INVISIBLE CITIES XXXIV -- Chapter 5, ..... 1

(I know it's self-indulgence, but I can't help but think of T.E. Hulme's "Above the Dock," reading the Khan's description of the moon's progression in his dream.)

1. If a person is, or may be[come], master of his/her domain, and if Kublai Khan's entire empire exists merely--or maybe just possibly--as words and dreams, mightn't any person gain leadership of grand empire?
2. What of the notion that the Khan's empire is so huge and that it's impossible for him to ever visit all the cities?  Is this and Polo's descriptions anything like the famed tree that falls in a forest with no one to hear?
3. Regarding the structure of the book, do the opening expositions to each chapter--the situation the Khan finds himself in--dictate the meme of Polo's coming descriptions?  (And any thoughts at all on how much time passes during or between each chapter?)

INVISIBLE CITIES XXXIII -- Chapter 4, ..... 2

Have we arrived at 

the process Calvino employed 

to "create" each of his cities?

*

INVISIBLE CITIES XXVII -- Chapter 4, ..... 1

Of Distant Lights and Crystalline Structures

1. "Your cities do not exist.  Perhaps they have never existed.  It is sure they will never exist again."  Whether they existed before or will exist later, when is it that Marco Polo's stories do indeed exist?
2. Discuss Marco Polo's salesmanship.

INVISIBLE CITIES XXVI -- Chapter 3, ..... 2

1. The ending italicized section of Chapter 3 is less exposition than it is a sharing of a city by the Khan rather than by Marco Polo.  Considering what we read in the opening italicized section, is there any difference between the book's cities by the one who experienced them or how (in this case, by a dream) they were experienced?
2. This issue of relative impartiality (if that even makes sense) seems reflected (sorry) by the concept of the city of Valdrada.  Thoughts?
3. The premise here of a city of departures, to me, comes over a little less gracefully than all the other cities, but I expect it's less for weak writing than it is for a characteristic ascribed to Marco Polo by Calvino.  What sort of person is the explorer?
4. The idea of a city that "knows only departures" is interesting, regardless of Polo's know-it-all identification.  Do such cities exist in reality or elsewhere in literature?

INVISIBLE CITIES XX -- Chapter 3, ..... 1

1. Kublai Khan notices that all of the cities are similar.  Really?  They all seem remarkably different to me--at least superficially.  How are they (here we go) perhaps even all the same city?  What evidence is there here at the opening of chapter 3 that this is so?
2. What then is the difference--if different at all--between Marco's various accounts (of the same or different city/ies) and what Kublai does when giving details and asking if there is such a city?
3. Now tie this into dreams.

M.C. Escher

INVISIBLE CITIES XIII -- chapter 2, ..... 1

Kublai Khan

1. Pattern would hold that the opening sequence of the chapter two holds a question to which the final lines of the chapters pose an answer.  What is/are the question/s?
2. When I first read this, I didn't get it very well.  The possibility that Kublai Khan and Marco Polo weren't even talking, but only imagining to talk made me wonder if they were both present at all.  Was Marco Polo, alone on some journey of his, imagining what it might be like to be explorer and official reporter to someone like The Great Khan?  From your perspective, what do you think?  I believe this makes sense on my second pass, but only maybe.  Considering the issues of nostalgia and memory, and past, present, and future, what is, at the very least, affecting, and at the most heavily tinting or obscuring, all of Polo's reports?
3. "You advance always with your head turned back?" and "Is what you see always behind you?" thus "He must go to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him": Is it possible to begin to gain access to a new culture--or a new anything--without using as initial framework/schema what you already know?  So no matter how far you travel, you ... what?  Experience the new only in context of the old?  And is this a reiteration of the same issue regarding two people of different languages and cultures talking to each other?
4. And what does the final line mean: "The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have"?  This echoes, I think (thoughts?), the last exchange between the men from the close of chapter one.  What's the connection?
5. Finally, back to the first paragraph here, what is the value Kublai Khan places on Polo's reports?  He doesn't want from him the information on taxes and politics and trade and treasure.

INVISIBLE CITIES XII -- Chapter 1, ..... 2

Marco Polo

This is end of the first chapter.  (Duh.)  How have your thoughts/opinions of the book changed since the opening scene and the first city or sp?  For me, the timing of this exchange and its revelation was perfect.  While I was very much enjoying the city-to-city descriptions and the poetry of Calvino's assemblages up to this point, I needed either something to happen or a substance-changing revelation, and I got it.  Also, I really appreciate Calvino's use of form here, as this final bit is very much like the last sentence or two of each vignette and the framework those sentences offer for the rest of that city.  This final ..... gives context for the preceding cities, all the way back to first.  But poetry is such a personal thing.  I could easily be seeing this in a way that you don't.  Thoughts?

1. "The emperor is he who is a foreigner to each of his subjects."
2. All the cities have a mythic/fairytale grandeur and vagueness.  How is this explained or justified by the situation of the Khan and Polo's difficulty in language?  How does this news--the language differences--turn on its head everything we've read so far?  From whom are we getting the stories of the cities: the firsthand of Polo, or the secondhand of Kublai Khan?
3. "Everything Marco displayed had the power of emblems, which, once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused."  Hmm.  Sounds a little bit like Zora and Zirma.
4. "Perhaps ... the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind's phantasms."
5. And what of having to know something before being able to possess it, as the Khan asks in the final enigmatic exchange?  This, too, sounds very much like some of issues we've been dealing with.
6. So Polo eventually masters the Khan's language.  Does this mean the rest of the cities we encounter throughout the book will not be subject to the same misinterpretation?  (And about "misinterpretation": are the Khan's interpretations of Polo's descriptions wrong or inaccurate?)

INVISIBLE CITIES V -- Cities and Memory: ZAIRA

"Zaira, City of High Bastions," courtesy
behance.net (click this!)

Zaira is related, and fairly obviously so, to our Sarah and happens to mean "lady" or "princess" in both (and I wish I knew more of the linking history ... McWhorter? ... or is it coincidence?) Hebrew and "Irish" (Gaelic, that is), and "Rose" in Arabic.  That's all fine and dandy, of course, but it marks a difference in theme--if not gender--from the first three cities.  Thoughts?

1. This first sentence, I think, captures the whole reason behind the Great Khan's fascination with Polo's descriptions.  However, do such subjective descriptions do him any good?
2. According to the rest of this first paragraph, what then is the relationship between the "measurements of its space" (physical locations or landmarks (?)) and the "events of its past" (memory)?
3. What do you make of "...the usurper, who some say was the queen's illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock."  Does this offer a window into either Calvino (or is he too shrewd to so expose himself) or at least one of the two characters?
4. "...but contains [memory] like the lines of a hand."  Palmistry?  Forget divination for a minute; what's the connection here, and can the memories therefor be "read" at all?  Or is there an issue of magic at hand here after all?  Is memory and its ties to things a mysticism or conjure?
5. Moving, relocating, is an engagement that sparks the memory.  Packing up items, sorting through boxes for treasure and trash, reorganization, etcetera bring past the hands and eyes items--landmarks--that hold in their essence, that trigger, memories.  Those memories are written like so many scars into the collections of junk we accumulate.  Do we throw away those memories, as certainly the runes of their recording are gone, when we throw away the landmarks?  I haven't thought about my Boy Scout days in ten years, but sorting through that old box because we've got to trim the fat down to naught, I encountered stacks and stacks of long-hidden memories.  But as Zaira absorbs like a sponge the waves of memory that happen within it, are those memories ever available to any of those who walk past the chink in a wall or who were not present when the hole appeared in the net?  Or does each citizen have access to an adequate number of memorial artifacts that those of others don't matter?  What do you make of the very physical, earthy, and private nature of the memories of Zaira?  Or do I have it wrong and all is shared by all?
6. So, the "high bastions."  If the city is swollen with memories--even built entirely of memory--it stands to reason that the bastions would be so tall.  But a "bastion" is a defense.  Thoughts?

castle bastion at Copertino, Italy

INVISIBLE CITIES I -- Introduction, and Chapter 1, ..... 1

Superficially, Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, is not a complex book.  If you look at the table of contents, you can see that it's categorized very simply into cities and types (memory, desire, signs, etcetera), as well as the periodic ".....," which indicates italicized encounters between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan (and considering Calvino, we might even want to ask, "So why the 5-point ellipsis?").  From the outset, these descriptions of cities and how they (the descriptions and the cities, which, as we discover, are two distinct things) relate back to their stated type are fascinating all on their own, one by one like individual poems in a collection.  However, as we dig into the meat of the book--the relationship between Polo and the Khan and the situation (a deliberately vague word) of the empire and the overlapping of cities--we should see how these descriptions and adventures interrelate and build one upon another.  Calvino, as far as I'm concerned, is a magician with a million tricks.  The conceptual undercurrent of this book is, first, ingenious, and, second, all the more so because he makes it work, faithful to the concept to the end.  Be open-minded.  This book, if you let it, will stretch you.

On a technical note, regarding the blogging of the book, each reading day I'll put up one to five posts, one post per city and "......"  This is mostly for organizational purposes, particularly as I'm very interested in going back at the end and examining together, for example, all the "Cities of Memory" or "Hidden Cities."

*

….. 1

1.       Calvino’s language and word choice is always important.  I think we need to assume that he’s taking on the whole Beethoven every-note-must-be-perfect thing.  Notice the use of we.  Who is “we”?  We see it first in the second sentence: “…of the territories we have conquered….”  If we assume that we can’t take anything for granted, then what’s he going for there?  (The italicized encounters are narrated in third person omniscient.)  I guess I should ask whether you believe Calvino is speaking “we” from his own first person perspective over the survey of the book’s contents or if he’s channeling the Khan and speaking the emperor’s “we.”

2.       Considering what I said in the little introduction above, is Calvino, in the remainder of this fatty second sentence, acknowledging that we—he and us—will never fully understand….  What?  Cities?  Cultures?  People?  The book (or Book)?

3.       There’s an adroit composition to this little essay.  Compare the first sentence to the last.  Why does the Khan pay more attention and interest to Polo than his other explorers?  What obstacles, or potential conflict, can we anticipate?

4.       A question to consider over the course of the book: Why did Calvino choose Marco Polo and Kublai Khan?  There are some near-obvious possibilities, but others….

5.       Have you read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”?

INVISIBLE CITIES -- Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino

I've done this a few times: start talking about a book before I finished it (Fever Dream, All the Pretty Horses, and Witch and Wizard come to mind).  This time, I needed a new book to take with me to my son's karate class (is it bad of me not to focus with more diligence and dedication?).  Last week I'd taken along a copy of Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, but the novel didn't exactly "click," so I'll save it for another day.  Today, on the other hand, I grabbed Calvino's Invisible Cities, and what a pleasant surprise the first 25 pages were (I hardly saw a kick or heard an ai-yah!)!  I'm not going to get too into it here (most basically: Marco Polo's talking to Kublai Kahn about the cities of the latter's kingdom, the former describing without verbal language, but gesticulation, pantomime, and artifacts, while the monarch understanding through them experiencing, certainly, something else entirely, which experience of dramatic and accepted miscommunication is actually very similar in concept to some of the cities remarkably described by Polo -- hugely post modern and delightfully poetic), but it is pointedly similar to Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, and so similar, in fact, that I cannot imagine (and I've made similar connections before, but never with any certainty; this, I feel, must be certain) Lightman not having gained inspiration from Calvino.  I am terribly excited to read the rest of this brief "novel" (author and book-critic monster, Gore Vidal, wasn't content classifying this book as a novel, nor work, meditation, or poem, but a "marvelous invention") and am breaking off here and now to get back to it.

Stay tuned.

read Gore Vidal's essay on Italo Calvino's fictions here