The Invisible Cities By Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in San Remo, Italy. He is an
essayist and journalist as well as a novelist, and is a member of the editorial
staff of the Turin publishing firm Giulio Einaudi Editore. His other novels
include _The Castle of Crossed Destinies__ (also published in Picador),
_Cosmicomics,__ and _t zero.__ In 1973 Italo Calvino won the prestigious Italian
literary award, the Premio Feltrinelli.
First published of Invisible Cities in 1972
translated from the Italian by William Weaver
Invisible Cities
_Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he
describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars
does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity
than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors
there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the
territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall
soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of
emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odour of the elephants after the
rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes
rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they
are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us
the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax
of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies' protection, offering in
exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It
is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us
the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene
has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre, that the triumph over enemy
sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo's
accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to
crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites'
gnawing.__
Eudoxia
By Marcus Inkpen
Machinima Fuschia Nightfire
CITIES & THE SKY 1
In Eudoxia, which spreads both upwards and down, with winding alleys, steps, dead
ends, hovels, a carpet is preserved in which you can observe the city's true form.
At first sight nothing seems to resemble Eudoxia less than the design of that
carpet, laid out in symmetrical motives whose patterns are repeated along straight
and circular lines, interwoven with brilliantly coloured spires, in a repetition
that can be followed throughout the whole woof. But if you pause and examine it
carefully, you become convinced that each place in the carpet corresponds to a
place in the city and all the things contained in the city are included in the
design, arranged according to their true relationship, which escapes your eye
distracted by the bustle, the throngs, the shoving. All of Eudoxia's confusion,
the mules' braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell is what is evident in the
incomplete perspective you grasp; but the carpet proves that there is a point from
which the city shows its true proportions, the geometrical scheme implicit in its
every, tiniest detail.
It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia: but when you concentrate and stare at the
carpet, you recognize the street you were seeking in a crimson or indigo or
magenta thread which, on a wide loop, brings you to the purple enclosure that is
your real destination. Every inhabitant of Eudoxia compares the carpet's immobile
order with his own image of the city, an anguish of his own, and each can find,
concealed among the arabesques, an answer, the story of his life, the twists of
fate.
An oracle was questioned about the mysterious bond between two objects so
dissimilar as the carpet and the city. One of the two objects--the oracle
replied--has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits in which the
worlds revolve; the other is approximate reflection, like every human creation.
For some time the augurs had been sure that the carpet's harmonious pattern
was of divine origin. The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no
controversy. But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the
true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that
spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the
other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.
Armilla
By Romy Nayar & Ux hax
Machinima Hypatia Pickens
Collaborator:
Leona80 Mhia
Nadiemequiere
THIN CITIES 3
Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been
demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know.
The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that
makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses
should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of
pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo's
white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still
hanging from the boughs. You would think the plumbers had finished their job and
gone away before the bricklayers arrived; or else their hydraulic systems,
indestructible, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of
termites.
Abandoned before or after it was inhabited. Armilla cannot be called
deserted. At any hour, raising your eyes among the pipes, you are likely to
glimpse a young woman, or many young women, slender, not tall of stature,
luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in
the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or combing their long hair at
a mirror. In the sun, the threads of water fanning from the showers glisten, the
jets of the taps, the spurts, the splashes, the sponges' suds.
I have come to this explanation: the streams of water channelled in the
pipes of Armilla have remained in the possession of nymphs and naiads. Accustomed
to travelling along underground veins, they found it easy to enter into the new
aquatic realm, to burst from multiple fountains, to find new mirrors, new games,
new ways of enjoying the water. Their invasion may have been built by humans as a
votive offering to win the favour of the nymphs, offended at the misuse of the
waters. In any case, now they seem content, these maidens: in the morning you hear
them singing.
Isaura
By Lanjran Choche & MORLITA Quan
Machinima By NikoleX Moonwall
THIN CITIES 1
Isaura, city of the thousand wells, is said to rise over a deep, subterranean
lake. On all sides, wherever the inhabitants dig long vertical holes in the
ground, they succeed in drawing up water, as far as the city extends, and no
farther. Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake; an
invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything that moves in the
sunlight is driven by the lapping wave enclosed beneath the rock's calcareous sky.
Consequently two forms of religion exist in Isaura.
The city's gods, according to some people, live in the depths, in the black
lake that feeds the underground streams. According to others, the gods live in the
buckets that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the edge of the
wells, in the revolving pulleys, in the windlasses of the norias, in the pump
handles, in the blades of the windmills that draw the water up from the drillings,
in the trestles that support the twisting probes, in the reservoirs perched on
stilts over the roofs, in the slender arches of the aqueducts, in all the columns
of water, the vertical pipes, the plungers, the drains, all the way up to the
weathercocks that surmount the airy scaffolding of Isaura, a city that moves
entirely upwards.
Esmeralda
By Rebeca Bashly
Machinima Spiral Silverstar
TRADING CITIES 5
In Esmeralda, city of water, a network of canals and a network of streets span and
intersect each other. To go from one place to another you have always the choice
between land and boat: and since the shortest distance between two points in
Esmeralda is not a straight line but a zigzag that ramifies in tortuous optional
routes, the ways that open to each passerby are never two, but many, and they
increase further for those who alternate a stretch by boat with one on dry land.
And so Esmeralda's inhabitants are spared the boredom of following the same
streets every day. And that is not all: the network of routes is not arranged on
one level, but follows instead an up-and-down course of steps, landings, cambered
bridges, hanging streets. Combining segments of the various routes, elevated or on
ground level, each inhabitant can enjoy every day the pleasure of a new itinerary
to reach the same places. The most fixed and calm lives in Esmeralda are spent
without any repetition.
Secret and adventurous lives, here as elsewhere, are subject to greater
restrictions. Esmeralda's cats, thieves, illicit lovers move along higher,
discontinuous ways, dropping from a rooftop to a balcony, following gutterings
with acrobats' steps. Below, the rats run in the darkness of the sewers, one
behind the other's tail, along with conspirators and smugglers: they peep out of
manholes and drainpipes, they slip through double bottoms and ditches, from one
hiding place to another they drag crusts of cheese, contraband goods, kegs of
gunpowder, crossing the city's compactness pierced by the spokes of underground
passages.
A map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different coloured inks, all
these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. It is more difficult to fix on
the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long
invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito, spiralling
upwards, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all
the points of the city.
