My principle post-it note

My desk is nearly covered with post-it notes reminding me of what’s important--at least for the next 24 hours—but after reading Italo Calvino’s “Six Memos for the Next Millenium” most have been tossed away in favor of six words: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency. Calvino had been asked to deliver a series of lectures on the qualities he valued in literature. Instead of looking to the past, Calvino, like many other thinkers in 1985, turned his thoughts to the new millennium and tried to predict the values he thought would sustain and invigorate literature. Each word became the title of a lecture. It’s not hard to extend his views beyond literature to all art and, in particular, theatre. You’ve got to hang your art on something and Calvino’s vision for this century is a pretty heady start to finding that something. His six titles speak for themselves but I’ve chosen quote or two to give you some sense of his direction.

Lightness: “Lightness for me goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard. One should be light like a bird, not like a feather.”

Quickness: “Approach the infinite without the least congestion, in the most crystalline, sober and airy style…It is the rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience…”

Exactitude: “…means three things above all: A well-defined and well-calculated plan; …an evocation of clear, incisive, memorable visual images: …a language as precise as possible both in choice of words and in the expression of the subtleties of thought and imagination.”

Visibility: “It is the images themselves that develop their own implicit potentiality, the story they carry within them. Around each image others come into being, forming a field of analogies, symmetries, confrontations.”

Multiplicity: “Who are we, who is each one of us, if not the combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.”

Consistency: [Calvino died just before writing the last lecture of the series. He left only the title. It’s more than enough for a start.]