Category: Spring 2020

The city of Melania, from “Cities & the Dead 1,” illustrated a feeling of endless consistency that has featured in two of the places I’ve lived. As Calvino describes, “at Melania, every time you enter the square, you find yourself caught in a dialogue,” yet if “you return to Melania after years . . . you find the same dialogue still going on” (72). This persists despite the fact that “Melania’s population renews itself,” and that “the dialogue changes, even if the lives of Melania’s inhabitants are too short for them to realize it” (73).

In the city in which I grew up, Oklahoma City, the dialogues around me were often the same. Kids are causing trouble. The weather makes no sense. Healthcare sucks. Family is everything. Work hard. The government doesn’t care about you. Politicians are liars. Go to Church on Sundays. School is boring. We’re due for another drought. Moore will have to rebuild, again. In high school I started working and gained more and more independence from my family, allowing me to experience more and more of the city and wider metropolitan area (comprising about 20 surrounding towns and suburbs). No matter where I went or who I talked to, these things persisted.

After my junior year, I moved to finish school at a boarding school in the mountains of New Mexico. On the weekends, I would semi-regularly go into the nearby town of Las Vegas, New Mexico. Over time, I started to hear the town’s own dialogues. The government doesn’t care. There’s no more jobs. So-and-so is leaving. That shop is closing. These people are visiting. Walmart sold out of this today.As I went back and forth between OKC and Las Vegas, I came to notice the contrast more and more and started to understand that these places had a certain temporal consistency, not a refusal to change but a refusal to acknowledge the inevitable change as it happened. 

In the last two years, I’ve only spent a little over two months in Oklahoma City, and I’ve started to notice that renewal Calvino describes. The barista I used to know by name now works as host and the host now works as barista. The city has built a new park where an abandoned office building once stood, and built an office building on what used to be part of a park. The daughter of the family who owns the Moroccan restaurant down the street runs the restaurant she used to serve in, and her son pours our tea. The drug dealer who worked the corner near my friend’s house now owns the house across the street, and his dealers work the corner.

Of course, all cities have these tropes, these things which are talked about more often than others, and different parts of cities speak of different things. None of this is meant to condemn this tendency to refuse to acknowledge change, but rather to reflect on its inevitability, and the way some places cope with its challenges. In some places, even when coronavirus arrives, people still worry more about the next tornado season.

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 father. 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.

Thin Cities 1, Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

Isaura is a city built upon deep vertical wells.  And so far as the wells reach, the city exists.  Beyond the reach of its underground lake, the city ceases to be, its visible border mirroring the unseen borders of the dark lake below.  Polo describes two religions growing up as a result of this geography.  One group of people worships the god of the deep reservoir, the unseen lake.  The other group worships all the methods produced to ensure that water moves upwards to the city.

In the thin city of Isaura, Calvino begins to look at how religion is developed and how a person’s perspective influences how they think of the divine. The gods in the dark lake would indicate that humans will never see the gods and can only blindly trust that the water will continue to be there. While gods in the buckets, the gods of lightness, give people an opportunity to see those gods and exist as an emblem of striving for better, just as the gods continue to rise. It seems that the two forms of religion are different, one deep down under the earth, and another up high in the air. However, for me, they are just the same in essence. They are the embodiment of inhabitants’ desire for the city to grow, for their own prosperity. The deeply hidden gods of desire are the motivation for the gods of lightness to rise, up to the sky. While the gods of lightness follow the “wave” of the gods of desire and give new forms to the desire. Just as described in Cites & Desire 2, the city of Anastasia, “if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave”. People in Isaura are the slave of the black lake, digging holes in the ground, and drawing up water from it.

In my dream, I visit the city of Isaura, it is a thin city, but also a heavy one. The water in the moat looks very similar to its source — the black underground lake. The water here is always opaque and dark in color, not that it is dirty, but it is dark by nature. People here don’t mind what makes the lake dark but rely on it to earn a living. All of the inhabitants stare at the wells and buckets all day long, with no expression on their faces. Suddenly I start to wonder if the ground cracks at night, the inhabitants might disappear in the lake and become part of it. I start to think about what they will become. If I dive deep into the lake, I would probably discover some big fish with no expression on their faces, or the ruins of a city that once prospered.

The city of Isaura somehow reminds of the cities in the UAE, such as Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The underground black lake here consists of petroleum. Beyond the reach of oil fields, there’s only desert and the cities cease to be. Dubai, for instance, is a city that strives to “move upward”, with the Burj Khalifa as the tallest building in the world. Oil fields give birth to the cities and civilization here. It is awesome that the cities have the ambition and capacity to move upward, but there’s more to consider when the oil runs out and what to rely on then.

There are books that you read and forget, likewise there are books that you read and they get etched in your thoughts forever, Calvino’s book is one of them. 

As you walk around unfamiliar places, you observe things that the locals ignore or don’t reflect on consideration anymore. Calvino takes the feeling to an extreme by making his cities as magical as possible, so you have a sense not only of the physical attributes but also more nebulous aspects, the vibe and the atmosphere that are so difficult to describe to other people. 

To me, Calvino’s cities give the impression of being in between the dreaming stage and reality, and the way we bind them together to control the rhythm of time in our minds. Undesirable memories bear the heavy load of past actions and the feel of nostalgia that overwhelms opens the door to incomplete desires that translate right into a tangible future that we will never have.

 How many times can we modify the past in our minds? How many times can we convey the dead back to life by thinking of them? But the memory does not come face forward, it surrounds you and often catches you in a deadly embrace and the reflected image may replace the original thought. 

In the, amidst a labyrinthine maze of canals, ancient Gods of locals and foreigners clinging to the edge of upside down doors and black and white strings connecting relationships between residents of a spider-web city, I couldn’t resist the charm of Maurilia. It was the city where I eventually managed to relax my frustrated mind. The comfortable safety of its sepia postcards led me back to cozy evenings with my grandma when I used to go to her house after school, and she made tea with some delicious pastries. Calvino brought me to type these words here and now that render her precious presence more real than ever. While writing this I can virtually discover the sound of her voice in my head.  

The cities that Calvino talks about are the places you must experience on your own, walk the streets, marvel at the architecture, the labyrinthine roads that never seem to end, look at the outline of houses by which they stand, cross the canals and continually seek to discover new places. As you walk around you can think about how cities are at the same time similar, yet amazingly different. It’s never clear what is real and what is not, what is the effect and cause, this is possibly part of the invisibility of the title. 

At this point the more I think about the book the more I feel I have to re read it and then read it again. However, there is one thing I can definitely claim about “Invisible Cities” that it’s a vivid dream, which can be experienced and cant be described.

Is there a city that stood out, or that you found especially memorable? Why? Does any city remind you of a city you have lived in or visited, and if so, in what ways?

One of the cities I found especially memorable is Chloe, where “the people who move through the streets are all strangers”. In Chloe, people imagine stories with others in mind at encounter, but never stop and greet each other. It stood out to me because my thoughts changed more or less along with reading each paragraphs and overall it inspired me to think a lot. After reading the first paragraph, the city impressed me because the social life in this city diverges a lot from what we are doing and taught to do in daily life. The great difference brought me a feeling of isolation that I can hardly imagine in detail how people behave in Chloe. Then, by the description of diverse citizens in the second paragraph, the city Chloe gave me a stronger feeling of disorder — the inhabitants are of distinct characteristics while they all stick to one rule of socializing. Since when we talk about diversity of people, we will relate to freedom and self-realization. But in Chloe, diversity coexists with the oppression, the word in my understanding lying behind the strange rule of socialization. And its last paragraph echoes my thoughts because in Chloe men and women also have desires and dreams, which unfortunately will be destroyed in the end. However, the existence of the phantom makes the whole thing more creepy and scary, at the same time leaving me more questions: does the phantom refer to anything; why is there the phantom; what is the relationship between the habitants and the phantoms. Moreover, the subtitle is “trading cities” for Chloe but I cannot connect the ideas in a persuasive logic. Remaining these questions in mind and looking back on how I thought about this city along the reading process, I found there is intersection between Chloe and cities in our real world, but it is interesting that I remembered it because there’s part of it I cannot relate to.

Esmeralda, city of water, naturally reminded me of Venice, also known as a water city, which I visited last winter. When I read “a network of canals and a network of streets span and intersects each other”, things appearing in my mind is when I followed Google Map direction on my phone to walk through the narrow streets and cross countless canals in Venice. When reading “to go from one place to another you have always the choice between land and boat”, I recalled my experience to take ferries from Murano to Burano in Venice and due to limited ferry routes and times, I waited on the pier for quite a few minutes. Of course, the network in Venice is not as dynamic as that in Esmeralda since Venice only has one level, at least from my experience. But same with Esmeralda, the route from one point to the other tends to be a “zigzag” and has a couple of alternative plans. In summary, Esmeralda can remind me of Venice because they both have special characteristics like abundant with water, having a network of canals and a network of streets, which differentiate them from other cities. And when reading the words about Esmeralda, my memories in Venice with matched images would pop up and make up my imagination about the city Esmeralda. 

IN CHLOE, A great city, the people who move throughout the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.

Calvino’s description of Chloe seems to point out a common characteristic shared amongst many megacities. In such cities, it is a natural part of one’s routine, almost inevitable, to encounter a large number of individuals. However, due to the high population density, most people are strangers. Amidst such a colorful crowd, yet most eyes are set on inanimate objects – some fixed on the ground, while most lie on their mobile phones. Those without objects of distraction are more aware. If one is curious enough, not yet accustomed, they start looking. Each person is given a two to, at most, five-second glance. If timings align, two eyes connect but this rarely sustains. 

Something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect on figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene.

Calvino describes people as characters. The personalities and qualities of such characters seem to be constructed within one’s imagination. The lack of information about another gives the viewer the power to fill the gap. These characters fill up the viewer’s “scene”, one at a time, implying one’s temporal attention is limited. The span of attention per subject is also short due to the richness of alternatives. Also, one must always give up looking at one to give attention to the other. 

The limited nature of attention – both spatially and temporally – seems to be a factor worth taking into account when constructing a VR setting. Due to our strong desires to process and understand our surroundings, to our fullest capabilities, having too much going on at one time or space could easily overwhelm the user. This would create an unpleasant and unsettling scene and would not be effective in delivering ideas clearly. Hence, it seems important to space out the introduction of new factors using time and space through taking account the time it takes for the user to shift their attention and process new elements. This also applies for the opposite case. If one wants to create an unsettling atmosphere, for a horror game perhaps, they could overwhelm the user’s attention through introducing multiple factors to the scene at once. 

Chloe reminded me of my last three summers in Seoul. That time was spent attending academies located in the center of Gangnam. The daily commute, specifically through the streets and underground station of Gangnam, came back to me while reading Calvino’s description of Chloe. Passing by hundreds of strangers during one commute, I noticed people were more connected to their phones than to their physical surroundings. As Gangnam was a relatively new place for me, I was one of the only few people looking around. Sometimes, I consciously refrained myself from doing so as it almost seemed like social courtesy to not look at others – two to three seconds was the limit before it became invasive. 

The subways were packed with people of various looks and personalities. They had different expressions depending on the time. Weekdays, especially during commute hours, people were more occupied, dressed in their formal work attire. A feeling of stress permeated the enclosed space. Weekends, Friday nights in particular, were more lively. People stood with their group of friends, ready to hit the lively streets of Gangnam after a week of intense work, to destress over multiple bottles of soju and karaoke sessions. Now that I look back, it becomes clear my perception of such strangers were highly limited to my imaginations. It also makes me wonder, the thoughts which came across one’s mind, when I was the stranger to the eye of the beholder. These thoughts we will never know, as strangers are granted merely a couple seconds worth of attention in our scenes.

Invisible Cities is an interesting read that gives wings to let my imagination fly among different unique cities. Olivia in chapter 4 is among those that impress me the most.

The opening in this chapter talks about that acceptance of failure is worse than failure itself. One of my favorite sentences in the book lies in this opening, that is “If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eye, peering at the faint lights in the distance.” It is the need to find the good even in the darkest times, and it reminds me of a city in Vietnam – Saigon – that later somehow resembles Olivia to my surprise.

Olivia, “a city rich in products and in profits,” can be “indicated its prosperity only by speaking of filigree palaces with fringed cushions on the seats by the mullioned windows.” It is not only described by its look, but also signatured by the leather smell of saddlers’ shops, by the sounds of women chattering, and by “an action repeated by thousands of hands thousands of times at the pace established for each shift.” Marco Polo’s need to use different words to describe Olivia allures to the fact that there is no true perception of the city: each person forms their own understanding and perception of the city upon their position in society. The inability to acquire one true description of Olivia, as Marco Polo later remarks, is also because of the city itself: “Falsehood is not in words; it is in things.” Olivia, in itself, is impossible to be perceived in one true way.

This part of Olivia reminds me of my city. It reminds me of myself sitting on Saigon river’s bank, on the side of Binh Thanh district looking towards the lights of skyscrapers on the other side that create a magnificent skyline. Saigon, just like Olivia, is also “rich in products and in profits.” Saigon, like Olivia, is impossible to be perceived in one true way. Ask a person to describe it to you and you will get a different answer – or perhaps an entirely different city – each time. One man frequenting the skyscrapers will paint for you a glorious Saigon. Cross the river and the people residing by the riverbank will tell you about a peaceful side of it. But just as the great Kublai Khan does, one must remember that “the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.” In all of its glory or peace, in every of its skyscrapers or terraces, Saigon in itself is a city of a million colors. Why describe it with just one color, one adjective?

Another detail of Olivia that resonates with my city is the repetitive cycle of a human’s life working for the industry, living one identical day after another. This cycle, as monotonous and perpetual as it is, if omitted, will lead to the collapse of the whole system. The repeated labor of a human is, after all, an indispensable gear in the industry.

Octavia is a thin city, both literally and figuratively. It is literally held between two steep mountains by ropes, chains, and ladders, surrounded by nothing but the abyss. Its entire fate depends on those two thin contact points between its vast network of spider-web infrastructure and the mountains. Octavia may thrive with “terraces like gondolas”, cable cars, and chandeliers, but its inhabitants know well enough that such thrive comes with great demise. The question is not if but when the city will collapse into the abyss between the two steep mountains, when the city will lose its quasi-stability, when some ropes decide to snap and set up a chain reaction that brings down the entire city.

Octavia reminds me of Dubai and other big cities in the Gulf regions, not literally (maybe in a parallel world when this ever happened) but metaphorically. If Olivia’s foundation is a net between two steep mountains, Dubai’s foundation is the discovery of oil in a hostile environment of the desert, neither of which offers a permanent sense of stability and certainty. Although Dubai has already moved on from oil and diversified its economy, its physical foundation has been laid: skyscrapers and condominiums that run on air conditioners and desalinated water pumps. An engineer once told me buildings that are over 6 storeys high is unsustainable here in the region. Good luck trying to find one, except for traditional houses from the era when the city was still a small, sustainable fishing village.

If there is one thing Octavia’s residents should do, or should have done, it would be to build using light materials, or to reinforce its ropes, or to not build such city at all. The same thing can be said for Dubai: a city of such size and infrastructure should not have been built in such an environment. Dubai’s fate will lie in the changing climate that drives the desert city increasingly more inhospitable. Once the air conditioners run out of electricity, once the pumps run out of water, Dubai’s abyss will become apparent.

This was an absolutely splendid read and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of traversing through the various cities. There were simply too many cities that stood out, but I’ll do my best in narrowing down my favorite ones. Octavia, the city of spider webs, hovering over the void, captured my interest right away. The life of its inhabitants relied on the net to continually support them. However, as time progresses, there is a sense of uncertainty that exits because the net won’t last forever. I thought this sense of uncertainty connects to our unease and uncertainty we face today. With how COVID-19 is panning out and the multitude of disasters, uncertainty seems scary. I also loved Valdrada with its reflections and Esmeralda where there is no repetition.

Although these cities did not remind me of a particular city in real life, Armilla and Zenobia reminded me of fictional places. Armilla, the city of water pipes, reminds me of the game Super Mario Bros. In the game, Mario travels through pipes and I loved how people Armilla did the same. Zenobia, the city of heights, reminds me of Fortree city in the game Pokemon Emerald. In Fortree city, there are numerous ladders and people travel across platforms and hanging sidewalks, just like Zenobia.

Despite the vivid details, much of the cities encapsulated more than just objects and descriptions. For example, Zaira, a city that contains its past, cannot be simply described by what it has. The line, “the city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand written in the corners of the steets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, eery segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations scrolls,” encompasses this concept of history and the passage of time. These conceptual details would largely depend on who’s creating it in the virtual world, but if it were up to me, showing little wears of time in the buildings and having various statues and monuments would aid in creating this abstract concept. In this city, since it is about the past, being able to discover and read up on its history would help tremendously in exemplifying what Zaira would be like.

Throughout the novel, the use of time was used to convey an impression of the city. Most commonly, it was used to give an ominous feel of uncertainty or destruction. In the case of Octavia, time represented a sense of uncertainty and impending doom. In Leonia, time conveyed the message of innovation and eventually the destruction from excess garbage and its own innovation. Time also represented a loss of morals and decay as shown in Clarice and Eutropia.

As I was reading through the many descriptions of cities in Invisible Cities, I tried to imagine which of the ones depicted had some sort of resemblance with any city I had visited before. This was a bit of a challenge with cities that had more abstract descriptions, particularly for those labeled as “Cities & the Dead”. However, one particular city that stood out to me was the City of Esmeralda, a “city of water”, with “a network of canals and a network of streets [that] span and intersect each other” (79). I found this city quite memorable due to its dynamism: with its network of uneven paths able to be traversed by boat or by foot, there seems to be an infinite possibility of routes to take. With the different “steps, landings, cambered bridges and hanging streets”, people of Esmeralda are spared of a repetitive path, and can always find new routes leading to the same destinations (79). 

Another reason why I find the city of Esmeralda memorable is that it reminds me of Zhujiajiao (朱家角) a watertown in the outskirts of Shanghai that I got to visit during a day trip in my Sophomore Spring semester. Though my trip to Zhujiajiao was short, the town was so interesting and fun to explore due to its various bridges, canals, and small shops that my experience there is still fresh in my mind. Interestingly no matter where we went, we didn’t really get lost – many parts of the town were so memorable that it was easy to retrace one’s steps and go back to where one was originally. The network of canals and streets of Esmeralda also instantly brought to mind a short boat trip I took during my day trip in Zhujiajiao. Even though it lasted less than 5 minutes, it provided an interesting viewpoint of the town, where I could see the many zigzags and levels that made up the town. Overall, these similarities between both cities made me really appreciate reading about Esmeralda, as it allowed me to remember Zhujiajiao and think of it in a different light as I think back to my experience there 2 years ago. In a way, this reminds me of Marco Polos’ statement, “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places”.

Time is used in Fedora as an inevitable agent in shaping people’s perceptions and ideas of the city as well as an obstacle to the desired changes in the city that exist in its inhabitants’ imaginations. The creation of the blue globes is someone’s hopeful imagination of a utopic Fedora, but in the time they used to create it, the city changes drastically causing their future to be restrained to a glass globe. In this sense, their realization becomes invalid both through the warping of their perceptions of what the city could be due to the new image of a changed Fedora and in the impossibility of completing their imagined reality because of physical changes in the city. In this sense time stomps out a branch of what Fedora could have been, as the city evolves into following another path while the creator envisions creating a unique branch of their own. 

Time also functions as something that results in the preservation of ideas and beliefs of what Fedora should be. This is done through the use of a museum with the globes, displaying the immortalized visions of Fedora. In a contradictory manner, Marco Polo also hints at time not necessarily being a hindrance or an obstacle resulting in the death of Fedora’s realities, as he notes that these visions are as “equally real” as the stone Fedora of today. This is because the Fedora of today was created or shaped when it was “accepted as necessary” but “not yet so,” as it too existed as an imagined reality before its completion. In this sense, Fedora’s inhabitants’ imagined city is also possible as they all existed at one point as “assumptions” along with the big, stone Fedora.