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The New York Grid System
I go to sleep and dream of travelling the grid system, as a current of information along a microchip. I wake up in New York City and the dream becomes reality. Urban life has been written about and talked about and still nothing is done about it. The situation becomes worse. These monster cities with the surrounding land captured and held hostage. This prisoner land to be ground through them, like a living animal through a mincer, and then ground through the peoples bodies living in the city. People become miniature mincers whose brief lives will pass from this monster city, like a blur of a speeded up image caught on camera film. They are simply cords of snot smeared alongside of a building. All they are to this city are globules of spit that have their brief life of consuming. They are containers of toxic city deposits. Everything including little pieces of sunlight and stretches of rain must be consumed into them for a time. The weather vanishes along with manufactured goods, to be simply reprocessed as shit from their living backsides. Even if the snot tried to slime its way down the side of the buildings, and into the streets and into the drains, it would simply end up in the ocean. A shadow of the ocean exists by the monster city. For kilometres out it has turned into grey New York sludge, to accommodate its abandonment by marine life, its complete desolation and lack of life. We must look forceful and know where we are going. In this way we accommodate the grid system; Brooklyn, Forty Second Street, Broadway, Park Avenue, Central Park, Madison Gardens, The Empire State Building, The Bronx, Wall Street, Soho, Greenwich Village, The World Trade Centre, The Statue Of Liberty for some, Times Square and Harlem. These words are simply a way of naming the grid system. Famous landmarks to be over publicised to the world, so that the monster city becomes deluded about itself, and so we can all get to know someone or something in our isolation. 'Hey, isn't that the world famous Chelsea Hotel, written about by that 'American' singer Leonard Cohen?' There is a way of naming something, and there is a way or overnaming something, so that the whole world fantasises about it. When they finally come to its gateway, to its massive structure, with their pockets lined with money and their heads full of dreams, from all the things that they have read about it or seen on TV, they will finally know it to be a sham. All their preconceptions to be misconceptions and all their dreams to be illusions. In this way they have learnt something about themselves. They will operate in a different fashion when they arrive back home to their less publicised places. Then they will say, 'No, you are wrong. I know that place to be a sham.' Yet they will also know of its treasures seldom talked about, and they will see the new precious treasures in their own backyard, previously unseen. If someone trips over something, or has fallen down and hurt themselves in the street, then the New York City public don't really see it as another human being such as themselves. Here people have taken on the status of trees or cars, or fallen logs. Step over them briefly, through layers of flow, from street level up through the traffic, to inside the buildings. People don't look at each other. If they ever did it would probably be as much of a shock to them, as suddenly stumbling upon a black bear eating berries, in Banff National Park, in a Canadian wilderness so distant, its light will never reach their overpriced dingy East Village apartments. If two people happened to stumble upon one another, both vulnerable at the same time, it would be bear meeting person and person meeting bear, both just as scared as the other. So we ring out our bear bells of toughness and defensiveness in the grid systems of the great cities, to let all of the imaginary bears know that we are coming and that we mean business. 'Don't fuck with the fuck! Mother fucker! Fucking arsehole! Fuck you!' The flow is on many different levels. If you stand up on a building and look down, there will be people moving in the windows of the buildings as if on street level. Those buildings have absolute stability and constructed heights to accommodate the layers of human movement. There will be the massive crowds on street level intersected with roads, and then beneath that the underground bus stations, basements and subways. They too will have there own glow and way of life. Each level has its flow and its etiquette for weekdays and weekends, for days and nights, for calendar months and calendar years. The openings and closings of businesses and shops are the seasons of the giant grid systems. Whenever the flow is interrupted, this will occur as simply a large river boulder dislodging from the edge and falling in. The flow of the water will accommodate the stone, by simply moving around it on its way to further along the river's surface. As the stone sinks lower it will gradually disappear as the flow moves over the top of it. There are many examples of these blocks in flows throughout the monster cities. For example, if someone suddenly stops and cries into their hands, for reasons that nobody knows, or if someone is murdered. The monster cities are full of themselves and their own expansion. They like to have the wilderness put aside somewhere, as a little symbol of mystery and spirituality, to exist somewhere in the backgrounds of their consciousness, like leaving an old church erected and never visiting it. For to step beyond the borders of the monster city, may be to find that nature is such a long way from the city's centre, that you never really get there. You may also find that every wildlife documentary on the discovery channel, has been filmed in the same national park, with same armed guards at its borders. And you may find that when even those guards have failed, then it's all to be filmed in the zoos, the final bastions of wildlife extinction. They are electrified simulated rainforest trees that those monkeys are not allowed to climb in. That is a concrete swimming pool for that polar bear that sways its head so much, that Zoochosis becomes a way out of its misery. In some ways the inhabitants of the monster cities are like paedophiles, because to live here is to take the innocence of the earth and secretly fuck it. Now there are no more excuses left. We all know what we are doing to the planet, but we won't stop doing it. |
