Jackson Webb

In his essay ‘Lightness’, Italo Calvino describes how poet Guido Calvalcanti creates a sense of lightness in his work by a kind of descriptive leveling out: ‘The weight of matter is dissolved because the materials of the human simulacrum can be many, all interchangeable.’

Beauty of woman and of wise hearts
and gentle knights in armor;
the song of birds and the discourse of love;
bright ships moving swiftly on the sea;
clear air when the dawn appears
and white snow falling without wind;
stream of water and meadow with every flower;
gold, silver, azure in ornaments

Calvino compares ‘and white snow falling without wind’ to an apparently similar line in Dante’s inferno: ‘As snow falls in the mountains without wind’ He observes the relative lightness and weight that these lines invoke. Cavalcanti ‘levels’ out the snow with the other images of beauty he describes, and the words ‘white’ and ‘fall’ ‘dissolve the landscape into an atmosphere of suspended abstraction’. In Dante’s iteration, the specification of place and the metaphorical framing of the scene with the adverb ‘as’ lends the image a distinct sense of substance and weight.

It seems like a brilliant example of how evocation can allow us to mark out a principle or attitude towards reality, to describe an ethos or a position. The material qualities of our work can evoke an attitude towards our lives and can acknowledge that our social and cultural relations have a ‘texture’.