cloz ’s Reviews > Invisible Cities > Status Update

Their invasion may have driven out the human beings, or Armilla may have been built by humans as a votive offering to win the favor of the nymphs, offended at the misuse of the waters. In any case, now they seem content, these maidens: in the morning you hear them singing.

And when my spirit wants no stimulus or nourishment save music, I know it is to be sought in the cemeteries: the musicians hide in the tombs; from grave to grave flute trills, harp chords answer one another. (Hypatia)

in Hypatia you have to go to the stables and riding rings to see the beautiful women who mount the saddle, thighs naked, greaves on their calves, and as soon as a young foreigner approaches, they fling him on the piles of hay or sawdust and press their firm nipples against him.

And you know that in the long journey ahead if you, when to keep awake against the camel’s swaying or the junk’s rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your work will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, you battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every equinox.

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist. (zirma)

This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, vir-tues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech.