Strange New World
As the year comes to an end I often find myself musing over the effects of time. I do use this period as an incitement to reflect upon the changes of the past year. I also do the same around my birthday, though I notice I tend to reflect on my own life more then. Now it’s the world around me. Today is 2010. Tomorrow is 2011. It could be pointed out that this is all just a convenient fiction; that the calendar is a rather arbitrary device. But I would counter that it reflects our experience of the seasons. It may not be a perfect representation of what we all know but certainly the year is not a random construct. And so each year passes and changes creep upon us. And then you look around and everything is different than it once was.
I think the reason I decided to write these essays in the first place is that I noticed the way things were mutating and decided to say something that ran against the current. Also I am convinced that out of little commitments something can be born that wasn’t there before. If I mourn the loss of a critical intellectual life amongst so many of the people I come in contact with, both in reality and in virtuality, then rather than wring my hands I should do something, even if that thing is small: for the seemingly insignificant thing will bring about a change if done consistently, like drops of water against a rock.
The Doors - People Are Strange
Am I the only one who gets an odd sensation that something vital has been lost in the last few years? I don’t mean anything political. Or economic. I feel it inside; it’s nearly indefinable, yet in I feel it most in our human relationships. That somehow we have all become more distant from each other, stranger. Yes I know… I live in Alaska and that does make me distant from so many people and perhaps stranger. But that’s definitely not what I mean. By ‘stranger’ I mean it in an existential sense, as in Camus, or the old Doors song People Are Strange.
All the time I lived in New York City during the 80’s and much of the 90’s I kept up with many good friends through letters and very occasional phone calls. I knew what was happening with my friends. I felt close to them. I saved all of those letters. But then came email. And something began to radically change. (Do you save emails?) I remember a friend found me through my email address and started sending me his long monthly family newsletters. I received these for a year or so. But I never actually received a letter from him nor his wife. Nothing saying, “Hey how are you? Long time no talk!” And I hadn’t seen him for over 20 years. I eventually unsubscribed. (That’s a weird concept all it’s own! Don’t get me started.) And I never heard a word again from them. And that cued me into the new strangeness of this online universe.
During this period I also lost touch with many friends in the cracks between the old letter writing days and the new electronic mail. Phone numbers no longer worked. People moved as if in exile. But not to worry I was told people would keep their email addresses and stay in touch. But no one seemed to take into account the fact that people would change those email addresses like changing fashions. But not to worry social networking would bring us together. And in a way it did. Although ‘together’ isn’t quite the word I would use. Because as people have become more “connected” we have in reality become more disconnected, less involved in reality, yet somehow cheering each other on in virtuality.
I remember an early moment with Myspace. I had already figured out that there was no way to communicate any substantial ideas through the forums. Trolls came through every possible serious “discussion” and turned it into a postmodern joke. At that time I was curious to know what kind of people were out there. Besides learning that most Romanians were vampires, I discovered that people had become shallow and narcissistic to a degree I had not thought possible. I remember the horror of realizing that one girl had photos of herself as a cutter and others were cheering her on, as if to say, “Slice away! You go girl!” And the photo itself implied another person concurring with her. That is when the truly nightmarish proportions of our culture’s obsessions with feeling good and being positive really knocked me out. Over and over I have heard people talking about encouraging each other. Not being negative. Supporting your friends. But on the other hand, the dark flipside, you had the people who would make it a vocation to spoil every serious conversation they could get their hands on. Two days ago I finally shut down my moribund Myspace page, which was so infected that it completely trashed the computer I was on.
Then there is Facebook, which by contrast is a well of positivity. I have somewhere between two and three hundred ‘friends’. Frankly it seems like a big absurdist sensitivity session. Yes it has had some uses. But it has surely taken something away in exchange. Suddenly I was “found” by lots of folks who had previously dwindled away. But with very few of them do I actually communicate. I have started to feel two things at once towards this system. One: I am addicted to this thing (surely I am hardly alone). And two: How do I construct my life without it? (Much easier said than done.) Or at least minimize the effect of it. If I dropped it tomorrow morning what would happen? (The same could be said of the automobile or the telephone.)
The strangeness comes from the passing of time. It is clear to me that in a very few years we have changed, in some radical way, because of this entire virtual world. We have gone viral ourselves. We have used our tools to do what we have often wanted to do: to stay in touch without really being affected by each other, to extend, as all media extend, not only our good qualities but our worst as well, to pass on meager signs of affirmation, rather than to be involved with other real souls who not only smile and laugh but who also ache and mourn. Thus how shall we be comforted and healed in a world of positive expressions and good vibes?
Here’s to finding more depth and meaning in 2011.
Byrne Power
Haines Alaska
12/31/10
Faux Pas
I noticed something yesterday as I stepped out of a local grocery store. They had sprayed something white around some of the windows to give it the look of snow on the glass. Now this kind of stuff happens all over America around this season. But, um, this is Alaska. There is no reason on earth to fake a white Christmas here. Snow isn’t in particularly in short supply. I noted this last year mockingly when I saw that the local post office in swinging with the season had smeared gobs of white synthetic fakery on their large glass doors. I pitied the poor guy who had to razor this chemical sludge off of the window in January, probably the same poor guy who had to scrape the snow and ice off the walkway for hours on end. For several feet of true snow concealed the ground all round. And the thought came, not for the first time, that Baudrillard was right about the simulacra that infest our reality.
I remember 1989, a trip, a whim, paid for by my mother, to visit Disneyworld in Florida for Thanksgiving. We stayed in a fake Victorian beach resort on a fake beach on a fake lake. We visited Mexico, Japan, Norway, even the United States, not to mention an imitation Los Angeles and several fantasy worlds. There were mechanical birds, birds with clipped wings and some of the entertained even thought the real birds migrating through the park were somehow a product of the Disney touch. I remember at one crucial juncture looking down at a large lonely cockroach crawling out of a blossoming flower garden and thinking that every insecticide spray in the park stood against him. “Be fruitful and multiply,” I said to him. It was the reality of that bug that spoke to hollowness behind our lies. For this was indeed Mecca for the contemporary American dream.
These symptoms were hardly unique to Walt’s kingdoms. Once I started to see the sham scenery I couldn’t stop seeing it. I was visiting a couple of elderly friends in that same annus mirabilis 1989. They lived outside of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. I was taken over to a Home Depot with them to buy a bookshelf. Their son, who was older than I was at the time, was given the task of getting it. A long rectangular box was placed in the car. I was assured that this was to become a sturdy wooden bookshelf. When we unpacked the thing in their garage I saw that indeed wood was a component of the structure. The “boards” were all made of some pressed wood muck, looking like the cellulose equivalent of hogshead cheese. Instructions were given in detail on how to properly screw the thing together. But there was a final step that took my breath away for sheer audacity. Accompanying the wood scrapings fashioned into timber were long panels of contact paper with photographs of real wood. These were to be dutifully laid over the headcheese to simulate the desired substance. Now the price of this monstrosity, certainly decayed and broken by now, was around sixty dollars. At that time twenty dollars worth of lumber and nails would have built a swell bookshelf exactly the same size. Aesthetically, veritably, ontologically this homely construction would have been the real thing. And like the shelves I am looking at today they would be admired and used many years hence. But for some reason this elegant solution didn’t even occur to these regular folks, just as it doesn’t to many people today.
The Imitation of "LIFE"
Why?
I’ve puzzled over that for years as I observe the strange array of materials we surround ourselves with. Why do people settle for the cheap, which ultimately costs more, and the ugly, which disguises itself as the cute, the pretty, the charming? From linoleum designed to look like tiles to vinyl siding, again as so often, aping the appearance the appearance of actual wood. It’s interesting that these things often imitate the stone, wood, glass; textures that signify authenticity. It’s like there is a craving for reality without the faintest desire to actually touch it. Maybe it’s the splinters?
And it’s not just the material world.
I remember a friend coming over to my old New York City apartment once and listening to the Cramps version of Rockabilly, later nicknamed Psychobilly. When I shifted to the real honest-to-God old school Rockabilly from the 50’s he quailed. Johnny Burnette, Link Wray, Gene Vincent were not to his liking at all he said. Why? I asked. Because he would rather hear the interpretation than the real thing, he explained. (Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that listening to a record can scarcely be called listening to the real thing.) Prior to this most of the people I knew who liked, say, Eric Clapton’s or Jimi Hendrix’s versions of the blues were usually quite curious to hear their influences. But in the late 80’s something was definitely shifting. Today it is much less common to find souls interested in the roots of anything.
But then again look at the swollen flow of simulacra in our own times. In the Internet age, the time of digital downloads, the presence of reality has grown thin indeed. As we move our binary abstractions around through the microwaves the concept of a stable thing has grown faint, feeble. A little over a hundred years ago to listen to music you had to make it, or listen to someone else make it. No microphones. No amplifiers. No recordings. As the Twentieth Century progressed (or at least conned itself into believing it was progressing) people collected hard disks that initially were like pottery, later made of hard vinyl. They collected these things, invested themselves in the music and artwork found in these long playing records. Other techniques evolved, wire recordings, magnetic tape, miniaturized versions of the tapes, optical soundtracks, eventually laser discs and their compact form. These compact disks contained numbers read by light. Eventually, as in science, as in art, as in statistics, the numbers, the abstractions would take on a life of their own. And the function of music would deteriorate from an art that hovered around the many meanings of human existence to personalized interior soundtracks for our own simulated mental movies.
A faux pas in French means literally a “false step” or a misstep. To a bad French student who only knows enough that the negative is often formed by the word pas it might accidentally be read as a “false not” or perhaps a “false negation”. This strange world of self-conscious simulations are perhaps best understood as false negations and missteps towards a world where human meaning is decreased and the illusions of abstraction multiply exponentially.
I hope it is not a faux pas to ask what small steps we can take to strengthen the things that remain.
Byrne Power
Haines, Alaska
12/9/10
Non-Random Thoughts