Visibility (Calvino)

The fourth memo. Calvino distinguished two directions of imaginative process: the one that starts with the word and arrives at the visual image, and the one that starts with the visual image and arrives at its verbal expression. Both directions were essential. Both were, in 1985, endangered by the atrophy of the mind's capacity to generate its own images under the pressure of a culture saturated with prefabricated ones. Four decades later, the endangerment has intensified. Large language models do not produce visual images directly, but they produce verbal descriptions of extraordinary vividness — descriptions that arrive with such confident detail that the reader's own image-making apparatus can be overwhelmed by the supply. The inner cinema goes dark, not because the projector has broken but because the screen is already occupied.