There’s a quote from
Baudelaire I’ve always found funny: apparently, when asked why he didn’r write
any nature poetry, his answer was simple and direct: “I don’t worship
vegetables.” Just the right amount of
bluntness and smart-assery that reveals a genuine creature of the city.
The city is, for many
of us, the landscape of record. I didn’t
grow up where that was the case: my two principal childhood homes were suburban
and country, and the circles of my travels seem to take me back to small
towns—places of mixed blessings that seem to be where I settle, as a rule. But I believe the city is the arena in which
the drama and situations of the 21st century inevitably take place,
and I believe there is nothing particularly fresh or insightful in saying that.
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But it isn’t as bleak
as that. In Milan only a week ago, I
again brushed against the ideas of the Italian Futurists—Marinetti and Boccioni
and their celebration of the art of machinery and noise and combustion. Too bad some of them filtered that passion
into Fascism, because they were certainly on to something in the human spirit. We love the new, the brilliant and
violent. We love the crash and clamor of
things, especially when we’re young, but in my case some of the affections
lingered into middle age, so here I am—part of me Futurist, while another part
romances the past and the layers of cities.
And as character in
modern fiction, cities in modern times take on personality. You get to know them gradually: at first they
are mysteries, broad stereotypes of what you have sometimes heard,
perhaps. For me, the cities often take
shape through what I have read: I cannot imagine Prague, for example, other
than through the lens of Franz Kafka, although in doing so, I no doubt miss the
city on a number of levels. As it
reveals itself through exceptions to type, the city unfolds slowly and with
nuance, like Molly Bloom or Quentin Compson, and you acquaint yourself in
stages, learning streets and districts and skylines as you might countenance
and expression.
So this entry is
intended to head up a section of my travel writings called Visible Cities. The homage is obvious: Calvino’s book Invisible Cities is one of the most
beautiful things written in the 20th century, and I owe him much
more than a title. Calvino’s cities were drawn as rich prose poems, fantasies
on ideas and on the way we organize, construct, and give meaning to the raw
materials around us. No wonder he used the
city: it is always a chaos almost always struggling to become something:
experts on chaos theory (of which I am certainly not one) claim that it is the
only way to explain the traffic patterns of cities, and since that assertion
requires a knowledge of physics above my pay grade, I will just assume they
have a point, and that the city’s disorder was a kind of vehicle for larger,
more conceptual orders that Calvino managed to discover in its parts and unruly
complications.
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So lovely and insightful! Thank you, Michael!
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