Cities fall Apart..

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?