Monday, September 04, 2006

invisible cities

marco polo: memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. Perhaps i am afraid of losing Venice all at once. If i speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, i have already lost it, little by little.

Khan: so then yours is truly a journey through memory! it was to slough off a burden of nostalgia that you went so far away. you return from your voyages with a cargo of regrets.

each game ends in a gain or loss: but of what? what were the true stakes? at checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner's hand, a black or a white square remains. by disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire's multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes. it was reduced to a square of planed wood: nothingness...

marco: the traveler recognises the little that is his, discoveryingthe much he has not had and will never have.

futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches

all from calvino's invisible cities. it is a very imaginative book. it was very short, but very very dense. it's like a maze you get stuck in. the distance is short, but you can't get out of it. they say it's a love letter to an imaginary venice. now that's clever.

another memory from 4, 5 years ago
xun yi cao's theme song hua xiang.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4BcebKc42Y

incidentally, i never finished watching it.

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