Links of fire etc

Everyone who comes within four feet of this young man falls instantly in love. I know. I have only met him once and he has already started kukularing me. He is named Pete and he is now the star of his own blog.

 

 

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is a work of startling and exquisite beauty. Mesmerising. It is a series of sort-of parables-- descriptions of cities which are actually descriptions, it turns out, of Kampala city, and transpire in the end to be descriptions of life.

 

From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream, they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.

 

This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again. The city's streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten.

 

New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something from the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of arcades and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape.

 

The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.

 

 

 

Finally, I am in a morose mood. So I made another blog. Stuff that I wrote when I was always in a morose mood.

 

 This is the story of an invisible man. A man who attempted an act that is routine and common and has been performed by many, but which, this time, and with this man, went disastrously wrong. In this man, the everyday act of hiding was performed so well that it transformed, through a gradual decent so slow and innocuous that he could not see its progress soon or distinctly enough to stop it until it was too late, into an act of ceasing to exist. I disappeared.

 

 

 

I post by email, because I cannot log on to blogger.com from the Gulag. Now, the email machine is going to put a long and longwinded legal disclaimer at the end of this post, warning you that dire consequences will follow if you look at this message with the wrong type of eye. Ignore it please.

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