The Identical Difference

B:

A:
With every sentence you read in Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, you start thinking that you understand the novel less and less, and then the novel comes to a point in which you feel like you understand it more and more. As you try to understand this novel, you begin to realize that it’s all linked to real life. It changes, but stays the same. It’s hard to understand your purpose in life, but it’s easy as well. When you add a film like “Waking Life”, to a book like “Invisible Cities”; you are left with a mixture of doubt and security, because you are so sure that what they’re saying is true, and that they’re all right, but perhaps you didn’t catch the point. The main point in both of them is simple: Life is not always the same, and there is not just one possible way to look at life.

If we take a look at Invisible Cities, for example, we find a part where Khan feels like Marco Polo is describing the exact same city but in many different ways. As if Marco Polo was carefully dismantling the city and rearranging it in a completely different order. What Khan feels is completely accurate. Polo is, in fact, describing the exact same city. What this tells us is that the way in which we look at things may change things a lot. It works in the exact same way when we take a look at Waking Life. There are many parts in which the people who the protagonist encounters throughout his dream mention how life is not really the same all the time. For example, there’s a part in which there are two women speaking of how we are not the same people that we were seven years ago, because our cells completely regenerate and change, and we also change physically. In order to remember how we “were”, we have to make up a story to connect the “us” from the past and the “us” from the present. A story that ends up being fictional most of the times. So, are we really the same person? Are those memories really ours or someone else’s? It’s just like the cities, who may all be the same at the end, but they’re different cities because you evoke them with different thoughts.

In “Waking Life”, we are basically given a very long speech by many different characters about why life is different when seen from other points of view. One of the speeches that drew a great deal of my attention was one given by a chimpanzee. At first it seemed like it was funny, then it seemed weird, and then it ended up being so serious that you could forget the fact that the speaker was a chimpanzee. Ironically, he was talking about humans´ evolution, which at first does not seem like a very appropriate topic to be spoken of by a chimpanzee. However, once you realize that the meaning of the chimpanzee is not just the irony, but the message that it transmits, you understand really why it is that it is a chimpanzee giving the conference and not a human. After all, we all relate the chimpanzees to extremely primitive humans, and yet they are not so “primitive”. In fact, in many aspects chimpanzees can be much more “advanced” than us, and this is exactly what the man who appears right after the chimpanzee talks about. According to him, there is a much greater gap between regular humans and people like Freud or Nietzsche, than there is between regular humans and chimpanzees. This is telling us that we are much less “advanced” than these chimpanzees. The monkey giving the conference about human evolution speaks also about how human life could’ve been very different if we had taken other steps, and the chimpanzee himself is a living proof. It is because of steps we made that we’ve “progressed” from chimpanzee to humans. The picture that corresponds to this situation is picture (A), which shows the chimpanzee wearing a white robe and reading his speech, while the humans are watching the show. The chimpanzee is evidently seated above the humans, showing superiority, and I could note that throughout the whole scene, the chimpanzee stays well above the humans’ heads. We can also see the chimpanzee dressed and with glasses, while at least the humans on the picture have an apparent lack of clothing and of other signs of “development”, or “technology” that would usually be present. The link between the chimpanzee and the humans is imminent, since we often relate them to the origin of our evolution, but in this picture we are seen as the same species, as if there was absolutely no difference between the chimpanzee and the humans, and maybe there isn’t. Maybe they’re just like two cities that are described differently.

Image (B) shows the movie’s protagonist walking besides one of the many different characters that he encounters throughout his dream. They are right in front of a huge city with a purple sky, and are talking about human individuality. The woman right before this scene was talking about how she’d hate to be an ant, because they’re all just like the others, and they always obey what the rest of them do. A city may be the ant colony of humans. All of the residents of a city live equally, ignoring each other and yet working in unison to make the city prosper. Is the woman’s nightmare already true? Are we perhaps already like ants? There is no connection between this picture and “Invisible Cities”, except perhaps that the background of this screenshot is a city, and that they’re talking about how we may all be the same but no one has yet realized. Perhaps we really are the same already, and we just like to see each other in different ways. Or perhaps we are all different but would like to be the same as everybody else.

In short, the pint of both “Invisible Cities” and “Waking Life” is maybe just to make us think about similarities and differences. Because of that, I think that cities as individuals are not important in “Invisible Cities”, and that’s why I think that there aren’t any cities that stand out when you relate them to “Waking Life”. What really is important are the cities as a group, since these reflect the message that both the novel and the movie intend to communicate. There are many unsolvable mysteries in the world, and we might never know the correct answers to them, even if we think we do. Our point of view may dramatically change all our life, and we must be find or avoid the difference between what is the same and the similarities between what is different.

Smart Flu

A nightmare has been around in these past few months. The flu… Well, not any flu, it’s the swine flu, which was an epidemic sickness that shook and is shaking the world. It started in Mexico, God only knows why. Mexico, being amongst the top ten most visited destinations in the world, helped the sickness move around the world, and spread it first to France and US, which are also conveniently amongst the top ten most visited destinations in the world. What’s even more convenient is that traveling is done mostly on airplanes when it’s about crossing the seas. So it’s you breathing the same air as some other 200 randomly chosen people, which perhaps raises the chances of acquiring the sickness. The US, with its admirably efficient health system, is the second country with the most deaths and by far the country with the most confirmed cases, which could also be because it’s right next to the Mexican border. However, as Mexico City resumed its regular activity and classes were re-opened, the US confirmed more cases and the flu appeared in new countries. As Mexico goes back to its regular way of life, Colombia received two days ago the news of its first confirmed death, and Japan confirmed the virus was in Tokyo, coming from girls who were in New York for an MUN conference. Weren’t there CNG students there as well?

Changes...

MacBeth Scene

Our MacBeth scenes were more fun than I thought they would be, and although we had some mistakes, I think they turned out pretty good. At least they made us and the other class laugh at ourselves, and understand more deeply MacBeth, because we can say we were in the play. I had Malcolm's role at the ending scene, which earned me one of the longest speeches in the play, and although I tried hardly to memorize them, I forgot it all at the play since I was nervous, and I must admit that maybe I needed more practice. Our adaptation was supposed to be the Puente de Boyaca battle, and I'm not sure if everyone got it, but at least our costumes were kind of good, I'm not sure how the adaptation worked. I laughed a lot afterwards at myself, because I had written down part of my lines just in case I forgot them in the palm of my hand, and when I forgot them and glanced at my hand, the ink had spread all over my hand and I could no longer read anything. My team was fun, since even though we were not very organized and forced Ana to control us all every so often, we had fun doing it and planning it, or at least I did. I liked this activity, but because of how nervous I got, I'm not sure if I would like to do it again for now.

Swift's Changes

First of all, I must say that I sort of feel bad about my past blog because of what I read in this chapter...I had said that he doesn't describe the Lilliputian culture and ways of living, and this entire chapter explains how this weird kingdom lives. However it explains it with the absurdity of always. Their ways of living are "weird" because they don't match ours, but I think that Swift is trying to show how he thinks European countries should handle their laws and cultures. Maybe that's why he directs our attention to characteristic of these weird cultures that at first seem unimportant or weird, and doesn't talk much about things that we consider more normal and worth more talking. Gulliver may represent Swift, and his time spent in Lilliput makes a lot of changes, just like Swift wants to change the culture and the way of living, as well as the laws of Europe using that text. Swift mocks a lot of stuff from the European culture, or mankind in general. But he also suggests lots of changes, and I think what he wants is to promote those changes using his books, just like Gulliver's Travels.

Ridiculous to me but not to Swift

The more I read, the more ridiculous the book seems. Not because it's bad, but because Gulliver speaks in a very weird way. He exaggerates the events that don't deserve exaggeration, and speaks little of events that deserve further explanations. When he speaks about the war, he speaks as if it was long and terrible, even though it's a war started because of how to crack an egg open. Meanwhile, when he speaks about his invasions to the Blefuscudian port (which solved the massive war between the two countries) he says that he just walked over there and left carrying the whole fleet of ships. Of some interesting stuff, like the Blefuscudian and Lilliputan cultures, he just says that he "Won't trouble the reader with that", assuming that the reader is not very interested in that. I would've liked to hear more about the cultures of those countries, but yet he manages to keep going with the story without mentioning some important parts. (At least important if we want to read about the actual story, but maybe these events are not important to Swft, the writer, perhaps Swift doesn't intend us to see the actual story, but what the story signifies). Even though it appears at first as if he is leaving out very important parts of the novel, we can begin to see the events to which he is directing us to, the ones that he really cares about. He cares about the events that seem less important.

Absurd Wars

To my understanding, the incredibly long and terrible war between Lilliput and Blefuscu started because a Lilliputan king cut his finger when he opened an egg in a certain way, and Blefuscans say that the correct way to open an egg is the way in which the king of Lilliput cut himself. If I indeed understood correctly, this is most likely one of the most ridiculous wars I have ever heard of. It reminds me of world war one, which was caused only by nationalism, which can also be called rivalry between countries. The incident that ignited the tension that spread across Europe in the 1910's was very stupid, just like the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu. The war started between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, because an importan Austria-Hungarian was murdered in Sarajevo. That didn't even have any relationship with the Serbian government, but the tension was so big that this was enough. Just like the Lilliputan king's accident with the egg, it was absurd, and absurdity is one of satire's elements, which begins to show us how Gulliver's Travels can be a satirical novel. I'm not sure what the author's mocking with this. Probably he's just mocking human wars, because I'm sure there were stupid wars before world war one, at the time when Gulliver's Travels was written, since war itself is stupid.