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 VIII -- Cities and Memory: ZORA

image courtesy of designplaygrounds.com

Zora: a South and West Slavic word meaning "dawn, aurora".

1. How does Marco Polo really know what he claims to know of Zora as it no longer exists?  And the vignette's final paragraph reflects interestingly against the first sentence, which states of Zora that, "no one, having seen it, can forget."  So when it's gone... what?  Memory cannot be inherited, after all.
2. I mentioned synecdoche and metonymy in the last post about Tamara.  Inasmuch as either of these is a sort of--and maybe this is a stretch--mnemonic (and more so than just another crazy spelling) are all of the disparate and unforgettable points, all mnemonics really, synecdochic or metonymic of the whole--all for one and one for all?
3. If the most learned men are those who've memorized Zora and anyone who visits Zora cannot forget it, wouldn't anyone who simply visits and sees [all of] Zora become another of the most learned men?
4. This city is a little difficult for me to grasp.  Is it set up as it is only be ironic in the end?  This alone would make sense, but it leaves Zora otherwise shallower than the preceding cities.
5. Well, maybe not.  The whole notion of this city's memorableness together with its passing reminds me of the danger faced by the general world's public by the loss of a culture.  Loss of a spoken language.  Loss of oral traditions.  Loss of purity in aboriginal bloodlines.  Once lost, it will never return.  Some things, no matter the scholarship that pursues it after its demise, will never be brought back.  Only Jurassic Park managed that.