inspiration

Earth lights at night. Composite satellite photo by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center (click to enlarge)

The Global Vision project is inspired by many sources, including this epilogue from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino: it's an imaginary conversation between the legendary Emperor of the Tartars, Kublai Khan, and the Venetian explorer Marco Polo.

dedication

FOR THE CHILDREN

The rising hills, the slopes
of statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything, going up
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one after that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
your children:

Stay together
learn the flowers

go light.

– Gary Snyder

"The Great Khan's atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, Oceana, Tamoé, New Harmony, New Lanarck, Icaria.

Kublai asked Marco: 'You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me towards which of these futures the favouring winds are driving us.'

'For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city towards which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can search for it, but only in the way I have said.'

Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.

He said: 'It is all useless, if the last landing-place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.'

And Polo said: 'The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.'"

(Originally published as Le Città Invisibile, © Giulio Enaudi Editore 1974, translation by William Weaver © copyright 1974 Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch):

about the artist

He sees only the twisting of the path
and the winding of the stream.
He does not know that he is already
in the Land of the Immortals.

– ancient Taoist poem

You have to be the change
you want to see in the world.

– Mahatma Gandhi

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URL of this page: www.global-vision.org/inspiration/ • updated 15 May 2010