The Meaning of the City

Henry Miller said the city grows like a cancer. It breathes. It consumes.

We’re in Oaxaca. It can either be seen as an island refuge from the hard road that the focus of our journey takes place on, or as a momentary failure: a plunge into excess and decadence, where food is expensive, luxuries abound, and for a few days only, we can play the flaneur. All else will be defined by the austerity of “the real world”.

I’ve always felt the city is a perfect place for reflection because everything is so easy there. Survival ceases to be your concern, so you can relax and gain a little perspective...as long as you have the money for it. At breakfast, Nick, quoting a theorist, said the real place for reflection is alone in the woods -  bereft of books, projects, exercise, even meditation. The sparsity forces you to confront what is most real beneath all the activities and excuses. Maybe these two visions of reflection and its necessary conditions highlight best of all the differences between us as travelers. 

Before I continue that train of thought, I’d like to relate a conversation we’ve had that instead supports sameness [First, I’ll preface by noting that Nick is one year younger than me though we graduated college at the same time. He went to Stanford. I went to NYU. After school, we both ended up in the Bay Area.]:

Nick said that after school, he felt so lost about what he was doing, where he was going, who he was. Strangely, at the same time, at the tender age of 22, he also felt an unbearable urgency to resolve the issue, to become something or someone, while also feeling like it was too late to change courses, too late to try something new. If he wanted to be a great cellist or fluent in Chinese, he should have started a decade ago. If he wanted to be a doctor, it was too late: he just finished the wrong bachelor’s degree. It was too late for everything. Too late to become anything. 

As he told me this, I realized first and foremost, the absurdity of that attitude (of course there is plenty of time in a life to change courses, to learn, to grow, to become). At the same time, I also realized the simple fact that I have always felt the exact same way: for me, too, it always felt already too late to follow a career, to make something of myself that was of any value (this forces us to examine the question of value, but I’ll save that for another posting)...and yet we still had basically our entire lives still ahead of us...

Another feeling we both had, though coming from very different backgrounds, was that the world was - for lack of better words - totally fucked. The course the world appeared (then, as now) to be on - with an expanding wealth divide, growing consumerist alienation, and looming ecological catastrophe - seemed utterly dire, which first depressed us both, but second, called us both to some sort of action. Yet how, why, where, were answers not easily found. We both felt like failures paralyzed between two worlds - failures in the world of careers, respectability, and somethingness (where it was urgently too late to compete, while also being distasteful to compete, and yet the urge and the self-consciousness was never fully vanquished); but also failures in the world of its antithesis (alternative living, active resistance even to the point of revolutionary acts against the problems we thought we saw all too clearly) where we felt passive, uninformed (or else over-informed top the point of paralysis) spectators of the exciting sport of innovative counter-culture (we’ve both been to Burning Man, Rainbow/Primitive Skills gatherings, lived in squats and communes, festivals, eco-villages).

We both spent the next few years (after graduating college) in limbo, semi-revolutionary, working/living in sustainable communities, WWOOFing, traveling, and yet also half-heartedly trying to get by in the system we had only kinda sorta renounced as guilty for so much of our indecision and sadness. 

Last year, we came together in Berkeley and traveled to North Fork, California, where we sat our first Vipassana meditation courses and were bunked in the same cabin (I probably find this more symbolic than he does). Afterwards, we both, briefly, felt happier and more focused than ever before in our lives. Then we both kind of collapsed into the full force of what had always been the underlying problem all along: given the world as it is, how can we live happily, well. For Nick, it was clear that it had nothing to do with the world as it is, and was instead something that, all along, had only to do with his own head. Using the tools he had just been given by Vipassana, he was ready to work to overcome that which held him down mentally, while also working to liberate himself to exist in the concrete world by way of his hands. I too am working to overcome my mental hangups, but I’m not sure I have something so concrete to help me work through them like he does, yet.   

Which brings us to the present, to this journey: we are touring the everythingness of the world between Mexico City and let’s just say Buenos Aires (the main goal of the trip is Bolivia, but I’m holding out the romantic hope that we’ll be able to catch a boat from Buenos Aires back to New Orleans in July): urban living (both middle class and poor), rural poverty, rural voluntary moneylessness (sustainable eco-villages), indigenous ways that have survived, indigenous ways that have been transformed, spirituality (Catholic, Pre-Hispanic, and contemporary visions), survival (plain and simple), and everything else along the way. Yet we maintain fundamentally different (though similar) ways of looking at the world: Nick thinks the world went wrong with the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago; I hear where he’s coming from but disagree.

Nick looks to the countryside, to the silence of the woods, to fundamentally useful, practical manual skills. He points out how everything in a city sold by the indigenous has a weird museumlike quality to it because they were once the useful things one needed for daily life (clay pots, clothes, blankets, belts), but mass-produced plastics have changed all of that. Now synthetics are both cheaper and longer-lasting than what was used for survival in the old days, so most of their goods have become obsolete. The response has been strange - they’ve either insisted on selling the same things with names of places printed on them as (“authentic”) kitch, or they’ve actually reduced the quality to mass produce them more easily, knowing they’re not going to be used anyway (an example Nick gave was wooden knives made out of pine - originally, the knives were needed so they were made of a hard wood and reinforced with fire. Now people can buy metal knives for so cheap, they don’t need wooden ones anymore. The response has been to use a completely useless soft wood that wouldn’t cut anything, carve the name of a town into the side and sell them as souvenirs). 

It’s the saddest casualty of the world he had the most respect for: old ways in which every single object was made slowly, with care, because every single object had a real, important purpose. He looks at the city as the receptacle for consumption of the crappy ghosts and corpses of that which once defined an authentic way of life. The rest is just decadence. 

I see cities differently. Though I fully respect the attitude he describes, for me cities epitomize all of the divisions of mind and questions they give rise to: the ones that have been haunting me for nearly a decade now:

I wonder about being for the sake of being v. being with a well defined purpose. So many people have worked so hard to have an easy life. One full of pleasures, enjoyments, diversions. When a lot of people talk about ending poverty, you feel that they want everyone to be able to shop comfortably at grocery stores and go to the movies on the weekends. If that’s what life has been moving towards, then cities are the great accomplishments of history. If, on the other hand, those really are diversions and distractions from the ‘real’ purpose of being, then cities are probably the greatest hurdles towards finding the earthy, full, community-centered sense of place that many people believe is the real essence of life. 

I think about the casualties of Capitalism and all the fights I’ve witness or participated in for equal rights, for a dignified existence, for the ability to live...how? Once all hurdles are removed from any human being’s ability to pursue “life liberty and happiness”, then what follows? Leisurely city life? A return to the countryside and collective farming? Some for some and the rest for the rest?  

While Nick has pursued a life of returning to the basics, learning how to make everything with his hands, learning to be happy and comfortable in the wilderness with only what it gives him or what he can actively extract from it, I’ve taken the road of hoarding: I’ve hoarded visions of life, forms of community, ideologies, and competing visions about the meanings (and therefore means) of life. Now I feel totally bloated on the terrible, staggering immensity and breadth of what it’s possible to think and how it’s possible to live. 

And yet, I’ve still never found much clarity about where my place in that is. All I’ve come up with is to be a writer and try to convey the immensity, while also kicking around the idea of becoming a doctor because “helping people is good”. It’s a useful contribution to a community. So I’m sending my computer back to the states (thank you so so much Beth Miller!) taking off with Mr. Primitive Skills and returning to the sparsity of the road, far away from the distractions and decadence of the city, in order (hopefully) to sort through my humanity, find a little clarity, and to be able to return home in July with a newfound sense of purpose. 

Nick wants to learn skills, find out what appeals to him, what works for him, and take that home, where he will be taking a Master’s course in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford, and teaching how to use tools in the machine shop, and blacksmithing.

We leave Oaxaca tomorrow morning.