Friday, December 14, 2007
city thinking
The city seemed to actually vibrate with activity. People making their way up and down the street both walking and driving. The city was a flurry of movement when viewed from above.
This was the current result of the rise of the human species. Huge metropolitan areas developed so that humans had things to do. Not that the cities were the only human achievement, but from an elevated perspective a city can seem like an endless swath of unnatural objects. A busy metropolis studied from on high can also be seen as a human paradox of chaos and order, odd bustling here and scheduled actions there.
The thriving downtown was populated with lights and unidentified pieces of sound...made by humans to be received by their fellow humans. A car crash on one street can be heard faintly several blocks away and the lights from the flashing neon "bmkdk" catches the corner of the eye. It's the results of people creating this city, ongoing over many years, a whopping fun house of a vastly expanded anthill.
To the overhead observer the city is too complicated to absorb all the sensory input in a short time. If one was unfamiliar with the human race and began to observe the human city activity it probably would be not unlike a child watching ants dance in their anthill, but the ants have lots of stuff. I could imagine my reaction if somehow my mind was erased of my knowledge of people and I was placed on the 10th floor balcony in a major city and told to open my eyes..."What the HELL is THIS!"...I might exclaim.
The cars would be baffling. Just watch a cab. One person gets into the thing with wheels, they move then stop behind a bunch of other things with wheels. They wait, then they move as a pack forward each with maybe two people inside the thing with wheels that could fit five. Then the pack slows and stops to again wait. This goes on and on. Why is this done?
Along the street with the thing with wheels are other things with wheels but these things have two wheels and no covering. One person moves the thing about as fast as the larger things with wheels because of all of that stopping being done by those other moving things. They both end up waiting at the cross of moving things. Why are people needing to use these things with wheels and why in such an odd way? Where are they going?
Considering that I am imagining that I don't have people knowledge, maybe I have never observed ants either. If I studied both ants and people for the first time, I might have to conclude that humans are ants with a lot of stuff.
And then there's time. Perched in the same spot in that city, if the time dial could be spun back wards and forwards, the scene would change both imperceptively ( going back in time a half second) and greatly (spin back 150 years). Or one could begin to observe from that spot and continue for a long time.
