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REPLACED CITY
Every city is insufficient.
The city emerges solely from night dreams
and it materializes in the convergence of the beings that awake from them.
Individuals have no control over the city
and no human decree can submit it to their whims
- it submits to its own will.
Why does this street do exactly that corner?
What determines that, at that point,
it must lean slightly to the right instead of going straight?
A street parallel to a disabled trail line shows a little belly,
spaces away and returns to pair with the line.
Why does it do that?
the ground?
economic movements?
the aesthetic of a particular time?
Everything has its way of beingin the situation that led that urban body
to have a certain design,
but these elements are already part of what the city choose for itself,
as if everything around claimed its precise place
and every stone and every water
conspired in the same direction.
There is something that dispenses any human plan:
an inner conjuncture of the polis’ sense;
a come-to-be-city
as if every act to consolidate it has always been a wish of its own.
The city is both inside and outside of us, external body that is,
and the supposed impressions that one has of a place
are only emanations from the village itself perceived differently by each one.
It is always the same,
yet always being another;
presents itself different for each one,
despite containing the same streets.
The city speaks in the mind of each citizen whenever he is not thinking.
The city dreams him when he is not dreaming.
The neon signs are supported by the sleep of the olds
and each mirror in the houses, full of the reflexes from daylight,
multiplies the town in the nightmare of its inhabitants.
The dream is what makes the link between the urban elements,
between the layers of subway and sewer galleries.
By morning the city is replaced.
It remains as a dream what is so incomplete that fails to take place.
Every bit of street, sidewalk, houses and neighborhoods
are there because somebody dreamed it.
The dream is the most real part of the city,
realizing in us the other realities of that same city.
The city: this animal all-made of tetra-pak,
which devours itself while moving.
Animal-calligram that pierces the alphabet through the body
and the filthy of the street through time.
The city speaks by billboards dictating the rule of traffic jams.
By evening the thoughts are darker,
backyards are retired and lamps give their light peaches.
Everyone has thought
how his own life would be like if it were someone else;
if had had another story, loved another being,
lived in another house, attended another college and accepted another job;
known other friends, or had a more or less ordinary life.
Ever wonder why it is one and not another,
why it is women and not men,
why it is human and not dog.
It´s because,
simply
no other life or city can be performed beyond this.
You have to love a city so far as to make it fit in the eye