The Loop, the Rupture, and the Wilderness (30-37)

(Theses continuous.)

30

As the novelty of commodity and spectacle yields to ennui, the urban spaces devoted to the structures of commodity, likewise, lose their color—shrines crumbling after a god’s betrayal. An hour’s walk across the Loop, sightseeing, disappoints everybody except the most rapacious shoppers. Only the sheer size of the landscape impresses: the skyscraper’s strong-arm tactics, brutal and hollow. But even this bland tyranny fades after three blocks.

31

Only the clashes, the borders, offer relief. The psychogeographical war between the University of Chicago and the South Side—along the front, the urban remains vital. Seek out these boundaries.

32

The twilights of economic zoning, though more dynamic than the homogeny around them, can’t escape. These conflicts arise from economic (quantitative) discrepancies. Both identities rely on the values of capitalism: to take sides, even with the poor, is to acquiesce to capital’s terms, the fetish of money and income presiding over all “lesser” spheres of life. While these landscapes of class-conflict manifest what often remains invisible, they cannot present escape: merely an honest picture of the prevailing brutality. To celebrate these clashes is to celebrate the darkest traits of capitalism. Find these conflicts, explore them, but never mistake the vitality of war for peace itself.

33

“I stepped off the six at Randolph, on Michegan, to transfer onto the red-line. As I walked down Randolph, I stopped suddenly. The wall beside me had opened upon an alley, lit by two or three sulfate bulbs. A piece of construction scaffolding framed the entrance—more like a tunnel than an alley, maybe a cavern, somehow, an entrance… About a quarter-mile down, I saw a man in a pool of yellow light, snow moving through his halo, and a cigarette burning beside him. I don’t know what I saw there, something utterly different, a rupture. But I didn’t enter; I hurried to catch up with my friends.”

34

What created this “rupture”? What I saw was a space of intrusion, conflict—but where was the income-differential, the racial conflict, or the clash of generations? We know half the war, at least. The space around me was just blocks outside the Loop: boring, sterile, functional. But what was the enemy? Something secret, mysterious, alien, and therefore subversive. Neither functional nor commoditized nor spectacular. Nearly unpeopled. The slippery perfection of a dream, of myth: Aeneas or Orpheus at the mouth of Hades. Something sublimely foreign to the universe around it.

35

Whatever conspiracy of minutia occasioned this rupture, the aberration itself manifested a qualitative escape, determined not by class but negation of the class system. I could inhabit that unreal space as easily as a richer man. Here lies the true promise of escape.

36

Forests erupt across the wastes of Chernobyl in twenty years. The imprisoned forces liberated spontaneously. Surface fractured by depth. Just so: imperfections and chips in Chicago’s seamless ennui present themselves ex nihilo. Rebellions of the urban against itself. Cancers. Ghosts of a fire never quite extinguished, the thousand grandchildren of 1871, never quite stamped out. Follow their pull, explore, and when you’ve taken in your fill, light another.

37

Search the city’s placid surface for weakness, flaw, thin-ice or kindling, and stomp through. For all its fireproofing, the Second City can tremble, tentative as its father, at the memory of flame.