Invisible Cities
I’ve only been to New York City one time, but for me, it exists primarily as a setting for one of my father’s short stories, A Perfect Flower. I traveled so much in my twenties that eventually every city started to look like every other city and I quickly realized that I preferred the small towns and the countryside, the seaside resorts and the hidden places with traditional native architecture and beautiful views.
I used the Lonely Planet guidebooks that highlight experiences that are off-the-beaten-path. Murrells Inlet, where I now live, isn’t very exotic, but it does have a mystical aspect with its changeable weather and shadowy, primeval marshes.
One of the books that was inspirational to my planetary mapping process is Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. In the book, written in 11 sections with titles such as Cities & Memory, Hidden Cities, and Continuous Cities, Marco Polo describes cities he has seen to Kublai Khan, who is afraid that his power is an illusion. There are 55 cities, but instead of describing them in a literal fashion, Polo describes them as metaphors. He answers Khan’s questions indirectly, suggesting that memory and language are imperfect, and therefore no city can be sufficiently captured by stories or maps.
One of the Hidden Cities is called Olinda. Olinda is built in concentric circles, like tree rings.
In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin, which, if you look at it slightly enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennas, the skylights, the gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the squares, the horse racing track.
Similar in concept to a fractal, Olinda has an infinitely repeating pattern that is self-similar across all scales. No matter how closely you zoom in on Olinda you will see smaller versions of the entire shape.
Although language is insufficient, later Kublai Khan plays a game of chess with Marco Polo, and through the moves in the game, is able to visualize the structure of many other invisible cities. In actuality, retracing the legendary 13,000-mile, 24-year journey of Marco Polo means following the ancient Silk Road across deserts, mountains, and oceans. Starting in Venice, the epic route spans modern-day Israel, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and China before returning by sea via India.
