![]() Calvino’s literary inventions have the marvellousness and otherworldliness of magic combined with its underlying systems of rules. I wanna try buff some of the original shine back into that worn-down word ‘magical’. His finished results - from the never-ending, never-middling stories of If on a winter’s night a traveller, to the magical mystery tour of Marco Polo and his Invisible Cities - are crafty in the making and delightful in the reading. To me this always implied something provisional or unproved. It would take a post-modernist like Italo Calvino to use the Tarot, intricately and rigorously, not only as content but to generate the form and structure of a work of literature, with his 1973 novel:Ĭalvino is to some a writer of experimental literature. For him as for Ezra Pound, the esoteric and archaic were a long-untapped resource to draw upon and reconstitute as part of their modernist project. This little self-reflexive touch isn’t any evidence Eliot used the Tarot to help him compose ‘The Waste Land’. T S Eliot took it only half-seriously, admitting in the endnotes to his poem that, “I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience.” Departures like his character Madame Sosotris using cards not found in any traditional Tarot deck when she conducts a reading early in the poem which predicts what else we’ll find in it. As content, its oversized playing cards - with their suits of pentacles, wands, cups, and swords, and Major Arcana like The Tower and The Hanged Man - have featured in art as far wide as The X-Files, The Simpsons and ‘The Waste Land’. ![]() Then there’s the Tarot, that card-game turned fortune-teller. (Fun fact: Dick and Le Guin went to the same school but never met. The I Ching and its yarrow-stalk divination helped Philip K Dick and Ursula K Le Guin, the father and mother of modern SF, with their fiction and non-fiction respectively. Writers and artists can generate work, break through blocks, take inspiration from and towards new ideas by drawing upon existing systems of the occult, mysticism, Eastern tradition. You might, for instance, alternate the concepts of ‘up’ and ‘down’ paragraph by paragraph: as trajectories for your characters, moods, fluctuating fortunes.Īnother, more esoteric helpmeet is a sort of literary fortune-telling. Counter Craft calls ‘ rev engines ’: repeated motifs, simple procedures that help rev your creativity, that restrict choice and so free your imagination.
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