White City Facing

I wrote here about food, including food in the White City. 

Writing about food and the pleasures of eating and drinking (and coffee, and alcohol, and smoking) was, I think, the earliest version of an imagist-literary obsession of mine - trying to capture something specific and beautiful, and hard to do proper justice to, in language. Since then, other obsessions - light, architecture, art and art's function, 'perfected' bodies - have come and gone, but food and the pleasures of eating are the OG for me (complicated by illness later in life, but still keenly felt).

In the White City, they play the image game. This is the face. You play well (most people play well), and you have the respect of those around you, and you can be considered the right type of person. This is a more volatile security than similar positions in most cultures, and this is by design - the volatility is thought to keep people sharp, and makes room for dramatic reversals of fortune for individual players. This formally-encoded drama feeds into the game, provides it fuel, etc.

The people who live in the White City are strange, but they are still people. Not many of them (there are celebrated exceptions) can handle the idea of playing at literally all times, although there is a polite understanding that people should act as though everyone does do this. There are several culturally enshrined pressure release valves for Citizens. 

One (actually the biggest one, at least in the White City proper) is swimming in the sea. When the sea is mentioned in the game, it is with a sort of coy deferral - what could possibly be brought into relation with the sea? It is excessive to its place in the game, it contains too much; far, far more than cruelty and the future and the destiny of the emperor and the total hostility of the White City's great and terrible machine of war. To invoke the image of the sea is to provide another player with a neutral avenue for deescalation, should they wish to take it. Let's go for a swim together, and lie on the rocks and watch the sun grow red above us. We can get back to this tomorrow. 

Another is brunch. I had a chat with some of the lovely people on Phlox's discord about brunch the other day, and was surprised to learn that it still has a sort of ridiculous and middle class (derogatory) reputation. I grew up in Melbourne, which is a city where the institution of brunch is celebrated (I own, probably also in ridiculous and middle class (derogatory) ways) - a way of spending three or four hours of empty time with a friend or a small group, eating good food together, drinking stimulants (good coffee), catching up, all while the sun is working into its hottest period of the day. You don't (usually) get drunk, and you don't (usually) spend more than 25 dollars.

In the White City, this is the time where you don't have to maintain face. Most apartments in the city have a dedicated room for this (it will have stained-but-unpainted wooden shades, unembellished with images - these are moved around as the meal continues and the sun shifts in the sky, to allow for different 'room and sunlight' configurations. Guests usually take it in turns to set the shades in their favourite and most comfortable positions), and there are public eating houses where hundreds of citizens can sit together at vast communal tables and relax with the food and coffee and company. 

With great civic labour there must also be periods of rest - the exhalation after exertion, after trying for glory and after your success or your failure. Success and failure are strangely equivalent; they look like work, like striving. Rest is neither. Eat together, and swim in the sea. Tomorrow your service may begin anew. 

Room and sunlight configurations. Still from the (excellent) artist film SLOW ACTION, Ben Rivers, 2013, which can be found here.