ABlog

Here’s how I heard about what happened in London: Winston and I were in Maine for a few days of vacation and to see the premier of my friend Bea’s “Downeast Chamber Opera,” THE SINGING BRIDGE (a smashing success, as it turned out). On the morning of our first full day there, we’d gone to find a gas station. Winston was in the garage paying the attendant when I heard him react to a comment the guy had made. You know how you just know when it’s something big? Some historic cataclysm of the sort that makes strangers open up the way they do about the weather?

Winston came back and told me the man had said he’d heard something about a bomb going off on a London bus.

I did not want to think about it. I figured I would find out all I needed to know soon enough without pursuing it immediately. We went to have breakfast. Breakfast was enjoyable. We returned to the motel, where we saw on the TV that there had been multiple explosions in the London underground. I felt that this was a very great deal worse than one bomb on one bus. One bomb on one bus could have been the work of anyone.

“This’ll be a real shot in the arm for the Bush administration,” I said. We went out to hike in boggy woods, hunkered on granite reaches. We heard a hermit thrush and I said to myself that hearing this bird meant something, a positive sign. Despite everything.

By the time we got back to New York, four days later, it seemed the world had digested the story. It seemed America (is that what I meant by “the world”?) had decided the carnage wasn’t here after all, and if the Brits had to take a hit for our-their foreign policy, it was too bad but not exactly our affair. It seemed, too, that New Yorkers had digested whatever we have to digest, which is always a little bit different from whatever the rest of the U.S.A. has on its plate.

I didn’t much enjoy my subway ride yesterday, but I didn’t notice any extra security and I didn’t notice anyone else looking especially nervous.

I asked my friend who was raised in London how she had reacted. She said she’d made the obligatory calls, though she wasn’t all that worried on a personal level because nobody she’s close to over there is really in the habit of taking public transportation. “They’re funny, though, you know. They say things like, ‘When the IRA was setting off bombs, they used to let us know beforehand. Then you’d know to avoid the area. But these people don’t give any warning.’”

In the last Sunday Times I’d read before heading up north, Frank Rich had a column about Bush’s lame duck presidency in which he said that Bush was having trouble breaking through the fog of entertainment with messages about the War on Terror that were increasingly being viewed as irrelevant by the American public. In the aftermath of the news from London, I remembered the column and remarked on the irony, but now I’m starting to wonder to what extent the recent developments undermined Rich’s point. How much of the sense that business as usual has barely suffered a ripple of disruption has to do with the location (not here), how much with our capacity to get used to pretty much anything?

My friend who grew up in London said she had an impression that some people were waiting to base their reaction on the death toll: 50 or so might merit one reaction, 100+ another.

It’s not our adjustment to the possibility of bombs exploding during the course of our daily commutes that so troubles me: after all, it is in the nature of our mortal condition to be in a certain amount of jeopardy all the time, and it’s healthy to be able to block out what could happen. Rather, I’m troubled by our resignation (my own resignation) to a society in which “blowback” is a built-in, taken-for-granted feature. That resignation is just another step long a road that begins with our resignation to the deaths of “other people” (foreign nationals—people of color—Muslims—Arabs) in an unjust war, and with the radical erosion of “our” civil liberties (under the theory that the heaviest consequences will actually fall on “other people”—foreign nationals, etc.).

Resignation is, to my mind, the polar opposite of imagination. To be resigned is to look away, not necessarily oblivious to the knowledge that the blow might fall at any moment, but hoping at any rate to be sufficiently distracted not to mind very much when it does. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity”—and what indeed is that intensity but a malignant imagination? Tom Engelhardt refers to both the Bushies and the exploders of bombs on subways as “apocalypts” because both sides are locked in a spiraling logic of what they imagine and promote as clashing absolutes. They get off on imagining themselves as the protagonists of a Final Conflict; to the rest of us is left the solace of anesthetizing our imaginations (at any rate not sharpening them), lest we suffer too vividly. Or lest we seem too weird.

For those who point out the madness of “civilization” always do seem weird.

I reject the notion that the dangerous paranoid imagination is the truest. And yet, it is not so simple to refuse apocalypse: for although the people now in power foolishly refuse reality (and will not escape its reckoning), there also is a sense in which they create reality. Through them (but who put them there?) the apocalyptic imagination does help define our world. The enormous challenge then becomes: how do you get close to the sun, or the chain reaction, without being burned? How do you respond to the urgency, the real urgency, created by the paranoid death-transfixed vision, and yet yourself avoid the trap of messianism?

This is one of the problems I’ve tried to think through in my novel The Company of Cannibals :how is it possible to respond adequately to the destructive forces “we”/”they” have unleashed without reproducing the problem? (If the problem cannot be eliminated, might it be possible, at any rate, to reproduce it at a lower, less lethal level?) Several times in my life I have gotten close to the power of a sacrificial vision, the power that comes when we believe we are playing for high collective stakes, when we exit ordinary time and enter extraordinary time. I am not convinced that it is either possible or desirable for human beings to do without this power entirely, and yet a little of it goes a long, long way. I am fascinated by messianic cults, like the one led by Jim Jones (which started out with a vision of social justice) and Aum Shinrikiyo, the Japanese group that released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway. (Robert Jay Lifton’s book on the subject details the mental illness of the cult’s leader, which interests me less than does the allure that madness apparently had for others.) I’m haunted by the memory of disastrous mistakes made by idealistic leftists I knew in my twenties, several of whom committed a serious crime that caused the deaths of several people—all out of the very highest motives.

I’m beginning to think that fiction is on the skids (which of course doesn’t mean I and other people will cease to attempt writing it) because it is so hampered in telling the collective story. Its whole history is bound up with a vision of coherence that falls so far short of where we find ourselves now. Maybe this is one reason—beyond sheer laziness and the stupid American ideological bias in favor of “private,” “non-political” art—why contemporary U.S. fiction so often shirks what I consider to be the proper task of “imagination on the brink”: helping us envision where we actually stand; the contours of the cliff face we find ourselves clinging to.

It seems to me that the form of the novel, if it is going to serve at all, has to be bent to the breaking point in order to approach the kind of imagination I want now: not that which opts for the false heroic, the closure of apocalypse, with its clean lines of neatly contending forces—nor that which makes a fetish of entropy, incoherence—but that which insists that all of it is real: the coherence and incoherence, the dailiness and danger: not the one clean line, but the unpredictably intersecting stories that make up “the world” and may yet prevent the “apocalypts” from realizing their vision of a Final Conflict despite the seeming impotence of their rational opposition. (The imagination I want—though I wish I did not have to want it—also needs to account for the real possibility that the chaos of intersecting and colliding motives will produce disasters that can’t be recovered from, disasters no less tolerable for being unforeseen by apocalypts and non-apocalypts alike.)

What is it, really, that we are in the midst of?

I admire (for instance) the recent work of Juliana Spahr, as well as the book by Claudia Rankine (Don’t Let Me Be Lonely) that I mentioned last week, for trying to make language responsive to that question.

It’s clear to me that the answer can’t be singular. It’s not the Bush administration, not “WMD” (not even nuclear bombs); it’s not even one “thing” as large as Capitalism or the military-industrial complex. (Which is maybe why—though I haven’t warmed to his writing—I inwardly applauded when I read somewhere that J.G. Ballard once cited as among his favorite reading the transcripts of airplanes’ “black box” recordings, recovered after crashes.)

The following remarks by Baghdad blogger Riverbend, quoted by Tom Engelhardt on Tomdispatch.com, also speak most eloquently to the question of what we’re in the midst of (read the whole piece, a scorching analysis of a recent Bush speech, at http://riverbendblog@blogspot.com/):

“He [Bush] speaks of ‘abroad’ as if it is a vague desert-land filled with heavily-bearded men and possibly camels. ‘Abroad’ in his speech seems to indicate a land of inferior people—less deserving of peace, prosperity and even life. Don’t Americans know that this vast wasteland of terror and terrorists otherwise known as ‘Abroad’ was home to the first civilizations and is home now to some of the most sophisticated, educated people in the region? Don’t Americans realize that ‘abroad’ is a country full of people—men, women and children who are dying hourly? ‘Abroad’ is home for millions of us. It’s the place we were raised and the place we hope to raise our children—your field of war and terror.”

Running Tab

7/10/05: Not owning a car, I rarely drive. Winston and I sometimes rent one on vacations. When we do, I experience some moments of fear that despite my pristine driver’s license, I will have forgotten what to do behind the wheel. Then a feeling of mastery—I am still able to do that which defines an autonomous adult in our lunatic civilization.

Thirteen hours from Stonington, Maine to Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn. I find the Interstate terrifying; ditto the BQE. I notice, as usual, that it is all very well to imagine in advance that you will not give in to the pressure to drive above the speed limit, but in the event, it often feels safer that way (safer, for example, than letting yourself get sandwiched between enormous trucks).

I don’t mean that I’m personally terrified, exactly—tense while driving, but I also enjoy it. Why? Maybe because it appears I ought to be getting killed and so far that hasn’t happened. Because I derive a feeling of competence from not getting killed, even though I remind myself that I could easily be obliterated by someone else’s stupid actions over which I have absolutely no control no matter how defensively I drive.

It is inadvisable to give in to thoughts like this, not because the thoughts themselves aren’t perfectly sensible, but because the lifestyles of most people outside New York City and perhaps a couple other major metropolitan areas require that thoughts like these be suppressed when they arise.

After I turned the rental car in, I went on the Internet and found a press release, dated last April, issued by the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. According to a preliminary report on traffic fatalities, 42,800 people died in U.S. auto accidents in 2004.

All this and oil wars too! The other day I heard a guy say on a call-in show (a propos of the London explosions, if I’m remembering correctly): “Anybody who thinks we’re not gonna have a war for oil here and there ought to be riding a bicycle.” Of course his tone implied that “riding a bicycle” represents some outer limit of bizarre behavior.