another change of address

Beating the blank page

How do you will yourself to type when you’re thoroughly creeped out by the stories in your head?

This problem is one reason I find myself continually less inclined to socialize.

The absence of something either necessary or not

Pelicans, at least the brown variety that fish Lake Merritt, are shaped like tanker trucks with dinosaur heads - a creature that looks like it has no business flying. I watch these birds for their narrative: an exhausting-looking awkward takeoff, precarious circling, and then suicidal dives into the shallow lake. When successful, this is followed by great gagging motions as they choke down minnows.

Today is Sunday, and some sort of small orchestra with lots of brass is playing across the lake. When the wind is still, I hear horns of the various orders play exaggeratedly adagio renditions of familiar-ish music that may or may not have religious roots. This is the kind of thing Californians do in lieu of religions that have behavioral requirements. This is the land of post-Protestants.

The brown pelicans seem to easily find schools of fish today, as they don’t circle for very long before splashing down. I try to organize my mind, again, as I’ve done more times than makes sense in the three weeks since I quit the job. The people with their picnic blankets spread over the lawn by the orchestra clearly knew to come to the park this morning, prepared for the layer of goose crap, and picked out spots to maximize their enjoyment of sun, music, and a lake view. These are the people of routine, who set for themselves schedules to attain a wholesome and unimpeachable balance between work and leisure. In contrast, I have been paralyzed by the bottomlessness of unstructured time and an unending list of projects I both need and want to do. It’s a stupid and cowardly-feeling problem - to have too much time - but it is one that will only last for a while. I also know that it has taken me this long to hear words in my head again, and to feel my old content self again, even through the constant anxiety.

The band plays their saccharine versions of hymns and they sound lost, like the memory of where those songs came from is lost in the lake, drowned by a madman of amnesia. The world has clearly ended, but no one can remember exactly how or when it happened. Canadian geese fly past me in partial formation, and this too is decorative farce. These birds don’t migrate. Lake Merritt is their year-round home. They have no need whatsoever to form their Vs, but they do, even though they can’t remember why. On cue, the trumpets hit a climactic high note, held, predictably, way too long, and I’m disgusted with myself for being here to make this same tired observation.

This is precisely the predicament that my creative friends and I circle around constantly. We cannot take up the mantle of Pound’s injunction to “make it new” because every day brings us further confirmation that the world is in a poorly-written dénoument leading nowhere, refusing to end simply because the writer apprently feels there ought to be more pages still. Baudrillard’s essay on hate explains the phenomenon as an intense resentment, not of one another’s difference, but of our interminable sameness, set in a history that has ended but will not die. I wonder if this is why we are obsessed with process. It’s not a form of procrastination - we’re not enamored of any final product that looks like a replica of someone else’s final product. Novels, magazines, even performance art pieces all carry this inherent flaw. I think we’re trying to invent new processes because some atavistic sense of mysticism tells us that we might be able to find a way to bury history in an appropriately-marked grave and let the world finally, relievedly, rebirth itself into something else. A project like this seems like the only one worth getting out of bed for, the only one whose aim is set on a real accomplishment rather than mimicry of all the mistakes that brought us to this plastic-wrapped dead end.

Several more Canadian geese swim near where I sit, curious about whether I will toss them any crumbs. I once read a recollection of a music lecture given sometime around the mid-20th century, when the writer was a student of music. I believe they were studying Debussy, and the professor actually began crying. The students asked him why, and he said that it is impossible to hear the music the same way. The world did not know world war then. The lesson? There is no going back. The artifacts, the hymns, or the notes on the page may be preserved, but interpretation can and does get lost forever.

I cannot hear Canadian geese honking like they did in my childhood, when there was a world to believe in, one with progress and solutions. I’m mostly certain those ideas were myth then, too, and therefore not mournable in any way that is not essentially narcissistic. There is no way to believe in grand ideas without the self-conscious reflection upon making a decision to believe in grand ideas. That self-consciousness draws one back out of the experience of those ideas in the same way that people speak about how they “just couldn’t get into that book.” Those who persist in attempting to recapture unfettered belief find themselves plunging ever deeper into fundamentalism, the practice of which is ironically a series of declarations and self-examinations of their degree of devotion, where this far is never quite far enough. Those with ill-formed memories of belief go to the park to listen to sentimental hymns. They bring their children and tell them that this is sweetness, and pretend that it is not bitter also. The pelicans keep diving in their absurd way in this fake urban lake and I think we are all so profoundly sad but refuse to ever say so, and that this moment of silence on the matter may be the last unplayed note of Protestantism, final, but neverending, so smotheringly quiet that it muffles even our memory of there ever being sound at all.