City Creation (introduction)

ity

“Travelers return from the city of Zirma with distinct memories:

a blind black man shouting in the crowd, a lunatic teetering on a skyscraper’s cornice, a girl walking with a puma on a leash.

Actually many of the blind men who tap their canes on Zirma’s cobblestones are black; in every skyscraper there is someone going mad; all lunatics spend hours on cornices; there is no puma that some girl does not raise, as a whim. The city is redundant:

it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind.”

– Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

The City. The ur-metropolis. The center of the world.

Archaeological evidence attests that both the fay and the underfolk occupied the City in their turns, but for untold generations it has been the capital of the human world. A multitude of empires have each claimed the City as their own. It has spilled from its original boundaries, been reduced to rubble by invaders, and renamed countless times to honor forgotten god-kings.

But it remains the City.

reation