The Strange Truth About Us
Page 3
86.
Catastrophe theory—small changes in certain parameters of a non-linear system can cause equilibria to appear and disappear.
This may explain why we’re sometimes present in the annotations, and sometimes we’re not.
87.
We are falling into the strange truth about our Sherwood Forest, though we can still be seduced by weed-covered words of wisdom such as, “Let it go.” “Live in the moment.” “Think positive.”
88.
Us—life is no longer a lovely familiar.
89.
Over cocktails and canapés at the Sherwood Centre on Wednesday nights some of us have been spreading disquiet—about the wretched park beyond the fence, about our intimations of catastrophe ...
The vodka cloud is a teasing annotation that can bring with it the essential condition of bleak thought. On the other hand, the strange truth about alcohol is that, at times, it can reveal the world’s cheer ...
... even in the midst of pollution, ugly rivers, creeping industrial parks. Even with our marginal belief in anything other.
90.
The strange history of us personally and the even stranger history of our species continues to be written.
Though we don’t like the word species.
We mammals with our surfeit of thoughts, our over-full glasses of wine.
91.
We are saying that things are really fucked. And we’re still saying that things are really fucked.—Penelope Houston
92.
Other times we ask each other what’s new, as if our lives were boring and in need of a kick.
Not much, we answer.
Our eggs are still held in one basket; we’re still holding out for a technological fix. The only flights worth taking are flights of the mind. But that’s difficult because thinking has become like manual labour. Despite that, predicting the future continues to be practised by mortals without talent.
As practised by the pair of us in these annotations.
93.
We believe we are stand-ins for the public’s state of watchfulness in the face of stress caused by the steady ingestion of bad news. Erupting through this emotional deadness, though, are moments of panic.
This is to say that, despite our strict rules of engagement, our cries, though inaudible, are not exactly absent.
You’re not in the annotations with us, but can you hear them in The Strange Truth About Us?
94.
— You know I don’t like having only now. Don’t like thinking that each piece of life we have held has led us nowhere. That nothing will endure.
— Then don’t think about it. Think about the ovoid lines around the eyes of the warrior masks and how beautiful they are, how sublime. Think about the translucent surfaces on the bear and whale carvings.
— Perhaps if we buried the collection. They’d be safe in the earth, wouldn’t they? Instead of in a museum, in a grave. To be discovered in some distant time and marvelled over.
— We can do that. It’ll take planning. They’ll need protection from water and oxygen.
— Soon?
— Yes. Soon.
95.
Do you think our fears are ridiculous? This is a question that troubles us. Are we embarrassing ourselves by revealing thoughts and behaviours that in some future time will be judged absurd? In which we will be regarded as doomsters, as laughable old dears hiding under down pillows, quaking that the end is nigh?
We are self-conscious about this notion—that we will be seen as delusional misfits scaring everyone needlessly.
That we will be judged as dunces, become emblematic fools.
While those in the future are doing just fine, laughing at us, contemptuous of our fears. Because the end time as we imagined it didn’t show. Because end time is something that has always been an unconsummated worry over the millennia ...
96.
Here, in the annotations, we ponder scientific definitions in hope of their explanation—catastrophe theory, for example—which can be used to model the behaviour of a stressed dog. The way in which the animal responds to irritation will be either cowed or angry, depending on how it is provoked. The more it is irritated, the sooner it will reach the fold point and suddenly snap through to angry mode. We read about this online. Once in angry mode the dog will remain there even if the irritation is removed.
Can Catastrophe Theory explain our edginess? Is the steady ingestion of bad news irritating?
Are we approaching our fold point?
Are we angry yet?
97.
Ring, ring.
It is Angela Banger reciting quotes:
I don’t like disagreeable nature. I don’t like alien life forms. Or things I can’t understand. The deal is to just sing. Our songs are dark, negative, and have a really bad image, and that’s what we’re into. I don’t have a voice for singing. I have a voice for yelling. Death is life. It’s a frame of mind. We’re about flowers growing out of the mud and then turning back and rotting. My continuing to live is a future ...
Is Angela Banger angry?
98.
We consider present disasters but never see them as the beginning of our future. Thus we fail to look beyond the chained moment even while mammals die and hurricanes blow.
Even while, offside, choirs decry our love of gasoline and wastefulness. And beggars who know neither sleep nor irony accost us in the streets. And while we eat heartily of hormonally enhanced food and behold our children reach puberty at six, achieve childbirth at nine.
We participate; we observe; yet we fail to engage the news.
We say: Blame it on the corporations. Shouldn’t they be sorry for our torment?
The corporations say: What torment? You love the food. Look how fat you’ve become. How roly-poly. How happy.
99.
Life’s a romance. When it stops being a romance you blow your head off like Kurt Cobain.—Sandra Bernhard
100.
At the Sherwood Forest Cinema the audience was asked to rate four movie trailers by clapping the degree of their approval after each one. The four trailers were about, in the following order: (1) Fantasy, (2) Love, (3) Death, and (4) Disaster. Fantasy and Love got the most vigorous claps. There were a few tentative claps for Death. There were none for Disaster.
We want a story about the future that includes fantasy and love, because they imply hope and beauty respectively; and that does not include death and disaster.
Or one about a blind seer who foretells it all so we won’t have to.
Where’s a blind seer when you need one?
So say the comics among us.
101.
As a consolation we’re starting to think of ourselves as exotic wonders, as a race of people who lived during a golden age.
Imagining the stories people will tell in the future. About the marvels we were.
102.
— I think the bonfires are moving closer.
— They don’t look closer to me.
— They’re closer than they were. I’m sure of it.
— They’re not. I checked. Through the telescope. I couldn’t see human forms. Just smudges of light. That means they’re still far away.
— Pretty soon there’ll be fires outside the fence.
— That could be some time away. Be thankful we’re on a hill.
103.
Strangely, even with our mounting fears, we remain well, here within our North American castle.
While life outside continues as a major phenomenon: as the atrocity which is the world.
The Strange Truth About Us is that we know this atrocity is real because we see it on our TV screens.
We are seeing too much of it. And we are helpless. There are too many catastrophes to absorb.
104.
— If the Internet has supplanted much of our wonder—answering questions about people, things, systems, concepts—what now amazes us?
— Acts of human kind
ness. The man who didn’t drive by the injured body lying beside the freeway. The woman who called 9-1-1 when the shopper fell, then wiped the blood from her mouth until the paramedics arrived. The woman who gave money to a semi-stranger—a single mother—because she needed it.
— What about feats of athletic prowess? Are we not amazed by them?
— No. Because we suspect fraud. Although we’re amazed when an athlete tests negative for drug use.
— That’s true.
— What else?
— Animal intelligence. That amazes me. Cats, dogs, pigs, horses, squirrels, rats, whales, birds. That they always know what to do.
— Not human beings?
— Idiocy, while incomprehensible, is not amazing.
— The universe then? Once a source of amazement.
— No longer. The universe has gone CGI. It is now confined to a series of computer-generated images. Any amazement left has to do with the execution of its image.
105.
We understand that the future may not unfold as expected. Events that cause change will come from left field as they always have—new inventions, unknown events. But this can only be acknowledged as an uncertain possibility. So what are the odds that the future will be all right, good, or better than what we are experiencing as our present time?
Dim, we think.
106.
Evening, and we have moved from the lawn to inside the house. We have had our dinner with tall candles and wine, watched the news, and are preparing for bed. This is when we see two men—strangers—hurry by our bedroom window at approximately eleven in the evening. It is still the same day, Sunday, October 14.
Because there is a full moon we can see that both men are thin and bent and that one wears a toque, the other a ball cap, and that both carry packs. It is impossible to tell their ages. They disappear behind the house across the way.
107.
How did they get in? We check that the alarm system is on and then phone the guard station.
Ring, ring.
The station phone answers with a recorded message. Where are the guards?
We spend the remainder of October 14 (and the early hours of October 15) barricaded in our bedroom, sitting up in bed with the rifle between us.
108.
Us—Let’s get us from these walls ...
109.
The result of the internal inquiry posted in the estate newsletter:
On the night in question Kevin Stubbs, Rachel MacDonald, and supervisor Johnson Bentley (who were all terminated soon after) were the guards on duty. During the time that the two men were trespassing, supervisor Bentley was taking his meal break in the estate clubhouse. After that he had, in contravention of estate policy, taken a long nap. Stubbs and MacDonald, who had recently broken off a romantic liaison, were at their posts in the station guarding the entrance to the estate. Initially they were having an argument about their failed relationship but then, in a spirit of reconciliation, ingested a banned, though unnamed, substance. This caused them to become placid about their duties, spending at least the following two hours appreciating the rare loveliness of the evening, which they beheld from their positions in the guard house. From there they could see (they said) the pretty fires of the homeless flickering in the distance.
110.
Strange—like the future, truth is always in the process of becoming.
111.
The inquiry board’s recommendation: the purchase of four female Doberman pinschers and four searchlights that will be mounted on the corners of the property, and which will operate every day between the hours of sunset and sunrise.
112.
Fear, while not yet a news story specific to us, inhabits most, if not all, of everyone else’s news stories.
113.
I really hate the whole world right now. I really don’t like being on this planet.—Weasel Walter
114.
Meanwhile, residents are hoarding ammunition ...
Going forward, it’s another day, another annotation on The Strange Truth About Us ...
Another future.
115.
Promise you won’t leave my side.
Part Two.
Woman Records Brief Notes Regarding Absence:
Benchmarking
1.
Woman charges self with task of foretelling future using only twenty-six letters of alphabet, eight punctuation marks, and ten numbers, one to nine including zero, thereby proving some tasks are impossible to complete.
2.
Psycho film character Norman Bates enters dream world of woman causing recurring nightmare over decades about man in black suit chasing woman through forest with blood and annihilation in mind.
3.
Woman reads in Cool Memories IV by Jean Baudrillard that nothing escapes show-all see-all culture as sociological definition of transparency; then the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of transparent as something revealed by diffused light from behind, a metaphorical effect woman remembers from 1972 film Deliverance in which uncomfortable truths but no bloodhounds were distinctly seen.
4.
Images found in works by Cormac McCarthy, J.G. Ballard, H.G. Wells, P.D. James; Matrix and Mad Max films; PBS Nature segment on rise of poisonous jellyfish in world’s oceans; and content of wet Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet left on woman’s doorstep take root in woman’s mind.
5.
Fear repeatedly stops voice heart and eyes of woman who nonetheless manages to stay happily married.
6.
Meet the Future. It’s friendly. Telus print ad delivered to woman’s mailbox is received with annoyance because it is not large sum of money or good news.
7.
Woman is dismayed to read in Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges that corporate practice of strategic management and use of political correctness requiring citizens to suppress all genuine emotions in bid to move agendas forward has resulted in bland uniformity of public opinion and profound lack of dissent.
8.
Woman notes word mutation as in mutation of viruses has become feared word and that word crumbling while less fear-producing is also in common usage.
9.
To avoid being possessed by own opinions woman follows advice of writer William H. Gass and treats them like guests who stay too late drinking all the Scotch.
10.
While reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy woman experiences sudden desire for canned pears and vending-machine Coke which she fulfills at late-night grocery store via car then returns home hearing B.B. King lyrics I’m a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made on car radio while noting outdoor wind and rain and wondering where she would camp for night with shopping cart if required to do so.
11.
Friend who is authority on climate change (Renée Hetherington, The Climate Connection) tells woman planet has heated up one degree over past fifty years and will possibly heat up five degrees over coming hundred years resulting in future hot world as predicted by James Lovelock author of The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning.
12.
Woman laughs and dances her way towards precipice along with Madame de la Tour du Pin in weeks before French Revolution as seen on late-night TV movie.
13.
Woman acknowledges personal flaw of loving fifth edition Oxford English Dictionary too much thereby annoying family and friends who chide woman for using unknown words when known words will do.
14.
While reading quote by Kurt Vonnegut about defining a saint as person who behaves decently in an indecent society woman is again reminded that political correctness as form of social control has replaced former practice of gentility and good manners.
15.
Water is said to boil woman notes when bubbles of water vapour grow without bound as illustrated in square of arrows, curves, numbers, words, and colourful lines called boiling-point diagram or as woman further notes when pot of water placed over high
heat is steadily watched.
16.
A series of books published by Macmillan entitled Big Ideas/Small Books and one in particular by Eva Hoffman called Time causes woman to sustain steady level of excitement while reading.
17.
Ditto Oxford English Dictionary, fifth edition.
18.
Woman who reads quote by horror-film actor Lon Chaney that there is nothing funny about a clown in moonlight vows in future to cast own clowns in full-strength sunlight.
19.
Unable to afford artworks of conquered people woman collects quotes and fearful scenarios instead.
20.
Woman who discovers martini was created in 1911 by bartender named Martini working at Knickerbocker Hotel in New York City has so far found only one use for information.
21.
The Garden of Earthly Delights painted by Hieronymus Bosch holds unseemly fascination for woman who is compelled to return to it again and again.
22.
Woman reads online that because of integrated security system enabling users to view what their cameras are viewing via the Internet man from Boynton Beach Florida watched own house get robbed and contacted police directly from office at work.
23.
While considering the moist familiar of daily life woman concurs with Chrissie Hynde singing in band Pretenders that What’s important in this world / A little boy, a little girl and also What’s important in this life go / Ask a man who’s lost his wife.