The City V

Freedom is the mission and vision of the city.  Each unit of freedom is paid for in equal weight of regulation.  This is the city's ledger.  Freedom is comprised of equal measure of anonymity and naming.  This recipe for freedom is peculiar to the city.  It is not a freedom that has any grace associated with it, but no freedom is associated with grace other than the freedom paid for by suffering.  But the city denies this recipe for freedom by labeling it with damaged names.  This labeling is the primary function of psychology.

The city's sex is not normally discussed among those who speak of the human's habitat.  As nature's sex was female and its conquering god male, so the city's sex is male and its conquering god female.  Anyone who celebrates this understands neither the divine nor the female.

We live in the corpse of God and thus are secretly sustained by divine death; this explains the city's ecstasy.  The human has always thrived on death and the city affords great feasting.

Below the ecstasy, though, the human has the knowledge that the feast is limited.  Even God's decay is not forever.  So the human’s midnight plans are focused on what to do when the feast is over.

Each human, no matter how hardened the name in time, is dispensable.  Things, however, whether art, a coffee filter or a photo album, are indispensable.  The city teaches us this.

The human cannot put its arms around the city, although this is its deepest desire.  It would know the extent of the city's love, despair, thoughts, betrayals, but its partiality foils the longing of its depths.  The gap between the extent of the city and the human's ability to embrace it is the current of the city's energy grid and the material of its future.

There are noises in the city's body that mirror the mystery of the noises in the human's body.  So there are mirroring diseases, thoughts, orgasms, amputations, sadnesses.  When an act of the city coincides with a similar act in a particular body, the participating human momentarily feels the remote unity of the universe.

The continuous erotic relationship between hiding and revealing manifests itself in each habitat differently.  The human who would explore and map this relationship for the city, in such a way as to provide a spiritual landscape on which other humans can safely walk, will not be thanked by those who walk it, but may be oddly blessed by some of those who build structures on it for the navigation of the spirit.