The City VI

Faith in the city means believing God is dead¾not a parched cognitive belief, but one as living and sinewy as water.  I do not believe in the irrelevance of death, but its sticky vibrant passion, the eternal decay of the apotheosized dead.  My faith is rooted in my senses:  I smell the dead, I taste the living’s satisfaction, I run my finger along beloved epitaphs, I hear rats’ ecstasy, I see everywhere the silence which is the dead’s after the appropriate period of mourning is complete.  My faith has organic substance, unlike the artificial and chemical faith of the sophisticated who think because they’ve read about God’s funeral they believe.  Have they ever wept?  Have they visited the portals to his tomb and laid bouquets of tears?  To be alive means to believe.  To believe in the city is to believe that God is dead.   Unless you’ve wept, you don’t believe.  The city’s made of concrete, which is made from tears, even as all things are made of tears.  For, yes, people are weeping … but they are only weeping for themselves.  Their tears are small and cold.

The city has been built with hot tears of belief; what shantytowns shall rise from these new frigid drops of disbelief?

What the human calls in its vulgar tongue the tourist is the whore:  it visits only designated regions of the city—recommended, light, named, known.  These regions, while in different cities, are actually the same region in the same city.  Thus while the whore thinks it has traveled, it has hardly moved at all.

The whore increases as a popular mode of existence; it becomes responsible for the movement of disease and the birth of virulent new forms of pestilence.  Thus from the whore's pretty trinkets and limited experience come bugs, death, disaster, downfall and apocalypse.  The whores will be piled high in makeshift morgues in regions of the city they have never visited before; their visit will be free and they will not leave their hospitable resting place.

The city circles the earth and by circling becomes it, for the path walked in the shape of a circle is the only becoming.

The city, while littered with humans, while plural as the body is plural, breathes as one.

I would find God in the city, for I am made to find God.  Through God's death, the human is assured its quest is made eternal.  The eternity of the quest replaces the eternity of God.

Through arched pillars of popular light, I spy dark seductions.  I subject myself to all forms of degradation to enter these graves.  I become a worm.  I would be Christ before his gross apotheosis.  I betray those I love.  Yet for this, randomly, without warning, I find myself in majestic darkness¾the city's only concert, its gem.