danny

Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journey, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.

— Italo Calvino, The Invisible Cities

As Calvino’s Marco Polo, when recounting his travels to Kublai Khan, I found myself today in that place where all remembrances come to be a story, or they have to come to be one. As Marco Polo I too have to search my past memories and, after a long journey in lands of unspeakable beauty and rareness and other new sensations, I too come to terms to painting a portrait, or better a map, of what has been seen and lived.

Once back to the land of those who are like me, I sit and reassemble the views and mementoes that conform the land of my travels, that unknown land that my travels have crossed and perused in distant and then close contact. Those places come together in a topography of relations and connections, becoming a path, mountains and valleys, cities and jungles of what my eyes have seen, my ears have heard, my heart has felt.

Just as Marco Polo did, I now need the help of the knowledge of a higher conscience. I too go back to other men’s unfinished, incomplete cartography in search for the routes my story knows as hers. I too go back to the books and theory of others that have been there before, whether in person or in dreams, in levitating dreams of others or themselves, in long lonely or accompanied trips of theirs, in caravans, in excursions and in tours of completely craze and lost.

I am the cartographer of a new land, unknown and familiar only to me, in the midsts of others’ lands, others’ paths, others’ stories and worlds. I am the new one in this orb, the tamer of the unnamed tiger of Borges and the unnamed rose of Coleridge, and like Borges and Coleridge, by drawing it, every inch and every colour and every stripe, I too make it my world and I too hope to find the writing of the god.

To find my unrepeated cartography, my unique world. My story, my life, and my divinity. My own invisible cities.