In the mechanical age now receding, many actions could be taken without too much concern. Slow movement ensured that the reactions were delayed for considerable periods of time. Today the action and the reaction occur almost at the same time. We actually live mythically and integrally, as it were, but we continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age.
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964
Yesterday afternoon I walked around The Monkey's Paw. A small bookshop in Toronto specializing in "Old & Unusual Printed Matter." (I note that it feels strange to explain where and what something is; something I'd never heard of until a few days ago, its secrecy trivialized by instant search.) I was excited(?) to see it; it seemed like the sort of thing I'd like. I'm trying to find those. I've spent much of the last week indoors, working and sometimes playing in digital spaces. I hadn't felt the subway air, pushed ahead through the barrel of the station. I hadn't walked the streets; I had arrived, crossed from a station to an apartment building, and mostly stayed indoors. In downtown Toronto, if your apartment is connected to PATH, you can traverse a great distance in enclosed, elevated hallways. An endless mallway.
Anyway, I set out. The subway here is strange; something about the color of the light, or the tilework, or the layouts... they feel like a conceptual mess, emergent, then ineffectively sterilized. Or maybe it was my mood. I started out productive; I cleaned the apartment, did laundry, exercised, shaved. The routines of a person who is functioning and has things to look forward to. This isn't the whole story. They're details pointing at the moon.
I didn't look at my phone the whole trip, except to double-check my directions and subway stops. I stared down a vertiginous train's open borders; a big doorless train just stretching into the distance. Everybody too visible, somehow drawing more attention through depth, trying to figure out just how many cars away this particular set of shoes is. De-anonymized. Everybody quiet, bundled up, a nearby woman leaning her head against a guy's shoulder, asleep. That was the first audible crack in my mood; I growled inside about wishing I could enjoy that simple kind of pleasure.
In a recent podcast, Rob Zacny said that every time you break the 4th wall, you leave a crack. It undermines the illusion, and you need to be damned sure you're doing it for the right reasons. The image of accumulating cracks which undermine the structural integrity of a moment stuck with me. A slight variation on an existing image.
Buildings are rising all around. Thick blue glass ascendant. Did a beach ever dream it would become a hive for humans? External elevators opening onto platforms with simple wooden doors. People in motion inside a half-built hull. Lights in every floor up to the 30th; then 7 more complete-looking floors with no lights, only stacks of plaster and pack-wrapped palettes. Above that, 10 parking-deck-naked skeletons, with workers churning about. A penthouse starting to rise on the top, concrete anachronistic, at a deliberate angle, smaller than the rest of the building. A house with a rooftop for a lawn. The impatience of the elevator commute from street to sky. Other penthouses look on in approval and distrust. Are adjacent penthouse neighbors more conscious of each other, or do they agree like the rest of us to pretend we're all alone together?
There are lots of reasons not to look around on the subway. The main reason is apparently so you don't have to see the expressions on the other faces. I remain a provincial mouse, struck vividly by each encounter with the vicious density of our accidental cities.
Made it to the bookshop. Stopped to get a caramel latte from the starbucks on the way, my first small selfish purchase in over a month of strict poverty. In we go — smaller than I'd hoped, but still exciting; nice abstract music; the immediate sensation of strangeness brought on by knowing none of the hundreds of spines facing me are familiar. I burnt myself out on books working at the bookshop for a few years, tired of seeing them, tired especially of the deep alienation of knowing that so few of them held anything of interest or value to me. That the sphere of my interests was contracting, or that my taste was increasingly picky; that maybe I had already read the best books available for what I wanted; then the even worse sensation of many old favorites revealing their weaknesses, the prejudices of their authors, the haughty simplicity of my early mind; the growing question of what, if anything, is good, if I can't trust myself past, present, or future, and especially given that everyone else making art is a messy human, no paragons available, everyone hungry and horny and gnashing desperately to make a living in a nightmare world, suck some pleasure from the bones before the end. Or maybe it was just my mood.
Shelves loosely grouped by topic. Not alphabetized; books mostly from 30, 50, 100 years ago. Boats, trade marks of British shipping, netting. Trees of western Canada, color guide to edible mushrooms, collected methods of weed removal. Ancient kama sutra, a 1910s volume on happy marriage (vigorous shudder of revulsion), a 1970s text on the taboo of male homosexuality. Shelf after shelf of pattern-matching. Hardly any fiction; hardly any truth not disproved or rejected by subsequent ages.
I thought, "It's pretty wild how much knowledge is encapsulated here that has no further purpose." Then I thought, "How impressive it is that we've come so far, given that no one has yet written a true book." Something slamming into the 4th wall from the other side.
I get this feeling lately, where I want to like something. It roars up in bookshops, especially: I want to be fascinated. I want to see a book and have my interest spike. I want to read the first page of a book and be hungry for the rest. I want to open to the middle, be struck by any given sentence, and know for sure that I will read it. This happens so rarely. That's not the way most people write. Most of us are dumbing it down for ourselves or others, constantly. Most of us assume we will not be truly understood. And most of us are right.
Who I was, who I am, and who I feel like I'm supposed to be are all diverging. Disorienting. I don't know how to integrate, abandon, or replace myself. My springs require so much winding, and then I have to use them to turn the gears of commerce. I can be more positive, I can be more productive, but I can't make myself want to do these things. I genuinely have no real idea what I would want to do, if I were capable of wanting. Everything I do either for someone else, or to stave off collapse, or to escape myself. I'm having a hard time getting those to line up, or locking in to other motivations.
So I got to feeling pretty bad about a half hour into this bookstore visit. I made myself keep looking; imagine being excited by Egyptian designs, or types of irises, or the recollections of an early 20th century clergyman. But I couldn't. I'm so detached from the trappings of humanity, and so disgusted with the sources of our approved or rebutted interest, and so convinced that simple interest is more curse than pleasure given the limited amount of time available for recreation and the narrow band of things I can convince anyone to give me money to do... I can't find it. I can remember what it was like, to see something and let out an ooh of wonder. I can get there, rarely, but it's at the edges of human production. Bizarre imagery (Vampire Hunter D did it, but Dalí doesn't). Deep conceptual twists (I feel like I've already had, and discarded for lack of outlet, thousands of ideas more interesting than what most people dedicate years to writing a book about). Clarity in truth...?
I want a new philosophy of meaning. I want a new spiritual guidebook, which speaks truthfully to experience and clears my eyes. I want to read something that washes me in bath-bomb truth, glittering residual tingling. I want to believe that somebody else can tell me something that will help me be a better person. But I'm afraid I've heard it, and it hasn't helped. Not that I can't be helped; I still want to be helped. I'm just having a hard time finding a voice of relevant wisdom.
Maybe I have to write it for myself. Maybe that's the height of hubris — luckily I don't believe it! More likely, it is true that I miss my own voice very badly; I don't hear myself clearly most of the time anymore, let alone manage to communicate outwardly any form of it. I'm sneaking around in my own shadow, probably because I feel so cornered and worn down that truth hisses acidic from within. I'm angry at and disappointed in a great many things, and also enough... something to hear the voice of reason saying this isn't the way. The targets of my ire are one way or another unreachable. And the other emotions aren't coming to the phone right now.
I feel... lonely. Lonely in my own head, lonely in the pages of books, lonely in the world of ideas. Some of you are dear friends who alleviate that loneliness, who hold deep connections with me, and we delight and comfort each other in the torrential badness of the world we've inherited. And then when you aren't around, I'm not at ease with myself. I really miss being able to enjoy myself for longer than a few minutes!
Well! I made myself write this because there are other things I couldn't figure out how to say, and because I didn't want to do my work for a little bit. It came out half-wrong. It has the suggestion of a shape but comes to no conclusion. I got this book by Marshall McLuhan, even though I can think of ten reasons not to read it, and then I got Carl Jung's deathbed autobiography, even though I can think of twenty reasons not to read it. I want to understand my pure-mediated environment, and I want to hear somebody else apply some structure to their life's story, and see if I can do the same.