The Strange Truth About Us
Page 2
Blame must be apportioned.
And we are directly in the sightlines of blame.
Our house is directly in the camera’s sightlines, though it is not we who are watched particularly, but something nebulous—our generic security which is safeguarded, here within the walls of Sherwood Forest Estate where we live in voluntary confinement, in quaint withdrawal.
41.
In an affluent fortification, a private prison, one of more than thirty thousand in North America. It’s a cultivated oasis of spacious homes, winding streets, parks, and artificial ponds that sits, self-contained and guarded, on a rise overlooking a ten-mile surround of abandoned farmland. Like a castle or a fort. Like a stainless steel pod on the moon.
42.
Strange—finding ourselves in the objective centre.
43.
Strange—the powerful existence of our living intellects.
44.
The streets are named after characters in the Robin Hood saga—Friar Tuck Way, Little John Way, Nottingham Forest Way, North and South Maid Marian Way—sentimental, theme park-like names that serve to counter the wretchedness of the outside world.
As does the private security patrol, the dogs, the cameras, the brick fence topped with razor wire.
Yes, we understand the irony.
45.
The gated communities of contemporary North America and Europe are not a new phenomenon. Stockades, forts, walled cities, compounds, castles, bunkers, and fortresses have been a feature of human life since 3500 BC. These fortifications were designed for defence and warfare. Their purpose was to protect their residents from outside violence.
46.
These imaginings about the future, though initially motivated by worry over the fate of our collection, have become a source of stimulation for us. We acknowledge this.
Discussions about the future keep us mildly content, here within our splendid fortification.
47.
Our street is called Merry Men Way.
Imagine that! Merry Men! With a fife and a drum and a ho, ho, ho!
All these Sherwood Forest ways, you’d think we lived in an enclave of merry monks. You’d think that, by living on a Way, we’d become awakened.
To the awful predicament of our present time? To the future?
But will we remain merry once we’ve awakened to that? Will the koan of our raised voices be heard singing? Wailing? Laughing? What?
48.
Perhaps a book called The Cloud of Unknowing might point the way. Written in medieval times it was a guide for apprehending the unknown, but the title could well describe our endeavour to apprehend the future which, so far (in our imaginings), has resulted in mist and murk, in unanswered calls. Our desire to know the future, though, is not unlike a monk’s desire to know God.
With a ho, ho, ho ...
49.
Why is it that we want to know the future?
To ease these unwanted and paralyzing fears.
To reanimate the state of mind that has everyone sitting side by side in muted watchfulness, bidding the large, lush world goodbye.
50.
Sun, martinis, wind exchange. We are two people with an overwhelming thirst. One effect of the novel is kinesthetic, a dry substitute for imagination, but ordinary enough. This, perhaps, can be our consensus.
51.
About—to live in the midst of ourselves.
52.
We’re among the youngest people at Sherwood Forest Estate—retirees, aged fifty-three and fifty-four. The residents—many of them well advanced in their trek towards pit or pyre—call us “the kids.”
The lively, prancing kids approved of by our elders. Pat us on our heads! By their standards we did more than all right.
We made our money in commodity trading, became living ads for the good life. This is a confession. We’re the handsome pair romping on a tropical beach. Look at our tanned bodies and laughing faces! Look at us having onboard drinks while the sunset reddens our shoulders. Or the way we’re healthfully climbing a mountain with native guides and small brown goats.
Ah, the air! The air up here!
53.
We’ve embraced joy and enthusiasm as a way of seeing, yet encounter difficulty when we try to grasp the truth beyond this way.
54.
We have one child who keeps her distance, a twenty-five-year-old daughter who is a musician and lives in the city. She has changed her name to Angela Banger.
In the context of her career choice, we’re Buddhism. We’re Italian opera. We’re a first-class mystery. We’re stalking the lions of our own existence. We’ve upped the metaphor. Everyone’s eager to see what happens next. We’re interested in philosophy and in the human fact sheet of questions answered. And in belief systems, yes.
Besides heaven, the Way encompasses public speaking, crowd control.
Proceed to lane 16.
55.
Nevertheless, we believe that not enough sympathy is coming our way. The older generation may appreciate us; the younger one does not.
The world’s mess is our fault. They say. Angela Banger says. They all say.
No wonder we hide out.
56.
No wonder we prefer playing golf on the estate course. Or walking the inside perimeter, the encircling fence, like convicts or penitents; or watching movies at the village centre; or watching the terrible and trivial news while trying to imagine a fearless future.
Not the future of our investments. Not next year’s winter vacation. But the big picture. The whole shebang. The burger with everything on it. The planet with fewer of us using it.
57.
Another gust from the future. We are surplus here. We are your nightmare here.
58.
Truth—catastrophe will get you watching a screen.
59.
Can we see farther than the ends of our own noses?
We worry we cannot.
Ring, ring.
Still no answer. But don’t hang up. This much we’ve learned—your call will be answered sooner if you stay on the line.
60.
Who was it that said the present is both a bird and a prophet that only the future can recognize as such?
Was it you? Was it me?
61.
The pair of us is yearning to escape these feelings of apocalyptic dread.
Yearning, perversely, for a single catastrophe that will shake us out of the suffocating fear in which we are living, that will rouse us to emerge from behind our walls and collectively set the world aright. Yearning for one singular event that wins the race to let us down, that reveals itself as our future.
We want to know what it is. So we can say, finally: it was the plague; it was greenhouse-gas emissions; it was polar ice melt and the rising levels of the seas; it was overpopulation—the seven billion and counting of us along with our pets and livestock breathing out a lethal quantity of carbon dioxide; it was artificial intelligence; it was human infertility; it was nuclear war; it was our dependence on oil; it was the bees that stopped pollinating; it was the worldwide epidemic of brain tumours fifteen years hence, the result of current cellphone use; it was the global trade in arms and drugs; it was the vicious morons who were our rulers.
62.
Here, in the annotations, where we consider a century so far catastrophic ...
The bad truth about weather ...
Our wretched satisfaction with the fence ...
Our sentimental, wrathful nation ...
63.
We are shedding the grandiose for a sad erasure—our minds reveal the strange truth about our chilling normalcy.
64.
Regarding the human heart—my heart, yours. They appear to be breaking ...
65.
Us—a fragile objective.
66.
Us, and a Sunday afternoon in our annotated backyard where there’s emotion and confusion.
Where we’re drinking martinis and mourning the passing of
the stylized age—the passing of the cut-out culture, the novel purple thoughts, the ironic world. It wasn’t so bad, was it? Even when cancer shared affluent times, even when newscasters remarked, as an aside, that 20 percent of the world’s plants were near extinction, the same percent for the mammals. But these times aren’t nearly as bad as what we fear is ahead ...
Many who understand this say nothing. Play golf. Collect joie de vivre.
Collect memories.
That time ...
67.
— After civilization crumbles all that is left is harsh weather and camps of survivors.
— I don’t like it.
— I don’t like it, either. It’s been done. Humanity’s already imagined that future. Countless times. It offers nothing but chaos, brutality, and bad weather.
— Then how about bands of dirty humans hanging on through the extinctions?
— Been done, too. And besides, some would say we’re doing that right now.
— You don’t relish me naked beneath a fur blanket? Wild in some God-forsaken corner?
— Of course. Anytime. But stay on task for now.
68.
Truth—into this painful world comes love.
69.
Is it strange to love The Strange Truth About Us?
That the world is a persistent demand filled with energies that shape us but which we understand only partially.
That we insist on apprehending time as an arrow, or a bullet, or a dream, when it could just as well be understood as smoke, or a gust of wind.
That once we were content to judge the dreadful past, but now we judge the dreadful future and its unknown shape.
That without direct emotional engagement with the unknown, our experience of love may well end in darkness.
That to one who has died there is not much truth to be understood about us; and to one not yet born we may only provide a clue to understanding the strange truth about us.
70.
Is The Strange Truth About Us a novel about love? A picture of nature in the midst of a powerful explosion? Or is it becoming a novel of crashes? A falling off of curbs? A helpless and uncontrollable noticing?
71.
Could it be that we, the hidden-away people, the well-known wits, the lumpish dears, the fortunate protected few, are succumbing to the cumulative effect of a suppressed hysteria? To the violent annotations that represent themselves as news, to the creeping landscape malady which is the fact?
We are losing our ability to remain blasé. Offhand. Cavalier. Tuned out. Habituated to mounting catastrophe.
72.
About Angela Banger’s music. Is it violin, piano, guitar, tambourine, aria, fife and drum? No, fittingly, it is some kind of screaming.
She sends us quotes in explanation.
I have fond memories of floating among chunks of flesh down the Ganges.—Jello Biafra
We are happy to hear from her but are perplexed, not always sure if the quotes mean anything. She says they are quotes that stalk the truth.
Regular contact is a condition we place upon her in exchange for money. Technically, a quote is contact.
73.
Truth—an army of metaphors that lie.
74.
The sun shines or it doesn’t shine, but every day the air presents a stifling humidity. The wind blows dirt in drifts against the brick fence. Fourteen months without rain. Trucks haul in water to keep the gardens alive. We think about the estate going on without us, abandoned, dirt covering our garden of tiny delights.
The land around the estate is flat and arid; the nearby town, abandoned; the strip of food huts, motels, gas stations, and grocery stores strung along the highway outside the town—abandoned.
Shrinking gas supplies, foreclosures ...
75.
Companions in tribulation, we view the nightly news where horror and trivia are delivered by anchors with merry eyes, with voices as sweet as lullabies. We seem to be participating in a nightmare about humanity, but who can tell? The visuals are so alluring, bright, like gift-wrap.
We watch, enthralled.
The way high-definition colours—red, blue, yellow, silver—encase reports of bombings, floods, starvation, murders.
The way our spirits are buoyed or slammed as we flip through emotions while the stories slide by—rage, blame, guilt, frustration, and the big one: gratitude that what’s portrayed about others is not yet directly about us.
76.
Novel, queer, peculiar, eccentric. It feels strange to us. We tell a strange story.
77.
We find the world to be a broken one. Not long ago we expected warmth and calm and a wonder every day. Why weren’t we told that going forward would be different?
Would we have listened, believed?
78.
The quotes from our daughter arrive by email. The one by Lisa “Suckdog” Carver said:
It’s pretty depressing to be middle class when you’re artistic.
Finally a quote we understand.
79.
A truth, then, based upon a gathering of quotes. Our succinct sayings in a line or two that ring true and provide meaning, essence, reason, direction. That function as a repository for memory. That describe or explain or represent or temporarily capture a shifting reality, the boundaryless drift.
80.
Imagining the future is like pushing Sisyphus’s boulder up a hill with our noses—your nose, mine—our sore collective noses.
Though anything can change a story.
81.
— It was a long time after civilization had crumbled and no one was searching through the rubble.
— The rubble?
— Think of a wasteland of broken concrete, brick, stone, glass, and asphalt. Like a bomb site. Only many of the pieces are bigger.
— There are no survivors?
— Not in the rubble. This version is not about survivors and rescuers. It’s about rubble. Only that. Which has happened slowly, crack by crack, slab by slab, over the years. City rubble. Because people have fled. Cities have become dangerous places. The rubble is like a skin disease spreading across the earth’s surface.
— How awful.
— A satellite shot would show large, scabby, grey patches amongst the green and blue.
— Like an ugly rash. And the people?
— We could think of them as our descendants.
— All right. But where are they?
— In small settlements in outlying land. Just living. People will get by somehow.
— It sounds hopeful. How many billion?
— One or two.
— That’s a lot less than now.
— It’s anyone’s guess by how many the numbers will reduce.
— How do you think?
— In the usual ways, I suppose. Sickness, starvation, murder.
— But a large-scale dying off? Does there have to be that?
— It would seem so. There’s already too many of us on the TV screens.
82.
Imagining a day never dreamed of—right down to our absent bodies.
83.
We think about eroticism but no longer practise it, becoming instead visitors of motels and gas stations, feeding on TV expressions of irony, often without a second glance at the hellscape.
The sun illuminates the nightmare. The vegetative choir sings from the fire. The surrounding land is condemned.
Every day a river turns to blood.
Every day we speak our disembodied bulletins: Someone is sad. Someone loves the L.A. Kings. Someone is leaving the office, looking forward to Friday night ...
84.
What further things have become normalized?
The fires of the homeless that we observe from the upper storey of our well-guarded home?
As long as the fires remain distant, as long as those gathered around the fires remain marginalized and excluded from our great society, we feel safe.
But how long is l
ong? And who is it that’s forming our “great society”?
85.
Angela Banger’s Manifesto:
— Everything sucks. Money sucks. Work sucks. War sucks. Your dog’s cancer sucks.
— Everything is public. No ego crap allowed.
— Only friends matter. Everyone is friends now. All the same, equal, caring, cared for.
— We can watch a DVD or go to a concert or go to Thailand or Berlin but caring beyond our friends is something we will not do.
— We have abandoned the idea of long term.
— Everything is acted upon with a yes/no response, with a like/don’t like.
— We do not believe in growth.
— We can love, but only moderately, only discreetly, and then we move on, get another life.
— Happiness comes from obtaining something. We are on a constant search for “up.”
— Sustainability is so yesterday.
— If fame happens to us like an accident, then that’s okay. Otherwise, we won’t appear to seek it.
— We like the way we can multiply our group of friends by a few million other groups of friends and so end up taking over the world.