The City XIII

***

The human may be concerned that these declarations of the city are not homogeneous.  I ask the human¾is the city homogeneous?  Is the city, despite its regulations, consistent?  Does it agree with itself?  Does it do anything other than present itself in living polished objects to the human and say¾if it could speak¾I am this lovely museum, yes, but I am also a heap of merde around the corner, the dominating blanks and documents, the tepid fire, the caress that kills, the son who isn't yours?

I have known the city.  I have given my life to loving it.  I have lived in its hubris and squalor and devoutly desire nothing other than the inevitable¾that the city become all and the human consummated.

This is the purity the human seeks to compensate for the death of God.  This is the city the human inhabits and explores.  This is the corpse of God and the knife of variety.  This is the city of my mind.

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.

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.

The City X

The city is made of desire and befriends it.  The city's center, its eye of speed, if found and visited, returns the human's stare and rewards its interest with the pool of its pupil.  Should this black joyful moment occur, the human should not hesitate, but leap; should the fortune of the moment continue, the human may see desire's composition.

The black eye of the city and the white eye of the mirror are one.  Eye on eye and stare on stare, they are the fulfillment and negation of color.  This contradiction is the human and the city and desire.

In the swirl and stomach of the city, I prefer to relate to the human through as many intermediaries as possible, and as few.  With the former, I bounce from object to object like a pinball with no exit and thus mimic the city's movement; with the latter, I negate the human by becoming the object.  Either object or object of the object:  these are my modes in the city of stomach and swirl.  The human, though, prefers one, two or perhaps three intermediaries between itself and stench.  This preference of the human I call society.

As the human dissolves in the city's desire, desire increasingly becomes the definition of the human; God and all He stood for¾for the human, not for him¾all He stood for¾only non-desire¾becomes so remote that neither the height of God's past nor the depths of his deathly presence can be sensed by the human.  In the aesthetic tumult of the city, non-desire, God, the good, only become known through their contraries:  desire, the human, the mediocre.  (Evil is only good's contrary in the human; in God, compromise, which is the movement away from absolute perfection and debauchery toward mediocrity's expected tedious conformity to the human's social roulette, is the opposite of good.)

The human, if it has any nobility, accepts the style of death synchronous with its soul.  (But, then, we could say that each human is strangely noble.)  So God accepted his death and so eventually the city must accept its.

The city, for all practical purposes¾and what is the city but purpose and practice?¾is endless; the human explores and leaps and lives and never experiences an end … only beginnings.  So the city's time is always future.  The great explorers of the city may eventually get weary, but it is not from a lack of beginnings, but rather an excess of them.  Even should the explorer return again and again to the same region of the city, each piece of garbage cries out for life by claiming an archaeology, a discipline, an identity.  The city is not contained in this waste fragment, yet it is.  The reality that it is is what wearies the explorer as much as the reality that it isn't¾for there is an equal infinity to explore in both realities.  However, as the city is oriented toward what is (only God is oriented toward what is not), the explorer tends to move from object to object rather than simply move in the gravity of one.  This endlessness of movement both wearies and further stimulates all encountered objects to endlessly move.

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.