Listening to a podcast from Poetry Magazine I was turned on to the reproduction of a remarkable artifact. It brings me, in a way that no single book or essay or even film can do, to an encounter with the cultural habitat in which my own particular view (in time and place) of this world was shaped. Like something one would encounter in a book by Ray Bradbury or Lewis Carroll, on turns a corner in an obscure section of the city and happens upon a museum of wonders.
Category: Uncategorized
Revelations
“Write the things you have seen and what is and what will be.”
Mike Doughty is a wizard of words who fronted the group ‘Soul Coughing’, one of my favorite performance entities of the late nineties. This past year he had a vision of the “Book of Revelations”, surely one of the most influential and hallucinatory word epics of all time, as a rock opera.
The performance was sponsored by one of my favorite spoken word podcasts, Kurt Anderson’s Studio 360.
Although I don’t identify primarily as a practicing Christian, this piece reveals to me the power of language in a whole new way.
Here it is, in full.
The Victim Thing
It finally came to me, the reason I haven’t been able to get past the middle of the second season of “Breaking Bad,” the reason I can’t abide conspiracy theories, and the reason some stories draw me in and others bring up in me a barrier of stubborn resistance.
It’s the ‘victim’ thing.
Surely there are real victims in the world, who fall to genocide, starvation, famine, war and general global neglect. These are things I want to know about, because they are part of the truth, and only when we are exposed to the truth can we take any sort of useful action.
We are all ‘victims’ of something. People cut in front of us in line, treat us unfairly, ignore our best qualities, or we are victims of our own mistakes and unrealistic expectations. Fair enough. I certainly belong to that club.
But there’s the kind of victimization that’s solely a product of the mind, which functions as a state of being, a form of self-identification. This sort of victimization has two possible outcomes, both self-reinforcing. Either we surrender to being forever the butt of some cosmic joke in which we are the eternal fall-guy and there’s absolutely nothing that can be done to change the odds, or else we try to turn the tables by becoming the victimizer of others. In either scenario we find ourselves in eternal conflict with the world as it is.
An example of the former strategy is the drama queen. I have myself taken this route on more occasions than I’m proud to admit. For years it seemed that my life was a constant internal (mostly) battle with authority figures and with their ridiculous rules and regulations and unrealistic demands. My attitude was that, as the smartest person in the room, every other agenda should be shifted to accommodate my own particular modes of being. Underneath all of this, of course, was the nagging feeling that I could never be good enough, a feeling from which I could conveniently hide by projecting it onto others.
As you can imagine, this strategy gets no one anywhere useful.
Variations of this strategy include the ‘always complaining’ victim who is more and more seen as a pain in the ass and either gets shuffled out of the way or out of the organization, or else is ‘forced’ to quit, thus completely fulfilling the requirements of victimhood. More common is the ‘passive aggressive‘ strategy where one presents a minimally acceptable face to the people in charge while undermining their authority by engaging in corrosive gossip or kvetching with one’s fellow victims in the lunchroom or behind closed doors.
The other kind of victimhood is much more insidious and ultimately much more destructive. It can be indulged in by whole cultures and used as one of the most effective tools of politics and war. Walter White of “Breaking Bad” is the perfect example of this alternative. Seeing himself as having been rendered powerless by the circumstances of his life, extending to the bad faith and betrayal that he perceives in those around him, he chooses to become the ultimate victimizer, the “one who knocks” as he so aptly puts it. We’re fascinated by his every move as he descends ever deeper into a hell of his own making.
Looking around, I see Walter White in every corner of every awful conflict in the world today. Regard the recent actions of our Republican congress in its dealings with the State of Israel. We have here two political entities who draw considerable energy from their self-portrayal as victims. Republicans see themselves as the lone defenders of the ideals of white christian destiny against the rising hordes of the envious poor, the foreign invaders of our borders, unbelievers, and the practitioners of ‘reverse-racism.’ Israel, finding itself besieged on all sides by people who view it as either an illegitimate state or an undemocratic occupier finds itself caught in a cycle of increasing paranoia (the ultimate state of victimhood) toward just about everyone, even its allies. Desperately, the Israeli Prime Minister engages in the politics of its most powerful ally by appealing to those who most closely share his fearful and apocalyptic (and imperialist) view of the world.
It was the spectacle of an Israeli leader making political hay with Republicans that made me see the wide ranging implications of victimhood and to understand why I find it so repellent. The horror of it all is that those who feel the most victimized ultimately become the worst offenders against human aspiration and the most passionate advocates for war. Just ask yourselves, what nation, and what party have become the driving force toward a wider war in the Middle East?
The position of Israel is not so much different than that of Walter White, in that the more aggressive the stance the more destructive the repercussions. Here Israel has made a very bad bargain, for the people with whom it has invested its hopes are those who tend to view the world in apocalyptic terms, where only the righteous shall survive while the impure unbelievers are condemned to perdition. For them, Israel has little meaning beyond being a symbol of their own global hegemony and as fulfillment of a short-term prophecy.
For every nation and every party that exists in a world of paranoia and victimhood, the world is closing in, while the worst atrocities are committed in the name of vengeance against unbelievers. But we are no longer living in a world where one people can survive by disregarding the rights of others. Ultimately, one person, or one nation, can only make war against the whole world for a limited time, until the tide shifts and the world overwhelms both fear and hope and all of our conspiracies vanish in the tide.
…and one of these days I’ll get around to watching the next episode of “Breaking Bad.”
From Selma to Montgomery 50 Years On
I finally got around to seeing the movie ‘Selma’ and I had to drive to (of all places) Los Alamos, to see it, as it had been replaced in Santa Fe by a movie about white retirees in India. Over the past month or more the film was always on the top of my ‘must see’ list, but it kept getting shuffled to second place by something else, like the movie based on a book by my favorite author, or what turned out to be a crappy biopic about Alan Turing. The Turing movie had made me a little leery of seeing another historical biopic as that one was so absolutely formulaic and boring as a film. At any rate, a sense of urgency hadn’t come over me until ‘Selma’ had left my neighborhood for a place that’s even whiter than Santa Fe.
Partly it was hearing about the anniversary celebrations and march in Selma and partly it was watching a speech by someone I consider to be a truly great president. The film is an extraordinary document, in that it views history through the eyes of recognizable human beings. It breaks totally free of the usual revisionist image of absolute sainthood, portraying Martin Luther King as a flawed and passionate man motivated by righteous anger as much as by compassion, and as a brilliant and intuitive tactician who knows when to advance and when to have patience.
I have seen, time and again, these same qualities displayed in our president. I sensed that in his Selma speech Obama, in his always carefully modulated and tempered manner, allowed a bit more of that anger to graze the surface. This is one of his best and definitely one of his most challenging, as it pulls no punches about where America sits regarding racial prejudice and politics, as opposed to where so many people think we are. I’m sure that it’s being attacked by conservatives for its audacity, criticizing their lily white intentions or impugning their sense of christian righteousness. His characterization of Americans explicitly steers away from the doctrines of ideology that govern our oppressors:
“That’s what America is. Not stock photos or airbrushed history or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American as others. We respect the past, but we don’t pine for it. We don’t fear the future; we grab for it.”
Just a couple of week’s ago, when Obama spoke at the White House Prayer Breakfast he riled up the demagogues and their simpering allies with his critique of the common crimes committed historically in the name of virtually all religions. He offended some southern white christians by mentioning the truth about their own history and by avoiding their demand to continue dividing the world into waring factions of the faithful. Just last week, the Prime Minister of Isreal had the disrespect to use our congress as his platform to declare himself and his nation to be on the side of the most extreme factions in American politics. (The long term damage this has done to the relationship of Isreal and the United States – beyond the commercial interest of buying and selling weapons – is immeasurable).
The fact of the matter is that, at least since the Age of Reagan, there has been a swelling of reaction in this country against all people of color. Conservatism has become a code word for bigotry and the same sort of white crackuhs’ who for generations tortured and terrorized the black populations in the south are now the very same people making the legislative agenda in Washington. The truth is they never went away. Reagan simply got them to switch parties. Nowadays they dress better and talk better and most of the times they even manage to appear respectable. They even have their own television channels. To openly criticize them is to be accused of ‘reverse racism.’ Well, most of them happen to be white, and virtually everything they advocate reflects an underlying assumption of white supremacy so, what the hell, let’s just openly play the race card and stop bullshitting with each other.
Yes, things have improved for most people. I was five or six before I even knew black people existed, seeing one for the first time riding the bus downtown with my grandmother in my very segregated (at the time) northern city of Cleveland. I remember being threatened as a young campaigner for Louis Stokes, who became the first black mayor of a major city in the United States. I spent my high school summers in dialogue with mostly black students who were my fellows in Upward Bound, one of President Johnson’s War On Poverty programs, while the city borke out in flames all around us. When Barack Obama was nominated to run for president I had strong doubts that this country would ever elect a black man to be its leader, and I was proved wrong.
However, as Obama says in his speech, our march is not finished. How could it be? The wounds we’ve inflicted on one another don’t just go away without a long time to heal. Between the end of the civil war and the 1970’s over 3200 blacks were murdered in this country by white people, for no other reason than that they were black and somehow ‘offended.’ An enormously disproportionate number of people of color are imprisoned or excluded from the political process. As we’ve been shown, time and again, many of our communities are still governed by brutality.
In my years as an adult I’ve watched our society’s attitudes toward diversity broaden while at the same time I’ve watched the rise of political forces that seek to keep us back in the age of ignorance and intolerance. Obama’s election, perhaps more than any other single factor, served to flush much of the lingering hatred and prejudice out of the ol’ woodpile. The dawning of the Internet has accelerated this process of exposure. Talk radio and comment sections are dominated by bigotry, and ignorance has become a public virtue. While the right has organized and thrust itself into power the liberal left has acted like petulant short sighted children for the most part, angry because they don’t get the favors they demand and using this as justification for crapping out of the political process.
What I most admire in those who have been and are great leaders is the quality of patience, bred through a sense of true compassion and a willingness to take chances, risking unpopularity when the situation demands. These are the people with whom I choose to stand.
Here’s the speech:
The Best Since “The Wire”
I just finished watching the final episode of this 4 season series from AMC and Netflix. I’d heard about the Danish version for some time, but decided to check out the American version first because, well, I don’t speak Danish and I’d just watched an episode of another Danish cop series with which I didn’t think translated very well culturally. (It wasn’t “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – which was excellent.)
Plot wise and drama wise one could almost say that this police procedural is a cross between “Twin Peaks”, “The Sopranos” and “The Wire”, following the mystery of who killed a teenager, diving deeply into family dynamics and taking the time to tell a story in depth. However, “The Killing” has an element of psychological depth that goes beyond any of these shows, or any other police drama I’ve seen for that matter.
This is a show about people and not about forensics. The characters don’t look like they stepped out of ads in GQ or Vogue. As in “The Wire” we see things unfold through the eyes of working people with all of the flaws and damages that actual human beings are heir to. The chemistry between the two principals, played by Mirielle Enos and Joel Kinsman as detectives Linden and Holder carries is profound and electric and carries through all 44 episodes. The character of Sarah Linden is one of the most complex and believable I’ve ever seen on American television. Ms. Enos performance makes us love her and hate her and ride with her through every moment of sorrow and triumph and sheer determination. Beyond this, every significant character in the supporting cast is fleshed out with excellent performances by an amazing cast.
This is a show about consequences. Acts of murder are only part of a long chain of repercussions that begin with the choices people make, before and after the crime. Virtually every character is faced with who they are and choices that won’t let them escape the truth. There are lies upon lies, those we tell ourselves and each other, little lies and big lies, and every lie exacts a price.
The first two seasons pretty much follow the plot of the original Danish series and as a complete narrative is a riveting introduction to the main characters and the atmospherics of a very rainy Seattle that’s an apt climactic substitute for Denmark (where, according to an interview I listened to with the original creator there is one season all year – November). The next two seasons delve much further into the psyche of the main characters. The crimes themselves are more grisly and serve to reflect the shadows that lurk in the background of the personal lives of Linden and Holder. This is a dark journey where the possibility of redemption hovers always just beyond reach. It’s a darn good mystery as well.
I may check out the original Danish series one of these days. But, I think I’ll let this one settle for a while, just to savor it.
WOW!!
Are you catching this?
Obama is playing the Long Game. The ACE of BASS.
(I’ve always admired his ability to stick to the Long Game
in the face our short term view of politics based on FEAR.)
The politics that are going on right now are AMAZING!
Obama is actually doing what we originally elected him to do:
He is leading a REVOLUTION!
But where will WE be standing?
WE elected him to do it ALL.
(That ain’t how it works.)
We don’t just get to VOTE (or don’t) and then go home.
Politicians can’t change anything.
They are merely magicians, managers of INFORMATION.
WE must INTERPRET and make use of the INFORMATION.
WE must CHANGE. The world won’t accommodate our failure.
This is The Long Game.
* * * * * * * * * *
“If you want to find pure gold, you must see it through fire.” – Mumonkan
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Revisited
The videos from Ferguson, Missouri, of unarmed demonstrators and neighborhood people being confronted by lines of advancing police using military hardware revived memories of my own experiences in 1966 and again in 1968. I was at the time a student enrolled in a special summertime program for disadvantaged high school students in Cleveland, Ohio, living in dormitories and attending classes at Case Western Reserve University on the East Side of a very segregated city. One of my most vivid memories of that time is of returning late from an evening concert, finding all of the lights out and the doors locked in the dormitory and everyone talking in hushed whispers. There had been gunshots heard somewhere nearby. I remember taking the elevator to my floor, walking down a hallway and entering a room where several of my fellow students, mostly black, were gazing out of wide windows that faced the city’s near horizon, a horizon that appeared to be largely on fire. In the following days the campus where we lived was used as a staging area, surrounded as it was on three sides by ghetto neighborhoods and on the other by the Heights where perched the National Guard Armory. Every night we watched as military convoys went out into darkened neighborhoods to patrol the angry streets.
The earlier event in my memory, known as the Hough Riots, was a result of long simmering tensions in segregated neighborhoods where most of the population was black and most of the police force was white. It was a precursor to many such events in ensuing years in cities across the country. Detroit and Newark and hundreds of other cities exploded in 1967 alone. In 1968 the so-called Glenville Shootout (which was another full scale riot) took place in the summer following the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, a direct product of the buildup of frustration, rage and helplessness. It was accompanied by similar explosions in Baltimore Washington D.C., New York, Chicago and Louisville.
The memory of those streets, the convoys, and most of all those fires remain vivid to me.
Looking at the coverage of events in Ferguson I’m struck both by what’s similar and what’s changed. First of all, even though this had all of the elements that could turn the situation into a full scale riot, so far it has not. An immediate explosion of rage in response to the shooting of a teenager lead to some looting and destruction that was followed by an organized and peaceful demonstration broadly representing the citizenry, involving people both black and white. The response to this was a brutal and invasive military reaction by the police. They advanced into neighborhoods using sophisticated armored equipment, firing tear gas at demonstrators, residents, reporters and bystanders. National coverage resulted in a spontaneous national response in solidarity (for the most part) from people with a broad range of social and political perspectives. The national dialogue emerging from this is ongoing. There is some question whether the underlying factors contributing to what went on will be adequately addressed. Race is an obvious factor but to anyone looking beneath the surface the steady demolition of the middle class and the unavailability of economic opportunity is as much a contributor. The anger boiling under the surface of American life crosses racial lines and a much wider proportion of the population can feel some solidarity with those in Ferguson than in 1968.
More than a chaotic and destructive acting out of long stifled frustration, the events in Missouri remind me in some ways of another event that took place in 1968, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. During what became known as a “Police Riot” over 10,000 protestors of all races, classes and denominations gathered to protest the Vietnam War and faced an all-out assault by police that drew in demonstrators, observers and innocent bystanders and was broadcast on every major television channel all over the world. This event was a marker that signified a major change in the political climate and was a precursor to the extremely polarized politics that dominate our national debates today. The issues we are dealing with are the same: race, inequality, war and economic injustice. Add to this the ongoing demolition of the middle class and the inability of a divided government to address any of it with a common sense of purpose and you have a mix that leads inevitably to social turmoil.
For me this past week’s events brought up not only memories from as long ago as 1968, but of another moment in which I saw and heard an echo of those times and those events. I’m reprinting here the first post on this Arclist blog, made on December 29, 2001, four months after the events of 9/11 in New York City. At the time it felt to me like the tragedies of the day were a sign of where we were heading if we didn’t wake up as a nation wake to who we were and what was our impact on the world. It was a low point in my visions of the immediate future. My outlook today isn’t nearly as dire. As a nation I believe we’ve advanced in our awareness, although it may not be obvious from what we are shown on the news. In spite of ongoing paranoia and prejudice I think we are more of a nation now than we were back then, more able to see one another, even those that we distrust, as human beings that ultimately depend on one another.
_____________________________________
I post this then, as both a recollection and as a warning. The fast growing problems driven by economic inequality and environmental degradation transcend our own borders, as the attacks of 9/11 violently brought home. We can no longer deal with them effectively through the obstructed lenses of arrogance and bigotry. We must address our own shadows while engaging with the whole world. In the past decade we have learned much and perhaps begun to grow up out of our national adolescence. Something in me believes that however dire the onrushing darkness, we are becoming engaged and more capable of bringing in the light.
_____________________________________
December 12th, 2001
Arclist
Subject: Cities On Fire
As we creep up on the New Year I grow increasingly weary of being told by politicians and propagandists what “we” the American people have learned over this past year. The whole world has changed we are told, but outside the once protected borders of our national fairytale I don’t think things have changed very much at all. From the images and words broadcast over our national media I have to conclude that Americans have learned very little, other than to be more afraid. There is nothing I find reassuring in the faces of George and Laura (brought to you by Enron, Inc.) and Rudy (brought to you by Time Warner) found on the covers of every supermarket magazine. I keep wondering who is this great “we” promulgated by every talking head and pundit from Susan Stamberg to Charlie Rose.
When we are told that the best way to perform our patriotic duty is to go on consuming as if nothing will ever change us or slow us down, I only see more disillusion ahead. The symbol we currently wave in the face of the world’s poor is an enormous gas guzzling SUV proudly displaying the Stars and Stripes from it’s antennas. Our nation in relation to much of the rest of the world resembles a spoiled teenage bully who refuses to grow up, stoked on drugs and arrogance and technology. Our response to attacks on what we see as our inalienable right to consume is to declare war on anyone standing in our way.
I keep hearing about the responsibility of the world’s only ‘superpower’. What does that mean? It’s as if the only thing necessary for world conquest is to declare yourself the winner and then to kick the ass of anyone who disagrees. Like our surrogate Isreal in the Middle East, we’ve become the co-creators of our own worst nightmare. My best wish for this country in the New Year is that we wake up from the tailored national fantasy bought and paid for by the corporate powers now in charge. If not, we are likely to encounter more horrible lessons from the real world.
Wed Dec 19, 2001
Cities on Fire
Look up.
It’s gone.
They are gone.
All the people
All the concrete
All the glass
All the metal
All the money
All the lunch crowds
All the car exhausts
All the noise.
Only the silent hole
the arc lights
filling the emptiness
with emptiness.
We act as if something we can do
will change it all
will bring it back.
Nothing will change
it is no more
it will never be again.
When I was very young
the cities burned.
Thirty years ago
instead of crumbling steel monuments
there were burning wooden tenements
ruined neighborhoods
armies patrolling the streets at midnight
in American cities,
the streets since knocked down
to build steel towers
over the graves of neighborhoods,
and memories
of slave quarters and refugee camps.
All the places where furies dwell.
We built the towers
to exhibit a nation’s soul.
Did we think the furies would go away
forgotten
like the ghosts of empty houses?
They came back to us
didn’t they?
They returned in the dark screaming faces
falling from burning towers
hurtling in suffocating vertigo
like the fall of empires.
The furies always come back.
Now we search for them in ruins
trying to torture them out of the earth
like screams
like shadows
as if the earth created them
but they are ours.
Have you ever seen a city on fire?
Drought
It was that year when the southern weather crossed a certain threshold and so did my age, when I no longer wanted to embrace the dying forests. Those brutally long hikes that took me to the edge, baptized in exhausted sweat to reveal the wide world from mountaintops were no longer attractive. Too much drought afflicted the way. We had already destroyed the world we once knew, and all of those dead and dying forests only spoke of reproof and dismissal as witness to our homage.
Or was the imagined drought only the inward turning of a being used to “taking it all outside” of himself as projection and dramatization of his own infirmities? I know this forest, these walkways, the texture of every root and branch, the color of every flower. Am I merely loath to repeat experience already sufficiently gained? How many more rainstorms to be caught within? How many wrong turns upon the trail? Is this merely the inevitable weariness that comes with age?
The only way I can see toward new pathways is through the always surprising encounter with passion in the form of love and in the incantations of desire. Once, very early on I found myself in a room filled with fellow students, staring out of an empty picture window at the reflections of campus streetlights, having emptied myself of all reasons for taking another breath. I could no longer motivate myself to move a muscle, to act, to feel. A young woman of my warm acquaintance in those days of impatience, detecting my condition moved closer to my side and questioned my motionless silence. I could only force out the single word, “Why?” I wonder now how she guessed the context of the question, if by telepathy or merely an interpretation of my observed catatonia. She whispered, “Because you want to.”
Three Short Pieces
ALL OF THIS
When the drama has faded
and there’s less distraction
something still remains:
That feeling in the first moments
before there was doubt.
Both surprised to learn
the curious attraction
love
endures only
in a world outside of fairytales.
* * *
I sit writing on the train. This landscape, New Mexico, the high desert, a curative for me, for all the usual feelings of alienation and loneliness and getting old and being without a woman’s touch and everything. Something about dragging one’s vision along the rising and falling lines of mountain and plain from this second floor window seems to even things out. I take the ride from one end of the line, Santa Fe, all the way to the southern end at Belen, and then back again. Sometimes I stop for a few hours in Albuquerque. Late in the day the shadows collect in the canyons by the Rio Grande where low adobe houses collect along the river while massively beautiful cloud formations collect above the horizons waiting to be painted by the lowering sun. There’s a combination of colors this late in the day, where the soft greens of desert sage and the dark green of scattered pinions appear almost to glow against the russet colors of the dry desert soil. There’s nothing more magical that I’ve ever seen in this world.
By the time I return the depression I felt has lifted, and I’ve even gotten some writing done. It works a lot better than drugs or drinking.
* * *
Recently I took a trial journey into the universe of EVE Online, probably the most massive multi-participant internet game in the online universe. I’ve always been fascinated with the emergence of parallel universes that we collectively generate in the more imaginative corners of the media sphere. Going at least as far back as the invention of comic books and accelerating with each iteration of the digital age many of us spend large amounts of time participating in some way in massive virtual worlds. From Star Trek and Star Wars conventions to the proliferation of Renaissance Fairs and countless novelistic adaptations in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, based on movies and computer games and television shows the worlds of the almost real abound. With the perfection of digital media these worlds take on increasing concreteness that interacts with the ‘real’ world in weird and interesting ways.
I’d gotten the come-on ads for EVE a couple of years ago when it started up but never took the time to check out more than a few publicity animations posted on You Tube. Listening to a story on NPR’s On The Media the other day about one of the Americans killed at the embassy in Benghazi I found out that he was a major player in the EVE universe, having actually acted as a diplomat in the virtual world, building political structures based on his experiences working in the State Department. What further intrigued me was a mention that EVE accommodated upwards of half million international participants. Worth checking out.
When I looked up the site there was an offer for a 14 day free trail. With little to loose I signed up and downloaded the game (which took an ungodly amount of time – it’s a huge file – over 17 gigabytes). When I signed on I began by creating my avatar/character, selecting a gender, an ethnicity and a culture, a family name, and a look (mine resembles a younger and more handsome and sharply dressed version of myself). When I’d gotten all of this set up I launched the tutorial, and found myself piloting a smallish seedlike capsule, floating in a vast virtual space with other ships and objects drifting around me in the distance.
Almost immediately I arrived at the first and for me, possibly terminal snags. First of all I needed a mouse to properly manage the controls and I haven’t used a mouse in years, having moved around on laptops and trackpads or touch screens long ago. Then, the first real training directive I was given was to find a ‘mission box’ somewhere on the left of the screen, where a large stack of controls and options were arranged, and I couldn’t for the life of me locate it. The result was that I couldn’t summon the mission destination or engage the ‘warp’ drive in order to get there.
So I was left drifting, a floating seed in outer space growing increasingly distant from the mothership from which I’d been launched. Since I knew no one on the site and hadn’t quite gotten the knack of how to effectively communicate the only thing I could do effectively was to rotate the ship in several directions while I drifted, and listen to the strange sound effects and the suggestion of distant disembodied voices. I couldn’t even find a way to sign off.
Eventually I closed the thing down by going offline. I don’t know if or when I’ll go back and try again (perhaps if I purchase a mouse). As I think about the image of a disconnected seed floating free in space it occurs to me that the evocation was itself the most valuable part of my adventure. It gives me a perfect metaphor for the state in which I find my life these days. Mostly disconnected from people, the news, friends, and even for the most part from the internet and its versions of ‘social’ media, I feel my sensory life to be gradually opening up in new ways.
As the years have accrued I’ve gotten so caught up in webs of expectation and projection that I’d lost contact with my own creative vehicle. After years of drifting down rivers channeled by other people; lovers and friends and other voices in the world, I’d forgotten how to listen to the voice inside of me. Rather than trying to crash myself through the walls of loneliness I’ve begun to see that the very fear of being alone is based on illusions and the only way through the walls is to find the part of me that is never really separated from everything.
And I’m thinking as I drift in the game, totally free and out of control, what a great metaphor for my life as I experience it these days, sort of peaceful and content, with most of the activity somewhere at the periphery of my attention. Maybe it’s kind of like a slow and peaceful way of dying. I wonder what if I leave the game on and drift aimlessly until eventually one of those wandering space jockeys comes by and shoots me out of the picture for sheer pleasure or out of annoyance, or maybe just for practice. By that time I don’t imagine I’ll care.
As I continue in this mode I reflect on the people I encounter, with all of their expectations and desires. They appear to me more and more like ghost spirits. They are like the motes in this game that drift in and out of my field of vision, reflections in a cage I draw around myself to tell myself what is and isn’t possible. Can a hungry ghost loose his appetite? Most remarkable, in the middle of this vague emptiness a new character appears, one I’ve never really met before. It’s me.
Three Short Pieces
ALL OF THIS
When the drama has faded
and there’s less distraction
something still remains:
That feeling in the first moments
before there was doubt.
before there was doubt.
Both surprised to learn
the curious attraction
love
endures only
in a world outside of fairytales.
* * *
I sit writing on the train. This landscape, New Mexico, the high desert, a curative for me, for all the usual feelings of alienation and loneliness and getting old and being without a woman’s touch and everything. Something about dragging one’s vision along the rising and falling lines of mountain and plain from this second floor window seems to even things out. I take the ride from one end of the line, Santa Fe, all the way to the southern end at Belen, and then back again. Sometimes I stop for a few hours in Albuquerque. Late in the day the shadows collect in the canyons by the Rio Grande where low adobe houses collect along the river while massively beautiful cloud formations collect above the horizons waiting to be painted by the lowering sun. There’s a combination of colors this late in the day, where the soft greens of desert sage and the dark green of scattered pinions appear almost to glow against the russet colors of the dry desert soil. There’s nothing more magical that I’ve ever seen in this world.
By the time I return the depression I felt has lifted, and I’ve even gotten some writing done. It works a lot better than drugs or drinking.
* * *
Recently I took a trial journey into the universe of EVE Online, probably the most massive multi-participant internet game in the online universe. I’ve always been fascinated with the emergence of parallel universes that we collectively generate in the more imaginative corners of the media sphere. Going at least as far back as the invention of comic books and accelerating with each iteration of the digital age many of us spend large amounts of time participating in some way in massive virtual worlds. From Star Trek and Star Wars conventions to the proliferation of Renaissance Fairs and countless novelistic adaptations in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, based on movies and computer games and television shows the worlds of the almost real abound. With the perfection of digital media these worlds take on increasing concreteness that interacts with the ‘real’ world in weird and interesting ways.
I’d gotten the come-on ads for EVE a couple of years ago when it started up but never took the time to check out more than a few publicity animations posted on You Tube. Listening to a story on NPR’s On The Media the other day about one of the Americans killed at the embassy in Benghazi I found out that he was a major player in the EVE universe, having actually acted as a diplomat in the virtual world, building political structures based on his experiences working in the State Department. What further intrigued me was a mention that EVE accommodated upwards of half million international participants. Worth checking out.
When I looked up the site there was an offer for a 14 day free trail. With little to lose I signed up and downloaded the game (which took an ungodly amount of time – it’s a huge file – over 17 gigabytes). When I signed on I began by creating my avatar/character, selecting a gender, an ethnicity and a culture, a family name, and a look (mine resembles a younger and more handsome and sharply dressed version of myself). When I’d gotten all of this set up I launched the tutorial, and found myself piloting a smallish seedlike capsule, floating in a vast virtual space with other ships and objects drifting around me in the distance.
Almost immediately I arrived at the first and for me, possibly terminal snags. First of all I needed a mouse to properly manage the controls and I haven’t used a mouse in years, having moved around on laptops and trackpads or touch screens long ago. Then, the first real training directive I was given was to find a ‘mission box’ somewhere on the left of the screen, where a large stack of controls and options were arranged, and I couldn’t for the life of me locate it. The result was that I couldn’t summon the mission destination or engage the ‘warp’ drive in order to get there.
So I was left drifting, a floating seed in outer space growing increasingly distant from the mothership from which I’d been launched. Since I knew no one on the site and hadn’t quite gotten the knack of how to effectively communicate the only thing I could do effectively was to rotate the ship in several directions while I drifted, and listen to the strange sound effects and the suggestion of distant disembodied voices. I couldn’t even find a way to sign off.
Eventually I closed the thing down by going offline. I don’t know if or when I’ll go back and try again (perhaps if I purchase a mouse). As I think about the image of a disconnected seed floating free in space it occurs to me that the evocation was itself the most valuable part of my adventure. It gives me a perfect metaphor for the state in which I find my life these days. Mostly disconnected from people, the news, friends, and even for the most part from the internet and its versions of ‘social’ media, I feel my sensory life to be gradually opening up in new ways.
As the years have accrued I’ve gotten so caught up in webs of expectation and projection that I’d lost contact with my own creative vehicle. After years of drifting down rivers channeled by other people; lovers and friends and other voices in the world, I’d forgotten how to listen to the voice inside of me. Rather than trying to crash myself through the walls of loneliness I’ve begun to see that the very fear of being alone is based on illusions and the only way through the walls is to find the part of me that is never really separated from everything.
And I’m thinking as I drift in the game, totally free and out of control, what a great metaphor for my life as I experience it these days, sort of peaceful and content, with most of the activity somewhere at the periphery of my attention. Maybe it’s kind of like a slow and peaceful way of dying. I wonder what if I leave the game on and drift aimlessly until eventually one of those wandering space jockeys comes by and shoots me out of the picture for sheer pleasure or out of annoyance, or maybe just for practice. By that time I don’t imagine I’ll care.
As I continue in this mode I reflect on the people I encounter, with all of their expectations and desires. They appear to me more and more like ghost spirits. They are like the motes in this game that drift in and out of my field of vision, reflections in a cage I draw around myself to tell myself what is and isn’t possible. Can a hungry ghost loose his appetite? Most remarkable, in the middle of this vague emptiness a new character appears, one I’ve never really met before. It’s me.
Arclist 