When you ride up to the dojo you can see this view. The road is winding and narrow. There are cliffs on both sides. So keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel. You should be okay. There’s a lot to see, even at a glance.
That said, when Italo Calvino asked Marco Polo to describe his old world to Kublai Khan, he placed words in the old man’s mind, which no doubt he knew would be filtered, interpreted, altered, gaps filled in, and left behind.
Was that written as nothing more than a meticulously constructed recap of life in Kanes’ cold-hearted meditation on the great Khan’s brief refuge in Xanadu? Peacock poetics for jaded tastes too cool to be transported by tenderness, rapture, terror or truth? Airless and still as a vacant dorm room in June? Or as fragrant and fertile as a freshly plowed field? Did it remotely resemble the visions of cities Marco P. recounted to Marco R. as they leavened their jail time with tales of adventure and the hunger to get them told, bought and sold and read? All invisible but implicit, like Venice, recalled from a distance?
People said he made it up. As he lay dying, they say he said, “I did not tell half of what I saw.”
A generation later, when his children were grown and their children were little, a third of the people living in Europe died from the black plague. Some survived, abandoning the cities, to live in the countryside.
Though they have changed, many are still there, along the road, spreading out across the valleys and the sky. The people and the cities we heard about and many more. The Pleasure Dome, Venice, Rome, adventure, home, invisible, welcoming or forbidding, all open, drawing us on, like Odysseus and Sam, not free, not free at last, but soon at least home at last, the road winding on, through cities, invisible for now.
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Post and photo copyright © 2026 Jeffrey Brooks, MountainKarateNC.com, Yamabayashi Ryu, Mountain Karate Dojo, in the mountains of western NC.
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