¿Influencias en Neruda? Walter Benjamin/Paul Klee

  A rectangle, a finite and universal receptacle for the fragments of the universe in portrait format. A portrait of a city: an image, imagined. The rectangle is divided into three horizontal sections. 

The top section is demarcated by two thick, horizontal lines, which sandwich a black circle. 

Below are various bands of busy lines, roughly divided into two large sections by a broad band of lines resembling the stretcher bond pattern of a brick wall. 

What happens in these two separated sections is difficult to describe. Hieroglyphs, all of them resembling the primordial house, assemble along unbroken horizontal lines. 

Some of these hieroglyphs look like cuneiform writing, others resemble large apartment blocks with infinite subdivisions, others again look like the beginnings of a complex organogram of some mute Kafkaesque institution. 

Others look like honeycombs, or look as if they represent the logo of some business. 

The two thick lines might be Heaven and Earth, the horizon and the sky. 

The black circle (I am looking at a black and white reproduction) might be the sun. But instead of shunning our gaze because of its brightness, this sun draws our eyes into the infinity that is blackness. 

The thin horizontal lines could represent streets and the stretcher bond lines a city dividing and replicating itself by a wall. 

The lines which look like houses and institutions, might at the same time also represent the way that these institutions are settled and organized: the image of the city as an organograma or as a rich history. 

The hieroglyphs constitute an image of how both language and buildings reside in places and can thus help to enhance the division of society according to class. There again the lines may also represent a map of some intensely personal journey, some of the houses almost look like notes upon a scale, and what is a scale if it is not to distinguish and render clear the rhythm of stratification. No meaning is mutually exclusive in this painting. 

That is a definition of wealth. Looking at the drawing again, are the two outermost bands of the city form not walls, or bastions, to keep people in and out? Are the lines that connect the houses, paths? Are the curious domes crowned with their crosses and housing tree-like objects institutions, preserved like cheese under a glass bell?

From "A Leaf from the Book of Cities"(Análisis de Jacob Voorthuis)

http://www.wbenjamin.org/voorthuis.html
Google images
http://aquapunk.tumblr.com/post/5836365561/a-leaf-from-the-book-of-cities-by-paul-klee