The City III

Christ was sent to Jerusalem to test the human; naturally, the human failed—the human must fail when tested by God; this God cannot innately understand.  In failing the test, God established plans for his demise.  He was the human’s God and he had no desire to continue to be the God of such an unworthy being.  Thus he pointed to a new Jerusalem, one of continuous light and the end of endings.  We now live in this pointing.  Whereas Christ in dying raised an unseen force, a religion, God in dying has raised a seen force, the city.  Christ and the city are lovers across taut chasms of contradictions.

The human’s lover is not God, Christ, the city, technology, nature or even art.  The human’s lover can only be itself; this is why the mirror is necessary for the human and why God has performed the ultimate sacrifice by giving himself up to allow for its construction, for collapsing his verticality into the mirror’s shiny surface.  Divinity has been sacrificed for the consummation of human self-love.

The city constantly moves to compensate for the absolute stillness of God.  It constantly talks to compensate for the absolute silence of God.  Were the human to be still and silent, God might wake and a second, greater resurrection occur.  This is the terror and desire the human does not speak of, even to itself.  This inarticulate darkness is the fuel for yet more movement and speech.  We might name this darkness God and in so doing see that the human and God fuel each other without ever understanding either the other or the fueling.  This lack of understanding is necessary to ensure the human lives God’s death and dies God’s life.

If the human travels to the end of the city, which is to say the city's eye, it has traveled through God's corpse - eaten his body - and knows the worms that sustain the city's life.  At this point, the human and God are one.  But though many humans travel - indeed travel is the rage - much of it is superficial.  Most don't like worms.

The city is a fast river of words and sounds.  Should the human leap into it and not fear drowning, it might find stillness and silence in the water.

The city is the human's measure for all definitions; we cannot speak or know without it.

The city has a will.  I feel it in the city’s absent silences, in the rough tranquilities I manufacture from the allotted grass.  This will becomes mine by virtue of my regard for its power.  The degree to which I attend to feeling its will is the degree to which I will not participate in it.

Urban aggrandizement is the aspiration I must breathe if I wish to participate in the city’s goodness.  If I wished to be seen by the city’s eyes, I must incarnate its will, an event I cannot plan, but the city must engineer according to its random foreordination.  In this sense, and subject to the limitations of design, the city’s consummate representatives are chosen by it and assume its character neither thinking of their character’s circumference nor feeling its dumb haunted center.

The City II

In this second installment of the city, Bee continues his descent into the bowels of the urban and the decaying scent of God.

We can think of the dead God’s gradually decaying body parts as particular cities:  Jerusalem, bloody, divided, ancient, is his heart; Mexico his anus; New York his mouth; Tokyo his ears; Manila his nose; Paris his wardrobe; London his flatulence.  Every city is his eyes, skin and digits—watching, feeling, wiggling.

The city ensures God lives despite his death.  He foresaw the city as the only chance for his survival.  No, the human could not kill him, but it could degrade him through technology.  God saw the degradation of his son at the hands of humans, learned from it, and refused the same action for himself.  Christ was necessary for God, a sacrificial experiment to protect God from the shame of degradation.  So, while Christ’s death was shameful, God’s is quiet and ecstatic.  This is the divine secret hidden in the city.

God is absent from the city the way the dead are absent.  As the memory of the dead is incarnate in the scattered cemeteries throughout the city, so the memory of God is incarnate in the city itself—every brick, sign, plastic container, telephone.  In this way, the memory of God is everywhere.  The human lives in the cemetery of God.

While the city is plural, the city is also one.  Around this one city is a wall—thick, high, and long.  This wall is the human mind.  What is sufficiently powerful to assault it other than God from his grave?

To speak of God in the city is to speak of the death of God.  The churches are mausoleums, priests undertakers and cemetery attendants.  This is not to denigrate their functions, but elevate them.  To maintain the corpse of God with living souls is an integral and difficult task.  It is also an ancient one, as old as whoring.

The city at its apex is comprised of names.  But it emerged from the dark night of namelessness and strives for the blinding noon of anonymity.  It passes from collective to collective through the individual.

There is no future in the city, though the future is only city; there is only past.  The city arose from what is dead and its continuation is automatic, unquestioned, unquestionable—the new natural.  The artificial become natural.

The dark code that bore the human facilitates the human dialogue with mirrors, its ability to hear things that have no tongue talk.  So the human could hear the city, which is to say God’s corpse, speak, if it nurtured its relationship with the darkness of its origins.  The extent of hearing is proportional to the extent of nurture.  Yet parallel with the city’s growth, and inseparable from it, is the growth of technology, which the human uses to shield itself from the city’s speaking.  Cameras, museums, industry—all that strive to capture and confine—each of these is an eye between the human eye and the mirror’s.  In thinking it sees more, better or longer, by using this in-between eye, the human sees less.  Yet even now there is a place to establish a dialogue with technology, for the city and technology have become so wedded that to disentangle one would be to slaughter both.  So it is becoming that, as more and less are constructs of the human’s mind, what we now call less may tomorrow be more.

The City I

The City

Raised by his father as a Taoist, his mother as an anarchist, his aunt as a bohemian evangelical, and his anaconda as an anaconda, Oral Bee moved to the Baiganwadi slum of Mumbai and wrote “The City” in Maharashtra at the age of 23, committing suicide shortly thereafter.  Rodriguez Santos Miguel Egg Foo Sankaranarayanan, Distinguished Professor and Szechuan Chair of Urban SinoOccident Studies in the Faculty of The New at CUNY, is the translator.

The human animal, once a dusty mirror of nature and, before, even identical with nature, has traveled so far from its origins that it glimpses, for the first time perhaps, itself.

The human animal sees itself in the city¾the mirror it builds for this purpose.

Whether a horizontal city like Paris or Los Angeles or a vertical one like New York or Hong Kong, the human peers into stone, glass or steel and sees human eyes peering back.

These eyes form a sea of eyes.  This sea has no depth; it comprises only the faculty of sight.  Thus the city as a spiritual object is horizontal, or at least no taller than the tallest human, for each one looks into the depths of the city and sees there the equal of the depths within itself.

The human looks at the city and sees eyes, even as the individual looks into a single mirror and sees eyes.  But the mirror of the city, when peered into, contains as many eyes as humans, whether living or dead.

Many prophets have proclaimed that God is dead.  They have said what is true, but not said anything particularly interesting.  They have told us God is dead, but not why He died.  Did they think the human murdered him?  According to the ancient code, humans may murder humans, gods gods.  These prophets think they live beyond the code, but they do not; the code gave birth to humans and the gods.

God built the city by willing his own death.  Each brick, eye and stone, was paid for with a pound of God’s flesh, a litre of his blood.  The flat mirror of the city which we polish daily is the consequence of the planned suicide of God.

God, the only verticality, in dying, has given us our desire:  horizontality.  He has known since creation the human has only desired mirrors.  The city - our mirror, vanity and end.

Energy and the Object: A Practical Guide for Traders in Energy

Forgione closes his exploration of energy and objects by suggesting the outline or outlines of a method or methods which could, if implemented, alter the spiritual DNA of the species.

6.      A Practical Guide for Traders in Energy

6.1.   Follow energy.  If energy has fled the object it once invested, you do not need to seek a new object; the energy may be hiding between you and the object.  Stay close to the object which energy has fled and by so doing you may keep the energy that was once in the object with you.  This energy may be the energy of the object stripped of energy, but this can be more potent than the object invested with it.

6.1.1.      Since energy is constant, the only inconstant is the degree to which energy’s participants feel energy’s constancy.

6.1.2.      Since energy is omnipresent, only the participant’s hardened definitions can block its flow.

6.1.3.      Sacrifice, loss, and death are more ripe with energy than will, gain and life.  Who knows this other than these traders?  Yet who then knows that even more energy exists in the taut opposition of sacrifice and will?  Yet the greatest uses the wills of others to create the pole of will in himself.

6.1.4.      Here are but two examples showing how the trader in energy can create and trade energy on the universe’s exchange.

6.1.4.1.            Example One:  Simulation¾a step-by-step process

6.1.4.1.1.      One’s spouse is expected to arrive home in the early evening.

6.1.4.1.2.      The trader in energy, working from home, is feeling lecherous in the afternoon and drafts a note resembling this:

I, being the I upstairs, am tired of talk, am tired of its tatty chatter.  But, if you would like to manufacture love, if you would like to produce the licksickle of love on flesh’s fat factory, you may demonstrate this by being bold.  Specifically, I will know your interest by your entering my room without any due politeness, with the rank arrogance of female sexuality, wearing fashion that will permit groping up your lower and down your upper.

As I am solely interested in your body this evening and not any other aspect of you, as I doubt whether any other aspect of you exists, I do not want to be aware of you unless you want yourself exposed and violated.

6.1.4.1.3.      He plans to put the note by the front door, and thinks through the primarily possibilities:  fulfillment (assorted shapes, smells and stages), rejection (infinite imaginative and transformative possibilities), other (e.g. planned arrival doesn’t occur, the note is unnoticed and the path of rejection is falsely followed but truly simulated, etc.).

6.1.4.1.4.      But after he has explored his hopes and disappointments, incarnating through simulation the equal forms of energy of each, he realizes the energy has been realized through simulation, more energy, more fully, than in any of the possible actions resulting from his placed note; thus, rather than printing the note, he saves it in a password-protected folder along with a thousand other secrets¾a simulation of a simulation of simulations.

6.1.4.1.5.      He thus sets aside the binary choice he imagined offering to his spouse¾to couple with him or not¾and instead leaves himself with the greater unknown resulting from the unoffered choice.

6.1.4.1.6.      He hears his spouse arrive, make supper; he continues working, awaiting the now infinite possibilities of the night.

6.1.4.1.7.      The trader has lived and not lived.  He has been through a thousand worlds without leaving his chair.  He has made love to his spouse and been rejected by her.  She has been slain, she has run off with a lover.  He has breakfast with her the next morning; how much richer she is, having been invested with ten dozen lives.  He revels in the energy created from what was not done, from the gap between them.  He trades this energy for what he values most¾words’ raw rule, perhaps, fugues’ tight fancy:  it is up to him, what he does on his curious exchange.

6.1.4.2.            Example Two:  Negation¾a step-by-step process

6.1.4.2.1.      The trader in energy cherishes a relationship he has established in his mind.  Perhaps he thinks he is more powerful because of an artifact or person in his life, perhaps he has concluded that the best conditions for producing beauty are such-and-such.

6.1.4.2.2.      He throws away his cherishing.  He casts his conclusions over the edge of whatever planet he inhabits and watches them course into space like the limbs of lambs.

6.1.4.2.3.      According to desire’s rule, such actions would be sacrifices.  But in energy’s alligopoly, they are freedoms.  The energy trader knows that cherishing is the process for attempting to put energy in a cage, that concluding is a synonym for incarceration and death.  But he wants life and life is energy¾felt, free.

6.1.4.2.4.      He experiments, our oomphy merchant.  He knows energy is created more by loss and falling than construction.  Construction uses energy!  How much more efficient to allow falling to construct for him.

6.1.4.2.5.      He crawls into the space between what he thought he wanted and what he obtains.  Vast energy is there.  It can almost kill him.

6.1.4.2.6.      His silent exchange emulates energy’s exchange; this emulation is his revelry.  He pities the poor many who thinks energy lives in objects; he sees them atrophy themselves in objects’ laughing twine and wonders at the foolishness of man.

6.1.4.3.            While no fee or credentials are necessary to trade in energy in the manner I have described, one is required to subject oneself to energy’s curriculum, and one is required to find the curriculum first.  This takes time and, as we have learned, time is an elusive lover.

6.2.   Energy can, in theoretical terms, be directed at objectless objects:  desire’s God or energy’s art; or it can be directed at objective objects:  desire’s nature or energy’s technology.  But as desire’s objects only exist now in simulation and energy’s only objective object, technology, is the tool of simulation¾increasingly the simulator of simulation¾the trader has no choice of his direction.

6.2.1.      Energy’s trader thus is free and bound, educated and foolish, powerful and weak, a miggled merchant on the isotopes of time’s tictalk ruse.

6.2.2.      He displays characteristics based on energy’s dictates.  When will he display, and what?  Neither he nor energy knows.

6.2.3.      These characteristics are not his own¾which is the common man’s claim¾but simulations of energy.

6.2.4.      He confuses people, not by intent but as a by-product of his seeking the energy that’s present to him.

6.2.4.1.            Others are confused because they think flesh indicates energy is a solid, but the trader in energy knows that while energy takes solid form, the form is only as solid as a kiss.

6.2.4.2.            The trader in energy is hardly energy’s devotee¾energy is capable of commerce not religion¾but simply its extension; this knowledge helps the trader avoid religion’s classic stupidities.

6.2.4.2.1.      If one who claims to be a trader shows religion’s cracked yellow teeth while he talks, he hasn’t even begun to walk the orbits of space.

6.2.4.2.2.      But watch it¾even the true trader can wear religion as an evening fashion if energy directs him.  Energy is large enough to embrace religion for a night.

6.3.   The trader must attempt to transform his energy fully into another form.

6.3.1.      This fate is energy’s only one, but it is equally the only fate.

6.3.2.      The degree to which the trader is allowed to do this is known as efficiency.

6.3.2.1.            What allows him?

6.3.2.2.            Energy.

6.3.3.      The amount of concentration and the degree of transformation combine to produce the greatest names.

6.3.3.1.            The amount of concentration and the degree of transformation are determined by chance and opportunity.

6.3.3.2.            While names differ in weight, all humans are equally proud of their concentrations and transformations; their experience of energy is energy to them.

6.4.   Whether I act or lie still, whether I am calm or terrified, whether I weep or laugh, whether I speak or am silent¾energy remains equal without and within me.

6.4.1.      The lawyers and scribes of energy may wish to record the implications of this ambivalence, seeking laws in the thick horror of play, but the only implication is the transient shadow cast on others by my passion.

6.4.2.      Why does the trader have to seek energy, when it’s always within grasp?  Only because he is dense; if he were as brilliant as energy, he would always be centered in it and would disappear, as God in desire’s kingdom has disappeared and energy even as a word and rule one day will.

6.5.   If boats are feminine and robots are masculine, energy belongs with the former.  The trader in energy thus emulates the feminine as he emulates energy.  He emulates receptivity, indifference, caprice and compassion.  Without these, he is no trader in energy, but a trader in objects¾and the object is himself.

6.5.1.      Energy has knowledge, but it is the knowledge of the sun.

6.5.2.      Energy has a plan, but it is the plan of flesh.

6.5.3.      He who would trade in energy should learn first the sun and flesh; then he can trade.

6.5.4.      Movement is the first law of energy.  All is movement is the second law.

6.6.   You may object¾these classifications and divisions, this hierarchy, they betray an unsettled mind.  But all they betray is a mind given to energy; you betray a mind given to science.

6.6.1.      The trader in energy thus does not object, but builds.

6.6.2.      What does he build?  He builds simulacra of energy, tight words of joy bouncing on black surfaces of space.

6.6.3.      The trader blows hierarchies as a child blows bubbles; he is as unsettled as the wind.

6.6.4.      Does energy betray?  Betrayal is outside energy’s possibilities.  Betrayal is a function of desire.

6.6.5.      The trader in energy does not build by building, but by hiding behind energy’s building and wearing that hiding as his constant fashion.

6.6.6.      How does he hide?  Like the snake in its skin, the god in its pointing, the eagle in its pride.

Energy and the Object

5.      Energy and the Object

5.1.   A spiritual code of energy is undeveloped and it remains the task of explorers of the currents of the human soul to develop it collaboratively on the network which defies time and space.

5.1.1.      An attempt to begin this has been made in Section 6 below.

5.1.2.      Such a code would not construct systems of belief (which was desire’s task), but methods of relation¾coping constructs for the human as suffering agent, as suffering energy, as energy’s code-making object, as the animal who would believe but simply moves, as the animal who by moving believes, who constructs beliefs from the energy of movement.

5.1.2.1.            Why wears how’s fashion now.  So spirit now constructs how belief is constructed, not beliefs.  And even, by the law of mirrors, how how is made.  Manuals are never-ending; this is energy’s cold joy.  Is the manual on writing manuals the manual?  The one behind it all?  The code?  Can life be so prosaic?

5.1.2.2.            I have written the policy on policy and have seen the hide behind a and a eat its noun and its noun verbify.

5.1.3.      A spiritual code of energy might be written in the mathematics of language, in letters’ dubious law.

5.1.4.      I would like to see vast armies of blind researchers groping in the inner sancta of their souls, building orreries of energy for proud display in the museums of their minds.  Where are the objects?  What orbits what?  Who feels whom?  They grope, they are blind, they build … what more do you want in energy’s enkindling kingdom?

5.2.   Energy and Time

5.2.1.      A philosophical debate should be raging as to whether time is an object or whether it is a form of energy.

5.2.1.1.            If an object, it is becoming a simulation, like all objects.

5.2.1.2.            If a form of energy, it should be disinterestedly used.

5.2.1.3.            It should be raging, but philosophy now has an atomic nose and is on a carbon leash, led by a coat-white man through architected parks.

5.2.1.4.            To turn aside to energy¾this would be philosophy’s salvation and time’s seduction.

5.2.2.      Our lives are primarily comprised of snapshots of concentrated energy.  These snapshots, called memories, plans or hopes, are themselves forms of energy, simulations of the events themselves, which in turn are simulations of the snapshots.  They are like magnetic poles, defining and solidifying each other, but unable to unite.

5.2.2.1.            Humans dream of themselves becoming photo albums of themselves; then they would be real.

5.2.2.1.1.      To look at oneself in a photo¾doesn’t this elevate one’s flesh to truth and justify one’s life?

5.2.2.1.2.      To have someone else look at oneself in a photo¾doesn’t this elevate one’s flesh to Truth and apotheosize one’s life?

5.2.2.1.3.      To have all this looking occur not just in a photo but an album!  This is what lives are made for!

5.2.2.1.3.1.            And this manufacture is humanity striving to see energy, to seduce it to coalesce to a point, even for a flicker of a moment.

5.2.2.1.3.1.1.      Simulation allows the appearance of this coalescence.

5.2.2.1.3.1.2.      Photographs are its visible sign, energy’s incarnation.  The event itself, like the object, has divorced itself from energy and is solely an item buried in the soul’s archaeology; while the digging, discovery, classification, mounting and observing process can create energy, the object itself cannot.

5.2.2.1.3.2.            The camera is energy’s democratic eye.  Even more, the camera of the mind.  But most mental cameras are simply capable of taking pictures of other photographs, an orgy of flashing.

5.2.2.2.            As the energy of a particular human life begins to dissipate, it appears as a single snapshot at consciousness’ limens.  If some strange collector could gather these and form from them a single snapshot, would not God then be resurrected and humanity fulfilled?

5.2.2.2.1.      A recommendation I have for such a collector, which I obtained from energy while dreaming, is to paste each photograph he gathers onto the sky until the heavenly canopy is not stuffed with the archaic materials of clouds and stars, but ourselves¾a collage of simulation.

5.2.2.2.2.      If he should complete his task and the bowl above earth become an album, we might look up and see God again.  But this is not yet a standard methodology.

5.3.   An equal amount of energy is created both through the diminishment or disappearance of the object and the increase and appearance of it.

5.3.1.      One self-proclaimed lover of energy¾and indeed with some legitimacy to his claims¾a babbler in the heights and observer of circuses, a syphilitic child, no anti-Geist but a messy bless of yes, a sacred guess, loved energy too dirtily, despite his boasts of purity.  He was too isolated to justify his love.  But I offer you a polished mirror, one not the same size as your desire, but as the world’s.  He said, go over, and by this he meant, build a lightless closet so you can imagine you’ve gone over.  But I say, go over, and by this I mean, build yourself nothing and go into its light.

5.3.2.      If an equal amount of energy is created from the object’s diminishment and increase, why do humans, including even those who spin words that seem to go beyond the human, seek only increase?

5.3.2.1.            Not only this, but energy is also created from the imagination of the object’s diminishment and increase.

5.3.2.1.1.      Haven’t we only just begun to sense new sources of energy?  And aren’t those of great potency in simulation and absence?  Isn’t the objectless mirror the purest source and isn’t it the one form we have until now avoided?

5.3.2.1.2.      If energy can be created from the simulation of the object, the object loses its historical function, and simulation, even simulation of energy, becomes means and goal.

5.3.2.1.2.1.            As much or more energy can be created from object simulation as from the object itself; this is because the object is a finite set, but simulation an infinite set.

5.3.2.1.2.2.            As simulation of energy is equivalent to energy in a way that object simulation is not equivalent to the object, while the process to manufacture energy changes, energy remains the same.

5.3.2.2.            Isn’t this why the death of God¾the simulated death of a simulated being, the fiction of a fiction, the grandest simulation¾created so much energy?

5.3.2.2.1.      Isn’t this why we had to kill Him?  To discover new forms of energy¾ the energy of the negative, the energy of the non-existent?

5.3.2.2.1.1.            Haven’t we discovered in divine death the vast deposits hidden in iam?  What that grand fiction was trying to hide in summit’s fire?

5.3.2.2.1.2.            Isn’t our discovery greater than the sum of all discoveries to date?  Aren’t all our grand inventions, from the alphabet to the computer to set theory, simply stepping stones in wading pools to the sea of the energy of the non-existent?

5.3.2.2.1.3.            Aren’t we orbiting around this thought like scared curious children around a spacecraft, waiting for its door to open?  For its articulation, its laws, its commercialization?

5.3.2.2.2.      Now what simulation do we raise for future slaying?  Art?  Money?  But rather would we raise daily simulations that we burn¾gods we believe in for a day, then slay on the altar of our needs.  This constant virtual slaying is energy’s future.

5.3.3.      In this dawning age of energy, I say that only those who use energy efficiently will have anything to say.

5.3.3.1.            Efficient energy use means using energy from whatever sources it comes¾regardless of its source.  Whether diminishment, loss, transformation, gain, appearance¾each and all can be used.  Only the cloistered clown calls for one type.

5.3.3.2.            Even waste is energy, thus the efficient energy user uses the waste of others to fuel himself.  It is all the same to him; energy, not objects, subjects, desire or suffering, is his love.

5.3.4.      In the past regime of desire, power and love were frequently taken as opposites.  Perhaps they were.  Perhaps power was love’s absence and love power’s, that hope-hypothesis, God, being the strange conjunction of the two.  But here, with hypotheses in shreds hanging from tattered clouds and hope a bed of clattering worms on which we dream, in energy’s democratic realm (a democracy so fully instituted it inspires only horror among the sensitive), energy is equally in love, power and the hideous exuberant battle between the two.

5.3.4.1.            Is there not more power in power’s struggle to abdicate its power than power on its own?

5.3.4.2.            Is not love’s brute attempt to bring everything to sacrifice an energy that could light a megapolis for millennia or more?

5.3.4.3.            Energy does not care; energy wants itself.

5.4.   The object disappears with sufficient energy.  If we immerse ourselves in energy, there is no object.  Objectification is a result of perception; if we cleanse the eye of perception, the eye disappears.

5.4.1.      Unfortunately, no cleansing agent is available, only those that claim such agency.

5.4.2.      We, however, can simulate this agent by means of letters, which contain within them ruses so capricious and ancient they effectively de-objectify the world.

5.5.   Humans desire nature and god, but the material available to them to strive to fulfill their desire is other than what they strive for; the more they use this material for their striving, the more they move away from their striving toward the material.  To come closest to their desire¾attaining it is impossible¾they must give up on the available material and directly experience their desire.  But this direct experience is equally to encounter madness and death.  This is the unalterable alienated condition of humanity:  to nearly experience one’s desire and die or to strive after one’s desire and lose it.  But energy turns all this to love.

5.6.   Those who side with objectless energy are always opposed to those who side with object-oriented energy; this is duality’s truth.  Those who side with objectless energy are always aligned with those who side with object-oriented energy; this is unity’s truth.

5.7.   We shift from desiring something to desiring and in the disappearance of the object, which is nothing other than the fragmented plenitude of objects, energy is the only commodity, the objectless object, the dream of dreams.  We must pray to energy, not as we prayed to God, but as we prayed before we heard of God.

5.7.1.      The object becomes meaningless and this becoming is what is missed alike by the pompous critics of culture and their vapid contrapuntal others¾the advocates.

5.7.2.      Energy de-invests the object of its objectivity and demands (by not demanding) that objects become fluid pulses in its mystic-physic kingdom.