Flipping through an old paperback copy of Freakonomics I found lying around the house the other day, I was struck once again by a chapter devoted to the question of why people vote, when, statistically speaking, their ballots don't mean shit.
That sounds harsh, but numbers are harsh, and Freakonomics takes a cold look at life from the point of view of probability and statistics, and, when viewed through that particularly unforgiving, clinical lens, glimpsed through that narrow numerical prism, voting makes no sense whatsoever.
Consider:
We're told, repeatedly, that every vote counts. Your vote counts. You are encouraged to read up on the issues, weigh what the candidates favor and oppose, listen to the faint but insistent sound of your moral compass steadily pointing in one particular direction.
And yet, it doesn't matter.
How many elections have been decided by one vote in the entire world in the past, oh, one hundred years?
Freakonomics comes up with one, some kind of local election in Buffalo at the turn of the twentieth century.
The reality is, your vote doesn't matter. (Statistically speaking.) You could spend hours and days and weeks and months and years considering who is the best candidate for such-and-such particular office, but if you didn't vote, if you stayed at home crashed out on the couch and proceeded to watch a twelve-hour Silver Spoons marathon on Nickeloedon -- 'all Ricky Schroeder, all the time --' the absence of your vote wouldn't affect the election one little bit. Life would go on.
So what is going on when people decide to vote?
The authors of Freakonomics cite an intriguing survey out of Sweden, I think, which found that, when given the chance to vote via Internet, anonymously, from the comfort and privacy of their own homes, people en masse actually voted less than they did when they had to haul their ass out of their house and schlep their way to their local school to cast a paper vote.
Which means what, exactly?
People do everything for emotional reasons and nothing for logical reasons. (That's my theory, and I'm sticking to it.) Politicians bombard us with the fact that we live in a democracy, and, in a democracy, it's our moral duty to exercise our legal right to choose our next leader. That's right: you. Me. We have a duty to perform. A sacred trust has been given to us, and we must not waste that benediction. If we choose to remain at home and marvel with glee in our living rooms at little Ricky Schroeder's latest shenanigans, instead of driving on over to the City Hall to case our votes, we have, essentially, performed an act of moral outrage, if not cowardice.
This is the cynical way of looking at it -- that we vote because we think we'll feel guilty if we don't vote. If we thought about it calmly, cooly, rationally, we'd rationalize: the dudes who wrote Freakonomics are right. Our vote doesn't change anything.
Only the collective matters.
Aha!
What we have to work is here is the ongoing, endless electrical synergy that attempts us to reach outside of our individual selves and connect with something larger, greater, possibly even more noble than our own puny, fleshy, smelly human bodies.
The great irony of American electoral politics is that candidates shuffle from city to city, state to state, and in each of their speeches they state that they are merely spokesmen for the people; that it is you, the people, who are the true bedrock of the nation; that is you the people, who will make the real change.
But I don't think people want to hear that.
I think American politics reaches such orgasmic levels of intensity (and with ten months still to go before the election!) because people don't want that burden of change placed upon their shoulders. They come to the rallies and wave the signs because they are looking for, longing for somebody else to lift them up out of the muck of their lives.
"Hillary, John, Obama, Mike: Take us to the promised land, please! We're voting for you, not ourselves!"
And yet the vote is a link in the chain, a connection from one person to that other person, the one up at the podium, the one promising to lift the country to a new and more hopeful elevation. By voting, the voter may realize (rationally) that their vote doesn't make any difference whatsoever, but it stands for something else, something symbolic, something elevated, a state of mind and heart beyond logic and approaching something very close to religion.
Look at what's happening with Obama. He's become something bigger than himself. He's bringing the kind of energy that has not been felt in American politics since, I would say, the presidential campaign of Robert F.Kennedy. And people are responding to that; people are desperate for that kind of energy. (And this Canadian hopes that American, Obama, will ride the wave all the way to that distant but reachable shore of the White House in Washington.)
And there will come a day this November when the last ballot will have been cast, and the final votes will have been counted, and the result will read: 53, 543, 762. (Hopefully for Obama.)
Sitting in their living room, watching Katie Couric perkily read out those cold, static, indifferent numbers, some plumber kicked back with a beer and a smoke and a back that won't stop aching will be able to look at that number -- 53, 543, 762 -- and he will think: That's me -- that last digit. If I hadn't have voted, the number would be 53, 543, 761. That might not have made much of any difference, but Obama is now President of the United States of America, and I had a part in that, goddamnit. My wife's left me, my kids hate me, my job sucks, but I was part of the process that led to this man taking office. I made my voice heard. Tomorrow -- shit, later today, even -- that voice will have been silenced, and I'll have to resume my little life, but I helped that man get where it is we wanted him to go.
Life is nasty, brutish and short. We lead with our hearts and look for something to cling to. Usually, that 'thing' is each other. And I think a vote, at heart, is the way we latch on to somebody else. We are born alone and die alone, but a vote is a restless, hopeless stab in the dark at immortality, a middle-finger-to-the-face of statistics and probability, a means by which we can become part of that link that leads from our living rooms to a larger room, elsewhere, at the center of the nation.
Voting may reduce us to a decimal point, externally, but internally, an exclamation point has been crudely formed, one we puny mortals wield as the dagger that stabs at the universe's black hole of indifference and unfairness.
Statistically, it means nothing.
Which is why, of course, it means everything.
For who the hell wants to live their life as a mere statistic, when an silent but emphatic exclamation point is waiting to punctuate our lives from within?
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
REVERE YOUR SENSES
From The Last American Hero, by Elizabeth Gilbert, a non-fiction account of Eustace Conway, who lives in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, in a place called Turtle Island, trying to lead as natural a life as possible in this exceedingly, insanely modern world:
Eustace used his time with Dave to try to have him understand the fundamental essence of his philosophy, which centered on mindfulness. There is no way, Eustace said to Dave, that you can have a decent life as a man if you aren't awake and aware every moment. Show up for your own life, he said. Don't pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle-feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber through life in an instant-gratification sugar coma. The most extraordinary gift you've been given is your own humanity, which is about consciousness, so honor that consciousness.
Revere your senses; don't degrade them with drugs, with depression, with willful oblivion. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you're not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like; notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet feel like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfullness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is -- your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbors, and this planet. Don't pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge. You can never become a real man if you have a careless and destructive attitude, Eustace said, but maturity will follow mindfulness even as day follows night...
Eustace used his time with Dave to try to have him understand the fundamental essence of his philosophy, which centered on mindfulness. There is no way, Eustace said to Dave, that you can have a decent life as a man if you aren't awake and aware every moment. Show up for your own life, he said. Don't pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle-feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber through life in an instant-gratification sugar coma. The most extraordinary gift you've been given is your own humanity, which is about consciousness, so honor that consciousness.
Revere your senses; don't degrade them with drugs, with depression, with willful oblivion. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you're not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like; notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet feel like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfullness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is -- your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbors, and this planet. Don't pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge. You can never become a real man if you have a careless and destructive attitude, Eustace said, but maturity will follow mindfulness even as day follows night...
Sunday, February 03, 2008
SO TIGHT IT BRUISES
Sometimes I'll be browsing in a bookstore, poking my way randomly through title after title, wondering exactly what I think I should be looking for, when I come upon a book that seems to say: I am here for you and you alone. The subject matter seems particulary attuned to whatever it is I am thinking and feeling on that particular day, at that precise moment; the book's intent can be designed for nobody else but me.
Or so I like to believe.
The novel I bought last week wasn't one of those magical tomes. It was by an author, Richard Powers, who I'd always wanted to read, but for some reason never had; it had the requisite number of orgasmic blurbs on the back cover that are usually my criterion for picking out a book. (I almost never read the jacket copy describing the plot of the book, because these concise summaries usually, if not always, give away far too many details for my liking.) This book, titled Gain, was simply a book, one that I wanted to read, so I bought it, and I read it.
Are there a lot of novels that deal with the specifics of Stage III C ovarian cancer? I don't know. I kind of doubt it.
This was one of them.
Except that it wasn't only about a midwestern American middle-aged woman who is diagnosed with ovarian cancer; it's also about the rise of consumerism in the United States over the past two hundred years, and the manufacturing of soap, and the horrid intersection between commerce and health that seems to have overrun the modern world with a savage, feral ferocity.Do we get cancer from our own actions? Has society developed itself upward in such a way that is aftereffects inevitably drag us back downwards?
The book tells parallel stories: one narrative outlines the slow but steady rise of a company in Illinois that produces soap, charting its erratic progress from a one-man operation before the Civil War and well into the end of the twentieth century, when the company has become an American conglomerate; the other story chronicles the life of a woman who lives in the town that serves as this same corporation's headquarters, and how her savage disease may or may not be caused by her own consumerist lifestyle.
It's a fascinatingly brilliant book, and Powers is one of those writers who is so clearly brilliant, in his themes, prose and execution, that it almost overwhelms the reader.
(I think he's almost too brilliant, actually. Author John D.Macdonald once disparaged the kind of fiction that draws overt attention to itself, dubbing it the 'Look-ma-how-well-I'm-writing!' kind of storytelling, and Powers certainly falls into that camp. Every sentence is pristine and insightful, offering glimpses of understanding and perception that sometimes take your breath away. Every paragraph is polished to a perfect jewel. The result is enormously complex and moving, but oddly sterile; one is always aware that SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT is being discussed, which often drains the life right out of the tale being told.)
Maybe it's because I've been in and around and within ovarian cancer for the past two and a half years. Maybe it's because I found myself somewhat startled to realize that this book I picked up without having a fucking clue as to what it was about turned out to be about a woman suffering from, or with, Stage III C ovarian cancer. Maybe it's because books find us at the right time, randomly, when we need them. Maybe it's because I realize that most of the books we read we read too young, when we haven't learned about life. About what life can do to us.
For whatever reason, I found myself having to put down the book at times, for Power has done his homework. He knows about CA-125 tests. He knows about Taxol. He knows about chemo treatments, the pacing of them, the toll of them. He either knows somebody who has cancer or is an incredibly dedicated student of the disease. Inside this woman's mind we descend, and it's a moving and haunting downward journey. Chilling, too, is his portrayal of the price of technological development, the clinical madness of the means by which we strive, almost manically, to ensure that our cleanliness is next to godliness.
It was a reminder, the book was. About how sometimes stories can seize us by the lapels, slap us across the face, and shout: "I'm talking to you, motherfucker. This is about your life. As it is now. Read it and listen."
If I had read the book three years ago, I would have enjoyed it, I'm sure, and been moved by it, I'm certain, but it wouldn't have dragged a tiny razor across my heart the way it has done for the past week.
Good art can sometimes be an aphrodisiac, or a mindless diversion, but it can also be an emphatic embrace, warm and firm, cold and bracing. One whose warmth is so soothing we don't want to let go, but whose grip is a little too tight for comfort, a needed hug so tight it bruises.
Or so I like to believe.
The novel I bought last week wasn't one of those magical tomes. It was by an author, Richard Powers, who I'd always wanted to read, but for some reason never had; it had the requisite number of orgasmic blurbs on the back cover that are usually my criterion for picking out a book. (I almost never read the jacket copy describing the plot of the book, because these concise summaries usually, if not always, give away far too many details for my liking.) This book, titled Gain, was simply a book, one that I wanted to read, so I bought it, and I read it.
Are there a lot of novels that deal with the specifics of Stage III C ovarian cancer? I don't know. I kind of doubt it.
This was one of them.
Except that it wasn't only about a midwestern American middle-aged woman who is diagnosed with ovarian cancer; it's also about the rise of consumerism in the United States over the past two hundred years, and the manufacturing of soap, and the horrid intersection between commerce and health that seems to have overrun the modern world with a savage, feral ferocity.Do we get cancer from our own actions? Has society developed itself upward in such a way that is aftereffects inevitably drag us back downwards?
The book tells parallel stories: one narrative outlines the slow but steady rise of a company in Illinois that produces soap, charting its erratic progress from a one-man operation before the Civil War and well into the end of the twentieth century, when the company has become an American conglomerate; the other story chronicles the life of a woman who lives in the town that serves as this same corporation's headquarters, and how her savage disease may or may not be caused by her own consumerist lifestyle.
It's a fascinatingly brilliant book, and Powers is one of those writers who is so clearly brilliant, in his themes, prose and execution, that it almost overwhelms the reader.
(I think he's almost too brilliant, actually. Author John D.Macdonald once disparaged the kind of fiction that draws overt attention to itself, dubbing it the 'Look-ma-how-well-I'm-writing!' kind of storytelling, and Powers certainly falls into that camp. Every sentence is pristine and insightful, offering glimpses of understanding and perception that sometimes take your breath away. Every paragraph is polished to a perfect jewel. The result is enormously complex and moving, but oddly sterile; one is always aware that SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT is being discussed, which often drains the life right out of the tale being told.)
Maybe it's because I've been in and around and within ovarian cancer for the past two and a half years. Maybe it's because I found myself somewhat startled to realize that this book I picked up without having a fucking clue as to what it was about turned out to be about a woman suffering from, or with, Stage III C ovarian cancer. Maybe it's because books find us at the right time, randomly, when we need them. Maybe it's because I realize that most of the books we read we read too young, when we haven't learned about life. About what life can do to us.
For whatever reason, I found myself having to put down the book at times, for Power has done his homework. He knows about CA-125 tests. He knows about Taxol. He knows about chemo treatments, the pacing of them, the toll of them. He either knows somebody who has cancer or is an incredibly dedicated student of the disease. Inside this woman's mind we descend, and it's a moving and haunting downward journey. Chilling, too, is his portrayal of the price of technological development, the clinical madness of the means by which we strive, almost manically, to ensure that our cleanliness is next to godliness.
It was a reminder, the book was. About how sometimes stories can seize us by the lapels, slap us across the face, and shout: "I'm talking to you, motherfucker. This is about your life. As it is now. Read it and listen."
If I had read the book three years ago, I would have enjoyed it, I'm sure, and been moved by it, I'm certain, but it wouldn't have dragged a tiny razor across my heart the way it has done for the past week.
Good art can sometimes be an aphrodisiac, or a mindless diversion, but it can also be an emphatic embrace, warm and firm, cold and bracing. One whose warmth is so soothing we don't want to let go, but whose grip is a little too tight for comfort, a needed hug so tight it bruises.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
LIVERPOOL I LEFT YOU...
Part of the joy and agony of going away is wondering whether or not you'll ever come back. Listening to Ringo Starr's new song, Liverpool 8, a sentimental ode to who he was and where he emerged, I found myself thinking about my own hometown -- St.Catharines, Ontario -- and Ringo's lyrics gradually became my lyrics, and Ringo's melody felt, for a moment, like the soundtrack to a life that I am currently living.
Destiny was calling,
I just couldn't stick around,
Liverpool I left you,
But I never let you down
I don't think 'destiny' was calling me, per se (or at least no more nor less than it beckons any one of us), but it's a very odd thing, the choices we make in life, and the various, often diverging paths that emanate from each and every action.
I lived for the first nineteen years of my life in one place, and only left it for family vacations in the spring and summer, sunshine jaunts to Myrtle Beach or cottage getaways in northern Ontario. I couldn't imagine ever leaving St.Catharines -- for how on earth do you leave the only world you've ever learned -- but I knew that I would, and the decision was made somewhat easier by my parents' decision to move to Manotick, Ontario, just outside Ottawa, the summer after my first year in university. Since 1995, I've only been back two or three times to the place that raised me.
In between, I've lived in Japan, Cambodia, and the Philippines, visited Big Buddhas and Khmer temples, slept in hospitals in Thailand and been almost mugged in Phnom Penh. For someone who was raised a diplomat's kid, perhaps, this would be par for the course before puberty, but for somebody from St.Catharines, who considered a trek by city bus downtown somewhat exotic, this has been not only mind-blowing, but mind-altering, too.
When I was little, my dad used to take me flying in the small plane he sometimes flew on weekends, and we would search for our house through all the miles that separated the sky from the land. I think life is like that, and I sometimes wonder if I'm still in that plane. You go up, up, and away, and everything after that is a downward search, through the clouds, seeing what there is to see through the mist that weaves its way through the heavens like chimney smoke that has somehow drifted too high for its own good.
Hearing Ringo's new tune brought back my own love of my hometown, and I wonder -- not often, but sometimes -- how it's doing. How the roads are. (One of the advantages of having started distance running as a teen is that I was able to see my town foot-level through its streets, daily, watching and wondering.) How the winter snow falls on the lake that lay outside my childhood house. Who's running Pete's barber shop in the plaza near my house, where I got my hair cut every month for almost twenty years of my life.
Liverpool I left you,
But I never left you down.
I like that line. As if you have an obligation to honor the place and time that fed and housed you.
I hope I haven't let St.Catharines down.
Destiny was calling,
I just couldn't stick around,
Liverpool I left you,
But I never let you down
I don't think 'destiny' was calling me, per se (or at least no more nor less than it beckons any one of us), but it's a very odd thing, the choices we make in life, and the various, often diverging paths that emanate from each and every action.
I lived for the first nineteen years of my life in one place, and only left it for family vacations in the spring and summer, sunshine jaunts to Myrtle Beach or cottage getaways in northern Ontario. I couldn't imagine ever leaving St.Catharines -- for how on earth do you leave the only world you've ever learned -- but I knew that I would, and the decision was made somewhat easier by my parents' decision to move to Manotick, Ontario, just outside Ottawa, the summer after my first year in university. Since 1995, I've only been back two or three times to the place that raised me.
In between, I've lived in Japan, Cambodia, and the Philippines, visited Big Buddhas and Khmer temples, slept in hospitals in Thailand and been almost mugged in Phnom Penh. For someone who was raised a diplomat's kid, perhaps, this would be par for the course before puberty, but for somebody from St.Catharines, who considered a trek by city bus downtown somewhat exotic, this has been not only mind-blowing, but mind-altering, too.
When I was little, my dad used to take me flying in the small plane he sometimes flew on weekends, and we would search for our house through all the miles that separated the sky from the land. I think life is like that, and I sometimes wonder if I'm still in that plane. You go up, up, and away, and everything after that is a downward search, through the clouds, seeing what there is to see through the mist that weaves its way through the heavens like chimney smoke that has somehow drifted too high for its own good.
Hearing Ringo's new tune brought back my own love of my hometown, and I wonder -- not often, but sometimes -- how it's doing. How the roads are. (One of the advantages of having started distance running as a teen is that I was able to see my town foot-level through its streets, daily, watching and wondering.) How the winter snow falls on the lake that lay outside my childhood house. Who's running Pete's barber shop in the plaza near my house, where I got my hair cut every month for almost twenty years of my life.
Liverpool I left you,
But I never left you down.
I like that line. As if you have an obligation to honor the place and time that fed and housed you.
I hope I haven't let St.Catharines down.
Monday, January 21, 2008
EVEN EMPATHY
Every place is some place, and everyone is someone.
It's been interesting, living a long time in places where most of the people I encounter and work with on a daily basis believe very different things than I believe.
The other day I was at somebody's house, and a Christian prayer was said before dinner, thanking Jesus Christ for the heavenly bounty that was set before us. The conversation later turned to the fact that Barack Obama might not, in fact, be a true Christian, because he used to be a Muslim, and who knows if he still might still hold tight to some arcane doctrines from the Koran? And the Filipinos in the south, the Muslim ones, the ones causing all the terrorism -- they're not true Filipinos.
Another day, I bopped into work a little bit early, and one of the teachers was leading the other employees in a Bible study class before the school day began, lecturing about how good works were not enough, good deeds were insufficient, that the only way to get to Heaven was to accept the Gospel and invite Christ into your heart. Period. No exceptions.
I thought back to a few years ago, in Cambodia, where, at one place I worked, all the employees had to sit through a forty-five minute Buddhist cleansing ceremony, where local monks blessed the premises in a simple but lengthy ritual of incense and chanting. And there we were, dozens of employees from Canada and Japan, France and Korea, the Philippines and the Gambia, Italy and America, Sweden and Finland. Nary a Buddhist among us, I'd reckon.
Sometimes months, if not years, go by where I don't speak to a Canadian in person, where I don't commune with someone from a similar background as my own. And this is fine. This is as it should be: life on its own terms, you and the world, meeting and greeting and getting along the best way that you can.
Having lived in three different Asian countries, and having worked under Japanese, Cambodian, British, South African, Filipino, Korean and Gambian bosses, I've slowly come to learn that it takes very little to get along with people. Be kind. Be courteous. Listen to what they have to say. Smile. Nod. Thank them. If they state something that's quite different from what you believe, well, so be it. Maybe state your own opinion. Maybe not. Take it case by case, temperment by temperment. In either case, the day goes smoother when you simply seek to find the common human bonds among us, the reciprocity that allows us to smooth the wheels that move our fates.
So lost in our selves, I think, the isolated entities that shape the world around us. So certain of our own individual assessment of the world. So resolute.
Better, perhaps, to understand the human faults we all share, the misperceptions we live our lives under. (For who are we without our misperceptions? The world is a cruel and mean-spirited place, and without our beliefs, undoubtedly false, certainly translucent, we would be ill-equipped to deal with what the long, indifferent day has to offer.)
By dealing with those who have little in common with ourselves, a necessary paradox emerges: a unity of opposites.
With nothing much to link us, we instead search for the absolutes, however transitory and miniscule they may be. We gaze into the gaps between our words. Listen closely to the silences. What we find, if we delve deep enough, linger long enough, are fragments and shards of humor, and kindness, and sometimes even empathy.
It's been interesting, living a long time in places where most of the people I encounter and work with on a daily basis believe very different things than I believe.
The other day I was at somebody's house, and a Christian prayer was said before dinner, thanking Jesus Christ for the heavenly bounty that was set before us. The conversation later turned to the fact that Barack Obama might not, in fact, be a true Christian, because he used to be a Muslim, and who knows if he still might still hold tight to some arcane doctrines from the Koran? And the Filipinos in the south, the Muslim ones, the ones causing all the terrorism -- they're not true Filipinos.
Another day, I bopped into work a little bit early, and one of the teachers was leading the other employees in a Bible study class before the school day began, lecturing about how good works were not enough, good deeds were insufficient, that the only way to get to Heaven was to accept the Gospel and invite Christ into your heart. Period. No exceptions.
I thought back to a few years ago, in Cambodia, where, at one place I worked, all the employees had to sit through a forty-five minute Buddhist cleansing ceremony, where local monks blessed the premises in a simple but lengthy ritual of incense and chanting. And there we were, dozens of employees from Canada and Japan, France and Korea, the Philippines and the Gambia, Italy and America, Sweden and Finland. Nary a Buddhist among us, I'd reckon.
Sometimes months, if not years, go by where I don't speak to a Canadian in person, where I don't commune with someone from a similar background as my own. And this is fine. This is as it should be: life on its own terms, you and the world, meeting and greeting and getting along the best way that you can.
Having lived in three different Asian countries, and having worked under Japanese, Cambodian, British, South African, Filipino, Korean and Gambian bosses, I've slowly come to learn that it takes very little to get along with people. Be kind. Be courteous. Listen to what they have to say. Smile. Nod. Thank them. If they state something that's quite different from what you believe, well, so be it. Maybe state your own opinion. Maybe not. Take it case by case, temperment by temperment. In either case, the day goes smoother when you simply seek to find the common human bonds among us, the reciprocity that allows us to smooth the wheels that move our fates.
So lost in our selves, I think, the isolated entities that shape the world around us. So certain of our own individual assessment of the world. So resolute.
Better, perhaps, to understand the human faults we all share, the misperceptions we live our lives under. (For who are we without our misperceptions? The world is a cruel and mean-spirited place, and without our beliefs, undoubtedly false, certainly translucent, we would be ill-equipped to deal with what the long, indifferent day has to offer.)
By dealing with those who have little in common with ourselves, a necessary paradox emerges: a unity of opposites.
With nothing much to link us, we instead search for the absolutes, however transitory and miniscule they may be. We gaze into the gaps between our words. Listen closely to the silences. What we find, if we delve deep enough, linger long enough, are fragments and shards of humor, and kindness, and sometimes even empathy.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
YOU HAD TO BE THERE
At the beginning of his stand-up comedy career, Steve Martin wanted to create an experience for the audience that simulated and reproduced the best of the high-school hilarity he remembered happening amongst his friends and classmates, the kind of aimless, endless nights where you would sit around your house with your buddies practically gagging with laughter, only to find yourself summing up the stories the next day at school to puzzled listeners with the words: "You had to be there."
In other words, the experience was so unique, the humor so situational, the mirth so transitory and of-the-moment, that later explanations were not only redundant and futile, but somehow offensive, too, as if attempting to replicate such an ephemeral moment in time insulted the nature of spontaneous fellowship itself.
How many times have we faithfully, heartfully tried to relate a joke, an anecdote, a special, sacred, almost revelatory moment from our lives (or, conversely, a supremely silly one) only to see the expression on our listener's face vainly attempt to show comprehension, if not interest? They're not getting it, we think.
"Well," you finally say, sighing. "I guess you just had to be there."
In some ways, such are the stories of our lives.
Moments that overwhelm you with their intensity often elicit bored yawns and vacant glares from friends and relatives. Emotions that assault you with their relevance and horror, insight or compassion, remain almost mute when vocalized, drained of their vigor.
Slowly I'm realizing that most of our lives are lived that way -- singularly. Not solitarily, exactly -- after all, I spent most of the past three months squeezed in between fellow commuters on Tokyo's subways -- but individually, amongst ourselves, leaving us and only us with the means by which to comprehend and assess their impact on ourselves and the world.
Perhaps this is sounding a little academic, or a trifle vague, but what I mean is: All around us every day are people experiencing the most joyful joy and the saddest sadness imaginable, as are we, in wildly varying degrees of pleasure and horror. "Only connect," E.M. Forster wrote a long time ago, but quite often, usually always, that's not as easy or as beneficial as one might expect. A 'connection' implies a link, a spark, a conduit through which your energy can find a receptive circuit. And yet the energy transferred will never be the same as that which was emitted; it will be shaped, charted and transfigured through the other person, until something new is born, and your original thoughts, your initial feelings, may become distorted. This distortion may not necessarily be a bad thing; it may very well result in a greater clarity, a higher caliber of energy, a stronger intensity of purpose and emotion, but still: you give up something of yourselves when letting go. (What you gain constitutes the sum of life.)
What I wish -- for me, for you, for all of us -- is a life of such wonder and incomprehension that any attempt to relate it to others is mandatorily reduced to a familiar catchphrase: "You had to be there." Because it is the 'you' in 'you had to be there' that ultimately reveals itself to be essential; it is the 'you' that keeps the circuit running, the energy moving, the gap between the singular and the communal narrow enough to cross as we see fit.
The common usage of the phrase means: "If you were there, at that time, in that place, you'd get what I'm telling you." Looked at another way, it can become almost a lament, or a plea, because what you are doing is trying in such a futile manner to convey that which cannot be conveyed, and, in a sense, you want the listener to have been a part of it, a co-pilot, to share what you saw and felt what you felt. The experience alone wasn't enough; you need another party to validate that which transpired.
"You had to be there" becomes almost mournful, seen in that light, but a good mourning, if such a state exists, a grieving for a singular experience that should have been communal, that should have been shared. With you. You want to say: "I'm trying to tell you about something that changed me in such a potent way, but you're not getting it, and that's fine, that's cool, no problem, but if you had been there, you would now understand what I'm talking about, and we would have shared something, and that something would have lingered through our lives."
By saying ' you had to be there' I'm acknowledging that I've failed at my original intention -- to let you in on a marvelous moment of mirth or oddness -- but I've hinted at something larger, more inclusive: my desire for you, the person in front of me, to have been a part of my life in the recent past. To have shared something solitary, thus multiplying the both of us. You weren't there, not at that moment, but the hope is that in the future there will be other times, and you will be there, and though we will, as always, be experiencing something singular, it will, this time, be mutual, too.
In other words, the experience was so unique, the humor so situational, the mirth so transitory and of-the-moment, that later explanations were not only redundant and futile, but somehow offensive, too, as if attempting to replicate such an ephemeral moment in time insulted the nature of spontaneous fellowship itself.
How many times have we faithfully, heartfully tried to relate a joke, an anecdote, a special, sacred, almost revelatory moment from our lives (or, conversely, a supremely silly one) only to see the expression on our listener's face vainly attempt to show comprehension, if not interest? They're not getting it, we think.
"Well," you finally say, sighing. "I guess you just had to be there."
In some ways, such are the stories of our lives.
Moments that overwhelm you with their intensity often elicit bored yawns and vacant glares from friends and relatives. Emotions that assault you with their relevance and horror, insight or compassion, remain almost mute when vocalized, drained of their vigor.
Slowly I'm realizing that most of our lives are lived that way -- singularly. Not solitarily, exactly -- after all, I spent most of the past three months squeezed in between fellow commuters on Tokyo's subways -- but individually, amongst ourselves, leaving us and only us with the means by which to comprehend and assess their impact on ourselves and the world.
Perhaps this is sounding a little academic, or a trifle vague, but what I mean is: All around us every day are people experiencing the most joyful joy and the saddest sadness imaginable, as are we, in wildly varying degrees of pleasure and horror. "Only connect," E.M. Forster wrote a long time ago, but quite often, usually always, that's not as easy or as beneficial as one might expect. A 'connection' implies a link, a spark, a conduit through which your energy can find a receptive circuit. And yet the energy transferred will never be the same as that which was emitted; it will be shaped, charted and transfigured through the other person, until something new is born, and your original thoughts, your initial feelings, may become distorted. This distortion may not necessarily be a bad thing; it may very well result in a greater clarity, a higher caliber of energy, a stronger intensity of purpose and emotion, but still: you give up something of yourselves when letting go. (What you gain constitutes the sum of life.)
What I wish -- for me, for you, for all of us -- is a life of such wonder and incomprehension that any attempt to relate it to others is mandatorily reduced to a familiar catchphrase: "You had to be there." Because it is the 'you' in 'you had to be there' that ultimately reveals itself to be essential; it is the 'you' that keeps the circuit running, the energy moving, the gap between the singular and the communal narrow enough to cross as we see fit.
The common usage of the phrase means: "If you were there, at that time, in that place, you'd get what I'm telling you." Looked at another way, it can become almost a lament, or a plea, because what you are doing is trying in such a futile manner to convey that which cannot be conveyed, and, in a sense, you want the listener to have been a part of it, a co-pilot, to share what you saw and felt what you felt. The experience alone wasn't enough; you need another party to validate that which transpired.
"You had to be there" becomes almost mournful, seen in that light, but a good mourning, if such a state exists, a grieving for a singular experience that should have been communal, that should have been shared. With you. You want to say: "I'm trying to tell you about something that changed me in such a potent way, but you're not getting it, and that's fine, that's cool, no problem, but if you had been there, you would now understand what I'm talking about, and we would have shared something, and that something would have lingered through our lives."
By saying ' you had to be there' I'm acknowledging that I've failed at my original intention -- to let you in on a marvelous moment of mirth or oddness -- but I've hinted at something larger, more inclusive: my desire for you, the person in front of me, to have been a part of my life in the recent past. To have shared something solitary, thus multiplying the both of us. You weren't there, not at that moment, but the hope is that in the future there will be other times, and you will be there, and though we will, as always, be experiencing something singular, it will, this time, be mutual, too.
Monday, December 31, 2007
GO JUMP ON A BED! (NEW YEAR'S EDITION)
Watching a two-year old and a three-year old jump on a bed, into the pillows, bouncing back up again, then repeating the action ad infinitum, is a cautionary lesson in age and innocence. Who doesn't like to jump on a mattress and crash into the soft comfort of a couple of giant cushions? Who hasn't done that at least five, ten times in a lifetime?
Problem is, most of us haven't done that in about twenty, twenty-five years.
It's lost its thrill, most likely.
But to a two-year old and a three-year old, it's all thrill. (Or tragedy.) They haven't done this kind of thing repeated times. They aren't jaded. It's a fun and strange and novel enterprise, this jumping-on-a-bed-thing. The looks on their faces cannot be faked, or manipulated; the great thing about kids in general at that age is that they can rarely fake anything, despite their parents' often desperate prompting for decorum's sake -- if they don't want to say hi, they don't. If they don't like you, they don't pretend that they do. And when they want to jump on the bed, well, they will, goddamnit, and they will enjoy it.
As the New Year dawns, watching those particular kids do that particular action (repeatedly) seemed like a lesson to me, or for me, or for all of us. If getting older means accumulating experiences so that we can better prepare ourselves for all that life has to offer, good and bad, then it can also mean, or should also mean, that a necessary regression is sometimes in order, so that we don't forget that which we once embraced. (Kind of like how Robin Williams' alien character on Mork and Mindy was actually aging backwards. No wonder he was such a goofball...)
I'm not saying that we should all jump on our beds in our underwear. (Though please, feel free, if the mood strikes.) But the simple things are sometimes the best things, and the best things are sometimes those that hit us in our oldest, child-like parts.
So, for the coming year, I wish you one, two, possibly even three jumping-on-a-bed feelings, if only to remember the thrill of a distant, simpler past. (And some pillow-fight sensations thrown in for good measure, because those are even cooler, though slightly adolescent in their ferocity.) Acknowledge them when they arise. Savor them. Go back to being an adult for a few more weeks. And then repeat.
Happy 2008!
Problem is, most of us haven't done that in about twenty, twenty-five years.
It's lost its thrill, most likely.
But to a two-year old and a three-year old, it's all thrill. (Or tragedy.) They haven't done this kind of thing repeated times. They aren't jaded. It's a fun and strange and novel enterprise, this jumping-on-a-bed-thing. The looks on their faces cannot be faked, or manipulated; the great thing about kids in general at that age is that they can rarely fake anything, despite their parents' often desperate prompting for decorum's sake -- if they don't want to say hi, they don't. If they don't like you, they don't pretend that they do. And when they want to jump on the bed, well, they will, goddamnit, and they will enjoy it.
As the New Year dawns, watching those particular kids do that particular action (repeatedly) seemed like a lesson to me, or for me, or for all of us. If getting older means accumulating experiences so that we can better prepare ourselves for all that life has to offer, good and bad, then it can also mean, or should also mean, that a necessary regression is sometimes in order, so that we don't forget that which we once embraced. (Kind of like how Robin Williams' alien character on Mork and Mindy was actually aging backwards. No wonder he was such a goofball...)
I'm not saying that we should all jump on our beds in our underwear. (Though please, feel free, if the mood strikes.) But the simple things are sometimes the best things, and the best things are sometimes those that hit us in our oldest, child-like parts.
So, for the coming year, I wish you one, two, possibly even three jumping-on-a-bed feelings, if only to remember the thrill of a distant, simpler past. (And some pillow-fight sensations thrown in for good measure, because those are even cooler, though slightly adolescent in their ferocity.) Acknowledge them when they arise. Savor them. Go back to being an adult for a few more weeks. And then repeat.
Happy 2008!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)