““The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors changed.” (64)
It’s not unusual for me to do background study on an author new to me—admittedly (and regrettably) I’d never read Calvino before now—but in this case I felt I needed to know Calvino to be able to proceed. Putting his face into my head helped with the journey ahead. The reason—I felt a great many things about this narrative in the early pages that I didn’t believe I was absorbing on a surface level. In other words, me=impatient. Retrospectively I understand the absorption I craved may, may, may have come in a shorter time than my anxiety allowed me to suspect, that the intrinsic sensations of discomfort represented the manifestations of my efforts to figure out patterns I knew were there, but couldn’t see.
I like to nail things early and move on.
Amid the hypnotic beauty of the phrase and within the wondrous journey from one city to the next revolved a merry-go-round, circling slowly enough that I could easily jump on. But I felt, sensed, when it circled around again, in place of the horse was some other thing I’d never seen, followed then by the horse. And around and around and each time a bench or a clown in the place of the horse or the bench, followed by the rest of the familiar scene. Each revolution rendered the previous view, the pattern I’d gleaned, slightly off, so slightly that I doubted my own memory of the last turn.
“…the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed…” (28)
Insanity!
The brain naturally wants to bring order to patterns. To ward off the sucking sound of here comes a platitude, I ask permission to state the obvious with the aid of a sidebar.
(Sidebar: My entire life I’ve seen sounds as colors—I’m not talking simple flashes, but more like transference of complex sounds into equally complex, and moving, color patterns. A symphony takes form and shape, colors jumping and careening in their paths, acting inside or defying their own patterns, their sense defined (or ill-defined) by their motion within the larger body. I liken it to watching a color-enhanced satellite image of a hurricane, or one of those dancing visual images that pops up on some computer audio players. Because I never found cause to think this unusual, I only recently openly discussed it for the first time, completely in passing, with a professional musician. I heard it called by name: Synesthesia.
(Sidebar within a Sidebar: A mite bit of research led me to one Dr. Sean Day, who holds a position at Trident Technical College in South Carolina, but more notably is a synesthete who serves as president of the American Synesthesia Association. A journalist, one Ormie Day, once told me that the Day bloodline is fairly confined and that we’re all related).
The point—my natural ability to see order and flow in color patterns begins and ends with sound. But something, some facet of Invisible Cities bore down on me like a piece of music I couldn’t see. It ate at me from the inside. Insanity!
So I manually broke it into a color pattern.
I thought seeing it this way would make the patterns clear. Chapters 2 through 8 function like funhouse stairs, shifting (to all intents and purposes) right at each level, tossing the edgemost item off into the ether and picking up a new starter at the head of the line. Call back the image of the slightly shifting merry-go-round.
That makes sense up to a point.
The at-first-glance haphazard patterns of Chapters 1 and 9 then began to show their own order. I’d just begun to comprehend this as not at all a linear matrix, when my other half, the physicist, walked in with dinner from Dihn’s. “I want to show you something,” I told him. “From what I’m seeing, Chapter 9 is the inverse of Chapter 1.” He took out a pen and paper, asked me to read the colors from Chapter 1 in order, then the colors from Chapter 9 in reverse order. Then he assigned numbers to each color. Same numbers, same pattern. “I bet the rest of the chapters run through inverse order,” I said, willing to leave it to assumption. But while I ate my wonton soup, Art took the entire pattern scheme through the steps, working inward, Chapters 2 and 8, 3 and 7, and so on. Same mirror image, same inverse pattern, converging with Chapter 5.
And by assigning positive and negative numbers to the colors, Art determined that the book adds up to sum zero. “It cancels itself out,” I said, again stating the obvious.
My mind raced.
I looked upon the grid with a bird’s eye, performed a mental animation, transformed it into a three-dimensional figure, assigning not only a color but a different height to each. I swooped down, stood at the base as if walking into my old neighborhood in Chicago, and a (seemingly) random cityscape rose up before me.
Art played further with the same numbers, digging for deeper patterns, eventually needing to get back to his own work. But before he retreated to his own realm, he asked if I’d send the grid to him. He wants to show it to some people in the math department.
I imagined twisting the pattern like the double helix, with the center of stability on Chapter 5.
“…the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement…” (99)
Insanity!
I feel I could continue on, twisting and warping this grid, into a diamond, an orb, a dodecahedron…
“Whatever country my words may evoke around you, you will see it from such a vantage point.” (27)
…but I get the sense that it will always, always make sense of itself. It will always cancel itself out.
One thing for sure. I’ll never look at any city the same way again.”
Jacque Day wrote this review Monday, December 29 2008.
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