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".