London abides without centre, a universe expanding its contemporary cosmogony. The flux is lawless only on the surface. In reality, it follows the mechanism’s law, a purely material law. The mechanism has a function, not a soul. The metropolis needs a willing and cataleptic multitude since it requires the ultimate sacrifice: the function instead of the essence.
One can trace the outlines of a metropolis from rubble, debris, artificial and organic waste, carbon dioxide, sound pollution, seas of automobiles and buses, the impalpable film of indifference, the underground entrails in which runs the blood of the great Moloch.
But Metropolis is an impossible concept. One needs to fracture the city into small fragments and start from there. A river, the Thames, crosses the city. The river flows, blonde and putrid of mud and excrements, decaying and constant in its harmonic unrest under the bridges’ ideal architecture. Every area has its peculiar trace. Its sign marks its essence; it makes the history of the city.
Take Battersea Power Station, wrecked temple devoted to Victorian hubris. Or the majestic City with its flocks of white collars in commotion. Beside the Edwardian, Georgian, Victorian façades the slave world is besieging the streets, looking for a shelter to rest in peace.
