We write to remove the mist and shadow from our own souls, the dark veils from our eyes and hope by so doing remove them also from the eyes and souls of others. Even dark literature has to be seen as ironic, The Wasteland not as a celebration of despair but a light shone on the spreading necrosis of the age.
During the past few weeks, the final words of that particularly bleak book, Gatsby have for some reason been floating back to me, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.” The thing is, I think maybe that the tide, that current has changed and we find ourselves being borne ceaselessly into the future.
Every time that new phone comes out that we have to have, every time Facebook updates its features, every new alleged improvement upon something that was itself an improvement upon something else, you find yourself struggling desperately and impossibly to hold on to a bit of anything that once was, anything that became for a nanosecond against eternity important to you and that this age says that you need to let go of, move on, upgrade.
There was an age when we necessarily created certain things to accommodate our incapacity to comprehend eternity, concepts like Heaven and Hell and Karma. And when those things we created became corrupted, when our disbelief outgrew them, we became to imagine ourselves supermen, entities that had no need to accommodate the infinite because we could out do it. Fifty years ago it was the atomic bomb with its practically infinite capacity for destruction, today it’s the Internet, this endless rabbit-hole that we enter and get lost in while we infinitely expand and contract ourselves, 140 characters or less echoing through the Universe.
There is a story by Borges, The Witness, in which he describes the final moments of a man dying during the Dark Ages in England. The crux of the story, the Borgesian epiphany, if I’m allowed to sound a little like the pseudo-academic douchebags I loathe, can be found in the lines which read:
“Events far-reaching enough to people all space, whose end is nonetheless tolled when one man dies, may cause us wonder. But something, or an infinite number of things, dies in every death, unless the universe is possessed of a memory, as the theosophists have supposed.”
With the advent of the Internet, we did in fact imbue our collective existence with a memory, millions of gigabytes of it in fact, and with that feat accomplished, our self-created persistence of memory, this space where nothing is really ever erased, this thing that trumps both mirrors and paternity in multiplying and perpetuating the universe, we then proceeded to create ways of forgetting.
And it’s not just about forgetting things, objects, miniscule events, that "bar of sulphur in a mahogany desk", but we forget fucking people as well. The thing is, if our concepts of Heaven and Hell or Karma, of eternal reward or punishment, have been casualties of our conquering of the Infinite, (or our fear of it which may in fact constitute our only real concept of it), another casualty has been Love.
Whether it’s speed-dating or random Internet hookups, we no longer linger long enough to love anyone really, perhaps not even ourselves. The world now contracted, turned into this giant social particle accelerator, we rush into, through and away from each other at a velocity that has been unprecedented in history, beating on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the future. Whether you’re in Georgetown or Port of Spain or New York, and you’re logged into this particular universe, you get this steady diet of shifting identities, wavering genders, celebrity hookups that last a month and while the self-righteous may be quick to diagnose this as the disease, it’s simply the symptom, these people themselves as much victims as you or the beautiful woman that you fucked last weekend and will never touch again, without remorse, without a pang of regret, without the faintest sense of loss.
And it’s no good acknowledging it, this illness, and hoping that you can go back to a time when shit was slower, when you could savour life, and it’s just going to revert, via that reminiscence, to the way things were. The problem is, that for my generation, this is our Platonic cave, man, our Matrix, our Maya – our consciousness has awakened in it, has been awakened by it, and the next generation will be or already has been born into it.
The only thing that can save us perhaps is Love, not the larger communal concept which has died, but a personal reengagement with it. And yeah, I can see you in the back row smirking and muttering, “J’accuse, you hopeless romantic cunt,” under your breath, and I raise my hand and say guilty as charged. But even so, it’s a relative romanticism, the sort of thing that may have been less than ideal, if not immoral in times gone by – it’s a pragmatic romanticism that recognizes that Love can be found along the long road to perdition that this life can sometimes be, not at the end of it nor making the journey easier.
For me it’s a personal romanticism that looks in the rear view mirror and sees a path strewn with grief and beauty, moments that should have lasted longer, the artificial sepia tone and sentiment of a digital picture taken just a week ago.
I recognize the potential for the appearance of hypocrisy in this. I am as much part of this machinery as anyone else, more than most in fact – I commune with friends online, I flirt with women, I create alliances, I conduct business, I sermonize as perhaps I’m sermonizing now. And like most people today, when I unplug myself from the Matrix, it often doesn’t matter because you are so essentially programmed to behave almost precisely as you were when actually plugged in; to act otherwise is to submit yourself to the most universal ailment we have at present, the cognitive dissonance of the disconnected.
But I give myself credit for recognizing my sickness. Fuck, the recognition itself may be the disease, recognition of the fact that there was a time when people were better at love than we are in this time when a love that does not change with time has become quaint, quixotic, exotic, an anomaly, an anachronism in the age of digital subscriber lines.
Love, an individual reconnection to it when it has been effectively removed from the Zeitgeist, is the only thing that can truly anchor us. Everything else that we know flows with the current towards the inevitable cacophonic ocean of oblivion that seems to be the future ahead.
Still, it is something we’ve become ashamed of, particularly when relationship, the vessel that holds its fluid, tenuous substance together, fractures. You delete the pictures of you together, you change your relationship status, you unfriend each other, remove your expressions of intimacy, and you imagine that the heart works the same way. And for a while it does, because that is your reality, except that inevitable hour comes when you’re unplugged, that fleeting moment where the dissonance stops, and that is when you are most in tune with your ancestral self, when you recognize this thing that was once more or less universally identifiable as love but which is absent in the world that you inhabit. And then you plug in again and the moment passes.
I have plunged headlong into this life at times, trying to race toward this future that I’d created for myself in some juvenile fantasy half a lifetime ago. And to achieve maximum velocity I’ve discarded things, people, values, often not intentionally, often despite my best efforts to hold on to them. I’ve used past pain as an excuse to jettison women from my life, but I’ve come to realize it as false.
Last year, I found my true anchor, and for a while the old rules no longer applied, try as I might to enforce them. In the end, I lost her still, but not before I’d been effectively deprogrammed. Plugged back in, the dissonance now comes from existing within the illusion that we all inhabit, the frenzied pointless pace of it. I’ve done the deletions, the retractions, all the formal actions for the most part, but I’ve seen it simply as manifestations of the cowardice of the age, when love has become something less than fucking epic. It’s nothing more than a preparation for another plunge, a streamlining and the truth is, as good as I can be at it, I’m not up for it. I’ve lost the best woman I could have hoped to be with on my own journey to where the fuck ever I am headed, and my cardinal since then has been to try to discard what has been left, to make it appear less than it is. The anchor may be gone but the chain remains.
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