The future has a fierce grip on the present
A few words about farm life in the desert; food poisoning as a means to mental clarity; waking up sad; the occupying force of a stranger; being absently present; and more...
Just now I went to fry an egg on a hot stone a few steps from where I’m writing. It didn’t work but you can imagine the kind of temperature it takes to come up with an idea like that. I’m wearing nothing more than a shawl soaked in cold water. By noon the ants in my kitchen had called it a day; the horizon is a squiggly line. Hot air moving between two open doors is the only relief. Ambient ventilation, I’m told—several syllables too many. This heat has a number but knowing it would lessen the severity. It’s kind of like genocide in that way. Unimaginable, we say to a large sum. It’s the details we grasp. I should have cracked the egg over the hood of the car.
I want to tell you what happened over the course of three days in early December because what happened is this: Truly, deeply nothing. Can you imagine!? Remarkable. I was so sick I couldn’t even think. How often do you have that opportunity these days? People go all the way to India for it, silent for weeks. All I had to do was go to a bus station and eat beef noodle soup from a bowl that was washed in a puddle next to some dogs moping around and smelling one another’s asses unenthusiastically. I texted Eva before I was about to eat that if I get sick on this trip, it’s here and now. That was at 9:50 a.m. At 6:58 p.m., I sent her the following:
For all its troubles, food poisoning is highly effective in bringing mental activity to a standstill. I managed to write one note during this period: any company can just say "crazy times" now and increase your monthly payment by like 70%. No idea what the context was. For three days, all I saw was the inside of four walls and various ceramic fixtures. On the fourth day, when it was over, I emerged from my tomb with a sort of post-dissociative clarity, the kind you get after meditating or running or horse drugs. It was like I had just come into existence, living each moment as if it were my first. The buttery evening light spread over the rice fields, the highly edible smell of the air, the caress of a breeze—every impression made on an organ of sense produced an agreeable shift in my state of mind. My awe was so complete it was indistinguishable from air.
No sooner had things awed than they’d become awful. A few days later I was on a sleeper bus from Hanoi to Ha Giang when I woke up suddenly burdened by a potent awareness of passed time; a floaty, crushing feeling. Life is a long transition from not knowing how anything will turn out to knowing exactly what happened, and I felt too far along. I used to put rocks in streams and marvel at how the water pools at the dam. Now it’s just something I know. I felt homesick, not for a specific home but for anywhere but here on this bus, cold and smelling of baby shit, barreling through the mountains in the general direction of China. A sad song was playing in my headphones and I opened Instagram to this…
…and, yeah, it’s just a meme and laughing is supposed to make everything better but I couldn’t access the specific frame of context required to make it funny so the words just hit me literally. I’d been engulfed by gloom. What to do? I could try concentrating on the sadness but then all I’d be sad and concentrated sad instead of sad and kind of aloof about it. All the Instagram therapists say not to resist so I tried really hard to :::feel it:::, layering each despairing thought until together they formed a weighted blanket on my soul that I could remove once I was done with it, which is not the same as it being done. Then Mr. Rager came on and everything got worse while the bus continued in a direction away from anywhere that might make me feel better, a place I couldn’t picture in the moment. Everywhere is the same when you’re sad—it’s where the sadness is. I looked out the window absent-mindedly, the way I do when I let a great paragraph wash over me. Then I remembered that a good day occurred not too long ago.
The other day I was putting peanut butter and jam on toast when an ant saw what I was doing and got so stoked he had to tell the whole colony what was going on. By the time he could spread the word and return to the moment, it was gone. I'd eaten the bread, leaving the ant to rue its non-presence. Writing’s like that. The principal concern of sharing a moment often comes at the expense of enjoying or even noticing it. Peter Schjeldahl, in that piece I love so much, put it like this: “When I finish something and it seems good, I’m dazed. It must have been fun to write. I wish I’d been there.”
The impulse to share is a curse. It puts you outside the frame of a moment. There’s a canyon I visited in Thailand where busloads of people get dropped off at the bottom, climb some stairs, balance a ridge to the place where the photos happen, get the shot, check if it’s palatable, and leave. A beautiful place reduced to a future memory, looked at but not seen. Memorialization: The future has a fierce grip on the present.
I am not exempt from this impulse. Looking through my camera roll, some places look as foreign to me as to anyone who hasn’t been there. The term experiential dissonance comes to mind. I thought I’d coined it but actually someone’s already used it to describe something else. It’s when tourists are attracted by one experience (called Frame) but another experience (called Occupant) is crucial for the positive value of the total experience and for the Frame experience being consumed again. The best example I can think of is when you meet someone in a new place and they essentially become the experience. All the ways you felt about your surroundings you actually owe to how a person made you feel. A stranger is the ultimate Occupant.
Right now I’m reading American Pastoral, by Philip Roth. No one packs more in a paragraph. Here’s a great one:
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.
The best thing I read recently is The Red Hand Files #218, in which Nick Cave responds to AI-generated lyrics in the style of Nick Cave. A couple of weeks ago I wrote that writing will survive AI because what moves readers isn’t necessarily the words but that a human came up with them. Same goes for songwriting: “It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past,” Cave writes. “It is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.”
The worst thing I read recently is an ad for the police (?) declaring “All Cops Are Beautiful.” When I saw it making the rounds on Twitter, I thought, this could be in Germany, what with the country’s fetish for authority and pathological tone deafness. Lo and behold, it was—big, dumb billboard at one of Berlin’s busiest intersections, five minutes from where I live. A sinister and supremely lame example of anti-establishment rebellion co-opted by the establishment.
Tomorrow’s another day of living off the land in the hot place I mentioned at the beginning. More on that in the next newsletter.
INCREDIBLE ideas incredibly written here-- I immediately screeshotted the bit about the ants lusting after your toast and how sharing takes you out of the frame of a moment. It made me think about this quote (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/541239-we-drove-22-miles-into-the-country-around-farmington-there) from a Don Delillo book, where he talks about capturing a moment as a detachment from it, as you were saying, but also as a collective creation of something new. The tourists at the top of that Thai canyon may be missing out on something present, but they are still engaging in and creating a new thing together— taking a collective experience or idea and filtering it in a new way. Isn't that what writing is too? GREAT food for thought, I thoroughly enjoyed :)
Wordsmith 🏆🏆🏆