Imaginary cities
Jul. 29th, 2008 08:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kate_schaeferI've been reading Endless Things, the last volume of John Crowley's Ægypt series. Crowley always builds a world for his fiction, a world much larger and more complicated than the large and complicated image of that world presented on the page. Ægypt is about (among many other things) world-building, mostly world-building from the books read and lived in during childhood, supplemented with books read and half-read later in life, the hazy recollection of books described by others, and finally travel to the places of those books, insofar as they still exist or ever existed. It's about imaginary cities, even if those cities are real.
Crowley's imaginary cities include Adocentyn, Prague, Rome, London, and maybe New York. None of those are my imaginary cities; mine are Carcassonne, Samarkand, Trebizond, and Byzantium (I have an imaginary Bath as well, but since it's made up of equal parts Austen and Heyer, it's a prosaic Bath with little enchantment to it, and I suspect it would map pretty closely to the real, physical Bath in a way that the cities of imagination can never do).
Two of my imaginary cities -- Carcassonne and Samarkand -- come from poems I read when I was young, poems which are not technically great, but tremendously compelling nevertheless: "Carcassonne" by Gustave Nadaud, which I always read in translation by John Reuben Thompson, and "Samarkand" by James Elroy Flecker. I could bring either poem to mind (not whole, but whole enough for dazy contemplation) by muttering the name of the city under my breath, and there it would be, glittering towers, foreign cries, strange goods, dangerous beauties, mysterious religions, everything necessary for a life not known in Ohio. "For lust of knowing what should not be known/We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand."
"Samarkand" isn't really about Samarkand, a real city on the old Silk Road and still there in modern Uzbekistan, at all; it's about Baghdad, and journeys away from Baghdad, Baghdad being prosaic and everyday, and the destinations (including death in the desert) mostly prosaic as well, with Samarkand, and the journey to Samarkand, being somehow different. Baghdad today is all war and war recovery all the time; Baghdad in my youth was the city where Haroun al-Rashid ruled by day and wandered the streets in disguise by night, except when it was New York City instead (I read the stories of O. Henry a few years earlier than I should have); the idea that Baghdad could have been prosaic was amazing all by itself.
"Carcassonne" is, again, not really about Carcassonne, but about the never-made journey to Carcassonne and the longing for that other place: "One gazes there on castle walls/As grand as those of Babylon,/A bishop and two generals!/I do not know fair Carcassonne,/I do not know fair Carcassonne!" A few years ago, I was in France for two weeks, not many miles from Carcassonne, and though we talked several times of going to Carcassonne, and some of the others in our party went to Carcassonne, I didn't. I expect that I'll get there some time; I understand it's now much like Rocamadour, which I did see.
My imaginary Trebizond and Byzantium are from titles: Rose Macauley's novel, The Towers of Trebizond and Yeats's poem, "Sailing to Byzantium." I've read the novel and the poem, but the imaginary cities are not made up of that novel and that poem. They spring up entirely from the titles, from the peculiar magic of the imagined view and the imagined journey.
Completely imaginary places have never had this grip on my imagination. Atlantis, El Dorado, Shangri-La, Ultima Thule: I'm mildly interested in them, but I never went there in daydream. I suspect that I might have been fascinated by Adocentyn if I had stumbled across it in my youth, but I never heard of it (or remembered hearing of it) until I read Crowley's work, which rather surprises me, since I've read lots of Crowley's sources.
Where are your imagined places?
Crowley's imaginary cities include Adocentyn, Prague, Rome, London, and maybe New York. None of those are my imaginary cities; mine are Carcassonne, Samarkand, Trebizond, and Byzantium (I have an imaginary Bath as well, but since it's made up of equal parts Austen and Heyer, it's a prosaic Bath with little enchantment to it, and I suspect it would map pretty closely to the real, physical Bath in a way that the cities of imagination can never do).
Two of my imaginary cities -- Carcassonne and Samarkand -- come from poems I read when I was young, poems which are not technically great, but tremendously compelling nevertheless: "Carcassonne" by Gustave Nadaud, which I always read in translation by John Reuben Thompson, and "Samarkand" by James Elroy Flecker. I could bring either poem to mind (not whole, but whole enough for dazy contemplation) by muttering the name of the city under my breath, and there it would be, glittering towers, foreign cries, strange goods, dangerous beauties, mysterious religions, everything necessary for a life not known in Ohio. "For lust of knowing what should not be known/We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand."
"Samarkand" isn't really about Samarkand, a real city on the old Silk Road and still there in modern Uzbekistan, at all; it's about Baghdad, and journeys away from Baghdad, Baghdad being prosaic and everyday, and the destinations (including death in the desert) mostly prosaic as well, with Samarkand, and the journey to Samarkand, being somehow different. Baghdad today is all war and war recovery all the time; Baghdad in my youth was the city where Haroun al-Rashid ruled by day and wandered the streets in disguise by night, except when it was New York City instead (I read the stories of O. Henry a few years earlier than I should have); the idea that Baghdad could have been prosaic was amazing all by itself.
"Carcassonne" is, again, not really about Carcassonne, but about the never-made journey to Carcassonne and the longing for that other place: "One gazes there on castle walls/As grand as those of Babylon,/A bishop and two generals!/I do not know fair Carcassonne,/I do not know fair Carcassonne!" A few years ago, I was in France for two weeks, not many miles from Carcassonne, and though we talked several times of going to Carcassonne, and some of the others in our party went to Carcassonne, I didn't. I expect that I'll get there some time; I understand it's now much like Rocamadour, which I did see.
My imaginary Trebizond and Byzantium are from titles: Rose Macauley's novel, The Towers of Trebizond and Yeats's poem, "Sailing to Byzantium." I've read the novel and the poem, but the imaginary cities are not made up of that novel and that poem. They spring up entirely from the titles, from the peculiar magic of the imagined view and the imagined journey.
Completely imaginary places have never had this grip on my imagination. Atlantis, El Dorado, Shangri-La, Ultima Thule: I'm mildly interested in them, but I never went there in daydream. I suspect that I might have been fascinated by Adocentyn if I had stumbled across it in my youth, but I never heard of it (or remembered hearing of it) until I read Crowley's work, which rather surprises me, since I've read lots of Crowley's sources.
Where are your imagined places?
