Time Travel by Thought (of Italo Calvino)

WARNING: this is another one of those glimpses into the literature I get into over here in Japan. It's got nothing to do with Japan other than the fact that I'm using some of my time over here to get caught up on reading. Highest on the catch-up list is Italo Calvino, who I've mentioned before and who is, likely, my favourite author (don't tell that Neil guy). People say he's a modern fabulist. I've likened his lucid style to a literary incarnation of intercourse. I guess this is a literary response to his t zero, and if you're interested it might give you a look at what he's all about. That being said, if you think you might be interested in him, best to start with Marcovaldo or Invisible Cities as t zero is still a rather dense read.

From the sometimes indecipherable word stew of Calvino, a realization takes form. In the midst of the story I was about ready to abandon due to the sheer density of verbiage and thought, the long meandering streams of Calvino logic begin to crystallize and slot themselves in along one another like Tetris blocks. And, all of a sudden, “t zero” is the literary synthesis of time travel, just like that one scene in the sandstorm in Coelho’s Alchemist is the literary synthesis of magic. The words align so perfectly to express such a very abstract and, seemingly, insurmountable subject.

As my eyes grow wide and the corners of my mouth pull back in that which is none other than amazement, I read the words on the page, and like they did with Coelho, they seem like a spell: an incantation. The suspension of disbelief goes out of my mind as I sense it is no longer required due to the utter clarity of the prose. Calvino in “t zero” details moving forward or backward a second in time, and each second stands like a finite demarcation on the Z-axis of a time-space graph. It is like four dimensions are existing sustainably in my mind: forward and backward on the Z-axis is forward or backward in time, and the thin plane of X and Y actually contains the three-dimensional span of a universe. The narrator in the story talks of how he wants to move forward or backwards on this Z/time axis to get a perspective from outside of the co-ordinate t0 (or Z0, I suppose) where he resides. I picture him rising above or sinking below the seemingly two-dimensional plane of the milky way to gaze down upon or up at the physical location of all points within it at that moment of Z/t0 from a position in the future or in the past.

It is the clarity, though; the unerring logic of the paragraph that seems to make all things possible. Just as I thought that magic could exist as a rational force when reading that particular passage in the Alchemist, so, too, do I now think that time travel is as easy and as comprehensible as a shift forward or backward on an axis when I read Calvino’s “t zero.” It is this clean, clear, world-skewing logic of Calvino’s that always sets my mind alight when I read his work. He steps outside the X-Y three-dimensional plane that we all inhabit, and he looks down upon it from point W to cast our everyday in new perspectives.

Normal things, seen from obtuse angles.

That is Calvino, for me.

If you can get past his vocabulary, once you boil down Calvino’s prose, it is simple. It’s almost plain, really. If you can follow him to his point W, and you can look down upon our XandY from his perspective, it knocks your mind on its ear, broadening horizons in a world where there no longer seemed to be any space for it.