Modern Madness

I'd like to juxtapose a few things here that go along with my post from last night "The Bus Stop" and the theme of "true moments."

The following is the lyrics to Rammstein's "Stripped." Though they normally sing in German, this one is in English.

Come with me
Into the trees.
We lay on the grass
And let hours pass.

Take my hand
Come back to the land.
Let's get away
Just for one day.

Let me see you stripped.
Let me see you stripped.

Metropolis
Has nothing like this.
You breathing in fumes
I taste when we kiss.

Take my hand
Come back to the land
Where everything's ours
For a few hours.

Let me see you stripped.
Let me see you stripped.

Let me hear you make decisions
Without your television.
Let me hear you speaking
Just for me.

Let me see you stripped.

The song greatly recalls to my mind the novel 1984 where Winston takes to the woods in the countryside to make love to Julia, their great act of rebellion within one of the most totalitarian states ever imagined. He fumbles, hesitates at first, but before long they are lost in the most natural of acts in a way he was never able to experience with his frigid, Party-loving ex-wife back in the city.

The idea is that you can't truly share intimate moments while you're still plugged in to today's thoroughly mediated world; it is its own kind of totalitarian state, not as physically brutal as in 1984, but just as vicious and implacable in its efforts to destroy and deny what makes us human. You can't truly know another person with the television blaring, advertisements jumping out at you from all angles, incoming texts beeping for your attention and begging for response, Facebook updates that need to be made and all the millions of other distractions of modern society that prevent you from truly experiencing, from truly being in a moment. You can never truly know yourself in such an environment, either.

What to do? Well, first it means limiting your intake of all that. I don't have cable, I don't follow celebrity gossip, I don't follow sports and I don't listen to pop music. I go to the movies two or three times a year. But that isn't enough. You must attempt to create small bubbles, like pockets of air, inside it like I described in "The Bus Stop," or escape from it altogether from time to time like in "Stripped," even if it is "just for one day" or only "a few hours." It amazes me how refreshing and renewing a simple walk in the woods is for me. I'm lucky to be able to live in a city that has such wonderful national parks. DC is pretty great in that way. I leave my building, round the corner and within five minutes of getting off my couch I'm walking on an offshoot of the Glover-Archibald Trail. The trees envelope you after a few dozen yards and you may as well be out in the wilderness up on a mountain. Only the occasional sounds of planes overhead pull you from the natural world. The place is filled with insects, squirrels, chipmunks, birds, raccoons and deer. And of course dogs walking with their owners.

It is right there, so close. And yet so many of us rarely, or never, enjoy it. Putting on your running shoes, sipping a Gatorade and pulling out the stopwatch to make sure you keep your pace as you blow through the trail, thinking only of whether your new exercise shorts make your ass look fat, doesn't count by the way.

In fact, I just remembered a kind of perversion of the Prometheus story I witnessed within the last year. A deer had run out of the woods and into the business district a little south of Dupont Circle, bringing the gift of natural wonder to the Washingtonians' dreary morning commute. For its audacity and defiance of the set order of things, the deer was struck by a car on Connecticut Avenue and killed. I was walking to work and only saw the immediate aftermath of the event; the deer was already dead by the time I cam upon the scene. But there was the man looking forlorn sitting in his car, which was all smashed in the front, including the windshield. He was pulled over to the side of the road with a phone in his ear, no doubt calling his wife and AAA. And there was the deer, lying in the middle of the street behind a traffic light pole, more cars ambling past on either side of it, an obscenity, an indecency far more shocking than any nipple popping out during a concert or a curse word let slip on a morning talk show.

From the appearance of things, it didn't seem that mankind had accepted the gift this time around. We made sure to mete out the punishment ourselves as well, not trusting the gods to do so properly anymore.

But we must embrace that gift. Bathe in its purity from time to time and then carry around its residual glow. Hold at least some small portion of it until we can make our way back to such a moment again.

The alternative is a life of this:

Fleeing through dark tunnels,
Underground we make our way.
Vaguely smelling of a hard day’s work,
Our car sways and whines under our weight.
Brakes scream the story we dare not
Tell ourselves, lest we frighten the children.
We try too hard to avoid eye contact,
And instead tell ourselves stories of home.
Lovers waiting, children playing, tails wagging,
Comforts of couches and dinners and sleep.

Make tomorrow another day, please.
Not like the one that came before.
How long until home?
I make my way underground.

That is a poem I wrote about a year and a half ago that was published in Adbusters magazine, Issue #78 (July/August 2008) and which can be found on the third page if you start counting from the inside cover. The object of all this is well summed up by a quote from Thomas Merton that is found near the back of that issue:

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we can see, we cannot think.

And he died in 1968, never knowing about cell phones, texting, Facebook, Myspace or Twitter. Skip ahead just a short bit to 1976 (still in an age without all those things) and one of the greatest movies of all time, Network, and we have Max, an old news man, breaking off his affair with Diana, a young television producer:

Max Schumacher: You need me. You need me badly. Because I'm your last contact with human reality. I love you. And that painful, decaying love is the only thing between you and the shrieking nothingness you live the rest of the day.

Diana Christensen: [hesitatingly] Then, don't leave me.

Max Schumacher: It's too late, Diana. There's nothing left in you that I can live with. You're one of Howard's humanoids. If I stay with you, I'll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed. Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You're television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You're madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure, and pain... and love.

"Diana" is now in her fifties and probably looks upon us (my fellow under-30's) in much the same way Max once looked at her; from across an unfathomable gulf between meaning (diluted as it is in her) and madness. Not that she has improved at all, just that we've gotten so much worse. We have a lot to overcome, but it is not impossible.

The Bus Stop

Note: I wrote this last night (Thursday 9/24/09 for the record) and I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet. It feels like poetry, even though it is in prose form. That ambiguity intrigues me.

As I stand at the bus stop, waiting to complete my journey home from work, having already walked nearly a mile, I can’t help but become acutely and intensely aware of the bustle that swirls around me. Night after night, I see the people swish past, some arm-in-arm and some alone, the latter often with headphones stuck in their ears. Some of them even have hands dedicated to texting, between skipping songs they’re not in the mood for and other ones they’re not even sure why they ever downloaded, while they walk and try to keep half an eye on the way forward. I hear snippets of their conversations with each other or to people on the other ends of phones. The ones speaking on headsets appear to be insane at first, of course. Cars trundle past on their way to everywhere, weaving around the buses that loudly proclaim their adherence to their set route and schedule. Bicyclists dart here and there, their flashing red lights blinking away under the constant gaze of street lamps and headlights.

And I am there standing still. An observer of so much, I can forget that; that I am really there, inhabiting a body that can interact with what is before me. It reminds me how disconnected I am, how apart from so much of this society I stand. It is almost as if a metaphor I once imagined was brought to life. There is a bittersweet sadness; a primal longing to belong that inevitably rises up in these moments. But there is also a peace; a kind of warmth that settles over everything inside me. It is not truly loneliness that animates me at the bus stop, though the feeling is similar, but a sort of sadness that the world has placed us all where we are and that we all stand apart, even the ones who are walking together, so close they can whisper and hear without being overheard. At those moments I feel that I could be standing with someone who has known me all my life and still be alone.

But there is so much beauty there, too. The way the thin branches of a dead tree encircle the stars when I look up; the rotting boughs still stretch forth with elegant determination, powerful even in death. The dissonant strains of music from car stereos mix with the cacophony of rumbling engines, the occasional horns and myriad human conversation to form a song of pulsing life that would make John Cage smile and tap his foot to the nonexistent beat. And, on second thought, maybe that couple is sharing a true moment of love as they move on out of sight. Maybe they are not so far apart as they first appeared. Maybe it is possible to experience true moments these days; maybe this is one. And the inner warmth grows. And sometimes it makes me smile. Does any passerby, reflecting my position and observing me, have an inkling of why? Do they feel it, too?