Reading a Dream

AC+DC 131 Takeaways from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

🌤️ 25c

Thomas Yang Studio

Queridos vecinos,

I must admit today’s writing is like the day you exercise your weakest muscle. It’s uncomfortable, out of balance, tires easily and you dream of it being over even before it’s begun! How to begin?

How to Begin

When working out a muscle rarely used, you must prioritize strategic restraint. Because the muscle is "dormant," it lacks neuromuscular connection and endurance. Start with low resistance and high focus on form to avoid sudden strains, targeting it 2–3 times a week

The “Dormant Muscle” Regimen

1. Activation (Weeks 1-2): Perform the exercise with only your body weight or very light resistance. Focus purely on the “mind-muscle connection” (squeezing the muscle and feeling it work).

   • Sets & Reps: 2–3 sets of 12–15 repetitions.

2. Endurance (Weeks 3-4): Add light, manageable weight (e.g., a resistance band or 1–3 kg dumbbell). Maintain slow, controlled movements (2 seconds up, 2 seconds down) to build baseline tissue strength.

   • Sets & Reps: 3 sets of 10–12 repetitions.

3. Progressive Overload (Weeks 5+): If the muscle is meant for heavy lifting or stability (like the glutes or back), slowly increase the weight or difficulty, keeping reps in the 8–12 range.

Where was I…oh yeah. Yup, summarizing an entire book and one such as this, is not in my practice. Yet, I love this book and I found during some video research, to my embarrassment and delight that Jorge Luis Borges was an influence and Georges Perec, a contemporary. Now, I love both of those writers, so giddy am I now to explore beyond the channel - architecture school - which conveyed this book to me. These three writers all arrived differently and certainly out of order, islands unto themselves.

Maybe that’s step one?

Context.

Influences. Borges, I’ve written about and mimicked, his The House of Asterion is especially wonderful in its vivid brevity and twisting reveal. Knowing Perec was a contemporary makes so much sense now. A Parisian and Italian living through political upheavals, corruptions, and nightmares.

Further reading, offramps from here:

• Here’s the wikipedia for Calvino if you want to dive into it.

• An interview in Paris Review is here

Both members of Oulipo, (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated as "workshop of potential literature", stylized OuLiPo), a group of writers, from the 60s, I discovered in the late 90s as they influenced the possibilities of non-linear narratives - a form of engagement enabled and afforded by hypertext protocols and the internet in general. I suspect that was the last time I’d read this book!

Two books I recommend:

• The Collected Fictions of Borges

• Life a User Manual by Perec

more?

Oh yeah that actual takeaways…

Takeaways from
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino

Some basics:

• We happen upon a conversation

• Between two real historical characters

• They met in the 1270s!

• An emperor in China - Kublai Khan

• A merchant, explorer from Venice - Marco Polo

• 55 cities described

• Book written in 1970s

• A conversation in 9 parts

Necessary detail or no? 11 categories of cities, 5 cities for each category, 55 total,
bold means that category started out a section of the conversation. I’m dwelling on some of this because of the writing methods and constraints used by Oulipo, the group Calvino was a part. Sometimes they were arbitrary, other times seeking some structure to the writing that might reveal something else.

1. Cities and memory

2. Cities and desire

3. Cities and signs

4. Thin cities

5. Trading cities

6. Cities and eyes

7. Cities and names

8. Cities and the dead

9. Cities and the sky

10. Continuous cities

11. Hidden cities

Memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuous, hidden.

What are these about?

We could say for now, they are descriptions of what it is to be human. What it has been like for humanity to struggle with distinguishing itself, of questions of our uniqueness, difference, importance and indifference. What of the impact of the canon of Descartes separation of mind and body or the contemporary simulacra of here and now, this vs that? Each city conveys the struggling dynamic to reckon the inertia and entrenchment of ideas, dreams, conveyances, communications, stories, and - as discussed in The Crisis of Narration - the loss of guidance into fractals of subjectivities.

It’s a conversation about:

1. Memory, wanting to know the future, the barrier and bridging of language, the simplification/mis-reading opportunity of this barrier/bridge.

2. Our things, possessions, the impossibility of possessing everything, knowing everything, the past is as fluid as your present, the future as possible as your perspective.

3. Shifts in the storyteller, whose imagination, whose eyes, through which perspective do we see, what does it see?

4. The compromise, risk, foolishness, or danger of language, models of language and the resulting names bestowed with power to perpetuate the model of understanding whose eyes, whose perspective, what is seen.

5. Time, history and how it is remembered and discussed. Through eras with broad titles or specific people? Is not history without people.

6. The performance, theater, and illusion of those who speak of these, who are stuck, calcified, in one, or those who consider themselves evolved but are not and those who consider themselves having journeyed but never left what they know.

7. The continuous, what blurs, what edges, boundaries, limits, or parameters we might use to know something. Are we indeed here or know this to be true?

8. Acceptance, what then is our purpose? How to avoid becoming blind to what is hidden under our noses, before our eyes despite them being open.

9. Acceptance, attempting to broaden or open our perspectives, to see what is hidden, embedded, then what? Does it not all return back to the ground, to ruin, to a haunting nothing? The book closes with the reminder to not dwell in the past, nor dread the future. All of these are with us, now. We should endeavor to acknowledge: the reality of our circumstances, of that and those which are not blind nor malignant, to make space and help them endure.

More?

Another view on the structure, where the cascade is more evident.

memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

One interpretation is simply the structure of the conversation mimics the evolution, evolving nature of our lives, our pursuits, our universe. It is this motion we are of a part. Not separate from it. We’re always moving.

Interview
from 1985

Highly recommend. If you haven’t read any of the writers described here, give this a watch. Not about the book, about the writer and another book. Simple storytelling trick to mimic the writing of the book.

More?

Why 55 cities, why 5 per category? Meaningful?

I dunno right now as I write this but below, let’s write our way through it. Two is a comparison. Three triangulates a position. Four is an enclosure, symmetrical, complete. But five is not a shape we recognize so readily. It becomes long enough, the sense of variety and diversity begins here. We can see from the table of contents that the categories of cities cascade across the 9 sections. What might be the connection to the conversations? Below is writing to think. A bit messy. Ready?

Show the work!

Here’s the work area…breaking down each of the 9 parts of the conversation. Notice the cascade of city categories. Let’s try to characterize each of the nine parts and highlight a key insight:

1. Opens with Kublai Khan skeptical of the stories of Polo. The narrator, seemingly also of the stature of an emperor, confides the loneliness of the position, the melancholy of never knowing the extent of the empire. Thus the Khan resigns and invites the stories to wash over us and realize this endless expanse is also already in ruin. / cities / The tales of other envoys conveyed in incomprehensible languages, yet this diverse foreignness a possible requirement of such an empire. Whereas Polo enacts his tales, gestures, jumps and motions. Props and artefacts from his travels arranged like chess pieces. Up to interpretation. As years pass, Marco Polo masters the languages and idioms to regale stories in great detail and precision. Yet the object retain their aura of interpretation. Kublai asks if he will finally be able to possess his empire upon knowing all the emblems, Marco says at that point the emperor will be himself an emblem amongst emblems.
   City categories:

   1. memory x4, desire x3, signs x2, and thin x1

   2. memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

   3. Notes: a conversation about memory, wanting to know the future, the barrier and bridging of language, the simplification/mis-reading opportunity of this barrier/bridge

2. Kublai, comparing his tales to all the other envoys, asks the utility of Polo’s seemingly banal stories. He begins to suspect the veracity of his stories. Thus ensues a conversation or they imagine such. They sit in silence. A question arises about perspectve on the past. Does Polo peer into the past on his journeys or look to the future. The past is always in our shadow, always changing as we proceed. Each new arrival reveals a new past. “Future not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.” Kublai asks, “Journeys to relive your past?” or could have been, “Journeys to recover your future?” Polo answers, “The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.” / cities / Over time their conversations evolved from gesture to precise language but returned again to silent gesture. To a level of motionless connection.
   City categories:

   1. memory x1, desire x1, signs x1, thin x1, trading x1

   2. memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

   3. Notes: transition from memory and desire to things, possessions, the impossibility of possessing everything, knowing everything, the past is as fluid as your present, the future as possible as your perspective

3. Kublai shifts to describe possible cities and asked Marco Polo to then say if they exist in the empire. Kublai had already doubted Polos accounts and began drifting off remixing the tales / cities / Kublai has by now dreamt of a city and regales Polo. A harbor dark and weathered. Departing figures cloaked against the cold. The sequence ensues the anchor raised the scene diminishing to waving white rags. Seek out this city Kublai demands. Polo responds with a cautionary validation. It exists and I shall not come back to tell you of it for its secret — it only knows departures.
   City categories:

   1. desire x1, signs x1, thin x1, trading x1, eyes x1

   2. memory, desire, signs, thinness, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

   3. Notes: shift in storyteller, whose imagination, whose eyes, through which perspective do we see, what does it see

4. We witness Kublai awakening to or unwittingly reveal an internal battle waffling between undeniable early symptoms of decay, collapse, rot and aspirations or delusions of uniqueness, atomic perfection grinding not towards destruction but the opposite, an intense faceted gem. The inner monologue airs out its quandary, “why focus on the dreary, the mediocre and not the opportunity?”

   Polo replies a riddling provocation that warns of a futile and fatal spiral. There is no grand destiny or destination certainly there is no happiness upon achieving it should you miscalculate the sacrifices along the way, the costs to arrive there.

   We must remember what is also lost. / cities / Kublai proposes a description and task for Marco Polo. The Kahn’s offer is a model city containing everything of a norm, from which all others can be deduced. The model contains all probable combinations from the norm. Marco also has a model from which to deduce. A model consisting only of exceptions, exclusions, contradictions. Such a model is the most improbable. Likewise if we reduce the combinations of the model we increase the probability such a city exists. No matter which direction he ventures he is sure to happen upon such an exception. “But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.”
   City categories:

   1. signs x1, thin x1, trading x1, eyes x1, names x1

   2. memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

   3. Notes: continuing cascade from memory and desire to the compromise, risk, foolishness, or danger of language, models of language and the resulting names bestowed with power to perpetuate the model of understanding whose eyes, whose perspective, what is seen

5. Kublai watches his empire expand to encompass deserted regions, dry riverbeds, reluctant crops, and ponders it is time to grow within itself. However despite the success of moving mountains and felling timbers the weight is crushing not flourishing. In his dreams a counter point of cities light as kites, feathers, and the veins of leaves. He conveys this dream to Polo with a specific scenario of pinnacles, respites on the moons orbit. / cities / Marco details a bridge stone by stone. Kublai asks which stone is the support. “It is not one stone but the line of the arch which supports them.” Why tell of these stones if the arch matters? “Without stones there is no arch.”
   City categories:

   1. thin x1, trading x1, eyes x1, names x1, dead x1

   2. memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

   3. Notes: another take on perspective to include time, history and how it is remembered and discussed. Through eras with broad titles or specific people.

6. Kublai gestures beyond his bedazzled barge asking Polo if he’s seen a city such as the one before them [remarkably similar to Venice]. No. Thus begins a marathon of stories typically putting the Khan to sleep. Not this night. They endured til dawn broke and Polo exhausted has run out of tales. Kublai insists there is one more. “You never speak of it. Your Venice.” Polo reveals, “What else do you believe I’ve been talking about?…Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” Kublai prods further to share of this city by name from once he departed. Polo worries, “Perhaps I’m afraid of losing it should I speak of it, maybe it’s already lost.” / cities / Kublai reflects, “Yours is truly a journey through memory!” An attack, maybe imagined, ensues between them. Smoking their pipes silently a cloud revealed or embodied the murky fickle expense of travel and trade. What is clear, what is solid, what marks and scars the here and now. “The jam of past, present, and future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement: this is what you would find at the end of your journey.”
   City categories:

   1. trading x1, eyes x1, names x1, dead x1, the sky x1

   2. memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

   3. Notes: building on the perspective and revelations of time, we are warned of the performance, theater, and illusion of those who speak of these, who are stuck, calcified, in one, or those who consider themselves evolved but are not and those who consider themselves having journeyed but never left what they know.

7. (Format change, like an interview. Or interrogation. Perhaps they are not together)

   They discuss whether and where they are. The palace the battlefield the market or port. Always in two. Only their eyelids separate them. Perhaps the garden is not real and they don’t exist the dialogue is between two beggars with like nicknames. Perhaps the world is in ruin except for the garden. If so it remains unclear which is inside and which is outside. / cities / The interrogators continue speculating as to what exists and how they know it or what evidence presents itself. The formal format persists. Memories, aromas, sounds. Til Kublai admits not thinking of the laborers, mothers, servants. Polo suggests they then don’t exist. Kublai realizes they are needed. This speculation useless. Polo shifts that then they themselves don’t exist. Kublai summarizes “we have proved that if we were here, we would not be.” “And here, in fact, we are” offers Polo
   City categories:

   1. eyes x1, names x1, dead x1, the sky x1, continous x1

   2. memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

   3. Notes: The addition of continuous, introduces and blurs what edges, boundaries, limits, or parameters we might use to know something. Are we indeed here or know this to be true?

8. (A narrator tells us, describing activity)

   Marco lays out wares he has brought back. The tiled floor upon which he arranges his objects precisely the Khan attempts to interpret alternative meanings. He suggests a creative constraint to tell stories of the empire only using the chess elements. Upon his return Polo finds Kublai at a chessboard. A keen player the Khan considers the rules of the game and that which underlies cities success and ruin. They played and played. Til concentration delivered a elusive quandary: the game’s purpose. Once entertained the question took hold til the whole of the experience hollowed out. Reduced to nothingness. / cities / Lost in his riddling concentration Kublai is stuck with a vision of extreme reduction. All this for a square of nothing. Of planed wood. Polo guides the Khan to notice that the chessboard is ebony and maple. The small details of grain, differences in seasons, infections, frosts are all legible. Amazed at this expression Polo continues. Here a larva nest there a worm. Numerous evidences overwhelmed Kublai. Returning to their conservation to find Polo already off describing details of the empire.
   City categories:

   1. names x1, dead x1, the sky x1, continuous x1, hidden x1

   2. memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

   3. Notes: ok, assuming we accept all of the above conditions of society, what then is our purpose? How to avoid becoming blind to what is hidden under our noses, before our eyes despite them being open.

9. 4 atlases - The first meticulously describes all the cities in the empire. Some examples are given. Another atlas depicts the entire globe. Polo is challenged to name different points in the atlas. The third atlas describes all cities. / cities / The final atlas of Khan contain maps of promised lands, not yet discovered or visited. Kublai asks Polo how to go to these place, which route, what direction, what signals to guide our way. You can only begin, replies Polo. The Khan leafs through the atlas, passed cities that haunt and menace. Kublai senses futility, we’re converging only on narrowing circles towards the infernal city. Polo responds that the inferno will not be for it is already now with us, every day. There are two ways to escape suffering it. Accept it and become so acquiesced that you no longer see it. The second is risky and demanding. Constant vigilance and apprehension to identify who and what, “in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, and make them endure, give them space”
   City categories:

   1. dead x1, the sky x2, continuous x3, hidden x4

   2. memory, desire, signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuity, hidden

   3. Notes: Even if we accept that we might be blind, attempting to broaden or open our perspectives, to see what is hidden, embedded, then what? Does it not all return back to the ground, to ruin, to a haunting nothing? The book closes with the reminder to not dwell in the past, nor dread the future. All of these are with us, now. We should endeavor to acknowledge: the reality of our circumstances, of that and those which are not blind nor malignant, to make space and help them endure.

More?

What other people have said…

Summary from wikipeda:

The book is framed as a conversation between the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, and Marco Polo. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo, many of which can be read as commentary on culture, language, time, memory, death, or human experience generally.

Short dialogues between Kublai and Polo are interspersed every five to ten cities discussing the same topics. These interludes between the two characters are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a framing device that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories. In the middle of the book, Kublai asks about a city Polo never mentioned, his hometown of Venice. Polo replies, “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”

El libro se enmarca como una conversación entre el emperador mongol Kublai Khan y Marco Polo. La mayor parte del libro consta de breves poemas en prosa que describen 55 ciudades ficticias narradas por Polo, muchos de los cuales pueden leerse como comentarios sobre la cultura, el idioma, el tiempo, la memoria, la muerte o la experiencia humana en general.

Cada cinco o diez ciudades se intercalan breves diálogos entre Kublai y Polo en los que se debaten los mismos temas. Estos interludios entre los dos personajes no están construidos menos poéticamente que las ciudades y forman un dispositivo de encuadre que juega con la complejidad natural del lenguaje y las historias. A mitad del libro, Kublai pregunta sobre una ciudad que Polo nunca mencionó: su ciudad natal, Venecia. Polo responde: “Cada vez que describo una ciudad estoy diciendo algo sobre Venecia”.

Book Review
from 2025

Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city. Marina and Anna Della read Invisible Cities alongside the Travels of Marco Polo, and explore how both blur the lines between reality and fantasy, storyteller and audience. They discuss the connections between Calvino’s love of fairytales and his anti-fascist politics, and why he saw the fantastic as a mode of truth-telling.

Book Review
from 2017

We ask again, what it is to be human?

in 1270s China?

in 1970s Italy?

Now?

What is it to struggle to distinguish ourself, questions of our uniqueness, difference, importance and indifference. What of the impact of the canon of Descartes separation of mind and body, our relation to things, nature? What of the contemporary simulacra of here and now, this vs that? Each city conveys the struggling dynamic to reckon the inertia and entrenchment of ideas, dreams, conveyances, communications, stories, and guidance in a universe of fractal subjectivities.

Thanks for reading,

[sgp]

☕️☕️

Si estás en Barcelona, ​​envía un mensaje y ¡podemos tomarnos un café!

If you’re in Barcelona, send a msg, and we can go for a coffee!

ABOUT US

FIELD REPORT es el nuevo canal adoptado por CRC en colaboración con Possibility Hours y Adventuring Ventures. FIELD REPORT is the new adopted channel for CRC in collaboration with Possibility Hours and Adventuring Ventures.