Chimeras

Youth is a time of chimeras. Ideals, convictions, dreams. What luxury to be eighteen: there’s so much time and opportunity in front of you it would be a sin not to waste at least a little of it by doing something stupid. You’ve got mountains, oceans, wildernesses of time to experiment and explore and make mistakes. You can afford to gamble. You’ve got a spot at the blackjack table. You don’t lose a house or a marriage if you fuck up and lose. You go back to your room, get some sleep and get up the next day with a whole new set of delusions and aspirations to pursue.

The underlying assumption here is that our home planet will continue in a more or less normal pattern in the coming years, which I guarantee it will not, but for the sake of argument and the valuing of youth let’s forget that the ice off the north east coast of Greenland, the oldest and thickest sea ice in the arctic, has begun to break up due to warm winds and a climate-change driven heatwave in the northern hemisphere. I mean really, seriously, how can anyone get through a day without an abundant amount of denial to filter out two-thirds of reality? Given the stark facts of dead zones in the oceans, Fukushima, abrupt climate-change and the rise of corporate totalitarianism, WTF?! Give me illusion. Lots of it. This will be my focus today. Pipe dreams. Rainbows. Fata Morgana.

Where was I? Ah yes, youth. That stuff I once had some fifty years ago, that marvelous ship at whose bow I stood catching the ocean spray of a bright, fun-filled, adventurous future. We all get a shot at it: the brass ring. That shiny, tantalizing mirage that promises us a future of fulfilling careers and platinum albums and TED talks and millions of hits on YouTube.

Let’s go back in time fifty years to the fall of 1968: “Hey Jude,” “Magic Carpet Ride,” and “White Room” were among the top 20 songs on the radio. I was giddy with youth. Early manhood. Dreams of glory.

Vietnam was not one of them. I managed to avoid that horror. I was not cut out to be a green beret. I was far more drawn to the existential berets of Sartre and Albert Camus. But not entirely. The bleak undercurrent of nihilism had a sweet taste, but I continued to indulge in large Romantic ambitions. William Blake’s visionary eyes brightened my outlook.

My central chimera was literature. I wanted to be a writer. I was going to write books. Great books. Fantastic books. Goofy books. Nutty books. Eccentric books. Books like those that thrilled and astounded and altered my mind: A Movable Feast, Tender Buttons, Trout Fishing in America, Tarantula.

The Doors of Perception, Moby Dick, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake.

Illuminations, by Arthur Rimbaud. Le Spleen de Paris by Charles Baudelaire. Divagations by Stéphane Mallarmé.

And here I am now, many years later. An old man. I did manage to write some books. I’m not sure they’re nearly as good as the books that initially inspired me, but I like to think they’re of some value, enough value to validate the poverty and humiliation and burdens I placed on other people so that I could achieve that dubious goal.

This is not a good time for books. The current zeitgeist is zombie-like: people walking down sidewalks gazing at smartphones. Playing video games. Mistaking infantile shows like Game of Thrones for high culture.

Good lord.

I don’t like this current age. Not a bit. I don’t like the corruption, the fraud, the ravenous materialism, the wars, the imperialism, the corporate tyranny. The stupidity, the infantilization, the shallowness, the obsession with celebrity culture. The demise of bookstores and movie theatres. The proliferation of sports stadiums. The obsession with wealth. And positive thinking.

I despise positive thinking. Books like The Secret, the inane philosophies pushed by people like Oprah and Norman Vincent Peale. Positive thinking is just another form of magical thinking, the kind of thinking children under the age of six indulge and believe. This chicanery and egotistical self-deception sanctions attitudes of meanness and antagonism toward the poor since the underlying assumption is that the poor are poor because they don’t think positively enough. This is ridiculous. And cruel.

The goals I pursued as a young man now seem ludicrous. But I have the authority of hindsight. And I’m living in a culture that is decidedly different than the one in which I came of age and spent the early years of my adulthood. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that I began to see the deleterious effects of the new computer technology and how it was beginning to undermine the brilliance of print media and generate a population of people increasingly incapable of critical thinking and deep reflection.

“Reading,” writes Sven Birkerts, “is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don't just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity. The printed page becomes a kind of wrought-iron fence we crawl through, returning, once we have wandered, to the very place we started.” 

Note that he says “printed page.” It’s virtually impossible to read anything on the Internet. Everything on the Internet seems like an assault on reading. It’s an aggression against concentration, an attack against reflection and private, inner communion. You’ve got to contend with pop-up ads, videos that begin playing and are difficult if not impossible to shut down, or sometimes even find, pages that keep shifting up and down, and words slung together so sloppily and with so little care for nuance or depth that they don’t even compare favorably with junk food.  But who’s going to notice, or give a shit? No-one cares about the craft of writing, the subtleties and balance of a well-wrought sentence.

I’ve tried Kindle. The fonts were distinct, the background was dimmed a little, it seemed like a perfectly fine medium in which to enjoy a text. But I couldn’t. I felt somehow distanced from the writing, walled outside, able to see and comprehend the words but unable to absorb and savor the words. It’s as if the very weight of a book and the feeling of paper beneath my fingers were critical to my immersion. I suspect it has something to do with my age, the number of years I’ve spent reading books and magazines and the neural pathways to which I’ve grown accustomed. Perhaps a younger person would not find any problem at all in reading a text in a digital format.

But if one were to be honest, I doubt anyone would assume that the person standing on the sidewalk staring at a smartphone in amnesic unconcern is reading literature; it’s either a video game or Twitter, the social networking service in which users interact and post brief messages called “tweets.” The very word “tweets” is a red flag for the toxically shallow and narcissistic circus that has eroded the commons and polarized friends and addicted so many people while weirdly alienating them to their more authentic natures and impulses.

Every day feels like a Ray Bradbury story. Every day feels like another day in dystopia. People bewitched by tweets and Instagram and selfies sit and stand around in trances, utterly oblivious to the lives and phenomena around them while the planet’s ice fields melt and the sixth mass extinction intensifies exponentially from day to day, choking the air with wildfire smoke and becoming silent and dead in areas that once teemed with insects and birds.

I need a chimera. A different chimera. A chimera large enough and fast enough and strong enough to carry me elsewhere. And where is elsewhere? Elsewhere is elsewhere. It’s not a place. It has no longitude or latitude. It has no velocity, no trajectory or position in time. It’s outside of time. It’s outside of science. It’s beyond the reach of rational investigation. There’s no way to explain it logically or judiciously. It’s a mindset. A feeling. An understanding. An aura.