7 pm. interesting. Another little zig. I picked up the Italo Calvino book (which I borrowed two months ago from a colleague) "Six Memos for the Next Millennium" and read the third chapter called Exactitude.

Here are a few quotes:

• First I shall try to define my subject. to my mind exactitude means three things above all all:
• a well-defined & well-calculated plan for the work in question
• an evocation of clear, incisive, memorable visual images
• a language as precise as possible both in choice of words and in expression of the subtelties of thought and imagination.
• It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably.
• It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most genereic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinquishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.
• What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language.
• I would like to add that it is not just language that seems to have been struck by this pestilence. We live in an unending rainfall of images.
• What is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience.
• "This talk is refusing to be led in the direction I set myself" (p. 68)

There is mention of a famous quote by Borges on infinity from "Avatars of the Tortoise". I have a book called "The Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges" which claims to include all of Borges fictions. I decide to look for the quotation. It isn't there! There is no mention of the Avatars of the Tortoise". Hmmm. I then decide to try a search engine on the internet. Numerous hits! I finally notice that the source is referred to as an essay (NOT a fiction). Here is the quote: "There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite."

There is also mention of the famous debate between Piaget and Chomsky published in a book called "Language and Learning" (which I have). here the quote is from the introduction by Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini who contrasts the two positons as a crystal (invariance of specific structurres - Chomsky) and the flame (constancy of external forms in spite of relentless internal agitation - Piaget). Lovely metaphors!!

Leonardo da Vinci's codices comprise an extraordinary documentation of struggle with language. "The various phases in the treatment of an idea - like those of Francis Ponge, who ends by publishing them in sequence because the real work consists not in its definitive form, but in the series of approximations made to attain it - are, for Leonardo as writer, the proof of the effort he invested in writing as an instrument of knowledge; ... he was more interested in the process of inquiry than in the completion of a text for publication." (p. 78)