Travels through the Invisible Cities

What inspires you to write?

Inner turmoil? Personal vision? Sights and sounds of the world around you? Other people's writing?

For me, it can be any one of those things, but perhaps my favourite is when another person's creation inspires me to create. And one of my favourite books of all time to turn to for inspiration to create is Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

It has been said that Invisible Cities is impossible to critique or even describe, and in many ways that is very accurate. The first problem you run into when trying to describe it to someone is that there is no plot, no real conflict, and only two characters (apart from the various denizens of the various cities that exist only in description given by one of the characters to the other).

No plot. Just vibes.

Marco Polo describes the various cities of his travels to a skeptical Kublai Khan - except maybe all the cities are one city, and maybe some cities in the Khan's great empire had airports and bulldozers, and Kublai and Marco are a pair of homeless men scrounging the remains of garbage dumps in a post-apocalyptic future, or maybe they are eternal figures, forever reclining in silk hammocks in Kublai Khan's opulent palace, and maybe there is an atlas that contains all the cities there ever were, are and ever shall be...

How do you describe a book like that? I think it best to stop trying, and to simply list a few of the poems Invisible Cities has inspired me to write over the years.

To begin with, there are instances of inspiration to write about the work as a whole, or about individual chapters such as Eudoxia:

Invisible Cities

Kublai and Marco in a

Rubbish heap.

__

Riches found in

Conversation and imagination

Rusted flotsam

Ruined jetsam

Imagining whole worlds

In a thousand cities

Breathed out of asbestos and

Microplastics and

Cheap wine

As they stroll together

Between

Golden silver fountains

Battlefields of blood

Marketplaces of pepper and

__

Who is to say

What world truly

Exists

Outside the

Ever-swirling smoke

Rising from their

Ever-lit pipes,

Out there

Beyond their lowered

Eyelids?

...

Eudoxia

This shapeless spreading

Stain

Of a city

Crooked streets

Crumbling houses

Dust

Fires

Screams in the darkness.

__

Calvino knew the shape

Of the universe.

...

Then there are entire lines of thought that spring from a single phrase found within the book, such as the dead branches found in one of Kublai and Marco's conversations about past, present and future.

The Endless Perfection of Dead Branches

Dead branches

Stretch out further than

Live ones

__

In the mind’s paths

Paths your life might have taken

Branching out

From choices made

__

I could have stayed in

Hervey Bay

I could have stayed in

Sydney

__

I could have gone back to

Singapore

I could have gone back to

Tbilisi

__

Those branches of lives not lived

Stretch out forever

__

I can see them

Whenever I want

And they will always be

Perfect.

...

Occasionally in my own travels I will try to think about the city I'm walking through in the way Marco does, and occassionally a poem will come tumbling out.

Here is one from Malacca.

City of the Strays

Turned loose

Living from scroungings of

Affection one meal the

Next

But healthy enough

For all that the

Life of the stray

Agrees with them

Here, at least,

In this place.

__

Some cities

Welcome the strays

More than others.

__

Lazing languid evening

Sun setting

Over the straits

As a romp of otters

Swim by bobbing

Their heads politely

As they pass a

Restaurant abandoned by all

But for

The tourists

The wanderers

The strays.

...

Ultimately, the best way I could describe Invisible Cities is a work of meditation. On civilisation, on humanity - or perhaps more accurately on the general shape of those things. A broad outline of life, for you to see and agree or disagree with as you please, in each of the cities Calvino describes.

A meditation on the shape of the universe.

The Shape of the Universe (Valdrada Strands)

Step outside the

Universe

For a moment

Step back to see it

All

What would you see?

__

The shapeless spreading

Stain

Smoke and screams?

__

A ball a bubble

Bulging out since the

Big Bang about to

Burst?

__

Would you see

A tree growing

Out branching

In every

Direction?

__

A whirling fingerprint

Of god

Full of whorling

Patterns?

__

A single strand of

DNA

Twisting helix of

All creation?

__

But DNA (remember)

Has two strands

Twisting

Around one another -

Would you see it

If you stepped back

Far enough?

A second universe

Mirrored like Valdrada

Twisting forever

Around our own

Double helix

Together but never

Touching but for

Hidden bridges

Dependent but always

Apart

If you stepped back

Far enough

Would you see those

Hidden bridges linking

Life to life like hempen-rope Octavia

Linking our

Universe

To its twisting twin?

__

What life would spring

From such mirroring

Strands?