by Primo Levi
It seems to me that there is a moral to be drawn from these two stories. Our world is becoming increasingly complicated, and each of us needs an increasingly refined and up-to-date expertise. There are many dangerous professions, and the analysis of dangers (both evident and hidden) ought to be the ABCs of any professional education. We will never be able to eliminate all risks or solve all problems, but every problem solved is a victory, in terms of saving human lives, health, and property.
There is no substitute for expertise: we saw evidence of this recently in the terrible story of the child who fell down an abandoned well, only to die after two days of good-hearted but misguided efforts.1 Goodwill, courage, the spirit of self-sacrifice, and improvisational brilliance are of little use, and in fact in the absence of expertise they can even be harmful. Peace on Earth is promised to men of goodwill, but in an emergency woe to those relying on rescuers who bring only goodwill.
1. In June 1981, a child fell down a well in Vermicino, a village near Frascati, and the rescue attempts were broadcast live on television; all of them failed.
The Irritable Chess Players
Even Horace, himself a poet, admitted that he preferred to let many issues slide rather than risk the enmity of the irritable tribe of poets; and poets, or, more generally, writers, remain irritable today. We need only turn our thoughts to the dramas surrounding literary prizes, or the visceral hatred that poets nurture toward critics if a review contains even the slightest hint of doubt. Now we read, as Karpov and Korchnoi silently rip one another limb from limb in Merano, about the irritability of chess players.1 Why is this quality shared by chess players and poets? Do chess and poetry have something in common?
Lovers of the noble game insist that they do: a chess match, even if it is played by amateurs, is an austere metaphor for life and the struggle for life, and the virtues of a chess player, reason, memory, and inventiveness, are the virtues of any thinking man. The stern rules of chess—which demand that a piece, once touched, must move, and that one is forbidden to take back a move one has thought better of—reproduce the inexorable nature of the choices one makes in life. When your king, owing to your lack of skill or attention or your recklessness or your opponent’s superiority, is ever more closely pursued, threatened (though the threat must be clearly announced: it’s never a pitfall), cornered, and finally run through, you never fail to glimpse, hovering over the chessboard, a symbolic shade. What you are experiencing is a death; it is your death, and at the same time it is a death for which you bear the guilt. By experiencing it, you exorcise it and strengthen yourself.
This fierce and chivalrous game, then, is also poetic: and so it is perceived by everyone who has ever played it, at whatever level, but I doubt that the source of the irritability of poets and chess players lies here. Poets, and anyone who plies a creative and individual trade, have this in common with chess players: total responsibility for their actions. This is rarely, or never, the case in other human endeavors, whether well paid and serious or unpaid and playful. Perhaps it’s no accident that tennis players, for example, who play alone or at most in pairs, are more irascible and neurotic than soccer players or bicyclists, who compete in teams.
Those who do for themselves, without allies or middlemen between themselves and their work, are stripped of excuses in the face of failure, and excuses are an invaluable analgesic. An actor can put the blame for his failure on the director, or vice versa; someone who works for a manufacturer can feel that his own responsibility is diluted by that of his many colleagues, superiors, and underlings, and further contaminated by “circumstances,” by the competition, by the whims of the market, and by unpredictable events. A teacher can blame the curriculum, the principal, and of course the students.
The politician, at least in a pluralistic regime, makes his way through a jungle of tensions, collusions, open or hidden hostilities, traps, and favors, and when he fails he has a thousand opportunities to justify himself to others and to himself. But even the despot, the possessor of absolute power, sole arbiter of his open and avowed decisions, when faced with collapse will look for someone to blame in his place—he, too, reaches for an analgesic. Hitler himself, under siege in the Reich Chancellery, an hour before committing suicide, angrily unloaded all blame on the German people, who had been unworthy of him. But someone who moves his bishop to attack what he believes to be the weak point in his opponent’s line stands alone, has no fellow culprits even in theory, and must answer fully and individually for his decision, like a poet at his writing table before his “petty, paltry rhymes.” Even if it is only in the context of a game, he is a grown man, an adult.
We should add that poets and chess players work only with their brains, and that we are all quick to take offense concerning the quality of our brains. To accuse one’s fellow man of having defective kidneys, or lungs, or heart is no crime; saying that he has a defective brain, on the other hand, certainly is. To be considered stupid, and to have someone tell you so, is more unpleasant than being called a glutton, a liar, wrathful, lustful, slothful, or a coward: every weakness, every vice has found its defenders, its own rhetoric, those who ennoble and exalt it, except for stupidity.
“Stupid” is a strong word and a stinging insult: perhaps that is why the term possesses, in every language and especially in dialects, a myriad of synonyms, all of them euphemistic to a greater or lesser degree, as is the case for words relating to sex or death. If Christ, according to St. Matthew the Evangelist (5:22), felt it necessary to warn that whosoever shall say to his brother “Raca” shall be in danger of the council, but whosoever shall say “Thou fool” shall be in danger of hellfire, that is a sign that he had recognized the wounding nature of such judgments.
In the face of them, both chess player and poet stand defenseless: they have been stripped naked. Every verse they write, every move they make, bears their signature. They have no coworkers, no accomplices: they have learned from masters, in flesh and blood or at a distance of centuries and continents, but they know that it is cowardly to place the blame for their shortcomings on their teachers, or in any case on others. Now, someone who is naked, his flesh open to the world and densely covered with nerve endings, with no armor to protect him, no clothing to screen and mask him, is both vulnerable and irritable. This is a condition to which, in our complicated society, we rarely find ourselves exposed, and yet few are the lives into which the moment of being denuded never comes. And so we suffer for the nudity to which we are ill suited: even our actual, nonmetaphorical skin becomes irritated if exposed to sunlight.
For that reason, terrible chess player though I am, I believe that it would be a good thing if the game of chess were more widely played, and perhaps taught and practiced in our schools, the way it has been for many years in the Soviet Union. It would be good, in other words, for everyone, especially those who aspire to positions of authority or a political career, to learn from an early age to live like chess players, that is to say, thinking before making a move, even in the awareness that the time allowed for each move is limited; remembering that every move we make prompts another from our opponent, difficult but not impossible to predict; and paying for wrong moves.
The exercise of these virtues is surely advantageous over the long term, both for the individual and for the community. Over the short term, it has its price, which is to make us slightly irritable.
1. Anatoly Karpov played Viktor Korchnoi for the world chess championship in Merano, Italy, in the autumn of 1981.
Queneau’s Cosmogony
I’ve always believed that one should write in a clear and orderly manner; that to write is to convey a message, and that if the message is not understood the author is at fault; that therefore a courteous writer has the obligation to ensure that his writings are understood by the greatest number of readers, as effortlessly as possible. After reading Raymond Queneau’s A Pocket Cosmogony (Petite cosmogonie portative; in Italian, Piccola cosmogonia portatile [Turin: Einaudi, 1982]), I find that
I am forced to reconsider these principles: I believe that I will continue writing the way I set out for myself, but I also believe that Queneau was eminently correct to write the way he did, which is diametrically opposed to my way, and that I would like to write the way he did, if only I were capable of it.
Queneau is popular in Italy chiefly for his novels, the best known of which is the delightful Zazie dans le métro. Queneau, who died in 1976, at the age of seventy-three, was not only a novelist but also a poet and a publisher, and frequented surrealists, mathematicians, biologists, and linguists. For twenty years, beginning in 1956, he was the director of the respected Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, but at the same time he founded a journal of “potential literature” that described and offered dazzling instances of wordplay: there was no field of knowledge that escaped his curiosity, which was always lively and never amateurish. This Cosmogony is a poem in Alexandrine verse divided into six cantos, first published in 1950, and it tells nothing less than the story of the universe. I emerged from my reading of it dazed, giddy, with my head spinning, as if I’d just descended from a roller coaster.
There’s no doubt, it’s an extraordinary book, in both senses of the word. It’s not a book for everyone: it’s not for distracted readers, uneducated readers, or readers in search of instant entertainment; it’s neither homogenized nor precooked—it’s not easy to digest. Each of its nearly fourteen hundred lines contains a riddle, variously cunning, trivial, or dense with meaning: with allusions to illustrious French forebears (this amiable and universal soul here reveals himself to be, oddly, something of a chauvinist: he explicitly addresses his “lecteurs français.” But perhaps this means only that he’s well aware of how essentially untranslatable his poetry is) such as Baudelaire, Lamartine, and Rimbaud. Look closely, though: these are ambiguous references, midway between homage and derision.
At every step, the reader encounters slang impudently grafted onto terminology borrowed from every field of natural science; words transcribed phonetically (“l’histouar des humains,” “tu sais xé qu’un concept”; certain distant insects have discovered “que l’air est un espace où qu’on peut sdeplacer”). Frequently the hiatus demanded by the poetic meter is expressed with arbitrary spelling (“révolussilon” for “révolution”), in keeping with a mannerism that appears in Queneau’s essays as early as 1937, and is later used elegantly to render “spoken French” in his novels.
The array of his verbal inventions is surprising. The Diplodocus, one of the largest fossil reptiles, is an “interminable idiot”; the mammoth cetaceans wandering through the deep are so many “hercules” but also “erre-culs”; the ships that attack Syracuse and its defenses designed by Archimedes are “les flottes nazirêmes,” that is, the author explains to the German translator, Roman triremes with bad intent: Nazi triremes, in other words.
Given the number of instances of puns, Sergio Solmi’s translation into hendecasyllabic verse is outstanding, because no one could have done better, and at the same time inadequate, because at least half of the book’s color and spice has inevitably been lost. It is in any case an excellent guidebook for the Italian reader: it encourages him and smooths the way, but the facing text remains indispensable.
I think I’ve said enough about Queneau’s erudite whimsies and I would like to make one thing clear: these are not merely the caprices of a learned writer setting out to amuse himself. In this cosmogony they have a specific role; puns, vulgarisms, and sophomoric pranks clip off like a pair of shears any suspicion of rhetorical yeastiness. This is the same manner that Ariosto and Heine often employ; by virtue of it, these poets remain readable today, even for nonspecialists, while those who have spurned it are relegated to limbo. It’s an inescapable law: the author who cannot laugh on his own, ideally even at his own expense, eventually becomes the unwilling target of laughter. Queneau, a grand virtuoso of laughter, obtains with his comic wit what so many others have reached for in vain, and blends into a homogeneous continuum the much discussed “two cultures.”
It is no minor undertaking. In this baroque and heterodox yet fundamentally serious poem, a doctrine and a poetry emerge that are unusual, a pairing that had not been attempted since Lucretius: but Queneau is Queneau, and he fears protracted flights. His invocation to Venus closely follows the one that begins On the Nature of Things, but its lyrical impetus is at once solemn and buffoonish: the poetry of science is inextricably bound up with playfulness. It was Venus, “mère des jeux des arts et de la tolérance,” who gave the gift of valleys to mountains, women to men, cylinders to pistons, and coal cars to locomotives. Thanks to the goddess, all animals, at their given place and time, take pleasure from the planet “en y procréfoutant.”
Following the bilingual text is an extremely acute “Pocket Guide to the Pocket Cosmogony,” written by Italo Calvino, who was a friend and follower of the author (and how many Queneauian nuances we find in his books, from Cosmicomics on!). Calvino takes up the challenge and plays along: his clear-eyed commentary faithfully preserves the lightness and spirit of the text, and he works with patience and reverence to untangle the knots; this, too, is an intelligent game. With patience, indeed: let readers be forewarned, this is a book that demands patience; it’s not a cheap read.
Calvino has done the work of a philologist here, going back to the sources, consulting the comments of Jean Rostand, the renowned biologist and friend of Queneau, and questioning naturalists and chemists. He has solved many puzzles, but not all: the author himself had already admitted that there were some he couldn’t explain, illuminations of a moment. Perhaps that’s just as well for a reader who loves a game; he may be the one who comes up with the solution.
The reader’s patience will be rewarded. Out of this labyrinthine text spring passages of gleaming poetry and at the same time themes that are current and absorbing. The “Prosopopeia of Hermes” that we read in the third canto in its way expresses a serious and profound thought, the poetry of origins: a natural understanding of the universe that we rarely find in other “authorized” poets.
Poetry echoes all around anyone who pays attention: and not only in nature. “Il voit dans chaque science un registre bouillant / Les mots se gonfleront du suc de toutes choses” (“He sees in each science a boiling register / the words swell with the sap of all things”); there’s poetry in the buttercup and in the moon in springtime, but also in volcanoes, calcium, and the phenol function. “On parle des bleuets et de la marguerite / alors pourquoi pas de la pechblende pourquoi?” (“We speak of cornflowers and daisies / then why not also of pitchblende why?”) How can we disagree? The epic labor of the Curies, which led from pitchblende to the isolation of radium, waits in vain for the poet capable of telling the story.
The passage I’m talking about is the densest part of the poem. Shortly thereafter, Mercury describes the author to his readers in these words (the translation here is my own, and literal): “this one, you understand, is not at all didactic / what could he didactify, since he knows almost nothing?” This is one of the crucial elements of the work. It is not science that is incompatible with poetry but didacticism, speaking from a lectern, setting out with a dogmatic, programmatic, edifying intent. Queneau abhors the programmatic, he is the king of the arbitrary: he sets out to review all hundred chemical elements, and then, with a contrived excuse, he stops at scandium, which has an atomic number of 21, and calls an end to the game.
In this cosmogony, which starts from Chaos and comes all the way up to automation, the history of mankind is pointedly wedged into just two lines. But when he takes the opportunity to express what he feels, the cosmic and Biblical joy of the Beginning and, at the same time, the necessity of the end, Queneau spreads his wings and displays his power. He displays it, in his always surprising manner, in the very last lines of the poem: after describing the early days of Earth, the birth of the Moon, the mysterious transition from crystals to viruses, the primordial monsters, humans and their first devices, he lifts off with tones out of
the Excelsior1 into the apotheosis of calculating machines: but it is right here that his music stops, just like an old adding machine breaking down, and repeats itself, like a stuck record, stalling on the infinitives of verbs and finally ending. Consummatum est, the cosmogony is completed.
1. A nineteenth-century ballet (or series of ballets) celebrating the triumph of progress and machines.
Inspector Silhouette
That a retiree of either gender has both the right and the need for new pursuits, disinterested and enjoyable, is now taken for granted: there are tour operators, resorts, and hotels that cater exclusively to the elderly. For the elderly who choose to resist such disguised exploitation, or who lack the resources to enjoy it, let me suggest a household activity that I have enjoyed, that entails no risk, costs practically nothing, and is within reach of one and all. All you need is a dictionary; it involves searching for those common nouns that were originally proper nouns, names of people that over time, for whatever reason, have lost their capitalization. But for the discovery to be considered fair it is important that, in the mind of the player, the original proper noun has long since been erased, overlaid by the final common noun. In short, this game amounts to going lower-case hunting, much as you might go mushroom hunting.