Spectrum

Taking a break from all those wonderful cities that Marco Polo has described since now I wanted to continue onto Calvino's main story, MArco Polo and Kublai Khan. As I mentioned in my first blog of Invisible Cities has metaliterature in it. This is confusing me right now because I'm not getting what the plot of the story is. Though, I can see how Calvino's style of writing is represented by Marco Polo's way of describing his journeys through cities to Kublai Khan.

By including the dialogues between Marco and Kublai, Calvino is given the chance to intervene as Marco and subliminally show his style of writing. “Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo's cities resembled one another” (Page 28). Showing that Khan notices this, he infers that the reader will also notice the resemblance between a city with another as in metaliterature, Khan is the reader, just like us.

Have you ever had those moments where your explaining something and you are lost for words? Well this happens to Calvino, represented with Marco Polo, when he would much rather show than tell. "But you would have said that communication between them was less happy than in the past: to be sure, words were more useful than objects and gestures in listing the most important things of every province and city... and yet when Polo began to talk about how his life must be in those places, day after day, evening after evening, words failed him, and little by little, he went back to relying on gestures, grimaces , glances." (Page 39). We can see that in some parts when describing the cities he shows us how it is rather than straight up telling us. Ironically, he uses words in order to show us, obviously its the only way. 

It is interesting to see how both these characters behaviors reflect upon Calvino's writing. Put some personality in there and it'll just make it more interesting.  

"And the fever getting higher"

I have come to notice that there are five cities that are either in memory, desire, have signs etc.... Now I'm concentrating on Cities and Desires. Again we are introduced to five new cities: Dorothea, Anastasia, Despina, Fedora and Zobeide. These cities are filled with desires that are not sufficient in quenching the visitors thirst for more.

"Before then I had only the desert and the caravan routes. In the years that followed, my eyes returned to contemplate the desert expanses and the caravan routes; but now I know this path is the only one of the many that opened before me on that morning in Dorothea" (Cities and Desires 1). With its magnificent quarters and women in Dorothea, it is every man's desire to be there. Though staying there to long for visitors will want them to go back having their desires fulfilled.
The desire to own and buy everything is found in Anastasia. Desires surrounds finally drags oneself into manipulation becoming the slave of consumerism.
"The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea."( City and desire 3). Despina shows each visitor with what he wants to see. Though, the visitor coming by sea has already been quenched by its desire and is repeatedly experiencing the same journey and willing to go by land and vise versa with the land visitor.
Fedora, the city in which its citizens go to museums in search of what could have been their city. Desires not becoming real lead them to fantasize.
"After the dream they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream." (Cities and Desires 5). Zobeide, the city that was built to be something else. The desire to pursue a dream meant to build something fraud.

Each desire in the city brought unhappiness to its people as desire started to grow and grow never being fulfilled.

Città Invisibili

We find ourselves back to the beginning. Allegory has found its way to ask us to analyze it once more. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is filled with allegories, literal and figurative meanings that are just asking to be found and cracked open. This time they brought a friend along, metaliterature. "Metaliterature: writings about writing; any written discussinganother text."(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/metaliterature)

"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young venetian with greater attention and curiosity that he shows any other messenger or explorer of his."(page 5).
Reading the first page was already a work finding what each character meant in the three literary figures. As a class we found out that Marco Polo represents knowledge and power, Kublai Khan represents Power of the east, both a figurative level. Now, in a metaliterature level Marco Polo is the writer (speaker) and Kublai Khan is the reader (listener). But we missed something, the empire in which both our protagonists live in represents reality in the figurative level an oneself in metaliterature.

So I began with five Cities and Memories, Zaira, Zora, Maurilia, Diomira and Isidora. All cities encrypted into memories with slight effects onto the visitor. Diomira, the city in which leaves the visitor with the memory a better experience from the last visit and envy to those who have already seen such beauty.
Isidora, a city made up of ones dreams of youth that are finally made true when old. Its spial staircase representing life and aging indicate how the old men of the city only live in a memory. "Desires are already memories." (Cities and Memory 2).
Zaira, its descriptions only contains its past. The past carved likes lines on ones hands indicate it is there for a lifetime remembering what it is made of.
Zora, the city in which is full of knowledge but once it is remembered it disappears as it has not present. "But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her." (Cities and Memories 4).
Maurilia, the final memory city is forgotten by what it was before with the only memory contained in postcards. Showing only the beauty of Maurilia on the postcards, the past and the reality are forgotten.  
All five cities have one thing in common, and that is that in all of them memories prevent people from enjoying life.

Genes, Memes, Survival Machines

I didn't quite get which kind of meme Dawkins was talking about so I'll just leave this here.

Anyway, in chapter eleven Dawkins comes back with another concept of replication, this time not physical but cultural, memes. He doesn't emphasize on how dolphins or ants have tea time or how eagles play more and more video games as the years go by but he focuses on us humans.

He starts by stating we humans have many memes that have changed through time but one specific that continues to this day after many years is the famous, Does God Exist? “God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or ineffective power, in the environment provided by human culture.” (page 193) This is a controversial matter that has been disputed for many years leading to wars and changes in world history. Though, how can people believe in something that has barely any evidence to support its existence? Faith, as Dawkins describes, is a meme for blind faith that can replicate it self. People can go on believing and spreading faith for as long as they want without any backing up.

Though the our physical characteristics have a limited amount of time until they don't show up anymore through passing generations, memes have a longer life spam than genes. This means that ideas, from genes' survival machines, surpasses what was ideally genes mission to fulfill its needs. 

Symbiosis

Completing the tenth chapter of The Selfish Gene, I feel as if I could ace the Biology exam at any moment. What Dawkins has taught me fascinates me. Especially in this chapter where he describes how fungi co-exist with termites for each others' benefits, which is called symbiosis. Sure, I already knew types of symbiosis as oxpeckers (birds), eat ticks off of zebras to feed themselves and help the zebras get free of parasites. Although, I had never heard of plants and insects helping each other out for their own benefits for survival. That really impressed me. 

Putting this chapter in practice, I can see how this may benefit humans if they use reciprocal altruism. Doing a favor for another can be useful when you need it, though you can't be so sure if you'll fall into a scheming trap of a cheater and you end up as a sucker. When people ask me for favors, I nervously ask what they need hoping it won't be a huge one. I find myself to be somewhere in between a Grudger and a Sucker. looks like my genes are not selfish enough to be a Cheat. 

Vocabulary used: 

Reciprocal altruism (P. 166): Doing a favor to another, expecting to later benefit from this.

Symbiosis (P. 181): Also known as mutualism, this is the “relationship of mutual benefit between members of different species.”

Sucker (P. 184): An animal that helps another even if the other won’t help in return, “indiscriminate altruists.”

Cheat (P. 184): “Gain benefits without paying the costs.”

Grudger (P. 185): Only help those who help them in return.

Blue Eyes for You, Blonde Hair for Me

DNA: The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Deoxyribonucleic acid. Its billions year mission: To create strange new beings, to make out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

DNA is the what holds all of the genetic material that every living thing needs in order for its species to continue roaming the Earth. Though, we still haven't cracked open all of its mysteries in order to understand the fundamentals of its core. As genes inside the DNA control everything physical and the way a species evolves, it does not mainly affect the characteristics of it, like humans. I may have gotten my dad's eye color and my mom's hair color but I didn't necessarily inherit my parents's personality or skill. "No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch."(page 23)

I remember when once in class we discussed about what we inherit from our parents genes. Many said that both physical and characteristics were inherited. I on the other hand, opposed this theory saying only physical inheritance was affected when genes are passed on. Personality, skills and characteristics are all acquired by one's experience. I doubt that being funny, knowing how to dance and kiss well were around and evolved about one million years ago when the first modern humans were evolving. It couldn't of evolved after homo sapiens were around as human evolution takes a tremendous amount of time. Even though there is still a lot of things to discover and learn of DNA, Dawkins did his best to describe what is known from chromosomes. Cells being rooms of a building and nuclei bookshelves containing architect's plans of the building, it's as if though everything is being built to create their own survival machine, a physical, emotionless, dull machine.

Are Genes that Selfish?

It's been a while since I've read a good book. Suspense, mystery, action, comedy these genres fill my shelves. School textbooks are on my desk. Now with Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, it has me placing it somewhere in between. Now I'm eager to see who cracks open the famous Religion vs. Science debate in class. Though, from what was taught for almost a year now, I've learned more in just a few minutes of reading.

Richard Dawkins describes exceptionally well and interesting about the infamous subject of genes which many high-schoolers seem to avoid. "Survival of the fittest" just makes it the more exciting, seeing you can relate it to those movies or games where it's just killing and moving on to learning that penguins push their families and friends off cliffs for their own safety.

Stopping at chapter 2: The Replicator, it had many of my classmates questioning the author's, and Darwin's, reasoning over how could a mistake create perfection. "But now we must mention an important property of any copying process: it is not perfect."(page 16) There was bound to be a mistakes. If the Replicator was out there making millions of copies of itself, you wouldn't expect it to be 100% correct all the time. Not even the bible can handle writing the exact same thing hundreds of times without making mistranslations. "I suppose the scholars of the septuagint could at least be said to have started something big when they mistranslated the Hebrew word for 'young woman' into the Greek word for 'virgin', coming up with the prophecy: 'Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son...'"
Something can't become better without learning, or in this case adapting, from its own mistakes. Basically mistakes are what give evolution a reason: create a easier and safer life for the next generation. This is all part of Darwin's natural selection.
Therefore, genes are perfecting themselves for a better survival machine, us.