An Elegy For Kabul, August 2021-- Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and the Dead; the "City of Melania" in the 21st Century

Pix Credit: HERE

The news, shorn of its editorializing by its writers, is straightforward:

"Afghanistan's president fled the country on Sunday. . . Twenty years after toppling the militant regime, the United States rushed to exit the country. . . President Ashraf Ghani's departure — and the hurried evacuation of all personnel from the American embassy — followed a lightning-fast Taliban offensive across the country. . . Later, video put out by Al Jazeera appeared to show extraordinary images of armed Taliban fighters inside the Afghan presidential palace, lounging in chairs, strolling around with their guns and taking pictures of each other. The fighters give a tour to the Al Jazeera journalist, and at one point one rolls up an Afghan flag in the palace and puts it on a mantle piece. (Afghan president flees as U.S. rushes to exit with Taliban on brink of power).

The rest is politics. "The Taliban is soon expected to declare the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from the presidential palace in Kabul, an official told the Associated Press." (Here's the biggest news you missed this weekend).  In almost a parallel dimension, press reports indicated a U.S. embassy advising Americans to "shelter in place" (Ibid.) drawing, it seems from the discourse of school gun violence in the United States.  The military, in the meantime, was tasked by its political overseers to send more troops to bring all troops (and other personnel) "home." (Ibid). None of these  approximately 6,000 troops have yet to travel to the Islamic Emirate where, one imagine, they will not be welcomed by the new government. 

I leave it to others to produce the sort of political, cultural, racial, gender, economic, international, sociological, psychological, sycophantic, rebellious, institutional, religious, and other analysis perhaps driven by the need to please (an audience, superiors, peers, and the like), to perform acts of alligiance or fealty to those individuals or groups whose collars those offering that analysis wear /whether they know it or not), or to appear "at the table" of discourse that might lead to influence and (and I love this phrase the moved from slogan to kitsch in an instant) to "lean in." I do note with peculiar delght, the peregrinations of Hamid Karzai, who as Suetonius once noted of Caesar, "He was every woman's man, and every man's woman"(politically speaking of course) (C. Suetonius Tranquillus, Lives of the Twelve Ceasars, Julius Caesar ¶LII).

My purpose in this brief elegy--my free verse reflective poem that is nostalgic and melancholy--is for Kabul. Feel free to read between the lines.

When I go musing all alone,
Thinking of divers things fore-known,
When I build castles in the air,
Void of sorrow and void of fear,
Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet,
Methinks the time runs very fleet.
All my joys to this are folly,
Naught so sweet as melancholy.

When I lie waking all alone,
Recounting what I have ill done,
My thoughts on me then tyrannise,
Fear and sorrow me surprise,
Whether I tarry still or go,
Methinks the time moves very slow.
All my griefs to this are jolly,
Naught so sad as melancholy.

* * * 

Methinks I hear, methinks I see
Ghosts, goblins, fiends; my fantasy
Presents a thousand ugly shapes,
Headless bears, black men, and apes,
Doleful outcries, and fearful sights,
My sad and dismal soul affrights.
All my griefs to this are jolly,
None so damn'd as melancholy.

* * * 

'Tis my sole plague to be alone,
I am a beast, a monster grown,
I will no light nor company,
I find it now my misery.
The scene is turn'd, my joys are gone,
Fear, discontent, and sorrows come.
All my griefs to this are jolly,
Naught so fierce as melancholy
[Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy  [Dialogos Reprint of the sixth (1652) edition, by Chatto
and Windus, London, 1883; Ex-classics Project, 2009]

 Kabul, Italo Calvino's (Invisible Cities NY: Harcourt, 1974) City of Melania (Ibid., pp. 80-81) is a city inhabited by types who refresh themselves in the way of weeds in a vacant lot.  

At Melania, every time you enter the square, you find yourself caught  in a dialogue: the braggart soldier and the parasite coming from a door meet  the young wastrel and the prostitute; or else the miserly  father from the threshold utters his final warnings to rhe amorous daughter and is interrupted  by the foolish servant who is taking a note to the procuress. You return to Melania after years  and you find the same dialogue  still going on; in the meantime the parasite has died, and so have the procuress and the miserly father; but the braggart soldier, the amorous daughter, the foolish servant have taken their places, being replaced in their turn by the hypocrite, the confidante, the astrologer. (Ibid., p. 80).

This is a city of renewal.  The old is new, the new is old, and both await the return of something different that is the same, all given form by the dialogues of the of the roles into which people (and institutions) are poured. "When one changes role or abandons the square forever or makes his first entrance in it, there is a series of changes, until all the roles have been reassigned; but meanwhile the angry old man goes on replying to the witty maidservant, the usurer never ceases following the disinherited youth, the nurse consoles the stepdaughter, even if none of them keeps the same eyes and voice he had in the previous scene." (Ibid., 80).  But the dialogues may not be measured in the lives of an individual, or even in the lives of the stable of permanent  collective characters each of which assumes itself unique. "If you look into the square in successive moments, you hear how from act to act the dialogue changes, even if the lives of Melania's inhabitants  are too short for them to realize it." (Ibid., p. 81). It is the dialogue that remains--that dialogue are the buildings, the roadways, and the life of the city.  Its human vessels add interest, but Melania is itself the city of dialogue, a city of "a hundred thousand king's sons fallen in low estate and awaiting recognition."

The city serves as the container, the ritual bowl (dǐng (鼎)) in which the essentialized reductions that passes for institutional humanity, psychological humanity, ideological humanity, huddle together and give each other comfort through the ever more strenuous performance of the ideological and institutional expectations of the roles they have each embraced. Over and over, "inquiring of the  dǐng" ( 问鼎; wèn dǐng), questing for status, authority, perhaps power.

This certainly is the stuff of bloodsport--but the city is indifferent.  It is a vessel, and serves its purpose by providing the container for the endless performance of the dialogues among characters that substitute for self-reflexive life. Certainly its characters become all the more colorful the more powerfully they pull of their character and the role they have embraced in the life of Melania is served up as proof of the robust exercise of free will. 

 As time passes the roles, too, are no longer exactly the same as before; certainly they actions they carry forward through intrigues and surprises leads toward some final denouement, which it continues to approach even when the plot seems to thicken more and more and the obstacles increase. (Ibid., p. 81).

Perhaps the Gods find amusement here.  It passes the time to bet on the dialogues.  Yet even that can reduce itself to a numbing sameness as the dialogue itself becomes yet another character in the City of Melania.