Accepting The Unavoidable
What do you expect to leave behind after you die? As you live, you leave behind a legacy, and what this legacy is about, reflects what you are. As a person, you survive moments that will change and strengthen your heart. You experience emotions that will change and develop perspectives. You will learn information that will change and nourish your ideas. You will simply live life through a constant change. A person is affected by all these changes and consequently, a city is too. A city reflects its inhabitants or the inhabitants reflect the city, still, in both cases, they are directly connected to one another. They each live a life, some are long and others short, and then die. However this death might not really be death but just a dream, or it could actually really never lived.
In the movie Waking Life, there is a scene where a couple talks about some of the things that bother them, including the way in which we might really not be living but we are already dying. We could be experiencing a moment where our body is dead but our brain is still alive. There is no way of proving if what you’re living is actually the last few minutes of work your brain is doing as you die. In the same way in which you can live a lot in a short dream, you could be living a whole life in those six to twelve minutes of death. So you really don’t know if you are dead or you are alive. It’s a conception that includes dreams and reality that one can’t really decipher and has no way to prove if it is one or the other. In Italo Calvino’s book, Invisible Cities, there is one city, Eusapia, which also experiences this limbo. This city really consists of two sections, one that the living domain and one that contains the dead, but at the end “…there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.” (Invisible Cities p. 110) So, just as this city has one part that reflects the other and you can’t decipher which is really which, humans don’t really know if what they are living is a dream or it is actually some kind of reality. What they do know is that the dream can be based upon reality or reality can be based upon the dream, and that one city is really a reflection of the other, “They say that every time they go below, they find something changed in lower Eusapia…So the Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy.” (Invisible Cities p. 110)
Just as one city affects the other, they change with time. Change is unavoidable, but uniqueness is what identifies each person, or a city, and there is a basic part that will always stay the same. “We´re always becoming different people yet we always remain essentially ourselves.” (Waking Life 36: 56)During the movie, this is stated when two women discuss the way in which a person grows and “regenerates” through life, because it is true, we are always changing but we are born with a section that preserves uniqueness and will make each person stand out as exclusive and exceptional. At the beginning of the movie there is also a college professor that says, “It is always our decision who we are.” (Waking Life 11:10) And this is also true, because we live in a place where we are taught morals and lessons that will help us in life. These will lead us to a life of integrity and honesty, but the truth is, each person chooses which social codes to apply, just as anybody can choose which advice to follow and which to ignore, and in this same way, each individual is a part of a whole, a part of a city, that is being formed by what its people are choosing to do, so a city doesn’t really get to choose what it is, but the people that live in it do. When people try to avoid change, they choose their end, and if the people of a city don’t let it change, what might have originally been unforgettable, as it tried to remain more memorable, like Zora, in Invisible Cities, will “languish,” “disintegrate,” and “disappear.”
Language and communication work in the same way, they must be constantly readapting to survive. New points and ideas want to get across and people are constantly looking for others that will understand, or teach. Expressing ourselves can become very difficult. People have ideas and experience emotions that are simply too unique and personal to have others understand. “We use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we are experiencing.” (Waking Life 12:07)This proves to be correct when Marco and the Emperor try to communicate at first through gestures and symbols because that is the only language they share. However, with time, Marco Polo learns the new dialect and is able to be much more concise with his descriptions “And yet each piece of information about a place recalled to the emperor´s mind that first gesture or object with which Marco had designated the place.” (Invisible cities p.22)This proves we will never get to be fully understood. That the things that we feel and think might get explained to one point or another but the truth is that we “are looking for a perfect communication” (Waking Life 38:14) that will never arrive and sometimes what sticks and stays the most is the simplest, most primitive ways such as “gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects.” (Invisible Cities p. 22) This is a universal language that will give space to individual interpretation but will always mean just one thing or another. So in many ways we should just accept some things of nature, like the fact that we will never be fully understood, or the fact that change is unavoidable or that a city is composed by its people, and that each person reflect its city.
In the movie Waking Life, there is a scene where a couple talks about some of the things that bother them, including the way in which we might really not be living but we are already dying. We could be experiencing a moment where our body is dead but our brain is still alive. There is no way of proving if what you’re living is actually the last few minutes of work your brain is doing as you die. In the same way in which you can live a lot in a short dream, you could be living a whole life in those six to twelve minutes of death. So you really don’t know if you are dead or you are alive. It’s a conception that includes dreams and reality that one can’t really decipher and has no way to prove if it is one or the other. In Italo Calvino’s book, Invisible Cities, there is one city, Eusapia, which also experiences this limbo. This city really consists of two sections, one that the living domain and one that contains the dead, but at the end “…there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.” (Invisible Cities p. 110) So, just as this city has one part that reflects the other and you can’t decipher which is really which, humans don’t really know if what they are living is a dream or it is actually some kind of reality. What they do know is that the dream can be based upon reality or reality can be based upon the dream, and that one city is really a reflection of the other, “They say that every time they go below, they find something changed in lower Eusapia…So the Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy.” (Invisible Cities p. 110)
Just as one city affects the other, they change with time. Change is unavoidable, but uniqueness is what identifies each person, or a city, and there is a basic part that will always stay the same. “We´re always becoming different people yet we always remain essentially ourselves.” (Waking Life 36: 56)During the movie, this is stated when two women discuss the way in which a person grows and “regenerates” through life, because it is true, we are always changing but we are born with a section that preserves uniqueness and will make each person stand out as exclusive and exceptional. At the beginning of the movie there is also a college professor that says, “It is always our decision who we are.” (Waking Life 11:10) And this is also true, because we live in a place where we are taught morals and lessons that will help us in life. These will lead us to a life of integrity and honesty, but the truth is, each person chooses which social codes to apply, just as anybody can choose which advice to follow and which to ignore, and in this same way, each individual is a part of a whole, a part of a city, that is being formed by what its people are choosing to do, so a city doesn’t really get to choose what it is, but the people that live in it do. When people try to avoid change, they choose their end, and if the people of a city don’t let it change, what might have originally been unforgettable, as it tried to remain more memorable, like Zora, in Invisible Cities, will “languish,” “disintegrate,” and “disappear.”
Language and communication work in the same way, they must be constantly readapting to survive. New points and ideas want to get across and people are constantly looking for others that will understand, or teach. Expressing ourselves can become very difficult. People have ideas and experience emotions that are simply too unique and personal to have others understand. “We use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we are experiencing.” (Waking Life 12:07)This proves to be correct when Marco and the Emperor try to communicate at first through gestures and symbols because that is the only language they share. However, with time, Marco Polo learns the new dialect and is able to be much more concise with his descriptions “And yet each piece of information about a place recalled to the emperor´s mind that first gesture or object with which Marco had designated the place.” (Invisible cities p.22)This proves we will never get to be fully understood. That the things that we feel and think might get explained to one point or another but the truth is that we “are looking for a perfect communication” (Waking Life 38:14) that will never arrive and sometimes what sticks and stays the most is the simplest, most primitive ways such as “gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects.” (Invisible Cities p. 22) This is a universal language that will give space to individual interpretation but will always mean just one thing or another. So in many ways we should just accept some things of nature, like the fact that we will never be fully understood, or the fact that change is unavoidable or that a city is composed by its people, and that each person reflect its city.
