The City of Ché is the Invented City. Like all works of the imagination, its roots are real, perhaps natural, its playfulness discomforting. I have named it after Ché Guevara in the hope this might magically conjure memories of dreams of revolution. Done in a spirit of art more than science, but is art not a science of the imagination? Heaven knows we need some good metaphors to make sense of obscure times.

The first pub one comes to in the city is ‘The Untrustworthy Object’. Its outdoor sign is a copy of René Magritte’s famous painting by the same name, showing a tobacco pipe hovering above the legend ‘Ceci n’est pas un pipe’ (‘this is not a pipe’). The place is empty apart from the barman, and dark.

In many ways cities have made us what we are. So now to one of the great questions of the city: what was life like before, say for our Stone Age ancestors? What might someone have thought and felt, living in a small settlement, say twenty dwellings, ten people to each home, standing on a grassy ridge miles from the next place, rarely seeing outsiders? Perhaps this isn’t so hard to imagine – shrinking oneself down, so to speak, in personal memories of caravan or tent dwelling or youth hostelling, one imagines being there for years so that it is a way of life.

The City of Ché is every city, where everything meets, connects, vanishes like exchangeable signs mounted on some circuit board. Flickering or dead illuminations are bypassed like stray ants. Citizens are processed, behaving, ghostly, filled with unsatisfactory desires, vaguely or vividly resenting manipulations practised upon them (?) by others. We all hate the secret police, their eyes a thousand cameras blinking softly with the others around the arcades and estates. Two thirds are described as comfortable, which is also a medical term. Lappings and cloudscapes glimmer, flow blue and white across a seamless tower of glass. Surfaces play in cinematic spaces, their depthless colours and forms detach. 

The City of Ché is the inflationary city, everyone’s future, an archetypal play of generalities schemed by minds unfussed with details. It prefers obedience, tolerates disobedience to an extent, as in a waiting game where the future is always deferred. As nature is unfinished, so is the city.

Yet I relaxed on a thought of craggy rocks hewn as strong and definite as this city was vague. And the city seemed a veil of appearances and the rocks did not. It was a visceral thing.

Text: 2009/22