The Devastationalist Manifesto

On the back cover of the paperback edition of My Pilgrim’s Progress, George Trow’s second, and ultimately fatal, attempt to trace the line of Western Culture’s post-war descent into inanity, there is a blurb by the literary pundit, Sven Birkerts, that embodies the root of that inanity with uncanny perfection.

It reads:  Trow models the thrilling possibility that one can, from the stronghold of one’s own experience and knowledge, decipher something of the world.

As if there were any other way!

You might be thinking that that sentence could be taken a number of ways, but it’s even worse in context :

“It’s an ambitious venture, especially as Trow proceeds with no authorized historical perspectives or terminologies. He goes forth solo, walking into the jungle with his compass and knife, a bit of an old-school anthropologist. What amazes me — and contributes to the true readerly excitement — is that in many ways he pulls it off. He models the thrilling possibility that one can, from the stronghold of one’s own experience and knowledge, decipher something of the world; that the murk of late modernity can be pierced and rendered at least partially comprehensible.”

Here is an established public intellectual, one of the men our culture has specifically tasked as an arbiter and caretaker of creativity and free expression, and he is openly professing his amazement that someone could actually make sense of the world without the aid of authorized perspectives and terminologies. As if using one’s subjective experience in that way were somehow a form of illicit thrill-seeking. He might as well be wearing a sign that says, “Don’t think for yourself.” Disgraceful.

Pyramid of Night (Mackay)

Andy Mackay

Sometimes it seems that the human condition can be summed up as standing dazed and bruised at the bottom of various slippery slopes and wondering, “How did we get here?”

One answer might be our mistake in taking it for granted that speed, ease and convenience are always and everywhere inherently desirable qualities, ideals to be considered above all others in shaping our world. When the actual truth is they have blood-sucked the value from virtually every human activity that has ever fallen under their tyrannical sway. They are the insidious de-values, quietly replacing the deeper satisfactions of considered, diligent effort over time, from which human pursuits previously drew meaning.

In practice, this means that we are too quick and too enthusiastic when it comes to adopting simulacra, allowing virtual things to stand in for their actual predecessors with no questions asked. (E.g., a phone call is not an actual conversation, an MP3 is not actual human beings making music.) And the thing we need to be on guard for is that the technologies driving this process always tend towards increased individualism and isolation — away from the real world, real encounters, real relationships — whereas the original things were, by definition, tactile, tangible, social and communal. The scariest part is that over time, as the avatar stands in for the actual thing, people (gradually but inevitably) forget there ever was anything actual. The avatar becomes all we ever know.

Recently, a friend sent me a demo of a chilling new song that he was inspired to write after watching an ad for a dating service on TV. The song did a good job of capturing one unutterably sad and depressing aspect of the process described above, which is the commodification of romance — people shopping for love like they were ordering shoes from Zappos.

And of course there are upsides to it, just as there are upsides to cell phones, iPods, Facebook and all the rest. Speed, ease and convenience in all their glory, beckoning and beguiling. But in the end, what’s on offer is too creepy for words. It really is like a dystopian sci-fi novel, with all of us would-be Winston Smiths contemplating suicide in our grimy little bedsits, while the omnipresent Big Screen offers salvation only through deeper levels of solipsism and alienation.

This passage below is from Michael Kimmelman’s exceptionally illuminating book, The Accidental Masterpiece (2005). (Exceptional in that it is one of sadly few contemporary documents — by a formally educated, mainstream critic no less — that eschews theoretical frameworks and instead demonstrates a deep personal understanding and appreciation of the chaos and messiness that underlie how art is actually created and experienced by human beings in the real world.) I hijack this passage from its original context (Kimmelman is discussing the effect Kodak’s rise at the turn of the last century had on society’s notions of preservation and memory) for my own purposes, so it is only fair to note that Kimmelman goes on to argue for other side later on in the same chapter, making a rather poignant case for the transient beauty of snapshots and even color-by-numbers paintings:

“Before cameras, educated, well-to-do travelers had learned to sketch so that they could draw what they saw on their trips, in the same way that, before phonograph recordings, bourgeois families listened to music by making it themselves at home, playing the piano and singing in the parlor. Cameras made the task of keeping a record of people and things simpler and more widely available, and in the process reduced the care and intensity with which people needed to look at the things they wanted to remember well, because pressing a button required less concentration and effort than composing a precise and comely drawing. During the last century, the history of amateurism in America, whether it entailed snapping photographs or painting pictures or tickling the ivories, like so many other aspects of life, increasingly centered on labor-saving strategies to placate our inherent laziness and to guarantee our satisfaction, a promise, if you think about it, that should be antithetical to the premise of making art, which presumes effort and risk.”

And this is from Mockingbird (1980), by the prototypically itinerant, alcoholic, mid-century, mid-list writer Walter Tevis, a breathlessly melancholy sci-fi ode to the redemptive power of books. It’s sort of like if Philip K. Dick had written Brave New World+Fahrenheit 451. This bit below is an illiterate and suicidal android explaining to his platonic human consort how their world came to be as it is. Though the consort knows very little about the past and has barely any concept of “history,” learning how to read has sparked her innate curiosity. She wants to understand how things fell apart. The android mentions that in the past there were these things called “streetcars,” and she wants to know what happened to them [and remember, this was written in 1980]:

“The automobile companies got rid of them. Bribes were paid to city managers to tear up the streetcar tracks, and advertisements were bought in newspapers to convince the public that it should be done. So more cars could be sold, and more oil would be made into gasoline, to be burned in the cars. So that corporations could grow, and so a few people could become incredibly rich, and have servants, and live in mansions. It changed the life of mankind more radically than the printing press. It created the suburbs and a hundred other dependencies — sexual and economic and narcotic — upon the automobile. And the automobile prepared the way for the more profound — more inward — dependencies upon television and then robots, and, finally, the ultimate and predictable conclusion to all of it: the perfection of the chemistry of the mind.”

At some point in your life, you may hear or read some variation of an argument that goes like this: “Don’t blame science or technology. Blame the applications of technology or the people who misuse it.” If someone should happen to make such an argument to you, I encourage you to respond by punching them in the face as hard as you can.

I’m American (Imster/Terhune)

Bootfoot

Is it a matter of fact
Or just a matter of faction?
Don’t believe a word I say
When I show you my reaction

I can still hear you saying to her
“Don’t tell” from another room
All you have to do it want it
And someone will give it to you

You tell me how you feel
Tell me how you’re feeling
But I think the way you close your eyes
Is a whole lot more revealing

I remember each word you said
“There’s love behind every move”
Is this how you act behind me
While I take it from you?

Well, I wait for a train
Or I wait for the tide
Or I’m wasting my time
I thought that you were mine

I’m American
And I want mine
I’m American

You go out and get it
Is that the way?
You get what you want
In the land of the big and the brave

But I can still hear you saying to her
“Don’t tell” from the other room
All you have to do it want it
And someone will give it to you

Well, I wait for a train
Or I wait for the tide
Or I’m wasting my time
I thought that you were mine

I’m American
And I want mine
I’m American

Wait for a train
Wait for the tide
Wait for a train
Wait for the tide

Well, I wait for a train
Or I wait for the tide
Or I’m wasting my time
I thought that you were mine

I’m American
And I want mine
I’m American

This is from the Bootfoot MySpace page:

“Eleanor Imster and David Terhune wrote songs together and played them in a band called Bootfoot. Many friends, family, and a future husband, (Marc Fagelson) helped make the Bootfoot sound. Eleanor and David share a unique vocal blend, and their songs weave in and out of pop, folk, country and rock. Their CD “Bootfoot” contains 13 tracks that showcase this successful collaboration. It can be purchased by contacting bootfootmusic@yahoo.com.”

This is from A General Theory of Love (2000) by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon (M.D.s all). They are talking about how memory stores and shapes love, guiding our romantic choices in mystifying ways:

A scientific theory of memory is therefore a map of the soul. Every such diagram must attempt to delineate the mind’s Dark Continent: why do people possess emotional knowledge that leaves no conscious trace?

A lover tests the combination of himself plus serial others like a child juxtaposing jigsaw pieces until a pair snaps home. Love’s puzzle work is done in the dark: prospective partners hunt blindly; they cannot describe the person they seek. Most do not even realize, as they grope for the geographical outline of a potential piece, that their own heart is a similar marvel of specificity.

So, what makes your little heart go pitter-pat? Me, I’ve always been a voice man.

Which brings us to the forever incomparable Chrissie Hynde, standing steadfast and unblinking in the midst of this blazing conflagration from the Pretenders’ shamefully underrated second album. This particular song, incidentally, also makes a good answer to the question (should it ever come up), “Was James Honeyman-Scott really that good?” (The sheet music might even read: “Duet for girl and electric guitar.”)

The English Roses (Chrissie Hynde)

The Pretenders

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[Click to play, right-click to download MP3. Doesn't always work with Mac/Safari.]

Just before it rains
And the wind whips ’round the balcony
And the sky closes
On the English roses

And she’ll be pacing
‘Round and ’round and ’round and ’round her room
But these storms always find her
To remind her

To the endless sky
Of pink over grey
She looks for an answer
But it’s too late

Maybe it’s true
Some things were just never meant to be
Maybe not

This is a story
Of fruit cut from the vine
Forgotten, left to rot
Long before its time

This is a story
About the girl who lived next door
Looking for someone to hold

A wish made on a star
Brought her here tonight
In the courtyard she waits
A thousand broken dates

But she holds the hymnal
Where so carefully pressed
Is the English rose
She laid to rest

It’s only a story
Flowers in full bloom
Bouquets in every room

This is a story
Of fruit cut from the vine
Looking for someone to hold