A City is an Antimemetic Apparatus
I can’t unsee it lately, in all the sharp corners of the square buildings on the paved streets; in the constant light of the fluorescent streetlamps and their endless hum; in the susurrus of traffic from inside every single building, and its rigid roar when I walk outside.
There’s a part of every person that aims at control, at skillful manipulation of the world. Some people call it the Left Hemisphere, some call it Technic, I tend to call it the Systematic Mode of Experience. Whatever we call it, that part of you wants to break everything down to its parts, turn those parts into a problem, and solve that problem by manipulating the parts into an arrangement it likes more.
This part of us is useful, but often gets out of hand. It outbalances the part of us that wants to understand and belong in the world. The part some call the Right Hemisphere, or Negative Capability, or Spontaneous Mode. This part of us wants to see the whole, to feel the larger pattern and exist fully in it.
In a city, or even a good-sized town, everything you interact with, day to day, is manmade, formed by human hands from a layout drawn by human minds. It’s a situation by the Systematic Mode, for the Systematic Mode, to keep us as much as possible away from the larger pattern of the Spontaneous. The city is an apparatus made to hide something from us; its function is to make us blind to some facts about the world we’d rather not see.
Day after day, every moment, we’re shown the work of human hands manipulating the world. We’re steeped in the implicit assumption that everything can be engineered, that everything can be broken down for parts and re-arranged into something more convenient for us, or more profitable for someone else.
It’s part of the trauma of natural disasters — seeing all this Systematic human work wiped away by a whim of nature. You see it in people’s eyes, hear it in their voices, the tragedy isn’t just the loss of their own home and property, it’s the psychic dislocation of watching all those Left Hemisphere assumptions crushed in a moment. All those paved roads, those streetlamps, those neat corners and engineered traffic systems — the flood and the fire destroyed them with nothing but a moment of indifference.
I don’t know what cities blind us to; but I can feel it lately, at the edge of my awareness. I stand on my balcony, looking out at the hills, listening to the cars and the shouts and the sirens, looking at all the apartment buildings and office complexes on the skyline, like filing cabinets for storing human lives — and I can feel the city trying to make me forget something. I can feel it inflating the confidence of the part of me that wants to believe everything can be tidied up, everything can be manipulated and put under human control.
In the thunderstorms at the end of summer, flooding the streets and shaking the windows, it’s like there’s something on the tip of Reality’s tongue — it could tell me if only I could remember how to hear.
Book List
While I am dedicated to making my Imago project about more than just intellect, books, and words… there are so so many books calling out to be included, in one way or another. Here are a few at the top of the pile, and what they seem to be calling out to me:
Reality and Catafalque, both by Peter Kingsley: Kingsley has a unique way of revisiting historical currents with an established narrative — and then backing away from the available evidence about those historical currents, and noting how the established narrative falls apart at the slightest touch, replaced by the suggestive shape of the evidence itself. His specific examples of this are fascinating (Parmenides, Empodocles, Carl Jung…), but more so than that, his way of seeing feels highly instructive. There’s no need to believe something just because someone a couple centuries ago said it was so, and then more and more people got tenure by agreeing.
The Matter with Things, by Iain McGilchrist: Every time I heave one of the volumes off my shelf and open to a random page, I find the most thought-provoking quotes I’ve seen in weeks. In general, I have a lot of respect for McGilchrist — his work on the left and right hemisphere describes a really-obviously-true dynamic in direct experience, though I can’t comment on whether or not that experience is rooted in neuroanatomy like he claims. (Though people with way more knowledge than me or you of the neuroanatomy involved seem to find it convincing.) I’m interested to see how McGilchrist expands from the description of those experiences into a wider view of things.
The Journey of Soul-Initiation by Bill Plotkin: I’ve already read a fair bit of this one, but it’s going to take a while longer. So far, it begins like a reading guide to the rest of Plotkin’s work — and I’ve been using it as such. After each chapter that summarizes a previous book of his, I go back and read that previous book, to deepen my context. That means that on the one hand, I’ve only gotten through 3 or 4 chapters of JoSI. But on the other hand, I’ve read 2 of his previous books that JoSI summarizes. Soon, I’ll get back to this one and continue onward.
All the World an Icon by Tom Cheetham: Henry Corbin is a fascinating figure, and Tom Cheetham is the best writer about Corbin’s work in English I know of. This book explores Corbin’s ideas on ta’wil, something like “spiritual hermeneutics.” From what I’ve seen so far, the idea is to interpret what lies beneath language, the sacred impulse that gave rise to the imperfect expression in the text (not just text, actually — also events, persons, etc). As someone who’s spent a lot of time developing my own sense of interpreting beneath language, I’m very excited to see another take on it.
All Desire is a Desire for Being by Rene Girard: Ironically enough I want to read this one because people keep telling me Girard is really good. I’ve dipped in a bit and haven’t been impressed, but the fact that I’m still interested anyways feels unfortunately like a point in Girard’s favor.
Friendship as Practice
My buddy Tasshin visited me over the past month, and wrote an essay on friendship while he was here. I love his approach to making and maintaining friendships, and there’s a lot to learn from hearing him describe how he goes about it.
Opening Up Somatic Practice
As far as I can see, somatic awareness is at the root of every contemplative or meditative practice, every attempt to live life by your values. That’s why I put together a course on it, an that’s why I’ve written and spoken so much about it.
One of my projects lately is to make some of the basics more widely available, so people can get started with good context without needing to spend money on it. That’s why I’ve been practicing making videos, and why I recorded this talk on Patreon about what I see as the cornerstone of somatic resonance — two ways a body scan can feel.
I’d love your support, whether on patreon, or as a youtube subscriber, or in the Somatic Resonance course — but more importantly, if somatic practice has made as big a change in your life as it did mine, I’d love to hear about it. Comment here, tag me on twitter, e-mail me, message me — if somatic practice has helped you, I’d love to hear how. The clearer I can get on the range of transformations people get from the soma, the better chance I have of helping more people understand why they might want to try it.
I suspect modern cities fit this bill except they aren’t even made for humans and cause psychological misery while at the same time giving people the illusion of separation and control from this world and this forgetting you are talking about.
Living in a hurricane prone area I have seen the look on people’s faces you describe when they realize there is no person who is protecting them from the world itself. It is amazing how quickly they forget this after each storm.
I, too, have been deep into Kingsley lately. I think his voice and viewpoint are important and he has some insights about our current moment and ways of thinking I have yet to find elsewhere. I found him as a result of my search to understand the thinking and practices at the beginning of western civilization.
I’m intrigued by the other titles you listed and will look into them. Thanks!
I’m curious as to whether you find any relation between your somatic practice and the incubation practice Kingsley talks about the iatromantis using?
Perhaps the city defies and hides nature's cyclical way of being. Squaring the circle?
Our booklists are similar. Haven't read Girard yet either. Have you read any Hillman or Norman O Brown? I recommend The Dream and The Underworld by Hillman and Life Against Death or Love's Body by Norman O Brown. Cheers!