Things that astound me increase. Proportions of books unread to read, deficits, number of people I should have called ages ago. The stack of unwritten letters teeters on the edge of non-existence. I think about them and sweat. The stored up unsaidness overwhelms. We are stunned into a silence of forgetting when we remember the words that we never spoke.
Let me put it another way. The statistics that life accumulates. Number of cups of coffee, pairs of underwear, drinks consumed, tissues used, blades of grass stomped, keys misplaced, cans thrown surreptitiously into the single sort recycling bin, verses remembered and forgotten. Should I have been a pair of ragged claws or not? Sometimes, shuddering into the icy wind, a sea-floor existence in the absence of subcutaneous nerves seems, by comparison to the monotony of a currently-inhabited routine, a delightful alternative. Give me a lobsterian existence and I will show you bliss in forgetfulness because God, the nights spent worrying—sometimes worrying just about worrying too much.
How about a character sketch instead? Can it be possible to write into existence a woman with veined hands, watching commercials aimlessly on a warm afternoon in New Jersey and not have it be one’s forgotten grandmother? How, with this pseudo-imagined picture in mind, could it be possible to function at a level above the cliché? Give up on the characters. Keep the notion of clichés, because we’re always on guard, aren’t we?
I tell my friends I’m “over” clichés. Even that rings hollow. I’m just spending my afternoons looking for things to be over. A project meant for some unhappy person that I never thought I’d grow up to be. Proust next to Joyce on the bookshelf, staring into the living room. Who says that clichés can’t still embarrass, belittle, transform a previous life’s definition of sophistication into sophistry? I guess, not me.
How do these references compute? I’m not saying what I want to say.
Maybe it’s this: the violent rage against a lack of faith in the ability of weather to inspire, disrupt, shake up.
It can. The thing you thought impossible creates tremors in the wide earth, and gives back life in a storm.
Simply: there it is: precipitation altering the landscape of an entire city, even briefly. Forgive me for the triteness of my recognition that fleeting whiteness, frozen waters, icy winds transform postures, change wardrobe decisions, commission uncertain expeditions to the warmer regions of blankets. Forgive me because, when it comes down to it, one’s aspirations for the conveyance of meaning don’t belong in the world-historical. They belong at the level of you and me. Sitting here staring at each other’s blankness and hoping for a spark of connection. Ketchup bottles between us, the air somehow (and again, forgive the fault of inadequate language) electric in some way. Shouldn’t that still astound us? That even after the discovery of electricity and its flowing into every crevice of our lives, we should still feel it in a manner similar enough to one another that we recognize it as electricity?
Sparks fly when language approximates the unexpected translation of ordinary sharing of a meal into something involving electrons. To look at each other, my God to see each other existing in the world, how can this not still move us to ask “how do you like your tuna?” Shouldn’t we constantly, instead, drop jaws to the placemat and surrender ourselves to the improbability of concurrent existence at the level of a shared meal?
None of this makes sense! Try something else.
I throw a snowball. You duck. Action induced by climactic patterns that have their birth over some flat part of Canada. The sentiment might hang thick like sugary molasses, but a little sentimentality won’t kill the inhabitants of a present moment so darkly colored by irony that it feels like a turtleneck sweater out of the dryer. Focus instead on the essentials. Snow. A contraction of the small muscle tissues created by a passing of stimulus from the brain to the legs. You duck. You duck. You duck. Not in time! An explosion of frozen water. Imminent counter-strike.
There’s something not-so-vaguely sexual about it. I get it. Believe me.
Okay, for the unconvinced, who wear their apostasy like a starched shirt, wake up: the treachery of blank stares and empty repartees does nothing but annoy. I’m through with aging notions that there can be no truth in a conversation over beer. That it requires an expedition to far-off mountains in search of precious metals to deliver the final verdict: meaning relies on the tipping of one dominance in favor of another. Or worse, that we have to interact via networks, providing our meanings in the safe context of a screen.
Horseshit. Let’s settle this on the pitch. Or perhaps instead, iron your shirt on a Sunday night before riding the subway to work and tell me that you are unmoved by the tragedy of your helplessness. You who never thought that you would own a restaurant guide and underline or highlight the places you want to try. You who tell the cashier that you forgot your discount card. You, who waits for some sign from the ether that you’ve moved on. You have to, or you wilt. That’s the way we have to play the game.
Get it yet? We talk about the weather because it’s a distraction. We talk to each other about how the soup is and make plans to write letters. We thrust our private selves into a public world for the sake of finding some sort of commonality. Don’t flex your superior thoughts in my direction, because believe me brother, I’ve seen the failures of my own great artifices and will see many more before even today waltzes through its own revolving door.
I’m just trying to make it one stultified pairing at a time.
In other words, imagine thinking in the vernacular of Sunday nights all the time. It would, quite simply, bring you to absolute despair. And, what’s worse, a despair that leaves you alone in your underwear, watching late night television programming whose blankness no longer presents an interesting problem but simply the reality of your life. It’s impossible to say, for instance, “infomercials are killing America.” You will be greeted with blank stares, my friend, if you offer this assessment to a book club. Blankness being the least of your problems by this point. What on Earth are you doing in a book club, you’ll have to ask yourself.
So what’s the alternative to this mass of unconnected and unfulfilled signifiers? How do we map ourselves into the landscape created by an agency that exists far beyond the borders of our own personalities?
Dunno. Maybe we should think about it a little harder.
