The City I

The City

Raised by his father as a Taoist, his mother as an anarchist, his aunt as a bohemian evangelical, and his anaconda as an anaconda, Oral Bee moved to the Baiganwadi slum of Mumbai and wrote “The City” in Maharashtra at the age of 23, committing suicide shortly thereafter.  Rodriguez Santos Miguel Egg Foo Sankaranarayanan, Distinguished Professor and Szechuan Chair of Urban SinoOccident Studies in the Faculty of The New at CUNY, is the translator.

The human animal, once a dusty mirror of nature and, before, even identical with nature, has traveled so far from its origins that it glimpses, for the first time perhaps, itself.

The human animal sees itself in the city¾the mirror it builds for this purpose.

Whether a horizontal city like Paris or Los Angeles or a vertical one like New York or Hong Kong, the human peers into stone, glass or steel and sees human eyes peering back.

These eyes form a sea of eyes.  This sea has no depth; it comprises only the faculty of sight.  Thus the city as a spiritual object is horizontal, or at least no taller than the tallest human, for each one looks into the depths of the city and sees there the equal of the depths within itself.

The human looks at the city and sees eyes, even as the individual looks into a single mirror and sees eyes.  But the mirror of the city, when peered into, contains as many eyes as humans, whether living or dead.

Many prophets have proclaimed that God is dead.  They have said what is true, but not said anything particularly interesting.  They have told us God is dead, but not why He died.  Did they think the human murdered him?  According to the ancient code, humans may murder humans, gods gods.  These prophets think they live beyond the code, but they do not; the code gave birth to humans and the gods.

God built the city by willing his own death.  Each brick, eye and stone, was paid for with a pound of God’s flesh, a litre of his blood.  The flat mirror of the city which we polish daily is the consequence of the planned suicide of God.

God, the only verticality, in dying, has given us our desire:  horizontality.  He has known since creation the human has only desired mirrors.  The city - our mirror, vanity and end.