Life origami and entre-temps
Unfolding our collective responsibility in conflict and in peace
In a fitting temporal revisiting, I dove into my only half-finished musings about time and space from 2011 when I was still teaching high school students…or they were teaching me.
I titled a blog post at the time Spatial Existence and began to wonder about a topic which has deepened and matured in my being over the years since. Here is the earlier post:
As I sit here rereading A Separate Peace and teaching it to my 9th graders, I am struck by the many subtleties of the novel. Among these is the very spatial, and almost timeless, Finny. The title of the novel obviously gives one pause because of its multitudinous interpretations… it could refer to the separation of the Devon School from “the gray encroachments of 1943,” the separation of oneself in independent and defined identity from another, or… as I’ve been pondering over this morning… the separation of existence in space from existence in time.
Gene writes of Finny’s “magic gift for existing primarily in space” as his “choreography of peace.” Quite the character foil, Gene seems to be caught inescapably in the lockstep advance of time… even doubly in his mind which always works in cynical anticipation, “facing in advance whatever the destruction was.” Consider even the first paragraph of the novel in which Gene manages to refer to memory, memory within memory, the new within the old, and the powerful acceleration of the war which still haunts and defines him. In fact, his spatial existence seems to be the dark momentum and yet already passed moment of World War II. “The war was and is reality for me. I still instinctively live and think in its atmosphere,” Gene tells us, describing how this moment of his past has opened into (ugly irony) a gaseous pressure-filled medium surrounding his once and future breath.
Be present, they tell us. Are we to interpret this question as a request to fill and experience the present moment? Or is there something even more at work here? A charge to let our spatial reality dominate our existence… at least for a moment. I want to try, for today, to let go of time. I understand that it will still wash over me… for example, in the simplicity of watching the sunrise as I drive to work. And it will pull me when a friend asks about last night. But I want to try. Was that Finny’s gift? Or his Achilles’ heel?
I find that when I feel the impending pull of something I don’t like, that when I live in future moments that I find unsteadying, upsetting, or numbing, that my instinct is escape… physical, spatial escape. To get in the car and drive and drive and drive. Sometimes I only think about that kind of escape. Sometimes I’ve actually done it. I think part of that urge emanates from the way in which time has become social and deceptively unidirectional. In his provocative book, The Culture of Time and Space — a book I return to over and over again for the way it challenges my thinking — Stephen Kern writes about how the experience, the very nature of time itself changed as humanity moved into the 20th century. Whereas primitive societies live in a sort of harmony with time, with the seasons, with the shared memories of collective history told through stories by the fire, technologically advancing “modern” societies exist in a neurosis of relative and divided time. Relative, most likely because of the manner in which time divided into a single and linear “public” time (the clock in the town square, the 8-hour workday, the train schedule, etc.) and “private time” (the space of memory – now private and less shared, now required to isolate itself against the onslaught of the breaking apart of time into minutes, seconds, nanoseconds… things that we can understand intellectually but not experientially.)
And so, of the July Crisis in 1914 (in which “peace slipped away”), Kern writes:
While distinctive past orientations of the five major belligerents shaped their expectations about the future, the exigencies of the present during the July Crisis tended to work on all of them more or less alike. The present was a parenthesis of time between a glorious and prosperous European past and an uncertain future, when diplomats spoke and acted for nations under circumstances of extraordinary temporal compression. This was the climax of the age of simultaneity. Telegrams sent to half a dozen capitals triggered a variety of responses simultaneously. Telephones carried instantaneous two- and three- way conversations. The compacting of events in time was best suited for the one new art form of the period — the cinema — that was able to suggest the multiplicity of occurrences in many distant places in a single moment. The July Crisis was a montage of the simultaneous activity of scores of diplomats and later, of millions of soldiers. Each nation had a unique perspective and a different stake in the outcome, but the sense of the present was generally similar — thickened for all by the sheer density of events and expanded spatially by the new technology. Far different was the sense of the future, which determined why and how the various nations finally went to war.
To experience space, like Finny, perhaps requires a sort of extrication from reality. While not recommended as a strategy for living, it could be an interesting experiment. Thus, tomorrow’s theme: spatial existence…
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There are two threads which interest me here. First, the emergent sense my younger-me had that our existence unfolds over time but only in space–the being of life, which seems rather self-evident to me now–but more interesting, this phrase that John Knowles uses for the inhabitation of the now as a ‘choreography of peace.’ Second, the notion that time and space can themselves be mediated by culture into products that structure experience and thought. I hinted at it back then but clearly did not develop the fullness of this idea.
Personal journeys of growth and transformation are illuminated and guided by many amazing teachers before and of our time. While many address interconnection, it often feels the “work” of personal growth is a project for people to take on by themselves. Recently, I was listening to a podcast of a live talk given by Eckhart Tolle. Not dissimilar to events hosted by other spiritual guides, the event was given in a large setting packed with audience members. I know because I could hear their applause, laughter, and sighs of recognition at his remarks. I was thinking about how they have all come–separately or perhaps with one or two others–to learn how to apply mindfulness to their individual lives. Yet, how can we not see that each seat is taken, that we have arrived at a problem as a collective, but then leave to solve it one atomized bit by another? Why are we trying to solve suffering as individuals when the problem is clearly collective?
Could the answer lie in a choreography of peace? I’m quite stuck on that phrase. What is that? While pondering this idea, I happened to look out the window at a paper birch tree swinging and bowing as gusts of wind passed on their way. That, I thought, is a choreography of peace. The motion of the wind, master choreographer, dictates the motion and momentary form of the branches and leaves and together, all matter making up the tree reacting at once to the present moment and its forces. The wind and the tree in their becoming become one being.
If so, then how is a choreography of peace connected to a separate peace, the title of the novel. Would a separate peace be a place or a time? In an article unfolding from Deleuze and Guttari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Marcus Doel argues for space not as a place, nor even as points which connect (e.g. nodes, sites, integers, localities, identities, selves) but rather as folds, as origami. There are no points in space in the essentialist sense, only perspectival “points” that are directional and point towards the vanishing or vibrating horizon. In this sense, being is not a constant or a consistency, perhaps only the latter in degrees. Being is only and always becoming (or also and always, if you prefer.) Our every “moment” is only an in-between or as Deleuze describes: “This indefinite life does not itself have moments, however close together they might be, but only meantimes (des entre-temps), between-moments.” If spatial existence is an unfolding, then it is embedded in a temporal existence; and vice versa, if temporal existence–becoming–is a between-moment, then it exists in a spatial unfolding. If this sounds circular and way too abstract, it is both. And that is partially the point. Peace as an idea shares this kind of mutuality. In fact, it requires it–perhaps not of time and space but of relations.
What is missing–for us lowly non-philosophers and non-geographers and non-philosophers-of-geography–is the experience of the human in space and time. It is not missing from his writing, but it is important for us to ground the ideas in ourselves. For it seems quite obvious that space is a site–what of your local park? Or your very self? Let's take the park first. It isn’t actually a fixed site as much as it convinces us it is. Imagine you are walking to the park. As you get close, you are nearing the park. You are relationally shrinking the distance of the park in an experience that is never a definite or extricable moment for you but always an in-between–an in-between steps, an in-between breaths, an in-between seconds and milliseconds and nanoseconds even. Indeed, the space is unfolding as you are always an in-between. The park is relational to you in its “park-ness.” Now widen and multiply perspective to imagine other people walking to the park as you are walking towards it. Imagine people already there moving around the park, perhaps kicking a soccer ball, maybe kids sliding down a slide, a couple walking their dog. And other people are leaving. There are birds flying and landing in some of the trees, planes sometimes crossing overhead. Maybe someone in one of the planes glances out the window and sees the patch of green between streets and buildings. The park is a place, yes, but its space is vibrational, unfolding according to varied and combined human experience, memory, seasonality, directionality, and its eventual and prior absence. It is created and recreated, folded and unfolded into an ever-changing origami altering with perspectival, reshaping, and fluctuating relationality with everything else. We will explore this idea in the context of the self in a minute.
This brings us to the idea of forces, not even structural per se, that direct and shape our experiences of space and time without our control and often without our awareness. What do I mean by that? Structures in society are forces, so is culture, and for that matter subcultures. But there are others. As an example from the novel, take the forces that Devon applies upon its students’ experiences. In its rules and traditions, yes, but even in its physicality. As Knowles explains: “Devon is sometimes considered the most beautiful school in New England, and even on this dismal afternoon its power was asserted. It is the beauty of small areas of order–a large yard, a group of trees, three similar dormitories, a circle of old houses–living together in contentious harmony.” A contentious harmony? An argumentative peace? One of the consistencies throughout the novel is the tension between camaraderie and competition structured within the tense ordering of space governed “over all, cool and matriarchal, [by] the six o’clock bell from the Academy Building cupola, the calmest, most carrying bell toll in the world, civilized, calm, invincible, and final”–the not-so-subtle suggestion being that the kind of civilization these boys must know and live in will be one of contentious harmony, and that’s final. It matters not if the boys are ready to surrender, “looking like white flags on the endless green playing fields,” they would take their “force-fed education” and become the kind of men they were expected to be in their world. And the finality? As John Donne wrote in his poem “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” death is not an individual, but a collective event. Each death diminishes the whole of mankind. These boys are stuck in a system which encourages competition–for grades, prizes, accolades, scholarships, prestige. It is the kind of individualistic competition necessary for the capitalist world they are expected to enter and dominate. But that kind of competition is muddied by the violent and death-oriented “competition” of war and by the shared human diminishment from anyone's death–which they all uncomfortably know, with the exception of Finny perhaps, that their sports and games are preparation for. They have been taught to win, even amongst brothers, but what then of their innate and experiential knowledge that enemies are not created by right, but by fear.
The privileged and illusory insularity prep school usually affords was nonetheless not able to protect Devon or its inhabitants from the war. Gene speaks of its grip often: how new routines and requirements were “established to keep up with the pace of the war,” how “the war swept over like a wave,” how students are constantly threatening to enlist, and by the end of the year how little was “left at Devon any more which had not been recruited for the war.” There was never a separate peace–not the place, not their age, not their attitude, not even Finny’s special ability to stay above it all…or so Gene aches to believe.
Why do so many readers unthinkingly trust Gene’s notion of Phineas as moving through the world “in continuous flowing balance, so that he had seemed to drift along with no effort at all.” Gene’s memories are not reliable. He tells us as much repeatedly–the stairs are much harder than he remembered, the grove of trees indistinguishable one from another upon his return. Reality is quite different from his memory. He also tells us that Finny only supplies a separate peace through his “special inventions,” a magical spatial existence that cannot hold up against reality. When I taught, an oft-chosen passage for essays was the following:
Phineas in exaltation, balancing on one foot on the prow of a canoe like a river god, his raised arms invoking the air to support him, face transfigured, body a complex set of balances and compensations, each muscle aligned in perfection with all the others to maintain this supreme fantasy of achievement, his skin flowing from immersions, his whole body hanging between river and sky as though he had transcended gravity and might by gently pushing upward with his foot glide a little way higher and remain suspended in space, encompassing all the glory of summer and offering it to the sky.
Finny is the essence of innocence and beauty, students would write. Students inevitably loved Finny. I had to purchase a used copy of the book to reread it and it was covered in high school Hannah's annotations, so many of which said nothing more than: “poor Finny!”
Yet it was an inadvertent falsehood for my students to stop there as it is the next line which reveals deeper reality: “Then, an infinitesimal veering of the canoe, and the line of his body would break, the soaring arms collapse, up shoot an uncontrollable leg, and Phineas would tumble into the water, roaring with rage.” Yes, you read that right–roaring with rage. The caricature that Gene creates of Finny and the one we so desperately slide into with blinded belief is undercut by Finny’s own behavior through the book–the “normal” way that he struggles with anger, disappointment, fear, and confusion.
Finny’s illusion of peace, like everything else we see with these boys, is a posture taken up against the world. We are always taking a posture against the world–whether against an abstract enemy, an existential risk, or each other. But Finny convincingly lacked this. The truth is he didn’t lack the savage within that Gene knows all too well–like most of us–that he possesses. But Gene was able to delude himself enough to believe Finny did. And Finny deluded all by being able to create an imaginary peace that was impossibly isolated and separate. Delusions abound all around, it seems. Gene’s imagining of Phineas as a river god may momentarily or symbolically have seemed to allow a separate peace, but even these moments ended in something less than divine. Gene knows this sense of freedom is a trick, is actually just “Finny’s vision of peace,” that it is not Finny himself that is absolute beauty but instead this “wildest demonstration of himself” which performs beauty and grants this wonderful delusion for his peers, and even for faculty who let him get away with so much rule breaking.
Gene needs Finny to be able to hold on to this kind of happiness trick, this divisible peace, in the face of all else he knows to be true in its ugliness. Why does Gene never give us Phineas’ last name? Because, even into adulthood, Finny still exists within him as pure potential, as the possibility of transcendence. On the other hand, Gene inevitably pulls Finny back to earth. Finny needs that, but Gene–knowingly or not–fights against this enemy. Gene Forrester–he is the roots to tie Finny to the earth and the unbroken forest whose terminus Gene is never sure of. As Paul Witherington wrote in a 1965 article on the novel: “Finny tries to represent life as he feels it should be.” Finny’s effortful magical thinking is what Gene and the others fall on their knees towards. Life should be like this, we all want to believe. Then it would be truly beautiful. According to this interpretation, Finny dies when his magic can no longer sustain realities of the world.
Finny’s choreography of peace was just that–the skill of arranging movements, space, moments, even people into a seemingly effortless dance. It too was a performance, though perhaps one that mesmerized with its appearance of divination. But just as Gene always knew that “wars were made…by something ignorant in the human heart,” “peace is indivisible” from the world at large. There could never be a separate peace. The title is a sham, just as is Finny’s magic. In her memoir of breast cancer and her critique of cancer culture and capitalism’s distortion of illness, Anne Boyer says “...the condition of lostness is, when it comes to being a person, what finally makes us real.” Finny is able to hold up physical and metaphorical conditions of impossible harmony…until he isn’t, until he too must be made real or un-essentialized.
To establish there is no separate peace is small potatoes. Peace requires a relationship with conflict just as illusion requires a relationship with reality. The larger question lies in the impossibility of arranging peace (as in the impossibility of arranging space from points)–to choreograph peace you must exist in a delusion where harmony is something separate from all else, where exquisite balance can be controlled and even directed. Or at least, such delusions are necessary to choreograph it from the top-down. We are globally, and perhaps within ourselves also, existing in contentious harmony–where the achievement of peace must contend with conflicting aims, adversaries, value systems, and ideological beliefs about the world and how each ‘we’ (each culture or society or individual of parts of oneself) is within it. Even this wording, the achievement of peace, is perhaps misguided.
Buddhist teacher, distance runner and D.J., Hakim Tafari talks about how surrendering to situations, emotions, and life itself is counterintuitively a superpower. In the context of conflict, surrender would appear to be the losing proposition. Tafari’s surrender, though, is not a surrender to the Other, but to the conditions of life, a letting go of fixed notions of being and of identity–whether in the self or of a nation. This kind of surrender allows for dialogue with the Other while still acknowledging untraversable distance. Boyer, in alignment with our park example earlier, reminds us that: “What philosophy often forgets is this: that few of us exist most of the time as just one person. This unoneness can hurt, just like any oneness can hurt, too.” The separation may appear to provide bliss, but the binary will ultimately be the death of us. So let’s return to the ideas that Doel was explicating–those of Deleuze who in turn was, at least in part, influenced by Maurice Blanchot and a concept called ‘the neuter.’ The neuter is neither positive nor negative, but that which escapes dialectical recuperation. Let’s also return, as promised, to the idea of the self as a place, or at the very least as something with an essence–this illusory way it so often feels to us. As Richard Carter-White, Marcus Doel, and Sergei Shubin explain in a paper titled “Maurice Blanchot’s troubling geography: Neutralizing key spatial and temporal concepts in the wake of deconstruction,”
Blanchot introduces a hesitation into this analysis of the assumed relation between oneself and the Other that in traditional accounts of relationality leads to proximity and the interiorization of difference by relentlessly pursuing the relinquishment of identity, the estrangement from one’s own self, and the accentuation of “the distance [that] is in the heart of the thing” (Blanchot, 1982: 255). What kind of relationship is possible when ‘I’ am distant and dis-stanced not only from the Other but also from myself; when “I is another,” as Rimbaud (2005: 371) said?
In other words, questioning our essentialist subjectivity leads to an un-doing (unfolding?) of the essentialist Other which otherwise could theoretically be incorporated into our understanding. Or to put it more plainly, let’s say you have a friend whose ethnicity differs from your own and they are struggling with some events that have revealed the precarity of their ethnic group’s position in the world. You sit with them, listen to them, and have known them for so long sometimes their experiences feel like your own. You too have experienced a marked sense of difference in and of the world and you think (but hopefully don’t say), I understand your perspective and I am going to take it in and incorporate it into my worldview. In short, if I try hard enough, I can understand my friend’s perspective and make it part of my own. Blanchot argues that is impossible. There will always be the neuter–the parts of your friend that are unknowable to you. Indeed, there are parts of yourself that are unknowable to you, thereby Rimbaud’s “I is another.” To answer the question at the end of that quote, with this neuter, with this impossible unknown always there and always escaping, what structures our relationships? The ability not to overcome distance, but to recognize, respect, and yes maintain it. The constant estrangement process of self within self, and the acknowledgement and relinquishment of identity…that last which is at the heart of so many conflicts and will not be so easily released. Applied to the concept of peace, the implication might be that true peace isn't about eliminating conflict or reducing differences, but about developing and pondering relationality while maintaining the irreducible distance between individuals or groups.
I want to return to a question I posed earlier in this essay: why are we trying to solve suffering as individuals when the problem is clearly collective? And I want to tie that in with the threads that have been developing throughout this essay–that of peace as contentious (or maybe irreconcilable) harmony, that of the unknowable known (the neuter), and the relational aspect of peace. Imagine a young man who has just enlisted, perhaps like Leper from A Separate Peace…or even Finny had he found a military home that would accept him. This young man lives in the in-between in an illustrative way. He is no longer fully a civilian, but not yet a soldier. He is leaving behind the innocence of youth but not yet immersed in the harsh realities of war. He exists in a shifting space between inculcated ideals and abstract violence he is about to witness and be bloodied by (whether actually or just metaphorically.) He is suspended, not as Finny is suspended in an idealized harmony above reality, but in the messy and moment-by-moment changing in-between that is reality. He embodies the neutral movement that occurs as he moves between voices and identities: the voice of his civilian past, the voice of the emerging soldier, the voice of his fellow enlistees, the voices of authority figures, the voices–distant, but closing in–of an enemy he has yet to encounter.
His very existence is a dialogue between all of these voices and a movement between all of these past and possible selves. He also exists, as part of a collective, representing an ideology deemed existentially important by the powers that be which have placed all of these soldiers into potential conflict with an enemy. The young enlisted man is constantly negotiating impossible contradictions–preparing for war in the name of peace, becoming part of a collective while maintaining individuality, existing between civilian and military worlds. The truths are always both/and and so must be any desired peace.
Peace is not the binary opposing conflict or war. It negotiates impossible contradictions, aligning with Blanchot’s idea of the neuter as “an unfinished response to the impossible.” Peace is not a fixed state or destination, but a constant negotiation between various forces and identities. It's always in the process of becoming, never fully achieved. Peace is an opening that maintains difference without attempting to resolve it. Peace, in this view, is about preserving the "strangeness" between different parties rather than trying to eliminate it. Like the example of walking to the park, the experience of peace is a constant unfolding. It's experienced in the in-between moments–between confrontations, between interactions, between shifting ideologies and changing identities and it is never finished. In its always incompleteness, it is full of contradictions and uncertainties. Thus, it requires surrender to contradictions and uncertainties. Peace is not comfortable, easy, or harmonious. It is an unfolding, more similar to the paradox of intense relaxation that Eckhart Tolle describes as necessary to being, than to the permanent being-state many international conflicts attempt to fix between parties. Indeed it is a process of ongoing negotiation, adaptation, and coexistence.
So, if we can't choreograph peace from above, what is our responsibility in contributing to it? And how can we contribute to it collectively?
I am no expert in peace studies, conflict resolution, or mediation. I don’t pretend to have any answers. About a year ago, when my middle school son was working on a project, we read together an article about the Hand in Hand school where Jewish and Arab students attend together. One of the teachers talks about how “We might have different languages, religions and cultures, but we choose to be here together,” and the school itself believes it has developed “a model of honoring one another’s traumas, experiences and histories that can be replicated” at other schools or in other contexts. Here, it seems the notion of maintaining uncrossable distance while still choosing a joint, if always disjointed, experience is the unfolding. Parents too engage in non-outcome oriented dialogue. After Oct. 7th, a large slice of the parent community came together. When asked why they came to the session, the repeated response was “We came to listen.”
As I thought about the question of our responsibility towards shared peace, a film I saw this past summer came to mind. All Your Faces, directed by Jeanne Henry, considers the restorative justice process as it has been established in France. Some of the participants have been victims of crimes, others have perpetrated them. But all choose to be part of the restorative justice process which, contrary to common belief, is not about extracting remorse from the offenders but rather deepening an understanding of the people behind those masks of victim/criminal. Again, it is a process of listening without expectation of resolution.
Both “sides” come to the meetings at the beginning blinded by anger–the victims with anger at how their lives were irretrievably altered, the perpetrators with anger of a defensive sort. The more they meet, the more the anger recedes. It reminded me of what Matthew Brensilver said on a recent Ten Percent Happier podcast about the way anger can paralyze us “in our unwillingness to make an assertive move. And so we actually have to make some move. We have to do something. To act in an assertive way rather than an aggressive way or a super passive way, there’s a kind of vulnerability in it. It’s easier just to stay siloed and angry and hostile in one’s own mind. Or be aggressive and dissemble and pretend that we are invulnerable, that is anger is declaring our invulnerability and yet it testifies to it, that we have been hurt, we can be hurt. To actually move into the realm of acting informed by anger rather than deformed by the tiny kernel of wisdom in the anger, that is tender kind of work.” The hurt needs to be heard; otherwise, the anger can be a lifetime. The suffering needs to be shared if the peace is to be. Because like any equation, when I is another, then another is I.
Assertive tenderness seems to align with the contentious harmony or intense relaxation we have touched on in this piece. Thinking about Phineas reminded me of Agilulf from Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight. 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.
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 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 reified:
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.
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 a calculated but nonetheless trivial busyness. And without his name, he fully disappears into nonexistence. Like Phineas.
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.
A separate peace, a separate story, a separate balm for our very shared suffering. No, it will be messy, it will be constantly unfolding and never resolvable, but our responsibility may be just to listen because it truly is tender work. And if death is a collective event, then life must be too. As Boyer writes, “The fate of the world relies on the promise of the negative, just as we can rely that sight is not the only sense.”