The City IV

The city, emanation of the unspeakable sinews of desire, is not the concretion of love particularly, although it can be felt sometimes to be love’s tenebrous plan.  The city works its erotic origins in strips of calculated discourse, providing its inhabitants with cosmologies of analysis - simulacra of spirit sufficient for the city’s religious bounds.

What is the city to me but one possible path through the labyrinth of God’s mind?  Are there other ways?  To know that is to know God and the only thing we know of God is that He cannot be known.  What is the pattern of the labyrinth, its shape, its smell?  What is the context of the city’s life?  These questions birth the tenor of our dreams; their forms and plots seep through hedges onto the path we normally live.

God hides, He hides in death, the perfect hiding place.  Just under seductive manholes I can’t lift through some inner incapacity.  I call the manholes society; they cover in weighty processed circles God’s blackened naked image.

I am born from society seeking what lies below it.

What lies below becomes for me what I name God.

I have faith that from below I would see what lies above and recreate it.

Beauty is the city's commerce; it is free for those who only wish to dialogue with it.  But the city drives the human to be constantly dissatisfied with only dialogue, thus beauty always has a price.

The precise configuration required to achieve the most beauty entered time some centuries ago.  Having made itself available to the human, it fled, as such configurations do, and what is left us are imitations and bombast.

Flesh becomes common in the city.  The human requires concentrated ecstatic despairing flesh to nurture and sustain democracy.

The poor cities of the world reek of God's decay, the wealthy ones reek of the cologne humans wear at funerals.  Together, God in the human may be known.  But one must traverse the spectrum of scents and deeply smell them all if one wishes to know the city, the human, or God.

The mystic’s central experience - of the omnipresent center and the absent circumference - is manifest in the city.  Each portal, intersection, bar is the city's center; one never reaches its limits.  So the modern mystic finds himself in the concretion of his experience.  He knows God has become permanently incarnate and there is nothing left to do but describe the manifestation of God's death.  What knowledge.  What sadness.  What life.