Never was the world I know more peculiar than now. I am at the office (where else?). With the surrounding tall windows, I feel that I am in a small vacuum jar. The jar contains my thoughts, my loves, my breathing. The world has become very small and very large at once. I have the great outside, the wide world, the immense swarming and twinkling universe in full view beyond the glass but true, intimate contact is very sparse here, within the bell jar. The oblique contact I do have is most often electronics-based or delivered with a layer of isolation. A snack is brought to me by a person masked and gloved. The snack is contained within a disposable vessel, the idea being to keep our germy selves from polluting each other but the vessel is, itself, a threat to the existence of the planet, wild life and me. I learned all of that on Television. In this situation, I am askew as any other of us may be. What happens now? Where does this lead? When can I get channel 7 back again? How do I get rid of the extra weight? How are you doing?
Once was a time that it would not be imagined for a U.S. President to resist handing over the keys after an election. It was unimaginable for him (a white him, because none else could be president, of course) to use power more for disruption of government than for control of government. Once was a time. Once was a time I could walk freely amongst the wild folk and breathe their exhalations. I feared not the intubation. Once was a time I could rise easily from a sitting or kneeling position and not grunt or be unsteady a whit. Once was a time. And…once was a time I could stand in a large body of folk, singing my lungs out. Maybe I was on pitch, maybe not. Maybe I was on tempo, maybe not. Maybe, maybe, but I was alive. I was in the moment of the manufacture of soundscape. I was creating. I was nearly fully human.
All of the rest of the current noise was here, way back then. It was more parcelled out and pigeon-holed. There was room. My guess is that there was more defined time for a this, a time for a that. Pete Seeger was alive. The Beatles had become artists and not just pop stars, working the room. Now, The Beatles are half dead. Pete Seeger is dead, art is on hold and we are left to figure out if it can ever be made again.
Once was a day that people seemed kind, a little. They used art to reveal love and balance. They spoke beyond the flash of sex appeal, smoothness. They often spoke without weapons, excepting the legendary facist-killing banjos. People got nasty to each other but then set that aside for thanksgiving dinner. I could watch ‘It’s a Wonderful LIfe’ and ‘Auntie Mame’ at Christmas time and not feel used by Pepsi-cola or Coke. You could almost trust the news to be more altruistic than narcissitic. The talking heads were earning their keep, certainly but they dealt in a modicum of veracity. The corporations were perhaps a bit less mendacious. Entertainment dealt less with the bare chest, the bare behind, the spectacular auto crash, the blood, the violence. Lord, how I miss The Beverly Hillbillies! (well…wait a minute, y’all – Donna Douglas was pretty titty!) There was a time for political battle, a time for release. I could pick up the newspaper or turn on the TV without a complete dread filling my heart.
In the background, during those good? old days, a long history of deprivation, slavery, human fault. There were folks badly used and genocide aplenty if you looked hard enough. The garbage floated in the river along with the shit. When a late 17th century or early 18th cruise boat overturned on the Thames, many died not by drowning but by ingestion of the water, exposure to disease. Sigh. Bad crap has always been with us. Cheap diamonds, too. And, the morally poor have always been with us. We have always been our own worst enemy. Hitler fades into Stalin fades into Quaddafy, into Hugo Chavez, into a remembrance of Genghis Khan, of Ulysses Grant… It has always been so. If we had an honestly written history of the time, my bet is that Neanderthal wasn’t exactly a kind, moral being. Maybe they couldn’t get channel seven, either.
Sigh. Sigh, I say. The past, good and bad? Gone. Gone for a while? Gone for a quick coffee, then to return? No. No and no. The Beatles? Gone for good. Jesus? Gone for good. Forget it, Mom…he won’t bring back a little pleasant gift. No roses at the end of living’s rainbow I am afraid. Hitler? Wellll…don’t know about that one for certain. He might come back, he might be here now.
Here is the great difference between what has been, gone and returned and our day. What’s peculiar about our world of the present day is this: Sure, the cool stuff and the bad stuff is here, will be, will come back, will go away forever. We have something different. We have a thing (not atom bombs) that fundamentally changes all. Our newest deadly problem is the widespread emission of electromagnetic radiation and the information/misinformation that is wedged onto it.
Yep. Captain Sees All, knows all. The television screen has attached itself to the mobile telephone which attached itself to our right hand and goes everywhere with us. It goes to the bathroom, the bedroom, the boardroom. On the screen is a constant flow of vulnerable noise. We have a room with a view. We have wide-screen and high definition. It’s easy to change the view and difficult to understand the difference between what is and what Photoshop or Paintbrush has done. The colours overwhelm, the sound is a fever pitch scream. Every note is Coloratura without colour. We have video from all corners, none of it honest. None of it is true. All of it runs 24 hours each day.
The world has always been exploding. The big bang was the first of many and great excitement continues. It has always been that we are speeding through the universe at enormous pace invisibly. The sun burning at vaporizing temperature is not felt, here. The wars on the currently dark side of our planet are not seen through my bell-jar window. That is how our lives have been until this day. Widespread, you might say omnipresent digital communication/miscommunication is a new wrinkle to the exploding inevitable. We can now see beyond the peaceful neighbourhood where we rest. The place over there where somebody’s Mom and Dad are carving up more than a turkey and shouting loudly about it? That place rises up out of the screen and infects our own living room. You can’t hear blue sky and birds for the missles landing on Azerbijan. You can’t see the honest politician who graciously accepts a win or a defeat for the hair pulling orange puff-ball fight in Washington.
The extremes catch the eye. A back-lit blue lighted screen plays on, giving no peace. Our blue skies and clean water are pretty darn peaceful but compared to what’s happening on-line, get boring. Peace doesn’t make easy sense. Peace is complicated. Peace doesn’t pump up the volume much. Peace pumps down the volume. I turn away. It is much more adrenalin driving to watch folks fall and seem to drown in the flowing blood. My blood pumps hard watching George Floyd be murdered by a policeman. That is an easy or a cheap thrill. I watch that instead of a blue sky, lazy day. The blue sky is harder to understand than a cheap thrill. By ‘clueing’ in to the world, I think I am opening myself and absorbing what’s the truth but no. It is real, the things I watch but It isn’t exactly the truth. Watching the circus events in Washington, I am better informed about the nature of political life? Nah. I am only stressing myself. The more stressed I am, the less well I can live my life. I should spend some time understanding that a blue sky is right in front of me. It is right outside my window. It is there to collect my thoughts, to balance me. The blue sky needs to settle into my heart enough to allow contemplative space. The blue sky is available to all the world and you don’t need electronics to see it (unless you are blind, but that’s another story I can talk about later).
I am unable to think clearly with nothing but murder to be aware of. By gluing myself to the show I am not learning how I might best be prepared, how to approach morals or ethics. What I should do and how I should feel get lost. I am gut-reacting, I am learning the wrong lessons. The shit hits the fan and I spend more time trying to clean up than learning where the toilet paper is. I can’t sleep. I am overdriven. I get addicted. Adrenalin is addictive, blue skies are too. Blue sky is another kind of high that gets run over by Beyonce’s lastest video or That Man’s latest exploits with his sleazy lawyer.
The truth is that we have blue skies, Beyonce and sleazy lawyers. The least important of the parts is the lawyer part. We don’t always need to know what the lawyers are up to. The blue sky is not all we need. Beyonce isn’t the only type of artist. We need the adrenalin awareness but we need relief. Constant on electronics don’t mimic blue sky very well. The colour is off and it’s too damn loud anyway. The mobile phone’s tone is largely an unbalanced ringing. The 24hour glowing news channel deafens a night sky. The fires of Beyonce’s latest near-nude busyness dim the bluest skies.
I am grateful there is an ‘off’ switch. Now, the task is to move my finger toward it once in a while. Mmmm. Yeah, today I will make a pie. I will know in my background mind that this is a luxury. Some folks don’t have enough to eat. I will know in my background mind that the blue sky of this morning is fading away. I will know in my background mind that D-Trump is feverishly golfing away while his sleazy lawyers destroy faith, democracy and a few dozen bottles of Dom Perignon. I will know a lot, I guess. I will also know that I have successfully enjoyed the time I have and forgotten for a blissful moment that a dark side is rolling it’s way toward me. The dark side is always amongst us. Meh.
Robert On The Air 