Where were we? Oh yes, I think I was in a bar somewhere consuming too many gin-and-tonics, swaying along to geezer music, and being a little bit of a sad sack. But all of that belongs to the Shroomington Era, about which I promised to dedicate ONE entry and one entry alone and now it's over, done, POW, and henceforth I will report exclusively on Life Version 3.0, this souped-up technicolor new state of being, and keep my meanderings far from the lugubrious Swamp of Past.
And I'm a terrible liar, because that will never happen, because every time I try to describe an isolated incident from, like, this morning, it inevitably connects to a tangled web of massiveness ending in some childhood revelation or a trip to the collective unconscious. That's just how I roll. A good friend of mine works in a smartypants Schmarvard cognitive neuroscience lab that is currently investigating hyperconnectivity between brain regions in subjects with synaethesia or perfect pitch. Apparently people with these traits are intensely associative, every experience lighting up some faraway neural correlate. I'm no synaesthete ("this is a condition where, say, you eat cheese and feel pain," Professor Schmartledge once explained) but I do have the pitchy thing going on for better or for worse, so maybe that helps to account for my loopy leaps in logic and sudden detours into remote psychological territory. If I could distill my deepest fascination, my driving obsession, down to one thing, it might be The Past-- my own and everyone else's. Memory, association, recollection, reconstruction. Not for nothing have I veered into schmoozicology, a field that concerns itself with historical objects and the formation of narrative around them. The other day I was looking at a dictionary of musical terminology from the fifteenth century-- in Latin, old musty pages, antiquated typesetting-- and the artifact had a weird mystical talisman-ish hold over me, like I was interacting with some sort-of- familiar yet also alien and irrecoverable culture. And then the other day we got to analyze a Bahler symphony in class and I FREAKED OUT over a section that was a clear depiction of memory in music, a sudden paranthetical, a dreamlike diversion into something identifiable to most listeners as a rustic simplicity (an idealization of the bygone days, the "pastoral", if you will). Bahler didn't by any means invent the device of musical reminiscence but he was SO damn good at it. I love those points of reference in music, those striking evocations accomplished much more rapidly than in words. They're everywhere, in Bahler, in Schlach, in Jilly Bowl, in terrible pop music that I won't admit to liking here.
Of course, history and memory are common preoccupations of every human being. I'm not special that way. How could anyone live NOT in a constant internal dialogue of "this is happening now, but it reminds me of..." ? Who is NOT captivated by family history, cultural origins? Even fucking Facebook is shamelessly capitalizing on people's past-obsessed tendencies these days. There's this new sidebar that will relay information like, "One year ago today you became friends with ___ !" or "On this day in 2009, your status was, 'Hazelnut coffee FTW,'" or, "Here's an unforgettable photo of you and X." Oh, the fake virtual nostalgia for our fake virtual lives! An artificially intelligent system dictates, through some algorithm, what "should" be meaningful to us and worthy of mental revisitation. I fear that for the Younger Generation raised at the teat of Facebook et al, this imposed artificial sentimentality will come to stand in for real experiential intensity. "Oh, REMEMBER WHEN we posed for those pictures so that we could upload them to social media to show everyone else how cool we are? Aww memories." This in place of sensual environmental cues that plunge us unwittingly back into a place of great personal significance. A smell that recalls a place you haven't thought about in ten years, the sound of someone's voice that sounds like someone else's voice and leads you with shocking clarity to some half-forgotten words that once arose from those vocal chords... but no, NO, let's forsake all of that richness for these shells of ourselves, these faux-signifiers pointing to intimacy and cultivated relationships but in reality attached to no real, resonant body of feeling. KIDS THESE DAYS.
And I am making apocalyptic, unfounded pronouncements. But hey, I am a YOU DORKER now, as of a little over a month, and we ("we!") have dealt with some End-Times-y sentiments of late. First my school auditorium fell victim to a flash flood, causing New Student Orientation to be pushed back by a week. Then there was the great East Coast Earthquake, which my roommate and I perceived as a small wobble ("hmmmm, is our wonderful yet slightly decrepit pre-war building listing slightly? Oh wait, that was a natural disaster? No way!") And then there was the hurricane brouhaha, in which we stocked up on bread, peanut butter, canned goods, bottled water, candles, flashlight batteries, and a few boozy options, and then settled in to wait for the Big One, checking the web incessantly all night for updates, jumping a little when a gust of wind rattled the windows, half scared and half morbidly excited for this thing to get cooking. I made myself a cocktail and wrote the longest blog post in the history of the genre (see below). Then I finally dozed off, waking at 3 PM to a world that was not nightmarishly ravaged and dystopian, but still a little drizzly.
These ominous Biblical rumblings characterized my first few weeks in the City, but mostly I was smitten with my new digs. So many tall buildings to crane my neck at, so many sketchy-ass neighborhoods to get lost in, so many people from both my recent and distant past to reconnect with. School started, and it looks to be promising yet terrifying-- as it IS grad school in the humanities, it has a certain inevitable amorphousness, a need to self-justify, but once I transcend the existential hand-wringing, it will become a deeply rewarding endeavor. I think. (At least that is how I feel right now, on Week 2. Five years to go).
So there has been honeymooning galore for me in this initial phase, yes, but also predicted doses of discomfort, alienation, and adriftness. I just can't be ON all the time. My smiling muscles start to seize up. I spew out all of my basic data on automatic to new people (what degree? where from? what neighborhood? what classes?) and they oblige me in the same way, and the whole thing gets exhausting, this foundational phase of networking that must take place before the connections become easy and natural. It doesn't help that I'm in a strange headspace due to the, shall we say, soap-operatic dimensions that my personal life attained in the past months on several fronts. Right now part of me doesn't even want to bother getting past the first phase of knowing someone new, because it's a slippery slope from "So where did you grow up?" to "Wow, I just traipsed naively through the MINEFIELD that is your neurological miswiring/ social dysfunction/ crazy baggage and HAHA that's ridiculous and kind of funny that I even managed to do that but wait, actually my right leg is blasted off. Okay, not my leg, but maybe like, my big toe, which fuuuuuck still hurts a lot and now I'm hopping around like a Looney Tunes character after an Acme product encounter and OUCH. MY TOE. GOD DAMN."
So, some days I want to frenetically forge new relationships. Other days I want to just stay under the covers, protect my remaining appendages from the perils of getting close to other people.
BUT. Speaking of explosions, and history and memory, and apocalyptic situations, and any other trope that has been vaguely thematized in this post... today is 9/11/11 and I'm newly living in the city where it happened, ten years ago. Dies illa. I didn't go to Ground Zero today, but paid my respects earlier in the week by going to a few free concerts of Bach funeral cantatas at the chapel directly across from the site. During the disaster, the chapel, which remained miraculously intact, had served as a refuge for relief workers; now, on the anniversary, the church had mounted an exhibition to commemorate those days. I saw photographs of exhausted men in tears, handwritten letters from children thanking them for their aid, printed transcripts of phone calls issued from inside the towers from people who never made it out. I had of course been affected by the attack when it happened, but I was thousands of miles away, in high school, and it seemed more like a disaster movie than a real event. And then "9/11" rather rapidly morphed into an abstraction, a trite, propaganda-laden shorthand for everything negative that transpired in my coming-of-age decade. For me, it took being IN the space and seeing the evidence to comprehend the tragedy on a personal level, to empathize with the individuals who had gotten caught up in this terrible thing.
Then the musical ensemble performed their Bach, and I got suddenly weepy because it was ethereally beautiful and all I could think about was my wonderful professor who taught me everything I know about that repertoire and who is 98% responsible for why I am where I am now, and how the last time I saw him was at his wife's memorial service in June after she'd died of lung cancer. And then post-concert I went home to an email informing me that a member of my (very small, close-knit) high school class had just passed away from a congenital illness.
Sometimes the universe whacks you over the head with the most clichéd and basic tenets of existence, like memento mori and Take Nothing for Granted. We're surrounded by shadows, always one millimeter away from disaster but usually oblivious to it, and all of this TIME rushes around us in unfathomable patterns and we don't even know what to do with it. We miss so much and it's just the way we are. We sit and fret and withhold and are parsimonious with ourselves until something rips the veil away to expose the fragility of life, and THEN we commune, suddenly compassionate in those times of need, but only then. Most of the time we're built to have blinders on, because otherwise we'd get nothing done; we'd be too overcome with Weltschmerz to even function.
But I'll try to hold these messages with me a little longer now, so that on those days when I want to disengage and curl up and live a cloistered half-life, I'll remember that time is a-wasting, tick-tock-tick, and that real growth occurs when we act authentically and bravely, even if this causes things to temporarily suck and toes to go missing and teeth to be gnashed and tears to be shed. See, the streets of life are bustling down there for a limited time only. I plan to go dancing on those streets, to wipe out spectacularly on those streets, and perhaps to lose some more limbs in the process. Because I've heard that they eventually grow back.
