Collection of Sand

by Italo Calvino

  Nothing to do with science-fiction, not utopian or weird: the states of his imaginary atlas resemble states that exist in reality, and are rendered that bit more familiar and accessible by being associated with a small number of reassuring emblems. He would also invent a name for the capital and would superimpose a circular franking mark on the stamps, so that they looked even more persuasively lifelike. At times his work would also include an envelope completely covered in stamps and franking marks, with the address written in mock handwriting, and names of people and places also invented but always just about credible.

  The fascination of stamps always starts in childhood: it is aroused both by a passion for the exotic and by an obsession with systematic classification. It was as a child that Donald Evans, an American from New Jersey, began not only to collect stamps but also to invent new ones, which meant inventing a geography and history parallel to the geography and history of the world that other people recognize. As he grew up, Evans did not completely abandon this childhood passion, even though, while continuing to paint in any spare time he had from his course on architecture, he did hide it as though ashamed of it. This was in New York at the end of the 1950s, a period when Abstract Expressionism totally dominated. But a short time later the arrival of Pop Art persuaded Evans that his earliest figurative predilections were in tune with the most up-to-date artistic tastes. The road to success as a painter opened up before him: but instead the only thing that interested him was finding the peace to live doing what he liked best. In the 1970s he did nothing but paint stamps, about 4,000 of them, distributed across forty-two imaginary countries, with an exhibition every year, but he stayed in New York as little as possible. He lived almost permanently in Europe, especially in Holland, up until the fire which cost him his life, in Amsterdam, at just thirty-one years of age. The book that introduced me to him is proof that a circle of friends and connoisseurs venerates him and his work as though he were a saint (The World of Donald Evans, text by Willy Eisenhart, New York).

  Willy Eisenhart reconstructs the short life of Donald Evans (1945–77) in minute detail and comments on his oeuvre, all this by way of an introduction to the eighty-five colour plates which are organized as in a collector’s album: the imaginary countries are in alphabetical order. This collection of stamps is also at the same time a collection of hens, windmills, dirigibles, chairs, palms, butterflies and all sorts of exemplars of the various countries’ flora and fauna (actually ‘Flora and Fauna’ is the name of a federal country which is situated goodness knows where in Evans’s geography, certainly in Nordic climes). The fact is that Evans adores classifications, nomenclature, catalogues and pattern books: and what better form could this serial passion of his take than a whole series of stamps? ‘Catalogue of the World’ is the title that he proposed for his entire oeuvre.

  Other pages depict sheets of stamps which are all identical and not yet separated along the perforated lines. Others still show stamp collections that try to reconstitute this kind of original sheet by putting in rows stamps that are all the same but are differentiated by the dark shadow of the frank mark and the irregularities of their outlines. (Evans took particular care in imitating the perforations, or the absence of perforation in series that are meant to be older and that precede the invention of the perforating machine.) There are also more abstract combinations, like the domino pieces in the extremely elegant stamps of ‘Etat Domino’, or the Scottish tartans of ‘Antiqua’, which were painted in honour of a female friend whose family originated from Scotland.

  Eisenhart sees the origin of this philatelic obsession in Evans’s introverted character. I would say that what inspired him was the urge to keep a diary of states of mind, feelings, positive experiences, values that were summed up in emblematic objects; but the nostalgic vision of the stamp album allowed him to cultivate an interiority that had at the same time become objectivized and dominated by his consciousness. What prevails is the order in this serial arrangement, the irony of his invention and attribution of names, and also the restrained melancholy of hazy landscapes, repeated in all the different colours.

  Creating stamps was for Donald Evans above all a way of appropriating the countries he had visited, the places where people lived: his adopted homeland, Holland, inspired him to create the stamps of ‘Achterdijk’ (‘Behind the Dyke’, from his first Dutch address), and of ‘Nadorp’ (‘After the Village’, from a friend’s address), where he expressed his love for the flat landscapes, windmills of various kinds and also the Dutch language. The stamps of ‘Barcentrum’, from the name of a bar Evans frequented in Amsterdam, have more lively colours: this is a beautiful series which is also a list of drinks in order of price, in glasses that are all different. Gradually we realize that many of these names of states are not invented at all, but are the names of modest or tiny places which Evans had been to and to which he attributed the prerogatives that belong to sovereign states. Thus after a summer on the Costa Brava he designed the stamps of Cadaqués, with a cheerful series of vegetables.

  Other names belong to a geography of feelings: ‘Lichaam’ and ‘Geest’ (‘Body’ and ‘Soul’, in Dutch) are two twin kingdoms in the far North which have the same currency (the ‘ijs’, in other words ice) and stamps (with seals and narwhals). Two African islands are called ‘Amis et Amants’ and form one of the states that emerged from the decolonialization of an ancient French protectorate, the ‘Royaume de Caluda’. Initially the new states still used the dreary stamps of the old colony with the changed name overstamped on them; then the ‘Postes des Iles Amis et Amants’ issued a new series with views of places called ‘Coup de Foudre’, ‘Premiers Amours’ and ‘La Passade’.

  But it was above all through food that Evans established his relationship with countries, catching their most typical flavours and aromas during his travels. After a trip to Italy he invented a new country, ‘Mangiare’, whose currency was calculated in grams and whose very sophisticated stamps form a museum of vegetables, fruit and herbs: from peas, capers, pine-nuts, olives (small dot-like images which stand out against a bare background and are elegantly framed) to courgette-flowers, rosemary, celery and broccoli. The state of ‘Mangiare’ dedicated a special issue to the recipe for pesto alla genovese, with its basic ingredients (basil, pine-nuts, pecorino cheese, garlic). Another series (dated 1927) exalted the cucumber, which was portrayed in the shape of a dirigible. During the Second World War the state of ‘Mangiare’ was invaded by the army from Antipasto: an overstamp indicates the stamps from the occupied zone. In the postwar period a region of ‘Mangiare’ called ‘Pasta’ became independent: the ‘Poste Paste’ issued a series which is a splendid showcase of varieties of pasta.

  Even the homesickness experienced by the American in Europe is focused on visions of food such as fruit. The evocative plates devoted to a country called ‘My Bonnie’ (as in the song ‘My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean’) are dotted with cherries, all apparently identical, but each with a different shade of red and a different name, taken from catalogues produced by fruit farms.

  All in all, this supposed introvert was a man who was not at all turned in on himself but projected outwards, towards the things of the world, chosen and recognized and named one by one with great delicacy and loving precision. Perhaps what interested him most in stamps was precisely their celebratory function: he wanted to oppose the carefully programmed, bureaucratic, official celebrations of all the postal ministries in the world with a ritual of private celebrations, commemorations of minimal encounters, consecrations of things that are unique and irreplaceable: basil, a butterfly, an olive. Without the illusion of stealing them from the flow of time which rapidly transforms stamp series into traces of t
he past.

  [1981]

  The Encyclopedia of a Visionary

  In the beginning was language. In the universe that Luigi Serafini inhabits and describes, I believe that the images were preceded by the written word, by those minute, agile and (we have to admit it) very clear italics of his which we always feel we are just an inch away from being able to read and yet which elude us in every word and letter. The anguish that this Other Universe conveys to us does not stem so much from its difference to our world as from its similarity: similarly the writing could easily have been developed in a linguistic area that is foreign to us but not unknowable.

  On reflection, it occurs to me that the peculiarity of Serafini’s language cannot be solely in its alphabet but also in its syntax: the things belonging to the universe that this language evokes, as we see them illustrated in the plates of his encyclopedia (Codex Seraphinianus, published by Franco Maria Ricci), are almost always recognizable, but it is the connection between them that seems to be turned inside out, with unexpected combinations and relations. (If I said ‘almost always’ that was because there are also some unrecognizable forms, and these have a very important function, as I shall try to explain later on.) The crucial point is this: if Serafinian writing has the power to evoke a world where the syntax of things has been distorted, it must contain, hidden beneath the mystery of its indecipherable surface, a deeper mystery still regarding the internal logic of language and thought. The images of things that exist coil and link together; the havoc this wreaks on visual attributes generates monsters; Serafini’s universe is inhabited by freaks. But even in the world of monsters there is a logic whose outlines we seem to see emerging and vanishing, like the meanings of those words of his that are diligently copied out by his pen-nib.

  Just like Ovid in the Metamorphoses, Serafini believes in the contiguity and permeability of every territory of existence. The anatomical and the mechanical swap morphologies: human arms, instead of finishing in a hand, finish in a hammer or a pincer; legs are supported not by feet but by wheels. The human and the vegetable complete each other, as in the illustration of the cultivation of the human body: a wood on its head, climbing plants up the legs, lawns on the palm of a hand, carnations flowering out of its ears. The vegetal world also mixes with the mercantile one (there are plants with a trunk-cum-wrapped-sweet, others with ears in the shape of pencils, others with leaves as scissors, or with fruit like matches), the zoological mingles with the mineral (dogs and horses that are half-petrified), as does cement with geology, the heraldic with the technological, the savage with the metropolitan, the written with the living. Just as certain animals take on the form of other species living in the same habitat, so living beings are infected by the forms of the objects that surround them.

  The shift from one form to another is followed stage by stage in the human couple making love, who gradually metamorphose into an alligator. This is one of Serafini’s most ingenious visual inventions, alongside which I would put, in my ideal selection, those fish which are just surfacing from the water and seem to become the huge eyes of a goddess of the silver screen; and also the plants that grow in the shape of a chair, so that all you have to do is to cut them and whittle them down in order to have a ready-made wicker seat; and I would add yet one more thing: all the figures in which the motif of the rainbow appears.

  I would say that there are three images that most inspire Serafini’s visionary raptus: the skeleton, the egg and the rainbow. One would think that the skeleton is the only nucleus of reality that stays as it is in this world of interchangeable forms: we see skeletons waiting to put on their covering of skin and flesh (which hang limply from hooks, like empty suits of clothes) and after the act of getting dressed look at the mirror, perplexed. Another illustration conjures up a whole city of skeletons, with television aerials made of bones, and a skeleton-waiter serving a bone on a plate.

  The egg is the fundamental element that appears in all its forms, with or without its shell. Shell-less eggs fall from a tube on to a lawn, which they immediately cross, slithering along like organisms endowed with perfect autonomy of locomotion, only to then climb up a tree and fall again, this time taking on the characteristic shape of fried eggs.

  As for the rainbow, it occupies a place of central importance in Serafini’s cosmology. As a solid bridge, it can support an entire city; but it has to be said that this is a city that changes colour and consistency, just like its support. It is from the rainbow that certain little animals emerge, multi-coloured and two-dimensional, with irregular shapes never seen before: they emerge from circular holes in the iridescent tube, and could be the real vital principle of this universe, corpuscles that generate the unstoppable general metamorphosis. In other illustrations we see that what is spraying out the rainbows into the sky is a kind of helicopter which can draw them in their classic semi-circular form but also in the shape of a knot, a zig-zag, a spiral, or as a steady series of drips. From this helicopter’s fuselage, in the form of a cloud, hang so many of those polychrome corpuscles, attached to wires. Are these corpuscles the mechanical equivalent of the iridescent dust-cloud which is suspended in the air? Or are they hooks placed there to catch colours?

  These corpuscles are the only indefinable shapes in Serafini’s visual cosmos, as I mentioned earlier. Beings of similar form appear like luminous little bodies (are they photons?) in a swarm flying out from a headlight, or like micro-organisms carefully catalogued at the opening of the botanical and zoological section of this encyclopedia. Perhaps they have the same consistency as graphic signs: they constitute yet another alphabet, more mysterious and archaic. (Similar shapes, in fact, appear sculpted on a kind of Rosetta Stone, alongside their ‘translation’.) Maybe everything that Serafini shows is a kind of writing: only its code changes.

  In Serafini’s writing-universe almost identical roots are catalogued with different names because every tiny little root is a differential sign. The plants twist their tender stalks like lines traced by the pen, they penetrate the earth from which they have just sprouted, only to bring forth subterranean blooms or to resurface once more.

  These vegetal forms continue the classification of imaginary plants that was begun by the genteel Nonsense Botany of Edward Lear and continued by Leo Lionni’s astral Parallel Botany. In Serafini’s nursery there are cloud-leaves that water the flowers, and web-leaves that capture insects. Trees uproot themselves spontaneously and walk; they go to the seashore from where they set sail, their roots whirring like propellers on a motor-boat.

  Serafini’s zoology is always disturbing, monstrous, the stuff of nightmares, a zoology whose evolutionary laws are the metaphor (a sausage-snake, a shoelace viper on a tennis shoe), metonymy (a bird which is a single wing ending in a bird’s head), and the condensation of images (a pigeon that is still an egg).

  After the zoological monsters come the anthropomorphic ones, perhaps failed efforts on the road to humanization. That man became man starting from the feet upwards was explained by the great anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan. In Serafini’s illustrations we see a series of human legs that try to find completion not in a torso but in an object such as a ball or an umbrella, or just in a luminosity like that of a star shining and going out. It is a crowd of beings of this latter kind that we see standing on boats drifting down a river, passing under the arches of a bridge, in one of the most mysterious images of the volume.

  Physics, chemistry and mineralogy inspire Serafini’s most relaxing pictures: most relaxing because most abstract. But the nightmare starts up again with mechanics and technology, where the tendency of machines to morph into monsters is no less disturbing than the human tendency to do the same thing. (Here we are remind
ed of Bruno Munari and a whole group of inventors of crazy machines.)

  If we move to the human sciences (including ethnography, history, gastronomy, games, sport, clothing, linguistics, urban studies) we have to bear in mind that it is difficult to separate man as subject from objects which are now soldered on to him in an anatomical continuity. There is also a perfect machine which satisfies all man’s needs, and at his death becomes a coffin. Ethnography is no less horrific than other fields: amidst the various kinds of savages, catalogued with their characteristic costumes and weapons and dwellings, there is the rubbish-man and the rat-man, but the most striking of all is the man in the street or rather the street-man, with a suit of asphalt decorated with the white lines of road markings.

  There is an anguish in Serafini’s imagination which perhaps reaches its peak in gastronomy. And yet here too we discover his peculiar kind of happiness, which comes out above all in technological inventions: a plate with teeth that chews food so that it can be sucked up in a straw; a contraption for supplying fish as though they were running water, through tubes and taps, so as to maintain a constant supply of fresh fish at home.