222. The Jute Rope Universe - Hollynn Huitt
Italo Calvino’s Octavia, illustrated by Gérard Trignac
The best way I can describe what happened next is by sharing a story a friend recently told me about her daughter, Arden—that as a toddler, Arden would become so immersed in play that she’d lose all sense of scale and reality.
In college, I spent a semester studying abroad in the Netherlands—a surreal privilege I couldn’t have imagined for myself until it happened. There I was, a scholarship kid from a small town in South Carolina, living in a castle ringed by, not one, but two moats, with a Eurail pass burning a hole in my pocket. I was seeking personal and creative transformation: I visited all the great museums, I walked along the Seine, and I definitely learned how much wine is too much wine. But also, and maybe most importantly, I encountered Italo Calvino.
It was in a travel writing class taught by the poet Denya Cascio; she assigned his Invisible Cities, a work of fiction that imagines the explorer Marco Polo in conversation with the emperor Kublai Khan. In separate, chaptered accounts, Polo describes cities in Khan’s empire so fantastical as to be unbelievable. And yet, his reports of each place—from how they look, smell, and feel, to the people who inhabit them—are so finely wrought that you forget they’re impossible. You’re fully, immersively transported.
One day, midway through studying the text, we walked into the tall-ceilinged, wood-beamed classroom-from-your-dreams to find objects piled on the desks: a length of jute rope snarled into a bristling knot, a plastic bag of crumpled soda cans, a soft scarf, knit in a rainbow gradient, swirled into a peaked pile. Denya asked us to choose one and, in homage to Invisible Cities, forget the object as it exists in our world and imagine an invisible city contained within. I chose the rope. It started slow. The obvious observations (color, texture, size) came easily. After ten minutes, having described every contour, I looked to the front of the room, thinking that she’d probably call time soon. She had the look of someone prepared to wait, so I turned back to the task.
The best way I can describe what happened next is by sharing a story a friend recently told me about her daughter, Arden—that as a toddler, Arden would become so immersed in play that she’d lose all sense of scale and reality. She had a toy fire truck that she loved to roll back and forth, and eventually, in the course of play, she’d flip open the miniature ladder and try to climb it. Other times she’d open a door and attempt to squeeze in.
I, too, got lost. One detail led to another until I stopped describing and started imagining. I wrote my way into this rough city, this place of darkness and filtered light, populated by industrious people with calloused hands who long ago had the idea to cut single strands of jute to weave rope ladders across chasms, so many ladders that the world was a fibrous, living nerve. I pushed so far that, when Denya quietly called time and I looked up, the room spun around me. I had the distinct feeling I’d opened a portal into my imagination shuttered since childhood, and now it was a place I could return to, again and again.
- Hollynn Huitt
