Almost Visible Cities
after Calvino
Gregory Norminton
… Having contemplated the nothingness which was all that remained of his victory, the Great Khan turned his eyes on his opponent. Marco Polo, whose designs for the endgame the emperor had suspected from the opening gambit, knew better than to congratulate his host on the bloodless conquest of a maple chessboard. He bowed his head, averting from that wise and terrible face a gaze which had taken in countless faces.
‘Ten thousand moons,’ the Great Khan said, ‘have waxed and waned since last we spoke. Have you been on your travels all this time, or have we slept and dreamed the passing centuries?’
‘Sire,’ said Polo, ‘I have travelled without rest through the cities of men. I have heard the bellowing of women giving birth, the mewling of babies, the cries of lovers and the gasps of the dying. Everywhere the human tide rises and falls. The city is the place of despair and of hope. It is the inferno and the sanctuary.’
‘The centuries have not brought peace to the world.’
‘Nor wisdom. For the city alters but men do not. Or not at a pace sufficient to survive their ingenuity.’
‘The years,’ said Kublai, ‘have not cleansed you of your love for riddles.’
‘How else may we perceive the riddle of the world?’
The Great Khan let out a sigh such as a tomb might make when it is opened after countless years of silence. He turned his gaze from the sandalwood in the fire to the magnolias of Kai-ping-fu as they kindled in the sunset. ‘It is all useless, then, if time and learning cannot release us from the infernal city.’
‘There is no need for conjecture. The proof and disproof of your fear exist beyond these palace walls, in the worlds that we form by being together.’
‘Tell me – for this evening will never, I think, ripen into night, and I have a great hunger to know what was and is and may come to pass …’
Cities & the Desert 1
The best way to approach Iduba is by sea, preferably reclining on deck half asleep after a meal, for only by mistaking it for a dream can the mind accept what the eye perceives. The masters of Iduba, in founding their city on the coast of a vast and featureless desert, appear to have forgotten the story of Babel, for the buildings they have commissioned rise as if they would escape the earth which is the destiny of all our endeavours. As your boat nears the harbour, you strain your neck to see the tops of the towers, and at once you long for their windswept heights, for you have entered the heat and dust which is the lot of the city’s migrant workers. You see them in their thousands, sweating in the sun or shadowed in the dry wells of the towers, while in the upper storeys the citizens grow fat on revenue from Iduba’s famous export. This mineral salt, which locals call hulum, grants whoever tastes it an overwhelming sense of ease and prosperity. Little wonder that it should be valued above all the spices, for its use bankrupts nations, whose populations turn for comfort to the very illusion that first enslaved them.
To the beneficiaries of Iduba’s wealth, plenty appears the natural condition of life; yet even in the midst of luxury there are signs of decay for those willing to read them. It is possible still to visit those islands built in the shapes of palm trees and crescent moons in the waters off the coast. For a time their whitewashed villas were the most desirable residences in Iduba. Now the poisoned sea laps at their foundations, while lurid blooms of algae stifle the brackish lagoons between abandoned gardens. From the vantage point of the towers, few citizens choose to look at these corroded strips of reclaimed land. Instead, they retreat with their purses into vast bazaars where the luxuries of the world accumulate. It is said by the workers that these temples of commerce are destined to become the mausoleums of Iduba, or to vanish entirely in one of the ever more frequent sandstorms that bury whole streets and drift as high as date palms against the dusty towers. Visiting dignitaries, generously hosted in return for singing the city’s praises, insist that its mineral wealth will allow Iduba to meet all challenges. Yet nobody knows how long the deposits of hulum will last. Idubans dread to contemplate their depletion, for without revenue to bind them to their employers, the migrants will drift elsewhere in pursuit of work, and the day will dawn when Iduba proves to have been nothing but a mirage, a vision that dissolves into the timeless and levelling sands from whence it seemed, once, to challenge the heavens.
Cities & Time 1
At first sight, Parvulo appears little different from other cities: shops and houses line the roads, infants in parks point at squirrels, schoolyards echo with the clamour of children. In a tranquil and leafy square, you take your rest on a bench and observe whole families at leisure, while office workers feed sparrows, brood over chessboards or play with their children in the middle of the working day. You see little evidence, on the faces of Parvulans, of ill health or distress, none of the heaviness of flesh and spirit with which other city dwellers are encumbered. This is not to say that inhabitants are blandly happy; on the contrary, lovers’ rows are more full-throated, and their reconciliations more passionate, than might in other cities be considered seemly.
Time is the unofficial currency in Parvulo, and wealth is measured not in spending power but in the amount of leisure available once the basic needs of the body have been met. Parvulans used, like the rest of us, to devote their lives to the purchase of goods intended to compensate them for the time lost in their acquisition. The pursuit of material gain made them ill, unequal and indebted, until by slow degrees it became preferable to be free with few goods than a slave with many. There was no coercion or compulsion in this. When everyone in a crowded room speaks loudly, it becomes impossible to hear a word, yet when everyone in the room speaks softly, everyone can be heard. This, in metaphor, was the discovery that Parvulans made. By taking up less space in the world, every citizen ensures that there is more space for everyone. With more time to explore the self and the world that surrounds them, they delight in the round of the seasons, and all nature is their congratulation. It is no longer the city’s passion to expel and discard, to measure its prosperity by the ease with which it squanders the world’s resources. Parvulo looks to its nearest neighbour, which daily is threatened by the cataclysmic collapse of mountains of refuse, and knows that the steadiness of its system cannot immunize it against contagion from a wider society which mistakes wastefulness for prosperity, greed for need.
Having admired their gracious city, you wonder how Parvulans can insulate themselves from the ongoing misery of the world. There is only one hope, though it may be a foolish one. It is that Parvulo’s model spreads, not by conquest or coercion, but by the simple eloquence of its unique and all too repeatable example.
Cities & the Desert 2
A visitor to the city of Keystone might assume that it is inhabited by giants, for who else could build such cathedrals of industry, the furnaces and smokestacks that obscure the day with smoke and banish the night with flames. Wading deeper into the foul brown air, you learn that the citizens are of ordinary size and divided between those who must live and perish in the canyons of steel and others, more privileged, who by serving the furnaces earn the right to be sheltered from them. These functionaries can be seen processing along tunnels of tinted glass, while in the streets preachers lambast the poor for their poverty, and melancholy whores flaunt whatever assets were loaned to them at birth. The beauty of women has a price in Keystone and there are no poets to praise it, for poetry is idleness to a culture in which Nature herself must earn her keep. This she does by surrendering from her folds a dark flammable liquid which is both the wealth and the ruin of the city. The senator or statesman long ago breathed his last who did not owe his position to the extraction of this fuel. Given the scale to which its availability has expanded the city, the demand for it is insatiable, for no man can see his wife, or child return from school, without the help of Keystone’s elixir. This dependency has so enriched a minority that truth itself has become a commodity which can be depreciated with judicious investments, and the few scholars remaining in the university can be relied upon to think in ways that are profitable to their patrons. As a result, it is the norm in Keystone for the poor to be castigated and despised, while the powerful are lauded for a wealth which, no matter how it was acquired, is regarded as proof of moral virtue.
Yet to stay in Keystone, if one can stomach life outside its hostelries and pleasure domes, is to discover that the consensus does not lack dissenting voices. These can be heard discussing the iniquities of the system and dreaming of its demise. Public meetings are not uncommon and take place with the authorities’ blessing, for the powers discovered long ago that there is nothing to fear from a message that inconveniences a majority of the city’s inhabitants. Marginalized and derided, the malcontents console themselves with the hope that industry will exhaust itself, choking on its unreason. They are mistaken, for Keystone’s thirst is exhaustible only by the limits of Nature herself, and the city fathers, oblivious as all true madmen must be of their insanity, will have laid waste to the four corners of the earth before they abandon a system that once served the city that now serves it.
Ingenious Cities
At the end of seven days, moving northwards, you quench your traveller’s thirst with the sweet waters of Miranda. After drinking deeply, you wonder how it came to pass that a fountain should be placed in the middle of a forest. It takes a minute or two before you perceive the homes all around you, topped with meadow grass and sedum, hunkering into banks covered in bougainvillea, or raised on stilts in pools brimming with lotus flowers. What you took for a wilderness is really your intended destination; for where other cities seek to impose themselves on the landscape, Miranda is designed to blend into the conditions from which it seems to have grown. Every building is constructed in relation to its environs: a hill, a tree, a termite mound, a winter stream. The city is a conversation between land and man, nature and civilisation. Indeed, so accustomed are Mirandans to their way of living that they see no distinction between these categories. This is not the result of sentimental thinking, for Miranda is subject to a harsh and changeable climate, so that wetlands are essential to absorb floodwaters, while the green shade of trees filters dust out of the air and offers a refuge to citizens from the heat of the sun.
We have known the melancholy of urban places, the unease in vacant lots and treeless courtyards. This may explain the frenzy of city living, as the heart inside us batters for respite, for the green world in which it became human. In Miranda, by contrast, life is lived at a leisurely pace which, far from hindering enterprise, permits citizens to work to the fulfilment of their gifts. The reality is that Mirandans are profoundly practical and relish pitting their wits against seemingly insurmountable problems.
Along a range of hills that surrounds the city, and far out to sea, vast wheels spin on the wind and carry its power inland, while along the once barren coast, seawater is distilled by captured sunlight into fresh water that irrigates orchards and fields of corn. Water is valued to the point of reverence, and everywhere the intermittent blessing of rain is captured and stored, filtered and cleaned to be used again. Hard though it may be to imagine, every home drinks in the power of the sun, storing it in chemical hearths to be released as required after sundown. So resourceful are Mirandans in harnessing the weather, and so abundant the fruits of their cooperation with the seasons, that few inhabitants do not participate in some way in the life and well-being of their durable city.
Perhaps, great Khan, you doubt the existence of so happy a commonwealth. It is true that, shortly after I waved goodbye to my hosts, I began to distrust my memories of Miranda. Perhaps there is something in those fountains that purges one for a time of scepticism. It may be that Miranda is impossible, a dream that cannot withstand the scrutiny of wakefulness. Yet nothing in that vision is beyond our ingenuity, and I suspect that only inertia and habitual thinking prevent us from building Miranda in our homelands, from giving it space and letting it endure.
Cities & Idols
It is impossible, in nightmare or malediction, to conceive of a city more infernal in aspect or function than the metropolis of Bolgia. From denuded mountain to famished plain, it sprawls beyond measure or comprehension, engulfing all who come to it in a labyrinth of scrapyards and prisons, barracks and bordellos, drained canals, fetid shacks, tanneries, and middens. War is the chief engine of Bolgia, for the city long ago exhausted its resources and must prey on its neighbours to secure the essentials of water, food, and fuel. Scarcity is not the sole reason for Bolgia’s belligerence: war is necessary, at frequent intervals, to ease the pressure of a burgeoning population, while the prospect of external enemies channels the rage of young men who might, otherwise, turn on their masters.
Although it is questionable whether one can ever be said to have arrived in a city so vast, you may find yourself, on your travels, in a rubbish-strewn square when fresh hostilities have been declared, whereupon you will see, carried above the heads of the crowd, the bronze idol in which reposes the city’s hunger for meaning. This idol is the figure of a charging bull, the fetish of a god of enterprise and competition. Though the cult manifests itself in enslavement for millions, to question its supposed benevolence is to risk a charge of heresy. A high priesthood, indistinguishable in dress and manners from the city’s plutocrats, dedicates itself to the pursuit of unbelievers, for though the bull cult is not obligatory, the wealthy in their gated enclaves cannot tolerate any scepticism that might question their divine right to rule. Credulity is essential to Bolgia’s self-consumption, and the rich are happy for the poor to console themselves with vengeful gods whose propitiation does not, on close examination, differ greatly from that of the sacred bull.
Exploring Bolgia is a perilous business to be undertaken only in armed company, for a city in which other resources have become scarce will sate its appetite on the last item in abundance: human flesh. Countless numbers are sold into prostitution, or sell parts of themselves to medicine, for life is a brutish struggle to survive, while the elites have withdrawn into compounds guarded by militia against the desperation of the masses. Within their gilded cages, the rich occupy themselves in furious debates concerning the shape and nature of the city they no longer dare to explore. Some hold that it is the only possible city, that nothing under heaven can be more perfect, while others doubt its spiritual reality, and a very few speculate about its future. These last are shunned by their peers, who fear the utterance of a secret known to many, yet acknowledged by few: that the present in Bolgia feeds on the future, the old on the young. The city fathers, when they deign to acknowledge the disease, blame it on those who would cure it, for they know in their hearts that Bolgia’s only hope lies in patricide. For no body politic can consume itself indefinitely. Such a property belongs only to the sun, and possibly to hell with its eternal fuel of souls. Bolgia, being an earthly place, will have, by one means or another, to transform itself or face annihilation. Until then, it will continue to seethe, a cauldron of meaningless suffering above a fire of inexhaustible need.
Cities & Time 2
From there you proceed along a highway of abandoned vehicles, weaving between rusting hulks, behemoths of a failed migration to a plain that never existed. You must withstand several days of this, the dust scorching your lungs, before you reach the outer districts of Gardenia.
It is possible at first to imagine that these are ruins, for Gardenia, which was not always blessed with such a fruitful name, used to be a teeming metropolis, fuelled by industries that expanded the city beyond its capacities, till those industries failed and the limits began, like the corona of a bruise, to fade and contract. In these impoverished quarters, the task of demolition is left to the wind and weeds. There are houses collapsing under scrub which even the ghosts have abandoned; dilapidated theatres where rats cross the stage; temples to a god of prosperity upon whose altars pigeons roost. The rich of the inner city turn their backs on the periphery. Only their servants gaze in wonder and sorrow at the vastness of its remains. Yet the visitor to Gardenia would do well not to trust appearances. Life is returning to the blighted neighbourhoods, working its way up from the asphalt as a plant forces its way into the light. Where smoking factories once stood, poisoned soils are being nursed back to health in the roots of Italian alders and poplar groves. As you wander from your path, you see tilled fields, beehives in new meadows, market stalls on street corners, and everywhere people toiling and trading. Repair workshops double as hostelries, for the citizens of Gardenia have become intensely sociable, and every day in the green thoroughfares a festive atmosphere reigns. People take pride in growing their own food, which they distinguish from the feed that once consumed their wages. Where formerly these kitchen gardeners had been tenants dependent on their employers for water and fuel, now they manage the same for themselves. Everyone owns a little, and such is the level of cooperation that visitors from the centre scoff at what they perceive to be laziness – for how can industrious folk waste so much time in talk and play? Perhaps most offensive to outsiders is the extension of neighbourly feeling to the non-human, for birds and pollinating insects are welcomed, while trees, which some call leaf residents, are afforded the respect and security of citizen status. Sentimental madness, the sceptics say; yet the locals shrug and return to their labours, for they know what will grow in the wasteland, and are too busy tending it to mind the ill opinion of those who will have, in time, to make the same discoveries.
The Great Khan sighed again and shut the atlas in which he had attempted, without success, to find the cities of which Marco Polo spoke. Clenching his lips on the amber stem of his pipe, he fixed his eyes on the Venetian.
‘Each of your cities,’ said Kublai, ‘appears to refute its predecessor, one place contradicting what has been built in another. Which, then, is the true city, the city of the world as lived in by men?’
‘All of them,’ said Marco, ‘and none. Each city is a reality in which the inhabitants have chosen to invest. Each is a dream, or a nightmare, which by dreaming together men have made real.’
Kublai turned his eyes on the arrested sunset beyond the balcony. It was impossible to determine whether the point of brightness on his wizened cheek was a jewel or a tear reflecting the sky. At length he said, ‘How is it possible to live with this war in my breast between hope and despair?’
‘If I knew the answer to that question, I should never have had to leave my native city.’
The emperor of the Tartars flattened his beard against his amethyst choker. ‘The horror you speak of is too easy to imagine, while the good seems an idle fantasy. I fear the struggles of men will never cease, just as I shall be unable at last to possess my empire.’
And the Venetian answered: ‘Sire, a day will come when all the emblems and signs of your empire will be known to you. On that day you will understand that we cannot own the world of which we are a part, any more than a pearl can claim the necklace on which it is threaded. Then, great-hearted Khan, your empire will possess you, for the world and humanity are indivisible, as you and I and the reader of these words are one and the same person …’