March 8, 2024
The older I get, the more my life is haunted by invisible buildings. I have written about ghosts, but ghosts are people. These are buildings that used to be there, but have been torn down or remodeled out of recognition. In some cases, I may be the only person who remembers them. Does that matter, especially as I will myself be a ghost soon enough? None of these buildings are great losses in the historical-preservation sense. I am not talking about the great Library at Alexandria, although one of the buildings is the old library in Canton, Ohio, where I grew up, from which a timid bookworm child checked out dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of volumes filled with dreams. I would love to know what possessed the architect of that long-invisible edifice to design a library whose floors were huge, thick panes of translucent glass. Perhaps to suggest what John Crowley’s fantasy Little, Big says about a book, that it is larger on the inside than on the outside? Of course, the same is true of us too.
What prompted this meditation on invisible architecture was the ongoing demolition of the Clarkson Building in downtown Canton, with its 27 apartments and 3 store fronts, in which I lived as caretaker, with my first wife, from 1973-1977. As of several weeks ago, it was still standing, surrounded by a construction fence, but obviously a shell, like an unconscious patient in the nursing home or hospice, a vacancy in which someone once lived. The Clarkson Building, which is probably close to being a centenarian, has in the past for some reason inspired loyalty in people other than myself. Perhaps a quarter of a century ago, the local paper had an article about two brothers who had bought it and were remodeling it singlehandedly. I contacted the brothers, explained my own feelings about the building, and, along with my mother, was given a tour of the ongoing modernization. I was touched by the labor of love, for I knew better than anyone how much labor had been put into the effort. They had managed to replace the huge, old boiler in the sub-basement, along with the original fuse boxes for each apartment, dating from the 1930’s, which were disintegrating even when I was in charge of them, no pun intended. All of this sat right beneath a paint store. I lived with visions of an explosion that would send the whole building off the face of the planet, punching the moon in the eye like the rocket in the famous Méliès silent film.
To this day, I can remember every inch of that building, could tell you where the water shut-off valve is for a particular section. There may be still clamps that I installed to stop aged pipes from leaking. I could show you how to replace the rope of the window pulleys, which were attached to 7-pound weights hidden in the casing of the window, even though of course it is useless knowledge. They have not constructed windows like that in 75 years. I could show you the storage room in which there was a ladder ascending to a trap door to get onto the tarred roof upon which, escaping the demands of tenants, I went in good weather to write poems. For bad weather, I had made a desk in the storage room out of two huge steam radiators and one of the building’s solid oak doors. I also remember the tenants, now long ghosts themselves, which is easy enough because they remained the same until the last year or so. All of them were senior citizens, often women who had outlived their husbands. Mrs. Leon had been in her apartment for over 40 years. There were some colorful characters, a few of them with, shall we say, issues. Some were humorously exasperating. A few were tragic and mysterious, like Mrs. Chambré, supposedly Belgian, who spoke with a strong French accent and was paranoically suspicious of me as an authority figure, though I was only in my early 20’s and looked like the just-graduated English major that I was, but who trusted my young and sweet-looking wife Bonney, and a lucky thing, for we had to have social services remove her, raving and delirious, from what we were later told was tertiary syphilis. We never learned a thing about her past, about how a woman from Belgium ended up in an efficiency apartment in Canton, Ohio. I imagined her fleeing secret police during World War II, or some such. There were occasional deaths, one on the premises, my first look at a corpse that had not been carefully embalmed by a funeral parlor. A corpse that had sat for three days in summer heat. For years I contemplated a play for voices about the Clarkson Building’s eccentric and memorable characters, modeled on Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.
I am wistfully resigned to the demise of the Clarkson Building to some extent because it is part of an effort to expand the adjacent Palace Theatre, which opened in 1926 and is not only one of Canton’s historic landmarks but one which remains in continuous use. I saw many movies there as a child. Even if the Clarkson Building is just being demolished for parking, it will be in service of a good cause. But when I stand on that location, I will always see, in vivid detail, a building that was full of life a half-century ago, though now invisible to others. A block down from the Clarkson Building was the Kobacher’s department store, several stories high, from the days when people used to travel downtown to shop. In 1977, living at Clarkson, I watched and took photos as a wrecking ball diminished it, taking weeks, because it was built so strongly. I’m sure it must have been designated a bomb shelter during the Cold War. At Christmas, in my childhood, the whole third floor was turned into a wonderland, with a train big enough for children to ride on and, of course, Santa Claus. Where are the ghosts of Christmas past?
And I can travel through Canton seeing other buildings that no one else sees, or sees in the same way. The transformations differ. The building that was Lincoln High School is relatively unchanged physically, but is now the site of a Christian school. Perhaps 15 years ago, a friendly principal allowed me to roam through the insides, which had been given little more than a paint job, an emotionally powerful experience. On the other hand, Elizabeth Harter Elementary School exists only as its name: they tore down the building I attended and built a new one without renaming it. The house I grew up in, at 148 Roslyn Ave., looks the same outside but has been totally remodeled inside with wonderful creativity, a better place to live now than when I was young, although the neighborhood has declined somewhat.
Speaking of schools, because I was a student at Baldwin Wallace University back when it was Baldwin-Wallace College, where I still teach after 35 years, I walk a campus filled with invisible buildings, including Ott Hall, on whose roof, mounted up to by the old iron fire escape, I met my first wife at 3:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning—and also parts of buildings, such as the tiny experimental theatre that once existed on the very floor of my office in Marting Hall, on which as an undergraduate I played the role of the murderous old man in Yeats’s Purgatory, which opens the old man saying to his son, “Study that house. I think about its jokes and stories.” It is the house he grew up in, now a ruin, but in which he will soon see the ghosts of his past.
I go back in time using invisible buildings like steppingstones. It is only to be expected that the further back I go, the more truly invisible the buildings: to the eye of another, they no longer exist at all. This includes Mercy Hospital, in which I was born, now a parking lot across from the Clarkson Building, also two sites that were once at least locally renowned. I wonder how many residents at Meyers Lake know that a whole invisible amusement park is coterminous with the condominiums in which they live. The eye of my imagination—for of course that is what we are really talking about here, my undistinguished life being merely the pretext—can see the wooden roller coaster, the first I ever rode, the Tilt-a-Whirl ride on which I got sick, prompting my mother to force the attendant to stop the ride early, the stands that sold cotton candy and the huge waffles with powdered sugar that my mom and I both loved. On the other side of town, I have vivid flashes of another historic site, the Dueber-Hampden Watch Company, which, from 1889, was one of the largest employers in Canton, employing close to 3000 people. Its watches had an international reputation—there are articles about them online—but it closed in 1930, and seems to have remained a literally Gothic ruin, towers and all, until it was demolished to make way for interstate Route 77 in the early 60’s. And yet, I have a vivid memory of driving past it, fascinated by its desolate persistence, even though I could have been no older than about 10. Am I the only one left alive who saw it in person?
Oldest of all are the ruins belonging to my parents’ lives. When I was middle-aged, my father, brother, and I explored the ruins of the coal mine whose wooden superstructures were built by my Italian carpenter grandfather when my dad was a boy. The tipple rose perhaps 60 feet into the air, and, in my father’s eye, the tableau included my grandfather on a board stretched between two pieces of scaffolding that swayed with the weight of a man and a wooden toolbox, which I still own, that must weigh15 pounds even without tools in it. My dad is gone, and I am glad to take over the memory from him, as in a relay race, because I am sure the ruins themselves are gone now, along with the ruins of the farmhouse in which my mother grew up, without plumbing or electricity, and danced as a teenager on the wooden floor to music from a Victrola with my second cousin, both of them named Wanda. The other one, Wanda Gates, is still living at 98, and remembers.
I have risked going on so long in order to anchor the discussion in what passes for “real” in this world, encouraging readers in the process to engage in a meditation in which the catalogue their own invisible buildings, the kind of exercise I used to give when I taught poetry writing. Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream says that the poet “gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name,” but this is decreation, as I have called it, and it moves in the opposite direction, dissolving the local habitations back into the airy nothing whence they came. T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets are about the nature of time, and what is perhaps my favorite of them, “East Coker,” echoes the Book of Ecclesiastes:
In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires… Houses live and die: there is a time for building… And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane…
It is a poem very much haunted by airy nothing, and what I call decreation it calls dispossession.
The theme of invisible buildings brought to mind the title of a book by the Italian fabulist Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972). I owned the book but had not read it, and, since it is a short book, I did so. Invisible Cities consists of conversations between the Emperor Kublai Khan and the European traveler Marco Polo—but not quite the same conversations as recorded in the book usually called The Travels of Marco Polo, published around 1300. In Calvino’s version, Kublai Khan listens to Marco Polo’s descriptions of 55 cities belonging to the Emperor by conquest, but which are “invisible” to him in the sense that he controls lands he has never even seen, much less comprehended: “there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them” [5, italics in original]. The Empire has overextended itself, and is thus prey to a kind of entropy: it is really an “endless, formless ruin” (5). Thus, “Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termite’s gnawing” (5-6).
Marco Polo makes invisible cities visible to the Emperor in two senses. First, he provides particular details of cities that are far away, unseen. As he does so, the Emperor notices something: that the one city about which Polo never speaks is his native city of Venice. To which Polo replies: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice” (86). And: “To distinguish other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice” (86). For some, there is a city that grounds us, even if, like me, we are not urban in sensibility. Canton, a small, unimportant city by the world’s standards, will always ground me in every sense. But this is true for far greater writers: Dickens is unimaginable without London, Joyce without Dublin, Samuel R. Delany without New York City. For Joyce, Dublin became an invisible city first because of his blindness and second because he fled it into exile. But he declared that if the actual Dublin disappeared, it could be recreated to the last detail using the text of Ulysses.
However, the Emperor seeks to make the invisible cities visible in a second sense: inherent in their differences and particularities is a significant pattern, which is not just spatial but temporal: the city “does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand” (11). It is suggested that the search for this hidden order becomes acute at the end of a historical cycle, when the sense of dissolution into chaos is strongest:
“At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner to a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.” (135-36)
Cities undergo the same kind of cycle that is common in myth, of which cyclical histories like Spengler’s Decline of the West are displacements: “When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins. In the last pages of an atlas there is an outpouring of networks without beginning or end, cities in the shape of Los Angeles, in the shape of Kyoto-Osaka, without shape” (139). Shape without shape, dissolution into original chaos: such is Los Angeles, which is the kind of metastasis that Spengler called the megalopolis; so also is the city that grows by engulfing other cities, ballooning for example into what William Gibson’s early science fiction trilogy calls the Sprawl, otherwise known as BAMA, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.
Invisible Cities is divided into 9 chapters, which sub-divide into 55 sections organized according to 11 thematic groupings, some of which at first seem random enough, such as “Thin Cities” and “Cities and Eyes.” But two of these groups stand out: “Cities and Memory” and “Cities and Desire.” All possible cities—which we begin to realize means all possible creations of the imagination—arise from the interplay of memory and desire, outer and inner. The images of memory arrived from outside via the senses, but they are never mere reproductions. The mind is not a blank slate or photographic negative but actively shapes the images of memory. One metaphor for this is the mirror. The city of Valdrada, is built upon a lake: “Thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdroda does not repeat” (53). Yet the lake’s mirror, like all mirrors, does not merely reflect but transforms: “At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it. Not everything that seems valuable above the mirror maintains its force when mirrored” (54). When desire transforms memory, a possible result is “wonder,” a word that occurs with some frequency in Invisible Cities, but the more it does so, we are aware that the quest for faithfulness to “reality” that we call “realism” gives way to the literary genre most associated with “wonder,” the romance. And indeed one of the earliest forms of romance is precisely the traveler’s tale, starting with the Odyssey. The Wanderings section of the Odyssey is not told directly, but narrated retroactively by the traveler Odysseus himself. Its events are so fantastic—one-eyed Cyclopes, enchantresses that turn men into pigs—that we wonder about its veracity, especially as the tales’ teller is a hero renowned for his lying.
As all traveler’s tales do, Marco Polo’s descriptions of invisible cities and their peoples raise the issue of whether memory has not been kidnapped by desire. This is not just true of the Marco Polo of Invisible Cities but of the actual author of the book most commonly known as The Travels of Marco Polo, whose genesis sounds in fact like an episode in a romance. It is a wild story: Marco Polo allegedly dictated his book to a writer of romances named Rustichello of Pisa while both were in prison together, and the book’s original title was The Marvels of the World. Kublai Khan would do well to remain detached about the truth value of Polo’s descriptions of the Emperor’s cities, whose permutations proliferate with an exuberance that suggests the sheer love of invention, spiced with a satiric wit. One of my favorites is the city of Armilla:
The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo’s white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still hanging from the boughs. (49)
To me, the Clarkson Building was like Armilla: I knew its plumbing, its electrical lines, the circulatory and nervous systems of a building, as a doctor knows a patient’s body, and for the same reason, as I had to operate on it periodically.
The other famous account of a city of the Emperor is that of Xanadu in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetic fragment Kubla Khan, with its pleasure dome. The famous anecdote is that Coleridge fell asleep while reading the travel tales titled Purchas His Pilgrimage (1614), which produced an opium-assisted dream that in turn inspired the poem. But Samuel Purchas admitted that he himself had never traveled far from his own home, his book relying on sailors’ tales, including some by the famous voyager Hakluyt. Xanadu was real, the summer palace of the Emperor, but Coleridge’s Xanadu is a child born of the union of opium and romance. It is literally a dream city, dispelled by that notorious emissary of the reality principle, the “person from Porlock” who interrupted Coleridge’s dream and thus his poem.
Yet even without opium, we are such stuff as dreams are made on. On the level of ego consciousness, the split that Blake called the “cloven fiction” between the subjective and the objective, self and world, while a condition of alienation, at least provides the sense of a stable reality in which we know what is real and what is not. But as we descend into the depths in which memory and desire shift and interchange, we are no longer sure where we stand, in many senses. At one point, Kublai says, “I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden.” Polo replies, “Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raising dust on the fields of battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of pepper in distant bazaars.” Polo ends the dialogue by speculating, “Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps, and the hanging garden of the Great Khan’s palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside” (103-04). This leads to a kind of solipsistic condition from which there is no way out, explored by works ranging from Hamlet to Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, a book that, like that dream book Finnegans Wake, goes around in a circle, the last sentence completed by the first, to signify the condition of the ouroboros, the snake with its tail in its mouth.
But we are not content to chase our tails, eternally biting ourselves in the ass. We look for a thread out of the labyrinth, and that thread is language. Calvino’s Polo instructs Kublai Khan that all his cities are dream cities in a sense, and, while dreams seem senselessly random and pointless, hidden within them, as Freud showed, is a pattern that enables them to be interpreted:
“from the number of imaginable cities we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. 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. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” (43-44)
A rebus is a kind of puzzle in which words and images interplay by the substitution of the one for the other. In one form, an image or images substitute for a word, as pictures of a sword + a fish may mean “swordfish,” or a light bulb over a cartoon character’s head may stand for “sudden illumination or idea.” In a second type, words and images combine, as in “I heart NY.” Rebuses may be a trivial form of symbolic play, but they point towards the mystery at the heart of language, the mystery of the sign, in which is contained the mysterious, paradoxical, impossible relationship between words and things. “Cities and Signs” is one of the recurrent thematic groupings in Invisible Cities, which plays satirically, sometimes hilariously, with the old theory that language began with sensory images used as pictograms that directly pointed to their object and evolved towards the verbal, abstract, and relational. When Marco Polo first arrived at the Emperor’s court, he did not know the language, and had to improvise:
Newly arrived and totally ignorant of the Levantine languages, Marco Polo could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from his knapsacks—ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes—which he arranged in front of him like chessmen. Returning from the missions on which Kublai sent him, the ingenious foreigner improvised pantomimes that the sovereign had to interpret…The Great Khan deciphered the signs, but the connection between them and the places visited remained uncertain; he never knew whether Marco wished to enact an adventure that had befallen him on his journey, an exploit of the city’s founder, the prophecy of an astrologer, a rebus or a charade to indicate a name. (21-22)
We think of the curious Elizabethan fondness for the dumb show, the famous one being that which mimes the killing of the king in Hamlet, as if, in that intensely verbal drama, a dreamlike succession of silent images interrupts and tries to express a scene too censored to be spoken.
In Polo’s initial efforts, it is the syntax of the symbol system that is missing, the narrative or conceptual connective tissue that weaves the individual sensory images into a discourse. But the invention of that syntax leads to a new problem, for it turns out that the way that signs connect into larger patterns bypasses the kind of anchoring that enables them to articulate the real world. A sign should be an image that points either to an object that is its referent or to an idea that is its meaning or signified. But in fact, what signs point to is—other signs. Which in turn point to yet other signs. As Polo says, “Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger’s passage….The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth-drawer’s house; a tankard, the tavern…” (13). Of one city, he says, “However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it” (14). And leaving is no escape: “In the shape that chance and wind give the clouds, you are already intent on recognizing figures: a sailing ship, a hand, an elephant….” (14). From being trapped in a world of disconnected images of things, language develops towards its sophisticated opposite, a realm of signification that never arrives at things, but remains trapped within what has been called the prisonhouse of language. We are chasing our tail again.
Those not resigned to such imprisonment may seek to escape by using language to construct models. Kublai says: “And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced” (69). The idealists, such as St. Augustine in The City of God, think in terms of two model cities, one good, one bad. As for the good city, when Polo asks of the inhabitants of Thekla, “What is the plan you are following, the blueprint?” they answer, “The sky is filled with stars. ‘There is the blueprint,’ they say” (127). But this plan founders upon human imperfection. “Following the astronomers’ calculations precisely, Perinthia was constructed.” Yet in and below its streets dwell not just imperfect but monstruous men and women. “Perinthia’s astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters” (145).
But all models, all products of the imagination, good, bad, or ambiguous, are constructed according to rules, for imagination is a form of game playing, the characteristic activity of Homo ludens, and a game is a set of rules governing certain activities. The rules are, in other words, the hidden pattern the Emperor has been seeking, the pattern so subtle it can escape the termite’s gnawing. In a central passage, Kublai Khan is struck by the idea that, if he can discover the rules that govern them, he can both comprehend and master his invisible cities:
Contemplating these essential landscapes, Kublai reflected on the invisible order that sustains cities, on the rules that decreed how they rise, take shape and prosper, adapting themselves to the seasons, and then how the sadden and fall into ruins. At times he thought he was on the verge of discovering a coherent, harmonious system underlying the infinite deformities and discords, but no model could stand up to the comparison of the game of chess….Now Kublai Khan no longer had to send Marco Polo on distant expeditions: he kept him playing endless games of chess. Knowledge of the empire was hidden in the pattern drawn by the angular shifts of the knight, by the diagonal passages opened by the bishop’s incursions, by the lumbering, cautious tread of the king and the humble pawn, by the inexorable ups and downs of every game. (122-23)
Unexpectedly, we are back to one of the subjects of last week’s newsletter: conspiracy theories, based on the idea that there is a hidden order controlling our lives, though only known to initiates. To respond to a constructive criticism of that newsletter, there are certainly real conspiracies, such as the CIA’s plot to topple the government of Iran and install the Shah, such as the Bush administration’s lies about WMD’s in Iraq in order to topple another government inconvenient to the United States. But there is evidence for such conspiracies, at least now. On the other hand, there are the conspiracy theories in which desire and its shadow, fear, have conjured in the absence of evidence, the black magic of paranoia. We are currently writing a new chapter in the history of the kind of paranoia discussed by Richard Hofstadter in his famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964), and it is a history of borderline psychosis, sometimes venturing over the borderline. Life governed by rules like a game of chess? Surely that is the province of madmen and academics. Surely that is what Lewis Carroll is satirizing in Through the Looking-Glass by making the plot of the story an actual game of chess. That way, madness lies, even if the entertainment committee has provided a tea party.
On one level—a hidden level—Invisible Cities is probably a satire on the then-popular movement called structuralism, which held that all human knowledge in all fields seems to be governed by hidden structures that are in turn governed by a relatively simple set of rules, rules that are possibly wired into the human brain. Seemingly random on the surface, Invisible Cities has an invisible organization that is astoundingly complex. The Wikipedia article on it conveniently displays the organization of the 55 cities, fitted into the 11 thematic groups, in a quasi-mathematical table of horizontal rows and vertical columns resembling an Excel spreadsheet, displaying an organizational feat that makes writing a sestina look like a simple finger exercise. Calvino has been accused of turning literature into an elite postmodernist head game, a way of making those in the know feel superior. But that is an incautious allegation. For science is based on the idea that the order of nature is a manifestation of four fundamental forces that operate according to mathematical rules. In Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead tried to show, albeit unsuccessfully, that the rules of mathematics can be reduced to or equated with the rules of symbolic logic, a subject that Lewis Carroll was interested in. All biological life is a manifestation of DNA, a double helix of four chemicals that combine and recombine in various permutations. We are such things as rules are made on, apparently.
But a devastating question remains: what is the point of the game? The astute Emperor realizes that this is the last riddle:
The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game’s purpose that eluded him. Each game ends in a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the true stakes?....By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes. It was reduced to a square of planed wood: nothingness…. (123)
Is the final point of our lives that there is no point? Is our identity no more than the autoplay of a set of rules, in which case we are no different from AI, as the consciousness theorists have been saying for years? However, Calvino does not leave us with nihilism. Followed to its origin, our life may disappear into the nothingness, the point that is no point, from which it mysteriously emanated. But Marco Polo shows the Khan that out of that nothingness, it begins again. He shows him how the seemingly featureless chessboard is in fact full of differences and particularities. The ebony and maple squares have irregularities according to how they once grew: “Here a barely hinted knot can be made out” (131). Until finally, “The quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smooth and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai” (132), the world latent in a grain of sand.
What, then, is the moral of this story, this philosophical romance, or anatomy as Northrop Frye might have called it (he once said something appreciative to me about Calvino)? From the hidden rules of the imagination spring invisible cities, which are compiled in an atlas according to their two possible models, ideal and demonic. On the last two pages of Invisible Cities, the Emperor is poring over his atlas: first the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun…and so on (164). But he goes on to “the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World, and cries out in despair, “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us” (165).
Marco Polo replies with the last paragraph of the book:
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” (165)
In this election year, almost half the United States is possibly inclined to vote for the inferno. The rest of us can only follow, each in his, her, or their own way, the second way. Such are the “true stakes” of the game. My small tales of invisible buildings in the invisible city that is my life are my method of following the second way. The whole of my life, and my identity, will be invisible someday. But before that happens, perhaps I can make the good things endure, can give them space. As you may for the invisible realities of your own lives.
Reference
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Harcourt, 1972, 1974.