推衍； 在它眼里，我们的到来和别离 象颗小小的石子溅落在海面。 48 片刻的停留：从这荒漠的泉流 掬起生命之水匆匆地尝一口。 看！幻影商队已到了太虚之境—— 到达它出发之处。啊，快喝个够！ 49 如果你愿意为探索这种奥秘 耗掉你生命的珠片，那就快去！* 真理和谬误也许只差根毫毛—— 但请问，什么能是生活的真谛？ 50 毫毛也许就分出真理和谬误； 只要你能领悟，光一个阿里夫* 便是通向那仙窟宝库的线索， 或者，偶尔也能够通向那真主； 51 他隐而不露，在万物的脉络中 水银般地流动，避开你的阵痛； 他所赋形的万物，从鱼到月亮，* 在变化消亡；而他却永存无终； [整理者注：原书排版中“他”字下加点以示强调，电子版改为下划线。下第五十二、六十九、七十、八十五、八十八、九十九首及八十、八十一首“你”字并同] 52 让人疑猜了片刻，回屏风后面—— 那儿，戏台的周围是黑暗迷漫； 他，为了打发无穷无尽的时间， 亲自把戏儿编排、扮演和观看。 53 今天你还是你，如果只能仰望 那云霄之外重门紧闭的天堂， 或俯视倔强的大地，一筹莫展—— 那明天你不再是你，又将怎样？ 54 别浪费光阴，别为了无谓图谋 使自己疲于追求还争论不休； 销愁解颐的葡萄酒一杯在手， 强似为苦果或空无所有担忧。 55 朋友，在我第二次成亲的新房， 你知道，那婚宴有多热闹堂皇； 衰老不孕的理性我把她休去， 迎来葡萄的女儿做我的新娘。* 56 我虽然靠绳墨判断是非正误， 我虽然按逻辑区别兴衰沉浮， 但是在人愿意探索的一切中， 除了酒我从未深究任何事物。* 57 啊，可人们不是在说，我的演算 重排了岁月，使历法更为完善？ 啊，不，这只是从历书中勾销了 未生的明天，以及已死的昨天。 58 不久以前，在酒店洞开的门口， 暮色里来了位天使。他的肩头 托着个坛子，全身闪耀着光辉。 他叫我尝尝：原来是葡萄美酒！ 59 葡萄美酒，它能以绝对的雄辩 叫你争我吵的教派哑口无言；* 这至高的法师，能把生活之铅 点化成黄金，而且在瞬息之间。 60 这是伟大的马穆德，真主下凡。* 它旋风般地挥舞着手中利剑， 杀得那一帮信邪的黝黑贼寇—— 那骚扰灵魂的忧惧，纷纷逃窜。 61 若是上帝的庄稼酿成这酒浆， 谁敢胡说缠绕的卷须是罗网？* 是赐福，难道我们不应该享用？ 是灾祸，那么又是谁降祸世上？ 62 跟这人生的慰藉得一刀两断—— 或者是害怕死后的赊帐清算， 或者是巴望在我零落成泥后， 会有更神妙的酒灌满这杯盏。 63 啊，对地狱天堂的恐惧和渴望！ 至少一点无疑：此生象飞一样； 就这点无疑，其它的全是撒谎； 一度盛开的花朵，将永归灭亡。 64 难道这不奇怪？不计其数的人 在我们之前走进那黑暗之门， 却没一个回来介绍他的旅行—— 那儿，我们也得去探索和访问。 65 象被人付之一炬的先知书契， 先圣先贤们所说的那些天启 都是些传奇：他们梦中醒来时 告诉了同伴，重又回到了梦里。 66 我把灵魂向那幽冥之境派去， 想讨个死后生活的一言半语； 没多久我的灵魂已回来复命， 他说：“我本身便是天堂和地狱。” 67 天堂只是满足了的欲望幻境， 地狱只是受火刑的灵魂之影 投射于一片黑暗中：我们刚从 那儿现身，将很快在那儿忘形。 68 我们无非是串幻影你转我动， 绕着那中间的亮光来去匆匆； 这光儿发自太阳点亮的灯笼，* 这灯笼，掌灯者夜半提在手中。 69 但在这日夜相间的棋盘上面， 他摆弄的这些棋子也真可怜—— 移过来挪过去，吃子又是捉将， 然后，一个个放回小盒里长眠。 70 球儿不会有说对论错的问题， 它飞东飞西全看玩球者心意； 他把你抛落大地自有他道理—— 对呀！自有他道理，自有他道理！ 71 运指儿书写，字儿落纸手却移： 无论你的全部虔诚还是智力， 都没法把手招回抹去半行字， 洒上你全部眼泪也难洗字迹。 72 那翻转的碗儿他们唤作天空， 下面是我们生死其中的樊笼： 别趴倒在地下举手向天求助—— 它之行动无力也和你我相同。 73 用第一把土将最末一人塑出，* 把末世收成的种子播种入土： 开天辟地第一个早晨所写的， 在末日清算的黎明将要宣读。 74 昨天，准备了今天的颠倒、疯狂； 酝酿了明天的沉默、凯旋、绝望： 喝吧，你又不知从何来、为何来： 喝吧，你又不知因何去、去何方。 75 你听我说：从终点出发之时起， 他们就把帕尔温和穆希塔利* 抛过了天驹喷火的肩头，这时，** 在我命定是尘和魂的心田里*** 76 葡萄树把须根扎下：如果同它 我把缘结下，托钵僧笑骂由他； 我这贱料也许可做钥匙一把—— 能把门打开：他就在门外叫骂。 77 我知道：不管是真火点起情爱， 还是天怒之火烧尽我的骨骸， 能在酒店里看一眼真火之光， 强似在圣堂神殿里踌躇徘徊。 78 什么！从无知无觉的缥缈虚无 点化出的血肉还有哀乐喜怒！ 还会怨恨把欢乐禁锢的桎梏—— 谁敢破除就永世要遭受惩处！ 79 什么！他借出一点渣滓和烂泥， 他可怜的生灵还的却是金币—— 没借过债，我们哪有偿还之理——* 可他诉讼相逼。啊，可悲的交易！ 80 你呀！你在我彷徨流浪的路上， 布置下陷阱机关和美酒佳酿， 总不会撒下难逃的罪孽罗网， 再把堕落的恶名涂在我身上！ 81 你呀，你用污泥浊土把人塑造，* 你设伊甸园时也没把蛇忘掉：** 你虽用种种罪过把人脸抹黑， 你给人宽容，你从人得到宽饶。*** 82 白昼在消逝，就趁着天色渐幽， 忍饥挨饿的斋月偷偷地溜走；* 那陶工的作坊我又独自重游—— 各种各样的陶器围在我四周。 83 那模样是形形式式、大大小小， 都一排儿站在地上、靠着墙脚； 有的是话说个不停、唠唠叨叨， 有的象是在倾听，但绝无言笑。 84 其中一个说道：“这决不是徒劳—— 从普通泥土里选出我的材料， 先捏成这个形象，以后再打碎， 或者重新踩作不成形的泥淖。”* 85 接着第二个说道：“没一个顽童 会砸碎他曾喝得开怀的茶盅； 他不会糟蹋亲手制作的器皿—— 不管他后来会如何怒气冲冲。” 86 静下了没有多久，换了个开口—— 这个的相貌，可真是比较丑陋： “他们笑话我，老说我歪歪扭扭—— 怎么，那陶工的双手曾经发抖？” 87 听见了这话，有个多嘴的东西—— 想是泛神论者的小罐，生了气： “什么陶工陶器的，你给我说说， 哪个算陶工，哪个又该是陶器？” 88 另一个讲道：“哦，有好几位在说， 他扬言要把那些倒霉的家伙—— 那些他做坏的活计，扔进地狱。 胡说！他心地慈悲，办事不会错。” 89 谁却在咕哝：“管它是谁做谁买， 长期的搁置干得我差点裂开； 但只要给我灌满熟稔的酒浆， 我想，我能够很快就恢复过来。” 90 坛坛罐罐们正这样纷纷发言， 它们期待的新月已出斋露面；* 这时它们你推我碰：“兄弟，兄弟！ 听听搬酒人吱吱作响的垫肩！” 91 请为我凋零的生命把酒置办， 把死去的身子用酒洗涤一番， 用葡萄青青的叶瓣把我装殓， 埋我在并非人迹罕到的园边。 92 这样，我的遗体虽然已被埋葬， 还撒个葡萄累累的空中罗网， 使那一个个过往的虔诚信徒 都不知不觉地被它缠住绕上。 93 真的，我长期热爱的这些偶像。 使我在世上的声望大大遭殃： 让荣誉在浅浅的杯盏中消融， 把令名声誉只换了几声歌唱。 94 真的，我从前也常常起誓改悔—— 不过，起誓的时候我可曾酒醉？ 待到春风一吹，我又手拈玫瑰—— 那陈旧的忏悔已被撕得粉碎。 95 尽管酒的角色颇为背信弃义—— 它呀，总把我体面的罩袍剥去， 我还是常想知道：酒贩买进的 什么货，有他卖出的一半珍奇。 96 可春天哪，要同玫瑰一起消亡！ 芬芳的青春手稿呀，也得合上！ 夜莺啊，曾在树枝间娇啼曼唱—— 谁知道她来自哪里、去向何方！ 97 沙漠里只要清泉露一丝痕迹—— 哪怕是模糊迷离但透露消息， 昏迷的旅人也许会向它扑去， 就象被踏倒的草儿重新挺立。 98 但愿天使飞来时还剩些时间， 好收起已经展开的命运文卷， 叫那位严厉的录事重新写过， 或者就完全涂掉原先的那篇！ 99 爱人哪！要是你我他同心协力， 把握这全部事理的可悲设计， 我们就不用先把它砸个粉碎， 再按自己的心意拼它在一起！* 100 那边升起了找寻我们的明月—— 今后她还有多少回阴晴圆缺， 将多少回在这园中找寻我们， 但我们中有人或已消歇寂灭！* 101 如果你也象这月儿，啊，送酒的， 你会穿过星散在草上的游客， 欢乐地来到我曾坐过的地方—— 啊，请把空空的酒杯倒个个儿！
注释： 4 *新岁：这个新岁以春分为元旦。在波斯改用阴历后的长时期内，这一天仍是一个相传由杰姆西王（参看第5首注**）规定的节日。奥马尔在他的诗中时常提及杰姆西；他还参加了改订杰姆西历的工作。 **摩西的素手：语出《圣经·出埃及记》第4章第6节。据说这诗中指的是一种颇象藏红花的波斯花儿。 ***耶稣在那里的地上发出叹息：古代波斯人认为，耶稣起死回生的法力在他的呼吸之中。 5 *伊兰园：波斯一古园名，为夏达德王所建。现己湮没于阿拉伯沙漠之中。 **杰姆西王的七环杯：杰姆西王为传说中的波斯王；七环杯为一灵杯，象征七天、七海、七行星等。 6 *大卫：《圣经》中的古希伯来王，善歌。 **佩雷维语：三世纪到七世纪期间通行于波斯的语言，介于古波斯语和现代波斯语之间，属印欧语系之伊朗语族。 8 *内沙布尔：诗人的诞生地。见前言第3页注。[整理者注：该条注释为“内沙布尔：现伊朗东部霍腊散省（一译呼罗珊）城市名，历史上曾是首府，位于现省会马什哈德以西不远。原文有Naishápúr等各种拼法。”] 巴比伦：古都名。曾是古巴比伦王国及新巴比伦王国的都城。位于幼发拉底河东岸和两河流域中心，在现伊拉克境内。 9 *杰姆西：见第5首注**。 凯柯巴：古波斯国王。 10 *凯霍斯鲁：即波斯帝国创建者居鲁士（前？—前529）。他于前538年占领巴比伦城，灭新巴比伦王国。 **扎尔：菲尔多西《王书》中功业卓著的英雄。鲁斯吐姆为扎尔之子，以勇武著称。 ***哈蒂姆：以东方式慷慨而著称的人物。 11 *马穆德（971？—1030）：阿富汗加兹尼王朝国王。 波斯之霍腊散一带（见前言第3页注[整理者注：见上第8首注*]）曾受其统治。他在位期间 （998—1030）实行极端的集权专制，并多次侵犯印度。 12 *这首柔巴依译诗自十九世纪发表以来，是一首被人引 用得最多的四行诗。据认为，除了《圣经》之外，没有任何英语译文能象它这样为英语国家的人民所熟知。 13 *教祖：指伊斯兰教祖穆罕默德。 **远处隆隆的鼓声：波斯皇宫外置有大鼓。 18 *杰姆西得意豪饮的宫廷：这里指的是现在位于伊朗法尔斯省省会设拉子东北的波斯波利斯。该城又称塔赫特·伊·杰姆西，意为“杰姆西之御座”。现仅存一些遗迹。 **巴拉姆：波斯萨珊王朝（226—642）的一个君主。 19 *恺撒（前101一前44）：古罗马的执政官和统帅，后 被刺身死。 **在《获默伽亚漠之绝句》一文中，闻一多先生曾对个别几首柔巴依作了忠实优美的翻译。他的这一首译文是： 我怕最红的红不过 生在帝王喋血处的蔷薇； 园中朵朵玉簪儿怕是 从当年美人头上坠下来的。 20 *江漘、绛唇：原文分别作river-lip及lip，以表示两者之间存在着某种联系。为了在译文中传达这种联系，现将这两字分别译为江漘（jiāng chún，意为江边）及绛唇（jiàng chún）这两个声音相近的词。 21 *怕己归入昨天的七千年之内：按照有的解释，在奥马尔·哈亚姆时代，波斯人认为地球的年龄是七千岁。 26 *司祷：清真寺塔楼上的呼叫者，每天在一定的时刻叫信徒们祈祷。 29 *我来时好比流水，去时象风吹：在波斯诗人阿塔尔的笔下，塞尔柱国的两朝宰相尼扎姆·乌尔·莫尔克被杀时说了奥马尔·哈亚姆诗句中的话： 神哪，我正在风儿的手中消逝。 在《奥马尔·哈亚姆之柔巴依集》的序言中，菲茨杰拉德引用了莫尔克《遗言集》中若干有关奥马尔少年时代的片断：莫尔克、奥马尔和哈桑·本·萨巴赫曾一起在著名学者穆瓦法克门下学习。在哈桑的提议下，他们立下誓约，日后有福同享。莫尔克官居宰相后，荐举哈桑做了官。但他嫌升迁过慢，搞阴谋反对莫尔克，失败后遭到贬黜，结果成了一个专搞暗杀的教派的首领（莫尔克也死在他的手下）。奥马尔却不愿做官，只求在其庇荫下隐居一隅，潜心于学术研究。 31 *飞过七天门坐上了土星宝椅：波斯神话中，土星为第七重天的主宰。 38 *造物主塑出了人的形体容颜：据《圣经》故事，上帝按照自己的形象，用泥土捏成了人，又向他吹了口气，于是人就有了生命。第73、81、84等首同此。 **整个第三版中，只有这一首同第四版的完全不同： 听，听一会儿！正是用这种泥土—— 这吐出人们低语的倒霉泥土， 他们塑出了人儿不幸的形态， 然后又用这个名字把他称呼。 49 *珠片：又叫珠光片、亮片或八面光。常用来装饰衣物（特别是戏装）的金属片或塑料片。它晶光锃亮而价格低廉。 50 *阿里夫（Alif）：阿拉伯字母中的第一个字母（在波斯语中，其音名为Alef ）。伊斯兰教的真主“安拉”（Allah）也以它为起首字母。 51 *从鱼到月亮：据波斯神话，万物从月亮开始，到鱼结束。 55 *葡萄的女儿：喻葡萄酒。 56 *除了酒我从未深究任何事物：这里，奥马尔是在拿他的学术活动开玩笑。他还有一首柔巴依，是有关数学的。特别奇怪的是，多恩博士（Dr. Donne）的几首诗歌同它竟然如出一辙。奥马尔的这首柔巴依如下: 你同我都是一个圆规的形骸— 虽有两只脚却只有一个脑袋； 当圆弧的中心我们一旦确定， 两个脚尖我们就并它在一块。 59 *教派：原文是七十二个宗派。据认为，世界上有七十二种宗教，有人认为伊斯兰教包括在内；有人认为不包括在内。因非确数，不译。 60 *马穆德：参看第11首注。这首诗在字面上指的是马穆德对印度的战争这段历史。据记载，他曾多次侵犯印度，用掠夺来的大量财富把加兹尼改建为辉煌壮丽的城市。 61 *卷须：植物学名词。某些植物用来缠绕或附着其它物体的器官。这里指的是从茎演变而成的葡萄卷须。 68 *这光儿发自太阳点亮的灯笼：指的是月亮。这首柔巴依中用的是东方走马灯的形象。 73 *见38首注*。 75 *帕尔温即昴宿；穆希塔利即木星。 **天驹：喻太阳，这首柔巴依的内容涉及星象学。奥马尔·哈亚姆谙于此道，曾以此谋生。 ***菲茨杰拉德的各版原文中，仅第三版中在此行结束处有一句号，其它的一、二、四、五版中，该处均无标点，也即此首应与下面的一首连起来读。可参看第50首及51首末行的标点情况。 79 *这句中的“我们”两字，根据原作第二版及1887年版译出。 81 *参看38首注*。 **据《圣经》故事，上帝在伊甸之东给人类始祖亚当和夏娃安排了一个乐园。但园中还有一条引诱夏娃吃了禁果的蛇。 ***这首柔巴依中的反宗教思想达到了最高潮。奥马尔毕竟还是一个名义上的穆斯林，当然难以写出这样的诗来。很明显，这首诗中的“你”己不再是中世纪波斯的伊斯兰真主，而是维多利亚时代英国的基督教上帝。这首柔巴依极受托马斯·哈代喜爱。据说他临终时还请人把此诗念给他听。 此首之后，从82到90的九首柔巴依，在各版原文中都与全文隔开，而在第一版中还冠以《陶壶篇》之名。 82 *斋月：伊斯兰教历的九月是伊斯兰教信徒的封斋期。 84 *参看第38首注*。 90 *它们期待的新月己出斋露面：伊斯兰教历（阴历）九月封斋后第二十九天黄昏时，如望见新月，第二天就开斋，否则便推迟一天。因此急于开斋的穆斯林等待新月的心情十分殷切。奥马尔还有一首同样题材的柔巴依： 高兴吧！沉闷的斋月就要消逝， 不久，新月将补偿我们的损失； 看，给时光、斋戒害得瘦弱、佝偻、 苍白的老月，正在从天边消逝！ 闻一多先生在《莪默伽亚漠之绝句》一文中，对此诗也作了很精采的翻译： 高兴些吧——愁闷的月份终要灭亡， 新生的月儿渐渐将给我们酬偿： 看啊，那龙钟饥饿的老月， 憔悴佝偻，己奄奄垂毙于天上！ 99 *在《莪默伽亚漠之绝句》一文中，闻一多对此诗作了如下的翻译： 爱哟，你我若能和“他”钩通好了， 将这全体不幸的世界攫到， 我们怕不要捣得它碎片纷纷， 好依着你我的心愿去再抟再造！ 100 *闻一多对此诗也作了翻译（从第二行后半部起到第四行末）： （那儿方升的皓月又来窥人了， 月哟，你今后又将）圆缺几遭； 又几遭来这花园寻觅我们， 恐怕此中有一人再难寻到！]]> 月亮的女儿们 tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2009:/calvino//1.1032 2009-08-27T15:57:07Z 2009-08-27T15:59:45Z （本文系Ma Jian网友翻译。） 月球最初并没有表层大气作为保护层，暴露于无休无止的陨石撞击和太阳辐射的侵蚀之中。据康奈尔大学托马斯·葛得教授所说，月球表面的岩石在与陨石粒子的磨擦过程里被研成粉末。而根据芝加哥大学格拉德·凯柏教授的说法，从月球岩浆散逸出来的气体可能曾使这个地球的卫星变得轻盈而多孔，有如一块浮石。 “月亮是个老家伙，”Qfwfq表示同意，“满脸都是坑洞，伤痕累累。它裸露着身体在宇宙中运转，就像一条被啃光的骨头，身上的肉被侵蚀殆尽。但这样的事情不是头一回发生了。我记得，有许多月亮比这个更为年迈，也更为残破。我曾目睹这些月亮的一生，目睹他们的诞生，运转和死亡：一个被飞射而来的星星穿刺而亡，另一个死于它上面的所有火山口发生大爆炸，还有一个身上渗出瞬间挥发的琥珀色汗珠，然后浑身覆盖了淡绿色的云团，尔后收缩成一扇干燥而多孔的贝壳。” 当一个月亮死去的时候，地球上发生的事情是难以描述的，但我尝试用还记得的最后一个例子来谈谈。在经历漫长的进化过程之后，地球已经多少有点我们现在的样子；换言之，它已进入一个轿车比鞋底淘汰得更快的时代。与现今人类几乎一模一样的生物生产、购买、销售各样商品，城市的璀璨覆盖了所有大陆。这些城市的发展类似于我们今时今日的相同地点，不过大陆的形状有所不同。那会儿甚至也有一个纽约市，相似于你们都熟悉的纽约，但它更显新，应该说，更充溢着各种新产品——它如同一个全新的牙刷，它的曼哈顿区向外伸展着，上面闪闪发光的摩天大厦就像那尼龙质地的刷毛一般 在这个世界，每一样物件只要有一点点损坏或变旧，亦即在出现第一处压痕或者污迹时，便会遭到丢弃，并且一件崭新而完美的替代品会取而代之——只有一个错漏，一个阴影：月亮。它裸露着身体，历经侵蚀地行走于天际，黯淡无光，越发与这里地上的世界背道而驰，是过气物品中的漏网之鱼。 古老的表述，像“盈满之月”啦，“半月”啦，“下弦月”啦，依然在延用，但事实上已经变成一种修辞手段：我们怎么能够说一个布满划痕和坑洞，并且看上去像就要伴随着一场碎石雨坠落到我们头上的东西“盈满”呢？更不要说渐晦之时的月亮了！它十足一块被一点点啃掉的奶酪外皮，而那月朔之时总是在我们预期不到的时候到来。在每一期新月之夜，我们都疑惑他会否再度出现（还是我们期望它就此消失而去？），而当它真的再度出现，并且变得越来越像一把缺齿的梳子时，我们不由打个寒颤，侧目而不视之。 这是个压抑的情景。我们离开人群，挎着包包，从日夜开放的百货公司出来，看见在摩天大厦上架设得越来越高的霓虹灯告知我们，将会有源源不断的新产品发售，我们突然之间见到它苍白的身影在炫目的灯光之中缓慢而病态地移动着——一种想法便萦绕于我们脑间无法被驱散：我们所买的每一件新货，每一个产品，都会相似地变旧，破损，褪色；我们还损失了外出购物和疯狂工作的热诚——一种对工商业不无影响的损失。 正是如此，我们开始考虑如何处置这个有害无益的卫星。它毫无贡献，只是一艘无用的弃船。当它变轻之时，它的轨道会开始偏向地球：没有其他什么东西比它更危险了。随着它的逼近，它的运转周期越来越慢；我们不能再计算出月相。甚至乎连历法，这月份更替的节奏，也变成只是一项例行公事；月亮一瘸一瘸地向前移动，仿佛它就要准备崩溃。 在这些月亮低悬的夜晚，性情变得更为躁动的人们开始举止异常。总有一个梦游者沿着摩天大楼的扶手缓慢向上爬，伸出双手想要够到月亮，或是一个变狼幻想症病人，在时代广场的中心放声狂啸，又或者是一个纵火狂放火烧码头仓库。如今这些都已经是寻常事，不再吸引好事者聚集围观。但当我看见一个少女完全赤裸地坐在中央公园的长凳上时，我还是不得不停了下来。 甚至在我遇见她之前，我便有种感觉，某样神秘的事情将会发生。当我开着开蓬跑车经过中央公园时，我感到自己正沐浴在一道闪烁着的光之中，就像荧光灯泡在达到稳定之前放射出的一闪一闪的铅色亮光。我周遭的景色就如同一个陷入月球火山口的花园一般。那个一丝不挂的女孩坐在一个反射着单薄月光的池塘旁边。我刹住车。我想是在一秒之间我留意到了她。我走出车向她跑去，但一下子又停下来。我并不知道她的身份；我只是感觉到，我得赶紧为她做点事儿。 所有东西都散落在那张长凳周围：她的衣服，一只长袜和一只鞋子在这儿，另一只袜子与另一只鞋子却在那儿，她的耳环，她的项链，她的手镯，钱包，里面的东西从大大的口子漏出来的购物袋，还有数不尽的小包和小物件，仿佛她在一次大手笔疯狂购物后的回家路上，突然听到某种东西召唤她的声音，然后扔掉所有东西，发觉必须把自己从所有将其束缚于地球的客体和符号中解放出来，而现在她正等待着被带上月球去。 “发生什么事了？”我结结巴巴地说，“有什么我能帮助你的吗？” “帮助？”她朝上注视着我问道，“所有人都爱莫能助。所有人都无能为力。”很明显，她说的话并非关于她自己，而是关于月亮。 月亮在我们之上，呈现一个中间突出的形状，一副就要压下来的样子，如同一个破损的屋顶，布满芝士磨板上的那种坑孔。就在这一刻，动物园里的动物开始嗥叫起来。 “到此为止了吗？”我机械地问道，就连我自己也不知道我在说什么。 她回答道：“刚开始呢。”或者是类似的其他说话（她说话时几乎没有张开嘴唇。） “你想说什么？是说这是结局的开始，还是其他别的什么事情正要开始？” 她站起来，走过草地。她有一头铜红色的头发，披散在肩上。她是那么的弱质纤纤，以使我觉得有需要以某种方式去守着她，保护她。我把手伸过去，准备若是她倒下来或者接近什么可能会伤害到她的东西时抓住她。但我不敢用手碰到她，总是和她的皮肤保持几厘米的距离。在我跟着她穿过花园的一路上，我发觉她的动作和我十分相似，即是，她也在尽力保护着某样易碎的东西，某样容易掉到地上，摔成碎片的东西——因此需要这样子将这件东西带到一个可以把它轻轻安置下来的地方——某样她不能够碰到，只能够用手势指出的东西：月亮。 月亮仿似迷了路一样。它偏离了轨道，再也不知何去何从；它任自己如一片枯叶般飘零。有时候它突然出现，垂直坠向地球，在另一些时候，则以螺旋之势打着圈儿下降，还有些时候，它看上去就像漂流着一样。它正在变轻，这是毋庸置疑的：在有一瞬间，它看似就要撞向广场饭店，但其实它滑入了两座摩天大楼之间的防火走廊，从哈德逊河的方向消失而去。短暂时间过后它再度出现在城市的另一边，突然从一朵云彩之后窜出，以灰白色的月光洒照着黑人住宅区和东河，然后，它似乎被一股强风吹刮到，滚向了布朗科斯区。 “在那儿！”我喊出来，“在那儿——它停下来了！ “它不能停下来！”少女惊叫道，裸露身体，赤着脚板地跑出草地。 “你要去哪里呀？你不能这样子周围走！快停下来！喂，我在跟你说话啊！你叫什么名字？” 她喊出一个像是戴安娜或者狄安娜的名字，也可能是一声祈祷。然后她就消失不见了。为了跟上她，我钻进汽车，沿着中央公园的快车道搜寻。 车灯的光线照亮了篱笆，山丘，石塔，但那少女，戴安娜，却无迹可寻。如今我已走得太远了：我必定已经略过她了。我转头照原路驶去。一把声音在我身后说：“不，就是那头，继续追！” 坐在车后座的正是那位赤裸的少女。她正直指着月亮。 我想叫她下车，解释我不能这个样子载着她大模大样地在城市里开车，但我不敢叫她分神。她正专心致志，以防那时隐时现的辉光从视线逃走。但不管怎么样——这更为诡异——似乎没有路人留意这个坐在我车子后座的女性幻影。 我们驶过一条连接曼哈顿和主城的大桥。现在我们走在一条多车道高速公路上。其他车就走在我们旁边。我两眼直直地盯着前方，害怕我俩的行径所必然引起的来自周围车辆那儿的哗然大笑和说三道四。但当有一辆轿车超过我时，我惊讶得几乎要把车开出马路：一个全裸的少女蜷伏在车顶，头发随风飘扬。一刹那间，我以为我的乘客从一辆开足马力的轿车跳上了另一辆；但我只稍微转过脸去便看见戴安娜的双膝仍在那儿，与我鼻子持平的位置。她的身体不是在我眼前唯一的夺目之躯，我见到少女随处都是，用各种最怪异的姿势伸展着身体，紧贴着奔驰着的汽车上的天线，车门，或者挡泥板。她们金色或黑色的秀发，和她们裸露的皮肤发出的粉色或小麦色光泽形成鲜明对比。每一辆车上都有一名这种谜之女乘客，全都身体往前靠，催促她们的司机追赶月亮。 她们受到濒危之月的召唤——我敢肯定。那儿有多少这样的少女呢？越来越多的车子载着月之少女从城市的各个城区汇合于似乎停止不动的月亮之下的地方，聚集在每一个十字路口和道路交界。在城市的边缘，我们发觉来到了一个废车停置场前面。 道路消失于一片有着小型的山谷、山脊、山丘和山峰的地方，但造就这种崎岖地势的并非这里的原始地形，而是那些一层层被扔掉的商品：消费至上的城市用过这儿的东西，为了享受到使用新商品的快乐便将其抛诸脑后，让它们在积聚二手货的邻居这儿寿终正寝。 经过长年累月的堆积，破冰箱垒成的堆阜，生活杂志黄页以及废弃灯泡遍布于一个巨大的垃圾场。月亮现身于这个狼藉腐烂的王国之上，一片片变形废旧金属垃圾鼓起上升，犹如被汹涌的潮水冲起。老朽的月亮和那片如同焊上了一块各类残骸的混成物的地表十分相像；废旧金属的山脉变成首尾相接的一条链，就像一座露天圆形剧场，形状就跟一个陨石坑或月海如出一辙。月亮悬挂在这片空间之上。行星和它的卫星就如同对方的镜像一般运转。 我们的车子停下来了。没有什么比车的坟墓更让汽车怯懦了。戴安娜下了车，其他所有的戴安娜也一样。但现在她们身上的能量好像在减弱：她们迈着犹豫不决的步伐，似乎她们发觉自己置身于那些废铜烂铁之中，就蓦然意识到自己全身一丝不挂；许多少女抱着双臂挡着乳房，就好似受凉而打着颤一样。与此同时，她们散开来，爬上废弃物的山脉，爬下来进入那露天圆形剧场，在中心排成一个巨大的圈。然后她们全都高高举起双手。 月亮动了起来，就像受到她们手势的影响。在一霎那间它似乎恢复了能量，再度爬起来。站成圈子的少女双手向外伸展，脸和乳房朝着月亮。这是月亮向她们要求的吗？它需要她们把自己撑回天空？我没有时间去细想这问题。在那非常时刻，起重吊车粉墨登场了。 这台起重机由权威设计及制造，特别用作除去那不美观的累赘，净化苍穹。这是一辆加装了一条高高举起，蟹钳一般的吊臂的推土机。履带运转，吊车前行，稳夯有力，有如螃蟹；等它到达施工地点，似乎变得更是稳当了，底盘紧贴地面。吊臂快速旋转，起重车把它的爪子伸向天空：一辆有一条这么长吊臂的起重吊车能被造出来，实在让人难以置信。吊臂上的铲斗张开，露出利齿；现在，与其说像一只蟹钳，不如说它更像一张鲨鱼的大嘴。月亮就在那儿。它颤抖着身体，好像想要逃跑，但起重车似乎带有磁力：正如我们所见，月亮像被吸住了，落到起重车的爪子上。伴随着一阵干涩的响声——“咵！”——铲斗的双颌闭上了。在一瞬间，月亮似乎是像块蛋白酥那样被粉碎了，但是事实上它仍留在那儿，一半在铲斗内，一半在铲斗外。它被压成了扁圆形，就像被铲斗牙齿咬着的一支雪茄烟。土尘如骤雨一般掉下来。 吊车现在尝试把月亮从轨道上扯下来。吊臂开始扭向后方：此刻，需要很费力气才能够扭动吊臂。在这整个过程中，戴安娜和她的伙伴们高举双手一动不动地留在原地，似是在期盼以圈子的力量战胜敌人的进攻。土尘从崩溃的月亮上掉下来，落到她们的脸上，乳房上，她们才只好散开。戴安娜失声痛哭起来。 此时，被禁锢的月亮失去了它仅余的光华：它变成一块形状丑陋的黑色岩石。如果铲斗不能将它好好卸下，它便会撞到地球上。地面上，工人们正张罗着一张金属网，用长钉固定在地上；起重车正小心翼翼地把它的负荷卸载到这个区域。 月亮到达地面，呈现为一个布满坑洞的沙质巨岩，如此的黯淡，浑浊，难以想象曾几何时它以明亮的反射光华来照亮天空。铲斗的双颌张开了：吊车随着履带运转而后退，当卸下负重的一霎，它差点儿翻倒。工人们已经把网准备好了：他们把月亮网住，困在大网和地面之间。月亮在桎梏之中挣扎了一下：就像地震时出现的一波振荡，导致垃圾山上的空罐子雪崩般地滚下来。其后一切便再度回复平静。现在，那片无月的天空被大型照灯的光芒所浸淫。但不管怎么样，黑暗总算是消退了些。 拂晓之神发现这车的坟地上又增添了一具残骸：月亮被困在坟地中央，几乎不能将其和其他被弃置的东西区分开来；一样的颜色，一样糟糕的外观，让你难以想象他们也曾经新净光鲜过。一阵低沉连续的声响在这凡尘垃圾上的火山坑中回荡：拂晓之光照在一群懒洋洋，刚醒的活物身上。蓬头垢面的家伙们正在废弃货车被掏空了的躯壳，损毁的轮胎，受压变形的铁皮之间穿行。 在这堆被抛弃的物件之中居住着一个被抛弃者的社群——被排挤于社会边缘，或者是宁愿自我放逐的人；厌倦了奔走于城市，购买和销售注定转眼便会落伍的新商品的人；认为被丢弃的东西才是世界上唯一的真正财富的人。这些消瘦的人围绕着月亮，遍布那露天剧场似的垃圾场，或站或坐。这帮人的脸都被胡须或蓬乱的长发遮去半边。这是一帮衣衫褴褛，穿着失礼的人，而我那全身赤裸的戴安娜，还有昨晚其他所有少女就混在他们中间。他们走上前去，动手把那些用深扎土中的长钉固定着的钢网弄松。 忽然，如同一艘软式飞艇从停泊码头飙出，月亮上升起来，盘旋于少女的头顶和挤满流浪汉的看台之上，被钢网缠着，悬挂在那里。戴安娜和她的伙伴们正对付着那些网丝，一会儿用力拉扯，一会儿把它们抽出来。突然，少女们跑起来，月亮跟着她们，身上依然缠着网丝的一头。... 月球最初并没有表层大气作为保护层，暴露于无休无止的陨石撞击和太阳辐射的侵蚀之中。据康奈尔大学托马斯·葛得教授所说，月球表面的岩石在与陨石粒子的磨擦过程里被研成粉末。而根据芝加哥大学格拉德·凯柏教授的说法，从月球岩浆散逸出来的气体可能曾使这个地球的卫星变得轻盈而多孔，有如一块浮石。 “月亮是个老家伙，”Qfwfq表示同意，“满脸都是坑洞，伤痕累累。它裸露着身体在宇宙中运转，就像一条被啃光的骨头，身上的肉被侵蚀殆尽。但这样的事情不是头一回发生了。我记得，有许多月亮比这个更为年迈，也更为残破。我曾目睹这些月亮的一生，目睹他们的诞生，运转和死亡：一个被飞射而来的星星穿刺而亡，另一个死于它上面的所有火山口发生大爆炸，还有一个身上渗出瞬间挥发的琥珀色汗珠，然后浑身覆盖了淡绿色的云团，尔后收缩成一扇干燥而多孔的贝壳。” 当一个月亮死去的时候，地球上发生的事情是难以描述的，但我尝试用还记得的最后一个例子来谈谈。在经历漫长的进化过程之后，地球已经多少有点我们现在的样子；换言之，它已进入一个轿车比鞋底淘汰得更快的时代。与现今人类几乎一模一样的生物生产、购买、销售各样商品，城市的璀璨覆盖了所有大陆。这些城市的发展类似于我们今时今日的相同地点，不过大陆的形状有所不同。那会儿甚至也有一个纽约市，相似于你们都熟悉的纽约，但它更显新，应该说，更充溢着各种新产品——它如同一个全新的牙刷，它的曼哈顿区向外伸展着，上面闪闪发光的摩天大厦就像那尼龙质地的刷毛一般 在这个世界，每一样物件只要有一点点损坏或变旧，亦即在出现第一处压痕或者污迹时，便会遭到丢弃，并且一件崭新而完美的替代品会取而代之——只有一个错漏，一个阴影：月亮。它裸露着身体，历经侵蚀地行走于天际，黯淡无光，越发与这里地上的世界背道而驰，是过气物品中的漏网之鱼。 古老的表述，像“盈满之月”啦，“半月”啦，“下弦月”啦，依然在延用，但事实上已经变成一种修辞手段：我们怎么能够说一个布满划痕和坑洞，并且看上去像就要伴随着一场碎石雨坠落到我们头上的东西“盈满”呢？更不要说渐晦之时的月亮了！它十足一块被一点点啃掉的奶酪外皮，而那月朔之时总是在我们预期不到的时候到来。在每一期新月之夜，我们都疑惑他会否再度出现（还是我们期望它就此消失而去？），而当它真的再度出现，并且变得越来越像一把缺齿的梳子时，我们不由打个寒颤，侧目而不视之。 这是个压抑的情景。我们离开人群，挎着包包，从日夜开放的百货公司出来，看见在摩天大厦上架设得越来越高的霓虹灯告知我们，将会有源源不断的新产品发售，我们突然之间见到它苍白的身影在炫目的灯光之中缓慢而病态地移动着——一种想法便萦绕于我们脑间无法被驱散：我们所买的每一件新货，每一个产品，都会相似地变旧，破损，褪色；我们还损失了外出购物和疯狂工作的热诚——一种对工商业不无影响的损失。 正是如此，我们开始考虑如何处置这个有害无益的卫星。它毫无贡献，只是一艘无用的弃船。当它变轻之时，它的轨道会开始偏向地球：没有其他什么东西比它更危险了。随着它的逼近，它的运转周期越来越慢；我们不能再计算出月相。甚至乎连历法，这月份更替的节奏，也变成只是一项例行公事；月亮一瘸一瘸地向前移动，仿佛它就要准备崩溃。 在这些月亮低悬的夜晚，性情变得更为躁动的人们开始举止异常。总有一个梦游者沿着摩天大楼的扶手缓慢向上爬，伸出双手想要够到月亮，或是一个变狼幻想症病人，在时代广场的中心放声狂啸，又或者是一个纵火狂放火烧码头仓库。如今这些都已经是寻常事，不再吸引好事者聚集围观。但当我看见一个少女完全赤裸地坐在中央公园的长凳上时，我还是不得不停了下来。 甚至在我遇见她之前，我便有种感觉，某样神秘的事情将会发生。当我开着开蓬跑车经过中央公园时，我感到自己正沐浴在一道闪烁着的光之中，就像荧光灯泡在达到稳定之前放射出的一闪一闪的铅色亮光。我周遭的景色就如同一个陷入月球火山口的花园一般。那个一丝不挂的女孩坐在一个反射着单薄月光的池塘旁边。我刹住车。我想是在一秒之间我留意到了她。我走出车向她跑去，但一下子又停下来。我并不知道她的身份；我只是感觉到，我得赶紧为她做点事儿。 所有东西都散落在那张长凳周围：她的衣服，一只长袜和一只鞋子在这儿，另一只袜子与另一只鞋子却在那儿，她的耳环，她的项链，她的手镯，钱包，里面的东西从大大的口子漏出来的购物袋，还有数不尽的小包和小物件，仿佛她在一次大手笔疯狂购物后的回家路上，突然听到某种东西召唤她的声音，然后扔掉所有东西，发觉必须把自己从所有将其束缚于地球的客体和符号中解放出来，而现在她正等待着被带上月球去。 “发生什么事了？”我结结巴巴地说，“有什么我能帮助你的吗？” “帮助？”她朝上注视着我问道，“所有人都爱莫能助。所有人都无能为力。”很明显，她说的话并非关于她自己，而是关于月亮。 月亮在我们之上，呈现一个中间突出的形状，一副就要压下来的样子，如同一个破损的屋顶，布满芝士磨板上的那种坑孔。就在这一刻，动物园里的动物开始嗥叫起来。 “到此为止了吗？”我机械地问道，就连我自己也不知道我在说什么。 她回答道：“刚开始呢。”或者是类似的其他说话（她说话时几乎没有张开嘴唇。） “你想说什么？是说这是结局的开始，还是其他别的什么事情正要开始？” 她站起来，走过草地。她有一头铜红色的头发，披散在肩上。她是那么的弱质纤纤，以使我觉得有需要以某种方式去守着她，保护她。我把手伸过去，准备若是她倒下来或者接近什么可能会伤害到她的东西时抓住她。但我不敢用手碰到她，总是和她的皮肤保持几厘米的距离。在我跟着她穿过花园的一路上，我发觉她的动作和我十分相似，即是，她也在尽力保护着某样易碎的东西，某样容易掉到地上，摔成碎片的东西——因此需要这样子将这件东西带到一个可以把它轻轻安置下来的地方——某样她不能够碰到，只能够用手势指出的东西：月亮。 月亮仿似迷了路一样。它偏离了轨道，再也不知何去何从；它任自己如一片枯叶般飘零。有时候它突然出现，垂直坠向地球，在另一些时候，则以螺旋之势打着圈儿下降，还有些时候，它看上去就像漂流着一样。它正在变轻，这是毋庸置疑的：在有一瞬间，它看似就要撞向广场饭店，但其实它滑入了两座摩天大楼之间的防火走廊，从哈德逊河的方向消失而去。短暂时间过后它再度出现在城市的另一边，突然从一朵云彩之后窜出，以灰白色的月光洒照着黑人住宅区和东河，然后，它似乎被一股强风吹刮到，滚向了布朗科斯区。 “在那儿！”我喊出来，“在那儿——它停下来了！ “它不能停下来！”少女惊叫道，裸露身体，赤着脚板地跑出草地。 “你要去哪里呀？你不能这样子周围走！快停下来！喂，我在跟你说话啊！你叫什么名字？” 她喊出一个像是戴安娜或者狄安娜的名字，也可能是一声祈祷。然后她就消失不见了。为了跟上她，我钻进汽车，沿着中央公园的快车道搜寻。 车灯的光线照亮了篱笆，山丘，石塔，但那少女，戴安娜，却无迹可寻。如今我已走得太远了：我必定已经略过她了。我转头照原路驶去。一把声音在我身后说：“不，就是那头，继续追！” 坐在车后座的正是那位赤裸的少女。她正直指着月亮。 我想叫她下车，解释我不能这个样子载着她大模大样地在城市里开车，但我不敢叫她分神。她正专心致志，以防那时隐时现的辉光从视线逃走。但不管怎么样——这更为诡异——似乎没有路人留意这个坐在我车子后座的女性幻影。 我们驶过一条连接曼哈顿和主城的大桥。现在我们走在一条多车道高速公路上。其他车就走在我们旁边。我两眼直直地盯着前方，害怕我俩的行径所必然引起的来自周围车辆那儿的哗然大笑和说三道四。但当有一辆轿车超过我时，我惊讶得几乎要把车开出马路：一个全裸的少女蜷伏在车顶，头发随风飘扬。一刹那间，我以为我的乘客从一辆开足马力的轿车跳上了另一辆；但我只稍微转过脸去便看见戴安娜的双膝仍在那儿，与我鼻子持平的位置。她的身体不是在我眼前唯一的夺目之躯，我见到少女随处都是，用各种最怪异的姿势伸展着身体，紧贴着奔驰着的汽车上的天线，车门，或者挡泥板。她们金色或黑色的秀发，和她们裸露的皮肤发出的粉色或小麦色光泽形成鲜明对比。每一辆车上都有一名这种谜之女乘客，全都身体往前靠，催促她们的司机追赶月亮。 她们受到濒危之月的召唤——我敢肯定。那儿有多少这样的少女呢？越来越多的车子载着月之少女从城市的各个城区汇合于似乎停止不动的月亮之下的地方，聚集在每一个十字路口和道路交界。在城市的边缘，我们发觉来到了一个废车停置场前面。 道路消失于一片有着小型的山谷、山脊、山丘和山峰的地方，但造就这种崎岖地势的并非这里的原始地形，而是那些一层层被扔掉的商品：消费至上的城市用过这儿的东西，为了享受到使用新商品的快乐便将其抛诸脑后，让它们在积聚二手货的邻居这儿寿终正寝。 经过长年累月的堆积，破冰箱垒成的堆阜，生活杂志黄页以及废弃灯泡遍布于一个巨大的垃圾场。月亮现身于这个狼藉腐烂的王国之上，一片片变形废旧金属垃圾鼓起上升，犹如被汹涌的潮水冲起。老朽的月亮和那片如同焊上了一块各类残骸的混成物的地表十分相像；废旧金属的山脉变成首尾相接的一条链，就像一座露天圆形剧场，形状就跟一个陨石坑或月海如出一辙。月亮悬挂在这片空间之上。行星和它的卫星就如同对方的镜像一般运转。 我们的车子停下来了。没有什么比车的坟墓更让汽车怯懦了。戴安娜下了车，其他所有的戴安娜也一样。但现在她们身上的能量好像在减弱：她们迈着犹豫不决的步伐，似乎她们发觉自己置身于那些废铜烂铁之中，就蓦然意识到自己全身一丝不挂；许多少女抱着双臂挡着乳房，就好似受凉而打着颤一样。与此同时，她们散开来，爬上废弃物的山脉，爬下来进入那露天圆形剧场，在中心排成一个巨大的圈。然后她们全都高高举起双手。 月亮动了起来，就像受到她们手势的影响。在一霎那间它似乎恢复了能量，再度爬起来。站成圈子的少女双手向外伸展，脸和乳房朝着月亮。这是月亮向她们要求的吗？它需要她们把自己撑回天空？我没有时间去细想这问题。在那非常时刻，起重吊车粉墨登场了。 这台起重机由权威设计及制造，特别用作除去那不美观的累赘，净化苍穹。这是一辆加装了一条高高举起，蟹钳一般的吊臂的推土机。履带运转，吊车前行，稳夯有力，有如螃蟹；等它到达施工地点，似乎变得更是稳当了，底盘紧贴地面。吊臂快速旋转，起重车把它的爪子伸向天空：一辆有一条这么长吊臂的起重吊车能被造出来，实在让人难以置信。吊臂上的铲斗张开，露出利齿；现在，与其说像一只蟹钳，不如说它更像一张鲨鱼的大嘴。月亮就在那儿。它颤抖着身体，好像想要逃跑，但起重车似乎带有磁力：正如我们所见，月亮像被吸住了，落到起重车的爪子上。伴随着一阵干涩的响声——“咵！”——铲斗的双颌闭上了。在一瞬间，月亮似乎是像块蛋白酥那样被粉碎了，但是事实上它仍留在那儿，一半在铲斗内，一半在铲斗外。它被压成了扁圆形，就像被铲斗牙齿咬着的一支雪茄烟。土尘如骤雨一般掉下来。 吊车现在尝试把月亮从轨道上扯下来。吊臂开始扭向后方：此刻，需要很费力气才能够扭动吊臂。在这整个过程中，戴安娜和她的伙伴们高举双手一动不动地留在原地，似是在期盼以圈子的力量战胜敌人的进攻。土尘从崩溃的月亮上掉下来，落到她们的脸上，乳房上，她们才只好散开。戴安娜失声痛哭起来。 此时，被禁锢的月亮失去了它仅余的光华：它变成一块形状丑陋的黑色岩石。如果铲斗不能将它好好卸下，它便会撞到地球上。地面上，工人们正张罗着一张金属网，用长钉固定在地上；起重车正小心翼翼地把它的负荷卸载到这个区域。 月亮到达地面，呈现为一个布满坑洞的沙质巨岩，如此的黯淡，浑浊，难以想象曾几何时它以明亮的反射光华来照亮天空。铲斗的双颌张开了：吊车随着履带运转而后退，当卸下负重的一霎，它差点儿翻倒。工人们已经把网准备好了：他们把月亮网住，困在大网和地面之间。月亮在桎梏之中挣扎了一下：就像地震时出现的一波振荡，导致垃圾山上的空罐子雪崩般地滚下来。其后一切便再度回复平静。现在，那片无月的天空被大型照灯的光芒所浸淫。但不管怎么样，黑暗总算是消退了些。 拂晓之神发现这车的坟地上又增添了一具残骸：月亮被困在坟地中央，几乎不能将其和其他被弃置的东西区分开来；一样的颜色，一样糟糕的外观，让你难以想象他们也曾经新净光鲜过。一阵低沉连续的声响在这凡尘垃圾上的火山坑中回荡：拂晓之光照在一群懒洋洋，刚醒的活物身上。蓬头垢面的家伙们正在废弃货车被掏空了的躯壳，损毁的轮胎，受压变形的铁皮之间穿行。 在这堆被抛弃的物件之中居住着一个被抛弃者的社群——被排挤于社会边缘，或者是宁愿自我放逐的人；厌倦了奔走于城市，购买和销售注定转眼便会落伍的新商品的人；认为被丢弃的东西才是世界上唯一的真正财富的人。这些消瘦的人围绕着月亮，遍布那露天剧场似的垃圾场，或站或坐。这帮人的脸都被胡须或蓬乱的长发遮去半边。这是一帮衣衫褴褛，穿着失礼的人，而我那全身赤裸的戴安娜，还有昨晚其他所有少女就混在他们中间。他们走上前去，动手把那些用深扎土中的长钉固定着的钢网弄松。 忽然，如同一艘软式飞艇从停泊码头飙出，月亮上升起来，盘旋于少女的头顶和挤满流浪汉的看台之上，被钢网缠着，悬挂在那里。戴安娜和她的伙伴们正对付着那些网丝，一会儿用力拉扯，一会儿把它们抽出来。突然，少女们跑起来，月亮跟着她们，身上依然缠着网丝的一头。 随着月亮移动，一股浪潮从残骸的深谷中涌起：被压挤得像手风琴的废车蹒跚地加入到游行队伍当中，踊动前进；由破罐汇成的奔流发出像雷鸣一般的响声。你无法判断它们是在拖动着什么还是被什么所拖动。跟随着这个在垃圾堆里被拯救出来的月亮，那些被遗弃的人和物在马路之上卷土重来，涌向城市的富裕邻居那头。 那天早晨，城市里正在欢度消费者感恩日。这一年一度的盛会在九月某一天举办，专为购物者向那孜孜不倦地满足大家每一个愿望的生产活动之神表达感激而设。城镇里最大的百货公司每年都组织一次节日游行：跟随于一支奏乐队伍之后，一群盛装打扮的女孩用彩带牵引着一个体积巨大，颜色明艳的娃娃外形气球招摇过市。那天，巡游队伍正走到第五大街：领队的女孩挥舞指挥棒，大鼓被敲得梆梆响，而那个象征着“心满意足之消费者”的巨型气球，温驯地被一群头戴圆顶单檐帽，满身彩穗饰物，佩戴流苏肩章，骑着漂亮摩托车的女孩用彩带拉扯着前行。 与此同时，另一支巡游队伍正穿过迈哈顿区。那干裂而霉烂的月亮也正被赤裸的少女们拉着前进，在高楼大厦之间航行。在它后面跟着一条由报废汽车和火车残骸构成的长龙，被静默不语而渐渐壮大起来的人群簇拥其中。成千上万的人又加入了那从清晨就开始追随月亮的队伍当中。只见各种肤色的人们，许多带着大大小小孩子的家庭，纷纷加入到队伍当中，尤其是在队伍经过黑人聚居地和哈莱姆的波多黎各区时这种情况更见明显。 月之巡游在市郊一带兜兜转转，然后开始沿百老汇大街而下，静悄悄而迅速地来与那拖着巨型气球沿着第五大街行进的另一支队伍相会。 在麦迪逊广场，一支巡游队伍与另一支相遇；或者可以更准确地说，两支巡游队伍汇成了单独一支。也许是因为撞到了月亮那尖突不平的表面，那“心满意足之消费者“，瘪了气变为一张塑料布。现在坐在摩托车上的是戴安娜们，她们正用五彩缤纷的带子拖动月亮：或着，应该这么说，裸女的数目翻了一番，那些女骑手们都甩掉了她们的制服和圆顶帽子。类似的变化也出现在巡游的摩托车和汽车之上。你不能再分辨出，哪些车子是新的而哪些车子是旧的：扭曲的轮子和生锈的挡泥板跟光洁如镜，搪瓷般地反射着光泽的车身混合在一起，。 不止如此，巡游队伍所过之处，商铺橱窗便布满了蛛网和霉菌；高楼大厦里的升降电梯吱嘎作响；广告海报变得发黄；电冰箱好像变了恒温孵化箱，蛋架上坐满了小鸡；电视机上显示一片雪花。城市一下子把自己消费而尽了：现在它变成跟随在月亮背后作告别巡游的一个用后即弃的城市。 伴随着乐队打在空罐子上的鼓声，巡游队伍来到了布鲁克林大桥。戴安娜高举她的指挥棒：她的同伴们摆舞起她们的彩带。月亮作最后冲刺，穿过大桥弧形钢架的间隙，滚向大海，像一块砖头那样堕进水中，沉下去，在水面上弄出千千万万小泡沫。 此时此刻，少女们并没有松开抓着彩带的手，而是继续紧紧握着彩带；月亮把他们甩高，飞过钢架，飞出大桥：她们就像潜水者一样，在空中划出一条弧线，然后消失于水中。 我们一部分人在布鲁克林桥上，其余就在岸边的防波堤上，都站在原地吃惊地看着这一幕，正犹豫该赶紧跳下去救人，还是相信她们会再度像以前那样出现。 我们无须守候多久，海上便荡起圆圈形的波浪。在水波的中心出现了一个小岛，向上升起，就像一座山丘，然后变成一个半球，再后如同一个放在水面的球体，准确说，刚升到水面之上了；不，就像一个升向天空的月亮。说是月亮，但它已经不再和几分钟前那个我们看到沉入深海的月亮相像：然而，这个新的月亮用一种非比寻常的方式来表现它的脱胎换骨。它从海中出现，垂着一条由闪闪发亮的绿色水藻构成的尾巴；月球上喷泉喷出的水流赋予它翡翠般的光彩。它的表面就如同被一个水汽弥漫，但没有一点植物的热带雨林所覆盖。这层覆盖物看上去就像用孔雀的羽毛编成，上面布满眼睛图案，一身明艳色彩。 在这球体转眼升上天空之前，我们几乎未想到过会看到这样的景象。更多的细节都佚失于一种 “重获新生”和“生机勃勃”的笼统印象之中。此时正是黄昏：颜色的强烈差异淡化为颤栗不稳的明暗对比；现在，那月陆和月树只是这个光洁的发亮球体表面上勉强可见的轮廓。但我们能看到一些吊床正挂在月树的树枝上随风摇曳。我看到，躺在上面的，正是那些把我们带来这儿的少女。我发现了戴安娜，她悠然自得地摇着一把羽毛扇子，可能正是向我示意。 “她们在那儿！她就在那儿！”我高声喊道。我们都在叫喊。但随着月亮升入黑暗天空，只可看到月海和月陆反射太阳的光华，那再度见到她们的喜悦便已被因永远失去她们而起的痛苦所代替。 我们全都丧失了理性：所有人在大陆之上狂奔疾走，穿过那些重新覆盖大地的草原和森林，焚烧城市和公路，销毁一切我们存在的痕迹。我们仰天长啸，高高昂起长鼻和獠牙，甩动着屁股上蓬松的长毛。这股充斥我们这群青年猛犸象内心的盛怒让我们做出了这一切——其时我们发觉如今正是生命诞生之初，才明白到，我们想要的，我们永远都不能得到。]]> 摄影者历难薄 tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2009:/calvino//1.1031 2009-05-16T19:21:42Z 2009-05-16T21:11:12Z [整理者注：本文是读书公园网友hideall的译作。原贴在http://forum.bomoo.com/showthread.php?t=1368&page=2。另可参看英译本http://www.ruanyifeng.com/calvino/2007/07/the_adventure_of_a_photographer_en.html] 春天来临的时候，城里的居民们成群结队，扛着皮匣子，趁着周日出城去。他们彼此拍照，返来的时候，就如同满载的猎人一样快乐。他们成天等待，甜蜜而焦灼，只为了见到那冲洗好的相片。焦虑，又带着秘密的喜悦，如同炼金术士在暗房里操作，拒绝接受家人的任何建议，享受冲鼻的酸味。只有相片摆在面前时，他们大概才确信自己拥有过那样的一天；只有这时，山和涧、提桶儿童的跑动、妻腿上的光斑，才能确定这一切存在过，并且从此不容置疑。而其他一切，都可以溺死在可怀疑的记忆暗处不提。 看多了身边人，柏安这个从不摄影的人，开始察觉到了渐深的寂寞。当每一周，他发现自己刚刚倾诉过的对象，正在对人大谈某种滤镜的敏感性，或者哪几个感光度的数值时，那膨胀的音波使他明白。他想，大家都知道了，他对某项无趣乏味的活动，私下发表的那些讽刺言论。 从工作岗位上来看，柏安在一家工厂里做销售经理，但事实上他的兴趣却在于和朋友们剥茧抽丝地清谈品评。简言之，从思维态度上来说，他是一名哲学家。即使是和自己的经验世界相距十万八千里的事儿，他也想要尽全力去把握它的意义。目前他觉得地道的摄影中有些事让他捉摸不透，有一股暗力一直将刚刚有所长进的摄影者推回新手群中：比如，他们吹嘘自己的技术或者艺术能力，或者相反的，有些人盲目崇拜器材，他们将一切归功于自己所购买的相机，认为白痴也能用这相机照出杰作来，他们甚至这样诋毁自己，只为放大那机械装置的功德。柏安明白，这两种得到满足感的方式都不是关键：真相在别处。 需要指出的是，他对摄影问题何以引发了个人不适的观察——比如说某人感到自己被某事件所排斥——在某种程度上，是一个玩笑。安自己和自己玩，这样就不用考虑到其他人，还可以就势把他和朋友们分隔开。大环境是这样的：他的熟人们，同年龄的，一个接一个，全部已经成婚，组建了家庭，而此时安还是一个单身青年。 但是，两种现象之间，无疑是有联系的，因为对镜头的狂热往往是经由一种天然本质的生理机制而起，如同父权的次级影响。得到新生儿的父母，第一本能往往是把孩子照下来。鉴于生长的速度，孩子们越来越需要被拍照，因为没有什么东西比一个六月份大的婴儿更难保存，很快它就给一个八个月大的婴儿代替了，接着是周岁的。家长的目光里，三龄童完成过再多的形态改变，也不足以抵挡其很快被一个四岁的孩子所取代的命运。相册是唯一能保留这些短暂形态的地方，它们在这里被保存、并置。在新家长努力将自己后代定格在黑白或全彩胶卷里的热情中，既不摄影、也不生育的安，从那黑色器材里，大概看到了一段疯狂的竞赛。不过，他关于“摄影-家庭-疯狂”联系的反思是简要而无声的：不然他早该理解到，真正冒大险的人是他自己，这个单身男青年。 在安的朋友圈中，周末出城去过是惯例，这传统要是追溯上去，可以延续到大家的学生时代，后来加入进来的是各人的女友，接着变成了妻子小孩，还有乳母和女的家庭教师，各种连襟妯娌，新相识的同性异性朋友。既然这是老习惯，集体相聚，从不间断，安也可以跟着假装尽管时光流逝，但是什么也没有变过：大家总还是旧日里的那群姑娘和小伙子，这里不是什么仅存他一个单身汉的家庭联谊。 这样的事越来越多，爬山涉水的远足中，需要拍摄全家福时，一个局外人常常会被拉去帮忙，可能是一个路人被请来，对准方位，按下已经调整好焦距的相机快门。当此情形，安总义不容辞：他从一位父亲或者母亲的手里接过相机。对方马上冲着第二排的预留位置飞奔而去，把脑袋贴在另外两只脑袋之中，或者是挤在一堆小小人当中。安，仿佛手指生来只是为做这个用的安，集中注意力，按下快门。刚开始的时候，他手臂僵拙，常常把镜头对焦到船的桅杆、塔的尖顶上，或者给爷爷奶奶叔叔阿姨们处以砍首极刑。人家说他是故意的，还责怪他的玩笑开得毫无品位。其实没有：他希望自己的手指能够服从集体意志的要求，成为好用的工具，同时他也想利用自己这暂时的特权位置，告诫摄影者和他们的被摄以他们行为中的深意。当他的指尖足以脱离他的身体和人格的时候，他就可以自由地详尽表述这理论，同时将那些精心排列过的人物团体摄入方框内。在取景器和曝光表中，少数几次偶然的成功，给了他足够的镇定和信心。 “因为一旦开始了，”他会这么说教，“就没理由停下来。因为美而被拍下来的真实，和因为被拍下来而显得美的真实，两者之间只有一线之隔。如果你要给修建沙堡的小皮拍照片，待会儿那个对着垮掉的沙堡哇哇哭叫的小皮，还有后来那个被保姆安慰，在沙滩上找海贝的小皮，你也要照下来。你开始这么说的时候，比如,‘啊真好看！一定要拍下来！’此时你的观念，差不多就是觉得万事万物如果不被摄影留念，就要被永远地失去了，它们就像是从来没有存在过一样。因此，为了真正地活下去，你必须一直拍照。为了多多拍照，你要么得采取最适合拍照的生活方式，或者在人生的每时每刻都思考着和摄影有关的问题。前者是犯糊涂，后者是发神经。” “你才是犯糊涂的神经病，”他的朋友们会这么回答他，“还有，小心太不合时宜。” “一个人要是总想把眼前一切给捕捉下来，”就算没人再听他的，安还是会这么解释，“唯一可行的方法是至少每分钟拍一张照片，从睁眼开始算起直到入睡。只有这样，那一卷卷底片才可能忠实地反映出我们的生活，巨细靡遗。如果我要开始摄影，我会先认清这个道理，就算这意味着我要失去自己的理智。但是你们其他人还是坚持做了选择。这是什么样的一种选择？去选择反思的、可慰藉的、田园牧歌式的诗意，在自然中得到宁静、选择祖国和家庭。你的选择不光关乎摄影，它更是一种人生的选择，它指导你摆脱狗血矫情的冲突、矛盾的错综、欲望所带来的强烈不安、冲动，和小人。嗯，但是，你觉得你脱离了癫狂，其实你正陷入平庸，陷入愚笨。” 有一个谁前妻的妹妹，叫白瓷的，还有一个谁以前的秘书，名叫李蝶，这两个姑娘结伴要去水边玩球，邀他帮忙拍照。他答应了，但因为此时他正在组织自己反对生活照的相关理论，他对这两位朋友忠实地表达了这样的观点： “是什么让你们这两位姑娘，把你们这运动、发展、连续的一天，切分出这些当下的片段呢，是一秒钟的厚度吗？来来回回地掷球，你正活在现在，但是，当帧画间的韵律，在你们的动作间慢慢形成的时候，你的动机，就不再是享受游戏所带来的欢乐，而是为了在以后再见到今天的你自己了，是为了二十年后，在一张发黄的纸板上，看到你的当初。这里的‘发黄’，是一个情感概念，即使现代的冲印技术可以维持相纸的色泽长久不变。这种貌似追求自然的生活照趣味，恰恰谋杀了生活的自发性，赶走了现在。被拍摄出来的真实立刻就穿上了怀旧的外衣，就像是好日子已经随着时光而逝，往事只能回味——就算这是张前天才拍的新照片也罢。这样，你那为了摄影而存在的生活，从一开始，就已经做成了它自己的纪念仪式。去相信生活照比艺术照更真实，这是偏见。” 这么说着，安一边在水里围着两位姑娘疾走，捕捉她们游戏的动作，将画面从跳跃着浮光的水面中截取出来。她们在混乱地争球，朝着对手猛冲过去的白瓷姑娘，差不多淹没在水里，在特写镜头中只能抓拍到她的背部，在波浪里沉浮。安，为了不错过这一角度，高举相机冲进浪里，自己都快要淹死了。 “都拍得不错嘛，这张这张！”几天之后，她们如此评论，一边竭力取得女伴的肯定。他们约好在一家照相馆内见面：“你真好，下次再来给我们多拍几张。” 此时安已得出结论：摆拍是必要的，只要那姿态符合被摄的社会地位和个人品质，就如同十九世纪时的做法一样。他那反摄影的论战，也只能从这黑匣子的内部开始打起：针对已有的摄影理论和方法，自己建立起另外一个体系来。 “我想要买一架那种老款的箱式照相机，”他对姑娘们说，“是那种放在三脚台上面的。你们知道还买得到吗？” “嗯，大概旧货店里总会有吧……” “我们瞧瞧去。” 找这件稀奇物件，姑娘们只觉得有趣，他们一起找遍了跳蚤市场，问询上年纪的街头摄影师，跟随着去他们的老窝。那儿像是器材公墓，过了服役期的东西躺在木架子上，还有屏风、褪色的风景画板。一切应该出现在老式摄像师工作室里的东西，安都买下了。最后，他终于找到了一架盒式照相机，它带着一只球形的气泵快门。机器看起来很好用。安还买了杂七杂八的感光片。在姑娘们的帮助下，他在自己的寓所里，把一间房搭成了工作室，一切以老式器材为用，只除了两盏现代的聚光灯。 这下他满意了。“这里就是起点，”他对姑娘们如是解释。“在我们祖辈们摆出的拍照姿势中，在商议如何排列集体照座位的过程里，存在着社会学含义，也有着约定俗成、品位和文化。正装照、结婚照，全家福或者毕业合影，都在说明一种社会角色，或者习俗惯例的严肃和庄重，但是同时，它们也是如此荒谬，如此扭曲，充满了专制意味和等级色彩。这就是关键：为了搞清楚我们和自己背负于身的世界的关系，为了搞清楚而今我们想要逃避的究竟是什么，为了自我麻痹，相信如此这般它就消失了，但是……” “你想要谁给你摆动作？” “你们俩明天过来，我就会开始用我说的法子，给你们拍照。” “你说明白，你到底打算做什么？”李蝶这么问，她忽然猜疑起来。只有此时，当摄影棚完全建好的时候，她才发觉这一切的一切，都弥漫着可疑、危险的气味。“你觉得我们会来给你做模特？别做梦了！” 白瓷也和她一起咯咯笑出了声，但是隔日她却来到了安的公寓里，一个人。 她穿了件白色的粗麻袍裙，裙摆、袖口和荷包上，都绣着五彩滚边。她垂着长发，却把太阳穴以上的头发束起。她笑着，有点狡猾，侧着脑袋。他请她进来，研究着她的举止——有一点扭捏，有一点嘲讽——以便发现线索，找到她真实的个性。 他命她坐进一张大扶手椅中，自己便一头钻入那相机的黑布帘里。这种器材的后箱该是玻璃做的，影像在这里形成反射，好像它们已经被映在感光片上一样。这些影像鬼影一般，闪烁着乳白色的柔光，空间和时间已与它们毫无联系。对安而言，他就像是从未见过白瓷一样。她十分温顺，正吃力地放低眼睑，尽力伸长脖颈，像是有东西被隐藏了起来，如同她的笑，像是在掩饰真正的笑意。 “那边。就这样。不对，头要摆远点儿；抬起眼睛来。不，看下面。”安在匣子内捕捉着，那是白瓷身上的一些东西，忽然之间，它们如此珍贵。 “你现在在阴影里面，往亮的地方去一点。不，还是刚才好一些。” 有无数张可期待的白瓷照片，也有无数个不可被摄入的白瓷，他现在想要的只是唯一的那张，在它内里，应同时蕴含着过去和将来。 “我搞不定你，”在那黑布罩之后，他开始有了怨言，言语里怒火难抑，“我再也找不见你；我连找你的法子都没有。” 他从那块布里钻了出来，再度站直了身躯。他所做的一切都错了。那刻意强调的表情、在她脸上他所捕捉到的每一次秘密的意味，都将他推入情绪、心境和心态的流沙中：原来他，也不过是，面对时光流逝，无数试图去抓住生命的人中的一个，一名徒劳的猎手，如同拍生活照的那些人。 他只得取道相反的路径：完全按照表浅、清晰、明确的方式来找准人像，不再规避惯常陈规、以及模式化的脸谱。这些脸谱，首先是社会历史的产物，他们包含着着比任何言必称“真相”的表象更多的真实；它承担了将会被逐渐解释的大量意义。这难道不正是安精心设计这小小的工作棚的意图么？ 他仔细看白瓷。他应该从她外貌的表层特征开始着手。白瓷着装和打扮自己的方式——他这么想——能让你感到一些怀旧、和有意为之的反讽，它们在近年来广泛盛行，以使大家回想到三十年前的流行。相片应该在此种意图下划着重线：为什么他以前没有想到？ 安去找来一只网球拍；白瓷应该站在四分之三身位处，臂夹球拍，脸摆出那种感伤画片里的样子。对安来说，对黑色的披布下望去，白瓷的模样——那纤瘦合宜的姿势，和这姿势所强调出的违和感——看来十分有趣。他命她改变了几次位置，考量着胳膊腿与球拍、布景间的几何构图。在他的构想中，完美的画片里，应该是有球网的，但是你也不能要求太多，所以安只假想了一张乒乓球台。 但他只是还不确定：难道他不是在尝试拍摄记忆——或者，更糟糕，记忆表层铺陈的模糊回声？难道他拒绝将生活在当下作为未来里的回忆（如同一个周日摄影爱好者所作的那样）的态度，就没有带领他去到另一个同样不真实的极端，即将躯体付诸回忆，将它以目之所见的现在代替？ “动一动！别跟木头一样杵在那儿！把球拍举起来，该死！就假装你在打网球！”忽然，他暴怒起来。他发现，只有夸张姿势，才能实现客观的陌生化；只有假装出蓄势待发的动作，他才能赋予那些死气沉沉的无机体以表达力。 白瓷顺从地服从他的指令，即使当这些指令越来越模糊且自相矛盾的时候，这被动的态度，也宣称着她自己置身事外的身份，还有其他可能的含义：在这个与她无关的把戏里，她已经足够曲意逢迎。这不可知的神秘动作符合了她的心思。现在安所希望白瓷做的，指挥她把手或腿这么摆或那么放，并不是针对她对他的意念施暴的反应，所作出的一种简单表现，她对他施暴的反应，表现出的那种不可预知的挑衅劲儿，逼得他更想往她身上用力。 太像是梦了，安这么想。自他被掩埋的黑处，他凝视着，那个滤在玻璃方片上的幻想似的网球选手：就像当记忆前线里的一样存在忽然来袭时，你发的梦，被体察到，随即立刻变成了无法想象的什么东西，一样就算是在改变之前也足够骇人的东西，因为谁也难说它究竟会变成什么。 他想要拍摄梦吗？这样的怀疑藏在他体内，如同逃避现实的鸵鸟，将他撞晕了。他手握气泵球快门，像个傻瓜；同时白瓷，自管自地，继续那种怪诞的舞蹈，时不时定格在夸张的网球动作上，反手、正手、高举球拍，或者把球拍压低到地面，就像是那从玻璃眼中投来的注视，就是她要大力抽回的网球一样。... http://forum.bomoo.com/showthread.php?t=1368&page=2。另可参看英译本http://www.ruanyifeng.com/calvino/2007/07/the_adventure_of_a_photographer_en.html] 春天来临的时候，城里的居民们成群结队，扛着皮匣子，趁着周日出城去。他们彼此拍照，返来的时候，就如同满载的猎人一样快乐。他们成天等待，甜蜜而焦灼，只为了见到那冲洗好的相片。焦虑，又带着秘密的喜悦，如同炼金术士在暗房里操作，拒绝接受家人的任何建议，享受冲鼻的酸味。只有相片摆在面前时，他们大概才确信自己拥有过那样的一天；只有这时，山和涧、提桶儿童的跑动、妻腿上的光斑，才能确定这一切存在过，并且从此不容置疑。而其他一切，都可以溺死在可怀疑的记忆暗处不提。 看多了身边人，柏安这个从不摄影的人，开始察觉到了渐深的寂寞。当每一周，他发现自己刚刚倾诉过的对象，正在对人大谈某种滤镜的敏感性，或者哪几个感光度的数值时，那膨胀的音波使他明白。他想，大家都知道了，他对某项无趣乏味的活动，私下发表的那些讽刺言论。 从工作岗位上来看，柏安在一家工厂里做销售经理，但事实上他的兴趣却在于和朋友们剥茧抽丝地清谈品评。简言之，从思维态度上来说，他是一名哲学家。即使是和自己的经验世界相距十万八千里的事儿，他也想要尽全力去把握它的意义。目前他觉得地道的摄影中有些事让他捉摸不透，有一股暗力一直将刚刚有所长进的摄影者推回新手群中：比如，他们吹嘘自己的技术或者艺术能力，或者相反的，有些人盲目崇拜器材，他们将一切归功于自己所购买的相机，认为白痴也能用这相机照出杰作来，他们甚至这样诋毁自己，只为放大那机械装置的功德。柏安明白，这两种得到满足感的方式都不是关键：真相在别处。 需要指出的是，他对摄影问题何以引发了个人不适的观察——比如说某人感到自己被某事件所排斥——在某种程度上，是一个玩笑。安自己和自己玩，这样就不用考虑到其他人，还可以就势把他和朋友们分隔开。大环境是这样的：他的熟人们，同年龄的，一个接一个，全部已经成婚，组建了家庭，而此时安还是一个单身青年。 但是，两种现象之间，无疑是有联系的，因为对镜头的狂热往往是经由一种天然本质的生理机制而起，如同父权的次级影响。得到新生儿的父母，第一本能往往是把孩子照下来。鉴于生长的速度，孩子们越来越需要被拍照，因为没有什么东西比一个六月份大的婴儿更难保存，很快它就给一个八个月大的婴儿代替了，接着是周岁的。家长的目光里，三龄童完成过再多的形态改变，也不足以抵挡其很快被一个四岁的孩子所取代的命运。相册是唯一能保留这些短暂形态的地方，它们在这里被保存、并置。在新家长努力将自己后代定格在黑白或全彩胶卷里的热情中，既不摄影、也不生育的安，从那黑色器材里，大概看到了一段疯狂的竞赛。不过，他关于“摄影-家庭-疯狂”联系的反思是简要而无声的：不然他早该理解到，真正冒大险的人是他自己，这个单身男青年。 在安的朋友圈中，周末出城去过是惯例，这传统要是追溯上去，可以延续到大家的学生时代，后来加入进来的是各人的女友，接着变成了妻子小孩，还有乳母和女的家庭教师，各种连襟妯娌，新相识的同性异性朋友。既然这是老习惯，集体相聚，从不间断，安也可以跟着假装尽管时光流逝，但是什么也没有变过：大家总还是旧日里的那群姑娘和小伙子，这里不是什么仅存他一个单身汉的家庭联谊。 这样的事越来越多，爬山涉水的远足中，需要拍摄全家福时，一个局外人常常会被拉去帮忙，可能是一个路人被请来，对准方位，按下已经调整好焦距的相机快门。当此情形，安总义不容辞：他从一位父亲或者母亲的手里接过相机。对方马上冲着第二排的预留位置飞奔而去，把脑袋贴在另外两只脑袋之中，或者是挤在一堆小小人当中。安，仿佛手指生来只是为做这个用的安，集中注意力，按下快门。刚开始的时候，他手臂僵拙，常常把镜头对焦到船的桅杆、塔的尖顶上，或者给爷爷奶奶叔叔阿姨们处以砍首极刑。人家说他是故意的，还责怪他的玩笑开得毫无品位。其实没有：他希望自己的手指能够服从集体意志的要求，成为好用的工具，同时他也想利用自己这暂时的特权位置，告诫摄影者和他们的被摄以他们行为中的深意。当他的指尖足以脱离他的身体和人格的时候，他就可以自由地详尽表述这理论，同时将那些精心排列过的人物团体摄入方框内。在取景器和曝光表中，少数几次偶然的成功，给了他足够的镇定和信心。 “因为一旦开始了，”他会这么说教，“就没理由停下来。因为美而被拍下来的真实，和因为被拍下来而显得美的真实，两者之间只有一线之隔。如果你要给修建沙堡的小皮拍照片，待会儿那个对着垮掉的沙堡哇哇哭叫的小皮，还有后来那个被保姆安慰，在沙滩上找海贝的小皮，你也要照下来。你开始这么说的时候，比如,‘啊真好看！一定要拍下来！’此时你的观念，差不多就是觉得万事万物如果不被摄影留念，就要被永远地失去了，它们就像是从来没有存在过一样。因此，为了真正地活下去，你必须一直拍照。为了多多拍照，你要么得采取最适合拍照的生活方式，或者在人生的每时每刻都思考着和摄影有关的问题。前者是犯糊涂，后者是发神经。” “你才是犯糊涂的神经病，”他的朋友们会这么回答他，“还有，小心太不合时宜。” “一个人要是总想把眼前一切给捕捉下来，”就算没人再听他的，安还是会这么解释，“唯一可行的方法是至少每分钟拍一张照片，从睁眼开始算起直到入睡。只有这样，那一卷卷底片才可能忠实地反映出我们的生活，巨细靡遗。如果我要开始摄影，我会先认清这个道理，就算这意味着我要失去自己的理智。但是你们其他人还是坚持做了选择。这是什么样的一种选择？去选择反思的、可慰藉的、田园牧歌式的诗意，在自然中得到宁静、选择祖国和家庭。你的选择不光关乎摄影，它更是一种人生的选择，它指导你摆脱狗血矫情的冲突、矛盾的错综、欲望所带来的强烈不安、冲动，和小人。嗯，但是，你觉得你脱离了癫狂，其实你正陷入平庸，陷入愚笨。” 有一个谁前妻的妹妹，叫白瓷的，还有一个谁以前的秘书，名叫李蝶，这两个姑娘结伴要去水边玩球，邀他帮忙拍照。他答应了，但因为此时他正在组织自己反对生活照的相关理论，他对这两位朋友忠实地表达了这样的观点： “是什么让你们这两位姑娘，把你们这运动、发展、连续的一天，切分出这些当下的片段呢，是一秒钟的厚度吗？来来回回地掷球，你正活在现在，但是，当帧画间的韵律，在你们的动作间慢慢形成的时候，你的动机，就不再是享受游戏所带来的欢乐，而是为了在以后再见到今天的你自己了，是为了二十年后，在一张发黄的纸板上，看到你的当初。这里的‘发黄’，是一个情感概念，即使现代的冲印技术可以维持相纸的色泽长久不变。这种貌似追求自然的生活照趣味，恰恰谋杀了生活的自发性，赶走了现在。被拍摄出来的真实立刻就穿上了怀旧的外衣，就像是好日子已经随着时光而逝，往事只能回味——就算这是张前天才拍的新照片也罢。这样，你那为了摄影而存在的生活，从一开始，就已经做成了它自己的纪念仪式。去相信生活照比艺术照更真实，这是偏见。” 这么说着，安一边在水里围着两位姑娘疾走，捕捉她们游戏的动作，将画面从跳跃着浮光的水面中截取出来。她们在混乱地争球，朝着对手猛冲过去的白瓷姑娘，差不多淹没在水里，在特写镜头中只能抓拍到她的背部，在波浪里沉浮。安，为了不错过这一角度，高举相机冲进浪里，自己都快要淹死了。 “都拍得不错嘛，这张这张！”几天之后，她们如此评论，一边竭力取得女伴的肯定。他们约好在一家照相馆内见面：“你真好，下次再来给我们多拍几张。” 此时安已得出结论：摆拍是必要的，只要那姿态符合被摄的社会地位和个人品质，就如同十九世纪时的做法一样。他那反摄影的论战，也只能从这黑匣子的内部开始打起：针对已有的摄影理论和方法，自己建立起另外一个体系来。 “我想要买一架那种老款的箱式照相机，”他对姑娘们说，“是那种放在三脚台上面的。你们知道还买得到吗？” “嗯，大概旧货店里总会有吧……” “我们瞧瞧去。” 找这件稀奇物件，姑娘们只觉得有趣，他们一起找遍了跳蚤市场，问询上年纪的街头摄影师，跟随着去他们的老窝。那儿像是器材公墓，过了服役期的东西躺在木架子上，还有屏风、褪色的风景画板。一切应该出现在老式摄像师工作室里的东西，安都买下了。最后，他终于找到了一架盒式照相机，它带着一只球形的气泵快门。机器看起来很好用。安还买了杂七杂八的感光片。在姑娘们的帮助下，他在自己的寓所里，把一间房搭成了工作室，一切以老式器材为用，只除了两盏现代的聚光灯。 这下他满意了。“这里就是起点，”他对姑娘们如是解释。“在我们祖辈们摆出的拍照姿势中，在商议如何排列集体照座位的过程里，存在着社会学含义，也有着约定俗成、品位和文化。正装照、结婚照，全家福或者毕业合影，都在说明一种社会角色，或者习俗惯例的严肃和庄重，但是同时，它们也是如此荒谬，如此扭曲，充满了专制意味和等级色彩。这就是关键：为了搞清楚我们和自己背负于身的世界的关系，为了搞清楚而今我们想要逃避的究竟是什么，为了自我麻痹，相信如此这般它就消失了，但是……” “你想要谁给你摆动作？” “你们俩明天过来，我就会开始用我说的法子，给你们拍照。” “你说明白，你到底打算做什么？”李蝶这么问，她忽然猜疑起来。只有此时，当摄影棚完全建好的时候，她才发觉这一切的一切，都弥漫着可疑、危险的气味。“你觉得我们会来给你做模特？别做梦了！” 白瓷也和她一起咯咯笑出了声，但是隔日她却来到了安的公寓里，一个人。 她穿了件白色的粗麻袍裙，裙摆、袖口和荷包上，都绣着五彩滚边。她垂着长发，却把太阳穴以上的头发束起。她笑着，有点狡猾，侧着脑袋。他请她进来，研究着她的举止——有一点扭捏，有一点嘲讽——以便发现线索，找到她真实的个性。 他命她坐进一张大扶手椅中，自己便一头钻入那相机的黑布帘里。这种器材的后箱该是玻璃做的，影像在这里形成反射，好像它们已经被映在感光片上一样。这些影像鬼影一般，闪烁着乳白色的柔光，空间和时间已与它们毫无联系。对安而言，他就像是从未见过白瓷一样。她十分温顺，正吃力地放低眼睑，尽力伸长脖颈，像是有东西被隐藏了起来，如同她的笑，像是在掩饰真正的笑意。 “那边。就这样。不对，头要摆远点儿；抬起眼睛来。不，看下面。”安在匣子内捕捉着，那是白瓷身上的一些东西，忽然之间，它们如此珍贵。 “你现在在阴影里面，往亮的地方去一点。不，还是刚才好一些。” 有无数张可期待的白瓷照片，也有无数个不可被摄入的白瓷，他现在想要的只是唯一的那张，在它内里，应同时蕴含着过去和将来。 “我搞不定你，”在那黑布罩之后，他开始有了怨言，言语里怒火难抑，“我再也找不见你；我连找你的法子都没有。” 他从那块布里钻了出来，再度站直了身躯。他所做的一切都错了。那刻意强调的表情、在她脸上他所捕捉到的每一次秘密的意味，都将他推入情绪、心境和心态的流沙中：原来他，也不过是，面对时光流逝，无数试图去抓住生命的人中的一个，一名徒劳的猎手，如同拍生活照的那些人。 他只得取道相反的路径：完全按照表浅、清晰、明确的方式来找准人像，不再规避惯常陈规、以及模式化的脸谱。这些脸谱，首先是社会历史的产物，他们包含着着比任何言必称“真相”的表象更多的真实；它承担了将会被逐渐解释的大量意义。这难道不正是安精心设计这小小的工作棚的意图么？ 他仔细看白瓷。他应该从她外貌的表层特征开始着手。白瓷着装和打扮自己的方式——他这么想——能让你感到一些怀旧、和有意为之的反讽，它们在近年来广泛盛行，以使大家回想到三十年前的流行。相片应该在此种意图下划着重线：为什么他以前没有想到？ 安去找来一只网球拍；白瓷应该站在四分之三身位处，臂夹球拍，脸摆出那种感伤画片里的样子。对安来说，对黑色的披布下望去，白瓷的模样——那纤瘦合宜的姿势，和这姿势所强调出的违和感——看来十分有趣。他命她改变了几次位置，考量着胳膊腿与球拍、布景间的几何构图。在他的构想中，完美的画片里，应该是有球网的，但是你也不能要求太多，所以安只假想了一张乒乓球台。 但他只是还不确定：难道他不是在尝试拍摄记忆——或者，更糟糕，记忆表层铺陈的模糊回声？难道他拒绝将生活在当下作为未来里的回忆（如同一个周日摄影爱好者所作的那样）的态度，就没有带领他去到另一个同样不真实的极端，即将躯体付诸回忆，将它以目之所见的现在代替？ “动一动！别跟木头一样杵在那儿！把球拍举起来，该死！就假装你在打网球！”忽然，他暴怒起来。他发现，只有夸张姿势，才能实现客观的陌生化；只有假装出蓄势待发的动作，他才能赋予那些死气沉沉的无机体以表达力。 白瓷顺从地服从他的指令，即使当这些指令越来越模糊且自相矛盾的时候，这被动的态度，也宣称着她自己置身事外的身份，还有其他可能的含义：在这个与她无关的把戏里，她已经足够曲意逢迎。这不可知的神秘动作符合了她的心思。现在安所希望白瓷做的，指挥她把手或腿这么摆或那么放，并不是针对她对他的意念施暴的反应，所作出的一种简单表现，她对他施暴的反应，表现出的那种不可预知的挑衅劲儿，逼得他更想往她身上用力。 太像是梦了，安这么想。自他被掩埋的黑处，他凝视着，那个滤在玻璃方片上的幻想似的网球选手：就像当记忆前线里的一样存在忽然来袭时，你发的梦，被体察到，随即立刻变成了无法想象的什么东西，一样就算是在改变之前也足够骇人的东西，因为谁也难说它究竟会变成什么。 他想要拍摄梦吗？这样的怀疑藏在他体内，如同逃避现实的鸵鸟，将他撞晕了。他手握气泵球快门，像个傻瓜；同时白瓷，自管自地，继续那种怪诞的舞蹈，时不时定格在夸张的网球动作上，反手、正手、高举球拍，或者把球拍压低到地面，就像是那从玻璃眼中投来的注视，就是她要大力抽回的网球一样。 “等一等，这些垃圾到底是怎么回事？不是我想要的。”安把相机用布罩上，开始在房间里转来转去。 都是那件衣服的过错，还有网球，战前的隐喻……必须要承认，如果她穿着一件较街头的裙子，他所要的那种相片是拍不出来的。特定的庄重，是不可少的，华丽丰贍，就如同女王的官方照一样。只有晚礼服，以大低开领勾画出白肌和深色绸之间的界线，被首饰的寒光烘托而出，规划出普世的的女体与当下社会中女性的区别，毫无个人意味的平等的角色符号，如同在一尊隐喻的雕像上的垂幔，只有这样的晚礼服，才能让白瓷变成能入画的物件。 他贴近白瓷，从颈口往下，开始解她的扣子，又把裙子顺着她的双肩剥开。他想起某些十九世纪的相片，那些女人的脸暴露在白卡纸上，接下来是脖子，以及光的肩膀的线条，其余身体的一切都消失在洁白一片中。 这是他目前想要的人像，超越了时和空；他不是很知道要如何去实现，但他决意成功。他对着白瓷打亮聚光灯，推近机位，钻入布帘中调整镜头的孔径。他审视着一切。白瓷赤着身体。 她把裙子褪到脚踝；她里面什么也没有穿；她前跨了一步——不，是后退了一步，显得她整个身躯跃然于图片之上；她笔直站立，昂然于相机前，平静地直视前方，好像这儿只有她一个人。 安只觉得她的光投入他双目中，统摄了一切的视野范围，将随意的破碎影像挥去，让时空凝聚成一种有限的形态。就像这种视觉惊讶，和感光片上的投射，是连接于它们自身间的两种反射一样，他立即捏下了手中的球泵，再一次重新装上相机、拍摄、插入新的感光片、拍摄，一直这么更换感光片和拍摄，嘟囔着，快要被布帘给背过气去，“那边，这样就对了，好，再来，我现在可以搞定你了，再来一张。” 他用尽了感光片。他从布帘里露出身子来。他十分愉悦。白瓷在他面前，赤裸着，好像在等着什么。 “现在你可以穿上衣服了，”他说，十分满意，但是又有一点急不可耐。“我们现在就出去。” 她看着他，迷惑不解。 “我现在找到你了。”他这么说。 白瓷猛然大哭起来。 就在同一天，安发现自己爱上了她。他们同居了，他买了最时髦的相机、变焦镜头和最先进的器材；他建了一间暗房。他甚至买了一套装备，专门拍她夜里熟睡的样子。白瓷有时候被闪光灯晃醒，不胜其扰；安则继续拍她睡着时的生活照，拍她一次次从梦里惊醒，拍她开始对他发恼，拍她即使把脸埋进枕头里也无法睡着，拍她与他言归于好，拍她终于体会到这些摄影的强奸，事实上是爱。 在安的暗房里，一列列胶卷和样张上，白瓷在每一帧画面上凝望着，就像是成千只蜜蜂，从蜂箱里的蜂巢中往外望，但是这里只有同样一只蜜蜂：不同姿态、不同角度、不同妆扮的白瓷，摆拍或者被偷拍的白瓷：一气化三清一样。 “不过，为什么要这么迷恋白瓷？你就不能拍别的东西了吗？”这是他常从朋友那儿听来的问题，她也这么问过。 “这并不是只关于白瓷的事，”他回答，“这是有关方法论的问题。不管你想要拍谁，或者什么东西，你必须一直地、特专地拍下去，每日每夜、每时每刻。只有当穷尽了所有可能出现的相片时，摄影才有意义。” 可他没有说出对他而言最重要的那个意义：在她不知情的情况下，拍她在街上的样子，用各式隐藏镜头把她秘密地保存下来，拍她的时候不光让她看不见自己，也要让自己看不见她，让她为离开他视线、离开任何人的视线时候的模样而惊奇。不是他想发现什么独特的事情；他不是普遍意义上所谓的易妒男人。他只想占有一个隐形的白瓷，一个绝对孤独的白瓷，一个对他对任何人而言都不在场的白瓷。 这能否被定义为妒忌，是的，在任何情况下，这都是一种很难被容忍的热情。很快白瓷离开了他。 安陷入了深深的抑郁中。他开始写日记——当然，图片日记。挂着相机，关在家里，陷坐在扶手椅中，他瞪著虚无，禁不住抓拍起图片。他在拍白瓷的缺席。 他把这些相片集成相簿：你能见到满溢烟头的烟灰缸，凌乱的床，墙上的水渍。他开始设想专为世上那些抵触摄影的事物建立类目库，那些被系统地排除在相机、乃至人类视觉领域外的东西。在每样物件上，他都花成天的时间，每隔数小时用光成卷的胶片，以便跟得上光影的变化。一次，他完全为一间全空的、只装有暖气管道的房间角落而痴迷：他一直拍着这个场景，花了整整一天。 这件公寓完全被人遗忘了。旧报纸和信被揉皱了扔在地板上，他一直在拍它们。报纸上的照片也被拍了下来，他的镜头和那个遥远的新闻摄影师之间，建立起了迂回的联系。为了制造那些污点，其他相机的镜头曾瞄准了暴力执法、烧焦的汽车、奔跑的运动员、达官政要、庭上的被告等等。 拍摄这些由杂然而陈的长焦照片、白纸上粗暴的墨点所构成的室内静物，安觉得特别愉快。由自己的禁锢，他惊讶地发现自己嫉妒着新闻摄影师灵活的生活，他们紧随着人群而动，跟踪这流血事件、悲泣、宴乐、罪恶、时尚盛会、政府大典后的谎言；新闻摄影师，那些记录着社会极端、最富裕的与最贫穷的人，记录着不过是在寻常地点每时每刻发生的不寻常瞬间。 这是否意味着，只有特异的状况才有意义？安问着自己。新闻摄影者才是假日生活照摄影者的最终对手么？他们的世界是互斥的吗？或者，他们辩证地互相赋予意义？ 如此这般反思着，他开始撕碎这几个月里，积累了他的激情的有白瓷、或没白瓷的相片，除去了挂在墙上的一串串证物，掰碎了那些赛璐珞的自我否定，剪毁了胶卷，然后，把这些被有序摧毁的残渣，堆放在散落于地板上的报纸里。 大概是真的，整个的摄影术，他这么想，就是私人影像破片的堆积，以此来对抗大屠杀和加冕礼这样的揉皱背景。 他折好报纸的四角，以便将这捆巨大的包裹扔进垃圾箱，但是首先，他想先为它拍个照。他整理了一下边缘，以便让人可以清楚看到两部分不同报纸上的照片断片，正巧凑和上了。事实上他重新把包裹打开了一点，好让一些反光的纸板伸出来，那是一些撕掉的大照相的碎片。他打开聚光灯；他希望这张相片里被撕掉的被揉碎的影像清晰可辨，同时也能通过那些随意的、漆黑的阴影，显现出它们的不真实，还有，它们作为物质的实体，所具有的意义，那加以它们身上的注意力所从不曾留意的，它们赖以依存的力量。 为了将所有这些整合于一张相片里，他必须还要学会一项特殊的技巧，但只有这以后，安就不再拍照了。厌倦了每一项可能性，在即将圆满的瞬间里安认识到，拍摄相片是他唯一退出的一课——或是说，这一段时间以来，他一直费解寻找的真正一课。]]> 卡尔维诺的讣告 tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2009:/calvino//1.1030 2009-04-09T04:38:35Z 2009-04-10T20:03:33Z [整理者注：这篇是纽约时报发的讣告，感谢译言网站的Beanix译成中文并授权转载。本文首发地址为http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/65770/36141，另可参看英文原版http://www.ruanyifeng.com/calvino/2006/07/obituary.html] 小说家 伊塔洛·卡尔维诺（Italo Calvino）去世，享年61岁 日期：1985年9月19日，星期四。最新城市新闻最终版B版，第20页，第1栏。文化编辑部，撰稿人：Herbert Mitgang 导语： 　　伊塔洛·卡尔维诺，意大利当代小说界的领军人物、充满想象的寓言作品的大师，因受自6号发作的中风的折磨，于今天早些时候在意大利的锡耶纳地区的一家医院中去世，享年61岁。 　　卡尔维诺先生是少数拥有国际声望的重要小说家之一，他本来准备在今年秋天参加哈佛大学颇有声望的诺顿演讲会（Wiki）并发表自己的演说。（卡尔维诺为这个演讲会写了一些稿子，但还没离开意大利就去世了，因此演讲稿也没能在会上发表。Wiki；讲稿全文可参考 卡尔维诺中文站：未来千年文学备忘录） 　　约翰·厄普代克（百科）在评论卡尔维诺先生的作品《命运交织城堡》时说，“没有任何一位在世的作家（比卡尔维诺）更有才华了。”身为小说家，同时也是评论家的约翰·加德纳称卡尔维诺先生“或许是意大利现存最优秀的作家。” 正文： 　　卡尔维诺先生被民间故事、骑士和骑士精神、社会寓言和我们这个时代的传奇吸引：满载惊人的或滑稽的故事的记忆芯片——稍微歪斜地——就好像被嵌入他那未程式化的、无拘无束的大脑里一样。他笔下的角色也不曾沾染上现代社会日常生活带给人们的焦躁情绪。 　　去年12月，纽约时报书评专栏曾问他，他想成为哪个文学作品中的人物。卡尔维诺先生通过以下回答揭示了他的内心和他的艺术倾向： 　　“（我愿意成为）默库肖（莎士比亚剧作《罗密欧与朱丽叶》中的人物，罗密欧的好友。-via 四大叔；Wiki）。在他的所有美德中，我最欣赏他面对一个残忍的世界时拥有的轻松的态度，他的梦幻般的想象力——这从他创造的麦布女王（默库肖将之描述为驾着马车在熟睡的人脸上跑来跑去的小生物，强迫他们体验充满希望的梦境，可能让嘴唇起水泡。Wiki）的形象里可见一斑，还有他的智慧——那是在卡普列和蒙塔古两个家族家族（Wiki Carpulets Montagues）狂热的仇恨包围之中发出的理性的声音。他用生命的代价坚守骑士精神的陈旧习俗，或许只是因为他喜欢这种生活方式。他也是一个多疑的、爱挖苦人的现代人，一个能明辨什么是梦想、什么是现实的堂吉诃德式的人物，并且，他能清醒地生活于两者中。” 小说和故事作品 　　卡尔维诺先生于本月有两本书在美国出版。他的最新的小说是《帕洛玛尔先生》。标题中提到的人物，有着和著名的望远镜一样的名字，他是一个追求知识的人，一个生活在崇高的可笑的世界里、有着远见卓识的人。他在社会中表现得沉默寡言、很不耐烦，他更喜欢创造一些内心世界里的对话，聆听无垠太空的寂静以及鸟儿的歌唱。 　　他的第二本书是他早期的一部名为《困难的爱》的故事集的平装本。也是在这里出版的，出版商是 Helen & Kurt Wolff Books 和 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich。书中的人物包括一个陷入诱惑的世界无法自拔的士兵，和一个发现自己在游泳的时候把下身的比基尼弄丢的中产阶级妇女。 　　卡尔维诺先生的其他作品包括《树上的男爵》、《通往蜘蛛巢的小路》、《命运交织城堡》、《隐形城市》、《意大利民间故事》、《宇宙连环画》、《寒冬夜行人》和《马可瓦多》。作品的主题从对塔罗牌的戏仿到文艺风格的讽刺作品，包罗万象。 　　在第二次世界大战结束后的一段时间里，他曾尝试写纪实性故事。他早期的小说，《通往蜘蛛巢的小路》，描述了他在利古里亚（Wiki）群山中与游击队一道同纳粹和法西斯战斗的经历。最终，他意识到，适合他的唯一的写作模式，就是去创造。纯的科幻小说对他来讲太陌生了。他从宇宙万物运行规律中得到灵感，写出了非常接近科幻小说的作品，《宇宙连环画》。 寓言与时代交汇 　　此后，他开始用写寓言这种自己独有的方式与当下的事件作斗争。“如果读者看（我的作品）”他说，“我认为他会从我的作品中发现许多有关道德和政治的观点。这些观点来自我每天承受的经历。当我心情低落的时候，我就会开始想象一些能够传播喜悦的画面。总之，我确信我是一个富有时代气息的人。我们那个时代存在的问题体现在我写的任何作品中。骑士和骑士精神是和当今的战争有关的。不，我不是在真空中写作。这些寓言只是利用了一种不同的语言而已。政治并不重要，但文学却是随着政治摇摆、前进。” 　　以他自己的作品作衬，卡尔维诺先生嘲笑了包括美国小说在内的商业小说。在《寒冬夜行人》中，他发明了一个名为“同质化文学作品电子化生产组织”的团体。他说他是从电视网络和一些出版商实施的市场调查中得到灵感的。这些调查的目的是确定受众想要听什么、看什么，然后根据需求制造它。 　　《树上的男爵》讲述的是一个18世纪年轻的意大利贵族的故事。这个年轻人反抗家长的专制，最终在“大树上的一个理想的国度”度过余生。电影导演路易·马勒（百科）曾说，他曾在很长一段时间里，梦想将这部小说翻拍成电影。 　　为了帮助人们保留文学传统，同时也为了促进新的作家的诞生，卡尔维诺先生编辑了一部小说集，名为《Cento Pagi》（《一百页》），收录的是短篇小说，由 Giulio Einaudi... http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/65770/36141，另可参看英文原版http://www.ruanyifeng.com/calvino/2006/07/obituary.html] 小说家 伊塔洛·卡尔维诺（Italo Calvino）去世，享年61岁 日期：1985年9月19日，星期四。最新城市新闻最终版B版，第20页，第1栏。文化编辑部，撰稿人：Herbert Mitgang 导语： 　　伊塔洛·卡尔维诺，意大利当代小说界的领军人物、充满想象的寓言作品的大师，因受自6号发作的中风的折磨，于今天早些时候在意大利的锡耶纳地区的一家医院中去世，享年61岁。 　　卡尔维诺先生是少数拥有国际声望的重要小说家之一，他本来准备在今年秋天参加哈佛大学颇有声望的诺顿演讲会（Wiki）并发表自己的演说。（卡尔维诺为这个演讲会写了一些稿子，但还没离开意大利就去世了，因此演讲稿也没能在会上发表。Wiki；讲稿全文可参考 卡尔维诺中文站：未来千年文学备忘录） 　　约翰·厄普代克（百科）在评论卡尔维诺先生的作品《命运交织城堡》时说，“没有任何一位在世的作家（比卡尔维诺）更有才华了。”身为小说家，同时也是评论家的约翰·加德纳称卡尔维诺先生“或许是意大利现存最优秀的作家。” 正文： 　　卡尔维诺先生被民间故事、骑士和骑士精神、社会寓言和我们这个时代的传奇吸引：满载惊人的或滑稽的故事的记忆芯片——稍微歪斜地——就好像被嵌入他那未程式化的、无拘无束的大脑里一样。他笔下的角色也不曾沾染上现代社会日常生活带给人们的焦躁情绪。 　　去年12月，纽约时报书评专栏曾问他，他想成为哪个文学作品中的人物。卡尔维诺先生通过以下回答揭示了他的内心和他的艺术倾向： 　　“（我愿意成为）默库肖（莎士比亚剧作《罗密欧与朱丽叶》中的人物，罗密欧的好友。-via 四大叔；Wiki）。在他的所有美德中，我最欣赏他面对一个残忍的世界时拥有的轻松的态度，他的梦幻般的想象力——这从他创造的麦布女王（默库肖将之描述为驾着马车在熟睡的人脸上跑来跑去的小生物，强迫他们体验充满希望的梦境，可能让嘴唇起水泡。Wiki）的形象里可见一斑，还有他的智慧——那是在卡普列和蒙塔古两个家族家族（Wiki Carpulets Montagues）狂热的仇恨包围之中发出的理性的声音。他用生命的代价坚守骑士精神的陈旧习俗，或许只是因为他喜欢这种生活方式。他也是一个多疑的、爱挖苦人的现代人，一个能明辨什么是梦想、什么是现实的堂吉诃德式的人物，并且，他能清醒地生活于两者中。” 小说和故事作品 　　卡尔维诺先生于本月有两本书在美国出版。他的最新的小说是《帕洛玛尔先生》。标题中提到的人物，有着和著名的望远镜一样的名字，他是一个追求知识的人，一个生活在崇高的可笑的世界里、有着远见卓识的人。他在社会中表现得沉默寡言、很不耐烦，他更喜欢创造一些内心世界里的对话，聆听无垠太空的寂静以及鸟儿的歌唱。 　　他的第二本书是他早期的一部名为《困难的爱》的故事集的平装本。也是在这里出版的，出版商是 Helen & Kurt Wolff Books 和 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich。书中的人物包括一个陷入诱惑的世界无法自拔的士兵，和一个发现自己在游泳的时候把下身的比基尼弄丢的中产阶级妇女。 　　卡尔维诺先生的其他作品包括《树上的男爵》、《通往蜘蛛巢的小路》、《命运交织城堡》、《隐形城市》、《意大利民间故事》、《宇宙连环画》、《寒冬夜行人》和《马可瓦多》。作品的主题从对塔罗牌的戏仿到文艺风格的讽刺作品，包罗万象。 　　在第二次世界大战结束后的一段时间里，他曾尝试写纪实性故事。他早期的小说，《通往蜘蛛巢的小路》，描述了他在利古里亚（Wiki）群山中与游击队一道同纳粹和法西斯战斗的经历。最终，他意识到，适合他的唯一的写作模式，就是去创造。纯的科幻小说对他来讲太陌生了。他从宇宙万物运行规律中得到灵感，写出了非常接近科幻小说的作品，《宇宙连环画》。 寓言与时代交汇 　　此后，他开始用写寓言这种自己独有的方式与当下的事件作斗争。“如果读者看（我的作品）”他说，“我认为他会从我的作品中发现许多有关道德和政治的观点。这些观点来自我每天承受的经历。当我心情低落的时候，我就会开始想象一些能够传播喜悦的画面。总之，我确信我是一个富有时代气息的人。我们那个时代存在的问题体现在我写的任何作品中。骑士和骑士精神是和当今的战争有关的。不，我不是在真空中写作。这些寓言只是利用了一种不同的语言而已。政治并不重要，但文学却是随着政治摇摆、前进。” 　　以他自己的作品作衬，卡尔维诺先生嘲笑了包括美国小说在内的商业小说。在《寒冬夜行人》中，他发明了一个名为“同质化文学作品电子化生产组织”的团体。他说他是从电视网络和一些出版商实施的市场调查中得到灵感的。这些调查的目的是确定受众想要听什么、看什么，然后根据需求制造它。 　　《树上的男爵》讲述的是一个18世纪年轻的意大利贵族的故事。这个年轻人反抗家长的专制，最终在“大树上的一个理想的国度”度过余生。电影导演路易·马勒（百科）曾说，他曾在很长一段时间里，梦想将这部小说翻拍成电影。 　　为了帮助人们保留文学传统，同时也为了促进新的作家的诞生，卡尔维诺先生编辑了一部小说集，名为《Cento Pagi》（《一百页》），收录的是短篇小说，由 Giulio Einaudi 在都灵的公司出版。他解释道：“当今的意大利文学并没有真正的流派或潮流，有的只是迥异的作家们复杂的性格。但是，差异性正是值得鼓励的特性。” 加入意大利抵抗组织 　　伊塔洛·卡尔维诺于1923年10月15日出生于古巴的圣地亚哥·德拉斯维加斯。他的意大利父母都是热带农学家。几年之后他们回到了意大利位于里维埃拉海岸的圣雷莫市。卡尔维诺先生进入了都灵大学学习农学。当意大利加入第二次世界大战后，作为一个被强征入伍的“青年法西斯”成员，他参与了占领法属里维埃拉的行动。但在1943年，他加入了意大利抵抗组织，在利古里亚 群山中同德国人战斗。 　　1945年，他加入了共产党，并开始为党刊撰文。同作家契撒雷·帕维瑟（Wiki）和埃利奥·维托里尼（Wiki）一起，投身于社会主义政治和新现实主义文学风潮中。“共产党似乎拥有最现实的计划来让意大利复兴，以及阻止法西斯复活，”他说，“但是我在1957年退党了，现在我已经不参与政治活动了。” 　　在他的作家同行和评论家同行眼中，卡尔维诺先生是一位世界级的作者。他的故事，特别是他的民间故事，被翻译成不同语言在许多国家发行。 　　小说家玛格丽特·阿特伍德（百科）把卡尔维诺先生笔下的城市景色比作 “费里尼（Wiki）的早期电影。” 　　娥苏拉·勒瑰恩（百科），一位作品涉及科幻和奇幻小说的美国小说家，说道，“《意大利民间故事》带给人的数不清的乐趣之一就是，他能将人们耳熟能详的故事元素与完全意料之外的元素混合到一起。他是给我们讲述世界上最棒的故事的最棒的在世短篇小说作家之一。真的是太幸运了！” “弥足珍贵的贡献” 　　英国小说家安东尼·伯吉斯（百科）在评价同一本书时说道，“卡尔维诺为他的文化做出了弥足珍贵的贡献，我们的文化也沾了光。读他的书，我们更能确信我们的信仰：无论在什么地方，人类的抱负和志向基本上是一样的。” 　　对于卡尔维诺先生的《寒冬夜行人》，评论家迈克尔·伍德写道，“他是拥有奇特幻想、构思缜密的异常杰出的缔造者。卡尔维诺在文学世界里的地位处于豪·路·博尔赫斯（百科）之东、弗拉基米尔·纳博科夫（百科）之西。博尔赫斯梦见图书馆，纳博柯夫神驰文本和纪事文学，而卡尔维诺描绘了许多脆弱的图景，虽然收录成册，但却饱受拆散或错得离谱的威胁。” 　　卡尔维诺先生在谈到自己的作品时显得神秘难以测度： 　　“当我在写一本书的时候，我喜欢对它避而不谈，”他说，“因为只有在我写完整本书之后，我才能明白我到底干了什么，并把成果与我的本意进行比较。” 　　在他两年前写《帕洛玛尔先生》的时候，卡尔维诺先生说，“对于我现在写的这本书，我只能说它是一本非常不一样的书，但它仍然没有脱离人与自然的关系这个主题。这本书中的主角名叫帕洛玛尔先生，就像天文学观测所的名字那样，只不过，他探索的只是在他周围、离他最近的事物。” 　　卡尔维诺先生离开了他的妻子琪琪塔·辛格（曾任联合国教科文组织在巴黎办事处的翻译员，两人于1964年结婚）和他的女儿乔凡娜，撒手人寰。]]> The Daughters of the Moon tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2009:/calvino//1.1029 2009-03-08T03:31:57Z 2009-03-08T03:49:59Z Deprived, as it was, of a covering of air to act as a protective shield, the moon found itself exposed right from the start to a continual bombardment of meteorites and to the corrosive action of the sun’s rays. According... Deprived, as it was, of a covering of air to act as a protective shield, the moon found itself exposed right from the start to a continual bombardment of meteorites and to the corrosive action of the sun’s rays. According to Thomas Gold, of Cornell University, the rocks on the moon’s surface were reduced to powder through constant attrition from meteorite particles. According to Gerard Kuiper, of the University of Chicago, the escape of gases from the moon’s magma may have given the satellite a light, porous consistency, like that of a pumice stone. The moon is old, Qfwfq agreed, pitted with holes, worn out. Rolling naked through the skies, it erodes and loses its flesh like a bone that’s been gnawed. This is not the first time that such a thing has happened. I remember moons that were even older and more battered than this one; I’ve seen loads of these moons, seen them being born and running across the sky and dying out, one punctured by hail from shooting stars, another exploding from all its craters, and yet another oozing drops of topaz-colored sweat that evaporated immediately, then being covered by greenish clouds and reduced to a dried-up, spongy shell. What happens on the earth when a moon dies is not easy to describe; I’ll try to do it by referring to the last instance I can remember. Following a lengthy period of evolution, the earth had more or less reached the point where we are now; in other words, it had entered the phase when cars wear out more quickly than the soles of shoes. Beings that were barely human manufactured and bought and sold things, and cities covered the continents with luminous color. These cities grew in approximately the same places as our cities do now, however different the shape of the continents was. There was even a New York that in some way resembled the New York familiar to all of you, but was much newer, or, rather, more awash with new products, new toothbrushes, a New York with its own Manhattan that stretched out dense with skyscrapers gleaming like the nylon bristles of a brand-new toothbrush. In this world where every object was thrown away at the slightest sign of breakage or aging, at the first dent or stain, and replaced with a new and perfect substitute, there was just one false note, one shadow: the moon. It wandered through the sky naked, corroded, and gray, more and more alien to the world down here, a hangover from a way of being that was now outdated. Ancient expressions like "full moon," "half-moon," "last-quarter-moon" continued to be used but were really only figures of speech: how could we call "full" a shape that was all cracks and holes and that always seemed on the point of crashing down on our heads in a shower of rubble? Not to mention when it was a waning moon! It was reduced to a kind of nibbled cheese rind, and it always disappeared before we expected it to. At each new moon, we wondered whether it would ever appear again (were we hoping that it would simply disappear?), and when it did reappear, looking more and more like a comb that had lost its teeth, we averted our eyes with a shudder. It was a depressing sight. We went out in the crowds, our arms laden with parcels, coming and going from the big department stores that were open day and night, and while we were scanning the neon signs that climbed higher and higher up the skyscrapers and notified us constantly of new products that had been launched, we’d suddenly see it advancing, pale amid those dazzling lights, slow and sick, and we could not get it out of our heads that every new thing, each product that we had just bought, could similarly wear out, deteriorate, fade away, and we would lose our enthusiasm for running around buying things and working like crazy -- a loss that was not without consequences for industry and commerce. That was how we began to consider the problem of what to do with it, this counterproductive satellite. It did not serve any purpose; it was a useless wreck. As it lost weight, it started to incline its orbit toward the earth: it was dangerous, above and beyond anything else. And the nearer it got the more it slowed its course; we could no longer calculate its phases. Even the calendar, the rhythm of the months, had become a mere convention; the moon went forward in fits and starts, as though it were about to collapse. On these nights of low moon, people of a more unstable temperament began to do weird things. There was always a sleepwalker edging along the parapet of a skyscraper with his arms reaching toward the moon, or a werewolf starting to howl in the middle of Times Square, or a pyromaniac setting fire to the dock warehouses. By now these were common occurrences that no longer attracted the usual crowd of rubberneckers. But when I saw a girl sitting, completely naked, on a bench in Central Park I had to stop. Even before I saw her I’d had the feeling that something mysterious was about to happen. As I drove through Central Park at the wheel of my convertible, I felt myself bathed in a flickering light, like that of a fluorescent bulb emitting a series of livid, blinking flashes before it turns on fully. The view all around me was like that of a garden that had sunk into a lunar crater. The naked girl sat beside a pond reflecting a slice of moon. I braked. For a second I thought I recognized her. I ran out of the car toward her, but then I froze. I did not know who she was; I just felt that I urgently had to do something for her. Everything was scattered on the grass around the bench: her clothes, a stocking and shoe here and the others there, her earrings, necklace, and bracelets, purse and shopping bag with the contents spilled out in a wide arc, and countless packages and goods, almost as if the creature had felt herself called on her way back from a lavish shopping spree and had dropped everything, realizing that she had to free herself of all objects and signs that bound her to the earth, and she was now waiting to be assumed into the lunar sphere. "What’s happening?" I stammered. "Can I help you?" "Help?" she asked, with her eyes staring upward. "Nobody can help. Nobody can do anything." And it was clear that she was talking not about herself but about the moon. The moon was above us, a convex shape almost crushing us, a ruined roof, studded with holes like a cheese grater. Just at that moment, the animals in the zoo began to growl. "Is this the end?" I asked mechanically, and I myself didn’t even know what I meant. She replied, "It’s the beginning," or something like that. (She spoke almost without opening her lips.) "What do you mean? It’s the beginning of the end, or something else is beginning?" She got up, walked across the grass. She had long copper-colored hair that came down over her shoulders. She was so vulnerable that I felt the need to protect her in some way, to shield her, and I moved my hands toward her as though to be ready to catch her if she fell or to ward off anything that might harm her. But my hands did not dare even graze her, and always stayed a few centimetres from her skin. And as I followed her, in this way, past the flower gardens, I realized that her movements were similar to mine, that she, too, was trying to protect something fragile, something that might fall and shatter into pieces, and that needed thus to be led toward a place where it could settle gently, something that she could not touch but could only guide with her gestures: the moon. The moon seemed lost. Having abandoned the course of its orbit, it no longer knew where to go; it let itself be transported like a dry leaf. Sometimes it appeared to be plummeting toward the earth, at others corkscrewing in a spiral movement, and at still others it looked to be just drifting. It was losing height, that was certain: for a second it seemed as if it would crash into the Plaza Hotel, but instead it slid into the corridor between two skyscrapers and disappeared from view in the direction of the Hudson. It reappeared shortly afterward, on the opposite side of the city, popping out from behind a cloud, bathing Harlem and the East River in a chalky light, and, as though caught by a gust of wind, it rolled toward the Bronx. "There it is!" I shouted. "There -- it stopped!" "It can’t stop!" the girl exclaimed, and she ran naked and barefoot over the grass. "Where are you going? You can’t wander around like that! Stop! Hey, I’m talking to you! What’s your name?" She shouted out a name like Diana or Deanna, something that could also have been an invocation. And she disappeared. In order to follow her, I jumped back into my car and began to search the drives of Central Park. The beams of my headlights lit up hedges, hills, obelisks, but the girl, Diana, was nowhere to be seen. By now I had gone too far: I must have passed her; I turned around to go back the way I’d come. A voice behind me said, "No, it’s there, keep going!" Sitting behind me on the trunk of my car was the naked girl, pointing toward the moon. I wanted to tell her to get down, to explain that I could not travel across the city with her so prominently on view in that condition, but I did not dare to distract her, intent as she was on not losing sight of the luminous glow that was disappearing and reappearing at the end of the drive. And in any case -- and this was even stranger -- no passerby seemed to notice this female apparition sitting up on the trunk of my car. We crossed one of the bridges that link Manhattan to the mainland. Now we were going along a multilane highway, with other cars alongside us, and I kept my eyes staring straight ahead, fearing the laughter and crude comments that the sight of the two of us was no doubt prompting in the cars around us. But when a sedan overtook us I nearly went off the road in surprise: crouched on its roof was a naked girl with her hair blowing in the wind. For a second, I thought that my passenger was leaping from one speeding car to another, but all I had to do was turn my head ever so slightly to see that Diana’s knees were still there, level with my nose. And her body was not the only one glowing before my eyes: now I saw girls everywhere, stretched out in the strangest poses, clinging to the radiators, doors, and fenders of the speeding cars, their golden or dark strands of hair contrasting with the pink or dark gleam of their naked skin. There was one of these mysterious female passengers on every car, all leaning forward, urging their drivers to follow the moon. They had been summoned by the endangered moon: I was certain of that. How many of them were there? More cars carrying lunar girls gathered at every crossroads and junction, converging from all quarters of the city to the place above which the moon seemed to have stopped. At the edge of the city, we found ourselves in front of an automobile scrap yard. The road petered out in an area with little valleys, ridges, hills, and peaks, but it was not the contours of the land that created the uneven surface but, rather, the layers of things that had been thrown away: everything that the consumerist city had used up and expelled so that it could immediately enjoy the pleasure of handling new things had ended up in this unprepossessing neighborhood. Over the course of many years, piles of battered fridges, yellowing issues of Life magazine, and burnt-out light bulbs had accumulated around an enormous wrecking yard. It was over this jagged, rusty territory that the moon now loomed, and the swaths of crumpled metal swelled as if carried on a high tide. They resembled each other, the decrepit moon and that crust of the earth which had been soldered into an amalgam of wreckage; the mountains of scrap metal formed a chain that closed in on itself like an amphitheatre, whose shape was precisely that of a volcanic crater or a lunar sea. The moon hung over this space, and it was as if the planet and its satellite were acting as mirror images of each other. Our car engines had all stopped: nothing intimidates cars as much as their own cemeteries. Diana got down, and all the other Dianas followed. But their energy now seemed to fade: they moved with uncertain steps, as though, on finding themselves amid those shards of scrap iron, they were suddenly seized by an awareness of their own nakedness; many of them folded their arms to cover their breasts as if shivering with cold. As they did this, they scattered, climbing over the mountains of useless scrap and down into the amphitheatre, where they found themselves forming a huge circle in the middle. Then they all raised their arms together. The moon gave a start, as though affected by that gesture of theirs, and it seemed for an instant to recover its energy and to climb again. The circle of girls stood with their arms outstretched and their faces and breasts turned toward the moon. Was that what the moon had asked of them? Did it need them to support it in the sky? I did not have time to ponder this question. At that very moment the crane entered the scene. The crane had been designed and built by the authorities, who had decided to cleanse the sky of its inelegant encumbrance. It was a bulldozer from which a kind of crab’s claw rose up. It came forward on its caterpillar treads, squat and stocky, just like a crab; and when it arrived at the place that had been prepared for the operation it seemed to become even more squat, to cling to the earth with all its surface. The winch spun quickly, and the crane raised its arm into the sky; nobody had believed that a crane with such a long arm could be built. Its bucket opened, revealing all its teeth; now, more than a crab’s claw, it resembled a shark’s mouth. The moon was right there. It wavered as though it wanted to escape, but the crane seemed to be magnetized: as we watched, the moon was vacuumed up, as it were, landing in the crane’s jaws, which closed around it with a dry sound -- crack! For a second, it seemed as if the moon had crumbled like a meringue, but instead it rested there, half in and half out of the jaws of the bucket. It had been flattened into an oblong shape, a kind of thick cigar held between the bucket’s teeth. Down came a shower the color of ashes. The crane now tried to drag the moon down out of its orbit. The winch had started to wind backward: at this point, the winding required a huge effort. Diana and her friends had stayed motionless with their arms raised throughout this process, as though hoping to overcome the enemy’s aggression with the strength of their circle. It was only when the ash from the disintegrating moon rained down on their faces and breasts that they began to disperse. Diana let out a sharp cry of lament. At that point, the imprisoned moon lost what little light it had left: it became a black, shapeless rock. It would have crashed down onto the earth had it not been held back by the bucket’s teeth. Down below, the workmen had prepared a metal net, which was fixed to the ground with long nails, all around the space where the crane was slowly lowering its load. Once it was on the ground, the moon was a pockmarked, sandy boulder, so dull and opaque that it was incredible to think that it had once illuminated the sky with its shining reflection. The jaws of the bucket opened; the bulldozer retreated on its caterpillar treads and almost flipped over as it was suddenly lightened of its load. The workmen were ready with the net: they wrapped it around the moon, trapping it between the net and the ground. The moon struggled in its straitjacket: a tremor like that of an earthquake caused avalanches of empty cans to slide down from the mountain of refuse. Then all was peaceful again. The now moonless sky was drenched with bursts of light from big lamps. But the darkness was already fading, anyway. Dawn found the car cemetery holding one more wreck: the moon marooned at its center was almost indistinguishable from the other discarded objects; it was the same color, had the same condemned look as something you couldn’t imagine ever having been new. A low murmur resounded through the crater of terrestrial trash: the light of dawn revealed a swarm of living things slowly waking up. Hirsute creatures were advancing amid the trucks’ disembowelled carcasses, the shattered wheels, the crumpled metal. Among the discarded things lived a community of discarded people -- people who had been marginalized, or who had willingly discarded themselves, people who had tired of racing all over the city to sell and buy new things that were destined to go instantly out of date, people who had decided that the things that had been thrown away were the only real riches of the world. Encircling the moon, throughout the amphitheatre, these lanky figures stood or sat, their faces framed by beards or unkempt hair. It was a tatterdemalion or bizarrely dressed crowd, and in its midst were my naked Diana and all the girls from the night before. They came forward, and began to loosen the steel wires of the net from the nails that had been driven into the ground. Immediately, like a blimp released from its moorings, the moon rose, hovering above the girls’ heads, above the grandstand full of hoboes, and hung there, held by the steel net whose wires Diana and her friends were operating, sometimes pulling them, sometimes letting them out, and when the girls started to run, still holding the ends of the wires, the moon followed them. As soon as the moon moved, a kind of wave began to rise from the valleys of wreckage: the old car carcasses crushed like accordions started to march, creakily arranging themselves in a procession, and a stream of battered cans rolled along making a noise like thunder, though you couldn’t tell whether they were dragging or being dragged by everything else. Following this moon that had been saved from the scrap heap, all the things and all the people who had been resigned to being tossed in a corner started on the road again, and swarmed toward the richest neighborhoods of the city. That morning, the city was celebrating Consumer Thanksgiving Day. This feast came around every year, on a day in November, and had been set up to allow shoppers to display their gratitude toward the god Production, who tirelessly satisfied their every desire. The biggest department store in town organized a parade every year: an enormous balloon in the shape of a garishly colored doll was paraded through the main streets, pulled by ribbons that sequin-clad girls held as they marched behind a musical band. That day, the procession was coming down Fifth Avenue: the majorette twirled her baton in the air, the big drums banged, and the balloon giant, representing the Satisfied Customer, flew among the skyscrapers, obediently advancing on leashes held by girls in kepis, tassels, and fringed epaulets, riding spangly motorcycles. At the same time, another parade was crossing Manhattan. The flaky, moldy moon was also advancing, sailing between the skyscrapers, pulled by the naked girls, and behind it came a line of beat-up cars and skeletons of trucks, amid a silent crowd that was gradually increasing in size. Thousands of people joined the throng that had been following the moon since the early hours of the morning, people of all colors, whole families with children of every age, especially as the procession filed past the crowded black and Puerto Rican areas of Harlem. The lunar procession zigzagged around uptown, then started down Broadway, and came quickly and silently to converge with the other procession, which was dragging its balloon giant along Fifth Avenue. At Madison Square, one procession met the other; or, more precisely, the two became a single procession. The Satisfied Customer, perhaps owing to a collision with the moon’s jagged surface, deflated into a rubber rag. On the motorcycles now were the Dianas, pulling the moon with multicolored ribbons; or, rather, since the number of naked women had at least doubled, the female motorcyclists must have thrown away their uniforms and kepis. A similar transformation had overtaken the motorcycles and the cars in the parade. You could no longer tell which were the old cars and which were the new: the twisted wheels, the rusty fenders were mixed together with bodywork as shiny as a mirror and paint that gleamed like enamel. And, behind the parade, shopwindows became covered with cobwebs and mold, skyscrapers’ elevators started to creak and groan, advertising posters turned yellow, the egg holders in refrigerators filled with chicks, as if they were incubators, televisions reported whirling atmospheric storms. The city had consumed itself at a stroke: it was a disposable city that now followed the moon on its last voyage. To the sound of the band drumming on empty gas cans, the procession arrived at the Brooklyn Bridge. Diana raised her majorette’s baton; her friends twirled their ribbons in the air. The moon made a last dash, traversed the curved grillework of the bridge, tipped toward the sea, crashed into the water like a brick, and sank, sending thousands of little bubbles to the surface. Meanwhile, instead of letting the ribbons go, the girls had stayed attached to them, and the moon had lifted them up, sending them flying over the parapet and off the bridge: they described arcs in the air like divers and disappeared into the water. We stood and stared in astonishment, some of us on the Brooklyn Bridge, others on the jetties on the shore, caught between the urge to dive in after them and the certainty that we would see them reappear again just as before. We did not have to wait long. The sea began to vibrate with waves that spread out in a circle. At the center of this circle there appeared an island, which grew like a mountain, like a hemisphere, like a globe resting on the water, or, rather, raised up just above it; no, like a moon rising in the sky. I say a moon, even though it did not resemble a moon any more than the one we had seen plunge into the depths a few moments before: however, this new moon had a very different way of being different. It emerged from the sea dripping a trail of green, glistening seaweed; spouts of water gushed in fountains from fields that lent it the sheen of an emerald. A steamy jungle covered it, but not with plants. This covering seemed to be made of peacock feathers, full of eyes and shimmering colors. This was the landscape that we hardly managed to glimpse before the sphere swiftly receded into the sky, and the more minute details were lost in a general impression of freshness and lushness. It was dusk: the contrasts of the colors were fading into a vibrant chiaroscuro; the lunar fields and woods were now just barely visible contours on the taut surface of the shining globe. But we were able to catch sight of some hammocks hanging from branches, rocked by the wind, and I saw, nestling in them, the girls who had led us to that place. I recognized Diana, at peace at last, fanning herself with a feather punkah, and perhaps sending me a signal of recognition. "There they are! There she is!" I shouted. We all shouted, and the happiness at having found them again was already fraught with the pain of having lost them now forever, as the moon rising in the dark sky sent out only the reflections of the sun on its lakes and fields. We were seized by a frenzy: we began to gallop across the continent, through the savannas and forests that had recovered the earth, burying cities and roads, obliterating all trace of what had been. And we trumpeted, lifting up to the sky our trunks and our long, thin tusks, shaking the shaggy hair of our croups with the violent anguish that takes hold of all us young mammoths when we realize that now is when life begins, and yet it is clear that what we desire we shall never have. --1968 (Translated, from the Italian, by Martin McLaughlin.) (First published in English on The New Yorker, February 23, 2009)]]> Editor's Note tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2008:/calvino//1.1028 2008-12-15T06:33:03Z 2008-12-15T07:19:45Z The pieces brought together in this volume originally appeared in the publications listed below. Where both manuscript and printed copy are available, preference has been given to the manuscript version. Fables and Stories 1943-1958 'The Man Who Shouted Teresa', manuscript...

Fables and Stories 1943-1958

'The Man Who Shouted Teresa', manuscript dated 12 April 1943. 'The Flash', manuscript dated 25 April 1943. 'Making Do', manuscript dated 17 May 1943; published in La Repubblica, 17 September 1986. 'Dry River', manuscript dated October 1943. 'Conscience', manuscript dated 1 December 1943. 'Solidarity', manuscript dated 3 December 1943. 'The Black Sheep', manuscript dated 30 July 1944. 'Good for Nothing', 1945-6, original manuscript title; planned as a novel and adapted into a short story. It was published under the title 'What Noah Wasn't Like' in a small review as yet unidentified since we have only the pages with this story. 'Like a Flight of Ducks', Il Settimanale, II, 18, 3 May 1947. 'Love Far from Home', proofs with corrections in the author's hand, 1946. 'Wind in a City', proofs with corrections in the author's hand, 1946. 'The Lost Regiment', L'Unità, 15 July 1951, definitive version in the collection, Fourteen Stories, Mondadori, Milan 1971. 'Enemy Eyes' (manuscript title); L'Unità, 2 February 1952, under the title 'The Enemy's Eyes'. 'A General in the Library' (manuscript title); L'Unità, 30 October 1953, under the title 'The General in the Library'. 'The Workshop Hen', I Racconti, Einaudi, 1954. 'Numbers in the Dark', I Racconti, Einaudi, 1958. 'The Queen's Necklace', published under the title 'Fragment of a Novel' in Everybody's Days, Edindustria editoriale S.p.A., 1960. The author's note states: 'The following pages are taken from a novel I worked on between 1952 and 1954 but never finished. Through the picaresque adventures of a lost pearl necklace the novel was meant to offer a satire of various levels of society in an industrial city during the years of post-war tension.' 'Becalmed in the Antilles', Città aperta, I, 4-5, 25 July 1957; the author's note of 1979 was written in response to a request from Felice Froio. 'The Tribe with Its Eyes on the Sky', manuscript with a signed note by the author, as follows: 'October 1957 -- after the Soviet missile, before the satellite. For Città aperta, but not published.' 'Nocturnal Soliloquy of a Scottish Nobleman', L'Espresso, 25 May 1958; the editor's note accompanying the publication claims, doubtless after consultation with the author: 'In this fable the writer Italo Calvino expresses his assessment of the Italian situation on the eve of the elections. It's a story à clef, where the MacDickinsons, or Episcopalians, represent the Christian Democrats; the MacConnollys or Methodists, the Communists, and the MacFergusons, or Presbyterians, the non-aligned centre parties. The Scottish nobleman is one of the latter.' The text here published is taken from Calvino's typescript with corrections in the author's hand. 'A Beautiful March Day', Città aperta, II, 9-10, June-July 1958.

Tales and Dialogues 1968-1984

'World Memory', Club degli Editori, Milan, 1968. 'Beheading the Heads', Il Caffè, XIV, 4, 4 August 1969; the author's note says: 'The following pages are sketches for chapters of a book I have been planning for some time, a book that aims to offer a new model for society with a political system based on the ritual execution of the entire governing class at regular intervals. I still haven't decided what shape the book will have. Each of the chapters here presented could be the opening of a different book; hence the numbers given do not indicate any particular order or progression.' 'The Burning of the Abominable House', Playboy, Italian edition, 1973. 'The Petrol Pump' (manuscript title); Corriere della Sera, 21 December 1974, under the title 'La forza delle cose' (The Force of Circumstances). 'Neanderthal Man', in the collection, Impossible Interviews, Bompiani, Milan 1975. 'Montezuma', in the collection, Impossible Interviews, Bompiani, Milan 1975. 'Before You Say 'Hello'', Corriere della Sera, 27 July 1975. 'Glaciation', text written in response to a request from the Japanese liquor producer, Suntori, first published in Japanese, then in Corriere della Sera, 18 November 1975. 'The Call of the Water', written as introduction to Aqueducts Past and Present, by Vittorio Gobbi and Sergio Torresella, published by Montubi, Milan, 1976. 'The Mirror, the Target' (manuscript title); Corriere della Sera, 14 December 1978, under the title 'There's a Woman behind the Target'. 'The Other Eurydice', September-October 1980. 'The Memoirs of Casanova', stories written to accompany a collection of etchings by Massimo Campigli published by Salomon and Torrini, 1981. The author's note, in the third person, states: 'After Invisible Cities, a catalogue of imaginary cities visited by a resurrected Marco Polo, Italo Calvino begins another series of short stories attributed once again to a famous Venetian, in this case Giacomo Casanova. Like the previous book, this too is a 'catalogue', but this time of 'amours'.' Published in La Repubblica, 15-16 August 1982. 'Henry Ford', typescript with corrections in the author's hand, dated 30 September 1982. Television screenplay, never produced. 'The Last Channel', La Repubblica, 31 January 1984. 'Implosion', 13 August 1984. 'Nothing and Not Much', Washington Post, 3 June 1985.]]> Nothing and Not Much tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2008:/calvino//1.1027 2008-12-14T23:51:54Z 2008-12-15T05:56:19Z Calculations made by the physicist Alan Guth of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center suggest that the universe was created literally from nothing in an extremely short space of time: a second divided by a billion billion billions. (from the Washington... Calculations made by the physicist Alan Guth of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center suggest that the universe was created literally from nothing in an extremely short space of time: a second divided by a billion billion billions. (from the Washington Post, 3 June 1984) If I tell you I remember it -- began Qfwfq -- you will object that in nothingness, nothing can remember anything, nor be remembered by anything, which is one reason why you won't be able to believe so much as a word of what I am about to tell you. Tough arguments to knock down, I admit. All I can tell you is that, the moment there was something, there being nothing else, that something was the universe, and since it hadn't been there before, there was a before when it wasn't and an afterwards when it was, from that moment on, I'm saying, time began, and with time memory, and with memory someone who remembered, that is to say myself, or that something that later I would understand was myself. Let's get this straight: it's not that I remembered how I was when there was nothing, because there was no time then, and there was no me; but I realized now that, even if I didn't know I was there, still I had a place I could have been, I mean the universe; whereas before, even had I wanted to, I wouldn't have known where to put myself, and that's a pretty big difference, and it was precisely this difference between the before and the after that I remembered. In short, you must recognize that my reasoning is logical too, and what's more doesn't err on the side of the simplistic like your own. So let me explain. One can't even say for sure that what there was then, really was: the particles, or rather the ingredients with which the particles would later be made, existed in the virtual sense: that kind of existence where if you're there you're there, and if you're not there you can begin to count on being there and then see what happens. We felt this was a fine thing, and indeed it was, because it's only if you begin to exist in the virtual sense, to fluctuate in a field of probability, to borrow and return charges of energy still entirely hypothetical, that sooner or later you may find yourself existing in reality, wrapping around yourself, that is, a scrap, be it ever so small, of space-time, as happened to an ever increasing number of I-don't-know-whats -- let's call them neutrinos because it's a nice name, though at the time no one had ever even dreamed of them -- bobbing one on top of another in a torrid soup of infinite heat, thick as a glue of infinite density, that swelled up in a time so infinitely brief that it had nothing to do with time at all -- since of course time hadn't yet had the time to show what it would later become -- and as it swelled it produced space where no one had ever known what space was. Thus the universe, from being an infinitesimal pimple in the smoothness of nothing expanded in a flash to the size of a proton, then an atom, then a pinpoint, then a pinhead, then a teaspoon, then a hat, then an umbrella . . . No, I'm going too fast; or too slow, I don't know: because this expansion of the universe was infinitely fast yet started out from a beginning so deeply buried in nothing that to push its way out and peep over the threshold of space and time required a wrench of such violence as not to be measurable in terms of space and time. Let's say that to tell everything that happened in the first second of the history of the universe, I should have to put together an account so long that the whole subsequent duration of the universe with its millions of centuries past and future would not be enough; whereas everything that came afterwards I could polish off in five minutes. Naturally enough our belonging to a universe without precedent or terms of comparison very soon became a cause of pride, boasting, infatuation. The split-second yawning of unimaginable distances, the profusion of corpuscles squirting all over the place -- hadrons, baryons, mesons, a quark or two -- the reckless speed of time, taken all together these things gave us a sense of invincibility, of power, of pride, and at the same time of conceit, as if all this was no more than our due. The only comparison we could draw was with the nothing that had come before: and we put the thought behind us, as of something petty and wretched, deserving only of commiseration, or scorn. Every thought we had embraced the whole, disdained the parts; the whole was our element, and it included time too, all time, the future holding thrall over the past in terms both of quantity and fullness. Our destiny lay in more, more and more, and we couldn't think, even fleetingly, of less: from now on we would go from more to even more, from additions to multiplications to exponentials, without ever slowing down or stopping. That there was an underlying insecurity in this excitement, a craving almost to cancel out the shadow of our so recent origins, is something I have perhaps only recently come to appreciate, in the light of all I have learnt since; unless it was already secretly gnawing away inside me even then. For despite our certainty that the whole was our natural habitat, it was nevertheless true that we had come from nothing, that we had only just raised ourselves up from absolute deprivation, that only a fragile sliver of space-time lay between ourselves and our previous condition of being without substance, extension or duration. I would be seized by fleeting but intense sensations of precariousness, as if this whole that was struggling to develop were unable to hide its intrinsic fragility, the underlying emptiness to which we might well return with the same speed with which we had emerged. Hence my impatience with the universe's indecisiveness in taking on a form, as if I couldn't wait for that vertiginous expansion to stop, so I could discover its limits, for better or worse, but mainly so that its existence should stabilize; and hence too my fear, a fear I could not stifle, that as soon as the expansion let up the contraction phase would begin at once with an equally precipitate return to non-being. I reacted by leaping to the other extreme: 'Completeness! completeness!' I proclaimed far and wide, 'The future!' I cheered, 'I want immensity!' I insisted, shoving my way through that confused mill of forces, 'Let potential be potent!' I incited, 'Let the act act! Let probabilities be proven!' I already felt that the barrages of particles (or were they only radiations?) included every possible form and force, and the more I looked forward to being surrounded by a universe populated with active presences, the more I felt that those presences were affected by a criminal inertia, an abnegatory abulia. Some of these presences were, well, let's say they were feminine, I mean they had propulsive charges complementary to my own; one in particular attracted my attention: haughty and reserved, she would establish a field of languid, long-limbed forces around her. To get her to notice me, I redoubled my exhibitions of excitement at the prodigality of the universe, flaunted a nonchalant ease in drawing on cosmic resources, as if they'd always been available to me, and thrust ahead in space and time as though always expecting things to improve. Convinced that Nugkta (I call her by the name I would learn later on) was different from all the others, in the sense of more aware of what it meant to be, and to participate in something that is, I tried by every means available to distinguish myself from the hesitant mass of those who were slow to get used to this idea. The result was that I made myself tiresome and unpleasant to everybody, without this bringing me any closer to her. I was getting everything wrong. It didn't take me long to realize that Nugkta didn't appreciate my extravagant efforts at all, on the contrary she took care not to give me any sign of attention, apart from the occasional snort of annoyance. She went on keeping herself to herself, somewhat listlessly, as though crouched with her chin on her knees, protruding elbows hugging long folded legs (don't misunderstand me: I describe the position she would have assumed if one could have spoken then of knees, legs and elbows; or better still, it was the universe that was crouched over itself, and for those in it there was no other position to assume, just that some, for example Nugkta, did it more naturally). Lavishly, I scattered the treasures of the universe at her feet, but the way she accepted them it was as if to say: 'Is that all?' At first, I thought this indifference was affectation, then I realized she wanted to teach me something, to suggest I assume a more controlled attitude. My wild enthusiasm must have made her think me ingenuous, mindless, a greenhorn. There was nothing for it but to change my attitude, behaviour, style. My relationship with the universe should be the practical, factual approach of one capable of assessing the objective value of the evolution of any given thing, however immense, without letting it go to his head. That was how I hoped to come across to her, more convincing, promising, trustworthy. Did I succeed? Not a bit of it. The more I banked on solidity, on what was feasible, quantifiable, the more I felt I was coming across as a braggart, a con man. In the end I began to see the light: there was only one thing worthy of admiration as she saw it, only one value, and that was nothingness. It wasn't that she had a low opinion of me, but of the universe. Everything in existence carried some original defect within itself: being, to her mind, was a depressing, vulgar degeneration of non-being. To say that this discovery upset me would be an understatement: it was an affront to all my beliefs, my craving for completeness, my immense expectations. What greater incompatibility could there be than between myself and someone with a nostalgia for nothingness? Not that she was without her reasons (my weakness for her was such that I struggled to understand them): it was true that there was an absoluteness about the void, a rigour, a presence such as to make everything that claimed to have the requisites for existence seem approximate, limited, shaky; if one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the former that strike you, the impurities, the flaws; in short, you can only really feel safe with nothingness. That said, how should I react? Turn my back on the whole, plunge into the void again? It was hardly possible! Once set in motion, the process by which non-being was becoming being couldn't be stopped: the void belonged to a past that was irremediably over now. One of the many advantages of being was that it allowed us, from the climax of our achieved fullness, to indulge in a moment's regret for the nothingness we had lost, a moment's melancholy contemplation of the negative fullness of the void. In that sense I could go along with Nugkta's inclinations, indeed no one would be more capable than myself of expressing this feeling of yearning with conviction. No sooner thought than done: I rushed towards Nugkta crying: 'Oh, if only we could lose ourselves in the boundless spaces of the void . . .' (That is, I did something somehow equivalent to crying something of the like.) And how did she react? By turning away in disgust. It took me a while to realize how crude I had been and to learn that one speaks of the void (or better still doesn't speak) with a great deal more discretion. From then on it was one long series of crises which kept me in a state of constant agitation. How could I have been so mistaken as to seek the completeness of fullness in preference to the perfection of the void? True, the passage from non-being to being had been a considerable novelty, a sensational development, a discovery guaranteed to impress. But one could hardly claim that things had changed for the better. From a state of clarity, faultless, without stain, one had gone to a bungled, cluttered construction crumbling away on every side, held together by pure luck. How could I have been so excited by the so-called marvels of the universe? The scarcity of available materials had in many cases led to monotonous repetitive states, or again in many others to a scatter of untidy, inconsistent improvisations few of which would lead to anything at all. Perhaps it had been a false start: the veneer of what tried to pass itself off as a universe would soon fall away like a mask, and nothingness, the only true completeness possible, would once again impose its invincible absolute. So began a time when it was only in the chinks of emptiness, the absences, the silences, the gaps, the missing connections, the flaws in time's fabric, that I could find meaning and value. Through those chinks I would sneak glances at the great realm of non-being, recognizing it now as my only true home, a home I regretted having betrayed in a temporary clouding of consciousness, a home Nugkta had brought me to rediscover. Yes, to rediscover: for together with her, my inspiration, I would slither into these narrow passages of nothingness that crossed the compactness of the universe; together we would achieve the obliteration of every dimension, of all time, all substance, all form. By now the understanding between myself and Nugkta should at last have been clear. What could come between us? Yet every now and then unexpected differences would emerge: it seemed I had become more severe with the world of existence than she; I was amazed to discover in her an attitude of indulgence, complicity I might almost say, with the efforts that dusty vortex was making to keep itself together. (Already there were well-formed electromagnetic fields, nuclei, the first atoms.) Here it must be said that so long as one considered the universe as the complete expression of total fullness, it could inspire nothing but banality and rhetoric, but if one thought of it as something made from very little, a poor thing scratched together on the edge of nothingness, it excited sympathy and encouragement, or at least a benevolent curiosity as to whatever might come of it. To my surprise I found Nugkta willing to support it, to assist it, this mean, poverty-stricken, sickly universe. Whereas I was tough: 'Give me the void! All glory and honour to nothingness!' I insisted, concerned that this weakness of Nugkta's might distract us from our goal. And how did Nugkta reply? With her usual mocking snorts, exactly as she had at the time of my excessive enthusiasm for the glories of the universe. Slow as I am, only later would I come to appreciate that once again she was right. The only contact we could have with the void was through this little the void had produced as quintessence of its own emptiness; the only image we had of the void was our own poor universe. All the void we would ever know was there, in the relativity of what is, for even the void had been no more than a relative void, a void secretly shot through with veins and temptations to be something, given that in a moment of crisis at its own nothingness it had been able to give rise to the universe. Today, after time has churned its way through billions of minutes, billions of years, and the universe is unrecognizable from what it was in those first instants, since space suddenly became transparent so that the galaxies wrap the night in their blazing spirals, and along the orbits of the solar systems millions of worlds bring forth their Himalayas and their oceans according to the cosmic seasons, and the continents throng with masses whether jubilant or suffering or slaughtering each other, turn and turn about with meticulous obstinacy, and empires rise and fall in their marble, porphyry and concrete capitals, and the markets overflow with quartered cattle and frozen peas and displays of brocade and tulle and nylon, and transistors and computers and every kind of gadget pulsate, and everybody in every galaxy is busy observing and measuring everything, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, there's a secret that only Nugkta and I know: that everything space and time contains is no more than that little that was generated from nothingness, the little that is and that might very well not be, or be even smaller, even more meagre and perishable. And if we prefer not to speak of it, whether for good or for ill, it is because the only thing we could say is this: poor, frail universe, born of nothing, all we are and do resembles you.]]> Implosion tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2008:/calvino//1.1026 2008-12-14T09:13:50Z 2008-12-14T23:38:16Z 'Over the last few years, quasars, Seyfert galaxies, B.L. Lacertae objects, or, more generally, active galactic nuclei have been attracting the attention of astronomers because of the huge quantities of energy these bodies emit, at velocities of up to 10,000... 'Over the last few years, quasars, Seyfert galaxies, B.L. Lacertae objects, or, more generally, active galactic nuclei have been attracting the attention of astronomers because of the huge quantities of energy these bodies emit, at velocities of up to 10,000 kilometres per second. There are good reasons for supposing that the central driving force of the galaxy is a black hole of enormous mass' (L'Astronomia, no. 36). 'Active galactic nuclei may be fragments left unexploded by the Big Bang and engaged in a process exactly opposite to that which takes place in black holes, a process, that is, of explosive expansion involving the liberation of enormous quantities of energy ('white holes'). They could be explained as the exit extremities of a connecting link between two points in space-time (Einstein-Rosen's bridges), expelling material devoured by a black hole situated at the entrance extremity. According to this theory, a Seyfert galaxy a hundred million light years away may now be expelling gas sucked in by another part of the universe ten billion years ago. And it is even possible that a quasar ten billion light years away may have assumed the form we see today by taking in material that reaches it from some point in the future, travelling through a black hole which, as far as we are concerned, formed only today' (Paolo Maffeir, Monsters of the Sky, pp. 210-15). To explode or to implode -- said Qfwfq -- that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration and, by ingesting, cherish them. To steal away, to vanish; no more; to hold within oneself every gleam, every ray, deny oneself every vent, suffocating in the depths of the soul the conflicts that so idly trouble it, give them their quietus; to hide oneself, to obliterate oneself: perchance to reawaken elsewhere, changed. Changed . . . In what way changed? And the question, to explode or to implode: would one have to face it again? Absorbed by the vortex of this galaxy, does one pop up again in other times and other firmaments? Here sink away in cold silence, there express oneself in fiery shrieks of another tongue? Here soak up good and evil like a sponge in the shadow, there gush forth like a dazzling jet, to spray and spend and lose oneself. To what end then would the cycle repeat itself? I really don't know, I don't want to know, I don't want to think about it: here, now, my choice is made: I shall implode, as if this centripetal plunge might forever save me from doubt and error, from the time of ephemeral change, from the slippery descent of before and after, bring me to a time of stability, still and smooth, enable me to achieve the one condition that is homogeneous and compact and definitive. You explode, if that's more to your taste, shoot yourselves all around in endless darts, be prodigal, spendthrift, reckless: I shall implode, collapse inside the abyss of myself, towards my buried centre, infinitely. How long has it been since none of you has been able to imagine the life force except in terms of explosion? You have your reasons, I know. Your model is that of a universe born from a madcap explosion whose first splinters still hurtle unchecked and incandescent at the edge of space, your emblem is the exuberant kindling of supernovae flaunting the insolent youth of stars overloaded with energy; your favourite metaphor is the volcano, to show that even a mature and settled planet is always ready to break its bonds and burst forth. And the furnaces that flare in the farthest bounds of the heavens confirm your cult of universal conflagration; gases and particles almost as swift as light hurl themselves from vortex to centre of spiral galaxies, burst out into the lobes of elliptic galaxies, proclaim that the Big Bang still lives, the great Pan is not dead. No, I'm not deaf to your reasons; I could even join you. Go on! Explode! Burst! Let the new world begin again, repeat its ever renewed beginnings in a thunder of cannonfire, as in Napoleon's times . . . Wasn't it that age, by the way, with its elation at the revolutionary might of artillery fire that made us think of the explosion not just as harmful to people and property, but as a sign of birth, of genesis? Isn't it since then that passions, poetry and the ego have been seen as perpetual explosions? But if that's true, then so is its opposite; ever since that August when the mushroom rose over cities reduced to a layer of ash, an age was born in which the explosion is symbol only of absolute negation. But that was something we already knew anyway, from the moment when, rising above the calendar of terrestrial chronicle, we enquired of the destiny of the universe, and the oracles of thermodynamics answered us; every existing form will break up in a blaze of heat; there is no entity can escape the irretrievable disorder of the corpuscles; time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible. Only a few old stars know how to get out of time; they are the open door to jump from a train headed for annihilation. At the limit of their decrepitude, shrunk to the size of red dwarfs or white dwarfs, panting out the last glimmering gasp of the pulsar, compressed into neutron stars, here they are at last, light lost to the waste of the firmament, no more than the dark deletion of themselves, ready for the unstoppable collapse when everything, even light itself, falls inwards never to emerge again. Praise be to the stars that implode. A new freedom opens up within them: annulled from space, exonerated from time, existing, at last, for themselves alone and no longer in relation to all the rest, perhaps only they can be sure they really exist. 'Black holes' is a derogatory nickname, dictated by envy: they are quite the opposite of holes, nothing could be fuller and heavier and denser and more compact, with a stubbornness to the way they sustain the gravity they bear within, as if clenching their fists, gritting their teeth, hunching their backs. Only on these terms can one save oneself from dissolving in overreaching extension, in Catherine wheels of effusion, exclamatory extroversion, effervescence and ebullition. Only in this way can one break through to a space-time where the implicit and the unexpressed don't lose their energy, where the pregnancy of meanings is not diluted, where discretion and keeping distance multiply the effectiveness of every action. Don't distract yourselves fantasizing over the reckless behaviour of hypothetical quasi-stellar objects at the uncertain boundaries of the universe: it is here that you must turn your attention, to the centre of our galaxy, where all our calculations and instruments indicate the presence of a body of enormous mass that nevertheless remains invisible. Webs of radiation and gas, caught there perhaps since the time of the last implosions, show that there in the middle lies one of these so-called holes, spent as an old volcano. All that surrounds it, the wheel of planetary systems and constellations and the branches of the Milky Way, everything in our galaxy rests on the hub of this implosion sunk away into itself. That is my pole, my mirror, my secret home. It need fear no comparison with the farthest galaxies and their apparently explosive nuclei: there too what counts is what cannot be seen. Nothing comes out of there any more either, believe me: those impossibly fast flashes and whirls are just fuel to be crushed in the centripetal mortar, assimilated into the other mode of being, my own. Sometimes, of course, I do seem to hear a voice from the farthest galaxies: 'It's me, Qfwfq, I am yourself exploding as you implode: I'm splashing out, expressing myself, spreading myself about, communicating, realizing all the potential I have, I really exist, not like you, introverted, reticent, egocentric, fused in an immutable self . . .' Then I'm overwhelmed by the fear that even beyond the barrier of gravitational collapse time continues to flow: a different time, with no relation to the time left on this side, but speeding similarly headlong on a road with no return. In that case the implosion I've leapt into would be just a lull I've been granted, a respite before the fate I cannot escape. Something like a dream, or a memory, goes through my mind: Qfwfq is fleeing the catastrophe of time, he finds an escape route through which to elude his destiny, he rushes through the gap, he is sure he has reached safety, from a chink in his refuge he watches how the events he has escaped gather pace, pities, from a distance, those who are overwhelmed, until, yes, he seems to recognize one of them, yes, it's Qfwfq, it's Qfwfq who beneath Qfwfq's very eyes is experiencing that same catastrophe of before or after, Qfwfq who in the moment he perishes sees Qfwfq save himself, but without saving him. 'Qfwfq, save yourself!' cries Qfwfq, but is it the imploding Qfwfq who wants to save the exploding Qfwfq or vice versa? No Qfwfq can save any exploding Qfwfqs from the conflagration, as they in turn can't pull back the other Qfwfqs from their unstoppable implosion. Any way time runs it leads to disaster whether in one direction or its opposite and the intersecting of those directions does not form a network of rails governed by points and exits, but a tangle, a knot . . . I know I mustn't listen to voices, nor give credit to visions or nightmares. I go on digging my hole, in my mole's burrow.]]> The Last Channel tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2008:/calvino//1.1025 2008-12-14T01:57:43Z 2008-12-14T06:44:46Z My thumb presses down independently of any act of will: moment by moment, but at irregular intervals, I feel the need to push, to press, to set off an impulse sudden as a bullet; if this is what they meant... corpus delicti had become a part of my corpus, could I have explained what I had done and -- though I didn't manage to convince them -- why I had done it?) The first mistake they made in their diagnosis was to suppose that my attention span is so short that I cannot follow a coherent succession of images for more than a few minutes, that my mind can only capture fragments of stories and arguments without a beginning or an end, in short that the connecting thread that holds the fabric of the world together had snapped in my head. It's not true, and the proof they brought forward to support their thesis -- the way I sit motionless in front of the TV for hours and hours without following a programme, obliged as I am by a compulsive tic to switch from one channel to another -- can perfectly well be used to demonstrate the contrary. I am convinced that there is a sense in the happenings of this world, that a coherent story, explicable in all its series of cause and effect, is going on somewhere at this very moment, and is not beyond our capacity to verify, and that this story contains the key for judging and understanding everything else. It is this conviction that keeps me nailed to my chair staring at the video with glazed eyes while the frenetic clicks of the remote control conjure up and dismiss interviews with ministers, lovers' embraces, deodorant ads, rock concerts, people arrested hiding their faces, space rocket launches, Wild West gunfights, dancers' pirouettes, boxing matches, quiz shows, Samurai duels. If I don't stop to watch any of these programmes it's because they're not the programme I'm looking for, I know it exists, and I'm sure it's not one of these, and that they only transmit these programmes to deceive and discourage people like myself who are convinced that it's the other programme that matters. That's why I keep switching from one channel to another: not because my mind is no longer capable of even the very brief concentration required to follow a film or a dialogue or a horse race. On the contrary: my attention is already entirely projected towards something I absolutely must not miss, something unique that is happening at this very moment while my screen is still cluttered with superfluous and interchangeable images, something that must already have begun so of course I've missed the beginning and if I don't hurry up I risk losing the end as well. My finger leaps across the keys of the remote control discarding husks of empty appearance like the superimposed peelings of a multicoloured onion. Meanwhile the real programme is out there in the ether on a frequency I don't know, perhaps it will be lost in space without my being able to intercept it: there is an unknown station transmitting a story that has to do with me, my story, the only story that can explain to me who I am, where I come from and where I'm going. Right now the only relationship I can establish with my story is a negative relationship: that of rejecting other stories, discarding all the deceitful images they offer me. This pushing of buttons is the bridge I am building towards that other bridge that fans out into the void and that my harpoons still haven't been able to hook: two incomplete bridges of electromagnetic impulses that fail to meet and are lost in the dustclouds of a fragmented world. It was when I realized this that I stopped waving the remote control at the screen and started pointing it out of the window, at the city, its lights, its neon signs, the façades of the skyscrapers, the roof spires, the scaffolding of the cranes with their long iron beaks, the clouds. Then I went out in the streets with the remote control hidden under the flap of my coat, pointing it like a weapon. At the trial they said I hated the city, that I wanted to make it disappear, that I was driven by a destructive impulse. It's not true. I love, I have always loved our city, its two rivers, the occasional small squares transformed by their trees into oases of shade, the harrowing wail of its ambulance sirens, the wind that rakes the Avenues, the crumpled newspapers that flit just above ground like tired hens. I know that our city could be the happiest in the world, I know that it is the happiest, not here on the wavelength where I find myself, but on another frequency, it's there the city I've lived in all my life finally becomes my habitat. That's the channel I was trying to tune into when I pointed the remote control at the sparkling windows of the jewellers', at the stately façades of the banks, at the awnings and rotating doors of the big hotels: prompting my gestures was the desire to save all stories in one story that would be mine too: not the threatening and obsessive malice I have been accused of. They were all in the dark, lost: police, magistrates, psychiatric experts, lawyers, journalists. 'Conditioned by the compulsive need to keep changing channel, a TV addict goes crazy and tries to change the world with his remote control': that was the outline that served with only very few variations to define my case. But the psychological tests always ruled out the idea that I had a vocation for destruction; even my response to programmes presently transmitted is not far off average levels of acceptance. Maybe by changing channel I wasn't trying to disrupt all the other channels but looking for something that any programme could communicate if only it were not corroded within by the worm that perverts everything that surrounds my existence. So they thought up another theory, capable of bringing me back to my right mind again, they say; or rather, they claim that I convinced myself of this theory on my own and that this constituted the unconscious brake that stopped me committing the criminal acts they thought me ready to commit. This is the theory according to which for all my changing channels the programme is always the same or might as well be; whether they're transmitting a film or news or ads there is only one message whatever the station since everything and everybody are part of the one system; and likewise outside the screen, the system invades everything leaving space only for apparent changes; so that whether I go wild with my remote control or whether I keep my hands in my pocket makes no difference, because I'll never be able to get out of the system. I don't know whether those who put forward these ideas believe in them or whether they only say them in an attempt to draw me into the discussion; in any event they never had any hold on me because they cannot shake my conviction as to the essence of things. As I see it what counts in the world are not likenesses but differences: differences that may be big or then again small, or minute, perhaps even imperceptible, but what matters is precisely to tease them out and compare them. I know myself that in going from channel to channel you get the impression that it's all the same old story; and likewise I know that life is governed by necessities that prevent it from varying more than a certain amount: but it is in that small difference that the secret lies, the spark that sets in motion the machine of consequences, as a result of which the differences become considerable, large, huge, even infinite. I look at the things around me, all awry, and I think how the tiniest trifle would have been enough -- a mistake not made at a certain moment, a yes instead of a no -- to have generated entirely different consequences, albeit leaving the general shape of circumstances intact. Things so simple and natural that I was always expecting them to reveal themselves at any moment: thinking this and pressing the buttons on the remote control was one and the same thing. With Volumnia I thought I'd finally hit on the right channel. Indeed in the early days of our relationship, I gave the remote control a rest. I liked everything about her, the tobacco-coloured chignon hairstyle, the almost contralto voice, the knickerbockers and pointed boots, our shared passion for bulldogs and cactuses. Equally congenial, I felt, were her parents, the places where they had invested in real estate and where we spent invigorating vacations, and the insurance company in which Volumnia's father had promised me a creative job with profit-sharing after we were married. All doubts, objections, and conjectures that did not converge in the desired direction I sought to banish from my mind, but when I saw how they kept coming back more and more insistently, I began to wonder whether the small cracks, the misunderstandings, the embarrassments that had so far seemed no more than momentary and marginal eclipses might not be interpreted as ill omens for our future prospects, that is that our happiness might contain within it that sense of contrivance and tedium you find in a bad TV serial. Yet I never lost my conviction that Volumnia and I were made for each other: perhaps on another channel a couple identical to ourselves but to whom destiny had granted just slightly different gifts were about to embark on a life a hundred times more attractive than ours . . . It was in this spirit that I lifted my arm that morning, gripped the remote control and pointed it towards the corbeille of white camellias, towards Volumnia's mother's bonnet with its little blue bunches of grapes, the pearl on the father's plastron cravat, the priest's stole, the bride's silver-embroidered veil . . . This gesture, just when the whole congregation was expecting my 'yes', was misunderstood: most of all by Volumnia who saw it as a rejection, an irreparable offence. But all I meant to say was that there, on that other channel, mine and Volumnia's story was unfolding far away from the jubilant sounds of the organ and the flashlights of the photographers, yet had many things about it that made it more consonant with my truth and hers . . . Perhaps on that channel beyond all channels we didn't break up. Volumnia goes on loving me there, while here, in the world I live in I haven't been able to get her to understand my motives: she doesn't want to see me any more. I never recovered from that violent break; it was then I began the life described in the papers as that of a maniac of no fixed abode, wandering through the city armed with his incongruous gadget . . . And yet my reasoning was clear as never before: I had realized that I must begin to work from the top down: if things were going wrong on all channels, there must be a last channel unlike the others where the leaders, perhaps not so different from these here, but with some small variation in character, in mentality, in matters of conscience, were able to stop the cracks that open in the foundations, the reciprocal distrust, the degeneration of human relationships . . . But the police had had their eye on me for some time. When I shoved my way through the people crowding round to see the Heads of State getting out of their cars for the summit, then sneaked into the building through the French windows amidst a swarm of security men, I didn't even manage to lift my arm and point the remote control before they were all on top of me dragging me away, despite my protests that I didn't intend to stop the ceremony, only wanted to see what they were showing on the other channel, for curiosity's sake, just for a few seconds.]]> Henry Ford tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2008:/calvino//1.1024 2008-12-13T09:14:39Z 2008-12-14T01:54:20Z SPOKESMAN: Mr Ford, I have been entrusted with the task of putting a number . . . The committee of which I am a member has the pleasure of informing you . . . Obliged as we are to erect... suddenly rigid, extremely alert, furious) Why do you imagine birds are just something graceful to enjoy for their feathers and warblings? Birds are necessary for strictly economic reasons! They destroy damaging insects! Did you know that the only time I mobilized the Ford organization to solicit intervention from the United States government was for the protection of migratory birds. An excellent law had been drawn up for establishing reserves, but it risked getting bogged down in Congress where they could never find the time to pass it. Of course: birds don't vote! So I asked every one of Ford's six thousand agents, spread all over the USA, to send a telegram to their representatives in Congress. That was when Washington began to take the problem seriously . . . The law was approved. You must understand that I never wanted to use the Ford Motor Company for political ends: each of us has a right to his own opinions and the company mustn't interfere with them. On that occasion the end justified the means, I think, and it was the only exception. SPOKESMAN: But Mr Ford, enlighten me please: you are the man who changed the image of our planet through industrial organization, motorization . . . What have little birdies got to do with that? HENRY FORD: What? You're another one who thinks that the big factories have wiped out trees, flowers, birds, greenery? Quite the contrary! It's only when we learn how to exploit cars and industry as effectively as possible that we will have the time to enjoy nature! My position is very simple: the more time and energy we waste, the less is left to enjoy life. I don't consider the cars that bear my name as mere cars: I hope they will serve to demonstrate the effectiveness of my philosophy . . . SPOKESMAN: You mean that you invented and manufactured and sold automobiles so that people could get away from the factories of Detroit and go and hear the birds singing in the woods? HENRY FORD: One of the people I most admired was a man who dedicated his life to watching and describing birds, John Burroughs. He was a sworn enemy of the automobile and all technical progress! But I managed to make him change his mind . . . The happiest memories of my life go back to the weeks spent together on a vacation I organized with Burroughs himself, and my other mentors and closest friends, the great Edison, and Firestone, the tyre man . . . We travelled in a caravan of cars, across the Adirondack Mountains, and the Alleghenys, sleeping under canvas, gazing at the sunsets, the dawns over waterfalls . . . SPOKESMAN: But don't you think that an image like this . . . in relation to what people know about you . . . Fordism . . . is, how can I put it?, misleading . . . doesn't it shirk everything essential? HENRY FORD: No, no, this is what is essential. American history is a history of journeys between boundless horizons, a history of means of transportation: the horse, the wagons of the pioneers, the railroads . . . But only the automobile has given Americans America. Only with the automobile have they become masters of the length and breadth of the country, each individual master of his own means of transport, master of his time, in the midst of this immensity of space . . . SPOKESMAN: I must confess that the idea we had for your monument . . . was a little different . . . a backdrop of factories . . . of assembly lines . . . Henry Ford, the creator of the modern factory, of mass production . . . The first automobile for the common man: the famous Model T . . . HENRY FORD: If it's an epigraph you're after, sculpt out the text of the announcement I used to launch the Model T on the market, in 1908. Not that I ever needed any advertising for my cars, mind! I always maintained that advertising was pointless, a good product doesn't need it, it is its own advertisement! But that leaflet expressed the ideas I wanted to get across. It's in advertising as education that I believe! Read it, read it. 'I shall build an automobile for the masses. It will be large enough for a family, but small enough to satisfy the needs of the individual. It will be built with the best materials and by the best men available on the market, following the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be priced so low that no man with a decent salary shall be unable to possess it and enjoy together with his family the blessing of a few hours' pleasure in God's great open spaces.' SPOKESMAN: The Model T . . . For almost twenty years the factories of Detroit produced this car and no other . . . You spoke of the needs of individuals . . . But you're quoted as making this joke: 'Every client can have his car in his favourite colour, so long as it's black.' Did you really say this, Mr Ford? HENRY FORD: Sure, I said it and I wrote it too. How do you think I managed to get my prices down, to put my cars within the reach of everyone's pocket? Do you think I could have done that if I'd introduced new models every year, like ladies' bonnets? Fashion is one of the forms of waste I most detest. My idea was a car whose every component could be replaced, so that it need never grow old. It was the only way I could transform the car from being a luxury item, a prestige accessory, to an essential product everyone must have, one whose worth lies in its utility . . . SPOKESMAN: That marked a big change in industrial practices. From then on the efforts of world industry have aimed to satisfy the common consumer, and to increase the demand for consumer goods. That is precisely why industry has tended to design products with built-in obsolescence, things to be thrown out as soon as possible, so that other products can be sold . . . The system you introduced had consequences which run contrary to your basic ideas: things are produced that soon wear out, or go out of fashion, so as to leave room for other products that are no better than the first but seem newer, products whose fortunes depend entirely on advertising. HENRY FORD: That wasn't what I wanted. Change only makes sense before you have reached that unique optimum method of production that must exist for every product, the way that will guarantee the maximum economy with the highest yield. There is one method and only one method for making everything in the best possible way. Once you've got there, why change? SPOKESMAN: So your idea is for a world where all cars are the same? HENRY FORD: No two things are the same in nature. And the idea that all men are the same and equal is mistaken and disastrous. I've never worshipped equality, but I didn't make a monster out of it either. Even if we do all we can to manufacture identical cars, made of identical components, so much so that any component can be taken from one car and mounted on another, the sameness is no more than apparent. Once you've put it on the road, every Ford handles a little differently from other Fords, and after he's tried a car a good driver will be able to distinguish it from all the others, all he has to do is sit at the wheel, turn the ignition key . . . SPOKESMAN: But this world you've helped create . . . weren't you ever afraid that it might be terribly uniform, monotonous? HENRY FORD: It's poverty that's monotonous. It's the waste of energy and lives. The people who stood in line outside our hiring office were Italians, Greeks, Poles, Ukrainians, emigrants from all the provinces of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, crowds of them, speaking incomprehensible languages and dialects. They were nobodies, without trade or home. I made honourable men of them, I gave them all a useful job, a salary that made them independent, I turned them into men capable of running their own lives. I made them learn English and the values of our moral code: this was the only condition I imposed; if they didn't like it they were free to go. But I never turned away those who were willing to learn. They became American citizens, they and their families, on a par with those born to families here for generations. I don't care what a man has been: I don't ask him about his past, nor where he's come from, nor what he's achieved. I don't care if he's been to Harvard and I don't care if he's been to Sing Sing! I only want to know what he can do, what he can become! SPOKESMAN: Right . . . become by conforming to a model . . . HENRY FORD: I know what you're trying to say. I have always taken human diversity as my starting point. Physical strength, speed of movement, capacity to react to new situations are all qualities that vary from one individual to the next. My idea was this: to organize the work in my factories so that those who were unskilled or disabled could yield as much as the most skilled worker. I had each department's tasks classified according to whether they demanded unusual vigour, or normal strength and stature, or whether they might be carried out by people whose speed and physical capacities were below the average. It turned out that there were 2,637 jobs that could be entrusted to workers with only one leg (mimes mechanical operations pretending to have only one leg), 670 that could go to people with no legs (mimes as above), 715 for those with only one arm (mimes as above), 2 for those with no arms (mimes as above) and 10 jobs that could be done by the blind. A blind man given the job of counting bolts in the warehouse proved capable of doing the work of three workers with good eyes (mimes). Is this what you call conforming? I'm telling you I did everything I could to help each man overcome his handicap. Even the sick could work and earn their keep in my hospitals. In their beds. Screwing nuts on small bolts. It helped keep up morale too. They got better faster. SPOKESMAN: But work on the assembly line . . . Being forced to concentrate your attention on repetitive movements, follow a rhythm that never changes, imposed by machines . . . What could be more mortifying for the creative spirit . . . for the most elementary freedom of having control over the movements of your own body, over the expense of your own energy in line with your own rhythm, your own breathing . . . Always to perform only one operation, one movement, always made in the same way . . . Isn't it a terrifying prospect? HENRY FORD: For me, yes. Terrifying. For me it would be inconceivable always to do the same thing all day every day. But not everyone is like me. The great majority of men have no desire to do creative work, to have to think, decide. They simply want a job that allows them to apply the minimum amount of mental and physical strength. And for this great majority, mechanical repetition, participation in a task that has already been organized down to the last detail, guarantees perfect inner calm. Of course, they mustn't be restless types. Are you restless? Me, yes, extremely. Well then, I won't use you for a routine job. But most of the jobs in a big factory are routine and as such suitable to the great majority of the workforce. SPOKESMAN: They are like that because you wanted them to be like that . . . both jobs and people . . . HENRY FORD: We managed to organize the work in the way that was easiest for those who had to do it, and most profitable. I say we the 'creative' ones, if you want to call us that, we the restless ones, we who can't relax until we have found the best way of doing things . . . You know where I got the idea of the conveyor that brings the component to the worker without him having to move toward the component? In the meat-canning factories of Chicago, watching the quartered cattle hung on trolleys moving along elevated rails, to be sprinkled with salt, cut up, pulped, minced . . . The quartered cattle passing by, dangling . . . the cloud of salt grains . . . the knife blades sawing back and forth . . . and I saw the chassis of the Model T running along at hand height while the workers tightened the bolts . . . SPOKESMAN: So creativity is reserved to the few . . . those who design . . . who take decisions . . . HENRY FORD: No! It is extended! How many artists, real artists, were there in the past? Today we are the artists, we who experiment with production and the men who produce! In the past creative tasks were restricted to putting together colours or notes or words on a painting, a score, a page . . . And for whom in the end? For a handful of world weary idlers who hang around the galleries and concert halls! We are the real artists, we who invent the work that millions of people count on! SPOKESMAN: But professional skill has disappeared from manual work! HENRY FORD: Oh enough! You lot are always harping on the same note. Quite the contrary. Professional skill has triumphed, in automobile manufacture and the organization of labour, and this way it's been put at the service of those who are not skilled who can now achieve the same yields as the more talented! You know how many parts go to make up a Ford? Including screws and bolts, about five thousand: big parts, medium-sized parts, small parts and some no bigger than the cogs in a clock. Workers used to have to walk across the shop floor to look for each part, walk to take them to the part to be assembled, walk to look for a spanner, a screwdriver, a welding torch . . . The day was frittered away with this back and forth . . . Then they always ended up banging into each other, tripping over themselves, crowding each other, bunching . . . Was this the human, creative way to work you people like so much? I wanted to organize things so that workers didn't have to run back and forth through the workshops. Was that an inhuman idea? I wanted to organize things so that workers didn't have to lift and carry weights. Was that an inhuman idea? I arranged men and tools in the order of the jobs to be done, I used trolleys on rails or hanging cables, so that arm movements were kept to a minimum. Save ten thousand people just ten steps a day and you've saved sixty miles of pointless movements and ill-spent energy. SPOKESMAN: To sum up: you wish to save your workers unnecessary movements in the building of automobiles which allow us all to live in continual movement . . . HENRY FORD: It's time-saving, my dear fellow, in both cases. There is no contradiction! The first advertisement I used to persuade Americans to buy themselves a car was based on the old proverb 'Time is money!' It's the same at work: for each operation the worker must have the right time: not a second too little and not a second too much! And the worker's entire day must be based on the same principles: he must live near the factory so as not to lose time travelling. That's why I came to the conclusion that medium-size factories were better than enormous ones . . . and meant you could avoid big urban conurbations, slums, dirt, delinquency, vice . . . SPOKESMAN: And yet Detroit . . . The masses who gathered in the Mid West to look for work in Ford factories . . . HENRY FORD: Right, I was the only one able to offer high, ever increasing salaries, in a period when no other factory owners would even consider it . . . It was hard work arguing for my idea and imposing it on the whole American economy: the idea that it's higher salaries, not higher profits that get the market moving. And to give higher salaries you have to save on the system of production. That is the only saving that's really worth making: saving not to accumulate but to increase salaries, that is purchasing power, that is abundance. The secret of abundance lies in an equilibrium between prices and quality. And it's only on abundance that you can build, not on shortages: I was the first to understand that. If a capitalist works in the hope that one day he'll be able to live off the revenue, he's a bad capitalist. I never felt I possessed anything myself, but that I was managing my property by putting the best means of production at the service of others. SPOKESMAN: But the unions saw things differently. And for years you didn't want to have anything to do with unions . . . As late as 1937 you were paying teams of bouncers and professional boxers to stop strikes by force . . . HENRY FORD: There were some troublemakers who wanted to stir up conflicts between Ford and the workers, conflicts for which there could be no logical reason. I had worked out everything in such a way that the workers' interests and the company's interests were the same thing! These people came up with arguments that had nothing to do with my principles, nor with the principles that arise from the laws of nature. There is a work morality, a morality of service that cannot be overturned, because it is a law of nature. Nature says: work! prosperity and happiness can only be achieved through honest toil! SPOKESMAN: But what people called Fordism, or at least your more popular ideas about society -- stable jobs, safe salaries, a certain level of affluence -- generated new aspirations in the workers' minds. Were you aware of that, Mr Ford? Out of a shapeless, unstable mass, you helped to create a workforce with something to defend, a workforce with dignity and with an awareness of its own value, and hence a group that demanded security, guarantees, contractual power, the right to decide its own destiny. It was what they call an irreversible process, that your paternalism could no longer either contain or control . . . HENRY FORD: I always look to the future, but in order to simplify things, not complicate them. Yet all those engaged in planning the future, proposing reforms, seem to want nothing better than to complicate things over and over. They're all the same: reformers, theorists, politicians, even presidents: Wilson, Roosevelt. . . Again and again I found myself fighting a lone battle against a pointlessly complicated world: politics, finance, wars . . . SPOKESMAN: You're not going to deny that wars brought certain advantages to your business . . . HENRY FORD: Those advantages weren't part of my plans. I've always been a pacifist, no one can ever deny that. I was always against American intervention, in the First World War and in the Second. In 1915 I organized the Peace Ship, I crossed the Atlantic to Norway together with influential people from the Church, the universities and the newspapers to ask the European powers to break off hostilities. They didn't listen to me. Then my own country joined the war too. Even the Ford Company started working for the war. So I announced that I wouldn't touch a cent of the profits on war contracts. SPOKESMAN: You promised to return those profits to the State, but it doesn't seem you ever did that . . . HENRY FORD: After the war I had to face an extremely critical financial situation. The banks . . . SPOKESMAN: The banks were always another of your betes noires . . . HENRY FORD: The financial system is another pointless complication which hinders manufacturing rather than helping it. As I see it money should always come after work, as the result of work, not before. As long as I steered clear of the financial markets everything went well: I came through the Crash of 1929 because my shares weren't quoted on the stock exchange. My goal in my work is simplicity . . . SPOKESMAN: But you played a very important role in setting up this economic system you say you don't approve of. Don't you think that rather than being inspired by simplicity, your considerations are somewhat simplistic? HENRY FORD: When it comes to business I always relied on simple American ideas. Wall Street is another world to me . . . a foreign world . . . oriental . . . SPOKESMAN: Just a minute, Mr Ford . . . No doubt you have every reason to be annoyed with Wall Street. . . That's one thing, but to identify the financial world and all your enemies with people of a particular origin, a particular religion . . . to write anti-Semitic articles in your papers . . . to collect them in a book . . . to support that fanatic who was soon to seize power in Germany, these . . . HENRY FORD: My ideas were misunderstood . . . I had nothing to do with the obscenities that were to happen in Europe . . . I was speaking for the good of America and for their good too, these people who are different from us, and who, if they wanted to take part in our community, should have appreciated what the real American principles were . . . those principles I am proud to have run my company on. SPOKESMAN: You achieved an enormous amount in the area of manufacturing, Mr Ford . . . And you theorized a great deal too . . . But while things always behaved as you forecast and planned, men didn't, there was always something in the human being that escaped you, that fell short of your expectations . . . Is that right? HENRY FORD: My ambition wasn't just to make things. Iron, laminates, steel, they're not enough. Things aren't an end in themselves. What I was thinking of was a model of humanity. I didn't just manufacture goods. I wanted to manufacture men! SPOKESMAN: Could you explain a bit more clearly what you mean by that, Mr Ford? May I sit down? Could I light a cigarette? Would you like one? HENRY FORD: Nooooo! You can't smoke here! Cigarettes are a vice and an aberration! Cigarettes are prohibited in Ford factories! I dedicated years of energy to the anti-smoking campaign! Even Edison said I was right! SPOKESMAN: But Edison smoked! HENRY FORD: Only cigars. I can forgive a cigar or two. Likewise a pipe. They are part of the American tradition. But not cigarettes! Statistics show that the worst criminals are cigarette smokers. Cigarettes lead straight to the gutter! I published a book against cigarettes! SPOKESMAN: Don't you think that, as well as cigarettes, you might also have concerned yourself with the effects of rhythms of work on health? Or of the pollution your factories generate? Or of the stench of the exhaust emissions your cars produce! HENRY FORD: My factories are always clean, well-lit and well-ventilated. And I can demonstrate that when it came to hygiene no one took as much care as I did. But now I'm talking about the moral aspect, the mind. For my plan I needed sober, hard-working, good-living men, with happy family lives, with clean and orderly homes! SPOKESMAN: Is that why you set up a group of inspectors to enquire into the private lives of your employees? To stick their noses into the love affairs and sex lives of other men and women? HENRY FORD: An employee who lives in an appropriate way will work in an appropriate way. I chose my personnel on the basis not just of their performance at work, but their morality at home too. And if I preferred to employ married men, good fathers and home-makers rather than libertines, drunkards and gamblers, there were reasons of efficiency for doing so. As far as women are concerned, I am happy to give them factory employment if they have to support their children, but if they have a husband in work then their place is in the home! SPOKESMAN: Yet your first opponents were the pious puritans who fought against the spread of the motor car because they saw it as a danger to the family! Preachers and moralists thundered against it as something lovers could use to meet far from their parents' watchful eyes; something that encouraged families to gad about on Sundays instead of going to church; something people would mortgage their houses and dig into their sacred savings to buy; they said the car prompted an otherwise thrifty people to desire long trips and vacations; the car generated envy amongst the poor and stirred up revolutions . . . HENRY FORD: The reactionaries are like the Bolsheviks: they can't see reality, they don't know what people need for the elementary functions of human life. I always acted in line with an idea too, I had my model. But my ideas are always applicable. SPOKESMAN: Of course, the Bolsheviks . . . What do you think of the fact that right from the beginning Soviet communism took Fordism as its model? Lenin and Stalin admired your organization of production and to a certain extent became disciples of your theories. They too wanted the whole of society to organize itself along the lines of industrial productivity, they too wanted to have their factories and workers operate as in Detroit, they too wanted to produce a disciplined and puritanical workforce . . . HENRY FORD: But they were unable to give their workers what I gave mine. Their austerity, like that of the reactionaries, prolonged shortages; my austerity brought abundance. But I'm not interested in what they did: my idea was an American idea, developed in relation to America, animated by the spirit of pioneers who weren't afraid of hard work and were able to adapt to the new, who were frugal and austere but wanted to enjoy the things of this world . . . SPOKESMAN: But the America of the pioneers is gone. Wiped out by Henry Ford's Detroit . . . HENRY FORD: I come from that old America. My father had a farm, in Michigan. I began to experiment with my inventions on the farm, financed by my father; I wanted to build practical transport vehicles for agriculture. The car was born in the country. I kept my love for the America of my childhood and my parents. As soon as I realized it was disappearing, I started buying and collecting old farm tools, ploughs, millwheels, carriages, buggies, sleds, furniture from the old wooden houses that were going to ruin . . . SPOKESMAN: So, just as ecology originates in the culture that produced pollution, so antique dealing originates from the same culture that imposed the new things that have replaced the old . . . HENRY FORD: I bought a traditional old tavern in Sudbury, Massachusetts, together with its swing sign and veranda . . . I even had them rebuild the unsurfaced track the wagon trails used when they headed West . . . SPOKESMAN: Is it true that in order to bring back the atmosphere of the time of horses and stagecoaches around that old tavern, you had the highway diverted, the very highway your Ford cars were roaring along at top speed? HENRY FORD: There's room for everything in this America of ours, don't you think? The American countryside mustn't be allowed to disappear. I was always opposed to the exodus of farmers from the country. I designed a hydroelectric station on the Tennessee to supply low cost energy to farmers. I would have given them electrical appliances, fertilizers, and they would have stayed away from the city. But neither government nor farmers would hear of it. They never understand simple ideas: there are three elementary functions in human life: farming, manufacturing and transportation. Every problem hangs on the way we grow things, the way we produce things, the way we transport things, and I always proposed the simplest solutions. The farmers' work was pointlessly complicated. Only five per cent of their energy was being spent to good use. SPOKESMAN: So you don't feel nostalgic for that life? HENRY FORD: If you think I miss things from the past, then you haven't understood me at all. I don't care one bit about the past! I don't believe in the experience of history! Really, filling people's heads with culture from the past is the most pointless thing you can do. SPOKESMAN: But the past means experience . . . In the life of peoples and individuals . . . HENRY FORD: Even individual experience serves no other purpose than to perpetuate memories of failures. The 'experts' in the factory only know how to tell you that you can't do this, that that has already been tried but doesn't work. . . If I had listened to the experts, I would never have achieved any of what I did achieve, I would have been daunted from day one, I would never have managed to put together an internal combustion engine. At the time the experts thought electricity was the solution to everything, that engines should be electric too. They were all fascinated by Edison, rightly so, and so was I. And I went to ask him if he thought I was crazy, as people were saying, because I'd set my stubborn mind to getting an engine rolling that went 'brum brum'. Then, the man himself, Edison, the great Edison, said to me: 'Young man, I'll tell you what I think. I've worked with electricity all my life. Well, electrical cars will never be able to range very far from their supply stations. No good imagining they can carry batteries of accumulators around with them: they're too heavy. And steam cars aren't ideal either: they'll always need a boiler and fire and what it takes to fuel it. But the automobile you've found is self-sufficient: no fire, no boiler, no smoke, no steam; it carries its power house around with it. That's what we were waiting for, young man. You're on the right track! Keep at it, don't lose heart! If you manage to invent a lightweight engine that fuels itself, without the need to charge itself up like a battery, you'll have a great future!' That's what the great Edison said to me. The king of electricity was the only one who realized that I was doing something electricity could never do. No, being an expert doesn't count, what you've done doesn't count. It's what you can do and what you want to do that counts! The ideas you have for the future! SPOKESMAN: Today your future is already the past . . . and it conditions the present for everyone . . . Tell me, when you look around today, do you see the future you wanted? I mean the future you saw when you started, when you were a young country boy in Michigan, shutting yourself away in your father's farm shed, trying out different cylinders and pistons and transmission belts and differential gears . . . Tell me, Mr Ford, do you remember what you wanted then? HENRY FORD: Yes, I wanted lightness, a light engine for a light vehicle, like the small gig I kept trying to fix up with a steam boiler . . . I've always looked for lightness, reducing the waste of materials and effort . . . I spent my days shut up in the garage workshop . . . From outside I caught the smell of hay . . . the whistle of the thrush from the old elm near the pond . . . a butterfly came in through the window, drawn to the glow of the boiler, it beat its wings around it, then the thump of the piston sent it flying away, silent, light . . . (Images of slow heavy traffic in a big city, of trucks in a jam on the highway, of work at a steel mill press, work at an assembly line, of smoke from smoke stacks, etc., are superimposed over the figure of Henry Ford as he speaks these last lines.)]]> The Memoirs of Casanova tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2008:/calvino//1.1023 2008-12-12T06:50:00Z 2008-12-13T08:59:17Z           I had two steady lovers: Cate and Ilda. Cate came to see me every morning, Ilda in the afternoon; in the evening I went out socializing and people were amazed to see me always on my own. Cate was well-built, Ilda was slim; going from one to the other renewed desire, which tends as much to variation as to repetition. Once Cate had left I hid every trace of her; likewise with Ilda; and I think I always managed to stop either of them finding out about the other, both at the time and perhaps afterwards too. Of course I would sometimes slip up and say things to one of them that could only mean something if said to the other: 'I found these fuchsias at the florist today, your favourite flower,' or 'Don't forget to take your necklace again,' thus provoking amazement, anger, suspicion. But these banal improprieties only occurred, if I well remember, at the beginning of the double affair. Very soon I learnt to separate the two relationships completely; each relationship took its course, had its continuity of conversations and habits, and never interfered with the other. At the beginning I thought (I was, as you will have appreciated, very young, and looking for experience) that amatory arts would be transferable from one woman to the other: both knew a great deal more than me and I thought that the secrets I learnt from Ilda I would then be able to teach to Cate, and vice versa. I was wrong: all I did was to muddle things that are only valuable when spontaneous and direct. Each woman was a world unto herself, or rather each was a sky where I must trace the positions of stars, planets, orbits, eclipses, inclinations and conjunctions, solstice and equinox. Each firmament had its own movement, in line with its own mechanism and rhythm. I couldn't expect to apply notions of astronomy I'd learnt watching Cate's sky, to Ilda's. But I must confess that freedom of choice between two lines of behaviour was no longer an option: with Cate I had been trained to act one way and with Ilda another; I was conditioned in every way by the partner I was with, to the extent that even my instinctive preferences and tics would change. Two personalities alternated inside me; and I wouldn't have been able to say which me was really me. What I've said holds good as much for the spirit as the body: the words spoken to the one couldn't be repeated to the other, and I very soon realized I would have to vary my way of thinking too. When I feel the urge to recount and evoke one of the many twists and turns of my adventurous life, I usually resort to the well-tried versions I've developed for social occasions, with whole sentences and more repeated word for word, the effects calculated right down to the digressions and pauses. But certain escapades that never failed to win the appreciation of groups of people who didn't know me, or who weren't involved, had to be considerably adapted if I was to tell them to Cate or Ilda alone. Certain expressions that were common currency with Cate, sounded wrong when I was with Ilda; the quips Ilda picked up at once and returned with interest, I would have had to explain to Cate with every 'i' dotted and 't' crossed, though she appreciated other jokes that left Ilda cold; sometimes it was the conclusion to be drawn from a story that changed from Ilda to Cate, so that I took to giving my stories different endings. In this way I was gradually constructing two different versions of my life. Every day I would tell Cate and Ilda what I had seen and heard the evening before wandering round the haunts and hangouts in town: gossip, shows, celebrities, fashionable clothes, eccentricities. In my early days of undifferentiated insensibility, I would repeat word for word to Ilda in the afternoon whatever I'd said in the morning to Cate: I thought this would save me the imaginative effort one is constantly having to make to keep people interested. I soon realized that the same story either interested one and not the other, or, if it interested both, then the details they asked for were different and likewise different were the comments and judgements they expressed. What I had to do then was to produce two quite different stories from the same material: and this wouldn't have been particularly problematic; except that each evening I also had to live through things in two different ways in line with the stories I'd be telling the following morning; I'd look at everything and everybody from Cate's point of view and from Ilda's point of view, and I'd judge them in line with their two different criteria; in conversation I'd come up with two retorts to the same quip from someone else, one that Ilda would like, the other that Cate would like; every retort generated counter-retorts that I had to reply to once again in two ways. I wasn't aware of this split personality operating when I was in the company of one or the other of them, but mostly when they weren't there. My mind had become the two women's battlefield. Cate and Ilda, who didn't know of each other outside my head, were constantly clashing and fighting for territory inside me, hitting out at each other, tearing each other to shreds. The sole purpose of my existence was to be host to the bitter struggle between two rivals neither of whom knew anything about it. That was the real reason that persuaded me to leave              in a hurry, never to return. 2 I was attracted to Irma because she reminded me of Dirce. I sat next to her: she just had to turn her body a little towards me and put a hand over her face (I would whisper to her; she would laugh) and the illusion of being close to Dirce was striking. The illusion awoke memories, the memories desires. To transmit them to Irma somehow, I gripped her hand. Her touch and the way she started revealed her to me for what she was, different. This sensation was stronger than the other, but without cancelling it out, and, in itself, agreeable. I realized that I would be able to derive a double pleasure from Irma: that of pursuing through her the lost Dirce, and that of allowing myself to be surprised by an unfamiliar presence. Every desire traces its curve within us, a line that climbs, wavers, sometimes dissolves. The line the absent woman evoked in me might, a second before it began to decline, intersect with the line of my curiosity in the present woman, and transmit its upward thrust to this still all undiscovered trajectory. The plan was worth a try: I redoubled my attentiveness in Irma's regard, until I persuaded her to come to my room at night. She came in. She let her cloak slip off. She was wearing a light white muslin blouse that the wind (it being spring the window was open) ruffled. That was when I realized that a different and unexpected mechanism was taking charge of my sensations and thoughts. It was Irma who was taking up the whole field of my attention, Irma as a unique and unrepeatable person, skin and voice and eyes, while the resemblances to Dirce that occasionally surfaced in my mind were no more than a disturbance, so much so that I was eager to be rid of them. Hence my meeting with Irma became a battle with the shade of Dirce who kept on sneaking in between us, and every time I felt I was about to capture the indefinable essence of Irma, every time I felt I had established an intimacy between us that excluded every other presence or thought, back came Dirce, or the past experience that Dirce embodied for me, to stamp her impression on what I was experiencing that very moment and prevent me from feeling it as new. At this point Dirce, her memory, the mark she had made on me, brought me nothing but annoyance, constraint, boredom. Dawn was coming in through the shutter slats in blades of pearl-grey light, when I realized beyond any doubt that my night with Irma was not the one now about to end, but another night like this one, a night still to come when I would seek the memory of Irma in another woman, and suffer first when I found her again and when I lost her again, and then when I couldn't free myself from her. 3 I rediscovered Tullia twenty years on. Chance, which in the past had brought us together only to separate us just when we realized we liked each other, now finally allowed us to pick up the thread of our relationship at the point where it had broken off. 'You haven't changed at all,' we both told each other. Were we lying? Not entirely: 'I haven't changed,' was what both she and I wished to have the other understand. This time the relationship developed as both expected. At first it was Tullia's mature beauty which engaged all my attention, and only later did I tell myself not to forget the young Tullia, seeking to recover the continuity between the two. Hence, playing a game that came to us spontaneously when we talked, we would pretend that our separation had lasted twenty-four hours and not twenty years, and that our memories were of things that had happened only the day before. It was lovely, but it wasn't true. If I thought of myself as I was then with her as she was then, I was confronted with two strangers; they aroused warmth, affection, plenty of it, tenderness too, but what I was able to imagine in their regard had nothing to do with what Tullia and I were now. Of course we still regretted how all too brief our first encounter had been. Was it the natural regret for lost youth? But my present satisfaction I felt gave me no cause for regret; and Tullia too, now I was getting to know her, was a woman too taken up with the present to abandon herself to nostalgia. Regret for what we hadn't been able to have then? Maybe a little, but not entirely: because (again with this exclusive enthusiasm for what the present was giving us) I felt (perhaps wrongly) that if our desire had been satisfied at once it might have removed something from our happiness today. If anything the regret had to do with what those two poor youngsters, those 'others', had lost, and was added to the sum of all the losses the world suffers in every instant never to retrieve. From the height of our sudden richness, we deigned to cast a compassionate eye on those excluded: hardly a disinterested feeling, since it allowed us to savour our privilege the better. Two opposing conclusions can be drawn from my relationship with Tullia. One might say that having found each other again cancelled out the separation of twenty years before, erased the loss we suffered; and one might say on the contrary that it rendered that loss decisive, desperate. Those two (Tullia and I as we were then) had lost each other for ever, never to meet again, and in vain would they have called on the Tullia and I of today for help, since we (the selfishness of happy lovers is boundless) had entirely forgotten them. 4 Of other women I remember a gesture, a repeated expression, an inflexion, that were intimately bound up with the essence of the person and distinguished them like a signature. Not so with Sofia. Or rather, I remember a great deal about Sofia, too much perhaps: eyelids, calves, a belt, a perfume, many preferences and obsessions, the songs she knew, an obscure confession, some dreams; all things my memory still keeps in its store and links with her but which are doomed to be lost because I can't find the thread that binds them together and I don't know which of them contains the real Sofia. Between each detail lies a gap; and taken one by one, they might just as well be attributed to someone else as to her. As for our lovemaking (we met in secret for months), I remember that it was different every time, and although this should be a positive quality for someone like myself who fears the blunting effect of habit, it now turns out to be a fault, since I can't remember what prompted me to go to her rather than anyone else each time I went. In short, I don't remember anything at all. Perhaps all I wanted to understand about her at the beginning was whether I liked her or not: that was why the first time I saw her I bombarded her with questions, some of them indiscreet. Instead of fending these off, which she could well have done, in reply to every question she overwhelmed me with all kinds of clarifications, revelations and allusions, at once fragmentary and digressive, while I, in my struggle to keep up with her and hold on to what she was telling me, got more and more lost. Result: it was as if she hadn't answered me at all. To establish communication in a different language I risked a caress. In response Sofia's movements were entirely aimed at containing and putting off my assault, if not exactly rejecting it, with the result that the moment one part of her body slipped away from my hand, my fingers would slither on to another, her evasion thus leading me to carry out an exploration of her skin at once fragmentary yet extensive. In short, the information gathered through touch was no less abundant than that recorded by hearing, albeit equally incoherent. Nothing remained but to complete our acquaintance on every level and as soon as possible. But was it one unique woman this person who undressed before me, removing both the visible and invisible clothes the ways of the world impose on us, or was it many women in one? And which of these was it that attracted me, which that put me off? There was never an occasion when I didn't discover something I wasn't expecting in Sofia, and less and less would I have been able to answer that first question I had asked myself: did I or didn't I like her? Today, going over it in my memory, another doubt occurs: is it that when a woman hides nothing of herself I am incapable of understanding her; or is it that Sofia in revealing herself so abundantly was deploying a sophisticated strategy for not letting me capture her? And I tell myself: of all of them, she was the one who got away, as if I had never had her. But did I really have her? And then I ask myself: and who did I really have? And then again: have who? what? what does it mean? 5 I met Fulvia at the right moment: as chance would have it I was the first man in her young life. Unfortunately this lucky encounter was destined to be brief; circumstances obliged me to leave town; my ship was already in harbour; the next morning it was due to set sail. We were both aware that we would not see each other again, and equally aware that this was part of the established and ineluctable order of things; hence the sadness we felt, though to differing degrees, was governed, once again to differing degrees, by reason. Fulvia already sensed the emptiness she would feel when our new and barely begun familiarity was broken off, but also the freedom this would open up for her and the many opportunities it would provide; I on the other hand had a habit of placing the events of my life in a pattern where the present receives light and shade from the future, a future whose trajectory in this case I could already imagine right up to its decline; what I foresaw for Fulvia was the full flowering of an amorous vocation which I had helped to awaken. Hence in those last dallyings before our farewell I couldn't help seeing myself as merely the first of the long series of lovers Fulvia was doubtless going to have, and to reassess what had happened between us in the light of her future experiences. I realized that every last detail of a passion that Fulvia had surrendered herself to with total abandon would be remembered and judged by the woman she would become in just a few years' time. As things stood now, Fulvia accepted everything about me without judging: but the day was not far off when she would be able to compare me with other men; every memory of me would be subjected to parallels, distinctions, judgements. I had before me an as yet inexperienced girl for whom I represented all that could be known, but all the same I felt I was being watched by the Fulvia of tomorrow, demanding and disenchanted. My first reaction was one of fear of comparison. Fulvia's future men, I thought, would be capable of making her fall totally in love with them, as she had not been with me. Sooner or later Fulvia would deem me unworthy of the fortune that had befallen me; it would be disappointment and sarcasm that kept alive her memory of me: I envied my nameless successors, I sensed that they were already lying in wait, ready to snatch Fulvia away, I hated them, and already I hated her too because Fate had already destined her for them . . . To escape this pain, I reversed the train of my thoughts, passing from self-detraction to self-praise. It wasn't hard: by temperament I am rather inclined to forming a high opinion of myself than a low. Fulvia had had an invaluable stroke of luck meeting me first; but taking me as a model would expose her to cruel disappointments. Other men she would meet would seem crude, feeble, dull and dumb, after myself. In her innocence she no doubt imagined my good qualities to be fairly common attributes amongst my sex; I must warn her that seeking from others what she had found in me could only lead to disillusionment. I shivered in horror at the thought that after such a happy beginning Fulvia might fall into unworthy hands, who would harm her, maim her, debase her. I hated all of them; and I ended up hating her too because destiny was to snatch her from me condemning her to a degraded future. One way or another, the passion that had me in its grip was, I suspect, the one I have always heard described as 'jealousy', a mental disturbance from which I had imagined circumstances had rendered me immune. Having established that I was jealous, all I could do was behave like a jealous man. I lost my temper with Fulvia, telling her I couldn't stand her being so calm just before we were about to part; I accused her of hardly being able to wait to betray me; I was unkind to her, cruel. But she (no doubt out of inexperience) seemed to find this change in my mood natural and wasn't unduly upset. Very sensibly she advised me not to waste the little time we had left together on pointless recriminations. Then I knelt at her feet, I begged her to pardon me, not to inveigh too bitterly against me when she had found a companion worthy of her; I hoped for no greater indulgence than to be forgotten. She treated me as though I were mad; she wouldn't let me speak of what had happened between us in anything but the most flattering terms; otherwise, she said, it spoiled the effect. This served to reassure me as to my image, but then I found myself commiserating with Fulvia over her future destiny: other men were worthless; I should warn her that the fullness she'd known with me wouldn't happen again with anyone else. She answered that she too felt sorry for me, because our happiness came from our being together, once apart we would both lose it; but to preserve it for some time longer we should both immerse ourselves in it totally without imagining we could define it from without. The conclusion I came to from without, waving my handkerchief to her from the ship as the anchor was raised, was this: the experience that had entirely occupied Fulvia all the time she was with me was not the discovery of myself and not even the discovery of love or of men, but of herself; even in my absence this discovery, once begun, would never cease; I had only been an instrument.]]> The Other Eurydice tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2008:/calvino//1.1022 2008-12-09T08:27:52Z 2008-12-09T08:30:05Z You have won, men of without, you have recast the stories to suit yourselves, to condemn us of within to the role you like to give us, the role of powers of darkness and of death, and the name you... of the earth and in the earth; not what sprouts on the surface and which you think you can call terrestrial life, when it is no more than a mould that spreads its stains on the wrinkly peel of the apple. We could already see the plutonic cities we meant to found rising under basalt skies, surrounded by walls of jasper, spherical, concentric cities sailing on oceans of mercury, washed by rivers of incandescent lava. What we wanted was a living-body-city-machine that would grow and grow until it filled the whole globe, a telluric machine that would use its boundless energy in ceaseless self-construction, combining and transforming all substances and shapes, performing, with the speed of a seismic shock the work that you without have had to pay for with centuries of sweat. And this city-machine-living-body would be inhabited by beings like ourselves, giants stretching out their powerful arms across wheeling skies to embrace giantesses, who, with the rotating of concentric earths, would expose themselves in ever new attitudes giving rise to ever new couplings. These minglings, these vibrations were to give birth to a realm of diversity and completeness, a realm of silence and of music. Constant vibrations, propagating themselves at varying slownesses, according to the depth and discontinuity of the materials, would ruffle the surface of our great silence, transforming it into the ceaseless music of the world, harmonizing the deep voices of the elements. This to show you how mistaken your way is, your life where work and pleasure are at odds, where music and noise are two different things; this to show you how even then all this was clear, and the song of Orpheus none other than a sign of your partial and divided world. Why did Eurydice fall into the trap? She belonged entirely to our world, Eurydice, but her enchanted spirit was such that she delighted in every possible state of suspension, and as soon as she got the chance to launch herself in flight, in leaps, in ascents up volcanic vents, you would see her bending her body into twists and turns and curvets and capers. Boundary zones, the passages that led from one terrestrial layer to another, gave her a keen sense of vertigo. I have said that the Earth is made up of roofs laid one above another, like the skins of an immense onion, and every roof leads to a higher roof, and all together look forward to the final roof, there where the Earth stops being Earth, where everything within is left on this side and on the other there is only what is without. You identify the Earth's boundary with the Earth itself; you believe that the sphere is the surface that wraps around it, not the volume beneath; you have always lived in that flat dimension and you never even imagine that an elsewhere and an otherwise could exist; at the time we knew that this boundary was there, but we didn't imagine one could see it, without leaving the Earth, an idea that wasn't so much frightening as absurd. Everything the Earth expelled from its guts in eruptions and bituminous jets and fumaroles was sent flying out there: gases, liquid mixtures, volatile elements, worthless materials, refuse of every kind. The outside was the world's negative, something we couldn't even picture in our minds, the mere abstract idea of which was enough to provoke a shiver of disgust, no, of horror, or rather, a stupor, yes that's it, a sense of vertigo (certainly our reactions were more complicated than you would imagine, especially Eurydice's), into which would creep a certain fascination, an attraction to the void, the Janus-faced, the ultimate. Following Eurydice on one of her wandering whims we entered the throat of a spent volcano. Above us, the other side of something like the narrow passage of an hourglass, the crusty grey cavity of the crater opened out into a landscape hardly different in shape and substance from those we lived in deep below; but what bewildered us was that the Earth ended here, it didn't begin to weigh down on itself again in another form, from here on was emptiness, or at least a substance incomparably more tenuous than those we had so far encountered, a transparent, vibrant substance, the blue air. It was these vibrations that lost Eurydice, vibrations so different from those that spread slowly through basalt and granite, different from all the cracks, clangs and dull boomings that shudder sluggishly through masses of fused metal or great walls of crystals. Here, minute pointed sound-sparks darted towards her one after another from every possible direction and at a speed that was unbearable to us: it was a sort of tickling that filled you with unseemly cravings. We were seized -- or at least I was seized, since from here on I shall have to distinguish between my own state of mind and Eurydice's -- by the desire to retreat into that dark depth of silence over which the echo of earthquakes passes softly and is lost in the distance. But Eurydice, drawn as ever to the unusual and the rash, was eager to make this unique thing her own, regardless of whether it was good or bad. It was then that the trap was sprung: beyond the edge of the crater the air vibrated continuously, or rather, it vibrated continuously but in a way that involved different discontinuous vibrations. It was a sound that rose to fullness, faded, swelled again, and this modulation was part of an invisible pattern it followed, extended across time like a chequer of solids and spaces. Further vibrations were superimposed on these, and they were shrill and sharply separate, yet drew together in a halo, first sweet then bitter, and as they contrasted or followed the movement of the deeper sound, they imposed a sort of circle or field or dominion of sound. My immediate instinct was to get out of that circle, to get back to padded density: and I slipped inside the crater. But that same moment Eurydice had leapt up the rocks in the direction of the sound, and before I could stop her she was over the brim of the crater. Oh, it was an arm, something I thought might be an arm, that snatched her, snake-like, and dragged her out; I just heard a cry, her cry, join with the earlier sound, in harmony with it, in a single song that she and the unknown singer struck up together, to the rhythm of a stringed instrument, descending the outer slopes of the volcano. I don't know whether this image corresponds to something seen or something imagined: I was already sinking down into my darkness, the inner skies were closing one by one above me: the siliceous vaults, aluminium roofs, atmospheres of viscous sulphur; and the dappled subterranean silence echoed around me with its restrained rumblings, its muttered thunder. My relief at finding myself once again far away from the sickening edge of the air and the torment of those soundwaves was matched only by my desperation at having lost Eurydice. I was alone now: I hadn't been able to save her from the torture of being torn from the Earth, exposed to the constant percussion of strings stretched in that air with which the world of the void defends itself from the void. My dream of making the Earth live by reaching the ultimate centre together with Eurydice had failed. Eurydice was a prisoner, exiled in the roofless wastes of the world without. What followed was a time of waiting. My eyes studied the closely packed landscapes which, one above the other, fill the volume of the globe: threadlike caverns, chains of mountains stacked in scales and sheets, oceans wrung out like sponges: the more I acknowledged and was moved by our crammed, concentrated, compact world, the more I suffered that Eurydice was no longer there to live in it. Freeing her became my sole obsession: forcing the gates of the world without, inside invading outside, reuniting Eurydice with terrestrial material, building a new vault above her, a new mineral sky, saving her from the hell of that vibrant air, of that sound, that song. I would watch the lava gather in volcanic caverns, the upward pressure on the vertical ducts of the Earth's crust: that was the way. Came the day of the eruption, a tower of lapilli rose black in the air above a decapitated Vesuvius, the lava poured through the vineyards of the bay, burst the gates of Herculaneum, crushed the mule-driver and his beast against a wall, snatched the miser from his money, the slave from his chopping block; a dog trapped in his collar pulled the chain from the ground and sought refuge in the barn. I was there in the midst: I pressed forward with the lava, the flaming avalanche broke up in tongues, rivers, snakes, and at the foremost tip I was there running forward to find Eurydice. I knew -- something told me -- that she was still a prisoner of the unknown singer: when I heard the music of that instrument and the timbre of that voice, I would have found her too. I rushed on, transported by the lava flow through secluded gardens towards marble temples. I heard the song and a chord; two voices alternated; I recognized Eurydice's -- but how changed! -- following the stranger's. Greek characters on the undercurve of an arch spelt: Orpheos. I broke down the door, flooded over the threshold. For just an instant I saw her, next to the harp. The place was closed and vaulted, made specially, you would have thought, so that the music could gather there, as though in a shell. A heavy curtain, of leather I had the impression, or rather padded like a quilt, closed off a window, so as to isolate their music from the world around. As soon as I went in, Eurydice wrenched the curtain aside, throwing open the window; outside was the bay dazzling with reflected light and the city and the streets. The midday sun invaded the room, the sun and the sounds: a strumming of guitars rose from every side and the throbbing roar of scores of loudspeakers, together with the jagged backfiring of car engines and the honking of horns. The armour of noise stretched out across the Earth's crust: the cortex which circumscribes your surface lives, with its antennas bristling on the roofs, turning to sound the waves that travel unseen and unheard through space, with its radios stuck to your ears, constantly filling them with the acoustic glue without which you don't know whether you're dead or alive, its jukeboxes with their store of incessantly revolving sounds and the never-ending siren of the ambulance picking up the wounded of your never-ending massacres. The lava stopped against this wall of sound. Lacerated by the barbs of that fence of crashing vibrations, I made one more move forward to the point where for a moment I had seen Eurydice, but she was gone, and gone likewise her abductor: the song by which and on which they lived was submerged by the intruding avalanche of noise, and I could no longer distinguish either her or her song. I withdrew, climbing reluctantly back along the lava flow, up the slopes of the volcano, I returned to live in silence, to bury myself. Now, you who live without, tell me if by chance you happen to catch Eurydice's song in that thick paste of sounds that surrounds you, the song that holds her prisoner and is in turn prisoner of the non-song that massacres all songs, and if you should recognize Eurydice's voice with its distant echo of the silent music of the elements, tell me, give me news of her, you extraterrestrials, temporary victors, so that I can resume my plans to bring Eurydice to the centre of terrestrial life, to restore the realm of the gods of within, of the gods who inhabit the dense compactness of things, now that the gods of without, the gods of the Olympian heights and the rarefied air have given you all they could give, and clearly it isn't enough.]]> The Mirror, the Target tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2008:/calvino//1.1021 2008-12-08T08:34:46Z 2008-12-08T08:40:43Z When I was a boy, I spent hours and hours in front of the mirror pulling faces. Not that I thought my face so handsome as never to tire of looking at it; on the contrary, I couldn't bear it,... Me -- Why are you here, Ottilia? Where are we? On the moon? Ottilia -- We are on the hidden side of the target. Me -- Is this where all the bad shots go? Ottilia -- Bad? No shot is ever bad. Me -- But the arrows don't have anything to hit here. Ottilia -- Here the arrows put down roots and become forests. Me -- All I can see is junk, fragments, rubble. Ottilia -- Lots of rubble piled up makes a skyscraper. Lots of skyscrapers piled up make rubble. Corinna -- Fulgenzio! Where have you got to? The target! Me -- I've got to go, Ottilia. I can't stay here with you. I've got to aim for the other side of the target. Ottilia -- Why? Me -- Everything's out of shape here, opaque, formless . . . Ottilia -- Look carefully. From very very very close. What can you see? Me -- A granulous, pitted, bumpy surface. Ottilia -- Go between bump and bump, grain and grain, crack and crack. You'll find the gate to a garden, with green flowerbeds and clear pools. I'm there at the bottom. Me -- Everything I touch is rough, arid, cold. Ottilia -- Pass your hand slowly over the surface. It's a cloud soft as whipped cream . . . Me -- Everything's uniform, muted, compact. Ottilia -- Open your eyes and ears. Hear the bustle of the city, see the glitter of windows and bright shop displays, and bugling and bell-ringing, and people white and yellow and black and red, dressed in green and blue and orange and saffron. Corinna -- Fulgenzio! Where are you! But this time I couldn't tear myself away from Ottilia's world, from the city that was cloud and garden too. Here, instead of going straight, the arrows turned and twirled along invisible lines that tangled and untangled and coiled themselves up and unwound, but in the end always hit the target, though perhaps a different target from the one you expected. The strange thing about it was this: the more I realized the world was complicated interlocking inextricable the more it seemed to me that the things I really needed to understand were few and simple, and if I understood them, everything would be clear as the lines in a pattern. I would have liked to say this to Corinna, or to Ottilia, but it was a while now since I'd seen them, either of them, and, here's another strange thing, thinking about them I often confused the one with the other. I hadn't looked at myself in the mirror for a long time now. One day when I happened to walk by a mirror I saw the target, with all its fine colours. I tried to put myself in profile, three quarter profile: I was still seeing the target. 'Corinna!' I cried. 'Here, Corinna! Look: I'm just the way you wanted me!' But then I thought that what I was seeing in the mirror wasn't just myself, but the world too, so I would have to look for Corinna there, amongst those coloured lines. And Ottilia? Perhaps Ottilia was there too appearing and disappearing. And when I gazed at the target-mirror long enough, was it Corinna or Ottilia I saw peeping out from between concentric circles? Sometimes I get the impression I've run into her, one or the other of them, in the city streets, and that she wants to say something to me, but it happens when two subway trains pass in opposite directions, and Ottilia's image -- or Corinna's? -- comes towards me and flits away, followed by a series of extremely rapid faces framed in the windows, like the faces I once pulled in the mirror.]]> The Call of the Water tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2008:/calvino//1.1020 2008-12-08T06:07:05Z 2008-12-08T06:09:06Z I move my arm towards the shower, place my hand on the knob, turn it slowly, rotating to the left. I've just woken up, my eyes are still full of sleep, but I am perfectly aware that this gesture I'm... qanat that run underground for fifty yards at a time, communicating with the surface via these wells where a man can climb down securing himself to a rope to carry out maintenance work. I too project myself into one of those dark craters, in an upside-down world I drop into the showerhead holes as though into the qanat wells towards the water running there invisibly with a muffled hiss. A fraction of a second is all it takes for me to rediscover the notion of up and down: it's from above that the water is about to reach me, after a jerky uphill journey. In thirsty civilizations artificial watercourses run below or along the ground, much as in nature itself, while the great luxury of civilizations lavish with the vital lymph has been that of having water overcome the force of gravity, having it rise up to then fall down again; hence the profusion of fountains with plays and sprays of water, the tall pillars of overhead aqueducts. The imposing masonry of Roman arches supports the lightness of a torrent suspended up above; it's an idea that expresses a sublime paradox: the most solidly, lastingly monumental at the service of the fluid and transitory, the elusive and diaphanous. I listen hard to the network of waterflows suspended above and around me, to the vibration spreading through a forest of pipes. Above I sense the sky of the Roman Campagna crossed by conduits perched on gently descending arches, and higher up still by clouds that vie with the aqueducts to draw up immense quantities of running water. The point of arrival for an aqueduct is always the city, the great sponge made for absorbing and spraying, Nineveh and its gardens, Rome and its baths. A transparent city never ceases to flow within the compact thickness of stones and cement, a fine filigree of water swathes the walls and streets. Superficial metaphors define the city as an agglomerate of stone, many-sided diamond or sooty coal, but every metropolis can also be seen as a grand liquid structure, a space defined by vertical and horizontal lines of water, a stratification of locations subject to tides and floods and undertow, where the human race realizes an ideal of amphibian life that satisfies its deepest vocation. Or perhaps it is water's deepest vocation that is realized in the city: climbing, gushing, flowing upwards. It's in their height that cities find their identity: Manhattan raising up its watertanks on top of skyscrapers, Toledo which for centuries had to draw off barrel after barrel from the Tagus way below and plod them uphill on muleback, until for the delight of the melancholy Philip II el artificio de Juanelo lurched into creaking motion and, miracle of brief duration, brought the contents of its swinging buckets up the cliff to the Alcazar. Here I am then ready to welcome the water not as something naturally due to me but as a lovers' tryst, an encounter whose freedom and felicity are proportional to the obstacles it has had to overcome. To live in complete intimacy with water the Romans placed the baths at the centre of their public life; today this intimacy is the heart of our private life, here under this shower whose streams I have so often seen running down your skin, naiad nereid undine, thus I see you once again appearing and disappearing as the jets fan out, now that the water comes gushing in swift obedience to my call.]]> Glaciation tag:www.ruanyifeng.com,2008:/calvino//1.1019 2008-12-08T00:30:59Z 2008-12-08T00:33:27Z With ice? Yes? I go to the kitchen a moment to get the ice. And immediately the word 'ice' expands between her and me, separates us, or perhaps unites us, but the way a fragile sheet of ice unites the... With ice? Yes? I go to the kitchen a moment to get the ice. And immediately the word 'ice' expands between her and me, separates us, or perhaps unites us, but the way a fragile sheet of ice unites the shores of a frozen lake. If there is one thing I hate it's preparing the ice. It obliges me to break off a conversation just started, at the crucial moment when I ask her: A drop of whisky? and she: Thanks, but really just a drop, and me: With ice? And already I'm heading towards the kitchen as though into exile, already I can see myself fighting with ice cubes that won't come out of the tray. No problem, I say, it won't take a second, I always have ice with whisky myself. It's true, the tinkling in the glass keeps me company, separates me from the din of the others, at parties where there are lots of people it stops me from losing myself in the ebb and flow of voices and sounds, that back and forth she detached herself from when she appeared for the first time in my field of vision, in the inverted telescope of my whisky glass, her colours advancing along that corridor between two smoke-filled rooms booming with music, and I stood there with my glass without going to one room or the other, and she too, she saw me in a distorted shadow through the transparency of the icy whisky glass, and I don't know if she heard what I was saying to her because there was all that din or perhaps again because I hadn't spoken, had only moved the glass and the ice rising and falling went clink clink, and she too said something into her little bell of glass and ice, certainly I hadn't imagined she would be coming to my place tonight. I open the freezer, no, close the freezer, first I have to find the ice bucket. Hang on, I'll be with you in a sec. The freezer is a polar cave, dripping with icicles, the tray is welded to the base by a crust of frost, I pull hard and snap it off, fingertips turning white. In her igloo the Eskimo bride waits for the seal hunter lost out on the pack-ice. Now just a slight pressure to separate the cubes from the walls of their compartments: but no, it's a solid block, even when I turn the tray over they won't come out, I put it under the tap in the sink, turn on the hot water, the jet crackles on the frost-encrusted metal, my fingers turn from white to red. I've got my shirt cuff wet, that's very annoying, if there's one thing I hate it's feeling shapeless wet cloth clinging to my wrist. Put a record on, I'll be back in a sec with the ice, can you hear me? She can't hear me with the tap on, there's always something stops us hearing and seeing each other. In the corridor too she was talking through hair falling half across her face, she was speaking over the edge of her glass and I heard her teeth laughing on the rim, on the ice, she was repeating: gla-ci-a-tion? as if of everything I'd said to her only that word had got through, and my hair was falling over my eyes too as I spoke into slowly melting ice. I bang the edge of the tray against the edge of the sink, only one cube comes away, it falls outside the sink, it'll make a puddle on the floor, I'll have to pick it up, it's gone and got under the cupboard, I'll have to get down on my knees, reach a hand under, it slips through my fingers, there, I've got it and I throw it in the sink, go back to passing the tray upside down under the tap. It was I who spoke to her about the great glaciation, now due to return and cover the earth, the whole of human history has taken place in a period between two ice ages, a period which is almost over now, the numbed rays of the sun can barely reach the earth's frost-sparkling crust, grains of malt accumulate the sun's dissipating strength, then set it flowing again, fermenting into alcohol, at the bottom of the glass the sun is still fighting its war with the ice, in the maelstrom's curving horizon the icebergs roll. All at once three or four pieces of ice break off and fall into the sink, before I have time to turn the tray right way up they all tumble down drumming on the zinc. I grope around to grab them and put them in the ice bucket, now I can't find the cube that got dirty on the floor, to save them all I'd better wash them one by one, with warm water, no, with cold, they're already melting, a snowy lake is forming in the bottom of the bucket. Adrift on the Arctic Sea the icebergs form a white embroidery along the Gulf Stream, pass beyond it, head down towards the tropics like a flock of giant swans, block harbour mouths, sail up river estuaries, tall as skyscrapers they drive their sharp spurs between skyscrapers, ice rasping on walls of glass. The silence of the northern night is broken by the roar of cracks that yawn to swallow up entire cities, then by the hiss of ice slides that deaden muffle soften. I wonder what she's getting up to in there, so silent, no sign of life, she could have given me a hand, couldn't she, very nice, didn't even occur to her to ask: would you like me to help? Thank heaven I've finished now, I'll wipe my hands with this kitchen cloth, but I wouldn't want that kitchen cloth smell to linger, better wash them again, now where can I dry them? The problem is whether the solar energy accumulated in the earth's crust will be enough to maintain body heat throughout the next ice age, the solar heat of the Eskimo bride's igloo alcohol. Off back to her then so we can drink our whisky in peace. See what she's been up to in here, without making a sound? She's taken her clothes off, she's naked on the leather couch. I'd like to go over to her but the room's been invaded by ice: dazzling white crystals piled on the carpet, on the furniture; translucent stalactites hang from the ceiling, weld themselves into diaphanous columns, a vertical sheet of solid ice has formed between her and me, our two bodies are prisoners in the thickness of the iceberg, we can barely see each other through a wall all sharp spikes glittering in the rays of a distant sun.