Oh the city! Where men from the country come and stare ; Stare dumbstruck is what they do . The enormity – overwhelming crushing enormity of it all – a roiling swamp of rabid endeavor . The illimitable streets loom ahead , the formidable buildings impose themselves aloft , you are smothered shaped and manipulated not by time but by the overbearing presence of humanity. Humanity : the sublime illusion of human domination over nature. Where nature, that mysterious power that propels us into existence and that inexorably stills us, is a shadow trampled to the ground ,seeping in and retreating to the tiny rifts and ruptures in walls and sidewalks. Nature reduced to a wistful drooping park in which sad families gather to sit under an ancient tree or on bird-shit-spattered benches , convoke for a brief respite from all the turbulence and mental violence ( a place where all happens for no apparent reason) . The illusion of conquest so innocently harbored by men , so beautiful and manifest in the city, its evidence seated in every cobble , tenebrous alleyway and miserable throbbing aspect of the city. The illusion without which we could not live as we do , without which we lose ourselves . The miracle of society, of a people huddled together in one vast harmonious place – a people looking outward more than inward. The country where a person is subdued and self- absorbed ; the city where person ( if part of it) is raised to a tremendous height and all introvert becomes extrovert.
An endless torrential river of people floats by , you are inundated with curiosity, a potent swelling desire to know , feel and see all that is… is….. is – not has been! You want to discover who these mad laughing people are and what they think ; whether they know. You don’t avert your eyes , timidly mind your own business ; in the city you are emboldened to open up and leap from the abyss of your soul. You bluntly meet a gaze and bathe for an interminable two seconds in passing till connection is finally lost . With a gutsy beer in hand, on terraces along volitional streets, there’s the sick urge to sit down in front of a stranger and start blathering away , the unbearable allurement of generating incessant talk about nothing and everything ! To cast away and renounce all books and the activity of reading ; to be alive without the words of past age and sage; to be within the masses, to not shrink into a tiny little speck , an insignificant particle in the country, but to grow and spread and exist presently with your fellows.
The city where you can overhear a conversation about rhyme in poetry, where paintings take on a whole other meaning , brim with lustre , no reek of the impotent superficiality of modern man here . Newspapers , the emblematic product of cities , of everlasting affairs, a running commentary on happening , a constant outpouring of disgust , petty joy and foolish anxiety . The city as the place of Art , where it prospers and becomes dignified ; the strength of human expression unbridled ; a tender muscularity evinced in debates of merit, beauty and decadence in small high-street cafes steaming , quivering , in that glorious haze of cultural perfume . The streets endowed with an evolving and intensely overt fashion, where men in suits and women in dresses don’t look frail and ridiculous , but almost formidable and believable. Where Jazz music is at home .
Jazz music! … the lyrical tones of a city .In the country it tires ,wearies and rankles; Charlie Parker’s saxophone bedecked with mute fat clotted earth and deafening dead soil ! Yet in the city it lives , shudders , bristles and thunders brusquely into the depths of your soul , synchronizes to the waking beat of the city: its quiet mornings, cindering afternoons and unbelievable nights. Yes! It marks the delicate brilliance of sunlight on rooftops and the raving roaring flux of traffic of all kinds. No burning thoughts about death , mortality, no time to realize the extraordinary pull to the grave , all thought profoundly assembled in the immortal self-renewing rolling life-line of the city, a perennial appearance of dazzling figures , flashes of ideas centered on now and the elusive future , forgetting that threatening sense of our imminent end , the weakness of our timely lot and the creeping of something dark under ground , its green grasping roots ripping apart the foundations of mankind…………of mankind.
Rob's Notepad 