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".