Winter is ending when it was only ever a ghost. Its feeble reign was an invisible abyss with no growth, some cold, and nothing to see for the king of frost but a few paltry flakes clinging to a quickly warming ground. In this state spring will arrive, and I will think, none too soon. I feel like winter is a kind of sleep, and when it does not come I feel as restless as I would if I had lost a night of sleep, or slept little. You know what I mean, the sandpaper feeling. It’s not like I wanted to walk around trembling, but I thought that it made me stronger. I thought that I could feel a kind of warmth in the cold that I could not feel in the heat, that inside warmth.
Yet you may not feel this way, or, in any case, you may be on a different side a the planet and don’t have the same seasonal progression.
Still, season is a companion. The result is jarring when time passes and the . I have been thinking about invisible things. Teaching critical skills is like teaching an invisible code. The other day I revealed to my student that you don’t have to say thank you, that it is something that we do as a society. It is a moral obligation we have to one another: invisible things. This kind of invisible interaction is made manifest in Italo Calvino’s experimental work, Invisible Cities, which I recently read with high school students for a book club I am hosting at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn.
Change is sometimes hard to define precisely because we have never experienced it before. In the end, season is a relationship with land.
One thing I like about experimental literature is that it puts you into an unfamiliar place. It can be quite uncomfortable to read, but, if you stay with it, the prose can teach you a different way to look at, not only language, but thought.
I want to give a tool for discussion around Invisible Cities:
- Was there a specific city that caught your eye, or that you thought was interesting/disturbing/lovely? Why?
- Why do you think these cities are strung together by this conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan? What is Calvino trying to do here?
- Octavio Paz (poet, politician, and philosopher – writer from Mexico) described the settler colonial project as a project on time (I also got this from M. Nourbese Philip):
- settler colonialism is the creation of an idea placed on a land, disrupting and activly converting and/or killing indigneous populations.
- The US project provided three kinds of “time” which created racial constructs: the enslaved people (present), settlers (future), indigenous population in the past.
- In the Renaissance they made maps of “utopia” in Europe. Cities developed “identities” with indiviuality of people in art history.
- What do you think about the ‘chess’ section? Are cities somehow only relational?
- Why do you think the cities have names of women? (or many of them)
- Why the different types of cities? (“Thin” etc…)
- “seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure. Give them space.” (165) In the immensity of cities, time, and memories, we can find the good in each moment, in each person, and give that part room to breathe.
Bending Tree Education 