Today, on a deck chair behind the gym tucked between a condo complex and a body shop, I think mournfully of that picture. The house in Quebec has long since been sold. None of the five of us cousins live in the same city. Some of our children know each other more through Facebook than through live encounters.
Sitting alone, scrolling through the news on my phone on this melancholy morning, I’m bombarded by reports on crumbling glaciers and rising seas, increasing temperatures and climate refugees, false and incendiary tweets about nuclear weapons, fire, and fury, videos of Nazis and white nationalists parading through the streets of Charlottesville.
I miss those people in the picture. And I want to be them—fearlessly soaking up the sun, surrounded by family, embracing the day with unmoderated joy.
But of course I’m idealizing the past. My father and uncle had grown up during the Depression, moving from one apartment to the next, and in each, anxiety permeated the home as much as the smell of chicken fat. Anne had started her life in Vienna, and when she left that city as a young teenager, it was on one of the last Kindertransport trains, with her mother and father and all the other doomed parents left behind on the platform waving heartsick goodbyes.
“Jews will not replace me,” the Unite the Right demonstrators chanted in Charlottesville. I see them in a tiny window on my phone.
Our parents had no Twitter, but they were just as scared and appalled by the lunatic rantings of a powerful leader spewing out of their radios. Their wars were not fought in remote lands and shown to the public only in censored, sanitized pictures. Herbie had been an Air Force radio operator in England, where he met Anne. My father had served in the Canadian army, and though my mother only knitted lumpy scarves for the soldiers, she was no different from the other three in her knowledge of people who went away and didn’t come back, or came back changed, and not for the better. They hadn’t known nuclear weapons existed, but then saw them used.
By the time the cheery summer picture was taken, the four of them had already been orphaned—to concentration camps, to cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer’s. They’d lost jobs, faced bankruptcies, started anew over and over again. They’d worried about our safety, about our poor judgment and bad choices and still, always loved us unconditionally. They’d taught us the hatred of racism and war that my generation would claim as uniquely ours.
Despite their tanned, relaxed bodies, despite their barefooted comfort on that dock on that day, their lives were not perpetually sunny. They’d lived through the cataclysms that so frighten me now, and handled them with no more or less grace than anyone else. Now older than they were in that picture, I know all the pain that seethed and tumbled with all the joy inside them.
But they knew something I haven’t yet grasped. Somehow they mastered the feeling of helplessness that is so new to me and so corrosive in this strange new/old world.
Having grown up in hardship, did they have a stronger sense of their own agency? Having weathered enough calamities—both routine and extraordinary—had they lost their fear?
Neither, I think. Those four parents simply loved life’s essentials—food, water, sun, and a herd to huddle with—with a blazing fierceness that parched despair before it could take root.
Studying their picture like it’s the Torah, like it’s the cure to all diseases, like it’s my child’s face, I wonder: Can I learn to love like that?
This All-at-Onceness (1967-2015)
Now this strange, new, all-at-once situation in which everyone experiences everything all at once creates this kind of X-Ray mosaic of involvement and participation for which people are just not prepared. They have lived through centuries of detached ... of non-involvement. Suddenly they’re involved, and it’s a big surprise, and for many people, a kind of exhilaration. Wonderful.
- Marshall McLuhan, in an interview at the start of Our World 41
In the final segment of Our World, we hear the satellite’s steady, electronic heartbeat as the screen dims, briefly goes to black, then illuminates a man standing at the foot of what the zooming out camera reveals to be one of two radio telescopes.
“The sun is below the Eastern horizon,” he says in an Australian accent, “and it’s a cold and dewy morning as the astronomers here at the Parkes Radio Observatory are preparing to take us on a voyage to the limits of the universe, a trip to the edge of time.”42
Inside the control room, two scientists are about to capture signals from a quasar. Dubbed 0237-23, it is, in 1967, the most distant object known to man. “It may not seem like anything dramatic,” the correspondent tells us, “but when the mechanical pen on the chart of John Bolton’s recorder begins to shiver its way up to the right, and when we hear a hissing noise, we’ll be seeing live the signals from something ten thousand million, million, million, million miles away, the farthest reach of human experience. So now, let’s watch.”
The camera zooms in on what looks and sounds like a bulky old electric typewriter as it bursts into chattering life. “Here it comes...” the correspondent says. We hear it—a surge in crackling static—and the plotter pen rises up, up, forming a perfect parabola, then returning to its level course. “...And there it was.”
As Our World draws to a close, the broadcast signal hops from one satellite to the next in a montage of scenes from the sites that the show has visited. We zoom out to a model of earth in its solar system. Simulated satellites, like cherry tomatoes on toothpicks, revolve around it.
Now most of the journalists who made Our World are dead. Looking back at their forty-four-year-old vision of the future, I think that they were so wrong about what they thought they knew. Their earnest portraits of public works projects, fish farming, agribusiness—all of these artifacts of planning, these steady markers of development—weren’t silly; the number of people living in abject poverty, squalor, and ignorance has declined. But the change the show’s producers envisioned hasn’t happened gradually, or originated from any of the expected quarters. It isn’t what they chose to show in Our World that ultimately mattered, but simply that they were able to show it.
My first really good writing teacher challenged me with every submission. Why are you writing this? she’d scrawl on the manuscript. And why are you writing this now?
“It’s about simultaneity,” I’d written in my early notes for this project, “and simultaneity creates a sense of urgency.” Now, as I assemble and rearrange pages, build collages out of pieces of memory, I realize I’ve been looking backward as intently as the show’s producers had tried to peer into the future, as interested in my rear view mirror as in the spattered and pitted windshield in front of me. But it’s the present that’s revealing my past—the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, WikiLeaks and Anonymous, the spirit-lifting YouTube videos of flash mobs breaking out into song and dance at an airport in Beirut and an unemployment office in Madrid.
This is where hope and satellites have taken us. I’m at an age and living in an age where I don’t think the great milestones in history or an individual life—the torch being passed to a new generation, the Summer of Love, the thirteenth birthday, the first cigarette—trigger or even signal the moments of profound societal or personal shift. The beacons are embedded in McLuhan’s “humming, buzzing confusion”—shared images on the screen, the simultaneity of laughter and horror, the confluence of past and present, braided together in each individual’s snaking narrative of what could have, did, might happen.
Marshall McLuhan’s crazy interview at the start of Our World is like a great surrealist poem. While its words can’t be meaningfully parsed, they are marbled with truth and prophecy. They were also fueled, at least in part, by an enormous brain tumor that, three months later, was finally removed in what was, as that point, the longest recorded neurological surgery in medical history. McLuhan retained his speech, his ability to write and to think. But he lost great swaths of memory, and with it, his capacity fo
r any creative work.
She never lost her memory, but toward the end of my Auntie Anne’s life, she seemed to achieve some sort of armistice with her demons. On her seventieth birthday, newly widowed, she consented to being feted in the private upstairs dining room of a Chinese restaurant in a Montreal suburb. Trailed by a boisterous line of adoring grandchildren and great nieces, she marched around the faux gold pillars and under the garish red streamers, singing a silly song in her shrill Viennese voice. Once again crackling with energy, she had become our children’s Pied Piper. It seemed in that moment that she had finally survived the pummeling shame of having lived more years than her exterminated mother.
My mother’s creative life also flourished with age. By her mid-eighties, she rarely painted, but was instead a collagist, working in a form that’s not about reproducing or depicting, but about synthesizing. She moved slowly, and paused frequently, not just to regain her balance, but to pick up interesting bits of rock or bottle caps from the ground, or to peel pieces of poster off buildings and fences to use in her art. Her hands trembled from Parkinson’s disease except when she applied glue or paint or scraps of borrowed images. Her vision took shape on much smaller canvases than she used to work on. But still, she tried to make something entirely new.
Two years after Our World, I visited San Francisco for the first time. I was about sixteen years old, the Bay area was still the hippy Mecca, and I’d finally arrived (even though it was with my parents). While they went off to do something boring, they gave me permission to wander.
Somewhere near Fisherman’s Wharf, a young man in jeans, peasant shirt, Peruvian vest, and floppy leather hat, was selling the Berkley Barb. The sun danced off the water. I gave him a quarter for the paper. After pocketing it, he kissed me. I felt his downy beard on my face, and his tongue was as sweet as cinnamon. All you need is love.
Past, present, future—these tenses aren’t points on a continuum. They’re not points at all, no more than light is. After all, what is memory if not this all-at-onceness, this thrumming sense of who-you-were embedded and inseparable from who-you-are?
I swear that the electric goodness of that kiss persists. Its charge has lingered, reignited as I pluck this moment out of the ether as easily as I can see millennia-old history in the light of a star, just by looking up.
Endnotes
1. In McLuhan’s Wake, Kevin McMahon and David Sobelman (Canada, 2002), DVD.
2. Burton, Pierre. 1967: The Last Good Year (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1999), 114.
3. Ibid., 120.
4. Duncan, David Douglas. The Private World of Pablo Picasso (The Ridge Press, New York), 1958.
5. Ibid., 38-9.
6. McLuhan, Marshall. Gutenberg’s Galaxy (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2011, First edition, 1962), 37.
7. “French-English Expo Effort an Example for Canadians,” The Ottawa Journal, May 2, 1967.
8. McLuhan, Marshall. and McLuhan, Eric. Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. September 16, 1992).
9. Culkin, John. “A schoolman’s guide to Marshall McLuhan,” Saturday Review (March 18, 1967): 70.
10. Diski, Jenny. The Sixties (New York, Picador, 2009), 37
11. “The Council for a Summer of Love,” The San Francisco Oracle (April 1967) Vol. 1, Number 7.
12. “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture,” Time Magazine (July 7, 1967).
13. The Doors. “When the Music’s Over,” words and music (all rights reserved, Doors Music Co., 1967). Used by permission of Alfred Music.
14. Kilbanoff, Hank. “The Lasting Impact of a Civil Rights Icon’s Murder,” Smithsonian Magazine (December, 2008).
15. Ibid.
16. Congress on Racial Equality. “King Holiday 2009 Slideshow,” http://www.coreonline.org/Events/mlk_celebration/photos/mlk2009/mlk_2009_slideshow.htm.
17. O’Neil, Paul. “A Well-Witnessed Invasion – by Something,” Life Magazine (April 1, 1966) Vol. 60, No. 13.
18. Baulch, Vivian M. “The Great Michigan UFO Chase,” The Detroit News, http://info.detnews.com/history/story/index.cfm?id=210&category=life.
19. Mathis, Jo Collins. “UFO Mystery Still Haunts Some (1966),” The Ann Arbor News (March 20, 2006), http://www.ufocasebook.com/michigan1966revisited.html.
20. Freire, Paule. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition (New York, The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 54.
21. Mathis, Jo Collins. “UFO Mystery Still Haunts Some (1966)", The Ann Arbor News (March 20, 2006)..
22. Ian, Janis. “Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinkin’),” words and music (Taosongs Two (BMI), 1967), exclusive worldwide print rights for Taosongs Two administered by Do Write Music, LLC All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
23. New York Magazine (June 8, 1970).
24. Seldes, Barry. Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2009), 70.
25. “Unite for Bicentennial Action.” The Veteran (December 1975/January 1976) Vol. 5, No. 7.
26. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, Picador Press, 2004), 85.
27. Havel, Vaclav. Disturbing the Peace (New York, Vintage Press, 1991), 181.
28. Clarke, Arthur C. “Extra-Terrestrial Relays – Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?” Wireless World (October, 1945).
29. “Electronics: The Room-Size World.” Time Magazine (May 14, 1965).
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Oliver, Mary. New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
33. Belam, Martin. The Guardian (December 22, 2017). US ambassador to Netherlands describes own words as ‘fake news.
34. Kessler, Glenn. The Washington Post (December 30, 2017). In a 30-minute interview, President Trump made 24 false or misleading claims.
35. Yeoman, Barry. “The North Carolina GOP Has a New Suppression Tactic: Voter Defamation,” New Republic (December 2, 2016), https://newrepublic.com/article/139111/north-carolina-gop-new-suppression-tactic-voter-defamation.
36. Suskind, Ron. “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” The New York Times (October 17, 2004).
37. Weisenthal, Joe. “Donald Trump: The First President of Our Post-Literate Age,” Bloomberg View (November 29, 2016).
38. Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon (April, 1946).
39. Orwell, George. 1984 (New York: New American Library, 1950).
40. Ibid.
41. McLuhan, Marshall. Canadian Broadcasting System introduction to Our World (1967).
42. Our World, 1967. Burke, Stanley (25 June 1967). “Our World – Five continents linked via satellite,” CBC Archives (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation).
Acknowledgments
Most books are collaborative efforts, and this one is no exception. It was born and took shape under the extraordinary mentorship of several Lesley University MFA faculty, most notably Jane Brox and Alex Johnson. They teach both through how they live and how they write. I’m deeply grateful for Jane’s kindness, candor, and clarity, and for Alex’s passionate, incisive critiques and guidance. She was my literary midwife, and I couldn’t have been in better hands.
Along the way, many chapters of the book were workshopped—sometimes multiple times—by the members of Cow Skulls, my longstanding writers’ group. Thank you for your feedback and patience, my colleagues and friends: Carol Aucoin, Cindy Dockrell, Kevin O’Kelly, Kathleen Tibbets, and Debbie Sosin.
I can’t adequately express my gratitude to Simon and Glorianne Wittes, who were as loving and encouraging a set of parents as anyone could hope for. Their lifelong encouragement and the palpable joy they took in seeing me develop as a writer was a form of manna, and I have reason to silently appreciate th
at and so much more almost every day. Layla, your pride and encouragement, and that from almost everyone in my family has been a vital, motivating force. I love and thank you.
This book wouldn’t have been written without the support, keen editorial eye, and neck rubs from my husband, friend, cheerleader, and beloved companion Mark (who’s no slouch himself in the writing department). Thank you from the bottom of my still wildly pounding heart.
Finally, this book wouldn’t have been published without the leap of faith shown by Jaynie Royal at Regal House Publishing, by Frannie Carr Toth at Cognoscenti, and by the editors who published many of these essays in the past eight years. Thank you all.
Permissions and Previous Publications
“Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinkin’)” Words and Music by Janis Ian © 1967 Taosongs Two (BMI). Exclusive Worldwide Print Rights for Taosongs Two administered by Do Write Music, LLC All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
“When the Music’s Over” © 1967 (Renewed) (Words and Music by The Doors) Doors Music Co. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.
“London Calling” © 1979 (Nicky Headon, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Joe Strummer) Universal Music Publishing Group. All rights reserved.
“The Guns of Brixton” © 1979 (Paul Simonon) Universal Music Publishing Group. All rights reserved.
“Against the Wind” © 1980 (Bob Seger) Gear Publishing. All rights reserved.
This All-at-Onceness Page 24