As I read it, the point of Calvino’s Invisible Cities was the city was a free-floating series of signifiers, rapidly regurgitated in a travelogue or an Arabesque. This kind of post-structuralism is problematic: the sensuous practical nature of the city vanishes into symbolic structures, a baby thrown out with the wash of the ’signified.’

More relevantly here, Calvino does not intuit the ‘archetypal’ — in fact the opposite. Urban variety is not merely superficial but fundamental; maybe ‘polytheism’ is better, but still…

Calvino would reject the need for archetypes as an essentialist attempt to impose order where there is ‘really’ only movement. His problem then becomes how to define an urban sense at all (for me the opening quote above is a wrestling match, not a declaration).

This sense of flux is surely the mainstay of Invisible Cities, even for someone like me who is no deep reader of Calvino. In fact I hated the book; I read it as an attempt to hijack into pure symbolism an actual sensuous practical attempt to change the city, i.e. a ‘real’ one in a fuller sense of ‘real’. Namely, of course, Paris May 1968.

As a student of music, I constantly find two dimensions to it. Much like a coin, they relate to each other quite respectively. First, you find music in its theory. Fathomed, measured, written down in solid dimensions. Music is communicated through intervals, rhythm and measure. These are the things that Mozart, Bach, all the greats knew how to do that anyone could learn. And then there is the soul of music, essentially the heart. It is what makes you cry when you hear just the right part of your favorite symphony. Or the ballad that you and someone special fall in love to. Its the intangible, yet closer than air feeling inside of us. It is the gift that Mozart, Bach and all the other greats gave to us that we could never reproduce in a thousand lifetimes.

I believe that this beauty most definitely points to something. It is a voice that is echoing through the symphonies, through music. It is echoing inside of us.

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