Neurological Architecture

As tension arises between the Venetian and the emperor, we begin distrusting Marco Polo. Khan insists that Polo never talks about his own city, Venice, and rather nonexistent places. Polo keeps on describing his cities as if he avoided this discrepancy. "Your cities do not exist. Perhaps they have never existed. It is sure they will never exist again. Why do you amuse yourself with consolatory fables?" (page 59) said Khan to Marco Polo. The cities described up to this point have offered a variety of pathways, being waterways or roads such as the ones in Esmeralda. These are symbols of the lives' situations and possibilities encountered in every journey. The endless possibilities are many, but people only experience one.  For example, in Baucis we see people isolated from the rest of the world because its habitants have everything they need up in the sky, but we also see cities like Adelma, where one sees only the faces of the dead, thinking one is dead. "This means I, too am dead… This means the beyond is not happy," said Marco Polo. People can choose to be alone and find satisfaction in isolation, but others can not handle the grieve of death, enslaving themselves to the dead past. 

Thinking back to the conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, every city described has derived from Venice. "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice… To distinguish the other cities qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. for me it is Venice." As daring Khan questions the Venetian, he reveals Polo's cities are all in his brain, but still that does not contain them from continuing talking. Calvino has created a mental puzzle in this conversation, depicting different emotions, thoughts, and conceptions. All these are transformed into physical manifestations, but inexistent. 

Change

Fedora, from "Cities and Desire 4", is the city that never sleeps. It is constantly in change and has never been the same. As people construct it and build over it to make it their ideal city, it turns into a possible future that never was. "In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal cut, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe" (page 32) explained Marco Polo to Khan, or imagined he understood that. In this metropolis people choose the city that correspond to their desires from the museum and imagine what it would be like. As they imagine possible futures, these are squashed by the instantly coming future. This does not only happen to Fedora, but people too. As we reflect on our past and contemplate what we wanted before, we see we don't see that today because we are in constant change. 

Calvino comments on the divisions of Zenobia, from "Thin Cities 2", of those that through the years and changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it. This view has been the problem of many, seeing the distinct power between high and low classes. Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis portrays a futuristic city were the classist division between the working class, who live in poor conditions, and the upper class, which is made up of the city planners. In Zenobia there is only the view of a happy life as the inhabitants of the cities see their city, but in Metropolis'  dystopian society unconformity is even seen in one from the upper class, or the "planners". Marco Polo believes, it is pointless to classify Zenobia between happy and unhappy, but rather what is seen in Metropolis: those who make a change in the city and those that are consumed with their desires by the city.

Kublai Khan and Marco Polo remain being unable to understand their languages. Still, they successfully communicate because the Venetian's reports gave Khan a void filled everything, but words. Khan could choose to enjoy the cities or evade them because they thought they understood one another, or they thought the other told him what was right about the cities.

As chapter three begins, in the brief conversation conversation, Marco Polo says "With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear," to what the Emperor responded "I have neither desires nor fears." Dreams are understood and remembered as a recollection of images, similar to a rebus. These dreams Calvino talks about are our desires and the limitations they have: fears. How could Khan have no desires if he was a conqueror and how could me as a reader have no desires? I want to expand on Calvino's work and understand where the cities Marco Polo saw, are constrained. For example, what if one of this cities ended in an abyss, as it was believed before Columbus's discoveries.

Cautious Crafts

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities takes us to Marco Polo's explorations in America from a very interesting and unique point of view. As a vast array of cities are described from what would be Marco Polo's writing, they are read from what would be Kublai Khan's understanding of them. These two have conversations in no specific language. Rather they explain themselves with objects and they are understood by the other's and the reader's interpretation. "Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer)that the more one was lost in unfamiliar wearers of distant cities, the more on understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his…" (page 28). The reader tries to understand Calvino's writing, or Marco Polo's, but according to this explanation we also try to imagine what we read, but we don't necessarily get what is told to us. For example, as I read about Isidora in "Cities and Memory 2" I imagined it as a very meticulously built city. I inferred this because Calvino writes "Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made…" Violins have a a fame of being one of the most perfect crafts to be made, and there has been great debates over the understanding of the famous Stradivarius violins, which where made during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Though these were made hundreds of years ago, replicating and reproducing unique superiority of these violins has not been possible. I cannot say that Calvino compared violins with Isadora because of Stradivarius, but they seem to stick to my memory because of the caution and accuracy I see in them.

In one of Khan's and Marco Polo's conversations it is told that the future is explained depending on the past. "By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else's present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches."(page 29) I agree with Calvino's interpretation of the future and the past's correlation because for me to understand what I will want to do tomorrow I must understand what it better, what I did today and whatever I did before. As Calvino says, one's future journeys, which are experiences, could be "Journeys to relieve your past" and also "journeys to recover your future". 

X-Symbiosis

 Domain of danger: that area of ground in which any point is nearer to that individual than it is to any other individual.

Reciprocal altruism: behavior in which one organism provides a benefit to another and then altruism is "payed" back. It is the principle of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours".

Symbiosis

Richard Dawkins explains organisms' social behavior through their selfishness in chapter ten of The Selfish Gene. He explains "the important idea of reciprocal altruism, the principle of 'You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours'". All organisms have self interests and they do all they can to achieve them, even though many seem to work for the good of the group. In reality survival machines act as their selfish genes stimulate them to for their self benefit. This belief is contradicted by reciprocal altruism and the sociality between suckers, cheats, and grudgers. If genes' goal is to survive, then they do all they can to survive themselves, not others. If a gazelle in a herd notices a predator, what it really tries to do is minimize its domain of danger. Hawkins writes "The selfish-herd model in itself has no place for cooperative interactions. There is no altruism here, only selfish exploitation by each individual of every other individual," and he is right. Like the gazelles, I would also try to minimize my danger if there is a threat. For example, If I am walking in the street and suddenly see a man shoot a gun, I will run to where he is not directed. My escape would probably call the attention of the shooter, as the one of the gazzelle's predator, but it is a "competition to see who can jump the highest, the loser being the one chosen by the predator," ultimately a competition of survival.

Easy money

Symbiotic relationships are interactions between different species of organisms, for their own benefit. Dawkins explains symbiosis or mutualism with different examples. The most clear example is the relationship between ants and aphids, where ants protect aphids, and ants "milk" the plant sap aphids extract. The most interesting sociology studied by Dawkins in this chapter is the symbiosis between grudgers, suckers, and cheats. I do not know what population predominates, but I assure grudgers are very common. They are everywhere. These survival machines are not altruistic, but rather self-interested. Grudgers are eventually helped in their loofa because they need it, and then they only help those who have helped them. People borrow money to those who have borrowed them money before, but they don't just borrow money to anyone. Chapter ten of The Selfish Gene tells us to expect that individual survival machines will act for their own interests and to maximize their own security. Usually this selfishness overcomes altruism in its different forms. 

That Which Survives

My analogy of survival machine

"Inmortal coils", chapter two of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene states every living organism, from humans to viruses, is a survival machine that hosts the same kind of replicator as every other organism: DNA. "DNA can be regarded as a set of instructions for how to make a body," (page 22) is Dawkins' definition of DNA, but the importance of these replicators is also explained because it is where genes reside. "Genes are at least partly responsible for their own survival in the future, because their survival depends on the efficiency of the bodies in which they live and which they help build," explains Dawkins. I recall my Biology class with Ms. Blesgraeft in which she explained Darwin's survival of the fittest does not state the fittest are the strongest or those superiors to the rest, but rather the one that mostly passes its genes. It is each survival machine that has the duty of making its genes survive even when it dies and they way of accomplishing it is with sexual reproduction. My parents have successfully made their genes survive by passing them on to me, but if I want them to survive I must reproduce. Dawkins explains crossing over as the process of swapping bits of chromosome (alleles) in the formation of an offspring. He states there are dominant and recessive alleles that can or can not be active in the offspring. These could live for a million years, but their survival is very difficult. 

Genes compete with their alleles for their survival and ultimately in regards to genes, altruism is bad and selfishness good. Dawkins expands on this idea saying any gene that that increases its survival chances, tends to survive. I can say that my father's genes that affect growth definitely were altruistic in my offspring. While my dad measures 1.87 meters, my mom measures 1.60 meters and I 1.85 meters. The height affecting genes from my father are surviving instead of my mom's. Dawkins writes "The gene is the basic unit of selfishness," (page 36) and in my case I can not deny it. Being the unit that make up life, genes are the first form of selfishness. 

The Erroneous Primeval Soup

        In the second chapter of The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins explains how life and evolution began then. In the beginning everything was simple and there were no complex compounds. Dawkins writes everything began, "At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident," (page fifteen) and a molecule capable of copying itself was formed. This was the first Replicator, or gene within an organism. As replicators replicated, again mistakes happened. These are essential for evolution, populating the "primeval soup" with a variety of replicators. Dawkins claims all replicating molecules have descended from that first replicator, making us humans relatives to every other species. The mistakes in evolution have given the opportunity for variety. It was not good or bad, but it has been necessary for bringing all leaving organisms in existence the way they are. 

Dawkins explains the status of the "ancient replicators" today because  "They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the puttied world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control". These are in me and every other existing organism, but Dawkins presents us as "survival machines". Is that all we are? The former replicator had an advantage over the rest of the molecules from the primordial soup, in what today is a competition of survival of the fittest. It began with simple molecules and is now in animals, humans, bacteria and every other organism. It amazes me to be uncertain of what molecule humans come from because if we do come from the same gene, we are relatives of fungi, bacteria and even domesticated animals. It is also amusing how a structure as perfect and organized as the DNA double helix developed from a mistake. Will we ever know how to do these type of mistakes?

How come he was also a mistake... 

MacBeth log Sculpture

They Can’t Get no Satisfaction

In Candide Voltaire indicated that happiness and satisfaction are different for everyone. Candide’s happiness rambled on Cunégonde’s company, Paquette’s on a normal job, Brother Giroflée’s on quitting his devotion to religion, and Count Prococurante was never happy. Whether these characters where rich, poor, fortuned, unfortunate, successful or fiascoes, each had an aspiration. Everyone has an aspiration and that is what keeps people running. Whether it is Candide trying to find his love, or a businessman that wants to monopolize carbon production, in their own ways, they try to achieve something to satisfy them. Count Prococurante was rich and had a great collection of art and literature, but that was not what made him happy. For him everything had defects and everything he possessed disgusted him. Martin commented on this subject, “there is a pleasure in not being pleased,” which captivated me because maybe that does happen to many people. Some people feel everything is so vague and empty that they see or have because maybe as Candide, they feel superior to all they possess. My happiness and satisfaction lie on different things and certainly very different (less harshness, complexness and agony) from the characters in Candide. Happiness is unique for everyone and it is found in people’s own ways, and that is what everyone tries to do.

The movie The Untouchables portrays the story of federal agent Eliot Ness in his rampage to imprison the gangster Al Capone. As Capone intimidates Ness by killing two of his colleagues, he wanted more and more to make Capone pay for his crimes. Ness never rested until he was able to confine Capone to jail, and that was when he satisfied his desires. In this movie (and true story) satisfaction was achieved and that was the end to that goal, but in Candide, when Candide reunited with Cunégonde, he didn’t really want to marry her anymore and besides she had become ugly. Candide achieved his goal, but everything he did to get to his lover didn’t justify the means, while in The Untouchables the blood shed to capture Al Capone satisfied a whole lot of people. These two works don’t relate in any way, but they are clear examples contrasting the usual satisfaction and Candide’s. Another film that shows satisfaction is Martin Scorsese’s The King of Satisfaction. Robert Pupkin, an aspiring stand-up comic and a stalker, kidnapped a successful T.V comedian and demanded to host his show as ransom. After Pupkin hosting the show he was imprisoned, but when he was paroled he published a successful book autobiography and got his own comedy T.V show. In the end Pupkin became a successful comedian and he achieved what he wanted. Pupkin got his own show, however Candide lost all the wealth he got, to not mention the rest. How far should one go to get satisfaction?

Extraordinary Free Will

Optimism: 1. A disposition or tendency to look on the more favorable side of events or conditions and to expect the most favorable outcome. Or 2. The belief that good ultimately predominates over evil in the world. (Dictionary.com). In Candide we see many interpretations of optimism and pessimism, but Candide defined optimism as “the passion for maintaining that all is right when all goes wrong with us.” I think Candide’s definition is inaccurate because one doesn’t need to suffer to be optimistic. He is optimistic because Pangloss, who suffered an immense misfortune, induced him into that belief and because he also lived a calamitous life. I can be optimistic because I prefer to believe the world is good and not bad. My definition of optimism is more like the ones from the dictionary: a belief that happenings will be good.

Voltaire has now introduced a new character and he has philosophies of his own. Martin is a cynical pessimist that heavily contrasts Candide’s optimism. “Well! You see how men treat each other!” Said Martin to Candide when they saw one ship sinking in a battle with another. Martin’s sarcasm is evident and I have a feeling he is somewhat a representation of what Voltaire really thinks. “I have seen so many extraordinary things, that nothing is extraordinary any longer,” said Martin explaining why he wasn’t surprised with Candide’s story of the “love” between some girls and their monkeys. Martin was not as naïve and innocent as Candide, or at least he realized life was not a fairy tale. As Candide and Martin travel to France, Candide thinks of a way to explain why men act badly, but Martin said men have never changed their character: it was their nature (like animals) to be evil. People have always had the same types of characters and through the ages there has always been good and bad, and whether or not people change, Candide shouldn’t defend evil because men have free will. Once the damage is done, there is nothing to revert things. People have free will, but that doesn’t mean someone can do well simply because they want to. Free will doesn’t mean evil vanishes.

The Lost City of Gold

Candide and Cacambo mistakenly arrived at Eldorado, where they had everything. This country was monotheistic, there were no disputes over religion, there was no need of prisons, no inquisition and it was impossible for outsiders to get to it. Eldorado was pretty much the perfect country for Candide because the month that he was there he suffered no misfortune, he was equal to the rest, and had all the resources he needed. Love and greed overcame Candide and he decided to leave Eldorado and take mounts of jewels to pay for Cunégonde. “We can now pay off the Governor of Buenos Ayres, if Lady Cunégonde should be held ransom. Let’s go to Cayenne and set sail, and we will then see what kingdom we can buy”, said Candide. This is a clear example that shows Candide was not satisfied if he was not with his love, but it also shows Candide could become like the greedy European colonizers. I don’t know what will happen to Candide with his riches, but I can predict it won’t be good. The real critic of the colonizers was the King of Eldorado, who said, “A man should be satisfied with what works moderately well. I have no right to detain strangers against their will; that would be a tyranny which neither our customs nor our laws could justify. All men are free”. All this was precisely what the colonizers did with Native Americans. It is evident that Voltaire is mocking the European ways presenting Eldorado as a utopia, but he could also mean that a country like Eldorado (perfect) can’t exist because actually El Dorado, the “Lost City of Gold”, was never found.