Invisible Ideas

In a previous blog post, "Journeys of Our Minds," I  said that, up to the first few chapters of the book, Marco Polo was actually talking about knowledge. I believe I was mostly right as further in the book his ideas about cities become increasingly related to perception, imagination, our minds, or things that relate to knowledge. It's still hard for me to put all of the author's ideas together and understand them as a whole, but Calvino's philosophical ideas are hinted throughout the novel, either through the conversations in the interludes or the descriptions of cities.

The way we see things, or our perception, is an explored idea throughout the book. Calvino uses the sections under Cities and Signs when representing perception and understanding, but in other parts of the book similar ideas are mentioned as well. Marco Polo speaks about the cities in an imaginative way. He doesn't describe factual things about the cities, but rather gives abstract ideas about them. The young Venetian allows Kublai Khan to have a different interpretation of what he says, he opens his ideas to different perceptions. As Calvino shows in the interludes, through metaliterary elements, Marco Polo's relationship with the Khan, or the author's relationship with the reader, depends on interpretation. The reader questions Calvino's book and, as we spoke about in class, Calvino might as well been dead for a long time as our only connection with him is what he wrote. The cities have shown how languages are abstract, and communication can be about things and not ideas, or how our memories are based on simplifications of occurrences. One could say that the book shows how people's perception of things is abstract and undefinable.
In chapter 3 Calvino says, "Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours" (pg. 44). I believe this quote sums up many of the things Calvino is trying to represent throughout the book. Material things don't necessarily help you, but the thoughts that they can bring upon your mind, like when the cities allowed Marco Polo to reflect on his life, do make a difference. Our mind, and what we do with it, make up reality.

Should Women Mean Something?

Invisible Cities is loaded with literal and figurative depictions that help understand the cities and their meaning. One representation that Calvino has frequently used is women, bathing or naked, in the cities. The women never really interact with Marco Polo or the travelers, they just pose there as an attractive object. In Diomira women cry “ooh,” out loud, while in Anastasia they just tempt the men to bathe with them. Marco Polo wishes to fin women everywhere, in Hypatia he expected to see women in a wonderful river but he finds people committing suicide instead. The wonder of Isadora is that when a man is with two women, a third always appears.

Maybe it’s just my rather feminist point of view, but the author’s symbols or metaphors are too chauvinist for the year they were written. I do disagree with the way Calvino portrays themes like desire in the book, using a chauvinist tool. This made me question whether one should be able to question the author. I don’t like the way the author portrays women but I’m not sure if I can judge that. This made me wonder if art can show unfair or offensive things that shouldn’t happen in society. I guess that an artist or an author can express their thoughts in the way they want and not be offensive as long as it does not contradict that much with what we think.

Fantastical Contrasts

 Chapter three of Invisible Cities shows a change in the type of cities portrayed. Prior to the Khan’s dream, the cities had been pretty much possible places with concrete observations. One could see that these comments from Marco Polo were said in a literal way but had a figurative and metaliteral meaning from the author’s point of view, but in this chapter, Marco Polo’s ideas are figurative themselves. The cities show unreal things with imagination. Each of the cities represents ideas that one could expect from a dream, as Calvino suggests.

Zobeide is a city built upon the dreams of people. These people, from many nationalities, united themselves, perhaps showing another common dream: unity. The city was a dream, but a disappointing one (U.N.?). Marco Polo and his companions felt it was a trap, and ugly disappointing city, showing perhaps how some dreams can be.

Hypatia also shows a somewhat unrealistic city, which shows how Marco Polo’s narratives are growing into ones that are more figurative. In this city, the contradicting signs disoriented people. Some signs suggested that something would happen, but what acutally happened was unrelated. Marco Polo was expecting to see women bathing themselves in a river because of what the environment suggested, but he ended up someone committing suicide. This “Cities and Signs” city suggests that signs or symbols are subjective. As a philosopher of Hypatia said, “Signs form a language, but not the one you know.” That shows how knowledge plays an important role in communication. I found interesting the name of the city, Hypatia, which resembles hypocrisy. Hypocrisy comes from the Latin word hupokrisis, which means “acting of a theatrical part.” Perhaps by choosing Hypathia as the name of the city, Calvino meant that language can be an act that we must decipher.

An interpretation of Armilla

The rest of the cities in chapter three all show subjective situation, where Marco Polo observes some unreal ideas. He no longer focuses on describing the physical aspects of cities but rather wishes to explain them. Armilla has nymphs as some of its inhabitants and is made of pipes that don’t really make houses or any organized structure. Nymphs and naiads usually live in fantastical and beautiful places, creating a contrast with the mess in Armilla. Chloe is a city where people connect a lot through their looks but are actually completely distant. People just look at each other for an instant as they walk. Valdrada, built on a shore where people could see the reflection of a city on the lake, shows how contrasting appearances can be from actual meanings. All these cities show how things have different meanings and ways to looking at them. How we communicate is subjective, our connections can be all fake and people can pretend to be things they’re not. This chapter, as it implied ideas through abstract cities, made the way the cities are describe shift to being more figurative. 

Journeys of Our Minds

In the beginning of the second section of Invisible Cities, Marco Polo, who is actually representing the author, Italo Calvino, explains Kublai Khan the reasoning for his journeys. Calvino says, “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the forgiveness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places” (pg. 29). Later, as Kublai Khan mentions, Marco Polo does not talk about the material things of his trips, but instead the observations he made or the realizations he had, showing how exposure to different things can make us think about the ones we already know. These comments made me realize what traveling is all about, for some people at least, and how the cities can represent different things in one’s life. Calvino’s cities show how places or foreign things can make us reflect on our realities.

Isidora, the city of one’s dreams, contains the common flaw people find in themselves. In this case, people arrive there wanting to be younger, which relates to the quote I mentioned earlier, as the city makes people see what they didn’t do before, when they were younger. In Isidora, “Desires are already memories.” Just as people felt old in the city, society sometimes can make us feel like it’s too late for everything. Traveling can isolate us from that and make us realize what different perspectives exist. Marco Polo wouldn’t be able to comment on his experiences if he didn’t had such a wide array of them.

Marco Polo’s trips in the book mean much more than just a visit to those places. As Kublai Khan says, his observations and thoughts make his trips special. Even more, these trips or observations are just a literal and figurative way of explaining Clavino’s beliefs, as a work of metaliterature. As I mentioned before, traveling is a way of growing and understanding life, but what gives traveling those characteristics is the knowledge you obtain from it.

All Marco Polo’s observations, whether it is the ways one can see Dorothea, how Zora walks people down their memories or that Zirma is remembered by a few repetitions, show how he analyzes things. He is able to analyze them because he understands them as a foreigner, as he gets to discover them and differentiate them from other cities. What I believe Calvino is saying is that with knowledge, just as one can compare cities, one can build up upon ideas and eventually understand things. Another case in which the author shows that understanding is valuable and necessary is in the city of Zenobia. Merchants form different places gather at equinox, a special occasion, to trade something more special than goods: memories. Trading in memory, or learning and teaching, is better than building up on material things.

As I read the first two parts of the book the way, I perceived it changed. I started reading it as a simple book where each city critiqued a few things about society, personality or life, but as I kept on reading, and was able to put together some of these ideas, I started to understand what Calvino actually meant—I was able to understand some of its metaliterary aspects. Marco Polo’s trips, as I first observed, are an explicit way of showing how stepping out of your comfort zone is beneficial, but when put together, along with the conversations in the interludes, one can see that the book is showing how valuable knowledge is. Ways of acquiring information and insight into life are important, but as what made Marco Polo different from other travelers was that he analyzed what he saw, what we do with what we learn is what matters. Looking back at the first pages of the book I can realize that all along the author has said how influential knowledge, like this book, can be. 

An Intricate Structure

The way Calvino wrote Invisible Cities makes it an interesting but complex book to read. Even though I have tried to understand it, in the following chapters I would like to get to know where all these allegories or metaphors are going to and what they actually mean all together. The first aspect that came to my mind was that its chapter introductions and conclusions (the interludes), which are a conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, are describing the book itself, making it metaliterary, like Mr Tangen explained in class. Marco Polo represents the author and Kublai Khan represents the readers, showing how the author tells stories to the readers, and describing the way these relate an how the author communicates using the book. It is interesting to try to decipher what the metaliterature parts of the book mean, but I hope that when reading the rest of the book my questions about what it means are answered.

Another interesting aspect of the book is the way its chapters are divided. I decided to read the book in the natural order of the pages, rather than through the types of sections. In the way I have read it, it seems that each chapter has an introduction and a conclusion that relate to the chapters in between. These sections, which have dialogues between the two characters, have helped me as a reader since they make sense out of descriptions of cities. I feel like the interludes have helped me understand that in the first section Kublai Khan feels some sort of deterioration and that Marco Polo’s cities are meant to be interpreted, or that they are not just accounts of his expeditions. I hope that when continuing to read the book I can understand better the purpose for its structure. 

Genes of Memes

I agree with Hawkins in that memes are a unique feature that distinguishes humans from other animals, but I believe that this happens because of the complex level we are at evolution. Natural selection has made our brains prone to develop memes, want us to imitate genes, and therefore replicate them, in order to seek survival in our current modern cultures. Our selfish genes allow memes to happen. 

Memes are always in a way benefiting our survival. Human brains have imitated religious memes, the idea of believing in God or in hell, for thousands of years because it helps us live better. It can be because it makes us happy and satisfied to have an explanation for everything, and consequently makes our lives easier and for us to focus more on survival. It can also be because our brains are complex enough to analyze that imitating a meme and “fitting in” is necessary for survival, in many cases because doing otherwise might cause humans to kill you. Other memes, like Internet memes, also help our survival in a way. Entertaining oneself in leisure websites like 9gag or Funnyjunk, made up of memes, might help us be happier, relax ourselves and in the long-run, survive. Leisure can help us later focus more on things that help us live, like relaxing to later work harder, or simply distract our minds from survival-threatening thoughts.

Memes can also be ideas cheaters, like referred to in chapter ten, impose in our culture. Memes related to patriotism and nationalism are a way people manipulate suckers to make their ideas of survival rise and gain popularity. As Hawkins says, memes are selected, and I believe they aren’t selected by coincidence, our selfish genes shape the way memes are created and spread.

I believe memes are the complex gene expression that characterizes humans, but like every gene and its expression it is ultimately for the best of the organism or survival. The selfish genes that make us up at this point in evolution cause memes. At the end of the chapter Hawkins says, “We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicator.” Our selfish genes are so complex that our brains have been able to “turn against our creators” for the sake of our survival. 

Reciprocal Altruism?

We all have selfish genes, DNA whose only purpose is to survive, but how does this affect our lives? As I read chapter ten I noticed how we humans are simply really selfish organisms. Earlier in the book I had contemplated that ideas, but not until now had I noticed what it really means. It took me various chapters to get to know (or at least think that I know) what the title of The Selfish Gene means. It means we only care about ourselves, and I think it is true. During this chapter Dawkins gives some examples of fake altruism, like gazelles who try to jump high when a predator arrive, which looks like they're alerting the others if you have a naive unaware mind, as it actually means that they're trying the predators to kill the others. That's what organisms are, simply individualists who might pretend not to be one if it'll make it better for themselves.

Not as nice as it seems.

Earlier in evolution, or species that evolved further back in time, expressed their selfish genes through direct traits. Animals fit for survival like fish probably need to swim fast, or birds have better wings. Other cases might involve more complex survival skills, like a snail hiding fast inside its shell, or as Hawkins shows, a fish maintain its symbiotic relationships. As evolution brought about more complex organisms, like humans, survival became not only speed, or simple cause-effect analysis, it became networks of analysis and evaluation of stimuli and the environment, what is good for us taking into considerations thousands of factors. The way our brains think through every decision, unless we have a mutation or condition that alters our selfish genes, is always following an individualistic approach. Selfish genes or what makes us survival machines shape the way we think. Our ethics are selfish ethics. As my English class discussed a couple of months ago, when faced with the ethical dilemma of saving people from a train, people overall take a selfish approach. People rather kill someone with a lever than directly themselves. This exemplifies how selfish our ethics are. Our brains notice that for society it looks better to indirectly kill someone than doing it directly, so it's better for one's survival to do it the good-looking way. Thousands of genes in our elongated dan strands determine our actions, and at this point of evolution, humans' selfish genes have strengthened survival probabilities by disguising themselves.

When explaining the cleaner-fish's case, Hawkins says, "This is a considerable feat of apparent altruism because in many cases the cleaner is of the same size as the large fish's normal prey"(pg. 187). He uses the phrase "apparent altruism" because that's all altruism really is. Also in chapter ten, Hawkins generalizes individualism in communities by dividing individuals into cheater, suckers and grudgers. I believe that this truly explains modern society. The reason suckers survive is because grudgers make cheaters not overuse them, so that grudgers can benefit themselves, making them also cheaters. Suckers in a way are also cheaters, as survive because of the incentive they give cheaters for letting them survive. Society has this scenario is a more complex way. Grudgers make laws to help suckers benefit everyone, including themselves. Grudgers/cheaters benefit themselves and are more likely to survive. In a way everyone is a cheaters, a sucker and a grudger, in whatever proportion is adequate to survive and live better. In many cases of the modern world, survival doesn't necessarily mean getting rid of the others, so our selfish genes disguise themselves even more. Our selfish genes might make us want to guarantee our survival, so if it's not necessary to get rid of the others, we make our survival more likely by fulfilling any requirement that society puts on us towards having what is considered better. For example, people love doing charity work, but many times this is the result of billions of years of evolution that have led to our brains being able to analyze that helping others might help us look better, and therefore be more successful, or end problems in society that could potentially expand and affect you, therefore guaranteeing   your survival. Altruism means "the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others," so as I read chapter ten I noticed that "reciprocal altruism" is contradictory. Reading The Selfish Gene, particularly during this chapter, I've noticed that altruism is one of those words like utopia, which just don't happen, even if they appear to happen.