Cities and Memory: Linka

 

Big Ten Commissioner Tony Pettiti told Marco Polo that he would tell him about Big Ten cities and Marco Polo would tell him if they existed. "Here is an enormous, teeming city," Pettiti said. "Buildings pile up next to buildings. All manner of people that have ever existed bounce off each other on unimaginable business.  And yet, despite their differences, there is one thing that unites them: wanting to watch small, regional football teams from suburbs or even small towns nowhere near them on television. Every single week, they huddle together around television sets fervently hoping to see their team or other teams from cities hundreds or even thousands of miles away play, and in their excitement they are willing to buy the products they see on screen: extra large men's pants, various braces for sore limbs, farm implements. Every person in these gigantic cities where they are crammed next to each other in small apartments will order a backhoe or one  one of those string spinners used for weeds."

"Great Commissioner, I have not seen such a city," Marco Polo says.  I have seen a city where no one sleeps, where dreams become corporeal and mingle with the half-awake people. Where the distinction between dream and reality becomes blurred and so it has been for generations, no one quite able to determine whether they are in the city or in its familiar but convoluted double, where connections between the dreamers are ephemeral and yet somehow more lasting than in cities where people can differentiate between them. They float on gossamer streets that might not be there and nothing is where it is supposed to be. Those are the cities I have seen."

"You're always seeing cities like that," the Commissioner said.

Cities and Memory: Linka

Linka, the great city of the past.  Everyone in Linka knows that the city had once had been astonishingly prosperous, covered in riches, everyone happy and learned.  The love of the city's past is palpable.  They say that anyone born in Linka or who lives there long enough, no longer even sees the city as it exists, but in their mind's eye they travel the great thoroughfares and boulevards in their own parades celebrating the city's former glories.

Conversation in Linka only consists of the recitation of these former triumphs.  The residents' devotion to ancient scholars and poets and architects who built the great libraries and gardens and palaces is so clear that these great figures seem alive and well in Linka.  Their teachings and personalities have been passed down so thoroughly it is as though they can still speak. But they are not alive. Years of interpretation and scholarship and popular bastardization have created competing versions of the same figures. People in Linka sometimes argue over the merits of these great ancestors, arguments that lead to shoving matches and the inevitable interjection of passesby, who proclaim that the celebrated old figures would never shove, except for Balon The Shover who had perfected the art beyond the comprehension of any contemporary Linkan. "To shove like that is barbarity unworthy of Balon The Shover," is a refrain that is sadly more common than ever in contemporary Linka.

You would think that Linka is covered in monuments and statues and museums to honor the glories of the the city's storied past. But the city is barren. No one can agree when the golden age of the city was. Every person seems to have a different idea of when Linka was a guiding light to the world and when it has shrunk to its present decrepitude. Any meeting where someone proposes erecting a monument descends into denunciations and recriminations and the inevitable bout of shoving. Even after a particularly vigorous bout of shoving when someone suggested building a statue to honor Balon The Shover, a small but insistent faction denounced Balon and claimed that it was actually his successor Pleton The Pusher that had perfected the art, and that whatever shoving Balon The Shover was doing was low, brutish calisthenics. It took three days for the people of Linka to stop shoving each other. A similar episode happened after a suggestion to dedicate a street to Uliot The Chest Poker.

The city of Linka as it presently exists can never compare to the glories of the city in the past, and that makes the people who live there disgusted with their own city. They cannot build anything new because they fear it would compare unfavorably to what was there before, but they cannot admit that the desolate ruins of old, rotting buildings can ever be destroyed because of what they meant. The people of the city lead double lives, traipsing around the imagined city of past glory in their own heads while they grow ever more upset with the state of their own city as it exists, the one they traverse every day.  Linka is a city trapped within a million other cities that perhaps never existed, smothering the present.