The City IX

If the city is God¾or at least God's superficial shadowy photocopy¾how do God's lovers, chosen randomly from human stock and given divine weakness, seek him?  How do they seek what-is-not in what-is?  Initially, they simply seek the question¾its shape, taste, smell.  They may not ask it¾for they must hide their interests even as God hides in death¾but it disguised in the billion other questions of the city.  But just below is this central seeking question, which other lovers may hear and to which the dead God may point.

To seek God is to seek beauty, to seek beauty is to seek death.  To seek God in the city is to seek beauty and death in life.  How does one do this?  The human does not know.  The intersection of the city and the human strives toward this knowledge.

Loving God is like a husband loving his wife.  The city reveals this knowledge, and laughs.  But the human does not laugh; it shrivels like a prune and thinks it is dead.

I know that the city was begotten, not made.  This knowledge has much to do with God's death.

The cadence of divine justice is not synchronous with the human.  Whether the human lives or dies, whether it seeks or rests, whether it is holy or mediocre¾these are human concerns.  The divine lives and dies apart.  Nevertheless, while whether the human believes God is alive or dead makes no difference to God, the direction and weight of the belief makes a difference to the human.  Thus, in the city, with the human believing concretely and absolutely in God's death, human justice has the opportunity to become more apparent.  This appearance does not negate God's justice, which continues to act, though in the city through varied means, but overlays it, as a fog overlays a landscape.  This overlay is the human's gift to itself, an obfuscation and a thick grey glory.

Death and life are entirely different states to the human—one largely unknown, the other partially known.  But to the divine, death and life are simply different states or masks one wears, as if to different balls.

Humans who claim allegiance to a living god still exist in the city.  But neither their practice, which is the city's truth, nor their souls, if I could lay them on the harsh husks of hospitals and skin them, show any such allegiance.  The only humans who can claim such allegiance do not claim it, but rather hide, like the One whom they love.

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.

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.

The City VI

Faith in the city means believing God is dead¾not a parched cognitive belief, but one as living and sinewy as water.  I do not believe in the irrelevance of death, but its sticky vibrant passion, the eternal decay of the apotheosized dead.  My faith is rooted in my senses:  I smell the dead, I taste the living’s satisfaction, I run my finger along beloved epitaphs, I hear rats’ ecstasy, I see everywhere the silence which is the dead’s after the appropriate period of mourning is complete.  My faith has organic substance, unlike the artificial and chemical faith of the sophisticated who think because they’ve read about God’s funeral they believe.  Have they ever wept?  Have they visited the portals to his tomb and laid bouquets of tears?  To be alive means to believe.  To believe in the city is to believe that God is dead.   Unless you’ve wept, you don’t believe.  The city’s made of concrete, which is made from tears, even as all things are made of tears.  For, yes, people are weeping … but they are only weeping for themselves.  Their tears are small and cold.

The city has been built with hot tears of belief; what shantytowns shall rise from these new frigid drops of disbelief?

What the human calls in its vulgar tongue the tourist is the whore:  it visits only designated regions of the city—recommended, light, named, known.  These regions, while in different cities, are actually the same region in the same city.  Thus while the whore thinks it has traveled, it has hardly moved at all.

The whore increases as a popular mode of existence; it becomes responsible for the movement of disease and the birth of virulent new forms of pestilence.  Thus from the whore's pretty trinkets and limited experience come bugs, death, disaster, downfall and apocalypse.  The whores will be piled high in makeshift morgues in regions of the city they have never visited before; their visit will be free and they will not leave their hospitable resting place.

The city circles the earth and by circling becomes it, for the path walked in the shape of a circle is the only becoming.

The city, while littered with humans, while plural as the body is plural, breathes as one.

I would find God in the city, for I am made to find God.  Through God's death, the human is assured its quest is made eternal.  The eternity of the quest replaces the eternity of God.

Through arched pillars of popular light, I spy dark seductions.  I subject myself to all forms of degradation to enter these graves.  I become a worm.  I would be Christ before his gross apotheosis.  I betray those I love.  Yet for this, randomly, without warning, I find myself in majestic darkness¾the city's only concert, its gem.

The City V

Freedom is the mission and vision of the city.  Each unit of freedom is paid for in equal weight of regulation.  This is the city's ledger.  Freedom is comprised of equal measure of anonymity and naming.  This recipe for freedom is peculiar to the city.  It is not a freedom that has any grace associated with it, but no freedom is associated with grace other than the freedom paid for by suffering.  But the city denies this recipe for freedom by labeling it with damaged names.  This labeling is the primary function of psychology.

The city's sex is not normally discussed among those who speak of the human's habitat.  As nature's sex was female and its conquering god male, so the city's sex is male and its conquering god female.  Anyone who celebrates this understands neither the divine nor the female.

We live in the corpse of God and thus are secretly sustained by divine death; this explains the city's ecstasy.  The human has always thrived on death and the city affords great feasting.

Below the ecstasy, though, the human has the knowledge that the feast is limited.  Even God's decay is not forever.  So the human’s midnight plans are focused on what to do when the feast is over.

Each human, no matter how hardened the name in time, is dispensable.  Things, however, whether art, a coffee filter or a photo album, are indispensable.  The city teaches us this.

The human cannot put its arms around the city, although this is its deepest desire.  It would know the extent of the city's love, despair, thoughts, betrayals, but its partiality foils the longing of its depths.  The gap between the extent of the city and the human's ability to embrace it is the current of the city's energy grid and the material of its future.

There are noises in the city's body that mirror the mystery of the noises in the human's body.  So there are mirroring diseases, thoughts, orgasms, amputations, sadnesses.  When an act of the city coincides with a similar act in a particular body, the participating human momentarily feels the remote unity of the universe.

The continuous erotic relationship between hiding and revealing manifests itself in each habitat differently.  The human who would explore and map this relationship for the city, in such a way as to provide a spiritual landscape on which other humans can safely walk, will not be thanked by those who walk it, but may be oddly blessed by some of those who build structures on it for the navigation of the spirit.

The City IV

The city, emanation of the unspeakable sinews of desire, is not the concretion of love particularly, although it can be felt sometimes to be love’s tenebrous plan.  The city works its erotic origins in strips of calculated discourse, providing its inhabitants with cosmologies of analysis - simulacra of spirit sufficient for the city’s religious bounds.

What is the city to me but one possible path through the labyrinth of God’s mind?  Are there other ways?  To know that is to know God and the only thing we know of God is that He cannot be known.  What is the pattern of the labyrinth, its shape, its smell?  What is the context of the city’s life?  These questions birth the tenor of our dreams; their forms and plots seep through hedges onto the path we normally live.

God hides, He hides in death, the perfect hiding place.  Just under seductive manholes I can’t lift through some inner incapacity.  I call the manholes society; they cover in weighty processed circles God’s blackened naked image.

I am born from society seeking what lies below it.

What lies below becomes for me what I name God.

I have faith that from below I would see what lies above and recreate it.

Beauty is the city's commerce; it is free for those who only wish to dialogue with it.  But the city drives the human to be constantly dissatisfied with only dialogue, thus beauty always has a price.

The precise configuration required to achieve the most beauty entered time some centuries ago.  Having made itself available to the human, it fled, as such configurations do, and what is left us are imitations and bombast.

Flesh becomes common in the city.  The human requires concentrated ecstatic despairing flesh to nurture and sustain democracy.

The poor cities of the world reek of God's decay, the wealthy ones reek of the cologne humans wear at funerals.  Together, God in the human may be known.  But one must traverse the spectrum of scents and deeply smell them all if one wishes to know the city, the human, or God.

The mystic’s central experience - of the omnipresent center and the absent circumference - is manifest in the city.  Each portal, intersection, bar is the city's center; one never reaches its limits.  So the modern mystic finds himself in the concretion of his experience.  He knows God has become permanently incarnate and there is nothing left to do but describe the manifestation of God's death.  What knowledge.  What sadness.  What life.

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.