brady alexander

INVISIBLE CITIES

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is as inscrutable as it is gorgeous. It is, at least for now, my favorite thing to read. Structured as a dialogue between Marco Polo, the Venetian traveler who speaks of fantastical cities and their inhabitants, and Kublai Khan, who tries to understand his stories as his empire decays, each entry is a meditation upon memory, desire, myth, knowledge, custom, and impermanence. Often sad and always fabulous, the novel drips with mono no aware: a wistful sensitivity to all things being transient. It’s this I want to touch upon today: the feeling that it may be gone before you finish it, decaying in between your very hands. 

The book’s eponymous cities are often in a state of past and future. Changed by time and changing trends, Maurilia is nothing like its older self depicted in its postcards—it merely shares its name. Whether by design or else because the rest of it has vanished, Armilla now is only water pipes and faucets, tubs, and showers. Its original inhabitants now absent, the city made of water pipes has been reclaimed by nymphs. And so it is with every city in the empire. Each occupies a kind of sharp, elusive thinness and ephemerality. Kublai wishes very much to understand them, ascribing to each one an emblem, a distinctive symbol, thinking that if he could understand this central core, then he will finally be able to possess his own dominion. But this is futile too: “‘On the day when I know all the emblems,’ he asked Marco, ‘shall I be able to possess my empire at last?’ And the Venetian answered: ‘Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.’” 

So it is in life, as well. Never can we fully take in everything, and everyone. No model is sufficient to encapsulate the whole. As far as cities are concerned, I’ve felt this way most vividly with San Francisco, when I’ve visited. On every hill the city sprawls, a labyrinth in three dimensions, swept with fog. In every building, something new is made, words are exchanged, ideas unlocked, goods traded, and love shared. Someone changes. Something changes. And, by the time that I begin to understand even a little of the city, it’s changed so much that I must start over again. The San Francisco of the 70s, with its hippies, Harvey Milk, and rugged tenderness, is different from the San Francisco of today, with its startups and tech companies, its hipsters and its bright facades.   

Kublai, later frustrated with Marco, asks him why he talks so much of fantastical places: “‘your cities do not exist,’” he says. “[W]hy do you amuse yourself with consolatory fables? I know well that my empire is rotting like a corpse in a swamp.” But Kublai’s cities don’t exist, either—not for him. Marco tells him, “‘No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.’” A city is not the idea of that city, or its reputations and mythologies. A city isn’t composed of logic, but the fears and the desires of its people. And they’re as transient as buttresses and walls. 

When I think of the abandoned cities of the novel, I think of ghost towns like Centralia in Pennsylvania, Pripyat in Ukraine, the Shengshan Islands in China. So too is the fate of not just every city, but all empires. Kublai, as he ages, may be able to maintain his rule, his laws and power. But he can’t prevent the world from changing, and he can’t stop his own death. The first seed of each empire’s unmaking is planted on the day it is conceived. Empires, for all of their pursuit of wealth and glory for their emperors, are destined to be dust, committed only to the place of memory. We may take comfort in their fall, or sorrow, but no matter our reactions, they are ghosts before we ever understand them. 

I will never fully understand Invisible Cities, as I may never fully understand any city. But I am thankful for the way it makes me feel.

Brady Alexander is a contributing editor with Miracle Monocle and a fiction editor at the tiny journal, as well as an intern at Exposition Review. Their work is published in The White Squirrel, Miracle Monocle, and ThinkIR, and they’re looking for an agent for their novel/novella.