The city however does not tell its past, but contains it like lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. It isnt traditional fiction on a structural level, having no story arc or a defined ending. In Procopia, he talks about being in a hotel room with 26 versions of himselfpresumably, every version of himself that’s ever been there before. Zirma, Marco suggests, exists because people repeat their memories of it over and over again in their minds. The city (consists of) relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession the height of the railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.Īs this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. Im not sure how to describe Italo Calvinos Invisible Cities. Several cities, like Zirma and Procopia, change depending on how a person remembers them.
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