Metropolis 9 (conclusion)

Thought to say the truth I begin to disremember the details of that movie, the Neverending-Metropolis movie. It was a long time ago now, or at least it seems so. Like pallid scenes from an unfashionable movie seen five years ago. Was there ever a city where wishes came true, or is that just my conceit, an awkward spin I put on it? Was there a director, and, more importantly, was he anything like I remember him? And, the Neverending Movie? Surely it's an absurdity to even conceive of such a thing, a grand folly. Impossible to make a film about every event that ever happened!  Yet how wonderful if it were true. That scene with the heavy metal band trashing the hotel room, now did that occur, or was it remembered from some other movie or constructed from alternate scenes by my errant mind. My mind which is always dragged back to the wish-city, the Metropolis...
I got so puzzled about it all that I went back to the local cinema. A dirty-grey facade on a little-frequent street, scene of a million dispersed dreams. The usherette seemed unenthusiastic about my excited queries, but showed me wearily up some plush-scarlet steps to a glossy-white door.
Inside was a comfortable brightly-lit office space. Perhaps some sort of show-room for the public. A set of plexi-glass windows up at one end. Rounded corners, soft carpet, unobtrusive decoration, friendly to the eye. Dominant colour is an aqua-blue suggestive of a neutral, compliant efficiency. From out of nowhere looms the salesman. Neat little moustache, telephone voice, kindly-efficient eyes, extremely polite but not in the least indulgent. The merest formality of toadying and "customer is always right" concealing an enormous blank wall of indifference. Wearing a white tuxedo so shiny-pristine it's an offence to the eyes.
"Can I help you sir?". I start to mumble about do you remember old movies from five or more years ago. "Yes sir, I quite understand. Please say no more." He leads me gently but firmly to one side of the room where there is a low magazine rack covered in glossy leaflets. I try to get out an objection, but am interrupted by: "Yes sir, yes sir, quite so sir. If I could just draw your attention to our brochures?" "But..." "Thanks so much. I think you'll find you will be satisfied with our selection".
He takes a selection of these glossy brochures and fans them out skilfully on the big desk. A myriad of colours. Candy for the eye. The guy has obviously got his spiel all worked out and is allowing nothing to spoil it. Like a valet whose job is to stand around in a bathroom seeking tips. Using his automaton-like obsequiousness to express contempt. Interrupting with his large, insincere mouth: "Thankyou sir. Quite so, sir. There's really no need to explain. I feel sure our selection will be of interest to you Sir". Like a malfunctioning robot.
These glossy brochures of his are labelled Forthcoming Attractions. Not what I'm after at all. He is quite intent on selling me some new variant on my warped desire. Like flipping the channel. A New Season of Programming. It seems that my Metropolis or Wish-city was only one of these old fantasies lost among these glossy leaflets, the Upcoming Attractions drowning it out with the fanfare of their newness, with their blaring cheapness.
I guess I entered the wrong room... I'm being sold the holiday-life insurance-virtual wish machine-videogame package when what I wanted was the straight-hit-to-the-vein nostalgia trip, clear and even... though I hesitate to use the word... "authentic".

Metropolis 8

The latest scene to be shot takes place in a large cinder block industrial-grey hotel. Camera-spectator stands unobtrusive in corner. This could be the old-style luxury hotel or mansion if it weren't so grimly stripped of ornament, so processed and bold. Look out the windows and you'll see a receding avenue of identical buildings, like a great main street or city thoroughfare carefully denuded of any individuality, monolithic shapes like banks and department stores, though not cluttered with bright eye-catching signs and displays, but blank-walled and vacant-eyed, uniform, like a row of tombs. Rectangle being the obvious form, and essential to the grid pattern, all constructed from the same dull grey-brown brick, cheap and dense. Oh blessed uniformity. Allows one to concentrate.
Up in the penthouse suite of this hotel are staying the personnel and entourage of a heavy metal band. They are currently partying. It's an interesting process.
They're also going through the formal tradition of a room-wreck, done with celebratory gusto and a sense ot showmanship. What outlandish boys. They bill themselves as the return of Hair Rock, that much-missed genre. Transatlantic accents, "decadence", androgyny, copious amounts of coke. We need more spandex strides and poodle perms in pop music. Shouts of "Rawk n Rawl!", the stoner aesthetic. Mixed with make-up and hellfire, thunder n lightning, flirtations with soft-focus Satanism. They are spraying fire extinguishers, their boots trampling the bedcovers, kicking in doors, sweating to live out the bad boy role. Arcane kiss-curls, curlicues of make-up, sharptongue grimaces.
The lead singer, Izzy, stradles the plush carpet, his lurex pants glistening, and with a fluid yet wildly uncontrolled motion flings his white swallowtail guitar through the window. The band's shouts and leers become louder and more stylised, more violent, as if grasping for something tangible in the rooms they occupy in restless, unstable huddles. Bottle of vodka and nosecandy in the bathtub. Someone already fucking in the hall. From the floor below all you'd hear would be boots trampling broken glass and fixtures being ripped from walls. A big Fender bass takes a long arcing dive from one of the low topfloor windows, followed by assorted debris.

Asteroidea

Like the Asteroidea that circle in the sea,
So the heavenly wanderers that our bourn oversee,
So are the beasts and birds, and so are we.
The starts that glide their course by night
Make fated paths within our sight,
So do the asteroids on deep
Plot careful courses while we sleep,
Turn on turn, insensibly,
Like the turning of the wheel,
That great wheel of the galaxy
That by each movement, will reveal
The spiral and the five-armed star
Marking out a destiny;
Whether in depths of sky or sea,
Or bound by land like mortals are,
Whether peace or frightful war,
Whether death or ecstasy.
That man, four-limbed, one-headed, is
Like the bright comet of the astral fish,
Shown by five points of errant fire;
And tugged by currents and lazy drifts,
Knows not the end of any wish,
Nor yet the author of desire.

Metropolis 7

Now if only could see the script for this Movie. The dialogue is incredible, completely authentic, for the director (or so he claims) has the power of the Cosmic Recorder of all speech and thought. His claim seems genuine. The actor is given his lines to remember on a daily basis, at least that's the theory.
But this is no clear-cut memorable movie talk, carefully revised and faux-authentic, this is real speech, based on an original improvisatory and never-to-be-repeated performance. The actors have to get used to acting real talk as if they were lines from a movie, real speech with all its umms and ahs interruptions trailings-off and vagaries.
"What was I gonna say? Can you oh never mind..."
"Huh?... Whut?"
"Nuthin'".
I watched and listened once to a group of five kids speaking. If this scene had been represented in a film they would all have more or less taken turns to speak, and delivered their lines more or less clearly, all to the coherence of the plot. In fact, in real life, all of the kids spoke at exactly the same time, continually interrupting one another, all the time competing to chime in the loudest or wittiest, spilling out half-lines and half-words and sounds that were not words and never meant to be words, but merely sounds of assent or doubt, amusement or derision- All of it banal, meaningless, blabbing out stock phrases from TV, incomprehensible private jokes and words. Now it certainly would take an especially skilled kind of actor to recreate this (extremely common) kind of speech, which is really completely fluid, flexible, and insubstantial.

He lent us his spectacles and we looked at Europe

 He lent us his spectacles and we looked at Europe, and we were saddened and shocked and 

                         angered all at once. But some small, hard part of us, some interior iron, was glad. And 

                         eventually we were able to persuade our heart, to wake it to the gladness of the great work

                         to come, the great uncompleted work, the fostering and waking and tending of the seeds of the 

                         previous great works, the great works of Athens, the great works of Florence, the great works

                         of Paris.  And we were able to perceive in that flourishing and in that work of destruction

                         after all a wild joy, and a stern one, a double-helix twined upon itself, composed of contradictory

                         impulses, spinning like a top, full of dynamism and orgasmic potential. 

His gaze is the gaze of the bourgeois divested of illusion. Thus it is both noble and frightening, like the gaze of a fallen Zeus, divested of his splendour and somehow cynical. It is the gaze of Moses who has after all seen that there is nothing upon the mountain-top, and that the stones he holds in his hand are mere dross matter, come to tell us all, that he is after all still a prophet, and that there is after all still a Promised Land. 

We have given authoritarianism a chance, a million chances. We have tried the pyramid power structure, for thousands of years. It's given us pyramids of skulls, rivers of blood, obscenities of piled-up cash, rubble of broken lives. It's time for God's sake to dismantle it, somehow, by all means and any, to dismantle it, even if we have to become angels, even if it's impossible, even if it's the last thing we do. 

It's time to laugh at it and mock it, to fight it tooth and nail, to take up arms against it, to banish it, to undermine it, to fanatically attack its weakest points. It is ridiculous, therefore laugh. The more it demands to be taken seriously, laugh at it the more. The more it surrounds itself with mysticism and shadow, shine a bright light on it the more. To its pomposity and seriousness and ritual, laugh like you would at a clown, for it is clownish. Exalt small brave acts of disobedience and cynicism, exalt small honesties, exalt what is heartfelt, exalt what is whole-hearted. 

It is the Zigurrat of Ur, the pyramid of phraoah, the ridiculous and ungainly, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the monuments of Moloch, the tombs of the City of London, the military barracks, the sacred leader principle, the holy pyramid, the priest in his inner sanctum, the lofty priest caste, the banker caste, the proud stockbroker caste in his inner sanctum office, the celebrity-god, emblem and unwitting symbol of the hierarchy, symbolic sacrifice-victim of the priesthood. It is the missile, the phallus, the indestructible granite tomb, the needle of Cleopatra, the prick of profit, the cold hardness of cash, the glorious bank vault.  

It transumted, and became a friendly face, a falsely smiling face, and expressed itself with borrowed Venusian luxury, and false frontages of glossy pastel colours and perfect teeth. It transmuted, and clothed itself with mixtures of subcultures and glamour. It transmuted again, and became a jester with a mask of rebellion. It traded in these images as in all else, it traded in souls, it traded in hopes, its wares were like so many glittering and deceiving jewels in an endless fair, a fair that never let you sleep or left you in peace, a fair that was insistent and multifarious, and that colonised all your space, and lied to you, and maniuplated you in a sweet voice, and endlessly transmuted like a demon-nymph that could not be held. 

"I will this" it said "and I will traffic in everything, and all things shall be laid out upon my stall, and I will be the merchant-god, and turn all men to the shades of Mercury, with deceit, with conjuring, and with commerce. I will be the mask of mammon, the false face of the zigurrat-pyramid, the mountain of skulls. Behind me will be open sores and wounds, ugly corruption, sickening violence, which I will surreptiously traffic in as spectacle. Behind me the vacuous tomb-memorials, the marble pillars, the sparse bank vaults. Behind me every desire and impulse cheapened and parasited, every ugliness made concrete and sprawling and vast. I am advertisement, I am a perpetually grinning mask". 

The Phantom of No Sleep

What is this bare horror that comes around like clockwork, and yet unexpectedly? Unexpectedly because I did not prepare, somehow I thought this time would be an exception, and I didn't foresee it. And yet it came, the bare horror. It came at night, as it usually comes, at retiring-time. That is when the monster makes itself known, when it's time to sleep. This horror, this monster, is felt and experienced as a void, a frightening space, a lack. This absence is almost felt like a presence, something which has intruded into the room, but also, somehow, something which has always been present, and was merely covered, as with a flimsy bit of cloth, which time itself naturally dislodged in the course of day-to-day events, revealing it suddenly and starkly.

It is cyclical. This horror, this monster, this ghost, this phantom, is frightening and yet not ugly, not ghastly, not exactly ugly. She isn't an ungainly black dog. She's a sweet void, a smiling ghost, a mocking phantom, a terrible demon. She comes unbidden at night and enwraps me in arms which are no arms, and kisses me with horrible air kisses, that miss their target. She is the woman that does not come, whose presence is felt as an absence. And the tiniest bit of anguish I can wrench from within allows nothing to show on the surface.  

How does she affect me, the woman that is not there, who doesn't visit? Simply, I find myself unable to sleep. The night bothers me, the night itself, not the darkness, but something about the night irritates me like an itch, its void, its silence. Perhaps its emptiness. 

What do I need then? And what will stop this influence from flowing in, from ebbing in like a murky tide? I need incident perhaps, to be kept busy. Glad voices and cheerful faces around me. And sincere faces, soulful faces, voices capable of feeling and expression and truth. All that can put the phantasm to flight, she becomes jealous, restive, and finally she dwindles to nothing. It is the emptiness that makes her strong, and the silence that embodies her. That emboldens her to give me that embrace which is no embrace. 

I go to bed. I turn on my pillow. My pillow suddenly seems hideous and unbecoming. I know quite clearly that I shall not sleep, I have known it for hours. But whether it is a decision that proceeds from me, or some response to external stimuli, or some physiological consequence of having ingested something or other, I do not know. Perhaps it is worry, worry over work left undone. But I thought I had reached an age when I had conquered that, and I think I have, largely. I am not prone to stress, and it is not stress that keeps me awake. It is the persistent and worrying feeling that I haven't lived. It is the subjective feeling that haunts me, that something has been left undone, and with that feeling comes doubt, plaguing doubt, and on its wings, multiple and multiplying thoughts. And she is there, the phantom of No Sleep, she is there again as usual. 

She never leaves me alone for long. I thought I was rid of her, having suffered from her presence in the summer, and struggled through many nights of suffering and wakefulness. But we're a month into autumn now and she has come again, inevitably, though I didn't foresee it somehow. Somehow I never do. For a few nights, she is there, sitting on the bed, standing in the corner, silent witness to my tumultuous thoughts. What is she? She is a lack felt as an object, she is an absence felt as a presence. She is the space where the phenomena ought to be, the banal phenomena that makes life liveable. How I loathe my own susceptibility to such weakness, to so many clichés, how disgusted I am by the banality of my dreams. Can it be that I, I, who have conquered life, who has figured it out, who was so independent and so haughty, and with every good reason, can it be that I have fallen into the contemptible weakness of solitude, an affliction I cannot afford to suffer from?

And I turn upon myself, as upon a stranger, and see this contemptible weakness declare itself insistently. Just like a common mortal, I am afflicted after all, with petty, mean wants, that I can't quite forgive myself for entertaining, as though I had found myself to be infested with lice, or nits in the hair, after all susceptible to the common ailments of the common herd, and what's more, I was so prideful and stuffed-up and conceited that I haven't taken the time to build up a resistance to these common ailments, which some superstition tells me could have been accomplished by a letting go of ego and a common humility, but instead, I immured myself behind walls, walls of selfishness, and deceived myself into thinking I was free and independent. What a thought: I shut myself off behind walls, mocking the crowd, and afterwards suffered for it when the crowds finally departed, leaving in their wake a vast silence. 

This silence! What is in it? 

Metropolis 6

Of course the logistics of such a project are absolutely mind-boggling, and perhaps the Movie will never be one-tenth of the way completed. The Director, in his pitch to the studios, failed to account for the problem that the Movie is in effect Neverending and infinitely extendable in any random direction. The studio bosses refused to countenance the lunacy of the idea, a movie version of all human life, especially since the project seemed to cancel out the idea of finished product. The Movie's central idea was that it was a thing to be *made*, accomplished, enacted, and not necessarily a thing to be watched.
So this is what constitutes our wish-city, our Metropolis. But it is only one incarnation. The movie intruding, and becoming sharp and anxious. No doubt the movie will require numberless departments and subdivisions, to handle the re-enactments of certain periods of history. The director was at the moment madly keen on the re-enactment of the late 20th century. Here he was, sweating and cursing, always in a rush to finish the scene, morbidly anxious to get it exactly right, now and again leaping up and glowing with such transcendent, cherubic joy that the actors could not help bit pause and watch, moved and still, thinking the whole enterprise suddenly worthwhile. They admired the director, who formerly had been a lowly director of skateboarding videos. Lacking backing from the studios, he had decided to fund the immense project himself. This to some seemed like a heroic decision. Others asserted that the director was absolutely far-gone in derangement.