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Cities and memory

This blogger will attempt to review this book in an uncanny way.  In this allegorical feast, the confusing and ever-so-spooky journal of cities will rule the blog.  Obviously, our writer is know confused and finds himself doubting the value of the literary devices he learned when analyzing Invisible Cities.   Oh well, he’ll give it a shot. 

“Desires are already memories.” (Cities & memory 2)  Marco Polo attempts to describe the not so obviously invisible city.  The blogger is still contemplating whether the memory cities are in actuality one city that has been forgotten in desire.  By saying that desires are already memories, Marco Polo tries to make Kublai grasp the concept that this city/cities lies on another field, that desire drives people to do things that will be accomplished.  But, is this metaphorical?  Some might say that it is obviously metaphorical, for it is part of an allegory.  Others, like this blogger, like to discard perspectives that, in his naiveté, will drive him towards clichés.  He thinks that this excerpt shows that Marco actually believes that desire is a synonym of memory.  Then explain this, blogger…

 “The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”  (Cities & memory 3)

With the use of an analogy, Marco wants to bring Zaira closer to Kublai.  He wants him to feel the city in his hand, to look for it, and we he really desires to understand it, he will realize that it is already a memory.  The city that Marco is trying to describe lies on a different spectrum. It can never be visited through description.  That is why, according to this ridiculous blogger, Zaira, Zora, Maurilia, Diomira and Isidora are all the same city, and that they are described by memory and desire.   Why else, he says, would the names “remain the same” and since “It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them” (Cities & memory 5) Why not assume that they are the same city?  Oh, this blogger, how he yearns to prove his theory, but rumor has it, he forgot.