And without her all this varicolored sumptuousness seemed useless to me, wasted...
Reading Calvino
I didn’t find her that night or the days and nights that followed. All around, the world poured out colors, constantly new, pink clouds gathered in violet cumuli which unleashed gilded lightning; after the storms long rainbows announced hues that still hadn’t been seen, in all possible combinations…This was finally the setting worthy of Ayl’s beauty; but she wasn’t there! And without her all this varicolored sumptuousness seemed useless to me, wasted.
Italo Calvino’s short story Without Colors, contained in his collection Cosmicomics, uses a fantastical world to consider what happens when love falls apart.
Qfwfq and Ayl are “beings” existing at a time when the sun’s ultraviolet rays first become filtered before reaching earth. Their world, “dead, uniform gray,” becomes multi-colored, the sea is blue, the fires are red, etc.
The relationship between Qfqfq, our narrator, and Ayl, his beloved, is founded on play, making sense of what “things” are, and a shared conception of beauty. As things begin to change, though, Ayl runs away — into a chasm of earth, to avoid the light, the color, the changes. Qfwfq follows her, tries to lure her out, fails.
As with so many of Calvino’s stories, the imaginative plot of the story serves as a foil for making sense of our own world and how we make it up. In this particular story, he uses light and metaphor to instantiate the lover who has become illegible. While initially Qfwfq was able to identify with Ayl on the basis of beauty, the shift in their world severs this (alleged) common understanding, and their worlds follow suit. Qfwfq sees the beauty — the “pea-green lawns where the first scarlet poppies were flowering, those canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to a sea full of azure glints…” Yet, without Ayl there, it “all seemed so trivial to [him], so banal, so false.” What is the point? Or, what is (not) possible without the confirmation of life and world granted by a witness?
Qfwfq concludes the world in color is “so much in contrast with Ayl’s person, with Ayl’s world, with Ayl’s idea of beauty, that I realized her place could never have been out here. And I realized, with grief and fear, that I had remained out here, that I would never again be able to escape those gilded and silvered gleams, those little clouds that turned from pale blue to pink, those green leaves that yellowed every autumn…”
Qfwfq is navigating a gross misrecognition, “inevitable in any transaction of desire and attachment,” according to Lauren Berlant (p. 196). Their book, The Female Complaint, deals with the promises love makes, particularly to/for women: fulfillment, recognition, and freedom. Berlant argues that love provides a specific freedom to “look forward, again” — a future-oriented optimism with no boundaries or bottoms, “the source of and cure for a psychic disorder…whose effects are made to seem inevitable and a small price to pay for optimism or its fading memory.” Put another way, love makes promises that it has no requirement to keep, provides a source or sense of optimism that it has no obligation to fulfill, and opens up a new logic about what it means to have a life. Love, and the act of being seen through it, helps us to make sense of what seems otherwise senseless. “I’m in a field, therefore I am” — but am I, if nobody sees me in the field? The bearing-witness aspect of love is taken for life, for what makes us alive or at least confirms it.
Qfwfq is forced then, through his misrecognition of the lover, to call his own identity into question. What did he value, and why? He finds himself now trapped by these values, where once they were the premise for the life-affirming act of falling in love. Without confirmation of his values by the lover, his world no longer makes sense.
One reason I started this “project” was because, for many years, I lived a life that I was able to make sense of through love. So long as I was seen by the lover, through the mutual act of confirming dreams and desires, I had my world, I knew where and why my feet were on the ground. Once I no longer felt seen, or felt rather that the shifting nature of my dreams and desires made them newly illegible to my then-lover, the love and consequently the world I had constructed within it fell apart. It’s not uncommon — we just weren’t compatible anymore, or we wanted different things. Sometimes you wake up next to someone you no longer recognize, who no longer recognizes you, who was everything and made everything and now you wonder which version of the world was true and worth fighting for.
But then, what next? The lover is illegible, no longer can confirm your dreams, and you have to decide for yourself what the value of the dream is. If what you’re seeing is real and if it’s worth seeing (through). And despite seeing a new world and believing yourself to be within it, you may still, anyway, ceaselessly, wonder what’s the point without them? It’s one of the facets of love that makes no sense, this compulsion to have someone bear witness as confirmation of our very being — and not just anyone, but that one who so potently confirmed us as ourselves. I still find myself wondering where I am and why — less often but no less disorienting.
In a different story from the same collection (“The Distance of the Moon”), Calvino writes: “I thought only of the Earth. It was the Earth that caused each of us to be someone he was rather than someone else; up there, wrested from the Earth, it was as if I were no longer that I, nor she that She, for me.” It’s the story of a man who loves a woman, a woman who loves this man’s cousin, and the cousin who loves the moon. The woman, upon realizing the cousin loves the moon, tries to become the moon. Because love disrupts and dislodges, and unloving does it all again, manifold, such that love’s memory becomes its own sort of reality and fiction, makes everything shaky. Asking what is beautiful, then, is also a way of asking what is real, and knowing that two truths can be true at once.