Waking Cities

“The city of Life is different from any other city you will find in your empire, for its sole purpose revolves around the truth of what makes it real.” What is it that makes something real? In Calvino’s Invisible Cities, reality is approached from a particular point of view. It engages us to believe something is real by telling us about something which isn’t. We travel through a series of cities, varying from the most unimaginable to the most disconcerting, and find ourselves looking at a reality based on these imaginary places. It’s almost as if we were lead into a waking life, peering into something that is real while arriving from an imaginary reality. And this is depicted more easily by analyzing the movie Waking Life (2001), where many of the concepts that the various characters try to teach to the main character are also seen as an imaginary city, an invisible city. Invisible Cities shows us a reality through the eyes of the imaginary, giving us guidance and entertaining us at the same time, and which is clearly seen by the dialogues in the more direct Waking Life.

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Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan a city known as Eusapia. This is a very particular city as Marco Polo describes it. “No city is more inclined than Eusapia to enjoy life and flee care. And to make the leap from life to death less abrupt, the inhabitants have constructed an identical copy of their city, underground.” pg 109. They have made an exact replica of their city for the dead, where when people die, they are taken there and set as if they were still alive. “They say that every time they go below they find something changed in the lower Eusapia; the dead make innovations to their city; not many; but surely the fruit of sober reflection, not passing whims.” pg 110. How can it be that the dead make innovations to their city? It is obviously referring to something else that is not so literal. Also, the city of the dead? Sounds familiar to what Dante describes in his Inferno, but doesn’t necessarily have to relate to that. On the other side, if you think of something mentioned in Waking Life in the part where the couple talks, you do notice a resemblance.

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The guy mentions to his girlfriend on how it is that when a person dies, his brain continues to have brain activity for another 12 minutes. This he then relates to how it is that when you go to sleep you might only sleep for about a minute or two, but in your mind you experience a lifetime of events. Those 12 minutes then become an entire life you could be experiencing while already being considered dead. So are you living after death? In Waking Life it’s stated that you could live an entire lifetime in those few minutes, but when you think of it, when a person dreams, he doesn’t usually dream exactly the things his life is about, but sometimes dreams crazy things that we would never expect to happen in our lives. In Eusapia the same thing happens. “To be sure, many of the living want a fate after death different from their lot in life, the necropolis is crowded with big-game hunters, mezzosopranos, bankers, violinists, duchesses, courtesans, generals- more than the city ever contained.” pg 109. So in both cases, after a person dies, they don’t actually die, but experience a whole new life that may be different from the one they already had.

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Then in the movie of Waking Life a part comes when a scientist begins to explain how it is that we are actually part of an organized set of natural laws where we do not actually decide the things we do. He begins by comparing it to destiny and how the believe in God being the one that decides on what happens, when compared to science might make sense. If we are a system that follows all of the natural laws, and our brain is a system that sends commands to other parts of our body to issue a command, we believe we are free of doing it, but actually all of those things are done by laws such as the chemical laws and electrical laws. So no matter what we do, there is no such thing as free will. We are doomed to live in a world in which everything is predetermined. And then comes another city described by Marco Polo called the city of Perinthia. This city is as particular as any other city Marco Polo talks about, but what makes it unique is how it relates to this theory of predestination.

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“Summoned to lay down the rules for the foundation of Perinthia, the astronomers established the place and the day according to the position of the stars; they drew the intersecting lines of the decumanus and the cardo, the first oriented to the passage of the sun and the other like the axis on which the heavens turn.” pg 144. The city is arranged in a way so that everything about it is set according to the arrangement of the heavens, as if it were a reflection of the organization imposed in space by the natural laws. So the city actually becomes something that was predestined to be like that, it becomes what it was going to become anyways. “Perinthia- they guaranteed- would reflect the harmony of the firmament; nature’s reason and the god’s benevolence would shape the inhabitants destinies.” pg 144. So maybe things are supposed to be predestined in a way, for we are but a set of natural laws, and here Calvino expresses it in a way to make us understand. He tells us how it is that a city is reflected only and precisely on the natural bodies in space, and not how the architects of the city wanted to build it. Everything that happens in the celestial body will automatically cause something to happen in the exact same way inside the city, making the city something dependable on natural laws.

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Also, you can see how in the movie some captions actually help make the points proposed become more obvious and get more emphasis. Depending on how the images are presented, you understand and give importance to certain parts of what they are saying, so presenting them in the correct way can sometimes improve the results you get. For example, the first caption from Waking Life uses a series of elements of composition to help make the caption express what it wants to say in a more emphasized way. The guy moves position from being laid down to moving up and ending up being in a zoom to the previous caption. The characters are also set using the rule of thirds, appearing each on in the best position for this rule. Colors around them are mostly a scale of gray, starting at white and ending on black, all except for the two characters who appear with normal skin color. Also you notice the lines in the back of them which are used as guidance, as well as the fact that the woman is watching the guy as to give him even more importance. This becomes a prime element if you are to give importance to what is being said, for if it were presented in a less articulated way, your interest in wanting to know what is happening would be diminished.

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Then there’s a second image that refers to the scientist talking about the natural laws and about the concept of predestination. During his interview some composition details become even more obvious in the previous image. In this case the caption adapts itself to what the person talking is saying. As he talks about the natural laws, his figure begins to transform to something related to what he is saying. In this case he is talking about how the human is predestined because it works in a way that goes along with the natural laws, so his face becomes a series of mechanical operations. And not only that, but the rule of odds also applies since the number of objects working in the representation are 7, giving more importance to one of them. The colors become different as well. The center one becomes a different color from the rest apart from having the features of the face of the guy talking, while the rest become another color. All these elements come together to once again provide the caption with the necessary ingredients to make it a more interesting thing to pay attention to.

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The city of Life is just a simple addition to the numerous cities presented by Marco Polo in Invisible Cities. Each city tries to recognize an element of society by talking about it symbolically. Reality is transmitted by giving us something completely unreal, and a clear example of how it can relate to a reality is comparing it with some situations in Waking Life. But some things can contain more than one reality. In the case of the city of the dead and how we live on after death you find elements of utopia. By making a city of the dead where everything we do will be what is perfect for us, a utopia is formed. In terms of predestination, the idea of a city being made in accordance with the stars shows us how destiny is present around us. But then there’s the other part of the description of the city where when something happens in the city, the sky reflects it. So there is a trace of taking decisions and influencing our surroundings. What is real and what is not will sometimes switch side, but how are you to know which is which? Being able to understand and take the time to analyze the true meaning of something becomes essential, a tool you will use to discover what is real.