Monday, June 27, 2011
Joy
“I can’t believe some of the things you post there.”
I can’t, either. It does give me somewhere to put all of this where you may choose to scrutinize it at your leisure. And I do very much enjoy the additive nature of this project; that it grows in size and overall message complexity. I like to believe that some day I might dress it and send it out in my stead.
As for the content, I have no apologies. I sure hope no one finds out that I’m strange. BREAKING NEWS.
I’m fairly sure my readership consists almost entirely of past and future girlfriends, anyway. Hi, ladies. A valuable service is being provided for you here. Those past get to cluck their tongues and shake their heads knowingly. Those future may as well find out what they’re in for: spectacular melodrama and needless nautical references. I AM IN YOU. Well. You know what I mean. I also guarantee a deeper and more complete overall experience than the other candidates offer. They’re just a person. I am everyone.
What I do regret is the incompleteness of this tapestry. There is little joy. One doesn’t find Jesus on prom night nor does one run for pad and pencil when things are well. At least I don’t. There’s little need to make sense of experience when that experience is already what you wanted. You simply exist and enjoy. There is no reason to process it further and doing so would only serve to create damage and distance.
It presents a very real issue in terms of voice. Is this severed perspective punctuated with moments of shuffling ache really adequate? Were that the whole of my self I would be a sorry figure, indeed. However, I find it difficult to reproduce the rest of the equation, stretches of simple pleasure, in a satisfactory way. Even the quiet, daily happenings that constitute a happy day. Kurt Vonnegut said that such moments should be acknowledged, that we should do so out loud saying, "if this isn't nice, I don't know what is." I want to do more, but it's slow going. It somehow fails to translate textually though it accounts for the majority of my daily experience.
The only exception to this are periods of love which, while certainly falling under this heading, are the exception rather than the rule. Exception is easy. What remains, the rule, are the portions that I am tempted to summarize and skip over.
I am concerned that this is a serious error.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
The Good Girl
Today I watched The Good Girl. It was your standard tale of quiet desperation. A life of dirty kitchens with things left out on counters. Little miseries and retail lighting and insufficient fellows.
It was very sad. Not the boy, Holden. Were I to have read a synopsis this is the character I would have expected to like best. He’s a writer, struggling with inner demons alone. He wants to be understood. I found him repulsive. I found him empty, parasitic, leaking fluid and delusion.
The husband is just bland.
No, I liked her. Despite her ridiculous tan – how was this allowed – Jennifer Aniston handled this well. The sadness had little to do with her acting, though. The premise of the film is that her life is a prison due to decisions she had made earlier. She married the wrong man. She didn’t go to college. She stayed at a dead-end job.
I have a lot of gift cards. This is a popular present combining the flexibility of cash with the assurance that you were remembered. They sit on my desk and I observe them. I like thinking about the different things I might buy. I will go to, for example, Amazon, and examine interesting choices that I might make. A shirt. Some book. Titanium rings. I then close the browser and make a sandwich.
I cannot express how pleased I am that I never got married. I have done incontrovertible things but not that, never that.
“You ever feel like that? Like you gotta escape?” her husband asks.
But she doesn’t escape.
She throws herself on the mercy of the court as women so often do in stories like this. She remakes the same decisions and the lighting and music lead you to believe that things are better somehow, that she accepts this life. No more unfocused stares.
It just sort of starts over, but now there is a baby. If she were trapped before what is she now? The characters seek transfiguration through one another and basically accomplish nothing. Oh, one of them dies.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Fineskinde Farm
It rang and rang.
“Hello?”
“Hi, is Liz there?”
“Which Liz?”
“Liz O’Brien.”
“Hold on.”
I squirmed and clenched the phone cord. I wiped perspiration onto my pantlegs.
“Hello?”
I didn’t recognize the voice at all.
“Liz?”
“Yes, who is this?”
I told her.
A pause. “Oh my God. Hi!”
“Hi.”
“How did you get this number?”
“From Jessica. I gave her a message for you at the record store. I waited five years and didn’t hear back so I thought I’d call.” My best smile.
She laughed delightedly.
We spoke. She was in college still, in the south. Worked at a library and volunteered at a battered women’s shelter. She was studying English.
“What do you even look like now?”
“Pretty much the same, I guess. I had the Jennifer Aniston thing for a while, but now I’m back to just the standard. How about you?”
I told her.
“Haha, that doesn’t surprise me at all. I always imagined you turning out that way.”
She sang in a punk band. I was post-punk but willing to compromise. I was willing to do all sorts of things.
I was on point like never before. I don’t think I’ve ever been so charming. Every joke landed, timing tight, every nuance noticed. Pretty soon it was like we were children again.
“Do you remember when I threw up on your lap?”
“What?”
“On the bus. We were at Josh’s bus stop and I just turned and threw up all over you. His mom took me inside and called my mom.”
“I forgot about that!”
“The part I most remember is how you barely flinched. You were like a nurse, completely professional, trying to make sure I was alright. Helping me up.”
“I don’t remember that part!”
I do. I should have known and never did. She loved me all along and I never knew.
“What ever happened to Josh?” I asked.
It was getting dark. An hour had passed, maybe more. She had a boyfriend but I didn’t care. He was a placeholder.
“Usually when you talk to someone from your past, it’s awkward and strained. I can honestly say that you’re the kind of person I would want as a friend. We need to talk again.”
I could not agree more.
“Oh, you know what? Do you like writing letters? I’m an avid letter writer. If you write to me, I will write back.”
“That sounds great,” I gushed. “I’ve always wanted a pen pal.”
“Be warned, though. My handwriting is almost unreadable! What’s your address?”
I told her.
“Hello?”
“Hi, is Liz there?”
“Which Liz?”
“Liz O’Brien.”
“Hold on.”
I squirmed and clenched the phone cord. I wiped perspiration onto my pantlegs.
“Hello?”
I didn’t recognize the voice at all.
“Liz?”
“Yes, who is this?”
I told her.
A pause. “Oh my God. Hi!”
“Hi.”
“How did you get this number?”
“From Jessica. I gave her a message for you at the record store. I waited five years and didn’t hear back so I thought I’d call.” My best smile.
She laughed delightedly.
We spoke. She was in college still, in the south. Worked at a library and volunteered at a battered women’s shelter. She was studying English.
“What do you even look like now?”
“Pretty much the same, I guess. I had the Jennifer Aniston thing for a while, but now I’m back to just the standard. How about you?”
I told her.
“Haha, that doesn’t surprise me at all. I always imagined you turning out that way.”
She sang in a punk band. I was post-punk but willing to compromise. I was willing to do all sorts of things.
I was on point like never before. I don’t think I’ve ever been so charming. Every joke landed, timing tight, every nuance noticed. Pretty soon it was like we were children again.
“Do you remember when I threw up on your lap?”
“What?”
“On the bus. We were at Josh’s bus stop and I just turned and threw up all over you. His mom took me inside and called my mom.”
“I forgot about that!”
“The part I most remember is how you barely flinched. You were like a nurse, completely professional, trying to make sure I was alright. Helping me up.”
“I don’t remember that part!”
I do. I should have known and never did. She loved me all along and I never knew.
“What ever happened to Josh?” I asked.
It was getting dark. An hour had passed, maybe more. She had a boyfriend but I didn’t care. He was a placeholder.
“Usually when you talk to someone from your past, it’s awkward and strained. I can honestly say that you’re the kind of person I would want as a friend. We need to talk again.”
I could not agree more.
“Oh, you know what? Do you like writing letters? I’m an avid letter writer. If you write to me, I will write back.”
“That sounds great,” I gushed. “I’ve always wanted a pen pal.”
“Be warned, though. My handwriting is almost unreadable! What’s your address?”
I told her.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
The Centrifuge
The potential energy that clung to this body to reprimand and retard is forced now to the perimeter. It is released as heat and I feel it radiate from my person. I am heat. Netted muscle knits in advancement. A feeling of well-being settles upon us now as we affiliate with this, the world of common and communicable experience. I am jarred into wakefulness. I am pried from the abstract. Standing in the center of the sigil, gloriously present.
We are nearing the end of our exile.
My fear was always that there were a certain, fixed number of resources to allocate. I have come to suspect that this is not the case. Okay, really it was absurd – a revenge fantasy of the impotent. To test this hypothesis, however, it is necessary to construct a worthy vessel. A bearer befitting the borne. This is Unified Field Theory shit, kids.
Still, there is some property of physical activity that interferes with imagination. I use the word imagination for want of a better term. Imagination is not what we think it is. It is not simply a fictive picture show derived of contained chemical happenings. It is something far, far stranger.
I suspect that coma patients, opium addicts, and autistics are furthest along this axis. What they see and know is otherworldly, unique to each, and incommunicable. They cannot access this middle band, the wavelength on which communication is possible. What they can access is pretend and yet not false, or so goes the supposition. Related to this are art, dreaming, and creative enterprise generally, but also barking lunacy in its many shades. The capacity to make and alter is to fashion form from nothingness. To remake some portion of the material world. Is that not the very basis of power?
At the opposite end, of course, we have simple machines such as the lever. We mostly fall somewhere in between. I am moving left and am pleased to do so. It is easier and less dangerous. I spin and burn. Watch me shine.
I can still feel it. It’s not gone – not even dormant – but waiting, perhaps have fallen back to take position in marrow or vertebral crevice. It lurks and bides its time. Someday it will win. I know this; have always known this. The important thing is that it will not be soon.
In the present it is time for change. It is time to stand and take what is mine.
We are nearing the end of our exile.
My fear was always that there were a certain, fixed number of resources to allocate. I have come to suspect that this is not the case. Okay, really it was absurd – a revenge fantasy of the impotent. To test this hypothesis, however, it is necessary to construct a worthy vessel. A bearer befitting the borne. This is Unified Field Theory shit, kids.
Still, there is some property of physical activity that interferes with imagination. I use the word imagination for want of a better term. Imagination is not what we think it is. It is not simply a fictive picture show derived of contained chemical happenings. It is something far, far stranger.
I suspect that coma patients, opium addicts, and autistics are furthest along this axis. What they see and know is otherworldly, unique to each, and incommunicable. They cannot access this middle band, the wavelength on which communication is possible. What they can access is pretend and yet not false, or so goes the supposition. Related to this are art, dreaming, and creative enterprise generally, but also barking lunacy in its many shades. The capacity to make and alter is to fashion form from nothingness. To remake some portion of the material world. Is that not the very basis of power?
At the opposite end, of course, we have simple machines such as the lever. We mostly fall somewhere in between. I am moving left and am pleased to do so. It is easier and less dangerous. I spin and burn. Watch me shine.
I can still feel it. It’s not gone – not even dormant – but waiting, perhaps have fallen back to take position in marrow or vertebral crevice. It lurks and bides its time. Someday it will win. I know this; have always known this. The important thing is that it will not be soon.
In the present it is time for change. It is time to stand and take what is mine.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Boredom
It is the great devourer.
Every resource is exhaustible. If it inspires, it is only for now. Music is the most frequent culprit. Some series of sounds will access some hidden trigger deep within my person. The thrill is indescribable. I will chase that thrill. I will become engorged with that sound until the process becomes predictable. Each note expected, each lilt and lyric and wobble wrung dry. It gives now only a stale sort of pleasure. It is agreeable and nothing more. I therefore chase novelty, forever seeking newness and all that it offers. It is the same with fiction.
It is the same with people.
It’s an awful thing to say, I know. I must specify that this is not the case with all people. Those closest, who have penetrated to the inner circle through time or some unspecified set of unknown variables (see Magic Spells), are not subject to this brand of fatigue. For the rest, though, they simply wear out. We will be out somewhere and suddenly I know what you will say next. I know what you will say after that. It’s like realizing that, half asleep, you have begun watching a movie that you’d seen before. I turn it off and go to bed.
Strangely, this relates to alcohol.
For many years I would regularly go out and drink to excess. I would do this even knowing the horrific repercussions that faced me the next day. I would do this even during the KotB period when I think sleep deprivation brought me fairly close to madness. What I was warring against was my own behavior. I knew what I would do next and I hadn’t the choice to turn that particular movie off. There was no novelty and so there was no excitement. The trigger could not be flipped.
Pickling myself in alcohol meant that I was unsure of what would happen. I mean, of course, drinking until the governor went off-line. I would hook up with unexpected people. I would say amazing things. I would perform acts of incalculable stupidity. The point is, I would cede control – that is, the forebrain would cede control - to some baser self. Letting go was secondary, though, to the real goal, which was to achieve unpredictability.
I do not recommend this practice. It’s a miracle I didn’t die. Most people go through a phase of rampant substance abuse, typically alcohol, but are content to dismiss it as youthful caprice or questionable stress management. I think there’s something more at work here. It certainly warrants analysis.
Every resource is exhaustible. If it inspires, it is only for now. Music is the most frequent culprit. Some series of sounds will access some hidden trigger deep within my person. The thrill is indescribable. I will chase that thrill. I will become engorged with that sound until the process becomes predictable. Each note expected, each lilt and lyric and wobble wrung dry. It gives now only a stale sort of pleasure. It is agreeable and nothing more. I therefore chase novelty, forever seeking newness and all that it offers. It is the same with fiction.
It is the same with people.
It’s an awful thing to say, I know. I must specify that this is not the case with all people. Those closest, who have penetrated to the inner circle through time or some unspecified set of unknown variables (see Magic Spells), are not subject to this brand of fatigue. For the rest, though, they simply wear out. We will be out somewhere and suddenly I know what you will say next. I know what you will say after that. It’s like realizing that, half asleep, you have begun watching a movie that you’d seen before. I turn it off and go to bed.
Strangely, this relates to alcohol.
For many years I would regularly go out and drink to excess. I would do this even knowing the horrific repercussions that faced me the next day. I would do this even during the KotB period when I think sleep deprivation brought me fairly close to madness. What I was warring against was my own behavior. I knew what I would do next and I hadn’t the choice to turn that particular movie off. There was no novelty and so there was no excitement. The trigger could not be flipped.
Pickling myself in alcohol meant that I was unsure of what would happen. I mean, of course, drinking until the governor went off-line. I would hook up with unexpected people. I would say amazing things. I would perform acts of incalculable stupidity. The point is, I would cede control – that is, the forebrain would cede control - to some baser self. Letting go was secondary, though, to the real goal, which was to achieve unpredictability.
I do not recommend this practice. It’s a miracle I didn’t die. Most people go through a phase of rampant substance abuse, typically alcohol, but are content to dismiss it as youthful caprice or questionable stress management. I think there’s something more at work here. It certainly warrants analysis.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Keep on the Borderlands; II, ii
You need to understand the ship.
We talk about it a lot. Most recently it has been the HMS Swanky Blumpkin but is known by so many names. It is a table and it is a place and it is a vehicle. It is a vulpine monstrosity that was assembled of the earth and then expelled like a splinter from the fleshy coast.
Boasting twenty three forty six guns a load most substantial thickly twined and lacquered black decks and, at the prow, Athena with sword and scepter her brow furrowed in anger and disappointment. It is crewed by a brotherhood of survivalism. We have boiled soles and caught rats and known lean times. We have run down lesser craft without malice in order to fill bellies and maintain the Divine Propulsion. Piracy is wicked, I know. But you must understand that this is a warship.
It is needlessly ornate in crustacean rococo. Charred relief of daemons and water sprites interspersed with asymmetrical horns and swept scrollwork aproning each deck in a thick syrup of input. The decks are rigid and well-planed, buffed to a matte gloss catching points of reflected light at the peak of midday and when fully lanterned. Below decks are the dim halls full of directionless clicking and festooned with anonymous, locked doors. There is talk of lavish appointments, though others talk of cells. The crew is kept in barracks, row upon row of hammocks and sea chests bolted to the deck and stuffed with all manner of sanguine cargos. There are conference places and other rooms of particular purpose. A map room, for instance, dense with papyrus produced exclusively in the Nile delta fashioned as charts that must be chewed to a pulp and taken deep into one’s own cellular structure in order to be made plain. Information transference of a kind known only to the weathered primitives who see with sight unbounded and fold in upon themselves with laughter at the thought of such meager expression.
The banner above is graying. A skeleton, certainly, but not a head. Not a man at all, in fact. No one had ever surmounted the mainmast beyond the nest and so the original standard flew still. Flew, that is, when nature allowed. The bulk beneath had no such propriety. She needed no wind, no oars. She simply continues.
To understand that vessel is to understand her master. Identity in this case is not a matter of essence or achievement but rather a by-product of the relationship between captain and ship. It exists as function; even as lack of function. It exists in perpetuity even hacked and burned, rent asunder by indignant authority or criminal neglect. It is really just an error, a pock or defect on the cornea perceived as a black shape insinuating itself across each field of vision impossible to arrest impossible to approach.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Witch House
Things continue to be well. Sun and strength and a burgeoning sense of satisfaction. My mother and sister continue to maintain that I am going to get this job. I scoff but it’s a witch house. Such things are in the blood.
That’s a different sort of tone for us, isn’t it? I feel like I can tell you anything, internet. Let’s never fight again.
Our topic today is talking shit. Let’s scrub up and don gloves.
What is this? It is related to set theory in the sense that the operative property is one of organization. By casting some third party as other, the speaker offers a reclassification of social bonds in which speaker and listener are linked as self. Supposition of a self requires there to be a non-self. It’s a simple binary.
Why do we do this? Talking shit is one of the easiest ways to establish or strengthen social connectedness. You suggest that you and your audience are united and they then have the option of ratifying your suggestion by taking part.
It is also one of the few ways to use negative force to achieve a positive end. Rather than identifying and addressing the particulars of commonly held belief you instead isolate and belittle the alien. It's an awful practice. The trouble is that I am very good at this.
I will now wear a rubber band. I will operantly condition myself through mild pain and public humiliation. Wish me luck.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
This Is Water
Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005
by David Foster Wallace
(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master. This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera. Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck.
by David Foster Wallace
(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master. This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera. Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Keep on the Borderlands; II
“What are you thinking about?”
I returned with sudden awareness and focused on the sticky pad of dried milk surrounding the machine’s right front leg.
“What?” I ventured.
“I said, what are you thinking about. Are you even listening? God.” She strode around the corner and out of sight.
I was cleaning this area. Dabbing absently, the rag too dirty to do more than shift distribution of the fetid water and coffee grounds that swirled beyond the drain’s influence. The faucet and knobs were beginning to discolor. Under the sill were grains of sweetener trapped amidst the plastic mesh shelving liner. Eyes pulsed with a steady, cold ache. I wiped at the most conspicuous surfaces and pulled the half door closed behind me.
Canary walls and chipped wood led into the nave. The machine smells lessened, giving way to cut flowers and a farmhouse palette of stale bread.
“Well, I really need off so please don’t forget. I’ve told you like five times but you never listen to me. Barbara is totally freaking out and after last Friday she’s never going to speak to me again if I have to bail on another fitting. Did you do the sheets for tonight? Did you see Joe? He’s acting like a lunatic. Did you polish?” She lifted a tulip to the light.
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?” Her eyes narrowed and she stood waiting for a reply. I should tell her that I have brain maggots.
“I have brain maggots.”
“What?”
“I have maggots in my brain.”
Rachel sighed and rolled her eyes, replaced the glass and bent fussing beneath the terminal where she stored her personal effects. “Yeah I know, I know. Who is working tonight? Please don’t tell me it’s Klaus.” Her belt was black leather and studded with metal squares, straining against the loops. I wanted to grab it with both hands.
“I don’t know. Henry, I think. Justine or whatever.” My eyes were slipping forward out of their sockets. “I’ll be back.”
“Don’t forget. Next Friday.”
It was so peaceful before a service. I picked at the lint on my lapel and crossed back through the transept. The jacket clung uncomfortably but I couldn’t remove it. In the foyer I slipped behind the pockmarked slab and stabbed at the touchscreen.
Children discovered Lascaux. It is understandable that they would wish to keep such a thing hidden. Save.
Light tonight. Behind a flimsy door the stair led down to the crypts. Poised to draw it open I could see into the vaulted bar room as the black clad scurried about in preparation.
“Hey,” I called. He waved. She just looked at me.
I hurried down the stairs, grinding my teeth together. Just let me hide. Just let me gnash furiously, snapping disconsolate at bare heels that come too near. The bathrooms on this level were less trafficked and afforded some degree of privacy. Also, paper towels. Through another thin door the sounds of dishes stacked and slotted in haste, the whir of motors, and lilting treble of unsanctioned music.
I slid the bolt and peeled the black cloth away from my body. I stared hard into the mirror. Oh, it was so much worse. Pallor, bloat, the bags chalked in harshly, the head advancing. I could feel each glossy leg gliding just beneath the scalp, rippling the hairline and prodding the backs of my straining eyeballs; tracing the scarred amygdala. I kneaded palms into each socket and lapped at the dripping tap.
When the heat sinks were changed and the coat reattached I could finally consider strategy. We would go, certainly. It was Tuesday. I had to be fun now, funny now, jocular, jocularity was the order of the day and could I not deliver? I couldn’t think straight. The table in the corner would be best. It afforded the best acoustics for speaking when the room was full. I would sit next to her. No, better that I sit first and allow her to make a choice in where to sit so I know how to proceed. No, better yet, I would take the furthest position possible. I would sit last.
In the mirror I adjusted a necktie.
I returned with sudden awareness and focused on the sticky pad of dried milk surrounding the machine’s right front leg.
“What?” I ventured.
“I said, what are you thinking about. Are you even listening? God.” She strode around the corner and out of sight.
I was cleaning this area. Dabbing absently, the rag too dirty to do more than shift distribution of the fetid water and coffee grounds that swirled beyond the drain’s influence. The faucet and knobs were beginning to discolor. Under the sill were grains of sweetener trapped amidst the plastic mesh shelving liner. Eyes pulsed with a steady, cold ache. I wiped at the most conspicuous surfaces and pulled the half door closed behind me.
Canary walls and chipped wood led into the nave. The machine smells lessened, giving way to cut flowers and a farmhouse palette of stale bread.
“Well, I really need off so please don’t forget. I’ve told you like five times but you never listen to me. Barbara is totally freaking out and after last Friday she’s never going to speak to me again if I have to bail on another fitting. Did you do the sheets for tonight? Did you see Joe? He’s acting like a lunatic. Did you polish?” She lifted a tulip to the light.
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?” Her eyes narrowed and she stood waiting for a reply. I should tell her that I have brain maggots.
“I have brain maggots.”
“What?”
“I have maggots in my brain.”
Rachel sighed and rolled her eyes, replaced the glass and bent fussing beneath the terminal where she stored her personal effects. “Yeah I know, I know. Who is working tonight? Please don’t tell me it’s Klaus.” Her belt was black leather and studded with metal squares, straining against the loops. I wanted to grab it with both hands.
“I don’t know. Henry, I think. Justine or whatever.” My eyes were slipping forward out of their sockets. “I’ll be back.”
“Don’t forget. Next Friday.”
It was so peaceful before a service. I picked at the lint on my lapel and crossed back through the transept. The jacket clung uncomfortably but I couldn’t remove it. In the foyer I slipped behind the pockmarked slab and stabbed at the touchscreen.
Children discovered Lascaux. It is understandable that they would wish to keep such a thing hidden. Save.
Light tonight. Behind a flimsy door the stair led down to the crypts. Poised to draw it open I could see into the vaulted bar room as the black clad scurried about in preparation.
“Hey,” I called. He waved. She just looked at me.
I hurried down the stairs, grinding my teeth together. Just let me hide. Just let me gnash furiously, snapping disconsolate at bare heels that come too near. The bathrooms on this level were less trafficked and afforded some degree of privacy. Also, paper towels. Through another thin door the sounds of dishes stacked and slotted in haste, the whir of motors, and lilting treble of unsanctioned music.
I slid the bolt and peeled the black cloth away from my body. I stared hard into the mirror. Oh, it was so much worse. Pallor, bloat, the bags chalked in harshly, the head advancing. I could feel each glossy leg gliding just beneath the scalp, rippling the hairline and prodding the backs of my straining eyeballs; tracing the scarred amygdala. I kneaded palms into each socket and lapped at the dripping tap.
When the heat sinks were changed and the coat reattached I could finally consider strategy. We would go, certainly. It was Tuesday. I had to be fun now, funny now, jocular, jocularity was the order of the day and could I not deliver? I couldn’t think straight. The table in the corner would be best. It afforded the best acoustics for speaking when the room was full. I would sit next to her. No, better that I sit first and allow her to make a choice in where to sit so I know how to proceed. No, better yet, I would take the furthest position possible. I would sit last.
In the mirror I adjusted a necktie.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Memory
Memory is an adornment.
The only marking made upon a body by its own hands
And thus to know one from another.
The purpose of narrative is to create meaning. Experience itself has no essential qualities beyond basic sensory input. The world is perceived as an unrelated succession of lights and sounds and impact. These data are processed by the central nervous system and joined in an attempt to make predictions about the environment which will facilitate survival. The urge to organize, to make meaning through association, is a hallmark of humankind. Experimentation teaches that a certain series of sensory phenomena indicates danger while another indicates safety. Language allows these sequences to be labeled and explained. It becomes possible to convey the lesson without the experiment. This conveyance is narrative. Narrative is the primary method for imposing order on gross input. It is the method used to remember such order oneself and to share it with others. After the sensory input – the experience – has passed, what is left behind as memory is an approximation of that experience which is distinct from the experience itself. This fact is so obvious and such a commonplace that it is rarely examined. Recollection is necessary to catalogue memory, but also to create a sense of self and a sense of context among other non-selves. Narratives agreed upon by many become the foundation of culture. It is, no doubt, a useful evolutionary strategy, but one that involves a certain amount of construction.
Experience is limited by perspective. A given viewer witnesses a given event from a particular vantage point, which influences understanding. Perspective is both physical, as in an observer’s actual field of view, but also psychological. One sees what one expects to see. Such elements of subjectivity ensure that even the most meticulous attempt to relate past events is definitionally handicapped. There is an unbridgeable distance between experience and memory. Attempts to share those memories with others widens the distance further. When narrative is shared, each participant introduces a new perspective and a new set of variables. The information is subject to a new set of filters which alters final understanding. “Truth”, if such a thing exists, is not accessible. Unfortunately, such a postmodern approach is as uncommon as it is unsatisfying. The more we empower narrative as an explanatory device the more we need to believe in its fundamental trueness. Even those who are familiar with such theories suspend disbelief in order to privilege certain narratives. Even in fiction, a genre approached and understood as imaginative, readers require a level of plausibility based on seemingly arbitrary guidelines, many of which are created and perpetuated by the works themselves. Anomalous events, which occur in experience, are frowned upon in fiction. A constructed narrative, labeled as such, is judged by a different metric than the narratives we ascribe to direct experience, but is judged nonetheless. Whether or not something is true, or at least believable, matters.
It's how we recognize each other. I'm told that can happen.
The only marking made upon a body by its own hands
And thus to know one from another.
The purpose of narrative is to create meaning. Experience itself has no essential qualities beyond basic sensory input. The world is perceived as an unrelated succession of lights and sounds and impact. These data are processed by the central nervous system and joined in an attempt to make predictions about the environment which will facilitate survival. The urge to organize, to make meaning through association, is a hallmark of humankind. Experimentation teaches that a certain series of sensory phenomena indicates danger while another indicates safety. Language allows these sequences to be labeled and explained. It becomes possible to convey the lesson without the experiment. This conveyance is narrative. Narrative is the primary method for imposing order on gross input. It is the method used to remember such order oneself and to share it with others. After the sensory input – the experience – has passed, what is left behind as memory is an approximation of that experience which is distinct from the experience itself. This fact is so obvious and such a commonplace that it is rarely examined. Recollection is necessary to catalogue memory, but also to create a sense of self and a sense of context among other non-selves. Narratives agreed upon by many become the foundation of culture. It is, no doubt, a useful evolutionary strategy, but one that involves a certain amount of construction.
Experience is limited by perspective. A given viewer witnesses a given event from a particular vantage point, which influences understanding. Perspective is both physical, as in an observer’s actual field of view, but also psychological. One sees what one expects to see. Such elements of subjectivity ensure that even the most meticulous attempt to relate past events is definitionally handicapped. There is an unbridgeable distance between experience and memory. Attempts to share those memories with others widens the distance further. When narrative is shared, each participant introduces a new perspective and a new set of variables. The information is subject to a new set of filters which alters final understanding. “Truth”, if such a thing exists, is not accessible. Unfortunately, such a postmodern approach is as uncommon as it is unsatisfying. The more we empower narrative as an explanatory device the more we need to believe in its fundamental trueness. Even those who are familiar with such theories suspend disbelief in order to privilege certain narratives. Even in fiction, a genre approached and understood as imaginative, readers require a level of plausibility based on seemingly arbitrary guidelines, many of which are created and perpetuated by the works themselves. Anomalous events, which occur in experience, are frowned upon in fiction. A constructed narrative, labeled as such, is judged by a different metric than the narratives we ascribe to direct experience, but is judged nonetheless. Whether or not something is true, or at least believable, matters.
It's how we recognize each other. I'm told that can happen.
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