Intricacies

Berlin 04.10.2010

     Walking through the park just after dusk with a friend last night I made an observation that I have been waiting for, one that I have made many times before but had not quite put words to or made quite as concrete as last night:  the uncanny similarity of a person to a city.  We were talking about mental diseases.  Our past experiences have left us astonished at the drastically different dimensions one person can exhibit, and more remarkably, the drastically different thought processes a single person can follow.  Walking through the maze-like park with spinning seats and fences covered in ivy and spray painted tags, it was staggeringly obvious how similar a person is to a metropolis.
  
    Just as cities are built up over time, with the new buildings meeting the old, old buildings being renovated, sometimes demolished, or replicated, a person is constantly adding new bits: folders of knowledge, memories, character, experiences, to his self.  He is a building.  He is always under construction, always being built.  Just as parts of a city might be demolished, a person can be torn apart, and as the city is rebuilt with memory of the painful past, a person rebuilds his self after such an event.

     A city's citizens act as a sort of memory.  They bounce histories off of one another, circulating information, mulling it over, analyzing, and producing new ideas, buzzing just like a consciousness.  The streets and transportation systems act as both veins and neurons, transporting people and things in order to fuel new thought and solidify earlier thoughts in files of history.

    A city's subcultures are like a person's varying tastes.  Cultures and tastes may overlap one another, conflict, and or coalesce with one another.  In the stage of the metropolis, no matter how they interact, the subcultures in collection define the character of the city.

   We all have our intricacies.  Intricacies in our histories, tastes, dispositions, thought processes, streets, sidewalks, and homes.

New York City 20.07.2010