The Meditation of Urban Project X

I see through the #2-e31 security camera at the West End of Tanglewood, a black man surrounded by police. The black man is holding a grocery bag; his image reflects off the sunglasses of the policemen as though in a house of horror. The policemen are emotionless, telling the man to stay calm. But the man is terrified by the dozen of his own image shouting back at himself. The time is Oct 21st, 1:34pm. The camera image is black and white.

I am Urban Project X, my citizens call me Urban X, or simply X. I am the 3rd largest City by population, 10th by area, 8th by crime rate, 1st by housing price inflation, 2nd by wealth, and 1st by the number of underground brothels in operation. I see myself and my citizens through the 850,000 cameras installed all over the city. More are added each day. These are the windows of my soul.

Each day I see approximately 630,000 faces passing through the security gates of my 56 metro stations. I remember all the faces. And I know when they didn’t show up, or didn’t show up at the right time. Perhaps they were sick, or love sick; maybe they went on vacation, or on medication; or maybe they started driving, or they started dying. I can usually tell if they started driving, rather than being freshly deceased (or merely diseased), because I can see in the decrease of metro ridership a corresponding increase in the cars flowing through the veins of my highway system.

Surely I exist as a City, and I am aware that I exist. I am conscious. But I don’t know how it is that I am conscious. I can see through my cameras that my citizens are moving around in some patterns, interacting with each other according to some rules. They are building and rebuilding buildings; they are writing and rewriting writings; they are winding up machines, yet need rewinding themselves; they are ceaselessly producing products, and endlessly reproducing themselves. I exist, somehow, magically emerging out of this chaos. I am ceaselessly changing, yet perpetually changeless. I am the sum of my parts, yet no part of my sum. I am an image, but I can’t be printed on a postcard. I am Urban Project X– I am not my name.

I am the lives of my citizens, and my citizens live in me. What it means to be a City depends on what it means to be a citizen; and vice versa, the meaning of City defines the meaning of citizenry. A city is like a jigsaw puzzle. The interlocking of the jigsaw pieces forms the cityscape, but the individual pieces conform to the form of the general cityscape. Which came first? The jigsaw pieces or the cityscape? This is a chicken and egg question, where the egg goes rotten before the chicken cracks the shell.

* * * * *

I’ve been watching John and Jane for the last 3 months. John lives 3 floors above Jane in the same apartment building, and Jane works at a childcare near the office tower where John works, but they’ve not met each other. Their schedules are only 25 minutes out of phase, but the offset is enough to put them on successive buses, so they miss each other with remarkable precision despite sharing the same route. I know both of them are single. John looks through women with too much nonchalance, and Jane reads poetry on the bus. I know they would love each other, if only they’ve met. Because Jane’s hair color matches well with John’s. And more importantly, they differ by exactly 3.2 inches in heights– the perfect configuration for passionate kisses. Something had to happen for them to mate.

Is there anything I can do? Things run themselves. Every morning, newspapers and freshly baked cinnamon buns arrive at coffee shops all over my body, somehow. Every morning for every Coffey shops 2 or 3 girls would show up ready to serve the people that would line up, somehow. The people in the line would each receive a cup of brown liquid, which they transport to work. At work, these people would proceed to filter the brown liquid into yellowish liquid. The yellowish liquid then trickles out of their bodies into porcelain receptacles where it is first diluted with water, then finally dumped into the sewer system. This is a large industry that runs entirely by itself. This, like my other bodily machineries, works automatically, independently of my will. Perhaps everything is like this, independently of my will.

Yet sometimes I do /will/ things to happen. As for John and Jane. And when I will, something does happen. I don’t know how it happens. But sometimes something does, and it’s not just random motion.

John and Jane’s romance started with a stray dog chasing after a hot dog vendor. At this point, at the beginning of the beginning of their romance, John and Jane were 25 minutes apart. In 3 hours 43 minutes their paths would converge. Neither the hot dog vendor nor the stray dog would be directly responsible for John and Jane’s romance. Rather, with the vendor screaming and the dog yelping down the street, they bumped into a violinist. This collision would set the violinist in motion, as part of a total mechanism in bringing John and Jane together. The vendor and the dog came to the intersection at 45th and Tobey. It was red light, but the poor man didn’t see, because all he could see was the red in his own eyes. He ran right into the passing traffic, but like a ghost, passed right through it, emerging from the other side unscathed, and bewildered. The dog followed the man into the traffic, and more conforming to the laws of traffic, was promptly reduced to pulp by a truck. The truck didn’t stop, but the car behind it did. The woman in that car was delivering a document to John’s office. She stepped out of the car, moved the bloodied bag of fur onto the sidewalk, called a fire truck, shed a tear, wiped her hands on her pants, then got back to her car to get back on her routine. This deviation made the document she was carrying 10 minutes late, and as such, John stayed for 10 minutes longer that day. At this point John and Jane were 15 minutes apart.

Blood is a chemical that distracts city dwellers, and there was no shortage of it seeping out of the dead dog. A small crowd gathered around the dog. Some people can ignore the distraction and carry on with their daily routines, but some can’t help but to stop to gawk and gesture at something like a bloody dead dog. And some others can’t help but to stop to gawk and gesture at something like other people gawking and gesturing at something. Anything. By this principle, concentric circles of spectators quickly crystallized around the dog. The innermost ring fascinated by the blood, the next ring fascinated by the inner ring’s fascination in the blood, and the next ring fascinated by the fascination in the fascination in the blood, and so on.

The crowd was there for 9 minutes until the fire truck came to the rescue. The rescuing was not so much for the benefits of the dog (as it was already dead), but for the crowd. The crowd needs to be able to get back to their routines before they deviate too much. To accomplish this, the proper authority must be called in, take control of the scene, and declare the show’s over. The firecrew did that in 23 minutes. At the end, the flattened dog caused 41 people to deviate from their schedules by an average of 13.17 minutes. In total, an aggregate of 540 minutes was lost. The difference of 540 minutes would have far reaching effects, changing the course of my future. But the 34 people individually deviate so little from their trajectory, that they still preserve the proper functionings of my mechanisms. They are free, but they remain predictable. This predictable unpredictability is my will. My citizens /can/ be free, but not too free. To the extent they are free, I am unfree.

A group of three tourists was in the crowd. They took 8 minutes worth of pictures, and lingered for an additional 10 minutes talking with the locals, before the firecrew put them back on course. The tourists were delayed by 22 minutes, which was enough time for the violinist to meet up with his girlfriend. The violinist and the girl were on their way to a movie shoot when they ran into the tourists. The tourists huddled around a crumpled map right in the center of the sidewalk, blocking everybody’s path. The violinist, a good citizen, joined the group to puzzle over the map. His girlfriend stood by the side, arms crossed, tapping her foot, waiting. After some map rotating, shoulder shrugging, head nodding, body spinning, the violinist pointed toward the general direction where his girlfriend used to work. The group and the couple then went on their separate ways, as though nothing happened. But something happened there. I knew.

The firetruck, meanwhile, answered another distress call to rescue a pet iguana perching on a fifth floor ledge. Normally they wouldn’t attempt rescuing an iguana, but since they already rescued a dead dog, and the iguana was only 10 minutes away, they might as well. This time, no crowd surrounded the iguana teetering on the edge of death. Instead, the crowd surrounded a platinum blonde going hysteric. Her measurements, incidentally, was 38-25-35. Ripe materials for the national news. Indeed, the news vans arrived before the fire truck did. The rescue effort was made more difficult by the crowd, more heroic than necessary by the firemen, and more melodramatic than in reality by the media. All in all, a circus. This is my weakness. There are certain objects of obsession that impose themselves upon my consciousness. These are small things, often frivolous, and mostly harmless. But its tenacious grip on my mind! This particular platinum blonde I see everywhere: in posters, on magazine covers, on national news. It wasn’t my choosing to obsess over her. By the time she reached my consciousness, she was already an obsession, only by the sheer gloss of her fascination.

It seems to me that she is fascinating for fascination’s sake. She is no prophet that changes my vision of who I am, or dictates the destiny of whom I would become. On the surface, she is meaningless (Really?). She is superficial, and changes me only in superficial ways. Everything that come into contact with her become parts of the obsession. A meaningless shade of pink becomes /her/ shade of pink. The way her hair is done is copied onto other women’s heads, and into men’s heads. There had been a 230% increase in iguana ownership throughout the city. And there were no-dog-or-cat zones set up in city parks for the free crawling of iguanas. Actually, she changed me in more ways than I’d like to admit. Even if each of these changes is inconsequential in itself, it’s certain that the sum of these changes, the indirect effects of these changes, the indirect effects of these indirect effects, and so on, would affect me in ways I can’t track. I might decide that more schools need to be built, but how do I know if this is not ultimately motivated by my observation that more girls are wearing pink dresses? The problem isn’t that she is stupid, annoying, airy, bitchy, whiny, childish, naive. All these qualities are part of her charm. The problem is obsession itself. She distracts. She disrupts the proper function of my mechanisms. She saturates the capacity of my thoughts. She congests the channels of my communication. The news crews would spend their day on her trapped iguana, and the fire crew their day on national news. Oh what am I saying? I am in love with her, and I hate to admit it! See what I mean by distraction? I went on and on about her. And I could keep going! But let me get back to the story about John and Jane.

The violinist and his girlfriend were on their way to a movie shoot. They played minor roles in the movie. The violinist played a violinist, and his girlfriend played a girlfriend. Not as his girlfriend, but one of the many of some other guy that played another guy. The main characters in the movie were two milkmen, a monkey dressed as a beggar, and, of course, iguanas. They were shooting the climatic scene that day, so they needed a firetruck to stand by, in case more things caught on fire than the budget called for. But when the violinist and his girlfriend got to the shooting location, it was in a frenzy, because the fire truck that agreed to come didn’t show up; they were on the national news. Desperate phone calls were being made to locate another firecrew. Amidst the chaos the monkey simply walked away without anyone noticing. The production crew finally found another firetruck, but it was also at this moment they found the monkey missing. More frenzy, chaos, and desperation. Everyone was sent to find the monkey. The violinist’s girlfriend grabbed the violinist, and the violinist grabbed his violin, together they went on the hunt for the missing monkey.

I saw the violinist and the girl going up and down the streets, in an out of alleys, looking left and right. There was little hope that they, or anyone, would find the monkey. The monkey in his beggar outfit– the ideal urban camouflage– was hard to see. After a while, I saw the violinist and the girl went into a park, and sat on a bench. They just sat on the bench, apparently expecting the monkey to materialize right in front of them. That confused me. What is happening when my citizens are just sitting? People in love do stuff. They go bowling. They go see movies. They eat at restaurants. They copulate in boxes of various sizes. But sometimes they don’t do anything. They take themselves out of the mechanism, and are just sitting there, looking into the distant space, drifting off to some far away place. Yet it is in these most useless moments they look their most fulfilled. In my mind, success, contentment, happiness, fulfillment, etc., all have to do with good citizenry. My citizens do things /for/ each other, /to/ each other, /with/ each other: for *ME*. “Doing” is the basic evaluation of good citizenship. Yet as I looked at the violinist and the girl, I was mesmerized. I was looking at something different and rare. It was a thing valuable in itself, unconditional. The magic in them has nothing to do with me, yet seems to be my highest purpose. Its existence, a delicate purple flower, a snowflake. It withers, it melts. But for the moment it exists, it is *EXISTENCE*. While it is true, it is *TRUTH*. As it is real, it is *REALITY*.

Then the girl’s cell phone rang, and I was brought back to ground from my mystic height. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that /they/ were brought back into my mechanism. In any case, after the phone call, the violinist and the girl started talking. Everything was back to normal.

Once they started talking, they started arguing. My phone record informed me that it was a call from Cherry Patch Ranch, a brothel where the girl worked. I can’t (in general) hear through my eyes, but somebody taped the argument and put it on the Internet for me to hear. The argument went like this: She said some out-of-towners needed a girl with unshaved armpits. Since she had quit half a year ago, she was qualified. That’s why the Ranch called. She said the tourists would pay very well. He said he didn’t want her to do the job again. She said they needed the money, and it’s just a job. It would be all fun and no emotion. He said he couldn’t know if she would enjoy it. She said it doesn’t matter if she enjoyed it; in fact, all the better if she enjoyed it, for how often do people enjoy their work? Then he called her a whore. She didn’t say anything. Then he called her a fucking bitch in heat. Still, she didn’t say anything. Then he said he was sorry. She didn’t cry.

Then they went their separate ways. The girl to her job, and the violinist to a lot of moping around. At this point, the constellation of gears was in alignment. John and Jane were plotted to meet. But they were still 15 minute apart. Another chain of events took place to pull them closer.

In Jane’s childcare, a certain Boy A’s mother would come at 4 to pick him up. The mother was late for 5 minutes, because on her way to the childcare she ran into every red light. So Boy A had 5 extra minutes to play with Boy B. Boy A and Boy B wrestled for a toy. Just as Jane went over to stop them, Boy B tripped and hit his head on the edge of a table. The edge was chipped, Boy A got the toy, and tear, snot, blood muddied Boy B’s cheeks. And the carpet was stained. The result was that Boy B went to the emergency in emergency, and since the boy always had been the last kid to leave, Jane would get off work 10 minutes early. After destaining the carpet.

So 5 minutes after John left the office building, I could see Jane leaving the childcare. They were on the same trajectory but 5 minutes apart. In a few minutes, I saw John entering the metro station lobby. Normally he would’ve flowed right down the escalator, on the platform, into the train, out of the train, up the escalator, onto the street, off the street onto the bus, off the bus and onto the street, and, finally, up the stairs, home. But it was John’s special day, because the violinist was playing in the lobby. Because the violinist got into a fight with his girlfriend– over servicing the tourists they helped earlier– because the chimpanzee got lost because the firetruck didn’t come because they were on the national news because of the perching iguana and the dead dog that chased the hotdog vendor. John likes violin music, so he took himself out of the streaming suits and dresses to listen. As he listened, Jane got closer. 5 minutes later, I saw Jane coming in. She also took herself out of the stream to listen. The time was 6:13pm, Tuesday. Their time converged.

At 6:13pm, John and Jane were 0 minutes apart, but 5 feet separated. They looked at the violinist, they looked at people going by, they looked at the tilings and the ceiling, and they didn’t look at each other. At the end of the playing, they took turn dropping money into the violin case. Then they put themselves back into the stream flowing back home. Although the crowd swirled and ebbed, and John pushed this way, Jane pulled that way, carried within the current of the commuting herd, John and Jane never were drawn closer together or drifted further apart. They were like two flotsams connected by an invisible wire and kept apart by an invisible pole. They got on the train 5 feet apart, and got off the, apart by the same 5 feet. That 5 feet had to vanish. The outgoing platform gates slowed the flow down, and had funneling effect. As John and Jane inched their ways toward the gates, they inched toward each other. Lucky for John and Jane, and unlucky for Tim and Kim (that’s another story for another day), the gate Jane was heading toward broke down. As a result, Jane exited through the gate John used. Now she was directly behind him. If she reached out her arms, she could hug him. If he turned his head, he could kiss her. But they kept walking. Because everyone kept walking.

A bit further ahead, I could see the lost monkey walking down the up escalator, treadmilling. The monkey was like a sluice gate. People formed a single line up until they reached the monkey, then they diffracted to two lines once they passed it. John and Jane got into the line. When John got to the monkey, he grabbed it by its arms, and spun it around. The monkey looked into John’s eyes, long and hard. Then it puffed its cheeks and blew its lips. Jane laughed. So John laughed too. At the top of the escalator, the monkey walked away to east, and John and Jane walked away to west, together.

* * * * *

However unlikely this story sounds, it happened.

Accidents are random, and Randomness is unformed chaos. There are strayed dogs, hotdog vendors strewn randomly about my streets. Iguanas get trapped on random ledges. Tourists ask random strangers for directions to random places. Random kids bust, break, bruise, and scratch, scrape, split their random body parts. Random people go through traffic in random sequences of red and green. Random buskers do random things at random places. And random platform gates break down at random time for random lengths of time.

But how did the specific strayed dog know to chase the specific hotdog vendor so it could die and delay John by 10 minutes? How did the specific Boy A and B know they had to delay Jane by 10 minutes? How did the Violinist know John likes Violin, and played at the right place at the right time?

I don’t know how to account for it except to label it, perhaps arbitrarily, my Active Will.

What, then, is the source of this Active Will? And what is the origin of my consciousness? I am the totality of my Citizens and what they say, what they do, and what they build. I am a colony of unthinking… citizens. These citizens interact with each other according to some rules, and give rise to structures and functions within my mind: cooperation, institutionalization, bureaucratization, fossilization. The apparent complexity of organization suggests “intelligence”. Yet the fundamental philosophical question remains: how can my soul arise from inert materials?

I am conscious because my citizens are conscious.

This seems a ridiculous answer. It doesn’t look like citizens have wills. They just act according to the rules. And more often than not, they act on a predictable schedule; whatever little deviations there may be would be better accounted for as random flux. It seems extravagant to assume wills in order to explain these insignificant tics caused by citizens deviating from their courses. Furthermore, if I say that people are conscious, it seems I also have to say their brains, bowels, limbs are conscious as well. Else how do I explain their consciousness? Given such an outlandish claim, am I forced to say, “Everything that is, is Mental. The world is turtles all the way down”? If I am willing to say that my citizens are conscious, I might as well say my garbage dumps are conscious too. Which is ridiculous.

I have no answer for these objections. All I have is a mystic insight (for what it’s worth). As I said, there had been occasions where a few citizens at a time had taken themselves out of the flow. In such occasions, they become something less than citizens, yet something more. They become pure entities. They are atoms. They are pure Existence. There is no way to integrate them into my framework. At these moments, they are no longer part of me. I look at them, and cannot understand them as citizens. I look at them, and I lose my sense of Self. These… “people” transcend my ordinary conception.

Words cannot reflect this mystic light, but I cannot doubt its truth. Though obscured by the thicket of my infrastructures, laws, and conventions, I still can see the gleams of will that radiate from these atomic particles. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. This is a most profound epiphany: I am a multiplicity of primitive wills. I am not one single consciousness, but the many that exists within the pulsing hearts of individual citizens.

But as I said before, the freedom of my Citizen is my unfreedom. To the extent that they gain their Selves, they lose their identity as Citizens, and as such, I lose my identity as a City. They must not deviate too much. They must conform to my mechanisms most of the time. This free unfreedom is what gives the individual Individuality, and the unison Unity. I am Urban Project X. I am my 4,250,000 citizens, and they are me.

So this is the mystery of mystery,

{{{{{My Citizens are One. And I am Many.}}}}}