It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear

Genghis Khan founded the biggest empire the world has ever seen. Genghis was of "Barbarian" hordes of the steppes; he hated cities and razed them to the ground. The militaristic empire didn’t expand on building anything but on ruins, souls: invisible cities.

Marco Polo came from the powerful city state of Venice, controlling a global empire whose cultural legacy inspires to this day. The city father’s previous home had been razed to the ground by "Barbarian" tribes of the north, and they built Venice on 118 islands joined by 400 bridges. Since being built, the commercial empire has inevitably been sinking into the sea.

Marco Polo visited Genghis’ grandson Kublai Khan, who listened to him and made the Venetian an advisor of his court. In the last few decades, the ocean has been rising.

Kublai asks Marco, “When you return to the West, will you repeat to your people the same tales you tell me?”
“I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons I the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”

That is the voice I listen to: the ear. Cities, cities, cities: the noise of buskers, graffiti, slang spitting in the face of injustice fill my ears. Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities carefully constructs an image to slash it up, slams poles into the ground to let the foundations sink:

I do not wish your eyes to catch a distorted image, so I must draw your attention to an intrinsic quality of this unjust city germinating secretly inside the secret just city: and this is the possible awakening – as if in an excited opening of windows – of a later love for justice, not yet subjected to rules, capable of reassembling a city still more just than it was before it became the vessel of injustice. But if you peer deeper into this new germ of justice you can discern a tiny spot that is spreading like the mounting tendency to impose what is just through what is unjust, and perhaps this is the germ of an immense metropolis….