The City III

Christ was sent to Jerusalem to test the human; naturally, the human failed—the human must fail when tested by God; this God cannot innately understand.  In failing the test, God established plans for his demise.  He was the human’s God and he had no desire to continue to be the God of such an unworthy being.  Thus he pointed to a new Jerusalem, one of continuous light and the end of endings.  We now live in this pointing.  Whereas Christ in dying raised an unseen force, a religion, God in dying has raised a seen force, the city.  Christ and the city are lovers across taut chasms of contradictions.

The human’s lover is not God, Christ, the city, technology, nature or even art.  The human’s lover can only be itself; this is why the mirror is necessary for the human and why God has performed the ultimate sacrifice by giving himself up to allow for its construction, for collapsing his verticality into the mirror’s shiny surface.  Divinity has been sacrificed for the consummation of human self-love.

The city constantly moves to compensate for the absolute stillness of God.  It constantly talks to compensate for the absolute silence of God.  Were the human to be still and silent, God might wake and a second, greater resurrection occur.  This is the terror and desire the human does not speak of, even to itself.  This inarticulate darkness is the fuel for yet more movement and speech.  We might name this darkness God and in so doing see that the human and God fuel each other without ever understanding either the other or the fueling.  This lack of understanding is necessary to ensure the human lives God’s death and dies God’s life.

If the human travels to the end of the city, which is to say the city's eye, it has traveled through God's corpse - eaten his body - and knows the worms that sustain the city's life.  At this point, the human and God are one.  But though many humans travel - indeed travel is the rage - much of it is superficial.  Most don't like worms.

The city is a fast river of words and sounds.  Should the human leap into it and not fear drowning, it might find stillness and silence in the water.

The city is the human's measure for all definitions; we cannot speak or know without it.

The city has a will.  I feel it in the city’s absent silences, in the rough tranquilities I manufacture from the allotted grass.  This will becomes mine by virtue of my regard for its power.  The degree to which I attend to feeling its will is the degree to which I will not participate in it.

Urban aggrandizement is the aspiration I must breathe if I wish to participate in the city’s goodness.  If I wished to be seen by the city’s eyes, I must incarnate its will, an event I cannot plan, but the city must engineer according to its random foreordination.  In this sense, and subject to the limitations of design, the city’s consummate representatives are chosen by it and assume its character neither thinking of their character’s circumference nor feeling its dumb haunted center.