Illimitable

I was born 66 years after Pat Garrett shot and killed Billy the Kid, 92 years after the first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass appeared, and only 38 years after Geronimo died at age 79 at Fort Sill hospital while still being held as a prisoner of war. The one thing these dates have in common is that they are all under 100 years. I was closer in history to Geronimo and Billy the Kid when I was born then I am now to myself at age 5. My proximity to the nineteenth century doesn’t really surprise me. I’ve always felt more at home there than I do now.

Which isn’t really saying a lot. This is of consequence to me and nobody else, with the possible exception of my peers. The upshot is that I relate more to a time of small farms and open plains and creaking windmills than I do to tapping letters on a laptop, watching rock musicians play electric guitars on YouTube and entering a public space populated with zombies staring at tiny handheld computers as they attempt to simultaneously drive cars and walk across busy streets.

The world I currently occupy is psychotic, violent and dying. There are approximately 38 armed conflicts occurring in the world at present, including Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria, Somalia and Iraq. There had been approximately 1.2 million violent deaths in Iraq as of 2007. Statistics since then are disputable and murky.

Not that there weren’t any wars fought in the 19^th century. But the dizzying rise in human population has clearly contributed to an equally dizzying maelstrom of bloodshed and struggle.

I’m not trying to make anybody depressed by dwelling on these things, but you have to wonder what the human experience has meant all these centuries and where it’s going and does any of this have any real meaning in a universe so vast that the nearest solar system to ours is 4.24 light years distant.

I think about these things because my values and principles and habits feel more like 19^th century values and principles and habits than 21^st century values and principles and habits. The most salient of these being books.

I love books. A lot of other people love books but not nearly as many as 50, 40 or even just 10 years ago.

It’s heartbreaking to visit a bookstore. I try to stay out of them. Heartbreaking to see the inventories so eviscerated. Nothing quirky, nothing too obscure, everything mainstream blockbusters, stacks of Dan Brown and Tom Clancy and J.K. Rowling and Deepak Chakra, like the little bookstores in alcoves at the airport. And even there I wonder how many are selling because on any of the flights I’ve taken in the last few years – which were long ten-hour flights – I saw only one person reading a book: me.

Years ago when Bill Gates predicted that digital media would replace print media I tried hard to deny it, but deep down I knew he was right. It is to the extent that he was right, to the extent that people would drop reading books and magazines altogether and obsessively use electronic gadgetry to play video games, gossip on social media and watch YouTube videos (which I happen to enjoy doing quite a bit myself), that I did not expect. I also hoped that it would take much, much longer for people to give up the feel of a book in their hands, the soft whisper of paper when a page turned and the intense commitment that went into the editing and choosing a font, much less the intense concentration and intellectual labor that goes into writing for a tangible, clear-cut entity  – for the permanence of ink rather than the fickleness of pixels - and the immense difference that makes to someone about to embark on a writing project. It affects one’s attitude deeply when the stakes are that high. The level of earnestness goes way up. Writing for print elevates the quality of attention one brings to crafting a sentence or launching a provocative idea. It has become commonplace to stumble over grammatical errors and gross misspellings when reading a body of work online. Errors appear in books, but not nearly with the frequency as they do online. Books insure quality. And the ideas they express are much harder to delete. Nor is one surveilled, followed by algorithms or assaulted by ads while reading. Books favor a private communion with language and the serene, uninterrupted flow of ideas. How could they let that go?

But let go they did.  And the effect has been devastating. Here’s what Chris Hedges has to say in his 2009 book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle:

Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, we are bombarded with the cant and spectacle put out over the airwaves or over computer screens by highly-pain pundits, corporate advertisers, talk-show hosts, and gossip-fueled entertainment networks. And a culture dominated by images and slogans seduces those who are functionally literate but who make the choice not tor ed. There have been other historical periods with high rates of illiteracy and vast propaganda campaigns. But not since the Soviet and fascist dictatorships, and perhaps the brutal authoritarian control of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, has the content of information been as skillfully and ruthlessly controlled and manipulated. Propaganda has become a substitute for ideas and ideology. Knowledge is confused with how we are made to feel. Commercial brands are mistaken for expressions of individuality. And in this precipitous decline of values and literacy, among those who cannot read and those who have given up reading, fertile ground for a new totalitarianism is being seeded.

I take seeds very seriously. They’re amazing. A tiny seed – a speck on the palm of your hand – can house a sequoia that will one day grow to a ginormous height, or produce a fragrant Ylang-Ylang in the rainforests of Asia. I think of words as seeds: a small body of syllables with a little semantic latitude can take root in the mind and grow into a novel or a manifesto, a prose poem or a palace of ideas.

And this is what makes me feel so 19^th century. This isn’t 21^st century thinking. I’m not giving a TED talk or giving a seminar at a corporation. I will be posting this at a blog, which is completely not what I’ve been talking about (a healthy amount of cognitive dissonance has helped me adapt to this world and its contradistinctions), but it will be like bringing something from the first World Expo – The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations as it was more formally called - held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London in 1851 and setting it down on a table in 2019. Say, The Mountain of Light, the world’s largest known diamond in 151, or one of Samuel Colt’s Dragoon Revolvers. Because you can do that with words, create worlds, diamonds, dragons, gyroscopic metaphors. The sky is the limit. And even that’s not a limit. Because with a handful of letters I can make a limit illimitable.