The City XII

The experienced whore, who in the vulgar tongue is called cosmopolitan, is admired by the common whore.  This one who has given its body to the city in so many manifestations and varieties, who has felt the desperate caresses of so many humans, who has smelt the primordial intensity of so many holes, rises above the common by managing never to stay still.  By always staying in circulation, this preposterously envied one achieves what few do:  survival in the oldest, wisest and most dangerous profession.  And even more¾transforms the prostitution profession from the most despised to the most desired.  This surely deserves the admiration of even poets, should they still exist.

The common whore envies the experienced one because it thinks the other's life is glamorous.  But the other knows it is dirty; this knowledge is why the poet admires.

The city operates along the axes of all contradictions, including named regulation and anonymity.  Because of technology, the human is watched, tracked and named everywhere.  But because no one understands the technology and the eyes are always changing, there are grand opportunities to never be seen.  The one who loves God strives to live the latter point of this duality throughout his life.  One such God-lover balances ten million human lovers on the scales of spirit.

The same slow stasis exists in the city as once did in nature.  The human¾which only exists in the city; in nature, there was only the beast¾is, in the midst of the appearance of movement and speed, forced by the city's nature and regulations to spend much of its life staring at technological landscapes, waiting for technology to become aligned with its purposes.  In terms of inward processes, this is the same as the beast waiting for the buffalo herd to appear, the rain to fall, or the chief to give the word.  Of course, in the city, the human also spends much of its time moving technology and planning for it to move, while others wait.  But, as it must both wait for the moving and the planning, its waiting, its staring, accumulates, and the human stares not at trees and rivers as the beast did, but at concrete, planes, screens.  True, sometimes it stares at human faces, but, as these are often staring at technology and reflecting it, the faces are simply mirrors of the landscape they are absorbed in.  These human faces, having gradually absorbed their environment, increasingly reveal their unnaturalness; these faces are technology¾dumb, brutish, electric, wired.  Thus the human waits and stares, and this is its life.

The difference between the beast’s waiting and the human's is that, while the former did it for survival, the latter does it for what the human calls leisure.  God's death provides a foundation of survival upon which the human can dedicate itself to its purpose¾the building of the mirror and the becoming of it.

The city holds in front of the human impossible being, in the way nature held before the beast an impossible god.  The human watches technology to feel love, to laugh, to see the distance between the way it lives and the hopeful labyrinth of the imagination.  In the city, the human is as far from God in death as the beast was from him in life.