2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

20
P RELUDE
and white ceramic tiles of the floor of the palace. He tries to represent the characteristics of
each city he visited, their citizens and their civilizations. The emperor, being a good chess
player, realizes very soon that a regular chessboard with the usual pieces is far superior to
Marco’s gimcracks since a knight can represent an army as well as a horse, a queen can
stand for a lady at the window, etc. Moreover, the movement of the pieces according to the
rules is more faithful to Marco’s expressive intentions: each of the innumerable configura-
tions of the chessboard can indeed represent one of the cities Marco visited, its inhabitants
and its conflicts. Each state of the chessboard, in fact, represents “one of the forms that the
system of forms pools together and destroys,” and the game itself, since it includes all the
possible forms, comprehends the whole spatio-temporal universe. Endless games of chess
take soon the place of the experiences of the journeys, of the discussions about the objects
retrieved, of speech itself. Completely absorbed by the effort to grasp the hidden essence
of his empire, Kublai loses himself in the movements of kings and pawns until he reduces
his actions to the contemplation of what is left of every game: the black or white square
underneath the murdered king: “by disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the es-
sential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the
empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes: it was reduced to a square of
planed wood: nothingness...” 13 .
The most convincing clue indicating the centrality of combinatorial themes in Palomar
is to be found in its most enigmatic page, the page following the last. While the single texts
composing the book are simply introduced by the title (Reading a wave, The naked bosom,
etc.), in the index all the twenty-seven texts are reorganized in a totalizing and systematic
way. The index is composed of two distinct section: the list of chapters, where each of one
labeled by a triplet of digits, and an explanatory note. The former looks as follows:
13. Italo Calvino, Invisible cities…, 131. Translation slightly adapted.