City stories
October 24th 2006 17:18
Okay, one more old post. A tribute to Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Wrote this one about a decade ago, and it seems overwritten to me now.
But there are some ideas in it I want to reference...
The Cities
The City Above
A dozen tongues could sing for a dozen lifetimes of Galissa, city of angels, whose iron-straight streets have this property: that one sees in them what one wishes to see. The fame of Galissa, accordingly, is spread as far as the dust of the west and the ice of the east. But fame disintegrates the city. For Galissa has this curse: that the more men find, the less there is to find.
Already the city is moribund, its denizens never leaving their houses, its turrets giving way to flat stone roofs. An ash blows through the city, of a kind never seen since before the Elura swept down from the north. A hunger is painted in the stones of the gutters, on the faces of the animals. A longing pulsates in the flesh of the city.
And Galissa is shrinking, slowly but surely, its streets winding back on themselves, its houses crumbling and falling unused. In two centuries Galissa will have shrunk to the size of a small port, in four to the size of a small village, then gradually, inevitably, it will collapse to a thatched hut the size of a walnut.
The City Beneath
Nualla, pearl of the mountains, has two heads, one subterranean and one aerial. The latter rises to where fainting courtiers barely gasp out their blandishments. The former is sunk below the roots of the mountains, in a city only criminals inhabit, where murderers set a whore’s corpse on a stone throne and grovel before it.
The city below is a labyrinth, and a city without corridors, a honey-comb of innumerable rooms, so that a condemned man is never outside a cell, but only moves from one cell to another. Every cell has many doors, and every door has a lock. But so ingenious is the design of the doors that few have skills enough to make headway with them.
The city aerial fears these thin mute men who trudge about the dark with their huge chains of keys. Platoons of troops rush amongst them every fourth year burning, killing, and changing locks. But those exiled to the lower city are given this chance.
For if, by courage or deceit, one journeys through the myriad rooms and all the levels of the earth, and reaches the final door with its fourteen locks, and ascends the staircase that stretches to the palace anteroom, then he is received with cheering by the gasping courtiers, and trumpets herald him. The populace bow down, and he is king for a day, before his guards slice his head off the following dawn.
The City Within
Epictetus is a city of flesh carved into the side of a four-faced sleeping cyclops. Every millennium, if the legends are to be believed, the elders of the council make the vast trek from the bowels to the brain, to the core of the brain, and there deluge the area with unmixed wine in tribute to and fear of their host. Thus, it is said, the cyclops will sleep for another thousand years. But such things are scarcely credible, for it is doubtful whether so hard and long a journey can be undertaken, least of all by aged men weighed down with oceans of alcohol, and it is doubtful whether the giant lives at all, whether the entire city does not rest in flesh already decaying, or on rivers of blood pumped by a dead heart. The council of the wise is silent on the matter, and will neither confirm nor deny the stories.
The City Without
If you journey westward from Erendiris across the mudflats and the desert sea you will come upon a simple village set by the side of a pool of water. This is the city of Mrithia. If you proceed further in, you will soon find that the townsfolk of Mrithia recognize you at sight, though they will be at pains to hide it; and will as if inadvertently reveal that they are aware of your past and of the country you came from. This is an illusion, which, like all illusions, is founded on desire and fostered by false interpretation. What you see as recognition, familiarity even, are merely the mannerisms of this city: -- what you perceive as knowledge of your history and past are the commonplaces that the people of Mrithia utter amongst themselves to stave off the desert loneliness. And so you will resume your journey confused, uncertain, unable to shake the feeling of things undone, incomplete, and unable to shake the uneasiness of parts of you growing beyond your awareness.
The City Before
Nyessia is a city of shadows and memory, and its denizens are blind, or going blind, and the blind from other places migrate here, assured of sympathy among the sightless citizenry. For these reasons, Nyessia is the most treasured of all cities, for those going blind look upon her their last time as if seeing her their first -- faces, places they will not know again, consummations that will never taste as sweet. And they will look at the simplest thing, the yellowing curl of a dry leaf, and they will see in it expressed all the sorrow of the world cupped in its curve, the passing of time, memory.
There are cities within cities in Nyessia. Closed, lost worlds, systems of thought, language, gesture that fade from the consciousness of the citizenry, who nightly close their eyes on things long past, or things that never were, images already darkening or wearing away. And new worlds also, for every sensation of Nyessia, every touch and scent, is pregnant with association. Many are those who will sit for long hours in revelry, when the sound of a flute, or the soft murmur in a voice, puts them in mind of warm afternoons and quiet siestas.
But these are fleeting, fading syllables, and the images will never seem as real. The words savour of bitterness, turn to bitterness, bile on the lips, holding one meaning for the sighted and another for the blind. And the other name for Nyessia is “The City of Trifles”, for memory is an uneven thing, and the most insignificant pittances catch in it.
The City Behind
In Qalin there is no hope; the traveller to Qalin notices instantly the absence, the hesitation between speech, the distance between things, as if a spider had laid down its web between the houses, turned sluggish the movement of its citizens. For in Qalin time slips between the cracks, gets distorted, warped, turned outside in, as if all the hourglasses and sundials were in league to confound the city, as if they operated according to a time beyond the grasp of the city’s intelligence. If you cross a street on a Monday, it might be the Monday of the previous week before you finish; or if a man’s death day has come, it may be that his birth day will soon follow. A person who puts a kettle to boil might wait an eternity for nothing to happen; a room one intends to go to might already have been visited as soon as the thought is thought.
The possession of clocks is prohibited here, for they are treated with an almost mystic significance, worshipped by the common people, abhorred by the rich. The ticking of a second-hand, the chiming of an hour, are moments that fill the citizen of Qalin with a transcendence, an upliftedness. The face of a clock presented, the numbers in logical sequence, gathers half-looks from the citizenry, almost-glances of curiosity and fear, for it is impossible to dislodge the sense that there is blasphemy in gazing.
Thus Qalin is a city locked into itself, that condemns itself, for by time’s abandonment, and by the reciprocal denial and elevation of time, Qalin is thrust in the face of a future without certainty or direction, and her citizens turn to statues, afraid to move at all.
The City Between
The city at the edge of the Cirolean gorge has no name in any language; it refuses names, names don’t stick to it. What its inhabitants call it, or ever called it, no one knows, for to any eye the city is deserted, a ghost city, broken by the forest, vines choking the waters of the fountains, weeds pushing between the flagstones of the mausolea and temples. And perhaps it never had a name and was never inhabited, for nothing remains of any peoples that ever dwelt there, no record in the stories of any civilization, no books on the empty shelves of its libraries, no glyphs, marks, pictures, on any of its walls.
Yet one could imagine a citizenry, the marketplace filled, the smell of new bread, or of roses, or of incense. One could imagine the eyes that follow the traveller, the meaningful glances exchanged, the long unguarded stares from children and old men seated around the fountains. And it is undeniable that the city has presence, form, that it speaks of a vast and meticulous intelligence. It is perfectly planned, perhaps the best-planned of any city -- her streets run clear and honest, and waterways attend all parts of her.
And the water is polluted, undrinkable, and the rooms are bare and unfurnished, and one could imagine, also, that whoever commissioned the city abandoned it, for whatever reason, or built it simply as a monument to dusty deities. Perhaps only shadows and wild beasts ever owned it.
But someone must have built it -- for how could a city build itself? -- and someone must continue to build it, for the city goes on expanding, miraculously replicating, repeating herself, extending herself, her streets pushing further into the forest year by year with never a builder seen.
But there are some ideas in it I want to reference...
***
The Cities
The City Above
A dozen tongues could sing for a dozen lifetimes of Galissa, city of angels, whose iron-straight streets have this property: that one sees in them what one wishes to see. The fame of Galissa, accordingly, is spread as far as the dust of the west and the ice of the east. But fame disintegrates the city. For Galissa has this curse: that the more men find, the less there is to find.
Already the city is moribund, its denizens never leaving their houses, its turrets giving way to flat stone roofs. An ash blows through the city, of a kind never seen since before the Elura swept down from the north. A hunger is painted in the stones of the gutters, on the faces of the animals. A longing pulsates in the flesh of the city.
And Galissa is shrinking, slowly but surely, its streets winding back on themselves, its houses crumbling and falling unused. In two centuries Galissa will have shrunk to the size of a small port, in four to the size of a small village, then gradually, inevitably, it will collapse to a thatched hut the size of a walnut.
The City Beneath
Nualla, pearl of the mountains, has two heads, one subterranean and one aerial. The latter rises to where fainting courtiers barely gasp out their blandishments. The former is sunk below the roots of the mountains, in a city only criminals inhabit, where murderers set a whore’s corpse on a stone throne and grovel before it.
The city below is a labyrinth, and a city without corridors, a honey-comb of innumerable rooms, so that a condemned man is never outside a cell, but only moves from one cell to another. Every cell has many doors, and every door has a lock. But so ingenious is the design of the doors that few have skills enough to make headway with them.
The city aerial fears these thin mute men who trudge about the dark with their huge chains of keys. Platoons of troops rush amongst them every fourth year burning, killing, and changing locks. But those exiled to the lower city are given this chance.
For if, by courage or deceit, one journeys through the myriad rooms and all the levels of the earth, and reaches the final door with its fourteen locks, and ascends the staircase that stretches to the palace anteroom, then he is received with cheering by the gasping courtiers, and trumpets herald him. The populace bow down, and he is king for a day, before his guards slice his head off the following dawn.
The City Within
Epictetus is a city of flesh carved into the side of a four-faced sleeping cyclops. Every millennium, if the legends are to be believed, the elders of the council make the vast trek from the bowels to the brain, to the core of the brain, and there deluge the area with unmixed wine in tribute to and fear of their host. Thus, it is said, the cyclops will sleep for another thousand years. But such things are scarcely credible, for it is doubtful whether so hard and long a journey can be undertaken, least of all by aged men weighed down with oceans of alcohol, and it is doubtful whether the giant lives at all, whether the entire city does not rest in flesh already decaying, or on rivers of blood pumped by a dead heart. The council of the wise is silent on the matter, and will neither confirm nor deny the stories.
The City Without
If you journey westward from Erendiris across the mudflats and the desert sea you will come upon a simple village set by the side of a pool of water. This is the city of Mrithia. If you proceed further in, you will soon find that the townsfolk of Mrithia recognize you at sight, though they will be at pains to hide it; and will as if inadvertently reveal that they are aware of your past and of the country you came from. This is an illusion, which, like all illusions, is founded on desire and fostered by false interpretation. What you see as recognition, familiarity even, are merely the mannerisms of this city: -- what you perceive as knowledge of your history and past are the commonplaces that the people of Mrithia utter amongst themselves to stave off the desert loneliness. And so you will resume your journey confused, uncertain, unable to shake the feeling of things undone, incomplete, and unable to shake the uneasiness of parts of you growing beyond your awareness.
The City Before
Nyessia is a city of shadows and memory, and its denizens are blind, or going blind, and the blind from other places migrate here, assured of sympathy among the sightless citizenry. For these reasons, Nyessia is the most treasured of all cities, for those going blind look upon her their last time as if seeing her their first -- faces, places they will not know again, consummations that will never taste as sweet. And they will look at the simplest thing, the yellowing curl of a dry leaf, and they will see in it expressed all the sorrow of the world cupped in its curve, the passing of time, memory.
There are cities within cities in Nyessia. Closed, lost worlds, systems of thought, language, gesture that fade from the consciousness of the citizenry, who nightly close their eyes on things long past, or things that never were, images already darkening or wearing away. And new worlds also, for every sensation of Nyessia, every touch and scent, is pregnant with association. Many are those who will sit for long hours in revelry, when the sound of a flute, or the soft murmur in a voice, puts them in mind of warm afternoons and quiet siestas.
But these are fleeting, fading syllables, and the images will never seem as real. The words savour of bitterness, turn to bitterness, bile on the lips, holding one meaning for the sighted and another for the blind. And the other name for Nyessia is “The City of Trifles”, for memory is an uneven thing, and the most insignificant pittances catch in it.
The City Behind
In Qalin there is no hope; the traveller to Qalin notices instantly the absence, the hesitation between speech, the distance between things, as if a spider had laid down its web between the houses, turned sluggish the movement of its citizens. For in Qalin time slips between the cracks, gets distorted, warped, turned outside in, as if all the hourglasses and sundials were in league to confound the city, as if they operated according to a time beyond the grasp of the city’s intelligence. If you cross a street on a Monday, it might be the Monday of the previous week before you finish; or if a man’s death day has come, it may be that his birth day will soon follow. A person who puts a kettle to boil might wait an eternity for nothing to happen; a room one intends to go to might already have been visited as soon as the thought is thought.
The possession of clocks is prohibited here, for they are treated with an almost mystic significance, worshipped by the common people, abhorred by the rich. The ticking of a second-hand, the chiming of an hour, are moments that fill the citizen of Qalin with a transcendence, an upliftedness. The face of a clock presented, the numbers in logical sequence, gathers half-looks from the citizenry, almost-glances of curiosity and fear, for it is impossible to dislodge the sense that there is blasphemy in gazing.
Thus Qalin is a city locked into itself, that condemns itself, for by time’s abandonment, and by the reciprocal denial and elevation of time, Qalin is thrust in the face of a future without certainty or direction, and her citizens turn to statues, afraid to move at all.
The City Between
The city at the edge of the Cirolean gorge has no name in any language; it refuses names, names don’t stick to it. What its inhabitants call it, or ever called it, no one knows, for to any eye the city is deserted, a ghost city, broken by the forest, vines choking the waters of the fountains, weeds pushing between the flagstones of the mausolea and temples. And perhaps it never had a name and was never inhabited, for nothing remains of any peoples that ever dwelt there, no record in the stories of any civilization, no books on the empty shelves of its libraries, no glyphs, marks, pictures, on any of its walls.
Yet one could imagine a citizenry, the marketplace filled, the smell of new bread, or of roses, or of incense. One could imagine the eyes that follow the traveller, the meaningful glances exchanged, the long unguarded stares from children and old men seated around the fountains. And it is undeniable that the city has presence, form, that it speaks of a vast and meticulous intelligence. It is perfectly planned, perhaps the best-planned of any city -- her streets run clear and honest, and waterways attend all parts of her.
And the water is polluted, undrinkable, and the rooms are bare and unfurnished, and one could imagine, also, that whoever commissioned the city abandoned it, for whatever reason, or built it simply as a monument to dusty deities. Perhaps only shadows and wild beasts ever owned it.
But someone must have built it -- for how could a city build itself? -- and someone must continue to build it, for the city goes on expanding, miraculously replicating, repeating herself, extending herself, her streets pushing further into the forest year by year with never a builder seen.
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