Cellular Urban Geographies
More about humans and their cellular burrows
Sometimes Pilgrim’s vision of our species as kind of “plant life” falters, and he sees urban society more like a warm-blooded, animal: much larger than we are. Looking at it from the air: it’s a “living creature” with a glinting skin made of rooftops, over bones of wood and concrete (and everywhere above its skin: a “fur” of air pollution)!
Inside the city’s “skin and bone” are vast networks of specialized cells. An artery, vein, and capillary road system that brings these cells nourishment. There’s a digestive tract leading to landfills, and a fluid cleaning “liver” (that wastewater facility). There’s a network of “organelles” (us!) that turn food energy to build the greater cellular structures that maintain the greater organs we belong to: house, factory, shop, or business. While doing this: we take in nourishment through our cell’s membrane (in this case: through the door), and then emit dirty fluids and garbage.
Inside this animal-like urban creature: gas and water lines are “pores”. Transmission towers and phone lines are nerve pathways converging at the brain. The brain’s made of governmental and corporate bureaucracies behind thick glass: articulating ideas, making decisions, and reorganizing cellular communications.
One of their duties sends highly mobile “black and white” blood cells “down the capillaries” looking for mutant, damaging cells then removing their contents for “disposal” somewhere else along the venous streets.
Bad Dream of the Week
The particular urban organism Pilgrim’s describes has a life cycle like any other form of life: and its body grows senescent. Organs harden, and become tangles of dying cells. These dysfunctional cells increase in number and compete for nourishment, and that affects whether new cells flourish, and replenish older cellular neighborhoods. The organism can begin to fall apart: including brain and nervous system, as new cells fail to assume the places of older ones.
Inside Pilgrim’s “bad dream of the week”: this urban “creature” gradually senesces like the Roman Empire did. Colonies of cells along the limbs gradually loose communication, and the roads carrying nourishment back and forth and water systems alongside them aren’t well tended. Trade from the hinterlands slows, and healthy cells inside the urban center begin to starve. Malfunctioning cells proliferate to create greater and greater infections.
The city’s skin is now spotted and full of cellular eruptions. You can see it from the air. Its bones and skin lack maintenance, the organism’s scaffolding can no longer support certain organs and they die. Meanwhile the veins and arteries that fan out harden or rot. Anything still green and productive hoards nutrients that were once freely exchanged back and forth with other parts of the organism.
In fact: inside the decaying Roman Empire: villages “threw up high walls” we call castles, and had to abandon farming, as deviant armies traveled the countryside attacking and killing residents to commandeer food, females, and eliminate their competitors!
Pilgrim believes something like this is happening between the current Jewish State and Palestinians. These once formed a single interconnected educated, well fed organism. You could see it from airplanes as a single plant living in the middle of a desert! But parts of this organism tried to overgrow and strangle other parts, while neither side acknowledged they were part of the same organism.
As he writes humans inside this dying organism have abandoned communication, and persist trying to strangle each other in stubborn silence. This will certainly affect the rest of that organism’s health, cultural sanity, and societal order.
