the city of women, the city of mirth

       When Romulus looked down at his city, he discovered what every man after him will also come to recognize— namely, that cities are defined by women.  Women walk their streets, women make rounds in their marketplaces, women stand on their rooftops and at open windows, their voices filling the air.  From atop the Palatine Hill, this is how Rome must have appeared in the beginning, the kidnapped Sabine women traversing its alleys and passageways like luckless victims in a labyrinth.  In fact, if we are to regress and break down the word city itself, we will find that even it is feminine.  City, from the Latin civitas and ultimately, urbs, takes on the female gender grammatically in many languages: la ciudad in Spanish, die stadt in German, la ville in French, la città in Italian, and so on.
       So, women are cities, and cities are women.  I want to imagine that a city such as this is a slow city.  Once its avenues are drawn and laid and every square mile is populated, its citizens go about their lives in such an impeded state that to an outsider, it is immobile.  Cars slide on the asphalt, birds never land, strangers lock eyes for years, rain is in suspension, earthquakes do not seem to affect it.  Placed side by side, a normal city would appear to experience accelerated progress.  I want to call this type of city a city of mirth.  Mirth: jollity, gaiety, laughter.  Its inhabitants are young and then are old, they habitually find the shortest ways to the end of a conversation, buses and trains arrive at their destinations instantaneously, buildings are built and then razed immediately, etc.  The excited city left to its own accord would, like any other city of its kind, simply be founded, thrive, and die.
       To prevent this destruction, we must put these two entities together, the city of women and the city of mirth.  It is only by doing so that we can explain the continued existence of the cities of old: Byblos, Damascus, Jericho, Beirut and so on.  According to Calvino, cities such as these have struggled to finally arrive at their current shapes.  So then it is only natural that I want to imagine a city without a permanent form at all.  For example, its streets are arbitrarily placed, its residents speak in tongues not yet evolved, law and lawlessness coexist peacefully.  This polymorphous city takes on the shapes of its daily whims: a carousel, a puddle, an animal, a desert plant, and so on, a veritable constellation indecisive in both anatomy and arrangement.  From an outsider’s perspective, this is how this new city will always appear.  From the inside however, one only has to imagine the first days of the Roman empire through the eyes of one of its denizens.  If we were present in the moment, if we could place ourselves where we could never be, we would see Romulus above on his hill and the city of women below him, a city of aqueducts, bridges, outdoor theaters, markets with sundries and myrrh, baths, libraries, and roads repeating themselves in intricate gossamer patterns.  La mujer, die frau, la femme, la donna, and so on.  This would be the city of memory.

- Chicago (Dan Schultz)

memoranda neue

       In third person: A woman sits recollecting her lovers.  Hours after beginning, she finds that there have been more than she remembers.  She begins writing down their names on sheets of paper, on her hands and arms, in the margins of old magazines.  Soon, she resorts to the blank walls of her room, filling them each to their corners.  The ones remaining she begins reciting their names aloud, recalling their middle names and surnames whenever possible.  She consults the pages of The Decameron for those she has long forgotten; she consults telephone directories for those yet to come.  A lover is not determined only by past and current coital interactions, as is defined by normal usage.  Instead, to her, a lover is also every man with whom she will eventually come into contact throughout the rest of her life, physically, verbally, mentally, situationally, every man that she has not yet met, but has already assigned idiosyncrasies to and to whom she has committed names.  Engaged in this process of selective remembrance, she arrives at a new discovery: that she is living in the time of new memories.
       In second person: You meet a man who says he is able to will things and events solely by the use of repetition.  Under these rules, he explains to you, things happen as they should and things happen as they should not.  Macduff kills Macbeth, the smile of Persephone brings about the changes in the seasons, weight is a function of gravity, elephants fly, turkeys swim, fish crawl, and so on.  As an exercise, he tells you to think about mythical creatures, repeating them in your mind until they populate your every thought: sphinxes, sphinxes, sphinxes, hippogriffs, hippogriffs, satyrs, satyrs, centaurs, centaurs.  If you repeat an argument enough times, it becomes true.  For instance, Borges’ dreamtiger.  Dreamtigers exist along the Paraná River, inhabiting the dense foliage along the banks.  Their stripes are inverted, those dreamtigers.
       And finally, in first person: I am always forced to recall things as they were.  Remember the tigers: if you repeat an argument enough times, it becomes true.  In other words, hypotheses of the present will eventually turn into laws of the past.  In the time of new memories, a promiscuous woman dreams up future lovers in her bedroom, repeating their names with her inner voice, ingraining each into her mind.  Effectively, she has already spoken to each of them.  Effectively, she has already led each of them by the hand to her bed.  If I apply the same rules to logic, similarities appear.  Logic exposed under the fallacy of repetition begins to break down because logic does not exist if it is under duress.  What I mean to say is if an argument, action, or thought perseverates enough, we can begin to ascribe to it certain truths, or in the case of a mythical creature, even go so far as to analyze its behavioral patterns and circadian rhythm.