Between page 94 and 95 Calvin talks about Adelma. It’s hard for me to not relate most cities to the lived experience I’ve had with cities I’ve be¡en in, but in many ways Adelma represents a bunch of things I find interesting when looking at/observing a city or a space of function. Firstly it’s the question of a ghost, or rather what it means to be a ghost. With Calvino mentioning the dad, and the appearance and flux of an individual exhibiting multiple persons, many of them dead, perhaps inappropriately I couldn’t help but think of the idea of a ghost and the city.
In some senses, I was thinking about the idea of haunting, which has come up a bunch this semester for me (in class/philosophical discussion). In this sense of hauntology, the question becomes less about the idea of a literal ghost, but one about (arguably) the materialization of ideas, aspirations, and futures that were not realized. While I could delve into the philosophy of this a lot, my interest was much more in then relating to this city, in terms of how it sometimes feels to be in the city. This is much less true now that I’ve been able to be more in the city and explore it’s spaces, innards, and people more, but especially in the first few years of being here, and in comparison to Dubai (which I used to call home), things felt… dead?
My father often used to say that this is a city of gloom, slowness, and dead people. I used to be annoyed at how he phrased it, and I still do today, but in an abstracted sense, I wonder how parts of this (conflated with the reflections the book has in looking at this dynamic-shapeshifting-face of the dead) might actually be true. Not limited to Abu Dhabi per se, but if there were a way to glue together A.D and Dubai, create an amalgamated city, I think it would feel a lot like Adelma.
Of course all of this has mostly to do with thinking of the person/individual, or even collective movement of people/existence of people (communities), but I think what Calvin is also trying to look into is to the environment that allows for such people to exist. Or even if he isn’t, it made me think about what the environment does or enables. Which is to say, Adelma can’t be it without being accommodating to the kind of people it inhabits, right? The things that aren’t in focus are things like (on page 95) “”climbed the steps in a line, bent beneath demijohns and barrels” and “a little toward that crowd that crammed those narrow streets”. Though it isn’t focused, I was enamored to question what it meant for a city to allow, if not make/support a lifestyle that enables it to become this kind of a dying, soul-cycling function of an existence.