The Breathing Mountain, Take Two

The city is more than buildings, roads, and infrastructure. The city is also a society. It is a group of people networked into the physical structure of a space. It has an intelligence and character of its own. It is the body and mind of something greater than people.

Human beings are composed of cells. Each cell is an individual lifeform, with its own DNA, its own energy producing mitochondria, its own status as alive or dead. Yet we think of the collective of these cells as the living entity. Why, then, do we not extend this reasoning to the city itself? Cities are the collective of human interaction, just as humans are the collective of cellular interaction.

Yes, that's the trick. In order to understand the big picture, we must first zoom in. All the way down to the cell, then we understand how life networks with life to create a sort of uber-life. This lesson can be reapplied when we zoom out. Humans network with humans to create something more, an unfathomable collective entity. The Ancient Greeks didn't see themselves as individuals, but as part of a city-state. The cities themselves were the gods, embodied. Athens was Athena. New York City is a god today.

This is the spirituality of concrete and asphalt. And yet we ignore the big picture, just as we ignore the little one, too. We fail to see our part in the collective; we refuse to admit that there's something greater than us. We want to believe that we're the most important thing on this planet, and it wracks us to think that we may be just a part of something else.

And worse yet, we aren't part of a god. Our cities are not benevolent. They do not make the world a better place. Inside, they are riddled with the lines of segregation, class inequalities, and waste. Around them they consume the world. They devour forests, core the hearts of mountains, turn the skies grey with pollution.

We have created devils, and we are the devils' body.