INVISIBLE CITIES IX -- Cities and Desire: DESPINA

Despina, from the Greek Despoina: for "mistress" or "lady," also a Greek goddess of mysteries, and only to those initiated to her cult would be revealed her true name, whatever it was.  Finally (and does this at all connect to the Mary/Jesus reference in Zaira?) Despoina is also what the Orthodox Catholic Church names The Mother of God.

1. The first paragraph offers no immediate surprises.  Different approaches to any one thing show different faces, of course.  But how beautiful Calvino renders it!  The camel driver thinks of it as the approach to a ship carrying him from the desert, and the sailor pictures the stability of terra firma and all its luxuries unavailable at sea.  Describe, or define, in terms of desire the intentional self-deceit of the sailor and the driver, though they know it's a city.  Does this connect somehow to the name?
2. Like the last city, Despina seems more conceptual, and therefor less connected in some existential (or whatever) way to its name and the reader and... oh, I don't know.  What do you think? 
3. What do you make of the seemingly anachronistic technology?

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