The Urban Soup (Part X)

At dinner with international students, I heard a peculiar anecdote, the kind which often reaffirms some faith in humanity, before I realize that these things happen all the time, that these boundary events are not statistically significant and that, sadly, we struggle against chains in vain. (Prove me wrong, kids; prove me wrong!) I am writing about a story of a sojourn to the Native Students' Association social. Two white people arrived and stood around, feeling out of place in the hubbub, when all of a sudden, the crowd parted and the drumming and chanting began. One of the two out-of-place white people noticed something odd: one of the drummers was white. Furthermore, this fellow was known to him from back in Germany. Turns out he had been fascinated with native culture for most of his life, had practiced his drumming and ceremonial chanting in the industrial valleys of Germany before coming here. He was one and accepted. He will be the bald Nordic bodhisattva, speaking up for the greatest genocide known to humanity, a genocide that still continues. I have no doubt about that.

Less glorious, but still something are the back alleys of my neigbourhood. These alleys have been subjected to cliche-fication by every alternative magazine in the city, who so freely set their photo shoots there that one is left wondering whether the actual cool people have all gone off to do something better, the next big thing, like squirrel-hunting or spontaneus flash mob riots. But fuck them. I like these alleys too. Anyone who's bothered to look will see that they are far more honest than the fronts of buildings. Out back we have the dumpsters, the bits of drywall discarded, barrels on their sides, fences falling into disrepair, those wonderful rusted-over fire escapes which bring to mind all the summers I toiled in alleys like this, out of the eyes of genteel society. If it weren't so cold as to deserve the title "fucking cold", I'm sure I'd see the occasional child playing or impromptu barbecue and gathering in the paved-over postage stamps of backyards that you sometimes come across.

Consider: "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, insects flitting about and worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these forms, so different yet so dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by simple laws. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms, most wonderful, have been, and are being, evolved."