🦋 Cosmifables
"The Spiral" is the twelfth and last story in the original Cosmicomics collection, the book Calvino published in 1965. Qfwfq has fallen in love again; this time his avatar is a proto-gastropod somewhere in the Cambrian period, with radial symmetry but with no eyes to observe his own form or that of his beloved. "Form? I didn't have any; that is, I didn't know I had one, or rather, I didn't know you could have one." But one thing leads to another as he imagines, in his eternal darkness, the millions of other suitors who must be vying for her hand, and to distinguish himself begins to secrete a shell... But my error lay in thinking that sight would also come to us, that is to me and to her. ...I'm talking about sight, the eyes; only I had failed to foresee one thing: that the eyes that finally opened to see us didn't belong to us but to others. Qfwfq's predicament here is cute, and funny; but what really interests me about this story is the short meditative interlude in between his decision to grow a shell and his realization that it will do him no æsthetic good -- Calvino pulls the camera way back and still speaking in Qfwfq's voice, walks through long lists of the ways that beauty manifests in our world, a Dutch girl lying on the beach, a swarm of bees following its queen, coal smoke puffing from a locomotive, histories of Herodotus and tracts of Spinoza... and states clearly that all this beauty is foretold in the first mollusc's shell. When I summarize it this way I'm not entirely sure I buy it -- but in the story it rings crystal clear.
posted evening of Monday, October third, 2011
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