Spiderwebs

We seek to have our finger on the pulse of the city. Not in the urban-planner variety of pulse-checking--nothing so summary, informational, statistical, surface-based. (But that's why it's hard to talk about). We seek something more ethereal without being supernatural--I suppose something hard to notice, something you have to strain your attention for, something you have to aspire to, to train your perception and conception for. This is why we're still poor, why we stagger around like kids in fourth grade still not ready to emerge into the glaring sun into the yard where bullies stick out like buoys on a calm day.

Who are we?

The seekers of the city's spiderwebs; those gossamer strands of connection that break whenever some hulking creature set on its course bursts through them. We all see them from time to time: in a pastel sunset that looks like a Monet, in the suddenly and inexplicably radiant gaze of the bearded alcoholic, in the vertiginous stepping-back during conversation to take in all the bustle and realizing you're one toehold closer to the Good. And they fall away just like that: the shriek of a fire engine pierces the orange of the sunset, the directional gray ooze of wine-besotted volition, in the rendering of one conversation from the bustle which bursts its seams in vacuity.

We are they who climb and fall. We're the inexperienced but determined. No ascetics; not anymore. No uncontacted mystical tribes. No amor fati. No more hero-worship. No more anxiety of influence. No more future-oriented gaze. No more myth of progress. (Symmetrically) no more myth of regress. No more perfectionism. The sand-mandala's our model.

Night. Oh, night. A few nights ago I wanted to sing your rooftops in words. I wanted to feel the pulsing of starlight on my skin and hear the rough breathing of Orion's chest; I wanted to touch the volitional impulse of Ursa Minor as it reels there, in the center of the carousel. I dared in you to be. And in the leaping out of my normal skin, I could not fall asleep. I ran the same mission twice just so I could feel your heaviness. Just so I could stand on your rooftop.

(This passage betrays anxiety of influence. Disclosure: the theme of Night's from Rilke. The theme of heaviness is from Kundera. The bit with the carousel and Ursa Minor was me.)

Consider: "I do not want my house to be walled in on sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any."