Along the spine

I want to dig a little deeper into The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino as I suspect its themes will echo in many other books that I read along this journey.

The first description of Agilulf, the nonexistent knight, is of

a knight entirely in white armor; only a thin black line ran round the seams. The rest was light and gleaming, without a scratch, well finished at every joint, with a helmet surmounted by a plume of some oriental cock, changing with every color in the rainbow. On the shield a coat of arms was painted between two draped sides of a wide cloak, within which opened another cloak on a smaller shield, containing yet another even smaller coat of arms. In faint but clear outline were drawn a series of cloaks opening inside each other, with something in the center that could not be made out, so minutely was it drawn.

Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight, pg.4

Some of you who enjoy art may recognize the design of the coat of arms as the Droste effect which is when a picture recursively appears within itself, theoretically recurring as such infinitely if the eye or picture resolution would allow. Or more mathematically, infinite regress is the repetition of a logical thought based on the rule created by its predecessor, yet which therein requires infinite repetition. “It’s turtles all the way down” is one such example. In the case of Agilulf, his infinite regress is based on “something in the center that could not be made out” which both aligns with his unknowability (to us and to himself) and his purity.

He is perfectly clean, perfectly, jointed, perfectly articulate. He follows the rules to a t, thinks only in “exact and definite thoughts,” and perceives of others only as ideals for which the real persons inevitably disappoint him. He lives with a productiveness that can sometimes resemble genuine existence. Contrast this notion of nonexistence with, speaking humbly from my own experience, actual existence: messy, disappointing, flawed, full of struggle, full of contradiction, painful, passionate, and though guided by rules, not bound by them. And through all of this, we feel. Sometimes it seems as though life, or at least socialized life, is merely putting on a veil between others and our own rawness.

Agilulf cannot experience the range of emotions that existing people can. For example, “his envy for the faculty of sleep possessed by people who existed, was vague, like something he could not even conceive of.” In another scene, “people’s bodies gave him a disagreeable feeling resembling envy, but also a stab of pride, of contemptuous superiority.” He requires order and perfection which, with all of the messy, fleshy, smelly, existing knights, cannot ever be attained. As such, his nonexistence is reifed:

The slightest failure on duty gave Agilulf a mania to inspect everything and search out other errors and negligences, a sharp reaction to things ill done, out of place…But having no authority to carry out such an inspection at that hour, even this attitude of his could seem improper, ill disciplined…Every time Agilulf had a moment’s uncertainty whether to behave like someone who could impose a respect for authority by his presence alone, or like one who is not where he is supposed to be, he would step back discreetly, pretending not to be there at all. In his uncertainty, he stopped, thought, but did not succeed in taking up either attitude.

The Nonexistent Knight, pg. 10

Where Agilulf sees disorder, Raimbaut, the young paladin, sees “a senseless cluttering of insects,” something alive but foreign, something there but that does not make any sense. Disorder is a physical take on the scene where senselessness is a lack of understanding. Agilulf can never experience the world and therefore his ordering of it and thoughts about it always have a superficial quality. Yet Agilulf, despite himself or despite his nonself, manages to be incredibly repellant or attractive to others. The other paladins cannot stand his arrogant judgmental way, but Raimbaut finds him irresistible and Bradamante is deeply attracted to his exactness and perfection in all that he does.

In the end, though, Agilulf is only a name, obscured by an calculated but nonetheless trivial busyness. And without his name, he fully disappears into nonexistence. Similarly, at a more meta level, words and stories save us, hide us, and carry us as the narrator writes:

‘Tis towards the truth we hurry, my pen and I, the truth which I am constantly expecting to meet deep in a white page, and which I can reach only when my pen strokes have succeeded in burying all the disgust and dissatisfaction and rancor which I am forced here in seclusion to expiate.

The Nonexistent Knight, pg. 84

And isn’t the disgust and dissatisfaction the stuff of nonexistence? Or at least, these were the limited emotional palette of Agilulf. His disgust arose from the superiority of his nonexistence compared to the existing world, but for those of us who are in it, there is always the messy question of its existence, its solidity, of anything real…of any truth or Truth. This is what Raimbaut discovers when he ventures into true battle, when

his rage was real, and his fight was a real fight, and the effort to hold at bay two enemies was agonizingly exhausting in bone and blood, and maybe Raimbaut must die now that he is sure the world exists, and does not know if dying is more or sad or less.

The Nonexistent Knight, pg.41

But dying leaves a gaping hole rather than a nonexistence. When we encounter grief, the world’s existence is confirmed…and it is confirmed to be cruel and sharp and lonely and gutting and deeply aching. And it is when we push against this massive wall, as Agilulf does merely in order to hold onto his nonexistence, that we

manage to keep a sure consciousness of [ourselves]. But if the world around was instead melting into the vague and ambiguous, he [Agilulf] would feel himself drowning in that morbid half light, incapable of allowing any clear thought or decision to flower in that void. In such moments he felt sick, faint; sometimes only at the cost of extreme effort did he feel himself able to avoid melting away completely. It was then he began to count: trees, leaves, stones, lances, pine cones, anything in front of him.

The Nonexistent Knight, pg. 18

I have been witnessing the grief of a loved one over the past few months. And I have noticed that when he begins to notice his own drift, his own melting, he begins to declutter and order his world–whether his physical world by the sorting and discarding of old clothing or household items or his mental life which he revisits often considering what way of life moving forward will hold the most meaning.

Yet, I do not believe we can plan for meaning or order our lives around it, as much as I too strive to do such a thing, but rather that it only bubbles up in moments shared–with beauty or with others as Paul Kalanithi wrote in the last paragraph of his book, When Breath Becomes Air, just before he died, speaking to his newborn daughter:

When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air, pg. 199

Every night as I close the door to my 4 year old’s bedroom, he says quietly and then yells out “I love you too much!” And this is the true gift and cost of love, of existence, for its pains are always going to be too much for the lover when the object of his love is gone.

Let me leave you with one final thought: what if the nonexistent knight never existed? Our narrator, a nun, is very frank with us that for her penance, in writing down this tale, “what I do not know I try to imagine. How else could I do it? Not all of the story is clear to me yet.” And later she tells us that “One can never be sure of saving one’s soul by writing. One may go on writing with a soul already lost.” Wouldn’t it be a clever trick of Calvino to have a soulless (nonexistent) narrator write falsely of a nonexistent character? And now that I write that, I think, isn’t that what we all do. Do we not write our own lives, maybe not falsely but certainly erroneously, out of a certain nonexistence? Do we not will the story of our lives to be something existing, even though all stories melt and fade and maybe never were…and the too small thing to see on our shields, down to the very atom, is the only way we can touch the infinite.