Cities and the Sky: La Paz, Bolivia

More than thirty years ago, my poetry mentor Mark Strand urged a book into my hands and told me that reading it would change me forever.  That book was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and he was right: it transformed my sense of how narrative works, how language constitutes its own drama, how form communicates substantively, independent of the content of words.  It continues to be one of my favorite books.  If you haven't read it, I recommend it to your attention.

I have traveled a fair bit around this planet of ours, even before this peripatetically extreme year.  But I have never, ever, seen a city like La Paz, Bolivia.  

When I say it's breathtaking, I'm not talking about its 12000-foot elevation or its 2.2 million population.  I'm talking about its aerobatic precarity.  Its integration of city and rock, huge slabs of stone erupting into the neighborhoods, or vice versa.  The way the clouds settle overnight into the bottom of the city's basin, transposing the sky into the heart of town.  The way that houses march up the slopes in a consistency of red clay brick.  The way the city's heights and depths are strung together with a moving necklace of gondolas--the Teleferico: the extremities of this city's topography cannot admit a subway system (there are no flat streets in La Paz) so their solution is to connect themselves to and through the sky.  I was thinking of all these things when I desired a city, to paraphrase Calvino.

La Paz changes my sense of how a city works, how its forms govern its content.  It is a city in which the earth and sky seem to be mutually constitutive, each one acting not as a limit on human movement but rather as a catalyst for invention and expansion. 

I think that La Paz will now be forever in my mind one of Calvino's memorable, unimaginable, impossible cities.