WORKING SCRIPT: SYMPHONY FOR THE INVISIBLE CITYby James Sey
ONE NARRATOR, MALE. VOICE SHOULD BE DETACHED, ANALYTICAL, BUT POSSIBLY PERVERSELY CURIOUS, WITH AN UNDERCURRENT OF RADICAL DISSOCIATION.
FIRST MOVEMENT: THE DISCOMFORTS OF HOME.
I had always thought, like most of us do, that places had emotional cognates, the ability to stir memories and feelings long hidden. As a child this feeling emerged as a kind of sexually-charged romanticism, an inability to separate places and affect, a stilted fetishism for the flatness of beaches, the stained angularity of factories, the secret fellowship of road-planning schemes. As I grew older the conviction that places were in fact more significant than how they made me feel, or what i associated with them, began to grow. Finally, as an adult, it shaped my life. I became an urban cartographer, and embarked on a quest that some will call obsessional, to map what I called the invisible city. I had been for a long time convinced that places, the physical environment, were not only emotional cognates, but had in fact replaced our ability to feel, and that this was the root cause of our malaise. By this time I had ceased any attempt to lead a normal life, divesting myself of any human attachment. I knew that everywhere I went was preordained, that my actions, thoughts and memories were acting out a prior arrangement which fulfilled some nameless and faceless, non human purpose. Whether I sought refuge in the lost nostalgia of natural places, abandoned myself to the hellish logic of the city machine, or abstracted experience to some possible future place yet unrealised made no difference. I knew that my destiny lay in the system, and that all the apparent subtlety and wealth of my life's experience to that point had no existence of its own. I knew I had to find...the invisible city.
SECOND MOVEMENT: THE FAMILIARITY OF THE MAD.
My search had led me away from the past. I was immersed in the compelling geometry of the city-machine. Though I realised my quest was making me, by all ethical lights, mentally ill, this did not affect the logic of my search. My work as an urban cartographer had led me through many signposts, many tiny events which would have gone unnoticed by others. The changing of the colour of roadsigns, the painting of the exterior of certain buildings at certain times, the strange shifts in the behaviour of rush hour commuters - all of these were becoming elements in the final map - the graphic version of the invisible place which I was sure my life had led me to, which it was my destiny to discover. As I learned more about how to look, design sprung out from everywhere - designs I could not ignore, leading me as they did to the secret places of the city. Before me were the giant machines, promising the comfort of the system, the anonymous and awesome logic that the death of my intellect would bring. Yet I could not stop myself - I sought the secret switches, the invisible routes: finally, I sought the key to the machines which controlled such events. I knew then that the machine waited in vain for my embrace. I rushed to oblige, and signed my flesh as surety to a contract with God, who had by now begun talking through the body of the machines, telling me which road to take.
THIRD MOVEMENT: THE INVISIBLE CITY.
My search for the invisible city, and the map which was its document, was becoming distilled into a profound and cold abstraction which I could neither control nor take responsibility for. If my search for the secret heart of the system was foundering on the fallibility of my body and the desirability of the sexmachine, I knew there were more commitments to be made, more modifications to undergo, more refinements of my slothful and soft passageways. The seemingly random nature of my body's systems was beginning to disgust me. Driven on, I heard the voice of God becoming louder as the maps of places, and the map of my body which begun to infiltrate my sketches as if I was forming a new blueprint for it as well, these maps had begun to replace places themselves. I could no longer remember home, nor where I had begun this journey. As the maps became more arcane I lost the sense of what they referred to, and I knew I was becoming closer to God.
CONCLUSION: THE APOTHEOSIS OF PLACE.
I was led to a question. The beauty of the random geometries of the city which had overwhelmed me were giving way to what I imagined was a new phase in my awareness of what was required of me. The acid compulsion of desire had ceased to move me. I was now able to contemplate the curious beauty of these ancient rituals without my maps, with only a memory of them, and a detached acknowledgement that their angles, routes, events and codes had once been reality itself, both creation and destruction. In their stead were obscure ceremony, horizons full of emptiness, alien peoples. I stood before them sure of my knowledge, sure of my power. I obliterated the sun, I rose above the clouds....I disappeared.
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