I Read Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities’.

I chose this book based on a recommendation, in some way, given by Jacob Geller. I had just finished Disco Elysium and went back to rewatch his essay on the game. In it, he quoted and deciphered it, even having portions of the book narrated in italian. Playing Disco Elysium, it was hard to really give a concrete reality to the game because of how many voices in your head were going at once, how many observations were being stacked and lobbed at you, handed to you intimately, hail mary’d to you in a screaming voice. This book, as it was described, felt similar. Before I began to read it, it felt like it was going to be a scrap book, a collection of fictional tellings of fictional cities between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, and there would be no way to tell what was up, what was West, etc.

The beauty of this book is that these really do feel like dreamcities, ancient and historical provinces that exist in the islands of Calvino’s mind’s eye. They feel like places he can only describe through hypnosis. He describes the look of these places by telling of the behaviors of its people. He gives you a description of the smells that drift from the windows, of the heights your neck will crane to see, of the singular townsfolk you will hold conversations with. And none of them exist. None of them can ever be visited, whether in the 1970s, or the 13th century, or in 2022. These places do not exist, but also because they’ve been animated with perception, because they have been manifested, they do indeed exist. In corners of european walkways, on the shores of massive infrastructure, these places exist in glimpses the size of a polaroid.

The book moves quickly. Each portion is broken up by city, each named with that of a woman’s name, and if you aren’t able to recreate one city, if one doesn’t sweep you into it, one will follow almost immediately. Like reading a book of poetry, I can almost recommend reading this one at a slower pace than you would a standard novel. This feels like it could have been broken up into index cards, read at lunch breaks, at red lights, between meetings. At every day where you would find a momentary pause, take a journey to a city that haunted the author’s mind, that only appeared in greater detail in the reflection off of his iris. Like poetry, some of this feels personal, some of this feels like he is sketching, some of this feels deeply important, some of this feels like he is lost in a love he is destined to destroy. Each of these cities not only gives us a slice of what’s there but also what isn’t, each of them is an inland empire of the wrinkled labyrinth of Calvino’s mind.

A few years ago, when I was writing a few different things at once, none of which were coming together to any finale or climax or progress, really, I started trying to inspire myself to write differently. So many of the things I was writing about was about how people were interacting and very little of it was happening in any organic space. I challenged myself to write about places and only places. To take a few songs that I heard at random and to write about what that song would look like as a place that hadn’t been touched by human hands in centuries. What would the earth (or whichever planet it existed within) say if we were to observe it as a creature of only perception? I ended up calling it ‘TERRAFORMING’, because when I sat down with these songs rolling in my headphones, I was letting my fingers tectonically construct these places out of nowhere, eroding or diseroding places out of the blinding white nothing. I wonder what inspired Calvino to populate the earth with these cities, with these places. What lines of conversation brought him to these civilizations of spice and women and cathedrals and barracks and far stretching ocean culture. What made him need these cities to be touched by the hand of God, to in a blink become fashioned from ether and verve and ink?

Zora, Argia, Zaldreide, Adelma, Theodora, Eusapia, Valdrada, Octavia; these are my favorite cities, all for different reasons. Some of them for their reflections, some of them for their beauty, some of them for the way they attribute themselves towards the dead. Each of these places has never existed as a shore I can set my foot upon, but exist now and onward in their pulsing reverberation. For the page or two that Calvino has expressed about them, so forward has my mind lived within them for hours, for years, and populated them with attributes and histories that no other reader has. One day, can I as Marco Polo talk to another reader as Kublai Khan and then vice versa, describe these cities in extravagant detail, with population and experience that both sounds so familiar and alien to one another?

In between this dreamlike and ephemeral itinerary are conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, ones that seem to take place in a veritable haze on the portico of one of Khan’s grand palaces or perhaps in an elegant drawing room with windows surrounding the entire space. They wax philosophic on their existence, on the actualization of Places, on the quivering and heaving empire, on their selves. There are times when Khan even seems intent on disproving these cities which Polo describes, wherein Marco will spin riddles resembling an echo without creationsound. These interactions might be my favorite element of the book, as some of their observations reach larger than just cities and empires, but can be applied to peasants’ moments, to past and future, to the minute glimpses of our own lives. There’s a casualness to them, a stripped down banter that feels like we are shading in the spaces between living bodies.

There is lots of cool art to be found out there based on these Invisible Cities, even if not trying to recreate what he has described, at least inspired by the notion that places can be pulled and constructed, made whole and granite when yanked out of illusion. But my favorite art of them all is the cover of the copy of the book I picked up. On its front, the book is all white, and in a form of cursive along the top it says simply, “Calvino”. Below that, still in white, is imprinted a tiered sort of rectangle, with a single one-line-drawing of a lightly curved m, a seagull in flight that we could draw as children. And then along the bottom in the same cursive: “Invisible Cities.” This blankness, this open white possibility releases one’s mind from any preconceived notions about what any of these cities can be. It doesn’t give you a guide for the architecture or the style or the form that any of these places take. The bird can represent a freedom, a concept of open sea. But the whiteness, the oblivion, that gives our mind the true separation it needs to allow the words to craft the images in our mind.

This book is tough to love, even tougher to “rate”. I think for the most part, I read through these cities in a daydream, captivated not by the words on the page, but the places that those words took me. I loved the pages as prompts, and I loved the way they made my imagination take me to a different time and space. There were a great deal of sentences, passages and words that were beautiful, but none that really stood in the same place as the locales that no one will ever see quite the same as I did in my mind’s eye.

I would definitely recommend this book, especially for writers and daydreamers, for creatives who seek inspiration for the places that we know exist but don’t belong in books or on websites or social media pages. It’s for the people who still want to wonder what might be out there, for people who still romanticize the need for maps and a world that might be ever expanding. The dream that things are there to be found just beyond the crest of a hill or below the cliff of a dune that we need just a few more steps to go beyond. This book has promised a world that we will never a touch, has built entire cities, entire atlases from dust and promise, and without war, without death and without time has razed them all the same.