fantacy stories

Ah, another entry framed by a discovery I made through literature. In this case, itapos;s predictably "The City in Which I Love You". The collection of poems revolves around an Asian-American immigrantapos;s struggles with identity, memory, intimacy and spirituality. The epic titular poem touches on all of these themes and comes across as the narrator encapsulating his life in metaphor and introspection. It was reading this poem that made me realize just how powerful the city as microcosm could be. Itapos;s already not that far removed from reality, where we can navigate cities by landmarks that we attach meaning to, and there is a great amount of mental interplay between citizen and city. The use of cognitive mapping is gaining popularity in initiatives to better understand and plan cities for people by seeing multiple perspectives. The city becomes the canvas onto which we project our conceptions, while at the same being the brush that paints our perceptions. In a sense, the city becomes our theater for introspection and intrapersonal interaction, a tool by which we can examine our own issues of identity, memory, intimacy, and most of all, spirituality.

The amount of belonging we feel in relation to our residence,how we feel at home, reflects how at home we feel with ourselves. The city helps forge our identity while we forage for it. Again, the landmarks and routes we construct are exercises in memory. The city is also an intimate place where we are placed in proximity to other people and try to bond through the idea of citizenship, or examine through interpersonal interactions. The belonging we feel also signifies our levels of intimacy, as we can displace ourselves internally, replicating the distance that destroys intimacy.

All of these aspects relate to each other as they are all manifestations of several forms of acceptance. Self-acceptance, acceptance with history, and acceptance of the ever-absent yet omnipresent other. And it is this acceptance that drives our lives, "life is the gradual moving from the no to the yes". We are afraid to ever be satisfied because it would be like speeding up towards the immanent heat death, if one frames our lives that way. We would have no fire left to fuel our everyday living, and end up frigid at absolute zero. Of course, this happens on a subliminal level, and we do strive for a spiritual completeness, only to subconsciously sabotage our endeavors.

So what we end up with is our wandering in the city becoming our own search for a spiritual completeness. Spiritual not necessarily involving any deity, but rather as a contrast to our physical completeness. This is what really drives my interest in city planning, the importance of providing a place germane to identity achievement, both a plane of immanence and a space for transcendence.

Next entry probably will discuss cyberpunk and solipsistic conceptions of the city or be about Jack Gilbertapos;s The Great Fires (more a note for myself).
fantacy stories, fantad, fantaddish, fantadream.