Cities fall Apart..
“The Venice I found when I arrived
was not a disappointment - it was unreal. Venice is a city you must design and
build for yourself. The tourist Venice is a chimera, the historical Venice is a
museum. The living Venice is the one where every canal and palazzo and sun-shy
square, with its iron well and unlisted church, has been privately mapped. No
one can show you Venice. There is no such place. Out of the multiple
Venice's, none authentic, only you can find the one that has any value.”
Jeanette Witerson
From
childhood onwards I often try to decipher the unsaid stories revealed through
the glance of eyes, the curves of lips, the hints of eyebrows and the speed at
which the eye lids of the person whom I meet swings. Even now I could not help
but read between the lines of their action or gestures than chewing their words
with the mind’s digestive mechanism. In
every exchange I rigidly keep the firsthand knowledge even if unsure of my
capacity to reflect upon or reproduce the source. The search for unheard
melodies is interesting and adventurous if one has the right (?) kind of
perception about the multiple responses of it if shared. The post modern writer
may have the same eye view ,one may doubt, if reads certain works celebrating
uncertainties which less adventurous people call as impossible to sort out.
Here is a work of art that might have shown the panoramic view of Venice before
tearing the big photograph to pieces. Reading The novel, Invisible cities ,of Italo Calvino, is a scintillating experience if
one feels like a child who takes the
challenge of treasure hunt for nothing, who knows well that the treasure
is simply an experience, and no treasure in the conventional, literal kind of
the term exists. But the treasure hunt here is not direct as Santiago does in
Coelho’s Alchemist .It would have
been a disappointing experience if one approaches it with the attitude of a
learner who is the middle standard consumer with special kind of appetite for
second hand commodities, least fond of experiencing the pleasure of reading
through one’s own mind and eye and succumb him/herself to get underestimated by
being satisfied easily if a garnished summary is served in a decorated plate to
be swallowed. If we call Invisible Cities
as a historical piece, of course, it is history but personalized. Since history
stops proclaiming itself to be authentic, the work is historical. If we have a
taste for fictional it is fictional but appears like a single story located in
between mirrors placed face to face or in the similar way as reflected by a
Kaleidoscope. The major characters Kublai khan( the Coleridge hero) and Marco
Polo, belonging to different cultures, places and even spaces striving to get
themselves intersected through the universal thread of storytelling. There is
no common language to unify their perception. Still one did not stop listening
as the other did not stop describing. (A good metaphor to communicate the class
room discourse!). But the idea the listener gathered is according to his
knowledge, his experience, his level of understanding and his capacity for
imagination. Though the writer opens his own umbrellas (titles), such as cities
and Memory, Cities and Desire (smells waste land, but not about ‘waste’ land, I
guarantee) the philosophies are open for multiple interpretations as the
subject itself. Eventually the treasure
the reader searches would be the photograph of the empire of Kublai khan with
light and dark shades according to the emperor’s (reader’s) moods, with
masculine and feminine structure according to the narrator’s mindset . The City
has every possible impossibility to be Venice as it has every impossible
possibility to be Kublai’s empire.(Am I contradicting myself ? ) .The multiple
layers and vertical and horizontal division may make the reader diffident. But
when you read such a work, before you close the book after reading the first
page saying it didn’t interest me, (it is purely personal, you may be thinking
now, I am no one to interfere in your personal choice and it is against the proposed
ideal by Winterson quoted at the beginning ) please think twice because our
choices are built upon comfort and convenience. So isn’t it possible to think
about the inconvenience as an adventure wrongly graded?
