They Who Live In Cities

Cities are contradictions in themselves. A city brings thoughts together, it aggregates and transmits and disperses ideas. But a city also breeds close-quarters interaction, where difference becomes more important if one is not to lose one's identity. The polis then requires laws, regulations, social niceties — the polis must become a civis, the Greek democracy must become a Roman republic.

Cities militate against the rights of man. As one famous saying goes, free will ends where the reach of a hand meets the skin of a face. Free will and free expression are bound at the very least by the free will and expression of others. In a city, that physical landscape within which the metaphysical landscape moves, it means people are less free — they keep coming too close to each other.

And so humans may only enjoy the fullest extent of their rights when they are alone, separate from the logical demands of each other human. No man is an island, wrote Donne — but the hidden message in that meditation is obvious: nobody is free, and in a city, one is free least of all.

Lunchtime

In the rushing of the noonday hour
A fly descends
In hot oil and busy elegance
A meal is served

Hear one moment of silence
Between wingbeat and heartbeat

The sacrament of food
Consumes the moment
Lays it out to later
Autopsy of words

The smoke pours out
The heat returns
The daylight's messy business
Heads to evening's dusty doom

Living Out My Science Fiction Fantasies

No starships, no alien worlds or aliens, no underwater cities, no teleport chambers, no easy augmentation fixes for birth defects. I looked forward to many things, from my standpoint in the 1970s and 1980s, but have not yet found them.

And yet, I find cause for optimism each time I read Science or the quarterly tech update from The Economist or any of the other sources I routinely sift for news about these things. Today, for example, I am reading the mid-June episode of The Economist's Technology Quarterly.

The list is interesting: Tesla's dream of harnessing ambient energy, now closer to reality as Nokia begins to pluck electricity from ambient radio waves for free; salmon modified to spawn faster and bigger using natural hormonal stimulation; vegetarian robots that harvest cellulose (grass, twigs) to run themselves; amoeboid robots that can change shape and squeeze into tight spots; self-repairing metal sheets; carbon composites that are both the body and the battery of a car; straw-bamboo-clay composites that are earthquake resistant and environmentally friendly; information eavesdropping by magnifying keyclick sounds; educational software that reads your face to gauge if you understand something; software that defends you from distractions.

All that is just in the summary, not the detailed pieces. The detailed pieces are even more fascinating.

But the game I've often played is the one in which I wonder how it would be if all these discoveries were 'in play' at the same time. What kind of world would we be living in?

It takes some effort to realise that while many of my dreams have not yet come to pass, many of them already have. Handheld lasers, mobile phones smaller than a pack of cards, computers the size of a small book, near-instant searches through massive archives of collaboratively-amassed — these are the things of Asimov, of Heinlein, of the old greats from the old times.

I am happy when I think of this. Such happiness keeps me going as I wait for the days of Space: 2019 (two decades is late, but not too late), of Niven, of Brin's Uplift universe and perhaps Cordwainer Smith. But please, not the dystopian visions of Ballard and Kornbluth; having Orwell come true is already bad enough.

World, Flesh and Development

A couple of thousand years ago, in Palestine, an infamous rabbi had an equally infamous disciple (at least, from a modern day perspective, for he was the one who gave us the modern sense of a Greek word that used to mean 'unveiling') who said, "For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world."

Today I was sitting in a place in Somerset, watching the world go by, when the Meme said to me, "Y'know, the whole world depends on people spending a lot of money on what they don't need. If people only spent money on what they needed, everyone would be poor and the world would fall apart."

It makes a terrible kind of logical sense. And trying to reverse this pattern is not possible unless there is some sort of apocalypse first. Perhaps in 2012? Heh.

Private Lives

Sometimes I wonder how some authors can so convincingly get us into the heads and private internal lives of their characters. John Lanchester does it somewhat scatologically in his Mr Phillips, that old hack and wonderful enchanter James Joyce does it surpassingly and mystifyingly well in Ulysses; other examples abound (mostly in metropolitan life, and often in Irish literature — or literature written by the Irish).

One of the most acute examples, which at first sight or hearing doesn't seem to do much (and yet does enormously much, on a second or third hearing) is this one from that great London indie Brit-pop band, St Etienne:

The Milk Bottle Symphony by St Etienne

Tony leaves the Depot late.
Seventeen years with the Unigate,
Drives his float down Goswell Road at twenty-five to eight.

Number Nine, Mrs Doris Brown.
Pulls on her quilted dressing gown,
Shuts the fridge and boils the kettle,
Wipes the table down.

La la la la la la
Just as she pours the tea,
She's whistling randomly,
The Milk Bottle Symphony.

Milk Bottle Symphony

Number Twelve, there's Amy Chan.
Writing down a line for the CandyMan,
About the time she saw Tom Baker,
Drinking down the Hat and Fan.

The man next door is Gary Stead.
Shuffles downstairs with heavy head,
Scans the paper, takes a pill,
And stumbles back to bed.

La la la la la la
Didn't get home till Three
Singing appallingly
A Milk Bottle Symphony

Milk Bottle Symphony

Emily Roe's at Thirty-One,
Twenty minutes left to get her homework done.
Leaves her cornflakes on the sofa,
Says good-bye to Mum.

La la la la la la
Jumps on the Forty-Three,
Humming unconsciously,
A Milk Bottle Symphony

Milk Bottle Symphony...

A Milk Bottle Symphony is of course that great and subtle random orchestration of early morning noises one is treated to in a the early morning, if you live in a country (as I used to) which still has morning milk deliveries in glass bottles that clink as the milkman puts them outside your door. Delicious milk, fond memories. Being a student in England was one of the best times of my life.

Vox Urbana

Two years ago, I ran a poetry workshop for a bunch of teenagers. By accident, I opened a folder and... here it all is. Or whatever remains of it. I present to you...

A Wilderness of Stone and Steel

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“In the vacant places / We will build with new bricks.” T S Eliot, The Rock (1934)

Landscape:

The urban landscape has features which no other landscape has in abundance – throngs of people, the roar of commerce, the tall houses and great towers of the mighty all jostling side by side with the raggedness of the poor and indifferent, vehicular transport and, everywhere, the condition of humanity (both good and evil) concentrated and distilled into gleaming diamonds. Just as settings highlight diamonds, so too the urban landscape highlights the human spirit.

Language:

Hard, rough-edged words dominate: ‘concrete’, ‘slum’, ‘dirt’. Where the city is lyrical, it is like the flow of traffic along a major artery – and where it is evocative, it is full of smoke, rain, darkness, and hot metal. Urban life is gritty; it is full of lumps, bumps, contractions and contradictions. Stress, shortness of time and breath and space, all cry out beneath the broad sweep of the steel sky. It is here that ‘one’ is the loneliest number; it is also here that all languages become one.

Life:

She looked at me, an old woman; her face was a map of all her days. If you traced the veins back to her heart, you would know all her descendants and their lives. The young man with her was her grandson; his language of choice was not hers and his calling was one she admired, but did not understand. To him, life was stainless steel and antiseptic and translucent plastic which one threw away after use; to her, life was old wood and incense and bright oranges on a cold day.

Love:

They passed each other by, they passed by each other every day. He was a man of the briefcase, she was a lady of the towers. They rode in parallel elevators to the 57th floor. They lunched in adjacent restaurants. They were equally kind, equally ignorant of genuine suffering, equally devoted to the urban sprawl. They would have loved, their love would have resounded throughout all generations. But they never met, and love, hovering and waiting, was disappointed.

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What is the vocabulary of urban poetry?

Urban poetry is the combined voice of buildings, industry, and people. Traffic roars and the people move in tides across the city and back again, from sunrise to sunset and beyond.

How does a building speak? If it did, what would it say? What are the songs of machines, roads, and streetlights? What rough music does the daily grind of the workplace produce?

Urban poetry, the vox urbana, attempts to see into the spirit of the city. It evokes every passion of stone and the grittiness of tar, all ruthlessly exposed by the white glare of old lamps and the blue flash of MRT safety lights.

And most of all, it is the voice of faceless humanity, brought together by the forces of economic necessity and historical destiny to perform roles which nobody fully understands.

The vocabulary of urban poetry is therefore the language of city people, the sounds of traffic and machinery, dirt, steel, and windows. It creates lines like:

In restless dreams I walked alone
On narrow streets of cobbled stone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence…”

Paul Simon, The Sound of Silence