Updated 2 years ago
“In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war… A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum… Larval entities waiting for a Live One…”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Babylon (בָּבֶל) in the Bible was a cosmopolitan city where many people from many cultures came together to build a tower into heaven and were split by God into many languages and cultures.
See an interesting use of Babel in Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash.
In every age, there has been a Babylon, a place where many languages could be heard on the street, and people came to meet, trade ideas and goods, make art, party, and live their lives in some sort of Burning Man-style simulacrum of the astral plane – Jericho, Uruk, Alexandria, Rome, Baghdad, Constantinople, London… and New York.
At a certain point in human development, The Hero’s Journey often included a pit stop into the big city.
Even in science fiction, there is always the main skyscraper city, the megapolis such as the Citadel in Mass Effect, Tokyo in manga and anime, Gotham City, Metropolis, Coruscant in Star Wars, Mega-City-One in Judge Dredd, Isaac Asimov’s Trantor, and the Sprawl in William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels.
Now take a New York circa 2000, in the sweet spot between the urban jungle of the 70s and 80s, and the 21st century when capitalism so tightly squeezed any vectors for creativity, and made survival the priority, not taking acid under a dark bridge. A place where one could meet people from all over the world, from Russians from Stalin’s old secret science cities, to Israelis working for a moving company, to Georgians, to Japanese, no ethnic group dominating. It was the ultimate secret society, bar none.
Now add to that a music that is truly cosmopolitan – true modern world music.
The most cosmopolitan music in the most cosmopolitan metropolis.
The United Nations.
If the chance meeting of your parents, and their parents’ parents, and so on, coupled with the sheer improbability of it being YOUR sperm that made it to the egg, so many eggs, are so improbably to actually condense into the fact that it is YOU that somehow emerged into physical form… take that to the next level and immerse that You into the largest concentration of human beings and cultures on the planet, and add on top of all that, powerful psychoactive chemics It is miracles multiplied by miracles. Random Number Generators in every possible slot. A causal miracle divided by zero.
We still feel the aftereffects of the supernova from that time. What has endured is the relationships we made, the life-affirming bonds and connections, the feeling that no one else can possibly understand the communal experiences we had. We simply cannot forget the sacred feeling. It is burned into our memory, a blinking white light in the Akashic Records.
I went to New York in 1991 because it was the most ecumenical city in the world. It was the modern-day Babylon. Had there been another Babylon to take its place, I would have moved on without a second thought. As a white man, I was given considerable leeway by the police. But I never liked the squalor, the lack of trees, or the street crime, or a lot of the people frankly, or the simple truth that a random homeless person or thug could ruin your day at any time. Or the fact that New Yorkers are all at least mildy neurotic. Or the attitude that New York was the BEST at everything. It never was.
But doing the math, it was worth it, to be in the crossroads of the world.
As New York became squeezed by capitalism and gentrification, it lost its luster to me as I vacated to the hinterlands. Light gave way to dark. LSD gave way to alcohol.
The true metropolis for me lies on the Internet, but I have hopes that one day again this metropolis will congeal into physical form, somewhere on the planet, like an avatar from some reincarnating multilimbed Hindu deity.
Where will the 2020s take us? Times are ripe for a renaissance. Since 1840, creativity has exploded every 30 years, from the German progressive revolutions, the freeing of the slaves, busting up monopolies and Environmentalism, the New Deal, the psychedelic 60s, the Cyber 90s.
Is the Roaring 2020s destined to be the decade when all the stars align?
You can help make that happen.
Where will the phoenix rise again?
Also see:
How Texas > NYC
