living in the city
‘I have loved, Oh Lord, the beauty of thy house and the place where dwelleth thy glory.’
- Psalm 26
King David, of course, was in Jerusalem when he wrote that, a small city even by the standards of the ancient world, but still a city. You might think that, no, he was out on some idyllic picnic in the wilderness when he penned his psalm, but lo - he’s talking about the house of the Lord, the temple - that was in the city. That’s why there was a city there, so they could have a temple. Jerusalem was built on the site of an old Canaanite sanctuary, it had been sacred for a long time before King David showed up. And the glory. Wow. Cities are nothing if not gloriful.
This is a shot of the Tower Life Building, downtown San Antonio. It’s Sunday morning and I’m riding around on my bike, taking pictures. The traffic is light, a mixture of cars, bikes, electric scooters and city buses, an occasional motorcycle. The people walking around are in families or couples, sometimes solo. And the street people, the ones who live here, are settled into their spots, doing their thing.
From my spot outside Sip, at Houston and St. Mary’s, I can observe the downtown urban energy flow. Humans are funny creatures for sure, I think while sipping my matcha green tea. We no longer live in the forest like our ancient ancestors did for millions of years but we have replicated the forest by building cities. We chopped down the trees and replaced them with towers. We built pathways out of concrete and asphalt to accommodate our comings and goings. We became urban creatures.
Five thousand years ago very few people lived in the city, because there weren’t many cities to live in and they were small - less than 100,000 inhabitants. Five thousand years before that nobody had ever seen a city or even heard of a city because they hadn’t been invented yet. It was all rural life, roughing it, camping out alot and moving around at the whim of nature and weather and the migration patterns of the huge herbivores they hunted. That was the only lifestyle available.
There were no schools and no society to put your education to use in anyways; there was no wealth because there was no money. Food and water, shelter and good company were the currency and the economy.
The case could be made that the street people (as distinct from the homeless people) are the remnants of the old hunter/gatherers - unwilling or unable to adapt to modern life. There are hundreds of them in the downtown area of the city where I live. They are adept at surviving day to day with the simple tools at their disposal: begging and looking wretched. Some of them are con artists. Most of them are wounded in strange ways that nobody can see, and probably nobody can help. They’re wound too tight or too loose. These peculiarities give them a luminance or a vibrancy, strangely enough. Their masks are transparent. Their presence is ubiquitous and I can’t help but admire their life skills.
I’m sitting in front of the San Fernando cathedral watching the people stroll through the plaza. The sound of a jackhammer and the gentle whoosh of cars is in the background. The church bells chime at noon and the patron saint of our city - Saint Anthony stands nearby on his pedestal. He’s holding a book and a sprig of lilies. His nose is busted off.
There are trees planted around the plaza between the paved areas to provide shade and not only shade but the color green which our eyes subconsciously yearn for. Above, the blue sky and the white clouds, the vault of heaven serenely resides as always.
The hunter/gatherers of old sought the signs and messages from all the entities around them. The sky, the earth, the trees. They followed the stars at night and intuited a cosmic harmony that was meant to guide the affairs of men on earth.
Giant buildings rise into the sky, streets and avenues lead to more streets and avenues. Below the street level, the river flows from its source at the water treatment plant.
The glorious city: its canyons and mesas built for commerce - the god of our time. The convenience of the city, the streamlined shapes designed for efficient movement of ideas and products in service to the god of our time. In fact, commerce holds us in a state of enchantment, a seduction almost, not unlike an ancient pagan shrine. We’re afraid to look away lest we miss something, an opportunity that will never come again, an opportunity for commerce.
From the bridge I intuit all these things. The city, as a human construct built to recreate, if possible, the Garden of Eden - a place of bountifulness and leisure. The city as a destination, a place we are drawn to and then compelled to escape from (vacation). The city as an energy center, a node in a network. The city as a celebration.
A street person walks by with his boom box playing rap. The yellow shirted Centro worker (employed by the city) walks by cleaning up the scraps left by other city people. The pigeon zooms down to investigate the possibilities. A squirrel scampers up to reconsider his possibilities. From somewhere, hidden on top of a building or in the branches of a tree, a hawk watches it all.