Invisible Cities by Steve Zeitlin

Volume 30
Spring-Summer
2004

Return to Table of Contents

Calvino provides us with a set of urban eyes to see the city anew. He reminds us that New York is a city of infinite possibility and infinite dissatisfaction. It harbors endless "cities within cities," an urban tangle of associations, relationships, perceived and physical geographies.

Steve Zeitlin is the director of City Lore. He thanks his son Ben for some of the comments written in the margins of Steve’s copy of Invisible Cities.

New York Folklore Society
P.O. Box 764
Schenectady, NY 12301
518/346-7008
Fax 518/346-6617
nyfs@nyfolklore.org

The Kublai Khan does not believe all the descriptions of exotic cities that he hears. But I do.

I do, because Italo Calvino, the Italian fabulist, compels the reader to listen with his imagination to his marvelous descriptions of Invisible Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1974, translated by William Weaver). In this dream journey, first published in 1972, Calvino uses words as bricks to construct the towers and spires for a vast empire of imaginary cities and towns.

He conjures the city of Sophronia, made up of two half-cities—one of carousels and circus tents, the other of stone palaces, factories, monuments. One half is temporary, moved every half-year to another half-city. But it’s not the carnival and circus tents but the marble pediments, the monuments, the petroleum refinery that stay only briefly, then vanish, and return. He describes Octavia, a spiderweb city, with ropes and catwalks strung between two precipices; instead of rising up, it hangs from the web with rope ladders, hammocks, baskets, and dumbwaiters.

These invisible cities, and many more, are described by an imaginary Marco Polo to an imaginary Kublai Khan, who wants to learn about the wondrous far-flung cities in his vast empire. At one point, Marco Polo tells him, "Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know." The Khan protests: "there is still one of which you never speak...Venice." And Marco Polo answers, "Every time I describe a city, I am saying something about Venice. To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice."

For me, that Ur city is New York, a place so complex it harbors endless, unfolding cityscapes within its boundaries. I was reminded of the city’s imaginative possibilities in a recent New York Times story in which Patrick Healy describes the view that a pedestrian can catch from the city’s sixteen walkable bridges connecting Manhattan to the boroughs and New Jersey. From the Brooklyn Bridge on a foggy day, it’s "a field of skyscrapers wearing caps of cloud." From the Wards Island pedestrian bridge, "a jigsaw of housing projects." From the uptown Broadway Bridge, an urban forest; and from the George Washington, where you can see "the city spread out end to end, it looks like a gleaming table set for dinner."

Calvino provides us with a set of urban eyes to see the city anew. He reminds us that New York is a city of infinite possibility and infinite dissatisfaction. It harbors endless "cities within cities," an urban tangle of associations, relationships, perceived and physical geographies. Turn on its head the old saying "there are six million stories in the naked city"; instead, there may be six million cities in this storied town, for each one of us carries a different urbanopolis in our minds. New York is many intersecting worlds. Riding the subways, for instance, I befriend the homeless Tony, who opens up for me the world of New York underground. From friends, I learn about the abandoned tunnels where graffiti artists spray their colors just below the grates, where beams of light illuminate their art as in an underground cathedral. But for Calvino, the city does not give form to the lives of city dwellers; rather, city dwellers’ interior lives shape their own magical cities.

Magical cities, where "there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels....At every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to grab a scrap of food that slipped from the lunchpail of a high steel worker on a beam a thousand feet above the city, who was distracted by a girl on Madison Avenue, who..." The city is a collection of signs and symbols, coincidental and causal relationships, layers of texture and meaning.

With that in mind, I assigned Calvino’s book to my Writing New York Stories class at Cooper Union, then asked the students to write a piece about New York inspired by Invisible Cities. Ellia Bisker wrote,

The city is a floating island, secured with heavy anchors to its harbor. Every year the anchors are drawn up and the ships of the city throw iron chains to shore; then they steam out with the city in tow... The city has lingered offshore of every country in the world, has spoken every language, eaten every food. It brings with it culture—ballet, opera, graffiti, punk rock, stand up, obscure performance art. Brings dirty warehouse apartments, street fairs, stoop sales, bohemians, wherever it goes... No one ever knows where the city will go next, and so every misfit girl and boy in every backwater prays nightly that the city will come to them. When it does they jump aboard and leave with it, gypsy caravan city, circus train city, accruing new inhabitants as it travels.

The city is hope for everyone who wants to leave the place where they are, but... where do you dream of going when you start at everyone else’s destination? So the young misfits of the city silently drop from its shores in Timbuktu or Omaha, Nebraska, and when the city moves on they stay behind, looking for a new life in a place that does not travel.

The wonder of cities is not only in the skyscrapers or the churches or the marble promenades, but in the way their shapes and forms can spark the minds of those of us who experience them, inspiring us to imagine and reimagine until a city’s meanings and its wonder have no limits but the boundaries of our own imagination.

The Downstate column was published in Voices Vol. 30, Spring-Summer, 2004. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.