The Sacred City
Sep. 3rd, 2012 02:31 am"At night, the city is no more full of dreams than at any other time. That's where people go wrong. They think that the daytime city full of money, and work, and people who know where they're going is the real one, but I look all the time for the real city and it's not as simple as that. It's not simple at all.
You might think you might find it by digging holes or staring at the pavement, but it's not there in the mud and stone and brick. The real city is alive and breathing. You can look for it in the buildings, in the way they're built and why and how they look in the light, what someone called 'the spectacle organized by architecture.' But how could that be the real city? The real city is not organized by anyone. It just uses certain places to make itself seen, and the best architects know this and don't overreach themselves.
I don't know about the people. They seem to be living some great truth, like the dance of atoms, and of course it's not anything they understand individually. But still you could investigate them, follow a few threads of their lives, their friends, and those they work with. You could even find out what remains of their ancestors, and you'd still be no closer to that which moves and connects them.
It is that which gives me a feeling I've never known before. I'll call it a religious feeling 'cause I've no other word for it. When I see all of this, this city full of light and sound, and there's so much that you can't even imagine knowing all of it, so beautiful and so hideous all at once, it is then I start to think there might be a new god that only lives in cities.
It's not every day you discover a new god, especially such a powerful ambivalent one, sometimes a drunken stinking dangerous god, certainly. But still, the correct response to a god or a goddess, any kind, is worship. I don't care what anyone says, and that's what I want to do. I feel like St. Joan must have felt when she heard her voices, like a blasphemer. But I think we can do with more gods, not less, and I'll take that chance. And of course the presence of a god makes the city a sacred place, which is what I've always thought anyway.
Look at it. Just look at it. How could it not be?" ~ Barry Andrews
You might think you might find it by digging holes or staring at the pavement, but it's not there in the mud and stone and brick. The real city is alive and breathing. You can look for it in the buildings, in the way they're built and why and how they look in the light, what someone called 'the spectacle organized by architecture.' But how could that be the real city? The real city is not organized by anyone. It just uses certain places to make itself seen, and the best architects know this and don't overreach themselves.
I don't know about the people. They seem to be living some great truth, like the dance of atoms, and of course it's not anything they understand individually. But still you could investigate them, follow a few threads of their lives, their friends, and those they work with. You could even find out what remains of their ancestors, and you'd still be no closer to that which moves and connects them.
It is that which gives me a feeling I've never known before. I'll call it a religious feeling 'cause I've no other word for it. When I see all of this, this city full of light and sound, and there's so much that you can't even imagine knowing all of it, so beautiful and so hideous all at once, it is then I start to think there might be a new god that only lives in cities.
It's not every day you discover a new god, especially such a powerful ambivalent one, sometimes a drunken stinking dangerous god, certainly. But still, the correct response to a god or a goddess, any kind, is worship. I don't care what anyone says, and that's what I want to do. I feel like St. Joan must have felt when she heard her voices, like a blasphemer. But I think we can do with more gods, not less, and I'll take that chance. And of course the presence of a god makes the city a sacred place, which is what I've always thought anyway.
Look at it. Just look at it. How could it not be?" ~ Barry Andrews
