This is the story of Ukhur and Fea as told by the Great Wuah-Wuah. Experts to date disagree on why Fea does not have a rectilinear street layout, whether Ukhur is a city-state and when, if at all, lived the Great Wuah-Wuah. The manuscript that we are about to read bears on its cover the inscription “Notes on the Mirror Cities.” In the center of the first page one reads “All events are real to an extent set by your own definition of reality.”
“I had dozed off to the sound of the engine, the sun of the Critea desert boiling my upper skull. Bumping and all, I at first thought the spectacle a projection of my internal turbulence. From a lower height, it became obvious that the hill beneath me was trembling at a frequency uncharacteristic of an earthquake. I drove my plane even lower and continued flying in wide circles, when a building revealed itself in the place of the hill. Painted in a brisque brown hue with smooth angles and plain surfaces, it seemed uninviting in its subtlety. Specks of sand were falling from its roof in the rhythm of the vibration, forming sandfalls in all directions. Having roamed over these desolate plains for days, I jumped at the sight of a humanoid figure near the eastern facade. I approached slowly and landed my plane on a seemingly sturdy surface of sand. I approached her, and as she turned towards me, was surprised by her bright smile. ‘Hello’ I said in a cheerful but respectful tone I had acquired in my expeditions. ‘Nice vibes in this building, ha?’ The girl nodded back in agreement. Still smiling: ‘Bubble covertronica. It’s the new shit’.
In the next few weeks I found out that bubble covertronica is a merge of liquid trance and synth herbivore, two of the hundred-and-seventy-four music genres born in Ukhur in the past year. You learn this and a lot more at the initiation ceremony of the city that visitors undergo if they decide to stay longer than seven days. The ceremony takes place in the ‘Sacred Room of Music and Feelings’, located at its deepest point. The sole entrance to this room is through a corridor that pierces through the convoluted catacomb system of Ukhur, occasionally meeting pathways leading to one of the other rooms of the underground city. One walks the corridor in absolute silence. Silence is dealt with in Ukhur in the same way death is dealt with in our society. Respected and ideally avoided.
Ukhur is growling perpendicularly and parallely to the earth’s surface, only constrained by the location of the ‘Sacred Room of Music and Feelings’, below which nothing can be built. The modern part of the catacomb system looks nothing like the old convoluted one that today comprises purely ceremonial and entertainment rooms. Corridors in the modern part meet only in vertical angles and streets have labels indicating the distance to the closest vending machine. The constant population bloom has forced Ukhur to maximize its urban planning efficiency so that, as every Ukhurian will gladly attest, ‘No matter where you are you can grab a latte in ten minutes’.
There are drugs in Ukhur. I quickly learned to assume that someone I interact with is on one, sometimes more, of them and this made my experiences more clear. It was in one of the hilly rooms that started springing up recently that I first tried 272. Recent regulations made it possible to build rooms up to ten meters high, provided they were put to good public use. For officials and citizens alike in Ukhur, massive parties are good public use. The hills are fluffy and smell like strawberry when they are pink, mint when they are green and coconut-water when they are brown. Some are wobbly and people rarely stay long, some have iridescent plants and some have a slippery side and a hatch at their end that leads to one of the sub-cabines of the club. When you spread your arms and legs on the artificial grass, you feel the leaves vibrating, the bass propagating through the floor. Numbness; that’s what makes you stand up and climb (or roll or jump or crawl) down the hill because it is detaching from the ground and will be floating soon. Then the music and smiles get very intense and, for the next couple of hours, you are floating on a pastel-colored sea of noodles.
The order and duration of events at the Aquarium Club are always obscure. Reading through my notes I realise my order of narration is also twisted, even at times I am convinced I was sober. This makes me question whether I indeed visited Ukhur before Fea, as I narrate here, or it was the other way around.
Fea is hidden in plain sight under a massive dome made of germanium and indium vacuum-metalising films. This design gives Fea roughly two square kilometers, the area it has occupied for the past four hundred years. On a summer day the Critea desert reaches fifty degrees Celsius and nights can become insufferably cold, but Fea’s dome perfectly reflects sunlight and gives its surface a stark contrast to the dark and dump ambiance of Ukhur. At a distance of twenty kilometers, the location and size of Fea could indicate that it is a satellite town of Ukhur. This could not be further from the truth.
Fea’s layout consists of concentric circles that start at the end of the main market and reach the edges of the dome. Low walls pierce the circles vertically and divide the city into seven tangential sectors called the Arcs. Arc One contains the entrance to Fea, a sand-coated corridor that ends in a gate engraved on the dome.
The first thing you notice in Fea, even before the intricate gardens and colorful paintings, is the lack of sounds. Music is not entirely prohibited, Christmas pop tunes and pre-Barrock classical music are accepted on some occasions. Human voices are also rarely heard, particularly in public places. I soon began noticing that Fea’s avoidance of sounds has deeply affected its own design. Public clocks have no metallic components, streets are paved in a cloth-like material, engine-powered vehicles are prohibited and, in street markets, sellers advertise their products on, admittedly loud, tablets. Only you find Feans sometimes gathered in a circle around a source of a low and continuous sound striking in its monotony, for it never changes its rhythm and rarely changes its pitch. This they call Fean music.
Fea is best appreciated at faster time-scales. According to the School of Scale monks, meditating next to a running fountain for three years is the designated way to enter the first higher scale. Once there, the fountain is no longer perceived as a constant stream of water, but as a chaotic march of droplets that bump into each other, smash into smaller drops and, occasionallly, escape the downward movement imposed on them and splash on nearby rocks or evaporate while still in the air.
After this initiation, Fea and its music feel different. Where before there was a constant tone that you quickly grew to ignore, there are now innumerable patterns that make my brain giggle and experience sound fuller than I ever had, even under the most serotonine-enhancing substances I have tried in Ukhur.
When your brain moves to a faster time-scale, it does not take the world with it. Still, the sun rises every twenty-four human hours and the flower season visits once a year. It just feels longer. A monk of the seventeenth time-scale once told me with a smile ‘The sun always sets later in Fea’. Your body also stays the same, sometimes at the disappointment of your fast-moving brain. For example, you cannot talk quicker, your voice being constrained by your breathing rhythm and vocal tract mechanics, so discussions become slow and tiresome and are largely avoided.
In Fea you get your age by multiplying your biological age with your time scale. This makes me one of their youngest citizens, as it is not uncommon for even the ones crawling to have mastered the sixth timescale.
Moving between the time-disoriented Ukhur and time-scaled Fea soon proved challenging. Sitting at the Breathing Fields of Fea one day, I showed them a package of 452 I had carried over from my last trip to Ukhur. I saw the School of Scale monks angry for the first time. ’These are illegal here.’ Explanations are not given willingly in Fea, they entail talking after all, but I managed to get that ‘Fean life is naturally filled with experiences’ and ’Drugs are bad politics’. The latter was harder to parse and I spent many Fean hours at the Out of Time Library in order to understand the logic behind it. I learned that Feans abhor drugs because they believe them to be the cause of Ukhur’s over-consuming, numb society. The books provide countless examples of the disregard for their government system and public aspects of life, to the extent that their society is directly controlled by producers and distributors. According to Fean historians, the demise of Ukhur begins on the year they were forced to introduce a standardized numerical naming system for drugs, due to their large numbers and names often causing misunderstandings. ‘The Ukhurian has no Time for their environment’. By upper-casing time, Feans emphasize the subjectivity of it, so that your Time is part of your character and your choices. I soon realised that it was by opposition that Feans are so conscious of their political life.
One night at the Dance Temple I asked one of my buddies in Ukhur if he had tried “the higher time-scales”( As native humor norms go, I purposefully phrased the experience as a drug) ‘The higher time-scales? Right man, this would be cool but do you know that you have to stare into a faucet or something for three years or something.’ His smile denoted ridiculsouness. ‘So it is not illegal to do it here?’ The friend looked startled ‘Of course not’, ‘but there is no pill for it and that is almost the same.’
I have been a traveler in many places inside places. Once in an Eastern Berlin district, I walked into a patio with art exhibits carried piece-by-piece from Italy and Japan. National museum visits are obvious travels within travels, mostly tiresome and tasteless. In London one finds doors that can lead anywhere and on a Mediterranean island one does not need doors. For every place can have another place within it if you look long enough or have a certain kind of luck. But it is impossible to be in Ukhur within Fea or find Fea inside Ukhur, two cities opposite in every regard. Where in one time flows, time falls in granules. Where in one words are many and charged, words are silent. Where people move incessantly from parties to festivals, people linger in gardens for hours that last them days.
I soon came up with a series of social experiments designed to gauge the size of the gap between Fea and Ukhur. First, I sat on a bench in the most central part of Fea for five hours and was only interrupted by a buzzing bee. Spending the same amount of time in Ukhur’s central market, I stroke twenty-seven conversations.
I then prepared these two posters, the left one was placed on the wall next to the vending machine of Ukhur’s busiest square and the right on a tree in Fea’s ‘Blue Garden’:
75 $ is a price higher than the cheapest table sold in Ukhur (one produced in bulk from compressed sawdust) but much cheaper than any table sold otherwise. While vainly waiting for a call for my Ukhurian ad in my amber house in Fea, I received seven visits from Feans, who tried to exchange the table with a decorated oil lamp, a wooden tricycle, beef marinated in onion stew for twelve hours, a poetry anthology, four kilos of organic figs, a beginner’s telescope and waterproof salopettes, - all items of superior value to my table according to Fea’s thorough bartering system.
After this point my experiments became more intricate, to such an extent that their scientific purpose at times escaped me. On a night’s walk in the industrial park of Ukhur I left a cheap romance book under a bench. Walking the other day past a bench in Fea I found Nietzsche’s ‘Aphorisms on Love and Hate’. On another occasion I left a black sock in the last drawer of my room in Ukhur. When I opened the first drawer in my room in Fea I found a white glove, that I had neither used nor whose pair I ever found. One midday I prepared a healthy lunch in Fea (roasted zucchini and Brussels sprouts) and then, having to run to my apartment in Ukhur to pick up my notebook, I found Mac n’ Cheese in the oven (which I ate nevertheless). I spent the next weeks intentionally placing items in one city and looking for them in the other, my only pre-occupation being whether my prediction of the way in which the items would be opposite would be correct. It was not always. For what is the opposite of a sun-flower? Or a red jumper? But even when more than one options were possible, the reality of the two cities never disappointed in its contrast.
I then had a dangerous thought that kept following me in both cities. What would happen if I hid my notebooks, a life’s work, in one of them? What would I discover in the other one? I had carried out all my expeditions with utmost care, collecting notes that it took me months to process and distill into reputable publications. Yet these past few months (years?) in the desert I encountered civilisations that did not fit my narratives. People that defined themselves through opposition and obscured the boundaries between themselves and their surroundings. I started questioning the value of the barriers people of my profession put in history, the stories told about our civilisations, the ability to truly talk about anything in itself.
Not having yet decided whether I will search for them in Fea, I collected my notebooks in a box in Ukhur. ‘Notes on the inevitable adoption of agriculture’ , ‘Notes on our constant march towards war and affluence’, ‘Notes on how the state and its hierarchies gave birth to culture’ and ‘Notes on the mirror cities’, neatly placed one on top of each other, are still in my drawer in Ukhur, while I am moving between the two cities and preparing myself for the opening of the drawer in Fea. If finding yourself is so satisfying, then why is finding the opposite of yourself so daunting?”
This is the end of the story of Ukhur and Fea as told by the Great Wuah-Wuah. After Ukhur was uncovered due to a blazing fire that kept burning the underground city for days, Fea’s location was also discovered and the anthropology department of our university initiated a series of visits and interviews with Fea’s citizens. It was the first time that a small and isolated civilization whose political organisation eludes our taxonomies gave us such colorful and ornamented works of art, so numerous that they are now displayed in their own sector of most museums. In a drawer of an amber Fean house we found a collection of notebooks: ‘Notes on people that never or briefly adopted agriculture and disliked it’ , ‘Notes on the back-and-forth of human progress, sometimes the back being more pleasant than the forth’, “Notes on culture without the state”’ and, finally, ‘Notes on the mirror cities’.