The City XI

What is the city other than the name I give to the experience of the human in a world of mirrors?  Once the human surpasses a certain economy, it saw itself reflected everywhere; this laughing horrible multiplicity¾I am in that chair, that cloud, in you¾is, more than its plans, towers and traffic jams, the city.  Human:  see yourself in every urban object:  you are staring back, each object is animate in you.

I have an idea I would like to propose to the human.  The city's intense vast network of regulations results from God's decay; the only element capable of counteraction is the portion of the human not yet fully given to mirrors.  While the mirror is the human project, when it is complete, the human will be dissolved into it and end.  In the meantime, that portion not yet dissolved is necessary to mine the raw materials for the continuation of the human project.  This, then, is the idea:  let the human begin each day setting a plan for itself.  Let this plan be a no-plan¾that is, let it have no end (like the city, like God), be disposable (like the city, like God), be individual and secret.  Let the next day begin the same way, but let its plan be utterly different.  Let each plan be random.  Let it be absurd.  So, for example, let the human so given one day seek to distribute 10 coins to the owners of the 10 most desolate faces it encounters.  Let the entire day be devoted to this.  The next day let the human ride the metro from dawn to dusk, getting off at each stop, seeking the most private places to urinate.  These are just suggestions; let the chosen human, ripened for absurdity, formulate its own non-plans.  In this way, the materials for the mirror are mined through randomness and the city becomes more horizontal and polished daily.

All life is built on death.  So the city, which is mirrored life¾the emulation and end of natural life¾is built on the death of God, who was the breath and imagination of natural life.  The human is not natural; this is why its habitat is not natural.  The ecstatic emphasis on flesh¾sex, products, youth, the continuation of life, quantity over quality¾betrays that the human is unnatural, and screams its otherness at itself in verdant desperation.  If the human were natural, God would still be alive; but, as God is dead, the human proves its onto-technology.  In spiritual terms (not in time, which is related with spirit in obscure geometric fashions), the human became unnatural, God died and the city was born¾all at the same moment.

If I think I am the city, I am mistaken.  Yet if I become a mirror, I become more the city than itself.

The whore, who in the vulgar tongue is called the tourist, acts according to social necessity for the following reasons:

• its movement suggests to it that it has visited many cities and thus taken part in plurality, whereas it has simply visited regions of the same city; it has not escaped, but moves to suggest to itself it has;
• by moving, it tastes anonymity, transience and relativity without having to pay for these with the currency they demand:  blood, life, silence.  The same internal states can more cheaply be achieved by taking local buses to unknown destinations and simply paying attention.  But to have the awareness to do this!¾one would not be a whore.