Sorting Out City Life

DURING the week I allow my restlessness as an inescapable condition of city life. It seems peculiar only when I admit that there might be other ways of living. The artificial dividing line between "weekday" and "weekend" might be a necessary condition of city life, for one has to feel that if it all was "one time," simply days upon days, that city chores and anxieties were assented to or in some other way self-inflicted, or that one was even aware of other possibilities, then one would immediately leave forever.

It is necessary then, to create or recognize exterior conditions which keep us in cities, plodding along with whatever we may consider to be our work. Thus... a job or a lover or a mission, like confronting what one believes about politics, and we are tied to our cities and their carnal fetishes, but we have passed the buck somehow in our own minds. Or there may be a human sharing desire, whereby one is fulfilled in suffering by the existence of fellow suffers. Bolstered by, unhappy, confirming faces, and the sharing of despondent memories with friends, reliving other moments, marking recurring visions as the week passes again through each point.

Links between thought and action are of course broken apart in the city. Perhaps most of all by the recurring fantasy of the city, that the two can be integrated. Who would believe, in the country, that revolutionary socialism could replace television as the soul of America? Who could imagine the question itself, so far away from television?

All processes are instantly reinvested with wonder, once one leaves the city. Face to face with nature, neurotic embroidery is immediately and obviously less beautiful than the embroidery of trees and sky. One finds infinite variations on green, changing by moments with the movement of the sun across the sky, far more sensible than finite, variations on truth or social reality that seem so convincing amidst a bankrupt landscape of buildings and asphalt.

Perhaps one is simply nearer to functional reality away from the city, and that is what is so nice. So that if one might always walk around with blueprints documenting all the systems under city asphalt: water pipes leading to fire hydrants and toilets and bathtubs, and gas mains going to stoves, and electric and telephone lines to everywhere, and subway, tunnels taking people places, with purposes, city life might be a thrilling adventure. Or as I have hoped, if I could really understand just how electricity works, really understand about electrons and shared bonds and all that... in other words, understand what the energy of a city is, as one might want to understand the energy of love, I would always be truly aware of what was happening around me and always be happy.

In the country, one would rarely attempt to understand the functional reality that one can perceive. If you were looking at a stream you would never ask why it was moving or what its energy force was. You realize immediately that you have no idea, and that the question is a stupid one. It is impossibly confusing, potentially a life's work trying to sort out that one little piece of ground, and short of that, it is enough to just sit and watch it flow.

THERE are city questions. Here are some of them: Is this significant data? Am I happy now? Do my expectations color my experience? Might it possibly be true that past drug taking does affect present cognitive processes? Am I living in the here and now? Is alienation inescapable in a postindustrial society? How soon will the revolution be? Who am I where am I going?

These are real and important questions, but not categorically or universally so. If I leave the city, they immediately lose at least their reality. They almost melt away.

Perhaps it is the closeness to animals, different animals besides cats and roaches, that is important. Perhaps too, Camus is right in saying that "man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is." It must be both more and less intricate than that, depending in part on whether, the question is asked in the city or the country.

Suppose I am attributing too much to the city/country split. That these are all my projections, an emblem for my own schizophrenia. That is possible, but so what. Discrepancy is everywhere. In another mood, it could be discussed in terms of human good and evil, but it would make no more sense. Baba Ram Dass says that the mark of Western thinking is that it creates phony insoluble metaphysical dilemmas to keep people upset and working hard. I am told also that the Cubans have abolished the study of Philosophy in University graduate schools, because it has been shown that it tends to make people unhappy. So the Cubans have decided to get thephilosophers out of the city, into the country to the fields. Almost like sending a kid to a fresh air camp because you feel sorry for him. And that seems sensible.

Everything that I have read about Cuba (and many people seem also to feel this way) reaffirms human goodness. That means something, to think that perhaps Cuban cities are full of good things to do and talk about and believe in... that one doesn't have to look at trees to appreciate natural harmony.

I CAN NO LONGER imagine a solution to any problem, the least of which is my own unhappiness, that is short of revolution. How can the problems of pollution possibly be solved without getting rid of chemical companies that continually lie about the effects of their product, and who, when forbidden to sell them in America, rush off with them to the Third World? And the chemical companies won't really like being gotten rid of, and they have many friends, many more than I do.

I want to say that we should crush the state, not because I like the way it sounds in my head, not because of that debased and fragmentary reality, but because it is true by some objective standard, because I really believe it. I believe in politics devoutly in the city, perhaps because they are the same thing as the city. Every night in Cambridge my dreams are full of passion and violence. And yet, I sleep very soundly in the country, full of happy images. The city questions cease to make sense. It all seems subjective and ridiculous. So I must rush back to the city every Sunday, perhaps to make things objective again. In part to reaffirm the conditions of oppression that I perceive, and then to reaffirm my ideology of response.

Must I then stop going to the woods, cut off the illusory springs of remaining happiness so as to obtain a more coherent picture of my society? Sitting in a forest there is nothing worth knowing except that life is really great. But that can't possibly be right while the War is going on. It is too selfish a vision. It does not speak about most people's lives.

So what then, if one marches into one's unhappiness, and refuses to leave until every social force that contributes to human suffering is dealt with? Will whole new realms of discrepancy open up? Is that vision of the city, of totally insoluble chaos, a correct one? The revolution, whose insatiable thirst for action we would allow to possess our selves, where will it go? Organizing, building dream cities with understandable electricity, waiting for the big apocalyptic brawl. How is one ever to assure oneself of the immediacy and solidity of one's vision, amid what often seems its complete transparency? What strength is there to take on so as to see oneself through dark heavy times, construction workers breaking heads in New York, ferociously coming to the defense of bourgeois systems of oppression, what strength is there that will shield the core of belief, keep one working and believing, waiting, pushing the day when some new flag will fly over the White House, and Harvard University?

The world gets more insane every day. My AM radio just said, "Your right-on radio station is Here in Boston..." Shit, "Right on" used to mean something, just a couple of months ago. And now it is lost, rendered almost meaningless as an expression of passion. I want to smash the radio, to deny what is happening. But that would be insane. Yet there is the feeling that at some point there must be a final line, the line which Camus says defines the revolutionary situation, where one says this much and no more, and picks up a gun. A time when a meaningless death, though politically wrong, might be the only response left to a dying spirit.

A FRIEND told me about a Peter Weiss play he saw in London. It was all scenes of horror from Vietnam. The audience was asked... forced to sit there and watch it happen again and again, without the interposition of a TV screen and a room with furniture. The last "scene" had a man dressed up like a magician walk out carrying a black box. He gestured expansively, like a magician, opened the box, and took out a butterfly, which he held by one wing. He did this three times, each time very slowly. So the audience might be jarred to understand. Then, holding the box in one hand, he flourished the other and pulled a lighter out of a pocket. He held it up, slowly raising his arm.

He opened the top. He rolled the flint: three times trying to light a flame. And then, very slowly, on the third try, the wick ignited. Did they understand what was about to happen? Had they really been watching? Was there time left; the magician was opening the black box. He was taking out the butterfly and holding it up by its wings. His hands moved together slowly, until the butterfly was aflame and burned away in an instant.

In the theater, there would sometimes be screams. People would be real brave and shout "Don't," but it would still happen, and they would have the narcissistic satisfaction of having protested the act. Once, and it must have been a spectacular moment, many in the audience must have been shaking, a man leapt from his seat as the lighter moved toward the butterfly, and beat the magician to the floor.