As Aronofsky's Black Swan receives widespread acclaim, it strikes me that the processes behind the creation of works of art can often be as fascinating as works of art themselves. Here is an extract from writer Italo Calvino's notes on his masterpiece The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969), a novel which takes both its structure and content from the tarot. Even if you haven't read the book (in which case I recommend that you do) here is a rare insight into an artist's struggle towards realising his vision:
“I publish this book to be free of it: it has obsessed me for years. I began by trying to line up tarot cards at random to see if I could read a story in them. “The Waverer’s Tale” emerged; I started writing it down; I looked for other combinations of the same cards; I realised the tarots were a machine for constructing stories; I thought of a book, and I imagined its frame: the mute narrators, the forest, the inn; I was tempted by the diabolical idea of conjuring up all the stories that could be contained in a tarot deck...
And so I spent whole days taking apart and putting together my puzzle; I invented new rules for the game, I drew hundreds of patterns, in a square, a rhomboid, a star design; but some essential cards were always left out, and some superfluous ones were always there in the midst. The patterns became so complicated (they took on a third dimension, becoming cubes, polyhedrons) that I myself was lost in them...
Suddenly, I decided to give up, to drop the whole thing; I turned to something else. It was absurd to waste any more time on an operations whose implicit possibilities I had by now explored completely, a operation that made sense only as a theoretical hypothesis. A month went by, perhaps a whole year, and I thought no more about it. Then all of a sudden, it occurred to me that I could try again in a different way, more simple and rapid, with guaranteed success. I began making patterns again, correcting them, complicating them. Again I was trapped in this quicksand, locked in this maniacal obsession. Some nights I woke up and ran to note a decisive correction, which then led to an endless chain of shifts. On other nights I would go to bed relieved at having found the perfect formula; and the next morning, on waking, I would tear it up. Even now, with the book in galleys, I continue to work over it, take it apart, rewrite. I hope that when the volume is printed I will be outside it once and for all. But will this actually happen?
I would like to add that for a certain time it was my intention to write also a third part for this book. At first I wanted to find a third tarot deck fairly different from the other two. But then, instead of going on raving over the same medieval-Renaissance symbols, I thought of creating a sharp contrast, repeating an analogous operation with modern visual material. But what is the tarots’ contemporary equivalent as the portrayal of the collective unconscious mind? I thought of comic strips, of the most dramatic, adventurous, frightening ones: gangsters, terrified women, spacecraft, vamps, war in the air, mad scientists. I though of complementing The Tavern and The Castle with a similar frame, The Motel of Crossed Destinies. Some people who have survived a mysterious catastrophe find refuge in a half-destroyed motel, where only a scorched newspaper is left, the comics page. The survivors, who have become dumb in their fright, tell their stories by pointing to the drawings, but without following the order of each strip, moving from one strip to another in vertical or diagonal rows.
I went no further than the formulation of the idea as I have just described it. My theoretical and expressive interests had moved off in other directions. I always feel the need to alternate one type of writing with another, completely different, to begin writing again as if I had never written anything before.”
- Italo Calvino, on The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1969
As I write this from inside a London internet cafe helicopters swarm overhead, cops in riot gear and on horses patrol the streets. It seems like there's a time for typing and a time for action so...I'm off to show some solidarity! Wishing you a very happy weekend.
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