Invisible Kingdoms
I brought my iPad with me on the trip, expecting mostly to use it for reading material on the plane, but I often turned to it during the trip, in the middle of the day, when it was too hot to be walking around outside. I would read little sections from Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, and every day I would get just a few paragraphs into the text and think…OMG, he’s writing about Burma! Here’s a sample:
From the high balustrade of the palace the Great Khan watches his empire grow. First the line of the boundaries had expanded to embrace conquered territories, but the regiments’ advance encountered half-deserted regions, scrubby villages of huts, marshes, where the rice refused to sprout, emaciated peoples, dried rivers, reeds.
“My empire has grown too far toward the outside. It is time,” the Khan thought, “for it to grow within itself,” and he dreamed of pomegranate groves, the fruit so ripe it burst its skin, zebus browning on the spit and dripping fat, veins of metal surfacing in landslips with glistening nuggets.
Now many season of abundance have filled the granaries. The rivers in flood have borne forests of beams to support the bronze roofs of temples and palaces. Caravans of slaves have shifted mountains of serpentine marble across the continent. The Great Khan contemplates an empire covered with cities that weigh upon the earth and upon mankind, crammed with wealth and traffic, overladen with ornaments and offices, complicated with mechanisms and hierarchies, swollen, tense, ponderous.
“The empire is being crushed by its own weight,” Kublai thinks, and in his dreams now cities light as kites appear, pierced cities like laces, cities transparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves’ veins, cities lined like a hand’s palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness.
“I shall tell you what I dreamed last night,” he says to Marco. “In the midst of a flat and yellow land, dotted with meteorites and erratic boulders, I saw from a distance the spires of a city rise, slender pinnacles, made in such away that the moon in her journey can rut now on one, now on another, or sway from the cables of the cranes.”
And Polo says, “The city of your dream is Lalage. Its inhabitants arrange these invitations to rest in the night sky so that the moon would grant everything in the city the power to grow ad grow endlessly.”
“There is something you do not know,” the Khan adds. “The grateful moon has granted the city of Lalage a rarer privilege: to grow in lightness.”
***
The photos above are of Bagan, taken from the top of one of the 2,000+ temples and pagodas still remaining from the Kingdom of Pagan, where from the 11th to 13th centuries, more than 10,000 temples were built.