The Urban Soup (Part XII)

Every few days a new swarm of people-locusts descends on my living room. Today we have a fellow with pock-marks, a person with a mane of hair so shiny that it made you cry to think of the logistics of taking care of it, an eastern european talking machine and a few other very drunk architects and aspiring architects. The perfect designers of our urban visual milieu. I did not grill them, instead concentrating on the wine. They talked of things that went beyond me, then I pushed forwards on philosophy of mind which went over their heads, and so the sparring went back and forth for much of the night. (I am dramatizing: think of any gathering with semi-strangers you have ever had. That's what it was like. But I suppose the quality is in the perception.) There was talk of North America as the matrix, which I frown on. I think our continent, or at least our culture is more like Babylon, in the Rastafarian sense of the word. If that doesn't make sense, clarification is in order. I should probably hyperlink Babylon. But so be it, it is not so. I think I'll return to this theme at a later time, because it seems that every year I come up with a one-word summary of everything that is wrong with our culture and I try to shout it out as much as possible. In 2004-2005 it was Moloch, after Allen Ginsberg's stoned call-to-arms, which he himself repudiated with Part III and footnote to his rambling epic poem. For 2006 let us call it Babylon. Same Old Testament inspiration, except this time from the rastafarians, not my favourite Buddhist Jew.

Keep in mind that the Urban Soup is not Moloch or Babylon. The Soup is the symbol of everything that is anti-alienating in our culture. We are cold to each other in the streets but in our minds we are accepting of difference, and a few of us go so far as to dance out that diversity. Some don't dance but play their musics. Anything to keep diversity from becoming another meaningless buzzword. And how can it be a buzzword when there is the palpable sense that something that has never been built before is materializing before our eyes! This is when the swirling randomness of visions and dreams and long fog-walks and aimless wanders cystallizes into an affirmation, a grand "yes!". And this is the affirmation that battles the whirring helicopter blades of Babylon and the thousand blind windows of Moloch's facades. There are powerful enemies in every street corner and every utility pole, but there are also allies: strange peyote shamans coming out of the southwest, statistician bums, hidden identity huperhero hipsters. The cityscape becomes a lot more exciting if you think of it in this way. And why shouldn't I? It is a flight of imagination and nothing more. Every African or Latin American liberation writer has down the exact same thing. And if I retread the tired and used, let it be so. In many ways, we in the grip of affluence are in need of more liberation than the subsustence farmer. But that's too much of an argument for here.

Consider: "Memory itself is an internal rumour."