There is No Language Without Deceit

We tend to live all our lives with certain images in our minds, knowing that a chair is a chair, a red light means stop, a boat docks at a harbor and a plane goes through the air. But what if someday we find a place where nothing is what it seems? What if in life or in literature, there are moments where “the eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things…” (Cities & Signs 1). This is precisely where Calvino is getting at with the sections of Cities & Signs: breaking stereotypes and clichés, telling us to look at things with “new eyes.” That’s precisely what the city of Hypatia represents. “’Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.’ I had realized I had to free myself from the images which in the past had announced to me the things I sought: only then would I succeed in understanding the language of Hypatia.” (Cities & Signs 5). This city, and this short excerpt represent the book and life in general. This book is completely different from anything ever written, it’s unique, and so we cannot start reading it expecting to find what we’ve found in previous readings. We need to have a fresh start with this book, be prepared for anything, because if we start reading Invisible Cities expecting to find what we always do, we’d end up concluding that this book describes the weirdest cities we’ve ever heard about. We would lose in front of our own eyes the true meaning of things, just like Marco in Hypatia when he saw the blue lagoon and expected to find beautiful women and instead found corpses. “True, also in Hypatia the day will come when my only desire will be to leave. I know I must not go down to the harbor then, but climb the citadel’s highest pinnacle and wait for a ship to go by up there. But will it ever go by?” (Cities & Signs 5).  Everything is different everywhere, and we need to understand that when we are in front of something new. The colonizers of the Americas arrived here with those new eyes, they didn’t expect the people here to be drinking tea at 5, they were ready for something different. We always have to be ready for new things, which doesn’t mean letting go of everything, but just being prepared for different things so as to not lose the essence of those things, like what happened to Marco in Hypatia at first. 

Nothing or Everything

Nothing or everything. That’s all I can think about while reading Invisible Cities. Does it represent something or nothing at all? Does it really hold so many messages about life and/or literature as we think it holds? I find it ironic, that even though the book might hold all those messages, they don’t answer anything for certain, but rather leave us with more questions. “Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there…” (Beginning Section 2). This statement is so ambiguous: it could be giving a message about literature, or a message about life itself, or both, or simply no message at all and mocking the reader with the use of the word “imagine.” If there is really a meaning and Italo Calvino isn’t just fooling the reader with these apparently deep statements, I would think it’s a meaning rather close to what he said. If applied to life, it would mean that the more you live new and unfamiliar circumstances, the more you will understand what led you to that circumstances. But if it were applied to literature, it´d be saying that the more you read books like this one itself, the more you will understand the books that led you to this one and the meaning they had like Slaughter-house Five by Vonnegut or Macbeth by Shakespeare. Or even so, it could be talking about the book itself: it doesn't matter if we don't understand a city right away, the further we read, the more citiess we get to know, the more we will understand the cities that led us to where we are. Personally, I’d rather stick with the possibility that it applies to all.

There’s a section that has rather drawn my attention with possible answers, but has left me with more doubts than anything else. But doubts aren’t specific, they aren’t even tangible in our minds. Like the poker saying goes, “put your money where your mouth is” I must stick with the interpretation I see most fit to what I decide to interpret. This sections is Cities & Desire, in particular Cities & Desire 5. The description of the city of Zobeide, which is created from dreams of men themselves is like a city in the movie Inception (2010). The men can do whatever they want to the city because they must mold it according to their individual dreams, and the city ends up being a labyrinth on top of another, creating a trap for everyone. A trap for the woman they’ve all been chasing in their dreams. “After the dream, they set out in search of that city; they never found it. But they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive’s trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream so she would be unable to escape.” (Cities & Desire 5). Is this city like our minds? And is the woman in the dreams and every man in the city like the things we live? It could be. Just like in our minds we chase an answer, whether it’s in math or music, and when we fail to find it, just like the men failed to get the woman, we rebuild what led us to the point to where we got lost and arrange things so that the mistake will never be made again. Just like men in Zobeide change the place where they lost the woman in the dream as to not lose her again.