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Monday, January 05, 2009
LIFE IS LONG
Brian Eno & David Byrne
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
Todo Mundo : 2008
[Buy It]
October before last, I spent a few weeks camping my way through California. At the end of this week, I'm preparing to do it again. Funny how life repeats like that - funny odd, not funny ha-ha. For me, to be aware of this repetition is to experience a complex, even contradictory, mixture of feelings - it's a comfort, and a curse. The idea of reliving a positive experience is at odds with the idea of reliving an experience, period, while un-lived experiences accumulate at an astonishing clip. How much human misery is predicated upon trying to capture some old feeling, or to regain some lapsed state of grace - trying to live in memory rather than the moment? Like, all of it? And why do we cling to outmoded lifestyles, even as we speak so knowingly of the law of diminishing returns?
Of course, this trip to California will not be a reenactment of my last trip to California. I'm a different person now than I was then, even at the minor distance of a year - hell, I'm a different person today than I was yesterday. The urge to recreate the wonder and sweetness of that trip, moment by moment, is something that can be kept at bay if I stay aware of it. This is important, because I want to know how California looks and feels to me right now, not try to remember how it looked and felt a year ago. (There's a photograph of me in the corner of my partner's bathroom mirror: I'm standing on a cliff, with my back to the camera, looking out over the sea. My arms are stretched over my head, my left hand clasping my right wrist, in a posture of relaxation and relief. That's the feeling I remember from California, and it's the one I'll be tempted to try and recapture, if I let the past infect the moment. It seems as if the only surefire way to access that feeling again is to avoid striving to do so, since there is no relief in trying to split off from the present-ness of one's being - this is to be a shimmering, vague creature, caught in memory's shifting currents and not laid into the groove of the day.)
A new year comes with a sense of renewal, as if somehow the slate has been wiped clean, but it can also draw the annularity of events into excruciating focus. Around this time of year, instead of enjoying my morning coffee ritual, a sense of futility can overtake me - how many mornings have I made coffee in just this way? On how many more will I do so? And this minor, irritating awareness of routine can swell up to envelop everything in my life. In this humor my progress through time and space begins to feel less like a forest path, which has a destination, and more like a high-school track, a closed loop where the same scenery rolls by again and again. I make my bold resolutions - STOP WATCHING A DOUBLE SHOT AT LOVE WITH THE IKKI TWINS - yet continue to fold my life into tight creases of convention. Rituals that usually comfort me come to seem constricting, pointless, inevitable.
This new-year's discomfort with ritual, I experience on a couple levels. One, the futility of relatively static rituals - how many more times will I have to brush my teeth in my life, and finally, will it be the sheer tedium that kills me? To brush my teeth in this state of mind is to take an unduly mechanistic view of the human experience. To be reminded of the body's increasingly time-intensive demands for simple maintenance, as life goes on, so the act of living becomes an algorithm whose only function is to sustain itself. I am not currently as depressed as this post makes me out to be - in fact, I'm quite happy right now, and excited about my trip. The life-fatigue I'm describing is not currently upon me - if it were, I wouldn't be able to describe it as calmly as I am right now.
My current happiness is enhanced by the fact that I am coming off a solid two-week stint of depression, though, and that depression had a lot to do with what I'm talking about today. It had to do with the second level of discomfort-with-ritual I alluded to above - the sadness of rituals which are preserved despite being untenable. The holiday time has been a difficult time for me, in recent years, and this is wholly a function of the past. Some of my warmest, happiest family memories are linked to my childhood holidays, which make the current state of my family's holidays seem sadder by comparison. My dad's father - a charming rake we called "Pop," a mischievous presence among a family gently inclined toward sanctimony - died a couple years ago, and my dad's mother, almost sightless now (whose library fueled my early adoration of books), lives alone. All three of my dad's brothers have now gotten divorces or separations, dividing my cousins among various households. My mom's mother, with whom I was very close as a child, is senile now, and the joy I used to feel in her presence has bent into a heartbreaking discomfort that I can't help but beat myself up over, even though it's understandably hard on anyone to see someone they love in such a state, trapped in vapors of the past, telling the same stories and asking the same questions over and over again. There's nothing exceptional about any of this, and as family crosses go, it's not too heavy to bear. But the fact remains that the 24 hours or so I spend among my extended family around Christmas leaves me feeling incredibly drained, painfully nostalgic, wary of the future toward which this all inevitably slides, and mired in my personal history. The passage is natural, the discomfort comes from locking oars against it, which some members of my family, especially my mother, are wont to do. I would feel a great pressure lifted from me if we could devise family rituals that suited who we are right now, instead of trying to squeeze our dynamic and habits into a shoe that wore out a long time ago. But not everyone is with me on this, so I find myself in the uncomfortable position of trying to be a man in a context where I'm expected, in some ways, to remain forever a child. My mother still gave my brother and I each a stocking full of candy until she finally gave it up just a couple years ago. My grandmother, through no fault of her own, asks me what Santa Claus is bringing me, and I think, "I'm almost thirty." Again, she can't help it - the past is where she lives now. But when she asks me, I feel the jolt of an outsized and poignant metaphor.Labels: brian, repetition
posted by Brian
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