(or my exact words which I wrote when I was just down with first chapter, at home in this puja break
... Just down with one chapter in the first tos reading which was given long back by our young female teacher making a colourful and mysterious wrapper printed with words of great appreciation for the author in which she gifted all of us this book which I accepted as more like a fun reading assignment than any usual submission. But when I opened it to read and receive what it contained, its contents just kept falling non-stop on my head… they were all sort of objects, of all sizes and all colours but never seen before, and created more than one images at a time with a speed that all those images kept jumbling up with each other and then after they all would fall down, I’d have to arrange them once again relating them with their respective places... from where they fell and what each were about… )
But then.. as the conversation between kublai and polo grew and polo described more and more cities one after another i started getting the flow and progression keeping in mind that in which category each one is falling, city of desires, of memories, eyes, dead, hidden etc.,... though till a good extent I was still assuring myself every moment that what am reading through is not ‘nonsense’.
Its painted all over by imageries, allegories and metaphors, though in some cities its easily comprehensible… you know where the metaphor lies, and in some cities its not so easy to see through, and maybe I couldn’t even find in many but there is still a hint and a feel that you know it is there in it and also what it is. Every element and oddity of the cities can be taken with fascination and one may get driven to find some hidden implication, or try to relate it with something happening in known and real lives.
[
“No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused
with the words that describe it. And yet between the one and the other there is a
connection.”
‘Olivia’…there's a metaphor, a sort of message.. ‘falsehood is never with the words, its with the things’. Then in Leandra, the two gods Lares and Penates and their endless debate. And in procupia… exaggeration … to show population explosion
]
The book has surely pushed my realms of imagination, have gifted me many images of places utopian and where I would like to be and experience (like armilla.. forest and water pipes), and I already did as far as I could by travelling through it… It has changed rules and questioned some, what i may call as 'design principles' and made me relate some of it with my own desires and memories… for eg. When I read through the city of Esmeralda, where one has got numerous options of zigzag routes leading to the same destination… i had to stop in the middle to write something it reminded me from my school days… that is of all the different options, and they too zigzagged, which me and my brother would have, daily on our way back home from school… (continued in the part within the dotted line which may be skipped)
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from the point on the main road where our school bus would drop us. In fact I had three options in the dropping point itself. The first would branch to two out of which the first branch would meet the second dropping point route, and the other would then further branch to two, one of which meets the first again… well it goes on with lefts and rights till you reach a dead end and land right in front of my house… and we would sometimes take different paths and see who reaches first... and each would take equal time (if neither cheats :),)... or we would dribble a stone passing each other all the way from the bus stop till our home taking different routes different days, and in the end when we reach home mutual passing will turn into ‘who-puts -the-stone-in-the-goal’ sort of thing, where the goal will be our elevator well.
Or in diwali night I remember we friends standing on the terrace would take pride on the location of our building for the fact that even if we burst loud-banned crackers police would not be able track our house fast for they’d have to first make their way out through a maze.
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‘and so inhabitants of Esmeralda are spared by the boredom of following the same route everyday’
(after I read of phyllis). If I try to figure out how marco polo imagined of his cities and made a picture in his mind step by step which remained intact as long as he wished it to be.. then here I present a way to understand how he processed each image… there’s a blank sheet or screen… on which first those elements flash and appear at their respective meaningful or may be not meaningful spaces, and with each one of them there is a certain memory attached which was born or has remained more than others because of certain desires, or which has remained as a conscious memory for perhaps a story or just an instance had got attached with them, right at the moment he had seen or just desired to see… for if I say ‘he has seen’ then it becomes real, is it?… no, these are invisible cities?... sorry I couldn’t!
(stage - backstage)
And he says that he has been describing Venice all this while… all those desires and images coming in his mind which he is aware of, he has made them come by his will… ‘the story he has presented on the stage and directed it’…which shows that he knows that the only city which he has understood very well and which is implicit in his mind is his own where he was born and where he has lived his life… a city of which he was a part and not a passer-by, so at the backstage the city which is established there got expounded to its finest details of its scape and stories is only venice.
“
'Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,' Polo said.
'Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps,
speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.'__
”
true !
the book has reached extremities of exaggeration and imagination… has gone beyond infinity. Calling them impossibility will be an understatement.
like
• “it has earth instead of air.”…
• “The sky is filled with stars. There is the blueprint.’”
(just after I finished reading till a ‘trade’ part)
If I had been at Kublai khan’s place than may be at one point I had given up angrily and saying that this crazy guy is just bullshitting… but the fact that Kublai, the great khan isn’t saying it rather it sometimes seems that he joins with him in his (fourth-word-in-the-last-line), will always make the reader believe that this is something of high philosophy very deep whose essence can’t be captured just be reading through once… and you do feel that you are getting nearer to it yet never being able to grasp it. And even if you do grasp then its not tight enough, you'll keep losing it.
This book should come along with a label ‘read it with caution, its injurious to your mind.’
For its mind boggling… I mean it really boggles your mind.. and you feel that it (your brain) may burst out screaming and shouting and begging you to give it some rest for its too much of freaking imagination…
Read it slowly with immense concentration almost as if you are meditating… and you’ll get ‘high’ slowly... it can trigger the wildness in you… make you behave crazily… and you may start hallucinating without ..(ahem)
The essence of the book can be understood from the following words of kublai khan to marco polo
'At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am
prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have
reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they
may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities
live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.'
(thanks to ma'am and looking forward to read more of italo calvino)
