kingtycoon | In Fine Urbs

Very often now I'm made to think about what the city means, why it is here and what I should expect from it. These kinds of thoughts are really only one thought, which is a pretty common, maybe even important one - and that's simply stated as: What Will Happen?

What Will Happen is a significant question, in that the answer you provide is a signal of, just everything, everything about you. You might be headstrong, confident, totally secure in the world and your place in it- you might say that What Will Happen is what you want to happen. Sensible, take action, govern the realities of your circumstances, own the situation. You might say that What Will Happen is what will happen, you might have tried, with a will, to take control and steer your fat,e you might have found that fate didn't like that and made you take exactly what you got. You might be a fatalist.

What Will Happen. Is it a question or a statement, a guess? A wish, probably a wish. What Will Happen - an informed hypothesis.

In the City I know a lot of people, they ask - What Will Happen to the city. The idea is that they have an important voice, and that they have to take charge and control outcomes, steer the reality. They want to be the masters of things that surround them. They've an inflated sense of agency. Do you act on your environment, are you a force exerted on the world? Or rather, and more likely, are you an agent of the world itself, are you a subject of the geography? of time? of unseen forces?

In the City the people wring their hands and worry about the city's future, they say that it will die, or live, as if these matters were given them to decide, as if they were each and every one some lawgiver of an ancient time. We forget, living in such a new city, that in the end all the cities are built at the whim of the deity and no city falls but by conquest, and even then... Even then. Aeneas took the Trojan gods, the cult statues to found his city in the white hills. So the city was families and their gods? The city is the idols of the people who carry them forward? That idea probably seemed old fashioned to Virgil when he sang of arms and the man.

The City, it has a life that far excedes the lives of its constituents. We're not masters of the place, we don't rule or govern the city. We exist within it, for a time, and bend to suit it and then die. The city continues in whatever form it achieves, maintains itself. You want to say now that the city is the sum of its idols, and that's a sorrowful constraint, that we abide by these ancient forms.

In The City now they clamor for work, for businesses and jobs. Jobs, we are told will rebuild the city - and this call, over and over, reiterated a million times by the increasingly desperate leadership, to me it sounds like slaves begging to return to the plantation. A city is a place to work. Because work is taxed and without work the governors of The City have no means to support themselves, their vain ambitions - because they want to build a better temple to their ancient idols.

The city is a place to work, work is the purpose of a city. What would Virgil make of that? I think that the City is a Place for the people that live within it. It is theirs to occupy and to be shaped by, it is an ecology itself. Do we live in a place because it has the idols we worship or will we worship the idols that we want, and make the city shelter them for us? The city as a home for business, a place for work - it's an idea that ages quickly and poorly, a terrible idea but one that has taken hold and that has a life of its own in the city's constituents.

But now in The City we see the temples to the false idol of work decaying, we see the old god of servitude eroded to gravel and dust - and find that we are still in The City. It's here, we're here, it's still a place and we are its people - our gods were false. Idols after all are idols, but we're like the priests of Ba'al about to be slaughtered by Elijah, we pray and shed blood for our idols and they don't listen. Are they sleeping? The City continues, it doesn't need you to work, it needs something in you to break, for you to finally abandon this idea that you are a servant and must serve. That your value is measured in dollars per hour and that the wealth of the city is measured in wealth. Let it go. Let go the vain idolatry and just accept that people have to live in a place and that this is a place. And then live.

They say that the City is Decaying, or Rusting. That it's not what it used to be, that it's a failure, that it's a ruin. They don't see that it's the false gods that are fallen, the golden calves that have been struck down. That there is a city here, under all of what we see and that a city is a city if there is commerce in it or not. We see here the fatal flaws, the fraying edges, the final limits to the west, to commerce, to the plutonic adoration of Mammon. We can see here the end of foolish wants and the beginning of something new. The new life of the city and it's people.

I ask a lot of questions. I don't know what it will be to live here when the idols finally fall, really fall, I don't know what a day will be made of, what the meaning of the city will be. I want to know, I want to see, but I can't say - It will be this, or it should be that - I have questions. I'm waiting for The City to answer.