The great message of Cities & their Streams

Klil Zisapel
My first visit to China embarked at Shanghai. I was puzzled, thrilled and somehow intimidated, by the sight of this magnificent and overpowering city: apart from NY I have never seen such an imposing, grand metropolis in my life. The Urban landscape, a man-made marvel, invokes awe and admiration in human eyes. As we cross the threshold of a great metropolitan, the sight is highly stimulating, the view encompassing, and the impression often overwhelming.
Demonstrating the monumental achievements of men, it might serve as a boost to artistic inspiration; nonetheless there is something intimidating about the size; and the scale, which is beyond grasp, is alienating. Coming across the city’s formidable constructions and towering buildings, one naturally feels small. Indeed, a man also recognizes how diminutive one is facing the whopping vastness of the natural landscape, standing in front its gigantic soaring mountains, seeing its mighty beauty and sensing its ungraspable strength.
However, the sense of awe aroused by nature is in many respects different to that the city induces. The view of Nature is lofty and elevating; it bestows upon the diminutive viewer, engulfed in it, tranquility and peace of mind-rather than the eagerness, often anxiousness, which the urban view provokes. All embracing, and inclusive - it offers each and every insignificant viewer the sense of being a part of it without the need to act in order to participate; there is no outside spectator of nature.
The Chinese has acknowledged from very early on that as such, the natural scenery is a much preferable setting for contemplation, meditation and musing.
The practice of writing demands that -first and foremost. The act of writing is always the result of accumulated observations and reflection. Writing itself is a culmination of mental efforts taking course through a long period of time: Reading, learning, pondering and musing.
Even if we don’t go to the extreme of solitude some Chinese poets had chosen, these activities demand at least “A Room of her own”- Be the author a She or a He. In other words, a prerequisite for writing is room (mentally and physically) to allow quiet contemplation and long hours of concentration.The City- noisy and busy, dense with buildings and crowded with people, its spaces tight and pricey- hardly allows the ideal space for this crucial part of the practice of writing.
The acknowledgment that Nature rouses artistic inspiration has been a corner stone in Chinese Culture: poets had taken their inspiration from the susurrations of the wind through the bamboo groves and the trickling stream- and often wrote about them, trying to capture some of nature’s intangible essence with words.
Nature is also the great tyrant in our lives, arbitrarily wrecking human lives without notice and reason. Each of us humans, and humanity as a whole, can only achieve respite but can never evade nature destructiveness completely. Freud and other social thinkers had identified that dread, as the bed for the flowering of the first religions and philosophies, and an incentive to cooperation in joint effort to protect oneself against nature. ( It might still be the bedrock of culture up till today, if we consider nearly any kind of science from that prism. surely medicine, but also architecture and religion )
The riches of Chinese culture in their variety can nonetheless be said to take a psychological stand on this point, which is different- if not the opposite of that of western culture and its products. Especially Tao (and also Buddhism) had acknowledged and accepted the unruly destiny of one in the universe, through the adoration of the natural harmony if not justice in human terms- of the cosmos, I .e of Nature.
There is no such intellectual flight or psychological recourse to offer consolation, when social rather than natural forces crashes men, their lives or their hopes. The predation of economical forces, and calamities brought by social structure are off course not beyond humanity reach, nor beyond its responsibility. Therefore they are not, and should not, be accepted as unavoidable fate of man.
The city embodies it. As a symbol of great achievement of men, it has always highlighted the greatest achievements and shares of some. It is based upon the reclaiming rights of territory: the city’s view, like the natural- is for every eye to enjoy. But unlike natural landscape, its spaces are not open for every one to step in. the landscape of nature is all-embracing while the urban, in its essence not inclusive, is easily alienating.
The stream of the city: the gushing of people in the crowded streets and markets, the rushing flocks of busy faces on the move; trains running up and down, a surge of train and undergrounds-riders pouring from major central stations. Cars cluster and buses jostle their way slowly on the roads during the crowding of rush hour. The City’s tempo, its speedy beating pulse, is sweeping. At first, one is either swept a way enthusiastically, or right away feels swept aside and excluded.
In due time, living full-time city life proves to be exhausting and grinding, even to those who tend to zealously participate in it at first. Tel Aviv’s slogan is “the city that never sleeps”- what a torture if you do try to abide by this unwritten law. Not only one would not be able to write, one is not able to Be- one is easily lost to him-self in such a stream of invasive stimulus and excitations.
In my novel, the two girls, Danielle and Amit, are attempting one night to get rid of a pile of cocaine that would be otherwise consumed by Danielle. They are looking for a trash bin in the vicinity of the building they are living in- and come a cross a drunken guy that is most probably homeless. The three have a tragic-comic encounter, as the man is suffering from post-traumatic syndrome and his answers are addressing the war, whatever their question had been.
The City is the Sight for such encounters that bring together exemplars of different social groups that usually do not mix. In every metropolitan one would find, at the same time, representatives of elite groups and minorities, the affluent and the impoverished, the hopeful and the hopeless, the determined and the aimless. The constant flow of inhabitants into and out of the city injects new blood to the inhomogeneous social fabric. Some come seeking for recognition, others are looking for a place to hide. Despite the fact that even in the city, they each go their own path – in the city, more than anywhere else, different social groups do rub shoulders and even come face to face. Their diverging paths are much more often overlapping.
The big City is therefore horizons broadening; it has a liberalizing effect on its citizen, as an unavoidable result of the rich variety of characters and social group a city consists of. Such social fabric differs greatly from that of homogeneous communities in smaller towns and villages, wherefrom most of the city inhabitants have originated. And thus, for many of its inhabitant, the ones that hadn’t been born in it- living in the city presented a new kind of social surrounding, and it therefore represents a choice taking sometime during the course of life to live that way rather than the way they were raised.
This change of social settings impacts the individual in many ways. The enfeeblement of community ties as a result of industrialization and urbanization has preoccupied Social science from its beginning. Along with the feeling of belonging that living in a small community bestows- and is lost, social control is also loosening in the urban setting. What a person does with his friend during their spare time does not linger to the ears of his family, and his teacher is not most probably related to the family- like in the country. Gossip as a tool of social control, which keeps people on their toes, and make them toe the line: comply with authority and act normatively in fear of degradation- is much less powerful.
The strong ties of a small community are, not unlike close family ties, both heartening and suffocating. They are, at the same time, empowering and highly restraining. The big city represents the alternative to traditional life, a possibility of not abiding by its norms. As such it embodies for us, the liberation from it but also the loss it entangles.
Cities are mythical: they play a role in our lives that is beyond that of just another setting for human lives. In every culture and every era, they acquire meaning that transcends their materiality. They become symbols of many things that take place in them. Religious practice endowed Jerusalem with holiness. The city Sodom stands in the bible and from then on for an embodiment and symbol of a debased and corrupted society (later it lent its name to denote a certain practice banned by religious law -sodomy)
In the specifically Israeli context of today, the city I live in is very often derogated as the center of sheer indulgence, decadence and political-apathy. It is furthermore a symbol of the less-committed Israeli. “A Tel Avivian” could be used in this context as a term denoting a much less involved citizen of the state.
In slightly different contexts it stands for such social phenomena that occur in cities universally, and that the big city symbolizes around the world: promiscuity, affluence and excess, power and pretence. The city might be a symbol of either crude moneymaking life style or bohemian idleness, as these and these are among its residents.
The character of a city -if there is really something like it- could only be felt. However it is represented repeatedly through narratives: in personal accounts and in stories- from low to high culture. These stories about it, shape and reshape the myth.
A very recent and poignant example would be the TV series sex and the city- But if we look back to antiquity we can find Homer’s Troy, Virgil’s Classic Rome, and Dante’s Florence of the middle ages, To name just a few examples of the myths of the great city that literature has long created.
In our personal lives the City takes the place that each of us delegated for it according to his own psyche. It could symbolize a dangerous, even loathsome place- or as a place of inspiration. It could be the heart’s desire or its horror – and as we all know, it might play dual role, and symbolize both.