In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 Beyond from Beyond Dan Pagis’s Abba and Anton Shammas’s Arabesques In Eudoxia, which spreads both upward and down, with winding alleys , steps, dead ends, hovels, a carpet is preserved in which you can observe the city’s true form. At first sight nothing seems to resemble Eudoxia less than the design of that carpet, laid out in symmetrical motives whose patterns are repeated along straight and circular lines, interwoven with brilliantly colored spires, in a repetition that can be followed throughout the whole woof. But if you pause and examine it carefully, you become convinced that each place in the carpet corresponds to a place in the city and all the things contained in the city are included in the design, arranged according to their true relationship, which escapes your eye distracted by the bustle, the throngs, the shoving . All of Eudoxia’s confusion, the mules’ braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell is what is evident in the incomplete perspective you grasp; but the carpet proves that there is a point from which the city shows its true proportions, the geometrical scheme implicit in its every, tiniest detail. It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia: but when you concentrate and stare at the carpet, you recognize the street you were seeking in a crimson or indigo or magenta thread which, in a wide loop, brings you to the purple enclosure that is your real destination. Every inhabitant of Eudoxia compares the carpet’s immobile order with his own image of the city, an anguish of his own, and each can find, concealed among the arabesques, an answer, the story of his life, the twists of fate. An oracle was questioned about the mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city. One of the two objects—the oracle replied—has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the other is an approximate reflection, like every human creation. For some time the augurs had been sure that the carpet’s harmonious pattern was of divine origin . The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no controversy. 240 But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Threads The city of Eudoxia, the city of “good opinion,” may be an ultimately more reliable source of truth than the elegant, geometrical textile map transposing and correcting for its inscrutabilities. Or so ends Calvino’s lesson. In the case of this last of our five prefatory invisible cities, we see in operation something like the reverse polarity for what de Certeau regards as the typical relation between text and reader. Here, it is the ostensibly original text that departs from the norms mapped by an authoritative reading of it. Here, it is the text that wanders, eluding the determinative quotients of fixity. Here, it is the city-space that is transitive, not keeping what it acquires, or doing so poorly (as de Certeau might say). Here, it is the city that “has no place” (The Practice of Everyday Life, 174), that exists in a kind of beyond, which is why its inhabitants are obliged to consult the carpet patterned to decipher it, not only to find out the truth about their own lives—Anton Shammas calls this operation “autocartography”—but also to make sense of their city’s shapelessness . To the extent, then, that on the ground Eudoxia—the city of “beneficent truth”—holds definitive interpretation at bay, it could be said to resemble the movements of de Certeau’s practitioners, poachers , and nomad readers: “As unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of rationalist functionality, consumers produce through their own signifying practices something that might be considered similar to the ‘wandering lines’ (‘lignes d’erre’) drawn by autistic children . . . ‘indirect’ or ‘errant’ trajectories obeying their own logic . . . unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space” (The Practice of Everyday Life, xviii). Presumably, the arabesques that comprise the totality of Eudoxia’s design as reflected in the carpet are also present and somehow discernable in the city itself: “the geometrical scheme implicit in its every tiniest detail.” Evidently...

Share