De Rerum Natura

Wayfarer Chapel

I'm preparing for a writing workshop I'm taking next Saturday. We have to bring in notebooks in several sizes and so I was going through mine and found an old one. Ahh. The ubiquitous found blog post.

4/2/03

Knowledge of the world dissolves the solidity of the world, leading to a perception of all that is infinitely minute, light, mobile. - Italo Calvino

If 611 (a play I'd written previously) was about the weight and beauty of the world, I want to write about the incredible fragility of the world, wild nature, romantic and monstrous. I want to create a discrete world - a feminine world. A world that is dissolving, disappearing before our eyes. The idea that the more we know, the more we loosen our attachment to the world, or rather we compromise our ability to actually see and experience it.

Wayfarer Chapel

And then I reference these paragraphs from Calvino's Six Memo's. This one from Lightness.

The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius is the first great work of poetry in which knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world, leading to a perception of all that is infinitely minute, light, and mobile. Lucretius set out to write the poem of physical matter, but he warns us at the outset that this matter is made up of invisible particles. He is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies. Lucretius’ chief concern is to prevent the weight of matter from crushing us. Even while laying down the rigorous mechanical laws that determine every event, he feels the need to allow atoms to make unpredictable deviations from the straight line, thereby ensuring freedom both to atoms and to human beings. The poetry of the invisible, of infinite unexpected possibilities—even the poetry of nothingness—issues from a poet who had no doubts whatever about the physical reality of the world.

Socotra Island

This atomizing of things extends also to the visible aspects of the world, and it is here that Lucretius is at his best as a poet: the little motes of dust swirling in a shaft of sunlight in a dark room (II.114-124); the minuscule shells, all similar but each one different, that waves gently cast up on the bibula harena, the “imbibing sand” (II.374-376); or the spiderwebs that wrap themselves around us without our noticing them as we walk along (III.381-390).

I have already mentioned Ovid’s Metamorphoses, another encyclopedic poem (written fifty years after Lucretius’), which has its starting point not in physical reality but in the fables of mythology. For Ovid, too, everything can be transformed into something else, and knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world. And also for him there is an essential parity between everything that exists, as opposed to any sort of hierarchy of powers or values. If the world of Lucretius is composed of immutable atoms, Ovid’s world is made up of the qualities, attributes and forms that define the variety of things, whether plants, animals, or persons. But these are only the outward appearances of a single common substance that—if stirred by profound emotion—may be changed into what most differs from it.

It is in following the continuity of the passage from one form to another that Ovid displays his incomparable gifts. He tells how a woman realizes that she is changing into a lotus tree: her feet are rooted to the earth, a soft bark creeps up little by little and enfolds her groin; she makes a movement to tear her hair and finds her hands full of leaves. Or he speaks of Arachne’s fingers, expert at winding or unraveling wool, turning the spindle, plying the needle in embroidery, fingers that at a certain point we see lengthening into slender spiders’ legs and beginning to weave a web.

Double Tree of Grana

And then another quote:

One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather. - Paul Valéry.

And then I completely forgot about all this because I was working on a show called This World Is Not My Home. But in all of the workshops I ran for the development of this piece and in devising the work itself, as a director I was focused on lightness, quickness, stillness.

On the Nature of Things by Lucretius.