I
think it’s finally here, that feeling of irrelevance that’s been seeping into the
darker corners of my denial for at least a decade. My relation to the world has
altered. The pier is empty. The ship has sailed. Captain Ahab isn’t hunting for
a white whale in a world of towering, oceanic prose. He’s obsessively
doomscrolling a mobile phone next to a closed bookstore which is now a Starbucks.
The good news is that I’m old. Being old is surprisingly salutary; it feels
appropriate, like old boots on a wet day in December. There’s a side to obsolescence
not unlike adolescence. Irrelevance is to old age what an Amish horse
and buggy is to a Tesla sedan with all-wheel drive. It’s based. It’s genuine. It’s
contrary, it’s refractory, and agreeably anachronistic. When defiance of the
norms leads to social and cultural irrelevance, old age is the salt that enhances
its flavor.
I’m
not alone. Language itself has become irrelevant. More and more people can’t
read. They may be functionally literate, but reading for subtleties of meaning,
for nuance, for evocative insinuations or glorious insights into the realm of
human consciousness counts for very little. Don’t believe me? Go listen to a
podcast. Go on TikTok. Listen to an influencer. But before doing so, remove any
guns or potent pharmaceuticals from your office or home. Why else have things
such as ‘misinformation’ or ‘hate speech’ or ‘fake news’ become such a threat
that liberals – once the bastion of free speech – are now calling for
censorship? Language has become a wild beast, a bull bristling with banderillas
and blood running down the sides in a bullfight ring.
People
of a given age who rage over these issues are generally called curmudgeons – a
favorite word among gaslighters – and reminded of their irrelevance. We’re in a
new world now. Post a protest about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and – if you
happen to be a resident of England – you may have your house raided, as did author
and anti-Zionist Asa Winstanely, who argued the salient but unpopular point
that it’s wrong to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, and that the conflation
of these terms is used by the state to stifle dissent. This contradicts my
statements about the irrelevance of language; apparently, there remain
situations in which the written word still unsettles some people with a bit too
much relevance. I may be confronting an important paradox here: language
continues to have relevance depending on context, the intolerance and infantile
hypersensitivity of a heavily propagandized public, and the power of billionaires
who own and control the social media platforms to censor speech contrary to the
official narrative.
Thankfully,
I’m not a journalist, but a harmless poet, composing verbal amusement parks with
the relevance of a funhouse in a weapons manufacturing plant.
It’s
not like I wasn’t warned. In 1994, the prestigious publishing house Farrar,
Straus and Giroux brought out The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts.
The trajectory of Birkerts’ life was quite similar to mine: enamored of the
enchantments of the written word, he spent his early adult years living in very
humble circumstances while dedicating himself to the pursuits of a nascent author,
supporting himself with jobs clerking in bookstores. And also like me, and
being of a similar age, he has had to witness the slow, painful erosion of a
literary culture thousands of years old. Various literary cultures, I might
add. The apocalypse of the printed word has been global. “There is no
question,” Birkerts writes, “but the transition from the culture of the book to
the culture of electronic communication will radically alter the ways in which
we use language on every societal level.”
The
complexity and distinctiveness of spoken and written expression, which are
deeply bound to traditions of print literacy, will gradually be replaced by a
more telegraphic sort of “plainspeak.” Syntactic masonry is already a dying
art. Neil Postman and others have already suggested what losses have been
incurred by the advent of telegraphy and television – how the complex discourse
patterns of the nineteenth century were flattened by the requirements of
communication over distances. That tendency runs riot as the layers of
mediation thicken. Simple linguistic prefab is now the norm, while ambiguity,
paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit are fast disappearing. In their place, the
simple “vision thing” and myriad other “things.” Verbal intelligence, which has
long been viewed as suspect as the act of reading, will come to seem positively
conspiratorial. The greater part of any articulate person’s energy will be
deployed in dumbing-down her discourse…Fewer and fewer people will be able to
contend with the so-called masterworks of literature or ideas. Joyce, Woolf,
Soyinka, not to mention the masters who preceded them, will go unread, and the
civilizing energies of their prose will circulate aimlessly between closed
covers.
This
was written 30 years ago. Fast forward to 2024, and the detritus of the plague
are visible everywhere, at least to the like-minded bibliophiles who have
retreated into the sanctity of their libraries.
I’ve
noticed that some authors, such as former New York Times journalist Chris
Hedges, who wrote his own plea to the preservation of print media accompanied
with all the dire consequences its demise would have on society, in a book
published in 2009 titled Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the
Triumph of Spectacle, now writes a column on Substack which is accompanied
by a podcast, The Chris Hedges Report Podcast, covering
US foreign policy, economic realities, and civil liberties in American society.
Were it not linked with a podcast, for which his accompanying text is
essentially a transcript, I’m guessing his audience would not be as large. Which
is a shame, because Hedges is a beautiful writer; the lucidity and gracefulness
of his sentences were a special joy despite their oftentimes disturbing
contents.
Another writer, an
Australian woman named Caitlin Johnstone, also began accompanying her columns
with a video in which the text is read by her co-writer, Tom Foley. Anticipating,
I’m sure, the aversion people now have to the arduous task of reading. Read,
for example, her recent article “The West Only Has Pretend Heroes Like
Spider-Man And SpongeBob.” Here is an excerpt: “There are no real heroes with
popular support in the western empire, because everything that’s truly heroic
gets stomped down here, and everything that gets amplified to popularity is
either vapid distraction or directly facilitates the interests of the evil
empire.”
I envy people who have
the finances and patience to set up a microphone and what else technology
needed to put out a podcast. They’re hugely popular, an indication, perhaps, of
a return to an oral culture not that dissimilar from our distant ancestors
munching down hard on mastodon meat while listening to one of their clan
members deliver the narrative of killing the tusked, hairy monster with their
spears and unflinching courage. Joe Rogan – a hugely popular podcaster and UFC
color commentator – not to mention a massively built man highly skilled in the
martial arts – would dovetail into that role perfectly. His interviews can go
as long as three hours without becoming tedious. He is an absorbed listener and
adept conversationalist. Nevertheless, art, aesthetics, philosophy and/or literature
rarely, if ever, come under discussion.
At age 77, it is somewhat
befitting that a man in my predicament would try to find some meaningful
traction despite the haunting fact of my irrelevance. The once highly popular
blog provided a convenient substitute for the disappearance of print media,
particularly in that it bypassed the accustomed gatekeepers and editors and
gave one the freedom to write whatever and however you wanted, has been on the
wane. There are now platforms such as Medium and Substack which appear to have
captured the blog audience. All these mediums, however, are read on a computer
screen, oftentimes a small mobile phone screen. Not an ideal situation.
Another victim of our
electronic age is letters. I used to love writing letters. Still do. Provided I
can occasionally find someone to participate in the exchange of verbal flurries
and details pertaining to one’s personal life. There is no reason an email
cannot carry that burden, but most people evince a stubborn reluctance to let
their language spread its wings there. Don’t know why. It’s so frigging easy. Could
it be the ever-haunting specter of surveillance? The letter sealed in an
envelope was a private, sacrosanct world. Compare, for example, the warmth and
verbal panache of Keats’ letters to the abrupt bullets of a typical email and
you will witness an erosion of an art akin to the melting of the Himalayan
glaciers, or the ice sheets of Greenland.
I’m often amazed to
attend literary events. They’ve begun having a distinct Fahrenheit 451 vibe
about them, people still devoted to the literary arts and doing what they can
to preserve them. But the high and noble ambition of making a living by writing
the Great American Novel, of producing an On The Road or The
Handmaid’s Tale or Catcher in the Rye or Slaughter-House Five,
seems as antiquated and obsolete as a prospector leading a mule burdened with
camping equipment into the Nevada desert in search of gold.
Why should it bother me?
I’m retired – not so much from a literary career but from the menial shit jobs I
worked to make a living (what a remarkably odd and stupid phrase that is, make
a living) which were the bane of my existence. I hated every job I ever
had. But who doesn’t. It’s rare to find someone who makes money doing what they
love to do. I have nothing but a huge bonfire of envy for that person, and a
spark of admiration flying up into the dark cold night.
I watched a video
recently about the 15 signs of intelligence, one of which was change, the eager
embrace of the new rather than the stubborn reluctance to adapt. I couldn’t
disagree more. Which, I guess, makes me a really stupid person. But most of the
changes I’ve witnessed since the beginning of the 2000s have been unmitigated
disasters. All the sidewalk zombies I see every day gazing mindlessly at a
handheld device testify to an obliteration of intellect akin to the bubonic
plague. Or the dreary tedium of people checking their own groceries without
even a murmur of aggrieved humiliation at being put to work by the very store
to whom they're giving their money is another sad spectacle of fallen humanity.
Fuck change. If you can’t step in the same river twice, and the water is too
polluted for swimming, go for a walk instead. But watch out for the nincompoops
doing 60 mph down the sidewalk on a monowheel.
There is, I must admit, a
euphoric side to irrelevance. It means being detached. Unchained. Not
necessarily unengaged, not apathetic, not aloof, but off to the side, viewing
the pageantry of human absurdity from the margins, like one of God’s spies, a neutral
observer enlightened by dissociation and the wisdom of mortality, a bit like
one of the angels in Wings of Desire. The knowledge that you’re
temporary, ephemeral as a dragonfly when it comes down to it, is weirdly
exhilarating. At least in the abstract, where nothing weighs nothing, and all
the data banks nestled in row upon row upon row of floor-standing server racks count
for nothing in the stillness of a crystal. Sunyata, the Hindu term for ultimate
truth or reality, flashes semantically over a field of obsidian in the veined
wings of a dragonfly. Irrelevance is an amulet beaded with words.
It gives me a peaceful
feeling whenever I revisit in my mind’s eye that image of Johnny Depp in Dead
Man lying still in a canoe, mortally wounded, as he drifts into the ocean.
It all began by applying for a job as an accountant in the western frontier and
morphing – mostly by one crazy happenstance after another - into a surprisingly
lethal gunfighter. He has a memorable encounter with a frontier Iggy Pop, and an
infamous bounty hunter and murderous cannibal named Cole Wilson played by Lance
Henriksen. Most of these events occur while under the tutelage of a member of
the Cayuga Tribe named Nobody, archly played by Gary Farmer, who – under the
impression that Depp is English poet William Blake – befriends the accountant-cum-gunfighter
as he penetrates deeper into the American west, feeding him quotes of Blakean
wisdom until his final and fatal gunfight. Nobody leans over the carefully
prepared canoe to tell Depp “Time for you to leave now William Blake, time for
you to go back to where you came from.” “You mean Cleveland,” the dying Depp
mutters. “Back to the place where all the spirits come from,” answers Nobody,
“and where all the spirits return. This world will no longer concern you.” Nobody
gives the canoe a shove and Depp floats outward toward the gray horizon to that
place of ultimate irrelevance, of free-floating creative energy where particles
pop in and out of existence in a sparkle of divine fluctuation. “The authors,”
said William Blake, “are in eternity.”
