By day, the city is made of flesh and stone.
It is a binary field of openings and constraints.
It is produced and programmed by a social order in which phenomena—whether the rise of a new parking garage or the opening of a soup kitchen—have contingent but no less definite sets of meanings.
It stares back, and it anxiously resists a sense of play,
The temporal signature of the daytime city is flux.
The nighttime city is a web of electric lights.
It invites stochastic, incidental correspondences of subjective meaning.
When I was a child, my mother warned me that there was a giant gorilla living in the blue lantern at the top of the Industrial Trust Building. I worried that the beast might wake in a thrashing rage at any moment.
It is half-blind, and lends itself to imaginative re-inscriptions.
The temporal signature of the nighttime city is the flicker.
