Image and Imagination

In 1984 and 1985 Italo Calvino set about writing the lectures he was scheduled to deliver at Harvard University, starting at the end of 1985, later published under the title Six Memos for the Next Millennium (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985-1986). With his customary clarity and style, Calvino composed five of his six memos, or proposals, as the Italian would have it: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity (he died in September 1985, before completing the sixth one, Consistency). Of special interest to us is Visibility. Concomitant with his own love of imagery, which came to him in his childhood and never faded as long as he lived, Calvino believed that the creative process is rooted in the visual imagination. It is our sense of sight that guides us in our discovery of things and it is sight that presides over their depiction. Like handmaidens, our words garb figures in verbal fabrics: it is the poet’s job to strip them bare again and restore them to their visual essence. Not all imaginings originate in our eyes, Calvino explains, but they are all fed by visions.