Invisible Cities
Today I have been getting electric shocks from virtually everything I touch. It is like being trapped in the expository scenes of a superhero movie, wondering how many more times I’m going to be zapped by taps before I realise that something happened to me that day I climbed the electric generator fence to bring back that last football. Alternatively, I could be a character in an off-beat, off-Broadway musical who has just fallen in love, and all that I’m waiting for is these electric buzzes and flashes resolving themselves into a techno remix of some Irving Berlin song. There’s probably a throwaway Twilight Zone episode in there too, something about a man with electric limits to his widest senses, but I had to sort of sit down and think about that one, really, it didn’t spring intuitively to mind. Even the mundane idea of static electricity occured to me before that.
What I am trying to illustrate is how much of one’s experential data is based on the reality of films and TV rather than the reality of you, getting up and having some tea and walking around for a bit. Running parallel to my life, like any number of sandalled shoeprints on the sand in that Jesus thing, are alternative histories beyond count, paths which segue into and merge with and ultimately take over entirely from the blander and more banal periods of my existence. I don’t always know that this has happened; they are just lurking, waiting, there, ready to be discovered when I open my mind’s book to the entry for hedgehogs and find some crudely cut-out pictures of Sonic plastered all over the page. And time and time again, on idly flipping through that book, where broad scientific and philosophical theory had once formulated itself, sometimes neatly, sometimes sprawlingly, into my chaotic worldview, there now stands only three italicised words; See Italo Calvino.
Everybody should have their Bible, their great book of consolation. It has its specifications. It should be thick enough to stop a bullet in your breast pocket, but thin enough to be digested at a single sitting when most needed. Common enough to cheer you from the shelves of bookstores and libraries, rare enough for passing it on to be a hushed and hallowed ritual. It should not be the book you talk about most; rather, it should be the book you talk about least. If anyone else you meet should have read it, you are their brother. If anyone else should ever read it because of you, you are bound to them forever by hoops of steel and ichor; so choose carefully!
Then if you have read Italo Calvino’s strange and beautiful fantasy of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, which takes about as long to read as the train journey from Hamilton to Dumbarton Central and people you loathe and a job you hate, you are my friend. If one day you read it because I have mentioned it, you are more, even, than that, wordlessly enmeshed with me in the most profound links of love and debt (instantly redeemable for one drink and possibly one muffin at any Scottish bar or café). And if you have read it and don’t like it, I don’t know what to say to you, probably never will.