So yesterday my buscapades continued. As I was only my way to work, I noticed one old man getting kind of annoyed. He was one of those old guys who can't really stand up straight and needs a cane. I think he was upset because another old man was standing too close. I could here that they were talking to each other, but I couldn't make out what they were saying until this little gem from the one with the cane:
"Get away from me! Are you a faggot or something?"
He said it in Spanish, but that sounds even more abrasive.
They continued bickering for few seconds, then both got off at the next stop. The bus idled there for a few moments, and the whole load of commuters rushed to the right side of the bus to watch their continuing and escalating beef. The one with the cane was now wielding it as a weapon.
"Pinche Viejillos!" exclaimed one bus patron with a laugh. It means, roughly, "fucking little old men!" Perhaps I'm a little too sensitive, but it was too early in the morning for hostility and madness and callousness. I needed a book of Bukowski poems and a belt of whiskey, stat.
As the bus pulled away and relegated their rivalry to my memory, I felt a profound disgust for life itself. I can't take you through my thought process, because it was somewhat hazy to me: all I know is that something about these bitter old bastards, full of piss and vinegar, hanging on to their pride and preserving their last ragged breaths like a bag of jewels seemed utterly, utterly pointless.
But that was yesterday.
Today I've been listening to a song called "Intelligentactile 101" by a young lady named Jesca Hoop. A lot. It's nice.
As far as I can tell, the song is sung from the perspective of a fetus in her mother's womb. It mainly discusses her plans after she's born, like sucking her mom's fingers and other important things.
You know something? I love songs about being born. This one in particular is especially jubilant, rocking from side to side and laughing like a toddler with a set of colorful plastic novelty keys.
Dont' get me wrong: I don't want to be a baby again. I'm not pining for my childhood as a reaction to the unpleasant portent the two old men formed. All the same, the themes raised by this song are just really cheerful. I like the idea of just enjoying life, of seeing it through a fresh lens. That, I think, is the key: I've always though that life must inevitably become more complicated. Every moment we live adds a new dimension of context, a new aspect of complication that seems unimportant in the moment it occurs, but eventually breaks our backs with it's sheer weight as more and more of these moments accumulate.
If we didn't change, this would be completely true. But even though reality is a dynamic and ever-changing system, so is a human being. The concept of growing or acquiring greater strength to carry greater weight seems remarkably short-sighted as I think. Did not these mighty A.M. gladiators value their strength, their capable-ness, their identity as manly men without need of others to defend them? That way doesn't seem right to me. No, the answer isn't in addition, it's in subtraction.
Maybe I should explain this cosmology a bit more thoroughly before I engage this concept. Let's start with another old man: Heraclitus. Notable idea:
This world-order [kosmos], the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: everliving fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures.
This is essentially the concept of Universal Flux. It means that the universe is always changing. Kant was probably aware of this when he came up with his idea that the "real" universe is pretty much unknowable, because our perceived universe is always several steps behind the shiftless actual fabric of reality.
While all of this is a bit dizzying and maybe a little depressing, it's important to remember that a human being is not just a hunk of matter or a simple animal: we're much more than creatures, much more amazing than even the greatest and most majestic of reality's constructs. We're in and of this universal fabric, but we don't have to act like the rest of it. The sun, for all it's brilliance and power, must follow it's appointed trajectory. It must burn and burn until it has nothing left to burn. Sad.
But us? People? Do we have to keep all the residue and space dust that accrues on our happless, possibly hatless heads? Hell no! We can take showers! We invented shampoo! And this is not limited to detritus from the nether-corners of existence: this concept can also be applied to the ponderous context that collects over our lives. Just as every moment forces a new dimension of context for us to carry, we can perform an act of perceptual judo and be reborn. How? By understanding that the person you were just moments ago is not the person you are now. You've aged a bit, some things that seemed true then probably seem the tiniest bit less true or more true now, and just like a baby's rapidly changing synapses, your mind has made and severed thousands of connections. The point? You're a new person! That other person? Gone. Now there's you, and no one has ever met you before, and though that other guy has eaten all kinds of shit, you have never even had the pleasure of tasting chocolate.
The wonderful thing is that it's not limited to once a year or once a day or just whenever an epiphany decides to wander in: we can do this every minute, every second, every discrete unit of time we have in our whole lives! The only thing we have do is remember.
Maybe this is sounding very Catholic of me: a sort of modified penance to achieve absolution. This has nothing to do, though, with being in the good graces of the Universal powers that be. It has everything to do with the perception you have of yourself. You have to remember that existence is any incredibly complex dynamic system, and as small spinning convection cells in this system, we're in a perpetual state of flux too. If our perception of the whole system is always a few steps behind the system itself, why should our perception of ourselves be any more caught up? We are reformed and recreated every moment, so why not embrace contextual babyhood? It sure beats the alternative.
Man, I can't wait to know what chocolate will taste like to my tomorrow-tongue.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
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1 comments:
I also ride the bus, and I have seen a thing or two, let me tell you. Most of these things have involved wild-eyed, wild-haired passengers shouting angrily at unsuspecting fellow-riders for no readily identifiable reason, or the driver kicking a charming fellow in an oversized Raiders jersey off the bus for hanging out a window to shout obscenities at a blond UCSB co-ed, or a mousy middle-aged man in thick spectacles and a red windbreaker telling me my hair smells like oranges while squeezing my knee, but this one time it involved a baby. I was sitting next to a young mother holding her almost newborn baby girl. The baby was for some reason fascinated with me. She kept reaching for my hair or my nose or my watch, which is a pretty sweet 1979 Casio 'electric luminescence' goldish shiny thingy. Her mother kept pulling her away and trying to apologize, and sadly, because yo ha olvidado casi todo de espanol, I couldn't find the right words to tell her I didn't mind if her baby played with my watch, even though I had to hold my arm up for her to reach it and my hand was falling asleep. Anyway, while this was going on, I was having almost the same thoughts you were having on your busploit. I feel you, dawg. By the by, Los Campesinos! at the Troubadour on Nov. 27? I will almost certainly be there with bells on. Maybe we can actually meet one another in person. And then ride flying pigs together. Yay. Okay, it's fucking late and I've smoked too much keef. Au revoir. (Or just voir, I guess.)
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