zenosanalytic reblogged
I keep dreaming of the same city. It's not one I've been to, and I can't recall ever seeing it in a video. But it's consistent across dreams.
I don't know what this means.
Marco, meanwhile, continued reporting his journey, but the emperor was no longer listening.
Kublai interrupted him: “From now on I shall describe the cities and you will tell me if they exist and are as I have conceived them. I shall begin by asking you about a city of stairs, exposed to the sirocco, on a half-moon bay. Now I shall list some of the wonders it contains: a glass tank high as a cathedral so people can follow the swimming and flying of the swallow fish and draw auguries from them; a palm tree which plays the harp with its fronds in the wind; a square with a horseshoe marble table around it, a marble tablecloth, set with foods and beverages also of marble.”
“Sire, your mind has been wandering. This is precisely the city I was telling you about when you interrupted me.”
“You know it? Where is it? What is its name?”
“It has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason why I was describing it to you: from the number of imaginable cities we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
“I have neither desires nor fears,” the Khan declared, “and my dreams are composed either by my mind or by chance.”
“Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
“Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.”
