invisible cities (italo calvino)

I was taken by the metaphorical power of many of the cities that Italo Calvino describes. This is an excellent reading in order to see how you see because each world is a sort of archetype in and of itself, and though all of the stories were interesting, some resonated more than others. The thing about archetypes is that the ones that resonate more for each of us are closer to our experience of the world, and so can reflect back to us the way we see. Some ideas throughout that were interesting were: life//death as same, a lack of air//only earth, repetition, and mirrored actions. Below I'll go into more detail on two of the worlds that especially resonated with me.

The city of Olinda deserves special mention because it is how I experience time. In Olinda, there is a single point from which continually blossoms a new Olinda. In Olinda, birth is also death, and the present is a joining of past and future. In both these things there is balance. In fact, Olinda is all about experience as balance. I have this same need for balance, and a desire to join past with future in the present.

The story that resonated most for me was the second to last "Trading Cities: 4" on page 76, and I'll go into the most detail on it. It is about the region of Ersilia in which people constantly create a web of strings of relationship//connection between houses, but when there are too many strings, the city becomes unlivable//unmovable because there is no space, so the people must go somewhere else. This means the people of Ersilia are always on the move, and so they may never truly settle. The abandoned cities lose their form and become ruins where only the webs remain.

When I read this, I felt like Calvino was writing about me, about my world specifically. It is certainly akin to my art practice. I can't count the number of times I have abandoned a process when it got too full and figured out--when there was no space to move anymore--and moved onto something else, often completely different. This is very akin to the element of water, which, when it's container becomes full, must run elsewhere until it pools again in another basin, only to overflow that one as well (the Great Salt Lake and oceans being exceptions--only evaporation occurs there). The practice of forming webs is also what water does--it has extremely high cohesion and surface tension on micro-scale, so it can form webs that remain connected, which becomes important in it's web-forming abilities on an organismal-scale for example in the human body and in trees, and then rivers, estuaries, aquifers and oceans link all the bodies of water in the world creating macro-scale webs.

This city's life resonates because this is how I live--I am always forming webs of relationships within myself (see above: "This very akin to...") and sharing links with others when they're interested. This is also why I like Judy Pfaff--her work forms webs of interconnection through all the levels, joining them together.

What I wonder is: Wouldn't the strands finally start connecting between the ruined cities in Ersilia? If it is a region, it must have boundaries, and the webs must have points of overlap, so what happens when there is no more space but only web? Can this happen? Is it just the overall view--the ability to see micro, mid and macro levels at once? Is this what is happening for me now? Are my webs where physical cities once stood beginning to connect? For I have abandoned my last city, but it is still within me, all of them are still within me. And I can see how many of them meet up, where they slide along eachother and resonate, but I am not sure that I can quite see the whole.