all cities suck
on paris, roorkee, & care
a city maps life. like a function. the places you go, the tables where you read, the corners where you kiss & smoke, the people & the frames of your windows. life strains in the containers that hold it, like a man bunching up his dress to piss at a urinal.
i spent a week in paris for a conference & almost exclusively took pictures of graffiti & unhoused people. because paris is expensive & cold. you know that before you go. you know that more when you get there. but you still didn’t know it enough when people huddle in blankets outside luxury store shutters. the everyday absurdity of closing time- the violent reduction of available sheltered space exactly when the city becomes colder.
i’ve spent a lifetime in roorkee & only feel alive in brief flashes- a cigarette at jd, a night spent in ds barracks, a gasper-noe fever dream under a water tank, some roof, a locked room choked in pot smoke, or just stumbling around drunk enough to pretend campus doesn’t exist.
it’s not revelatory. i’m just a conflicted communist drawn to stubborn subcultures in the corners & cracks of city life. as someone whose only wet-dream has been the creation of the ultimate only ethically correct state, i watch these spaces unfold as resistances to the need for a state. resistances to dominant ways of being- more particularly, enforced ways of being- repurposed abandoned & unwatched spaces. the simple idea that the city captures & fits life into itself is evidence that there has to exist some prior, purer essence of life that the city could capture out of.
i read on some sub-reddit that a great way to get to know a city is to go to an AA meeting.
my air-bnb owner told me the town died at 9pm when i asked where i could get a charger. what he meant was the supermarkets closed. four night later at 12am, in some crammed scottish pub that you wouldn’t find on google maps, i stood in a very alive crowd yelling ymca in the middle of trivia night, laughing, dodging the low-ceilings, & talking animatedly & lovingly to everyone. i remember seeing someone’s iphone plugged in on a table & thought about the odds of them lending it to me for an hour or so.
would we need the city to care for us if people did instead?
care is basically the only thing i’ve thought about recently. i watched the whale last week & cried every time someone gave someone food, water, a key out of reach or carried each other’s groceries.
do you ever get the feeling people are incapable of not caring?
i’ve begun to feel like care, consent, & conversation are the only ways we’ll get anywhere in this lifetime. & that’s an extremely hopeless way to see the world. because our cities stuffed with people who continue to valorize an imaginary independence. people who have rationed all their trust to be cared for solely by their supermarkets, parents & the state.
when i think of being alive i think of pr & i holding each other while laughing so hard we’d lose balance. i think of kids cupping their hands around their friend’s lighter in a wind. i think of ke putting a roti in vr’s plate as pr puts one in ke’s plate. i think of all the infinite care we’re capable of- a world where everyone’s putting the oxygen mask on for someone else until somehow everyone’s just fine just in time as the floors slip out from under our feet.
for as long as there’s only one way to live in a city, one building with plug-points, curfews, & two or three genders, cities capture care. cities create an imaginary finiteness to our infinite care.
i wish i was just saying ‘we’re social animals’. i don’t even think we need each other. as everyone in that movie says over & over we aren’t going to save each other. we’re just hardwired to care. it’s a purposeless, infinite, impossible evolutionary glitch. we were made to interfere & change each other’s lives even as we have very little idea how we’re doing it & why. we might as well all die in the process of recklessly abandoning our souls to an infinite other.
i don’t know what to do about the dying part. the wet-dream is to create a state that forsakes the responsibility of caring for its people but empowers people to care for each other in safe ways. but that also makes me think i should stay out of politics because my politics has a knack for being stubbornly vague.
truth is my politics is terrified. my politics is exhausted & repeatedly cycles in centrist resets, leftist anguish, & bottomless anarchist dysfunction. idk where to go from here & worse, how to get there. i don’t even have enough friends i could agree with about the basics, forget retreating to a commune. i hate good movies & how there’s never enough time to sit & cry about how good they are.
but i’m not afraid of dying, & that’s mostly because i don’t feel like i exist. if i continue to live, i owe it to care.