Category Archives: plague journal

Institutions and the Individual

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After high school I moved away for college, and on my first visit home at the end of September, I went back on a Friday night to find friends. I walked up to the football field just after the game had ended. The stands were emptying out, people drifting off toward their cars. I remember the feeling, a still-adolescent feeling: I was shocked that the place had continued to function without me. They’d gone ahead with the school year, the football season, the turn in the weather, even though I wasn’t around. Apparently, I was just another graduate, another electron spun off into the universe. 

Anyone who has worked for a large company has probably experienced something similar. There’s good old Ted, who’s been around forever, knows where everything is, can help with any kind of problem, is as integral to the functioning of the organization as a catalytic converter. Ted is a company mensch. He’s practically part of the building. But then you show up one day and Ted is gone, retired, moved, let go under hazy circumstances, and now in his place is Bill. And Bill is no Ted. Sure, he seems nice enough, capable even, but he doesn’t possess that calming mastery of the org chart that Ted did, until two weeks go by and you’re calling Bill for all the stuff you would have called Ted for. And then pretty soon, maybe not even a month later, you’re shooting the breeze at lunch, and someone says who was the guy in that cube before Bill? What was his name? You can almost see his face. 

An institution is an organization that’s learned how to outlive its people. Institutions are broad structures that human beings pass through on their way to whatever comes next. And they develop rules, traditions, protocols, cultures, ways of existing that are above the people who come through them. That’s how they manage to exist through time. The people change but the institution persists. 

And yes, they can be creepy and overbearing. Institutions evolve toward a Skynet-like self-awareness. There is always the potential for the culture to morph into a cult, where rules and procedures turn into a kind of ideology, and the only behavior ideology recognizes is submission. So they’re not perfect. Like anything touched by human hands, they get bent, smudged, look worse for wear, and aren’t nearly as luminous after real world use as they were in the abstract, back when it was all a daydream. 

I go to the post office every day for work. It’s one of those mundane but necessary tasks, because even though most of the work can be done sitting at the computer, there are still documents that need to be sent back and forth. So everyday I check the PO box, that little metal portal into another world. And though I, like everyone, have made fun of the post office on occasion, I am essentially fond of the Postal Service as an institution. I depend on it. Its disparate outposts are a signal of its relentless reliability. 

When news arrived recently of changes at the post office, instigated by the newly installed postmaster general, and if not the result of the current president then certainly congruent with his desires to inhibit voting by mail in the rapidly arriving election, I was filled with a variety of feelings. There were all the normal feelings about the integrity of the election and about how this seemed, once again, to be no way to run a railroad. But it also felt logical and predictable: our current president is a destroyer of institutions. 

I’m writing this on the eve of the 2020 Republican National Convention, and this year the RNC will forgo a newly written platform, a document expressing its objectives and principles. Instead, the RNC adjourned without adopting a new platform until 2024 and stated that it supports the current president and his America First agenda.* Full disclosure: I dislike our current president.

It’s not another brick in the wall but another brick taken from a wall. Each institution he infiltrates, he destroys or remakes in his image, which is an empty facade, a building whose contents have been blown out long ago. This is not because he wants to destroy things per se (though perhaps he does?), but because he is the ultimate individual; he cannot countenance anything outside himself, anything greater than himself. He doesn’t support institutions, because he doesn’t believe in them. He believes in himself. Anything that steps to that belief is denied, until it succumbs to his personality, until it bends the knee, like the RNC, or until it breaks down because of his malignant hostility, like the post office or a number of other institutions. He might be actively engaged in the destruction of various principles and institutions as an expression of some political motivation, though that suggests some larger agenda above and beyond his own will to power, which I doubt. The reason he doesn’t like the UN is because he can’t stand it. Its persistence and existence outside and above him is anathema. He doesn’t believe anything in the world has dominion over him. He doesn’t have to listen to anybody about anything, whether it’s masks or climate change or the Federal Reserve or manners or anything. He is the ultimate authority. The potential existence of other authorities is a baffling insult. He expects people to fall in line. What else would they do? He has no empathy. He cannot see past the boundaries of himself. He can’t comprehend the feelings of others because they don’t exist. Sometimes he reads aloud words written by someone that are meant to transmit a feeling generally similar to sympathy. But these statements are always zombie-like, worse than a student reading aloud in class under duress. There is none of the self-generated pleasure he gets from free-associating, cruelty performed as a joke. I think he genuinely enjoys hearing himself talk because it reminds himself that he exists, that he is king. He’s a man who has been rewarded for doing and saying exactly what he wanted to do at whatever moment he wanted to do it. He’s got the self-awareness of a gland. It’s no accident that his real estate empire consists mainly of him putting his name on buildings. He is nothing but brand. He burns himself onto everything he touches. There is nothing outside of himself, and anything that approaches the sanctity of his fortress of individuality is mocked, condemned, corroded. 

Institutions were made to exist beyond people. They were made to withstand people leaving, people dying, people retiring. They were set up so that they could persist outside these vicissitudes. There was discourse hubbub a few years ago when Mitt Romney, then presidential candidate, said that “corporations are people, too.” This was derided as idiotic and a sign of his robotic, managerial slickness. But it’s literally true! Legally speaking, corporations are treated like people. And reasonable people can argue whether or not this is a good thing, economically, legally, morally, but Romney wasn’t riffing. And the reason that corporations are thought of as individuals, in the eyes of the law, is so they are separate from the individuals who run them. They are companies that are trying to turn themselves into institutions. Did Apple die when Steve Jobs died? 

The relationship between institutions and individuals is always antagonistic. I myself am comforted by the existence of institutions, rather than challenged. Perhaps that makes me simply less of a man. The question is what does one do with all those people who exist outside one’s self. Do those people actually exist? 

It’s like the roadways in my town. Why are they laid out the way they are? Isn’t there a better way to get downtown? Probably. It’s idiotic that I have to drive three miles to the interstate and then head down that way. I should just be able to drive out of my driveway and plow through eight neighbors’ yards and a school in a straight line to my destination. But someone or a group of someones long ago laid out the roads. And if I’m going to participate in this society in a meaningful way, I have to refrain from deploying my freedom to drive through people’s yards because it potentially provides a more direct route. Could these roads be improved? Absolutely. To give up one’s own freedom, if just a little bit, for the sake of perpetuating an institution is to confess that other people exist. I will only get what I want through compromise. That’s the secret of society: everyone is at least a little disappointed. It makes the motor run. To improve an institution means you think it’s somehow worthwhile. By destroying institutions he is destroying the ingredients that enable society. 

It’s exhausting to have to say all this in sentences. It feels so self-evident, so freshman year poly sci, so Basic. I’d much rather moon about some novel or my feelings about humidity. Part of the reason I find the post office magical is because I believe that the world visible through that little porthole actually exists, and it’s sending me notes. Do people actually think that man can give them what they want? 

*The label “America First” is a lie. Trump’s agenda has always transparently been “Trump First.” Any actual benefits America the polity receives from Trump unambiguously pursuing his own self-interests are merely accidental. I hold this truth to be self-evident.

Writers Are Depressing

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It’s true. It was always true. But it’s even more true now that we are in plague times. I follow several writers on Twitter, and for the past three months they have really been excelling in the depression department. I realize that there is plenty to be depressed about in these unprecedented times, but this is a layer above, a top spin on the already sad news of the day. Perhaps it’s a consequence of imagination, of a need to project into a fictional future. Perhaps it’s just the tendency to push rhetoric forcefully unto its limits. Perhaps it’s the ability to pluck out the most alarming/rhetorically forceful detail from a news story. There is one writer I follow, R, whom I really enjoy and whom (in this fantasy of friendship) I get along with splendidly. But R possesses a golden eye for the most disturbing snippet of the most disturbing news story of the day, an ever escalating stream of alarmisms. Turning over one of his quotations in the daily leaf pile that is Twitter is like being bitten by a sleeping snake — in the eye. 

Certainly I’m not depressing to be around. You either, dear friend. But in general writers are depressing, anxious, inward curling, and yet highly strung, excessively verbal, overly self-conscious. I am generalizing recklessly, but hopefully I’m not wrong, or not entirely wrong. I went to a writers’ conference once; it was simultaneously a thrilling experience and also a black hole of insecurity. Everyone needed a hug but no one was spiritually able to accept a hug. At least theater people are entertaining. 

A smarter person would have gotten off Twitter years ago. 

I reconnected with an old friend and discovered that he’d never signed onto Facebook. It was like finding someone who had never done drugs. How refreshing! What a naive, healthy blessing! Then, a couple of months ago, he signed up. Why would he do this? Why would he weather the social pressure of that platform’s plateauing domination? Why get this far only to succumb now? I think he’s still off Twitter but I’m too nervous to ask. 

I used to think that the main problem with Twitter was that its signal-to-noise ratio was broken. That is, everyone links to the same junk over and over. That is, entire conversations manifest in a private language of meme exchange. But instead Twitter is all signal, overwhelming signal — everyone signalling constantly with nuclear force. Every tweet is overburdened with meaning, overt or implied, a rhetorical peacockery. Everyone was insufferable on Twitter already and a slow-moving global catastrophe has only made this worse. The human quality previously known as charm now has the half life of your sourdough starter. To follow a person’s Twitter stream with any granularity is to become convinced they’re growing progressively unhinged. Unfortunately, this is also the only way to understand a person’s Twitter stream.  

And this is not to imply that these Twitter writers aren’t genuinely upset or don’t have legitimate reasons to feel upset. Lord knows they do. Perhaps all this note is is an admission that I can no longer stand the unrelenting broadcasting of their anxieties, and yet, paradoxically, I am seeing exactly what I’ve chosen to see. I have both clamped my own eyelids back and begun the unending scroll of horrors.

Another writer I follow — S — says that no one should be writing during this time, and that people should especially not write about this time. This is the same person who chronicles her life in graphomaniac detail, a fractured diary years in the making, a serialized hot mess. (It is wildly entertaining.) Her point is that this writing will surely be bad, which is probably true, though I don’t know what metric she’s using to determine what bad means. I think she resents people being performatively sensitive, which, okay: noted.

T is yet another writer I follow, one I admire to an almost painful degree. I don’t believe in writely perfection, in terms of prose or persona or general gestalt, but if I did, he would be it. And this ongoing calamity has turned T into a puddle, linguistically speaking. The reason you follow someone in the first place is you admire their prose and the way their sensibility filters through that prose. But in the context- and editor-free agglomeration of tweets you see that same personality and that same prose in all of its backstage, make-up-smeared freakyness. But it’s not backstage. There is no backstage anymore, at least not online. There are only additional trap doors of performance. 

A couple of other writers I follow (I know, I know: get off Twitter) have disappeared from the platform entirely over the past two months. They’ve obviously gone into hiding. They know when to hunker down, go dark with their verbs. The tweeting-writers who continue to thrive are the ones that dish out generalized, feel-good, you-got-this cheerleaderism. It’s a kind of tweet-hug, and I’d accept it if I were able. 

I feel like Twitter is a kind of live action role playing, but whereas other LARPing activities have separate characters and plots that move alongside life, Twitter LARPs with the same ingredients of actual life. It’s like a laminate of language wrapped over the coarse plywood of everyday activity. It feels apiece with the real thing but it’s actually a veneer upon the real. Within the scroll, it feels the closest thing to life, but when you’re simply walking around the real world (back when you could do that), you are confronted with real people who don’t know you’re playing the game and who can’t catch your signals. 

Why I’ve spent countless hours reading these unhinged fragments thumbed out by strangers is a question for a licensed professional, or God. But perhaps the better question is why do I feel compelled to follow anyone at all? Besides, no one can withstand that much unaccommodated attention — even happy people.

These Little Town Blues

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New York City is once again the center of the United States. I say once again, but really it’s always the center. It’s always been the true capital: if not the seat of government, then the seat of culture, money, the capital of Capital. It’s always been this way. In fact, New York is the true avant-garde of the country: it gets everything first. And it’s as if the city contains a karmic paradox where, for the price of its centrality to the nation (and to our imaginations), it must suffer first the psychopaths, the opportunists, the terrorists, and now the virus. 

In American literature, this leads to a kind of provincialism. Writers like Paul Auster or Jonathan Lethem can set novel after novel within the five boroughs and still be considered tackling a universal subject, while someone like Willa Cather or Faulkner or Welty or Jim Harrison are considered regional writers. New York is not a region. It is the region. 

Despite these relatively rural gripes even my black box of a heart was warmed by the appearance of the USNS Comfort ship plowing into New York harbor last week. I had read that it was headed that way, but I had no idea what it looked like. I didn’t know it would be white — like a giant metal robo-nurse. My heart swelled at the prospect that perhaps our techno-militaristic stockpile will somehow save us. If we could only breathe through bombs. 

Sometimes it’s beneficial to live in the sticks, relatively speaking. When the social distancing procedures came down, I thought glumly that these measures wouldn’t be that difficult to enact in my own life. Outside the three individuals in my immediate family and the three individuals in my office, I have to go out of my way to incorporate other people into my daily existence. I have to make plans. Any time except for a worldwide contagion this would be a recipe for depression, but now strangely it’s just slightly helpful. 

New York is the dream of rednecks everywhere, according to Saul Bellow. I too once wanted to go there. I applied to its MFA programs but never made it. The very next fall, 9/11 happened, and I breathed a (guilty, shameful) sigh of relief for continuing to ostracize myself down south — to be once again in a place where nothing ever happened. I have been to New York a couple of times, purely as a tourist, and I was amazed at how big it was, the sheer magnitude of people. Not to overplay my country mouse hand, but it’s overwhelmingly larger than my current life. All large northern cities are, but New York exponentially so. The universe of individual consciousness located within just one tall apartment building. Redneck leans head out of cab window, mouth open in wonder like a dog. 

Earlier this year — before all this — I was on a gig where I played “New York, New York” for the first time. I should have played it years ago, but somehow this was my first. One strange twist of fate was that the bass player on the gig was an older friend, and when I was a young whippersnapper, I used to hang out at another one of his straight-ahead gigs, and I would sneak up behind him and shout out a request for “New York, New York,” and without looking up to see who was heckling, he would say, “100 bucks or no dice.” Here in the land of “Margaritaville” and “Brown-Eyed Girl” one had to have some distant threshold of pride. But now we are playing it. 

When preparing, I was struck by how angry Sinatra sounds as he’s singing it. There’s contempt in his voice, bitterness. Surely that predates our own bitterness at playing the tune. Though, to be honest, I wasn’t bitter playing it. I was just glad I got through it without embarrassing myself or steering the band astray as I chopped out rhythm guitar. To be bitter, to really resent “New York, New York,” or NY, NY, one has to experience it more. One has to live it. Perhaps that’s what Sinatra was projecting in his recorded performance of the tune, both an admission of the city’s dominance over him (the implied narrator of the song), and also the song’s eventual dominance over him (the legendary performer), and its dominance ultimately over the culture. Have a city and a song ever so perfectly embodied one another? I don’t know. It’s a hell of a lot heavier than Kansas City.

Who’s Zoomin’ Who

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Barely a week into online school and my children have done more video conferencing than I have in my entire life. Though I try not to leer in the background as they fire up another session, I can tell they’re already adept. Heck, they already know to mute their line when not talking. 

At least we have the internet, I thought the other day, while staring at a bird hop blamelessly from branch to branch. That’s the first time I’ve been actively grateful for the internet in ages. I don’t feel comfortable making predictions in any direction regarding what life will be like Afterward. But since adults have complained since time immemorial that what students learned in school wasn’t directly applicable to “real life,” this sudden lurch into online shoestring interconnectivity means that the kids have rapidly surpassed even the most utilitarian parents’ wildest dreams.

Not long ago I remember a school administrator discussing typing skills. He said he felt a little sheepish teaching middle schoolers typing when they would just be speaking into their computers within a couple of years. I was shocked. Surely not. The future is great and everything, but surely the kids cannot surpass typing, my most cherished adult-level skill. 

Typing is almost pure pleasure, the closest physical analogue I have to thinking itself. The only other activity that is nearly thought-adjacent might be walking. But then of course it’s difficult to type while walking, so you have to walk back to the house quickly in order to get those already fleeting thoughts down. Writing by hand is also pleasurable, to be sure, but it’s more physically difficult. And then you are left with such a mess. The almost instantaneous amalgamation of near-coherence that one gets from typing is decadently profound. Even crap drafts look good. And it’s not just the physio-mental activity itself that’s pleasurable. (Apple committed hubris when, in an effort to increase its laptops’ thinness, it introduced the butterfly keyboard, which frequently broke. It made typing — on a laptop! its primary mode of input! — more difficult.) Thinking in written language is fundamentally different than thinking in speech. I don’t want to belabor the idea that writing-thought is stronger than speaking-thought (though it is), but that these are two different skills and lead to different kinds of thought. Literature changed, of course, when the typewriter was introduced and then again when the word processor (still such an odd phrase) was introduced, and it will change yet again when our speech can be instantaneously transcribed. (Cue up ye olde anecdote about Henry James’s late period.) I don’t want to stand across the river of language and yell stop, necessarily, but I do want to recognize the private constructedness baked into the very act of writing prose, as opposed to the performative expectations built into the speech act. Perhaps it’s simply quieter, with all of the epistemological complications. Besides, people who talk aloud to themselves are rightly thought nutso.

I agree there are benefits to all this instant video chatting. My kids can see their teachers and buddies quickly and at scale. For a generation that never really made phone calls, they seem useful. Perhaps this social lacuna we’re experiencing will bring back the old-fashioned phone call, long thought outmoded, but like typing perhaps still useful. I remember phone calls in 8th grade that consisted entirely of me and my interlocutor listening to each other breathe. This was called flirting. 

I was on a video chat the other day and I became distracted by the small pane filled with my face. Is this what people see of me every day? This guy with the giant forehead and pore-ridden nose? Is this how I appear? One benefit of a day without video conferencing is that I go through vast stretches of time without being confronted with the burden of my own face. That’s not to say that I’m not vain, self-conscious, peacockish when given the chance, a gaping wound of ego constantly starved for attention. It’s just that I’m a little less these things when I’m not confronted twice an hour by my own face. 

We’re besotted with faces already anyway. The emotions of entire nations tip on the demeanor communicated by the national equivalent of a conference call. Speaking extemporaneously in an entertaining manner is no way to run a country. And hopefully school won’t devolve into a CNN panel discussion, the teacher just an emcee, a sheep in Wolf Blitzer’s clothing. Prose is a more efficient means of information transmission. It’s more difficult to create. (So much easier just to talk and talk and talk.) But it blesses the reader with perspective, time, and silence. And it weeds out some of the bullshitters. 

I heard my son talking to a computer the other day. “Google Silver Surfer,” he said. 

“Type it in!” I hollered from the other room. “Practice your spelling by typing it in!” 

When I made it around the corner he looked at me like I was crazy.

Disaster Reading

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The first book I read this past week, the week when the world seemed to change, was J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. It was another one of those paperbacks forgotten on my shelves for years, bought somewhere along the road of bookworming life. I fully intended to read it, but unless one hops into a book immediately after purchase, the book has to ferment for a while, until the right circumstances of life obligation, mental weather, and raw will power coalesce to make the endeavor appear attractive again. And for some reason, this week was the week for Empire of the Sun.

The novel is a fictionalized version of Ballard’s own experience as a child during WWII, his idyllic life in the international settlement of Shanghai disrupted by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the settlement’s subsequent invasion by the Japanese army. After spending a couple of months scavenging through the wreckage of Shanghai, separated from his parents, Jim, the protagonist and stand-in for Ballard, is apprehended and sent to live in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center, where he stayed for the next three years until the war’s end. 

The book, soaked in death and deprivation and the rapid dissolution of civilization, is paradoxically a delight. Despite everything he has lost, Jim is rarely sad, rarely anxious. He is constantly resourceful and wily in his relationships with the grownups around the camp but also genuinely compassionate. He is somehow both entirely ruthless in his quest for another sweet potato and genuinely altruistic toward others. Perhaps the most morally interesting aspect of his character is how he admires the Japanese airmen, hoping to be one of them someday, and how by the end of the war he has become rather good at existing within it. He is entirely apprehensive about the end of the war because he has come to enjoy it. This echoes one of the central lessons of Tim O’Brien’s short story collection The Things They Carried, which is that war is horrible and yet also the most exciting experience possible, so that regular civilization afterward is a nourishing boredom. Perhaps it’s because of this competitive excitement that all war literature (and especially all war film) ends up being pro-war, no matter how noble its original intentions. Anything that dramatizes war helplessly glamorizes it at the same time. In this way someone like John Updike is one of the strongest anti-war writers because of his lifelong refusal to narrate it. He refuses to grant it his attention. 

I began reading the novel thinking it was a barely fictionalized version of Ballard’s own experience as a boy, a belief that grew shakier with each subsequent paragraph. After some Googling, I learned that the novel really is much more fictionalized. Though Ballard spent time in the camp at Lunghua, he never lost his parents. This is not a small revision. It’s Jim’s orphaned status (he is reunited with his parents at the end) that is the real inciting and exciting premise of the novel. All good children’s stories begin by eliminating the parents. It’s the doorway that leads to true adventure. 

This much wider fictionalized margin results in a more interesting book. It’s a novel that feels life-like. That is, it contains the almost random tugs and diversions of real life. It doesn’t communicate its architecture or themes overtly. It’s much more rangy than the movie version. Naturally, one might say, since most movie versions are much more structurally clearer than their novel source material. But still, for a novel it feels looser, almost journal like. There are even parts that are plainly dull, where the sense of adventure fades, where the plot, such as it is, circles back on itself. The reunion with his parents, his one goal throughout the novel, one which seems more and more unlikely, is oddly anticlimactic; they don’t appear on stage to do anything at the end. The plot satisfaction that their return might deliver is obscured by Jim commanding his old chauffeur, now re-employed, to drive him out to Lunghua one last time. The most convenient narrative tying up of loose ends is Jim’s quick reunion with Dr. Ransome. Ransome had been his chief mentor in the camp, in competition with Basie, the amoral and interestingly effeminate trickster figure who first takes Jim under his powdered wing near the funeral docks of Nantao. Their quick reunion, as Jim returns to the camp after wandering around the outskirts of Shanghai prior to the full arrival of American troops, is the most conspicuously convenient portion of the narrative. But even this is not given the full strings treatment. Paradoxically, where the plot would seem to yearn for Spielbergian rushes of music, Ballard draws back, skates on, moves to more interesting territory. It’s a strikingly unsentimental novel. 

Yes, yes, yes, but why now? Why this week, a week in which I have been unable to concentrate on anything more fully formed than the latest disaster headlines and the accumulating vapor of my own anxiety? Why read this novel now and read it with a sustained attention I’m rarely able to summon for anything else? 

Do I think our current situation and the outbreak of WWII in the Pacific are comparable? No, I don’t. And I think that’s in part why the novel was so alluring. It’s an escapism into the pure Known. All of the disaster that Jim witnesses and experiences is so visible, so easily comprehensible. Hunger, the loss of one’s parents, the constant threat of death by hostile forces — all terrible, but here, in this book, it makes sense. Whereas current American life does not make sense. We are living through an absence of sense, of concrete detail, of a stable narrative or narrator. We are in the land of as if. We are in a gap space of waiting to see what might happen, or at least at what scale events might happen, how bad it might get. And that unknown void is filled by the imagination (or, at least, by my imagination), and the result is horrifying. Each morning I awake and experience an ever shortening splinter of time where I am unaware of our new unreality. And then I remember. And then in the time it takes me to rouse myself and do some proactive domestic chore, I imagine all the horrible events that might happen: who might go to the hospital, who might die, how long this island-like life might last, what epoch-like economic tumult might transpire, what unvisited tributaries of calamity exist downstream. The mind is a terrible weapon. Anxiety is a kind of auto-immune disorder of the imagination. The ability to envision what might happen is mercilessly accelerated, so that one is paralyzed by all the proliferating mental possibilities. In fact, so much of my life doesn’t happen, because I am terrified of what might happen. I spend my days swinging between feeling utterly ridiculous and utterly terrified. In between I wash my hands.