INVISIBLE CITIES XIV -- Cities and Memory: MAURILIA

1. Why do the inhabitants prefer the city represented in the postcards?  What influence does the nature of the postcard have--on the city, or, generically, on anything?  Is there a difference between a postcard and, say, a regular photograph in its ability to depict a time or place?  What would happen (stay with me here) if memory worked both directions, toward the future as well as the past, and there were postcards of present Maurilia available for past Maurilians to examine?
2. For some reason this reminds me (story and movie) of Benjamin Button.
3. The second paragraph of the vignette discusses how two cities can exist simultaneously--two cities which are one city: one place, one name (same citizenry??), two cities.  Maybe this is going out on a limb, but if each vignette is a puzzle piece, what clue might Maurilia offer toward anticipation of the final, completed picture?  Does it have to be just two cities in one, or could the number be even potentially infinite within the confines of one geographic space and one name?
4. By extension (and this against the end of the first sentence of paragraph two), is it possible for there to be two or more people with the same body and the same name (and no, this is not an issue of schizophrenia or multiple personalities)?  And further, families, schools, countries, teams, gods, etcetera?
5. The final lines of the vignette tie back to the first question: is it just the nature of the postcard, that it describes a fiction rather than a reality, or is there truly a second city existing in the same plane and plot as the other Maurilia?

INVISIBLE CITIES VIII -- Cities and Memory: ZORA

image courtesy of designplaygrounds.com

Zora: a South and West Slavic word meaning "dawn, aurora".

1. How does Marco Polo really know what he claims to know of Zora as it no longer exists?  And the vignette's final paragraph reflects interestingly against the first sentence, which states of Zora that, "no one, having seen it, can forget."  So when it's gone... what?  Memory cannot be inherited, after all.
2. I mentioned synecdoche and metonymy in the last post about Tamara.  Inasmuch as either of these is a sort of--and maybe this is a stretch--mnemonic (and more so than just another crazy spelling) are all of the disparate and unforgettable points, all mnemonics really, synecdochic or metonymic of the whole--all for one and one for all?
3. If the most learned men are those who've memorized Zora and anyone who visits Zora cannot forget it, wouldn't anyone who simply visits and sees [all of] Zora become another of the most learned men?
4. This city is a little difficult for me to grasp.  Is it set up as it is only be ironic in the end?  This alone would make sense, but it leaves Zora otherwise shallower than the preceding cities.
5. Well, maybe not.  The whole notion of this city's memorableness together with its passing reminds me of the danger faced by the general world's public by the loss of a culture.  Loss of a spoken language.  Loss of oral traditions.  Loss of purity in aboriginal bloodlines.  Once lost, it will never return.  Some things, no matter the scholarship that pursues it after its demise, will never be brought back.  Only Jurassic Park managed that.

INVISIBLE CITIES V -- Cities and Memory: ZAIRA

"Zaira, City of High Bastions," courtesy
behance.net (click this!)

Zaira is related, and fairly obviously so, to our Sarah and happens to mean "lady" or "princess" in both (and I wish I knew more of the linking history ... McWhorter? ... or is it coincidence?) Hebrew and "Irish" (Gaelic, that is), and "Rose" in Arabic.  That's all fine and dandy, of course, but it marks a difference in theme--if not gender--from the first three cities.  Thoughts?

1. This first sentence, I think, captures the whole reason behind the Great Khan's fascination with Polo's descriptions.  However, do such subjective descriptions do him any good?
2. According to the rest of this first paragraph, what then is the relationship between the "measurements of its space" (physical locations or landmarks (?)) and the "events of its past" (memory)?
3. What do you make of "...the usurper, who some say was the queen's illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock."  Does this offer a window into either Calvino (or is he too shrewd to so expose himself) or at least one of the two characters?
4. "...but contains [memory] like the lines of a hand."  Palmistry?  Forget divination for a minute; what's the connection here, and can the memories therefor be "read" at all?  Or is there an issue of magic at hand here after all?  Is memory and its ties to things a mysticism or conjure?
5. Moving, relocating, is an engagement that sparks the memory.  Packing up items, sorting through boxes for treasure and trash, reorganization, etcetera bring past the hands and eyes items--landmarks--that hold in their essence, that trigger, memories.  Those memories are written like so many scars into the collections of junk we accumulate.  Do we throw away those memories, as certainly the runes of their recording are gone, when we throw away the landmarks?  I haven't thought about my Boy Scout days in ten years, but sorting through that old box because we've got to trim the fat down to naught, I encountered stacks and stacks of long-hidden memories.  But as Zaira absorbs like a sponge the waves of memory that happen within it, are those memories ever available to any of those who walk past the chink in a wall or who were not present when the hole appeared in the net?  Or does each citizen have access to an adequate number of memorial artifacts that those of others don't matter?  What do you make of the very physical, earthy, and private nature of the memories of Zaira?  Or do I have it wrong and all is shared by all?
6. So, the "high bastions."  If the city is swollen with memories--even built entirely of memory--it stands to reason that the bastions would be so tall.  But a "bastion" is a defense.  Thoughts?

castle bastion at Copertino, Italy

INVISIBLE CITIES III -- Cities of Memory: ISIDORA

Saint Isidore, courtesy
traditioninaction.org

Isidora, Isadora (alt. spelling), or Isadore (masculine) are essentially equivalents.  As will be the case for most of the Khan's cities--or, well, most of Polo's cities, as they're different, after all--I need to spend a few lines on the name.  While this particular name, similar to the last, is most typically given--if "typical" can apply to such rare use--in Spanish-speaking cultures, the name is originally Greek.  Similar to the last city, however--and I can't help but think, all things so far considered, that Calvino's doing this on purpose--this one has a couple of potential interpretations, one literal, of course, the other(s) much more subjective and connotative.  For a moment, forget the Greek (which thing is a pretty natural course for me as I've essentially no experience with Greek beyond abstract and limited peripheral study and am, instead, so much more Latin in my background).  The little parts of the name--Isi, d', and ora--indicate two iffy connotative possibilities.  It puts me in mind of either "Island of Time," or, particularly if we take ora (Italian for hour) as adjectival  rather than nominal and therefore required to match the feminine gender of island, oro (gold) to ora (adjectivally golden), "Island of Gold" or "Golden Island."  And it this makes at least a little bit of sense as the name deals naturally with a geographic location, correlating strongly with not only the book as a whole but the previous city, Diomira, which name connects directly to city/village, and, in Isidora's case, one near the sea, which would account for all the seashells.  The name "Isidora" is, however, not derived from such a place or from the "dirty" Latin I've employed.  It means rather and simply "Gift of Isis," Isis being a powerful Egyptian goddess.  This works too, of course, and probably even better.  Incidentally, Isidore--er, Saint Isidore--archbishop of Seville, was named in 2001 as patron saint of computers.

1. In many ways, the treatment of Isidora is very similar to that of Diomira.  The city is highly idealized.  We enter on the move and, though it wasn't mentioned by word in Diomira, full of desire.  What is the connection between memory--even nostalgia, that most subjective form of memory--and desire?
2. There are also among these similarities, of course, differences.  Instead of the cock's crow signaling the morning, there are cockfights; instead of the women pleasantly crying out from terraces, they solicitously crowd travelers on the street.  What is the potential that Isidora is (and to a degree even phonetically--just an "m" off, after all) a mirror reversal of Diomira?
3. But Isidora--Gift of the Powerful Goddess--is not a real city, but just the desire for a city by a traveler too long away from civilization.  What does this powerful desire do to the essence of the city--whichever city--he finally reaches at the end or interim of his journey?  Similarly, how subjective upon human perspective is the nature and identity of a city?  Do we see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, find what we want to find, regardless of what really is or isn't there and available?
4. What do you make of all the spirals?  How do they, too, connect to memory and desire?
5. Finally, define the ending sentence in context of what we've gone over above.

INVISIBLE CITIES II -- Cities and Memory 1: DIOMIRA

courtesy bonacho-portuguessave.blogspot.com

1. Many (all, actually, if I'm not mistaken) of Calvino's cities are girls' names.  Diomira is no exception.  My go-to site for name etymology is behindthename.com, which I've used here before.  Today, it failed me.  I found information instead here, and by extension here, which gives the meaning as the "important woman in the village."  The name is allegedly Spanish, but if we look at it from the Italian perspective (admittedly not all that different, particularly in this case), then we can break it into its constituent parts: Dio and mira.  Dio is, of course, God, and Mira (in nominal form) aim, sight, target, butt, end, goal, design (from my well-worn, i.e. beat-to-ribbons, Dizionario Inglese E Italiano by Loescher) and (verbal, "mirare") to take aim, to admire, to gaze, or in its reflexive, to look at oneself.  Thoughts?
2. Notice the motion of the first sentence?  From where are we leaving?  Why begin thus if, without context, we cannot know the starting point, in which case the direction and distance are useless, geographically speaking?
3. What is the poetical power (that is to say dripping rhetoric) of this line, "...is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time"?
4. Compare that line above to the general theme of entropy from the introductory ......
5. There's a dreamlike quality to Diomira--idyllic and distant.  Does it regard the name, Diomira, as discussed above?  How does it regard the type, Cities of Memory?
6. Notice also the sense of fairytale to the description: the 60 of this, the golden and crystal that, the idealized season.  How does this correlate back to Marco Polo and begin build his character (this is a longterm as well as an immediate question)?