The City VII

The human sits in relation to the city in the way it sits in the theater and watches a film.  The fellow spectators are unnecessary, the human watches in darkness.  All that is pure is the still quiet dialogue between the human and the spectacle it sees.  Yet the city’s energy ferociously works against this purity.  God in life worked toward perfection; in death He works toward imperfection.

The city is the womb of many things.  Among them is spiritual pragmatism, which is simply the human's recognition that the reaches of Heaven and Hell, whether psychological, otherworldly, real or projected, are ineffective guides for living; the only ideal of the city is life, though life, like all ideals, is an unflinching unforgiving master.  God's corpse necessitates pragmatism, even as all death does.  The idea of death is romantic, even as all ideas can be romantic, but its implementation is method and routine.

Life is apotheosized on the large silent back of death; democracy is the name of life's organization.  According to its dictates, the human builds its required structures of beauty in two places:  the individual bodies of the city's citizens, and art's timeless spaceless kingdom, which results both from the excess of the city's energy and the intimacy with the city's required negation¾death.  The human visits the past structures of beauty¾museums, palaces, castles, churches, anthropological sites (in the seen world); philosophy and religion (in the unseen)¾to pleasantly and painlessly intimate for itself the forgotten knowledge of death.  But only the artist travels into God's corpse on the winged beast of pain and reports what she has seen for the city’s citizens to package and consume.  It is a question for futurists to discuss¾how death will be mined once the artists have completed their feasting on the divine corpse.  After the structures of knowledge and the structures of life have been built, what can be built, on what, by whom?

The pursuit of the city's ideal¾and its organization, democracy¾carries with it the risk of death.  Not through duels, war and martyrdom¾the methods of the past¾but through sex:  this vast choreography life's chief adventurers understand and navigate; they accept the risks and any consequences do not surprise them.  This acceptance is the nobility that persists despite the human's changing habitat, ideals, and forms.

The best artists will be equally acquainted with life and death¾the latter through the post-apocalyptic Eucharist (the new forms of feasting on the divine), the former through an immersion in the vicissitudes of the city, its organization and the nobility that runs through time and habitat.

The artist who retreats to past forms, thinking this retreat is noble, lives in a portion of the city, thinking this portion is the whole, or who refuses the stench of the city's Eucharist, being afraid of God and death, is at most a craftsman, producing pleasant trinkets perhaps, but existing at best on the banks of beauty, participating in award-picnics and exchanging rote witticisms, which appear to the human who is easily provoked and amused as little gems of truth.