fantasy city
by uzwi
City as symbol of the self. Let’s not do this literalistically, item by item of possible correspondence. & let’s do it in at least a halfway contemporary way, acknowledging that a self is anyway, temporary, a snapshot of a passing state, less an item than an assembly of the relations between some other–constantly shifting–items. Like a dream, which, in Hillman’s formulation, tells us “where we are, not what to do”, a self–a city–is a progress report. Or absolutely not even that, because why does the self, the city, the dream, have to have a purpose or a product ? That’s why products, along with built environments, though sold as dreams, have so little in them of an actual dream. & maybe selves are the same.
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A brain is a city is a network is a maze. Totally. Let’s.
..is a video game. Repeating menaces. Patterns. Convenient familiar paths vs. paths through bad neighborhoods.
Makes me think of “Groundhog Day” (oh, here comes Ned Ryerson again…) He has to play it over and over until he can get to the next level only of course the enemy is himself.
In noir the city is a character, but in noir the city is also an expressionistic projection of the narrator/protagonist’s shadowy and jaded worldview.
Once you get ahold of a good idea, every idea seems like that idea.
(Non-) Literal (ist (ic (al (ly)))): some of us (cities) are noteworthy for our storied addenda; other stories are not worthy for our litter. Litter belies the literal stories we build, but lies buttressed by stone are more durable than truth made of tissue; their interaction is the realtime dream.
Speaking of litter, what is the mentality, as a self, of a city with poor sanitation services?
Zak: You may be onto something in terms of self being the enemy of itself, but only insofar as we view the self as unchanging.
Perhaps the self is only our idea of it, with any change relying on a larger matrix of peoples (the city), which in turn relies on fresh ideas to change, or rather infect, and rework at least some of its avenues and thoroughfares so that any daring individuals wandering its outer limits may be led to somewhere they did not expect. However, not all cities are as transmutable as Viriconium.
I think the reason selves “have so little in them of an actual dream” is because even though we acknowledge base desires as important, they are still regarded as base, as regression. What about trying to follow our deep imaginative desires as a way to extreme consciousness? But again, any evolution of self must bring the larger community–the rest of the city–with it, however long that takes.
I regret the last sentence of that post. It makes for an unnecessary confusion between ego & self. I should have put it that the “real” city (the “passing state, less an item than an assembly of the relations between some other–constantly shifting–items”) is to the self as the “progress report” is to the ego. As Evan says, if you want to find the (or a) real city, you have to risk the dive into chaos & shadow.
I would say, solve et coagula! except that implies a product. If there’s no product there’s no Stone. You have to come away with whatever you get. & make the same dive day after day.
I think this may be beyond me but there’s a wee difference between owning a fixed sense of self and ‘knowing thyself’; the fixed sense of self can leap from point to point, from each dived-for pearl to the next, and in that instant, any fleeting impression, any snatched bit of bizarre or banal conversation can be worked up and crystallized into an image of fixed self, each more perfect that the last, as though we allowed ourselves to be imprinted sequentially by snowflakes. In that sense perhaps the fixed self needs and craves the city and its fluctuations; perhaps the well-known self on the other hand just bobs and weaves around and between things; it’s not self-sufficient, just self-aware. Perhaps it’s not about types of environment, inner or outer, but to do with different senses of motion?
I think I regret the use of the word “symbol” too, in that it assumes the possibility of a fixed meaning, rather than shifting combinations of analogies & homologies, cascades of “events” which switch other events on or off at other levels, & are in turn switched on or off by them.
There’s activity, which we take as a homologue for process, and which therefore hints at product: a confusion that’s kept many a politician in business.
Paradoxically, the city’s clearer after dark, and from far away. Most of its visible zones of class disappear, and its inessential structures are reduced to lights – some marking its layers and avenues, but most flowing about: traffic as transmission. Half close your eyes, and its a model of synaptic networks and chemical shifts, a mental process objectified as the Westway.
Maybe (as so often) Dylan got to that thought first, in “Dark Eyes”: “the earth is strung with lovers’ pearls.” A wonderful notion, to imagine sodium highways seen from a jet as lines of desire, reaching into the night.
I’m fascinated by the archaeology of cities; layer upon layer of past events forming foundations for current and future happenings; the way in which the past lurks in dark alleys ready to mug the unwary and relieve them of their assumptions.