Chapter 7 Chapter VII

KUBLAI KHAN: I don't know how I can find time to travel to the countries you are talking about.I don't think you have ever left this garden. Polo: The people I see and the things I do have meaning in a spiritual space that is as peaceful as here, with the same half-light and the same mix of rustling leaves silence.In moments of concentrated meditation, while at the same time continuing to cross the river full of green crocodiles or counting how many barrels of pickled fish were loaded into the hold, I found myself always in the garden, attending the Khan at this hour of twilight. KUBLAI KHAN: Nor am I sure whether I am walking among the porphyry fountains in the garden, listening to their splashes, or whether I am stained with blood and sweat and leading troops on horseback against the land you will describe to me, or whether I am waving The knife slashed at the enemy who climbed the wall and attacked the city.

Polo: Maybe the garden is in the shadow of our drooping eyelids, and we've been busy with other things: you're raising dust on the battlefield, I'm haggling for pepper in a distant market.But even in the midst of the noise, we return here as soon as we close our eyes, in silk robes, thinking about what we have seen and lived, drawing conclusions, observing from afar. Kublai Khan: Our conversation, maybe between two beggars nicknamed Kublai Khan and Marco Polo; they were fumbling with a pile of garbage, rusty tin cans, cloth scraps, waste paper, and had a few sips Bad wine, so that in their intoxication they saw all the treasures of the East shining around them.

Polo: All that's left in the world may be a wasteland full of rubbish and the Hanging Garden of the Khan.Only our eyelids separate them, and we don't know which is inside and which is outside. The City and the Eye No. 5 After wading the river and crossing the mountain road, the city of Morianna suddenly appears before your eyes. Under the sun, its alabaster gates are transparent, its coral columns support serpentine decorations, and its houses are beautiful. It was made of glass, like an aquarium, and the shadows of dancing girls with silver scales swam under the jellyfish-shaped chandeliers.Even if it’s not your first time traveling, you already know that a city like this always has a counterpart: you only have to go halfway around to see Moriana’s hidden face—a mass of rusted metal, sackcloth, inlaid The wooden boards with iron nails, the coal-filled pipes, the piles of iron cans, the walls with faded signs, the frames of broken rattan chairs, and the ropes that are only suitable for hanging on rotten roof beams.

From one side to the other, the various images of the city seem to be constantly multiplying: in fact, it has no thickness, only one front and one back, like a piece of paper with pictures on both sides, and the two pictures can neither be separated nor face each other . Cities and Names IV Clarice, a glorious city, has a painful history. After several ups and downs, it always takes the original Clarice as its incomparable model of splendor. Comparing the city's appearance today can only be done when the stars are dim cause more sighs.In the course of hundreds of years of decline, the city was emptied due to the plague, crooked beams and canopies, and changes in the terrain made it impossible to see the former majesty. Due to neglect or no one took care of it, the houses were abandoned and blocked. ;then gradually the escaped come out of cellars and caves, in swarms like mice, hungry to search and bite, and at the same time to collect and mend like nesting birds.They grabbed everything they could get their hands on and moved it to another place for another use: brocade curtains became bed sheets, marble ossuary jars were used to grow perilla; the iron window grilles in the boudoir were removed to roast cat meat, The finely inlaid wood was used to light the fire.Put all the useless odds and ends of Clarice together, and you will become Clarice who survived the disaster, with a hut, rotten gutters, and cages.Almost all of Clarice's former splendor, however, remained; it was all there, and though changed in order, it still served the needs of the inhabitants as before.

The poorer days passed, and happier times followed; Clarice transformed from a shabby chrysalis into a gorgeous butterfly.The new abundance floods the city with new materials, houses, substances; new people pour in from outside;The new city gradually accepted the status and name of the old Clarice, and at the same time it gradually realized that it was getting further away from it and destroying it like rats and mold.Proud of its new wealth, Xincheng privately felt itself an unworthy foreigner, a usurper. The old fragments that survived were then repositioned to accommodate the new needs.Today they are preserved under glass covers on velvet cushions and locked in shop windows, not because they are of any use, but only so that they may be used to rebuild a city no one knows about.

Clarice went through more declines and revivals.Populations and customs have changed many times, but names, places, and indestructible objects remain.Each new Clarice, like a living animal, with its own body odor and breath, showed off the broken, dead Clarice's relics as treasures.No one knows when those Greek capitals adorned its columns: only one is remembered, for it was used for many years in a chicken farm to hold the hens' baskets, and was later replaced by others. These exhibits were moved to the Column Head Museum together.The sequence of these historical periods has been lost; it is generally believed that there was a first Clarice, but there is no evidence.Before moving into the temple, the column capitals may have been in the chicken farm, and the marble jars may have originally grown perilla and were later converted to hold bones.Only one thing is certain: a certain number of objects are moved about in a certain space, sometimes covered by new ones, sometimes worn out without replacement; piece it together.Maybe Clarice has always been a flashy mess, poorly matched and dated.

The City and the Dead Part 3 No city in the world is more inclined to enjoy a carefree life than Ossapia.In order to buffer the mutation from life to death, its residents built an identical dungeon, and all the specially dehydrated corpses, with a layer of yellow skin covering the bones, were brought to the dungeon to continue their previous activities .As to the nature of the activity, the first consideration is the moment when the deceased was in the most comfortable state of mind: most of the corpses are sitting at the table, or dancing, or playing a musical instrument.The trades and professions of the Eusapia of the living are also run in the dungeon--at least, the trades that the living are happy to carry on and never tire of: the watchmaker surrounds those who no longer move In the clock, put your dry ear close to the old grandfather clock that is out of tune; the actor reads the script with open empty eyes, while the barber soaps his face with a dry brush; Cow carcasses are milked.

In fact, many living people hope to live another life after death: the cemetery is full of hunters, mezzo-sopranos, bankers, violinists, duchesses, maids, generals - a number that the living city has never achieved. of. It was the job of a hooded fraternity to transport the dead to dungeons and arrange places for them.Except for them, no one can enter the Eusapia of the dead, and all the information about the dungeon is obtained from them. Some said there were fraternities of the same nature among the dead, and they were all willing to help others.The hooded brothers, after death, would do the same work in another Eusapia; legend has it that some of them were actually dead, but still walked up and down.At any rate, in Eusapia of the living, the Brotherhood holds power.

It is said that they found something changed every time they went down to Eusapia;Some say that Eusapia of the Undead changed beyond recognition within a year.In order to catch up with the trend, the living will follow the undead to change according to the situation described by the hooded brothers.In this way, the living Eusapia has begun to imitate the dungeon. It is said that this is not new: Eusapia above ground was actually built in the image of the dungeon by the dead.It is said that between the twin cities, the living and the dead are inseparable. City and Sky II Birsheba has a belief that has been passed down from generation to generation: the most noble virtues and feelings of the city are maintained in another Birsheba in midair. If Birsheba on earth follows the example of the city in heaven, two cities will become one.According to consistent legend, it was a treasured city of pure gold, with silver locks and diamond doors, all inlaid with exquisite workmanship, for the most precious materials required the most delicate skill.The inhabitants of Bersheba sincerely believed in the legends, and they respected everything that could be connected with the Celestial City: they stored precious metals and rare stones, they despised all worldly fuss, and they developed a reserved manner.

These residents also believe that there is another Birsheba underground that contains all the vile and ugly things, and they often deliberately eliminate everything related to or similar to the underground city.In their imagination, the roofs of the dungeon are overturned trash cans, strewn with cheese rinds, greasy bits of paper, fish scales, sewage, leftover noodles, and filthy bandages.They even imagined it as a sticky, thick black substance, like human excrement in the gutter, flowing from one black hole to another, falling to the bottom, until the layers of sediment bubbled, And a city of dung rose with twisted spires.

Some of these thoughts in Pixiba City are right and some are wrong.It is true that the city has two projections, one in the sky and the other in the ground; but the inhabitants confuse their structures, and dormant in the lowest layer of Birsheba is a city designed by the most authoritative architect, with the most expensive Built of materials, every apparatus and mechanism is flexible, every pipe and lever adorned with fringe, lace, and tassels. In order to achieve a higher perfection, Bersheba keeps filling his own empty shell, and regards such fanaticism as a virtue; the city does not know that it is only when it leaves itself, lets go, and allows itself to stretch, is the truly unrestrained moment .However, there is indeed a celestial body orbiting above Bersheba, shining with the light of all the wealth of the city-discarded treasures: a planet with floating potato peels, broken umbrellas, old socks, candy wrappers, Used tram tickets, clipped nail clippings, cocoon skin, egg shells, this is the city in the sky, and the long-tailed comet flying across the sky is emitted by the only free and happy behavior of the citizens of Birsheba. It's a city of stingy, petty, greedy people, except when it's shitting. one of the connected cities The city of Leonia dresses itself every day: residents wake up between new sheets and new sheets, wash their faces with freshly unwrapped soap, wear brand-new clothes, and pull unopened coffee from the latest refrigerators. Canned, listen to the latest music from the most modern radio stations. Abandoned on the side of the road is yesterday's Leonia, wrapped in a clean plastic bag and waiting for the garbage truck.In addition to tubes of squeezed toothpaste, broken light bulbs, newspapers, bottles, and wrapping paper, there are boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, and china tableware.To measure how fertile Leonia is, it is not enough to look at its daily production, sales, and purchases, but also to look at how much it discards every day to make room for new products.So you start to wonder whether Leonia's real pleasure is the so-called enjoyment of new things, or the discarding, cleaning, and cleaning of the filth that often occurs. In fact, people welcome scavengers like angels. The silent removal of yesterday's relics seems to be a ritual that inspires religious devotion, but perhaps because people don't want to think about things after they throw them away. No one has thought about where their rubbish goes every day.Out of the city, of course, but the city is expanding every year, and the scavengers have to travel farther.The amount of trash has increased, and the heaps have grown taller, piling up in layers within a wider perimeter.Moreover, the more advanced Leonia's ability to manufacture new items, the higher the quality of the garbage, which can stand the test of time and natural phenomena, and will not mold or burn.The rubbish around Lyonia became an impenetrable fortress, rising from all sides like mountains. The result: the more Leonia discards, the more she accumulates; the scales of its past have fused into an indelible breastplate.While renewing itself daily, the city retains itself in the only certain form: the waste of yesterday, piled on top of the waste of the day before yesterday and beyond. Leonia's rubbish may creep into other worlds bit by bit, but beyond its outermost slopes other city sweepers push out mountains of rubbish.Beyond the borders of Leonia, the entire world may be dotted with craters, each encircling an erupting city.Separating the hostile and unfamiliar cities are eroded fortresses, each supported by rubble that mingles with each other. The higher the pile of rubbish, the greater the risk of collapse: all it takes is a tin can, an old car tire, or a wine glass rolled towards Leonia to cause a major avalanche: mispaired shoes, old calendars, broken flowers; The past that is constantly trying to get rid of it, and the past mixed with neighboring cities, will bury it cleanly.Such a cataclysm would level the filthy mountains and wipe out all traces of the daily change of clothes.In nearby towns they had their road machines ready, waiting to level the land, expand into new territories, and drive the scavengers farther afield. Polo: Looking down from this garden platform, maybe we can only see the lake in our hearts... KUBLAI KHAN: Wherever our arduous tasks as soldiers and merchants take us, we maintain in our hearts this silent shade, this staccato conversation, this eternal night. Polo: Unless we should assume the opposite: that those who fight in the field and in the harbor exist because we two - who have been motionless since the beginning of Pangu - thought of them in this bamboo fence. KUBLAI KHAN: Unless there is no labor, no shouting, no wounds, no stench, only this rhododendron bush. Polo: Unless the porter, the mason, the scavenger, the cook who cleans chicken lungs, the laundry woman by the stone, the mother who cooks and feeds her baby exist only because we think of them. KUBLAI KHAN: To be honest, I never thought about these people. Polo: Well, they don't exist. Kublai Khan: I think this assumption does not seem to serve our purposes.Without these people, we wouldn't be able to swing around in this hammock. Poirot: Then we must reject this hypothesis.That is, the other assumption is correct: they exist and we do not. KUBLAI KHAN: We have proved that if we are here, we do not exist. Polo: And in fact, we are here.