Year: 2014

What is it about the spruce trees in snow? 

Trains arrive and depart in their branches.

Other people’s childhoods are up there.

There’s a newborn girl and a man of his times near the top

where a star would sit if this nearest one was indoors. 

Outside the trees are ripe with souls,

dark, end of the year, 

souls in their soul museums. 

Always the televisions. They’re everywhere. Airports, taxicabs, hand held via smart phones. They make a single melancholy whisper: your life isn’t adequate; you must buy something and fast. Remember: when you’re in the mood to buy, you’re likely not thinking. Here’s some excellent prose from the opening of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, written almost forty years ago:

 

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

 

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley‘s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

 

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

 

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”  

 

**

 

Postman’s prose seems dated now. Like so many American writers he was captivated by choices—our Victorian inheritance perhaps. Orwell didn’t merely fear that what we fear will ruin us—he feared the falsified nature of fear, its easy plasticity, the way fear itself can be the distraction. All advertising is built from fear—or “agitation” if you like—your skin is loose; you’re bladder is insurrectionary; you drink the wrong brand of soft drink; or worse—you’re driving a proletarian automobile. Orwell understood the entertainment industry of fear all too well. Lately there’s been a ubiquitous commercial for a British luxury car which suggests that you also can be a James Bond-esque villain if you fork over $75,000 for the accoutrement. People are indeed controlled by inflicting pain, and imagining that you’re doing the inflicting is one of the centrifugal bumble puppies of falsified fear. So my money’s still on Orwell. 

 

    

Once in graduate school I inserted some ideas from Heidegger into a paper and my professor wrote: “trite” in the margin. I asked him what he meant and he obfuscated but when pressed said Heidegger was a Nazi. “Well,” I said, “say what you mean. There’s no such thing as a trite Nazi.” 

 

We are living in “The Age of Glib”—everyone from public officials to your neighbor stinging Christmas lights seems to believe the first thing that comes to his or her mind is fit to be shared. Jack Kerouac famously said of creative writing: “first thought, best thought” but its one thing on paper and another thing at a press conference. When did it become fashionable to appear as if we don’t know better? The ghost of Gore Vidal whispers saying it was always fashionable, but Gore would admit its worse now if we could summon him. 

 

Say what you mean. But dare to think it through. As Christopher Lasch famously said: “we demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.” Another way to say it is that our apparent helplessness when we stand before the world will always be experienced as disappointment, now think. For God’s sake, think. 

 

Back to Christopher Lasch for a moment: 

 

“Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.” 

 

 

 

 

 

    

Once in graduate school I inserted some ideas from Heidegger into a paper and my professor wrote: “trite” in the margin. I asked him what he meant and he obfuscated but when pressed said Heidegger was a Nazi. “Well,” I said, “say what you mean. There’s no such thing as a trite Nazi.” 

 

We are living in “The Age of Glib”—everyone from public officials to your neighbor stinging Christmas lights seems to believe the first thing that comes to his or her mind is fit to be shared. Jack Kerouac famously said of creative writing: “first thought, best thought” but its one thing on paper and another thing at a press conference. When did it become fashionable to appear as if we don’t know better? The ghost of Gore Vidal whispers saying it was always fashionable, but Gore would admit its worse now if we could summon him. 

 

Say what you mean. But dare to think it through. As Christopher Lasch famously said: “we demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.” Another way to say it is that our apparent helplessness when we stand before the world will always be experienced as disappointment, now think. For God’s sake, think. 

 

Back to Christopher Lasch for a moment: 

 

“Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.” 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

There was the Russian place in Helsinki where the waiter wanted me to order bear. And the taverna on Paros where I watched sunlight in a glass of water. 

 

Nothing is quite right when you dine alone. But you solve the crossword while praising your hands. 

 

 

 

Always I write about the boy, not out of innocence, but because he is me and not me and the not me is where the advantages of irony can be found. I like knowing this. The boy always loved hieroglyphs. Once the boy spent a day believing he was an Ibis. In school they made fun of him for being blind. The Ibis was better. People who dismiss mythology probably don’t understand the nature of personal suffering. Hercules and the Hydra together make a child. The clear sunlight and the boy searching for mushrooms. He was all alone in the woods. He did not play with toy soldiers. He played with the life around him, the miniature “up close” creatures that let him in. “They are me and not me,” he thought. “That also means I am not me.” Long before there was a disability rights movement he knew he wasn’t any one thing. Later in college he read Emerson and he admired “Self Reliance” and: “Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.” Secrets came to him then. He lay face down on the frozen pond and knew there was ice under the ice but the fish could move there. And there were private crickets inside his sleeves. He could talk sideways to living things. That boy is me and not me. The man cannot spend his day face down with the ice fish though often he would like to do this. The poor man must workaday workaday in the steep hours feeling the tensile struggle to retain his innocence and curiosity. If he has irony its in the service of protection. The boy ran away; the man carries the woods with him. And the man knows why this isn’t sentimental at all. He also rescues crickets whenever he can.

Someone is knocking but it isn’t a pop song moment. Its a Jeohovah’s Witness. He smiles like a man who has the golden goose under his arm. He stands in the grey light and waves his pamphlets beckoning me to open the locked door. His pamphlets are of course the warning instructions for doomsday and I just can’t help myself, I have searched all my inner nooks and crannies and I don’t believe in doomsday and worse really (for the unsolicited JW) I don’t care for the idea. I like night music on dark roads. I like figs with teeth marks on them. I think reality should weigh itself. I love the way wind blows darkness against my cheek. I decide I won’t open my door. In this I’m aided by our dogs. The big one won’t bark but she’s stolid, leadning against my right thigh. The little one who is Tibetan and comes from a lineage of temple guard dogs, he’s barking the bark of the teeth that will never let go. I wave helplessly at the little window. “Sorry,” my hands say, but its more dangerous in here than you know. Ding Dong