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.