Invisible Cities and their name(s): insights into the (in)correctness of names

Two cities cohabitate under the name Aglaura. One is “Aglaura that is reported” – the city as it is said to be, which is defined in terms of its “proverbial virtues” and “proverbial faults.” The other is “Aglaura that is visible,” which exists in a physical place and entails lived experiences.

In CN1, the inadequacy of names is the result of the susceptibility of words to create and sustain false opinions: “nothing said of Aglaura is true, and yet these accounts create a solid and compact image of a city” (Calvino 1974, p. 67). From the Latin imago, the word ‘image’ derives from ‘imitari,’ meaning to imitate. The word image means how something is portrayed, how it looks, or how it seems. Yet in its modern use, the word image conjures, as Daniel Boorstin succinctly put it, “a distinction between what we see and what is really there” (1961, p. 191): in this sense, the image is about appearances; hence, it tends to be misleading, if not altogether fraught with intentional falsehood.

Its inhabitants believe that Aglaura is what they say it is. They faithfully adhere to their opinions, and ignore others who, though anchored in experience, lack the authority of received wisdom. The city reported overpowers the city experienced: “The city that they speak of has much of what is needed to exist, whereas the city that exists on its site, exists less” (Calvino 1974, p. 67). What is needed are clichés that sustain the fabric of unchallenged consensus. When clichés reign supreme, the conversation is limited to perpetual repetitions of platitudes: “you would like to say what it is, but everything previously said of Aglaura imprisons your words and obliges you to repeat rather than say” (Calvino 1974, p. 68).

For its inhabitants, the name of their city conjures up the city that corresponds to and is consistent with their immutable received opinions about their city: “Therefore, the inhabitants still believe they live in an Aglaura which grows only with the name Aglaura and they do not notice the Aglaura that grows on the ground.” Conflating the city with its images is not limited to a fictional Aglaura. Almost since its foundation in 1909, Tel Aviv has prevailed in the popular imagination as a cluster of well-known images purporting to describe what the city is about in terms of its telos as a Hebrew city and a vibrant and cosmopolitan city (Azaryahu 2006). These images constantly permeate the public conversation and greatly influence how pundits, politicians, and planners engage with the city. Tel Aviv, which is mentioned by name, is a confluence of reality, wishful thinking, and mere fantasy.

When it refers to a city, a name indicates a location, but a name also doubles as its reputation. Accordingly, the name of a city also stands for generally held beliefs and opinions about the city bearing that name. The inhabitants of Aglaura are attached to their long-established ideas of and opinions about their city, which the name encapsulates, unaware of the widening discrepancy between the city and its reputation. In this sense, Aglaura – as spoken by its inhabitants – is the correct name for the wrong city.

Leandra is the name of two competing visions of the city: “The true essence of Leandra is the subject of endless debate.” The debate is waged between two rival factions: the Lares and the Penates, the genius loci (spirits of place) worshipped by ancient Romans. These were the household gods that served as guardians. The Lares were originally the spirits of the dead, and were later assigned the task of protecting not only homes but also crossroads and cities. The Penates were the guardians of prosperity and the welfare of the household. The metaphoric reference to the Roman genius loci corresponds with the modern-day sense of genius loci as the spirit of place that embodies its nature.

An implied argument of CN2 is that, since the city displays a schizophrenic personality, the name Leandra can't express the true essence of the city. Yet, at another level, the underlying theme of the fable reported in CN2 is the question of to whom the city and its name belong. On the one hand are the Lares, the natives; on the other are the Penates, the newcomers. The Lares believe that the city is theirs, and it is the city that gives form to everything it contains, meaning that the newcomers should adapt to the city. The Penates believe that they are the true soul of the city, even though they arrived only recently. The Lares, for their part, consider the Penates “temporary guests, importunate, intrusive” (Calvino 1974, p. 79). Such is the built-in conflict in cities that attract many immigrants. Obviously, massive immigration is bound to change the character of a city and prompt resentment among veteran residents.

The Penates, according to CN2, “believe they take Leandra with them when they emigrate” (Calvino 1974, p. 79). But can a city be relocated with its inhabitants under the same name? Though not specifically concerned with names but with how the human mind conceives of objects in the world, the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker wrote:

Consider what kind of object “a city” must be, given that we can say London is so unhappy, ugly and polluted that it should be destroyed and rebuilt a hundred miles away

In Trading Cities 5, Marco Polo claims that, indeed, the relocation of a city and its inhabitants is a possibility. Ersilia is a city whose inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of their houses, and whenever the strings become too numerous that it is not possible to walk through the houses, the inhabitants abandon their city, leaving only the strings behind: “They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere” (Calvino 1974, p. 76). This creates an endless process of leaving and rebuilding the city; Ersilia is a series of abandoned cities of strings that are withering away, with one city that is inhabited, but on a temporary basis only: like the former Ersilia, the current one is bound to be abandoned and rebuilt elsewhere.

It seems that Marco Polo takes it for granted that new cities, successively built by the refugees, are called Leandra. The notion that the Penates take Leandra with them when they emigrate leaves the question open as to whether the new city where they settle would be called Leandra. What is probably meant is that they take the essence or the spirit of the city with them. In such cases, an adequate name for the new venture could be New Leandra.

Pyrrha is the Greek goddess of healing, but in CN3, it is the name of a city that unfolds between its mental picture, conjured up by its name, and the realities of the visible city. CN3 is about the capacity of a name to summon a picture of a city in the mind's eye: “[Pyrrha] was one of the many cities where I had never arrived, that I conjured up, through its name: Euphrasia, Odile, Margara, Getullia” (Calvino 1974, p. 92).

Aimed at understanding how the mind works as a mental camera and how vision, perception, and memory are linked (Friedersdorf 2014; Zimmer 2021), the creation of pictorial representations of people and objects in the mind has recently been the subject matter of research. Studies focus on the ability of people to see mental images when they think of people and objects they have seen. The condition involving the inability of the mind to cast memories as visual images is called aphantasia.

The concern of CN3 is not about the mind's power to visualize memories but the capacity of a name of a city that has not been seen to conjure a mental picture of its topography and architecture. CN3 does not offer an explanation as to how a name might allow the mind to visualize what has not been seen. Interestingly, at least from how it has been reported in the press, the ongoing research on aphantasia is not concerned with the involvement of names in conjuring pictures of people in the mind's eye.

At another level, CN3 is concerned with the tension between the invisible (conceptual) and the visible (concrete) city, as evident in the discrepancy between image and reality, between what is seen in the mind's eye and what is seen with the eyes. The observation that the latter trumps the former seems to affirm the common sense idea that the city, seen with the eyes, is the real city: “As soon as I set foot there, everything I had imagined was forgotten; Pyrrha had become what is Pyrrha” (Calvino 1974, p. 92). The name that once conjured up what transpired to be false images now refers to the city that is visibly there, and to it alone:

The city high above the bay is also there still, with the square enclosing the well, but I can no longer call it by a name, nor remember how I could ever have given it a name that means something entirely different

The idea that the name Pyrrha designates the city as it exists in the world but not the city once imagined in the mind's eye espouses a Cratylian concern with the correctness of names. The name Pyrrha, now reserved for the visible city, is fated to be forsaken as a reference to the forgotten city once seen in the mind's eye. Pyrrha as seen in the mind's eye is dead; long live Pyrrha as seen with the eyes.

Clarice is the name of “the glorious city that has a tormented history”: throughout its history it has decayed, then burgeoned again; yet, has always kept “the first Clarice as an unparalleled model of every splendor” (Calvino 1974, p. 106). The way it is portrayed suggests that Clarice is Rome in disguise: the glorious city is the eternal city that is also the city of the eternal return of splendor: Rome – imperial city, renaissance city, national capital – is a city that recurs not as a series of reincarnations, but as a succession of reinventions that are aware of and draw on the “first Clarice” as a model and as an inspiration. Applying Edward Said's formulation (1975, p. 315), the first Clarice enjoys “the authority of a privileged origin that commands, guarantees, and perpetuates meaning.”

Clarice is a city where change and durability are intertwined: “Populations and customs have changed several times; the name, the site, and the objects hardest to break remain” (Calvino 1974, p. 107). The reference to the name raises the question of whether something that constantly changes over time can be referred to by the same name. The name of a city may withstand time, but obviously the city keeps mutating over time. The persistence of name and site exudes a sense of deceitful permanence. Musing in Cities and Memory 5 Marco Polo observes:

Sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves

What distinguishes Clarice is the omnipresence of the “first Clarice” in the minds of its inhabitants: “That a first Clarice existed is a widespread belief, but there are no proofs to support it” (Calvino 1974, p. 108). In his poem The Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges (1972, p. 63) wrote: “Hard to believe Buenos Aires had any beginning. I feel it as eternal as air and water.” A beginning is a discontinuity in the linear flow of time, but it is also a source of a new continuity. Notwithstanding the alleged uncertainty about the historicity of the alleged “first Clarice,” what matters is an awareness of a beginning that, even if it is ill-informed, still allows for a sense of historical continuance.

Being a historical entity, Clarice is a city in a state of flux. In accordance with his extreme views on flux, Cratylus did not believe that words can refer at all to objects of any kind. However, CN4 offers the possibility of a city that retains not only its original name and site but persists over time and through change. The perseverance of the original name conjures up the first Clarice and hence sustains a sense of historical continuity that emanates from the alleged existence of the “unparalleled model of every splendor” (Calvino 1974, p. 106) that looms large in the imagination of its inhabitants. The name Clarice does not refer to successive discrete cities located at the same site and bearing the same name. Rather, it refers to the same city, even though this city is not the same as its previous incarnations.

CN5 is also about name and change – not in time, which is the topic of CN4, but in perspective and circumstance. Irene is “the city that those of the plateau call Irene” (Calvino 1974, p. 125): Irene is the name of a city as seen from a certain vantage point. The name Irene does not apply when the city is seen from a different vantage point, since it is not the same city. This assertion challenges the common sense idea that the name of a city is not determined by a privileged vantage point and by how different observers see it. The counterintuitive point is made in unequivocal terms: “If you saw it, standing in its midst, it would be a different city; Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes” (Calvino 1974, p. 125). According to this thinking, the city is different things for different people in different circumstances:

For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return

In a sense, CN5 considers the city as being in a state of ‘quantum coherence’: the city, like a quantum particle, is in a state of superposition and occupies different states at the same time. When the city behaves like a quantum phenomenon, it depends on the interaction with it. In quantum mechanics, the act of observation determines the object being observed. In the case of a city, the situation where different observers observe different cities rather than different aspects of the same city leads to the far-reaching conclusion that “each deserves a different name” (Calvino 1974, p. 125). Obviously, the idea to name each observed city differently is not applicable: the number of putative cities is practically infinite.

In his poem Jerusalem, 1967, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (1996, p. 50) articulates the idea of a city that has many names: The city plays hide-and-seek among her names: Yerushalayim, Al-Quds, Salem, Jeru, Yeru, all the while whispering her first, Jebusite name: Y'vus, Y'vus, Y'vus, in the dark. She weeps with longing: Ælia Capitolina, Ælia, Ælia. She comes to any man who calls her at night, alone. But we know who comes to whom.

A poem about a contested city, these names are those used to designate the city in different periods of its history and by believers of different religions. The idea that there is a city that has different names corresponds with common sense, but the multiplicity of names and the context of their use to designate competing versions of the contested city suggests the possibility that these names designate different cities that happen to inhabit the same space.

At a philosophical level, the notion that one can't consider the city as one and the same thing corresponds with the theory of universal flux formulated in Plato's dialogue Theaetetus: “[N] othing is one thing, or something, or of some kind” (152d–e). As a word that is one and the same, a name that designates the city can't be correct since the city is never the same. Marco Polo, who admitted to never visiting Irene, concludes: “Perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene” (Calvino 1974, p. 125). However, inadequate as they are, names are indispensable for speaking of objects. The only viable alternative is to avoid them altogether, which means silence. According to Aristotle (Metaphysics 101a7–15), true to his belief in universal flux, Cratylus “finally did not think it right to say anything but only moved his finger.”