Episode Details

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach and look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic, and with fresh methods of cognition and verification. The images of lightness that I seek should not fade away like dreams dissolved by the realities of present and future…

~Italo Calvino

«A fantastic representation of reality…» Ítalo

Forever grateful to this master, a curious, and colorful human being who wrote perhaps my favorite text, the closing paragraph of his seminal work Invisible Cities:

For now, I am a-musing myself today reading out loud the marvelous introduction to Calvino’s book “If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, 1979

His eclectic style and connection to the imaginary perhaps is clear in his birth chart [see an image of his natal chart and a quick reading below] paired with an unusual upbringing, (born in Cuba to Italian parents).

AUDIO below reading the introduction of Calvino’s book

Playful, intriguing, curious, always a wanderer and died too young or perhaps came to tell exactly what needed to be said.

We are here still reading, listening to his words. His oeuvre is fabulous as it was his colorful life.

For me, Ítalo like fellow geniuses such as Dante, Leonardo, and Borges covers the sky of my life with a luminosity that inspires abundant creativity.

Giovanna his only daughter, was left with the burden or perhaps the treasure of keeping that flame alive.

In my case, memories change and fade dissolving with new ones that only arise from the need to keep the flame alive in my mind, as opposed to my heart which is always receptive to any signal albeit made up.

I too lost my father, I was very young and all my memories at this point can make it into a fiction novel.

«Some fathers never die. It is the case with mine, a writer, whose sudden death almost 30 years ago propelled him into immortality, and left me awkwardly straddling two realities; one from which he was irreversibly gone and another where he is forever present. It proved impossible to spend any solid block of time in that first, heartbreaking reality and mourn him in peace — assuming there is such a thing as peaceful mourning — without being interrupted by regular and impetuous demands from the other one, where he was being read, published, reprinted, quoted, taught. 

[…] This year, in order to do things differently, I will make a conscious effort to separate the man from his writing. One of my favorite stories by my father (from the Mr. Palomar series) evokes a vivid memory of him sitting at the top of the sloping lawn beside our summer home in Tuscany. The Palomar character and my father are so similar that I tend to conflate them. The story is titled “Dialogue with a Turtle,” and the mental image it conjures up is of my father, in espadrilles, sitting cross-legged in a washed-out butterfly folding chair, his brow simultaneously knitted and raised, making him look 80 percent concentrated and 20 percent perplexed. But this image is a fake, as many memories are: It is a composite of various moments, of photos, of other people’s recollections.»

~Giovanna Calvino, Italo Calvino: A daughter’s reminiscences, 6/13/2014

«I started producing myths from modern science»

I am building a case against attention to myself.

In the last week, I have been a hermit, slowly dissolving into the echo of silence, in the upcoming weeks, I am in a retreat from the world, into a sort of fantasia…

Into the realm of th