The City II

In this second installment of the city, Bee continues his descent into the bowels of the urban and the decaying scent of God.

We can think of the dead God’s gradually decaying body parts as particular cities:  Jerusalem, bloody, divided, ancient, is his heart; Mexico his anus; New York his mouth; Tokyo his ears; Manila his nose; Paris his wardrobe; London his flatulence.  Every city is his eyes, skin and digits—watching, feeling, wiggling.

The city ensures God lives despite his death.  He foresaw the city as the only chance for his survival.  No, the human could not kill him, but it could degrade him through technology.  God saw the degradation of his son at the hands of humans, learned from it, and refused the same action for himself.  Christ was necessary for God, a sacrificial experiment to protect God from the shame of degradation.  So, while Christ’s death was shameful, God’s is quiet and ecstatic.  This is the divine secret hidden in the city.

God is absent from the city the way the dead are absent.  As the memory of the dead is incarnate in the scattered cemeteries throughout the city, so the memory of God is incarnate in the city itself—every brick, sign, plastic container, telephone.  In this way, the memory of God is everywhere.  The human lives in the cemetery of God.

While the city is plural, the city is also one.  Around this one city is a wall—thick, high, and long.  This wall is the human mind.  What is sufficiently powerful to assault it other than God from his grave?

To speak of God in the city is to speak of the death of God.  The churches are mausoleums, priests undertakers and cemetery attendants.  This is not to denigrate their functions, but elevate them.  To maintain the corpse of God with living souls is an integral and difficult task.  It is also an ancient one, as old as whoring.

The city at its apex is comprised of names.  But it emerged from the dark night of namelessness and strives for the blinding noon of anonymity.  It passes from collective to collective through the individual.

There is no future in the city, though the future is only city; there is only past.  The city arose from what is dead and its continuation is automatic, unquestioned, unquestionable—the new natural.  The artificial become natural.

The dark code that bore the human facilitates the human dialogue with mirrors, its ability to hear things that have no tongue talk.  So the human could hear the city, which is to say God’s corpse, speak, if it nurtured its relationship with the darkness of its origins.  The extent of hearing is proportional to the extent of nurture.  Yet parallel with the city’s growth, and inseparable from it, is the growth of technology, which the human uses to shield itself from the city’s speaking.  Cameras, museums, industry—all that strive to capture and confine—each of these is an eye between the human eye and the mirror’s.  In thinking it sees more, better or longer, by using this in-between eye, the human sees less.  Yet even now there is a place to establish a dialogue with technology, for the city and technology have become so wedded that to disentangle one would be to slaughter both.  So it is becoming that, as more and less are constructs of the human’s mind, what we now call less may tomorrow be more.