San Francisco

San Francisco's all worried about becoming something it's not. But it shouldn't worry. San Francisco will go back to being what it is. Something will happen.

No city in the world is as self-conscious as San Francisco. It's like it's this city that thinks it has to live up to itself for some reason.

When you divide San Francisco into its neighorhoods, the self-consciousness divides into multiplications of self-consciousness. All 76 of them have names and specific and unspecfic territories within their own individuated self-consciousness(es).

You can never really have the experience of being in San Francisco and saying,"where am I?", as you can in New York or Paris, cities where it used to be fun to be lost, especially if you were younger than you are now, to go down into the subway system and ride a train until you felt like stopping and coming up into the light (or dark) of the street and not knowing where you were, but feeling that where you were was just as good or better than where you'd been so it didn't matter that you were lost. That it's hard to be lost in San Francisco is one of its attractions, and attraction is a kind of charm that can work two ways, make you think you're missing something that was never really there.

When you do get lost in San Francisco, the lostness is felt at a personal level and has more to do with changes in the kind of people you see walking along the street in the neighborhood you're walking, that the people you saw last year in the neighborhood are not the same people you saw the year before, they're different people now, in the neighborhood for different reasons than the people who used to be in the neighborhood.

If you look hard enough when you're walking the streets of San Francisco where the people have changed, and if you're at least half-alive, you'll see that these new people you're seeing look like you. I know I look like some of the people I'm seeing, and I know also I'm capable of change and that sometimes change has nothing at all to do with me but is imposed by forces beyond me, and that these forces will change at some point into something they've either been before or never been before.

Jacques Lacan had a really cute theory he named, "the mirror stage." It has to do with the way infants' recognize themselves in the mirror--how old they are when they begin to see their own image and what they're seeing when they do. Lacan believed infant recognition was the beginning of a "permanent structure of subjectivity," and that from it we build a systemaic paradigm of "imaginary order."