The City VIII

The city exponentially increases the human's sense of its insignificance, intensifying its desperation for naming and names.  By showing the human itself, the city reveals to each inhabitant how much less it is than what has been shown.  That which looks in the mirror is less than the mirror; this is why the human envies mirrors¾and if it cannot be a mirror itself, at least it would inhabit one.  The act of individual contribution to the building of the mirror¾the city¾has become more important than the act of becoming as pure a mirror as one can be, which was the past spiritual ideal.  This redefinition is spiritual pragmatism.

The city spirals outward in lazy lines of fear toward proud diffusions, which in the vulgar tongue are called suburbs.  It spirals like galaxies, united by common shape and composition.  From God's decomposing flesh, the city's mind springs forth in imitation of the human's ambition.  Dense, multilingual, omni-clocked, like a great godless rubbery beast, it stretches tentacles of towns to the universe's end.  The human rides this beast, worships, feeds it.

When a human descends deep under the city into God's veins¾what in the vulgar tongue are called subways, sewers, catacombs or illegalities¾it smells God's flesh and gets a sense of his foul diet of wars, betrayal, disease and every imaginable suffering and injustice.  The fumes of airplanes are finer¾nothing smells worse than digesting decomposing history.

The city's variety gushes forth to compensate for God's death.  God in living was one, unchanging; God in dying unleashes his antithesis:  the antithesis of unity is variety, the antithesis of antithesis is antitheses.  So what God is not is concretized in the city.  As what God is and has always been is what-is-not, God's antithesis is what is¾what is is variety, variety is the city.  God has always been dead, thus as the human thinks God has died, God lives, but not in his death as He did before, but in the life and variety of the city.  This contrariness the human doesn't understand¾that to God, God lives in death and dies in life; to the human, God dies in death and lives in life.  But the human doesn't need to understand; it has its narratives and God has his.  Only at the intersection of these narratives¾at the circumference of flesh, the center of art and the cracks in the city's light, cracks which constitute the divine light¾do God and the human meet.

The human has always preferred God to another human¾His desirability has always overshadowed the perverse intense magnetism that draws it to another.  The rare human who has both confessed the greater preference and conformed to its deadly ordinances has inevitably been slaughtered by human lust, but then brought, as promised, into God to be digested by him.  Each of these humans has become new flesh, a new organ, on God's body and thus received an unspeakable name.  The city asks below its infinite questions what the human can now prefer to itself, with God believed to be dead.  It answers quite directly for those who still confess and conform¾the city.  The human can seek its greater desire by giving itself to the city's fumes, emanations and discordant symphonies, which rise from that vast sarcophagus.  Only by situating itself in the living scent of death¾and rejoicing in its situation¾can the human risk preferring what it always has.