The ashen skin of a city is bisected by lines forever intersecting, stratifying, or extending to the scarring of signs over-scarring signs. The borders of the body are amorphous; determined then re-determined then re-drawn then re-shaped into aerospace, into outer space. Accelerated outward/upward growth as a rule; contraction, the exception; paralysis, never. Talk of Vertical Cities—Seoul, Moscow, Hong Kong—and of Sprawling Cities—Perth, Los Angeles, Mexico City—and no matter their geographic limitations, the skin of all cities is hyperelastic, stretching outward and upward, blanketing new streets to new lanes on old highways—new layers of city skin, freshly-tattooed, unrolled alongside a couple crumbling fast lanes whose ink has faded—collapsing over sore-eyed housing projects and skin grafting the residents to a part of the city that they have not already once been stitched.
Acne Vulgaris runs rampant across the skin of suburban America—enflamed shopping mall cysts burst shop by shop from within and ultimately implode with the dermatological efforts of local governments, commercial interests and developers hell bent on priming the skin for more refined, more modern, more profitable outdoor boils to inject with the puss of their investments. Encasing and encircling these shopping mall boils lies hundreds of thousands of whitehead Mansions, McMansions, and otherwise; and a couple thousand blackheads of the same: all elegant and modern; all spotting the flesh in perfect labyrinthian patterns ensured by wrought iron gates and brick security towers. Somewhere within these white-and-blackhead clusters you are likely to notice private inflammations featuring Olympic-sized abscess pools, 18 holes of hypertrophic scarring and plenty of keloid courts where busy housewives are fond of going to serve up their stresses of the day.
Those who enter the flesh of a city and call it their home merge their skin with the skin of the city and are, in one way or another, responsible for its growth and health. However, there are some individuals, or cells, whose responsibilities yield more significant and lasting effects on the entire body of a city. Hypodermic citizens—city planners, mayors, CEO’s of industry—are said to regulate the City-Body’s temperature through choices concerning political integrity over corruption, racial equality, healthy living standards and safe and effective infrastructure etc.
The Dermal citizens produce the blood and sweat of the City-Body through their thankless labors. They erect new bone structures at the extremities and add to those preexisting appendages rising from the core—forever and ever, City-Body without end. These Dermal cells are the welders, bus drivers, roofers, plumbers, house cleaners, electricians, etc. who keep the City-Body in perpetual motion by exerting the fluids necessary to the ongoing growth and maintenance of Organ-Administrations, Institutions and Clinics necessary to the most crucial operations of Hypodermic cells. Generations upon generations of Dermals decompose-compose into their respective City-Bodies largely as a result of the sense of pride and meaning they experience through the cellular traces—i.e. “spiritual traces” or “energy traces”—of their ancestors which remain very much alive through the steady pulse of a City-Body’s infrastructure and with the persistent hum of their faceless efforts that can be heard if one presses their ear to any one of the countless-billion walls that provide any City-Body with protection, form and personality.
The City-Body decompose-composes through regular desquamation of burnt-out, flaky or otherwise unhealthy cells in the Epidermis: it’s four year college kids, its part-timers with loose roots, its friendless, dogless, jobless, homeless, fry cooks, cell phone salesmen, sign-spinners, bartenders, bachelors, overqualified, incapable, depressed, bi-polar, violent, silent, buss riders, bike riders, drug addicts—winners from one City-Body turn losers in another; repeat offenders from the jail cells of one City-Body turn penthouse success stories in another; but no matter their sociocellular status, these Cells all have one thing in common: they are lonely, alone and singular. Their existence within any given City-Body is contingent upon their capacity for cellular adhesion; without this, they are severed from the wellspring of its collective energies and forced to drift across the outer spaces until landing at yet another unfamiliar City-Body in hopes of this time finding other Cells they can adhere to.
Cellular Adhesion—a shared heat from the submission to confinement within a City-Body. Cell bodies reverberate under the skin, traversing arteries, careening through intestinal tubes… warmth from the City-Body on a commute on a Chicago’s winter day. Heat from the body in gridlocked six-lane traffic. Warmth in the emergency room waiting room: heat of unknowing, of outer limits. Warmth in a jail pod when cell doors unlock and inmates, as cells, reverberate within the common membrane. Warmth sustained by Dermal and Hypodermal classes through the production and maintenance of organs, veins, connective tissues.
The coldest places in a City-Body are found at extremities: under bridges, sidewalk encampments, psychiatric wards, studio apartments, cold warehouses tended by one, dingy bars, cheap motels, park benches, fast food dish sinks, social service offices, friend’s couches, parent’s houses—desolate appendages that produce more depression and doubt for the warmth of the body than any desire to fully embrace and contribute to it. Reynaud’s phenomenon on the City-Body. Constriction of blood flow to these isolated membranes produces discoloration up through the hypodermis, dermis and epidermis and is put on display for nearby City-Bodies.
What does a single Cell encounter in the spaces between City-Bodies? Clearly the environment is a hospitable one, their presence from one City-Body to the next attests to this. It is common knowledge that these outer-spaces are not entirely without multicellular organisation—untold swarms of Cells venture beyond their City-Bodies each year to vacation at popular Geographic Bodies, only to return home with photographs of ice cream stands in townships where the local Cells are friendly enough to take their picture, chat them up with a good joke or two, and send them on their way with a shortcut to the next town down the line that saves them an hour in traffic. It seems that the Town-Body would be an ideal destination for a single Cell to adhere to a greater multicellular organisation, but this is rarely the case. Immaterial forces drive an individual Cell to and from City-Bodies—forces that escape our basic understanding of memory and desire and plunge us into an abyss of effects clutching madly for sparks of cause—to understand them is to grapple with solitude which is like slaying a hydra with infinite heads: you trade one limb for a head of insight and die to even more heads roaring over your own.
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