Dreams on Cities on Dreams

Once one understands the origins of all the cities, little by little I could decipher the magic behind each. The invisible cities Marco Polo describes depict a dream or some sort of fantastical location that could only be found in someone’s imagination.  For instance, the city of Zobeide was founded upon a dream. All the men who come do so because they all dreamed the same thing. Who has not dreamed of a place which reunites people that have suffered similar occurrences, and then shape the city according to what they share in common. Since a lady escaped their grasp in the dream they built “an ugly city, a trap”, so that whenever the girl will appear she will have nowhere to go (46). Zobeide shows how significant dreams are to our reality and how influential they may become if everyone shares them. Zobeide develops, grows, and lives because of a dream some men had in common.

            Hypatia is a city where the meaning of words was mixed and hence its purposes as well. Marco Polo narrates how he was trapped by the common meaning of words and could not find the proper signs to meet his desires. Although desires are what he searches for, the city falls into the category of signs and cities, since the signs are what leads him to what he wants. He seems to be lost until a philosopher states “sings form a language, but not the one you think you know”, that Marco Polo realizes he must “free himself from the images…in the past” only that way he would understand the images in Hypatia (48). This city reflects the mixture of language and its meanings. Perhaps, either Kublai Khan or Marco Polo dreamed of a place where everything was not what it appeared to be. This city plays with reality and how signs may completely deviate one from its objective if not interpreted correctly. Something I like to do, picturing what would happen if bathroom meant auditorium instead of bathroom.

            The city of Armilla follows a more mythical environment where nothing ordinary exits but “water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be” (49). This city was not designed for humans but for nymphs who “in the morning you hear them singing”, happy because of the watery gifts the architects of Armilla gave them. Just like the previous cities either the Venetian or the conqueror imagined themselves visiting a city not inhabited by humanity, but by a different species and therefore Armilla was created. Yet, out of all the other cities mentioned above, this one was the one that helped me the most understand how Calvino forms each one. For very few people would deny Armilla’s magnificence and the incredibly relationship its citizens share with it. It all seems as if were part of a dream.

            At first, I was very confused with the way Calvino presents his cities, however it was a matter of using a more symbolical perspective to understand the city’s themes. Using my own dreams helped me connect the dots when figuring out how cities like Armillam Hypatia and Zobeide came to be.