IN a discussion about the literary imagination, Italo Calvino reflects upon the nature of archetypal images and asks: “Are we saying that neither religion nor literature exists but just as an algebra of conceptual operations or rather a (biological? ontological?) structure that conditions human imagination and informs all mytho-poetic activities with its own imprint?” (Italo Calvino: Letters 1941-1985: Princeton University Press, 2013, p. 366). His phrase, “an algebra of conceptual operations”, beautifully expresses the idea that I’ve long held but never so perfectly enunciated, that narratives created by the human compulsion to understand the mystery of existence, whether the narratives are projected by works of science or of art or by sacred texts, are an accumulation of images assembled by our senses in their constant sifting of data in order to interpret reality, each a body of unique signs and symbols but with none privileged to claim a singular irrefutable veracity for itself since each narrative is a self-contained language which draws its supposedly definitive conclusions from its own initially posited propositions as if the propositions were axiomatic truths snatched from the void of pre-existence. My tortuous attempt to state that idea is succinctly conveyed by Calvino’s phrase in which the word “algebra” brilliantly compresses the idea. We create algebraic equations between the continuous flow of our sensual perceptions and the words we assemble, or even invent, to dam that flow, thus creating a reservoir of knowledge.

As Gottlob Frege demonstrates in The Foundations of Arithmetic, once the proposition “Nought is a number” is accepted as an axiomatic truth like the proclamation of a prophetic revelation — and such acceptance, like an audience’s willing suspension of disbelief at the theatre, is only a common agreement among people — then the sequential propositions of incremental complexity that follow must also be true provided they do not contradict the elements which compose the original assertion. If our understanding of existence is this mental juggling of signs of our own invention, then do these signs represent some hieroglyphic imprint etched in every human brain at birth — what Jung called racial archetypes — which our obsessive ontological anxiety identifies with images received by our senses? Calvino then asks if human imagination “continues functioning by ordering the categories of the earliest human experiences into structures of images”. We appear to do so, and our perception of those structures, each a construction of a special language, whether in a secular or a sacred text, and each engaging us in a conjectural investigation of images calculated to convert speculation into belief, is all the knowledge our minds can attain. Their inherent archetypal force makes images a powerful element in all composition. And what is more, the hieroglyphic imprint in our brain comes with a programmed disposition — call it your DNA or your haath ki laqeerenh, lines on your palm, or just plain contrariness — to respond positively to some structures and to remain indifferent to others.

It occurs to me that Miguel de Unamuno would have rejected Calvino’s algebraic equation between experience and belief because it makes religion irrelevant whereas for Unamuno life without religion’s promise of immortality was meaningless. In his Tragic Sense of Life (trans. Anthony Kerrigan, Princeton University Press, 1972) he writes passionately about “the longing not to die, the hunger for personal immortality” (p. 42). There can be no sense to human existence if all we are destined for is to be swatted like a fly or trodden upon like an ant; the human craving for some special destiny for its essential self, that core of one’s being which seems so special, translates to a form of prayer to the unknown with religion acting as a self-appointed intermediary. The presumption behind Unamuno’s tragic sense that makes him cling desperately to his Catholic faith, which promises him an eternal existence, is that he does indeed already possess an existence within a solid body which religion’s pickling process will transform to a soul in everlasting bliss.

One becomes drawn by the passionate expression of his argument even as one considers it incoherent and easily refutable, especially when he emphatically asserts his dogmatic rejection of any epistemological doubt, as in, “There is no way whatsoever to make consciousness become aware of absolute unconsciousness, aware of its own annihilation” and that “We can not conceive of ourselves as not existing” (p. 43), or as in, “religion is nought but union with God, with God sensed in the manner that each man senses Him. God lends a transcendent meaning and finality to life” (p. 238).

It is like reading the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins — I care nothing for the pious Catholic persuasion that inspires his poems but admire the poetry as some of the greatest there is. So, with Unamuno. There is a beautiful passage in which he describes the stages of how the love of “ephemeral matter”, the things around us, leads us to love “the more lasting things, the things that we cannot grasp in our hands”, which then leads us to love the idea of “the Good”, and so on, and to conclude: “We come out of ourselves in order to penetrate farther into our supreme I; individual consciousness emerges in order to submerge itself in the total Consciousness of which we form part, but it does so without dissolving itself. And God is nought but Love emanating from universal suffering and becoming consciousness.” (p. 214).

The logic by which he arrives at that final sentence is questionable, but the confident tone of the expression is compelling, and one remarks how the Catholic vision possessing Unamuno is the same that would possess a Sufi in an ecstatic trance and no doubt also a shaman at the climax of his pagan dance in remotest Amazonia. Each individual converts a common mystical experience into a unique spiritual ceremony that he believes would be inconceivable outside the system of his preferred faith. However, even the faithless have mystical moments. There would be no art without the human compulsion to attain a beatific state by attempting to create that elusive, and ultimately unattainable, beauty which is the essence of form, the very soul of the thing, that steals away from the self just when the illusion of its solidity excites one’s imagination.

Here is Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet (trans. Alfred Mac Adam, New York: Pantheon Books, 1991): “Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality — it’s all evaporating.” (p. 15). The mystery of the self torments us, what puzzles the will is the memory of one’s earlier years in which, when we look back on lost time, we see an unrecognisable self that seems to have possessed a pre-cognition of ideas, though it never expressed them, which were developed by our later, very different, self. Finding some of his old discarded writings, Pessoa is astonished to discover in them some notions about language that he articulated only many years later, and he asks “the being in [himself] that presumes to exist if there might not be in the Platonism of sensations another, more appropriate, anamnesis, another memory of a former life that might only be of this life.” And then his suppressed anguish explodes in this glorious outburst: “My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? What is this space between myself and myself?” (p.16).

It is as when one stands in front of a mirror and, peering hard to see what can be known of the self in the reflected image, imagines that the reflection in the mirror is of another, someone behind the I looking at the mirror, a third who remains gravely silent as if he possessed knowledge of the self that was too tragic to express, and in that moment the I standing there experiences a disembodiment, an evaporation of its being, and there is only the other whose breath mists over the mirror when the I leans forward to come closer to the reflection, so that instead of a glimpse of the self there is only a vaporous mist rising silently from the mirror’s cold surface. The solid earth on which I stand tilts imperceptibly even as it continues to rotate ceaselessly, and infinitesimally, with each moment that passes, the space between myself and my self increases.

Pessoa is overcome by “an anguish of being exiled among spiders.” (p. 36). For him, “Life, ultimately, is in itself one grand insomnia, and there is a lucid disorientation in everything we think and do.” (p. 91). Some years later, Pessoa arrived at a sort of resolution to his puzzle: “I live myself aesthetically in another.” (p. 153). Staring at David sculpted in marble, we look at Michelangelo. When we read Hamlet, we are absorbed in Shakespeare. We listen to The Rite of Spring and are overwhelmed by Stravinsky.

Pessoa took the hypothesis of existence to its extreme by inventing other identities for himself, giving them individual characteristics, constructing the biography of each as a distinct other, and writing the poems each would have written, a poetry that is some of the best of the 20th century, thus creating a complex aesthetic otherness within which to dissolve his own identity and free himself from the torment of being. He chose several heteronyms for these others, naming one of them Ricardo Reis. He would have loved the grand joke played upon him by José Saramago in his novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (trans. Giovanni Pontiero, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1991) in which Saramago has the ghost of Pessoa visiting a living Ricardo Reis. No doubt Saramago knew the passage in The Book of Disquiet where Pessoa had written, “I feel I might possibly be someone else’s dream; I can imagine, almost carnally, that I might be a character in a novel” (p. 151), and conceived a fiction in which Pessoa’s ghostly dreamlike presence, together with his own invented other, Ricardo Reis, who is represented as a fully rounded character brought to life by a novelist, makes Pessoa more believably real than he himself dreamed of ever being, thus transforming his existence into an aesthetic phenomenon.A phrase from Borges comes to mind — we inhabit an “unstable world of the mind” — in his essay, ‘A New Refutation of Time’ (Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger, New York: Viking, 1999), where he writes about a “world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit … a world without the ideal architecture of space … an inexhaustible labyrinth, a chaos, a dream …” (p. 321). He quotes the opposing concepts of time propounded by Berkeley and Hume, and offers his own syllogistically rigorous conclusion: “Outside each perception (real or conjectural), matter does not exist; outside each mental state, spirit does not exist; neither then must time exist outside each present moment.” (p.329). He seems to agree with Schopenhauer whom he quotes at length: “No man has ever lived in the past, and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life …” (p. 331), an idea Borges finds also in a Buddhist treatise according to which “every man is an illusion”. But in the end Borges rejects philosophical speculation with a daring rhetorical flourish: “Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.” (p. 332).It is a poetical outburst with which the writer surrenders his being to a mystical possession by exterior elements. Baudelaire describes a similar experience in a letter to Wagner whose music, he tells the composer, produced within him “a rather odd emotion, which could be described as the pride and joy of comprehension, of allowing myself to be penetrated and invaded — a truly sensual pleasure, recalling that of floating through the air or rolling on the sea.” (Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire, trans. Rosemary Lloyd, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1986, p. 146).What is experience if not a confusing chaos of events and fragmented narratives penetrating and invading our senses or suddenly appearing in our minds as associations and memories? We live in a continuous turmoil of interpreting the tumultuous parade of images that comprise what we believe to be the world around us. We impose a taming grammar on the cacophony of words in our ears and convince ourselves that language communicates truth. A form of digitisation clicks away in a nano-technological cosmos, in which each particle of dust might be a planet, and produces an endless stream of printouts, each of which we evaluate as a new picture of reality, submitting that which doesn’t quite please us to Photoshop revision, experimenting with layers of alternatives to discover a truer representation among the compressed pixels.

Calvino has a short story, ‘World Memory’, (collected in Numbers in the Dark, trans. Tim Parks, New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), written decades before the digital revolution, in which the director of the organisation working on creating a data bank of every known detail of reality expresses a disorienting doubt: “Who could rule out the possibility that the universe consists of the discontinuous network of moments that cannot be recorded, and that our organisation does nothing but establish their negative image, a frame around emptiness and meaninglessness”, (p. 138). It is an astounding idea — as if the history of the universe was a description of a black hole. Perhaps written by Samuel Beckett, illustrated by Mark Rothko, with music by John Cage, and a commentary co-authored by Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. Another possibility suggested by Calvino’s story is that we ignore what we easily understand, discarding anything that can be known for certain into the dustbin of redundancy, and expend our intellectual energy constructing artistic, scientific and religious narratives about the unknowable, fully conscious that it will forever remain unknown: all our firmly held beliefs are dependent upon our remaining ignorant, a state of mental complacency fed by unthinking repetition, while that which we continue to be puzzled by is the object of creative fertility. We are constantly looking for that which we think must be there but which continues to be missing.

Calvino accounts for that missing phenomenon in the title story of Numbers in the Dark, which is set in the offices of an accountancy corporation at night when the workers have gone home and the middle-aged cleaning ladies, looking much like witches with their brooms, go about the rooms “tracing out their spells”. It’s a magical story, though simple and perfectly realistic. A young boy named Paolino has gone with his mother to help — to put down the shutters on the windows, empty out the wastepaper bins. The windows shuttered, the “night outside, the haloes of the streetlamps, the softened glow of distant windows across the street, disappear; now there is nowhere but this box of light” (p. 80), in which Paolino finds himself as in a dream. He goes from room to room, a world full of alculators, filing cabinets, telephones and intercoms — the paraphernalia of accountancy before the age of computers. In one room, he comes across a man and a woman who he thinks have stayed behind to do overtime, but who have been doing something else, a beautifully written, humorously subtle scene. Paolino is fascinated by some graphs hanging on the walls with lines going up and down on them. All around him is a world of symbols that measure and interpret data to produce a final mathematical certainty. In a room full of cubicles, he comes across a balding man tapping away on an adding machine, an accountant working overtime. He says he’s trying to get the accounts right, but they never do. Paolino asks why the work d isn’t one on electronic machines that work by themselves and presumably make no mistakes. No, says the accountant, “It was wrong from the start”.

The accountant takes Paolino to a little secret chamber which is full of the company’s old ledgers going back a hundred years. At the beginning of the company’s existence, there was a great genius, a Supreme Accountant, who was infallible, and whose immaculate work can be seen in the ledgers, but who once, just once, made a “mistake, a stupid mistake of four hundred and ten lire in an addition” (p. 88); every calculation made since then has exponentially inflated that original mistake, it’s billions now, “and it’s growing bigger and bigger and bigger”. No one ever caught that mistake except this old accountant. He is passing on the secret to Paolino so that someone in the world will know that what everyone believes to be a sacred truth is based on an error.