Understanding Invisible Cities with Author’s Illustrations for each and every City
A Study Guide with Pen Sketches in today’s context (10 of 55 Cities included here, more to follow)
The authors will interpret and illustrate each of the 55 cities through a series of blogs; this blog covers 10 Cities (Diomira, Isidora, Dorothea, Zaira, Anastasia, Tamara, Zora, Despina, Zirma & Isaura) from Part 1 of the book.
You must have read books on life lessons, but imagine discovering the biggest truths of life through a ride across 55 cities; cities which don’t exist, but as you read along you know you have lived, experienced, appreciated, hated, loved, feared and internalized the incredible accounts of these places through space and time in your own lives.
The authors take you through the metaphysical and emotional dimensions of these cities and throw some questions for the readers’ food for thought. The illustrations are a product of reference images and author’s own imagination.
Diomira, Calvino’s first city, gives a vivid account of a city with 60 silver domes, bronze statues and a golden rooster. Is it an imaginary city or is it an offshoot of Marco Polo’s memory of his travel diaries. But, in either case, what is meaning behind it? How is the same space capable of creating equally opposite perceptions of happiness and envy — just a few minutes apart? Is it the rhetoric of an idyllic utopia, which doesn’t really exist? Or is it the personification of human emotions that thrives on memories — memories which in itself are transient. Calvino’s cities are indeed a disguised narrative of metaphors.
Isidora, Calvino’s second city is a classic metaphor of the fact that desire is infinite while it’s materialization is finite. Just like a lost traveller in the desert urges for an Oasis, but often ends up in the mirage; the reality of desire for perfection is non-existent. You can persevere making endless “spiralling” efforts all your life, but there comes a time when you reach the wall (like the one in Isidora) where everything ceases to make sense. There’s no sense of accomplishment — rather a feeling of feel discontent. Eventually, the city of desire reduces to a city of memory, rather nostalgia.
Do you see Dorothea as a city with four aluminium towers, seven gates, hundreds of chimneys and four canals criss-crossing to create nine quarters; or do you see it as a city where women see you in the eye, soldiers play trumpet and winds flutter colourful banners? Does the glimpse of city’s genealogies, architecture, businesses and cultural traditions (marital exchange of invaluable goods) make it a city of desire? Or is the simple yet beautiful truth that city is “what you want to see, what you desire” — the sensorial perceptions? The camel driver’s exploration of ‘new paths’ is in reality the perceptions that alter with time — your past, your present and your future. Calvino interweaves this astounding thought that its one’s desire over time that makes you see the city the way it is.
Zaira is a city where the objects tell the stories about its people which keeps expanding over time. The city holds tens of stories, told hundreds of times. Just like we earn the lines/ creases in our palm — Zaira contains it’s history in its objects in every corner. Just like the palm is the testament of one’s journey, Zaira is the testament of all the collective journeys of its people. Perhaps, this is why Marco Polo says, he can describe the city, but it’s all in vain — because the listener has not made that journey in Zaira, and so Zaira’s handprints doesn’t contain “his story”.
Anastasia, an enticing city that gives you a sense that she’s there to fulfill all your desires. Where you toil your way through the day in an undying hope to ‘climb up the ladder’ and be part of the Nobility. She’s the clockwork and her inhabitants the small pieces that work tirelessly — not to accomplish their desires — but just to keep the city’s machinery running. Is Anastasia the capitalist prototype of modern day socio-economic, geo-political market supply ideology, which thrives on people’s aspirations and conscientiousness just like a “parasite”, creating an army of workers generation after generation, who are ultimately unaware of the ‘key’ to self-awareness or redemption or eventually salvation from this unending cycle.
Tamara, the city of signs — as many say, is a lesson in Semiotics. Calvino’s Tamara is an overt illustration of the signifier and the signified, demonstrating all of Pierce’s sign systems (iconic, indexes and true symbols). The reader is expected to interpret all the three signs types — for instance, the paw on sand is an “index” sign, which inherently presumes that the reader is aware of the relationship between the tiger and its paw to be able to comprehend it as tiger’s passage. The worldly knowledge of the reader/ traveller is prescient to this setting — otherwise which, the traveller’s interpretations reduce to arbitrariness. In another example, the “iconic” sign is used to connote that what meets the eye is not just the presence of something else, but literally something else (scales to indicate grocer’s shop, tankard for tavern). And lastly, the traveller unearths Tamara’s discourse though her “true” signs like the gilded palanquin portraying power, and volumes of Averroes suggesting learning — these relationships between the signifier and the signified are a derivative of one’s mental mapping of familiarity gained through reading books or hearing folklore and stories of the land.
Even after all these discoveries, Tamara is ‘undiscoverable’. She’s what she throws at you via the signs, but what lies beneath this facade, is unknown. And such is her effect on the visitor that even as you leave her, you seem to keep decrypting the signs in the sky… a sailing ship, a hand and an elephant.
Zora, a city that the earth has forgotten. Zora is frozen in time, its patterns remain constant over time and space, that a traveller can memorize as a musical score, note by note. The city reveals stagnancy and ultimately absence of life. Metaphorically, the city suggests that any living thing lacking the ability or willingness to adapt and evolve basis their context and placement will be lost over time. Zora’s memorizable form is her biggest barrier. She’s in travellers’ memories, like a blueprint, with each piece offering perceivable connections of either similarity or contrast. The lifeless, motionless Zora cannot be erased from memory, but her existence is purposeless.
To the traveller, Despina presents the form the traveller is longing for. For the camel driver, she is the ship, the vessel ready to carry him to the high seas, dock on new lands, and experience the gush of a seaman’s daily routine and perks of being in faraway lands. For the sailor arriving at Despina, she’s the camel taking him to the fresh water oases of the desert, where he can relish on exotic food and set his bare foot on tiled floors of whitewashed palaces. Despina is what you yearn for, she’s the ‘vehicle’ (ship or camel) of attaining your desires, you’re deprived of.
Zirma has a pattern. Repetition is her pattern. Zirma testifies the fact that memory has a way around repetitive patterns. But at the same time, this pattern is ‘retained’ differently and in varying details by every spectator. For Marco Polo, Zirma comprised scores of dirigibles, streets brimming with tattoo shops and obese women exhausted of humidity in underground trains. But his travel companions’ accounts validate only one such occurrence — just one dirigible, just one tattoo shop and just one obese woman at the train station.
These inconsistencies lead us to the next hypothesis — City reproduces patterns. Patterns in turn create memory, which in itself is associative, a derivative of inconspicuous details and of stories in our mental maps. Memory is but a reflection of our choice, our stories.
Isaura is a city thriving on the resourcefulness of water. Water, quite literally, is the origin of all life, but in Isaura, water defines the way and extent of life. The city progreses underground, proliferating as much as the expanse of the water body while the uncountable wells are like the veins brimming with the life-giving water through an exhaustive, rather precise mechanism. It is difficult to overlook the metaphorical similarity between water and the ultimate divinity, both formless, and ever abundant. The people of Isaura, are divided between this simple yet sometimes abstract contemplation of God, is it the water body — the spring of all existence or is it the apparatus that enables holding this water, and fuelling this enormous ecosystem of the city. Is the latter a hint at the conformist conservative pecking order of religious institutions?
Pooja and Tarun, the collaborating authors, are both urban planners and city enthusiasts.
