Page Two: Inertia, Inverted
It isn't the outside world but oneself that most often determines the nature of experience
By Louis Black, Fri., Jan. 9, 2009
The grand storms are swelling, there's the blasting of unending blizzards, and the once-familiar is now so shattered and disfigured that just talking of the tenor of these times may well be missing the point. Amid the blowback of recent history, accompanied by the disconnecting and individualization of ideology, there is less of a center than ever.
In the midst of chaos, I have often been calm. In fact, I may be at my calmest in the midst of chaos, but I could always be calmer. "Calm" may even be the wrong word: Over the years I've tried and succeeded, more than I have at most things, to focus on nonfocusing.
Having no attention span helps a lot here. There is the "I" that I am and the "I" that is the writer. The latter is far more serious, though almost equally unfocused.
When dealing with our dissatisfactions about life, some spew blame in all directions. The chanting is familiar to all of us: "The government sucks," "Too many people are greedy and corrupt," and "Why oh why is it that I'm so much better a person than all too many others?" On it goes: "The police should have better things to do than giving me a ticket," "My job sucks," "My boss sucks," and "Your job sucks!" The major problems I face and have faced almost always begin and end with me. When I want to move slowly, I can't; when I want to move quickly, I do no better. Staying still is not even an option.
A couple of decades back, I was quite taken with novels in which the protagonist at some point gives up on and surrenders to life by disengaging. Usually their lives have just been waiting for a long, flat stretch on which to pull over to the shoulder and stop. Shifting into a metaphysical neutral, they are just there. They become almost literally frozen in time and in space.
Since I have the above-mentioned attention span, which would shame a gnat, being frozen has never been an available option. Sure, I get depressed, bored, unproductive, professionally unhappy, and overwhelmed. Even at those times, however, it's just that I'm powerless and incapable of activity; time does not disappear or speed up.
Instead, if anything, it slows down incalculably. Essentially, all time ends up passing at the same horribly near-inert speed as minutes got ticked off in grade school by one of those standard black-and-white clocks: The clock's long hand would tick off each minute, getting louder and louder, slower and slower toward the end of the day – especially if one was in a particularly boring class.
Not for me is the blur of one speeding through a segment of his or her life. There has never been any hope of accessing that lack of awareness, during which hours and even days pass unnoticed. I have long been trapped in the heart of boredom. Sometimes I try for the disconnect. Hours pass by during which I try not to pay attention, forcing myself not to look at the clock. This is for the surprise at how much time has passed when I finally look. Invariably, when I finally check, less than 10 and often less than five minutes have passed.
In life, decisions are being made constantly, regardless of the circumstances. Purposely not moving is easier than moving, but it still involves making a decision. Being frozen, incapable of motion, on the other hand, is not a state one enters consciously. By definition, it is involuntary, and, in just what it is and how it is defined, the effect is an almost physical imposition. There are no decisions involved.
The definitive frozen-by-inertia work is John Barth's The End of the Road, in which, if memory serves, the protagonist gets stuck standing on a train platform. This is probably an unenlightened statement, but in a number of ways, Barth's world in that novel seemed defined by the academic life: a life that can be fascinating, and even thrilling, but one that is almost always slightly disengaged.
I read all the available Walker Percy novels. Percy is perverse in his belief in a kind of Christian existentialism. There is a God and a moral order, but that neither provides purpose nor necessarily makes anything make sense. Especially in his first two novels, The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman, he evokes the historic, great languor of the South.
In both books, the South is a crucial, if not the most crucial, character, cast as a land pervaded by a not completely inhospitable existentialism. Even though life may lack purpose, it is still very Christian. While this provides for a coherent, if mysterious, universe – as well as a moral and ethical structure to life – it doesn't provide for meaning in one's daily life. If anything, it lays a thin coat of moral judgment on the action of nonaction.
One of the novelists who was once very much part of the accepted canon but hasn't been for a long time is James Purdy. His novel Malcolm used to be part of many high schools' standard English curriculum, though this is no longer the case. In the beginning of the novel, the title character sits on a bench day after day. He's lost his father, though it is not clear if Dad died or simply left. This does remind me (though I've been advised that I'm too corrupt and square to cite him) of one of the great Jonathan Richman lines:
"And some boyfriend, he's lost his girlfriend,
Funny now, she was here just a minute ago."
There are other books, and probably movies as well, that celebrate inaction. To be motionless and blank, not even meditative, is to be without responsibility – with all the worries, anxieties, and problems associated with life just not there.
Not doing and not accomplishing I've always found easy. Unfortunately, I'm even worse at going. Born on the edges of the second generation after On the Road was published, we would drive across the country through the American night. Often we drove much the same cars as the Beats did: big clunkers made in Detroit in the 1950s. As we knew nothing of mechanics, our cars did not have souped-up engines that could power them up to top speeds. Instead, these old cars were slower than most. Driving them, one was thrilled to be able to actually hit and maintain 55 mph. It wasn't jazz blazing red in the dark of the car in the middle of the night; it was AM radio – mostly three-minutes-or-less pop or rock songs.
On the record, I should note that whereas "we" drove these Fifties cars, I did most of my traveling in a 1964 Volkswagen bug, which wasn't even parked on the same street as On the Road.
We lacked the Dean Moriarty/Neil Cassady sense of a speeding car as a form of art, speed as poetry accompanied by constant rapping. Sure, sometimes we all talked endlessly, but we never came close to capturing the sense of talk as speed, words pounding through the night as blood pounding through the body, as gas driving the motor faster and faster. Quite the contrary, as invariably our vehicle was the slowest on the road.
I love the notion of the race across the night deep into the heart of the country. The reality of it, however, used to drive me more than a bit crazy. The rhythm of the road would often kick in, but rarely during the night and usually only after three or four hours on a 10-hour trip. The first part of the drive would find me twitching in my seat, constantly checking the clock while switching AM radio stations in search of bearable and audible songs. During this part of those trips, the hours didn't fly by; they barely walked. Even more ironic and myth-denuding was to have snails, cartoonlike, passing the car. A pure vision of speed, the road, and harmony is not destined to be mine.
Years later I ended up in some rental cars that ripped clean and easy into the night – not the car I drive around Austin but a different one, sleeker and faster. The first couple of times I drove these were accidental. A rented car had to be moved from point A to point B, and I volunteered to do it. After that trip – one completely different from those long, endless drives with which I was too familiar – when I had to drive any kind of substantial distance, I would rent only fast, big cars. After I discovered the pleasure of Books on Tape, I finally managed to experience the miles racing by the whole time.
Hundreds and hundreds of miles, covered in a straight run from the beginning of the drive to its often too soon end: Typically, it was not visceral energy but intellectual engagement that allowed me to go fast. This just brought home once again how it isn't the outside world but oneself that is most often the determiner of experience. It's not the speeds one can or can't achieve that ultimately make any real difference; it's who we are and how we live.
