On the Unwritten World

“The comparison between the world and a book has had a long history starting in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. What language is the book of the world written in? According to Galileo, it’s the language of mathematics and geometry, a language of absolute exactitude. Can we read the world of today in this way? Maybe, if we’re talking about the extremely distant: galaxies, quasars, supernovas. But as for our daily world, it seems to us written, rather, as in a mosaic of languages, like a wall covered with graffiti, writings traced one on top of the other, a palimpsest whose parchment has been scratched and rewritten many times, a collage by Schwitters, a layering of alphabets, of diverse citations, of slang terms, of flickering characters like those which appear on a computer screen... In a certain sense, I believe that we always write about something we don’t know: we write to make it possible for the unwritten world to express itself through us. At the moment my attention shifts from the regular order of the written lines and follows the mobile complexity that no sentence can contain or use up, I feel close to understanding that from the other side of the words, from the silent side, something is trying to emerge, to signify through language, like tapping on a prison wall. ”

Italo Calvino, “The Written World and the Unwritten World,” - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/01/05/the-written-world-and-the-unwritten-world/. An interesting comment from a lecture Calvino gave in 1983. It evinces a kind of mysticism about the unwritten world. One wonders what Calvino might have made of the more recent biodeconstruction of Francesco Vitale. As Calvino noted in this same lecture, “I started from the irreconcilable difference between the written world and the unwritten world; if their two languages merge, my argument crumbles.”