As for objects which do not interest it, which give it neither pleasure nor pain, they are part of the confused mass of which it has no knowledge.¹

At the dawn of the Numeric civilisation all is brought into concrete existence. It is a fever. Hysteria. An irresistible feeling of escape. A state of upheaval. A relief.

Even art is realized. Gradually, as still more aspects of art are brought into concrete existence, it becomes clear that not only is art turning into a sign of social and cultural regularity, the properties of aesthetic experience are also being allocated to the qualities of the common good.

It is time to attend to the speculative promise of aesthetic freedom. Or, more precisely, it is time to meditate on a certain experience of formlessness; when things and knowledge cease to appear as such and the qualities ascribed thereto appear with fading degrees of probability.

Writing this makes me to think of something I once read in Italo Calvino’s manuscript for a series of lectures on literature, called Six Memos for the Next Millenium. In these essays Calvino meditates on certain peculiarities of literature, accentuating the qualities of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity in writing. Calvino died the night before he was to give the first of the lectures, and the lectures were never performed. The sixth and final lecture had only the provisional title of Consistency. 1985.

In one of the essays Calvino refers to an Italian author who throughout his life strove to capture his immediate surroundings in a strictly descriptive language. Inevitably, and to his great dispair, he always ended up with expansive elaborations on anything and everything. At some point the author decided to make the description of one particular matchbox his final literary effort. When he died a decade later, he left behind an unfinished manuscript of more than ten thousand pages.

This anecdote is quite illustrative of a literary quality like exactitude or muliplicity. There is one problem, though: the reference is not found in Six Memos. This is not the first time I have searched for the passage which I noticed when first reading the book. Previously, I have skimmed the pages with no luck. This time I re-read Six Memos from beginning to end, still unable to find the passage. The chapter on exactitude is indeed a meditation on the battle with language to capture something that evades one’s powers of expression. Just as the lecture on multiplicity deals with the fatal experience, that whatever the starting point, the matter in hand spreads out and out, eventually embracing the entire universe. The reference I am looking for ought to be there. This Italian author simply ought to have existed.

This incoherence has annoyed me from time to time, but I had purposefully stopped thinking about it untill I became aware of Enrique Vila-Matas’ novel Bartleby & Co. 2001. It is a narrative about an office worker who once wrote a novel about the impossibility of love, but since then has written nothing. He therefore thinks of himself as a ‘Bartleby’, after the clerk in the short story by Herman Melville who, when asked to do something, always replies, ‘I would prefer not to.’ Vila-Matas’ post-modern bureaucrat sets out to search through literature for all other Bartleby-esque authors…

I tried to avoid that book. I did not want to read it. I imagined that a novel entitled Bartleby & Co. would be nothing more than a farcical short circuit of the promise of aesthetic freedom, turning the negative singularity of Bartleby into a social and cultural role model. When I eventually read the book, that was pretty much my experience. 2010.

In Herman Melville’s short story, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, singularity is a result of denial and disobedience. 1853. In contrast, Vila-Matas’ Bartleby is singled out in the positive sense as an anti-hero, author, and artist. Melville’s non-clerk is a negation of social and cultural regularity, whereas Vila-Matas’ anti-hero-author-artist takes on the symbolic form of a social and cultural role model, which is a matrix for regularity.

If singularity is derived from the mathematical definition of “a point at which a given object is not defined or regular, for example infinite or not differentiable”–it is evident that singularity is in no way compatible with the concrete existence of individuals, things, or knowledge. Rather, one has to imagine a point in social and cultural spacetime that is equivalent to that of a black hole where gravitational forces cause matter to have infinite density and zero volume.

To think of the Italian writer who neither seems to appear in Calvino’s lectures, nor to have had a concrete existence, feels like that. Infinite density and zero volume. I am certain that his posthumous manuscript would include a significant essay on how the part is related to the whole. I would read this essay with great pleasure. It would never conclude but would be taken over by the evergrowing ambivalence of the matchbox. What ought to be a perfect cause to discuss whether or not the whole is more than the sum of the parts, turns out to be an abyss of uncertainties, incoherences, and improbabilities. And the more so, the more intense the liberation and the syncopation in writing become. The perpetual transformation of style in this essay is of an almost unbearable beauty, and I can only imagine my affectation when realizing that the essay I read is written in a spacetime that ought to be alien to me. But to my amazement, that is not what I experience, and I am made apparent in a spacetime of absolute lawfullness where all is expected to have been brought into concrete existence.

I am ascribed to a universe of holistic metaphors. A cosmos of suggestive superstructures that impose themselves with sublime origins, extensions, and complexites beyond human comprehension.

The effect of any cosmology derived from constellations like The Market or The Climate is first of all an anticipation and a sublimation of spacetime probabilities which are not containable by these metaphors themselves. These are spacetime monopolies, in other words, with a claim for universality that lie in the ability to transform anything into oceanic affect, and with a conception of regularity that is profoundly totalitarian.

The Imperial Gardens in Tokyo are oceanic. Endless. Without scale. The sheer size of the area has evidently overwhelmed those who have laid out the gardens over the centuries, generating a park cleansed of imagination and ideas. It has thus been possible to place a still growing complex of administrative buildings at the margins of the gardens without affecting the impression of an extension with no cause and no purpose.

This impression is further intensified by the location of the gardens in central Tokyo which indicates a land value beyond economic reality. For that reason alone the gardens possess a beauty that exceeds any other park, a kind of beauty that reaches its apex in the late summer when lawns and plantings are scorched and inanimate. By then the gardens have negated organic life and the contemplation of the park attends to a spacetime that is otherwise imperceptible.

In this non-organic cosmos it hurts to breathe. It is a spacetime defined by radiation. The light is blinding. The heat is gaseous. There is nothing to see or feel but the splitting of matter into still faster moving and lighter elements.

Contemplation attends to the areas of lowest intensity. Radiation decreases a little here, just enough to enable breathing. It is possible again to differentiate oneself from the gardens.

The zone separating the administrative buildings from the open fields of the park is a dense growth of trees and bushes that shield from the light and heat.

Bamboo. Cedar. Pine. Narrow and winding paths. Wide and open walkways. The administrative buildings are faintly visible through stems, twigs and leaves. Rows of white houses with reddish brown tiles.

One of the buildings seems to be located inside the park, within a large bamboo garden. A complete selection of bamboo species. A model of a bamboo forest. And a house is there. Along one of the walkways.

A small, white, building with at low and slightly curved tile roof. No windows or doors. The main part of the wall facing the walkway is moved inwards, constructing u-shaped entrances, or locks, at each end of the building. Along the walkway two wooden pillars support the roof.

The locks lead in and out of an oblong and dusky space. A corridor. A twilight. A surface of pitch-dark material with a microscopic, silvery, structure. Granulated and luminous. There is a faint smell of carbon. And a low, whistling, sound.

From time to time a blazing breeze stirs the mild and moist atmosphere.