Ode to Verses

( First of three parts )

Penthesilea, Raissa, Octavia, Olinda, Eufemia, Perenthia, Ersilia and Baucis. These are my chosen cities from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In that book, Marco Polo described to the aging Kublai Khan 55 cities in the Great Khan’s empire. Each tale would leave you breathless not for the sights but for the extraordinary dimensions they reveal about a place in an empire’s map. These dimensions are not about the height of skylines nor the breadth of city blocks, nor the thickness of the crowds that inhabit them, not even about the time they spent, lived or about to live. Then, you ask: What is left to describe shunning all these dimensions we have made a habit of looking at when contemplating a city?

Marco Polo shook Khan’s view of his empire, making the Emperor see things in facets his wildest dreams of conquest had not expected. To shake an emperor’s comfortable worldview is in the same league as to rouse a scientific revolution. In both cases, you risk your reputation, and as history has shown with Galileo, Copernicus and even with pious Darwin, society’s perception of your sanity, and your good standing in the church that has institutionalized your faith. But in the last century or so, human understanding of the nature of things has grown in perspective because science, as a way of knowing why things are the way they are, has, with reliability and boldness, provided the factual, testable foundations for our quests. If you doubt this, just look around you and see how science has redefined our concept of space and time. Now, learners and workers can, through computers, simulate and surround themselves with worlds they would otherwise not know. Science has even reconfigured our ideas of play and rest, of war and peace. Science has also offered us photographs from deep in our cosmic history. Our world changes as our scientific understanding of the nature of things grows, wherever your religious faith finds a home, whether you like it or not. You are not exempt from the laws of nature just because you are oblivious to it or refuse to understand it for whatever reason.

Back to the lush, cascading garden then where K and M, surrounded by imperial loot, are engaged in a dreamy discourse. Penthesilea comes up or does it? You see, Penthesilea is a city that you seem to be approaching and leaving at the same time, all the time, so that you are not sure which is the interior and which is the exterior. Penthesileans will always give you opposite directions within, or to and from the city with uniform certainty. Then there’s tickly Raissa that to the newcomer seems like a city of clenched-fist wails and flinging angry dishes, but in closer scrutiny, reveals an endless loop of laughter and glee that starts with a child chuckling in a windowsill. Octavia, instead of coming up in the conversation, hangs below. It is a city of nets. Everything in the city hangs by a vast net – cable cars, dumb waiters, planters, showers, hammocks, baskets. It is a city defined only by the life and strength of its redemptive net.

At first glimpse of these dimensions never before seen in a city, one is left breathless. Science is the same way. Till recently, scientists have been used to looking at things in four dimensions (the three dimensions of space and one of time). But in a quest to understand the beginning of things better, and to make sense of the things that work at certain levels, such as the theory of gravitation in the level of stars and the quantum theory in the subatomic level, and make them cohere into one grand theory of nature, minds may have to resort to the possibility of a universe with more than four dimensions, in fact, probably a 10- or 11-dimensional universe or more mind-blowing, a multi-verse!