Infinite Jest

The last few days I've spent in a sort of limbo haze.  While the weather has been deceptively summer-nostalgic, the news is terrifying and coldly discouraging.  Halloween is a mere hours away-- the costumed celebrators on the street seem oddly misplaced, and subdued.  As usual, it's everyone's opportunity to either hide inside a disguise or become the incarnation one has always craved.  Or feared.  

Down the block two of my neighbors were dressed today as a priest and a nun.  For some reason it was not amusing.  I'm too much of a Sunday sucker to cancel the urge to slightly kneel or cross myself in the presence of a holy robe.  I need this more than ever. The Jews may have had a September Day of Atonement, but Christians still have their weekly opportunity to clear their hearts.  The hourly bells remind me of my responsibility.  In the city, the sound of traffic and the sirens muffle their quiet melody.

In Manhattan most of us blend together.  Few wear their beliefs as a daily costume, and it's difficult without signs or flags to distinguish Palestinian sympathizers from Zionist demonstrators.  And all of us mourn the missing-- the dead and wounded-- the innocent.  In the preface to Election Day a palpable pall hangs over us all-- a kind of looming judgement.  We are both obliged and we are helpless.  While we freely protest and profess our allegiances, the fabric of our country is threadbare and shopworn. 

As a kind of preparation for the Oppenheimer film I'm still reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb.  It's a little terrifying to consider the options and political climate of a sort of 'winning' America at the end of World War II.  Not for me to judge the harsh decisions of 1945, but to better understand the roots of the Cold War that defined my childhood, and mushrooms into the difficult narratives that face our world today.  With all our technology and science, I have less faith in the capacity of this world to find some kind of balance.  Boundaries, threats, political greed and bullying blur the lessons of globalism and humanity.  We are once again at some brink-- several brinks. It interrupts our sleep.

Personally, I've had a week of long conversations-- phone calls from close friends, ex husbands... family.  They feel confessional and intimate... some necessary issues to face-- illness, deaths, decisions... but some simply a kind of need to unburden ourselves and share a personal moment.  At my age I'm so aware of the significance of time-- it both slows and quickens, and I suffer over hours lost, or a day without any output. There's so much to read, and to learn... and then there is football-- the World Series.  I have nothing against Taylor Swift but I prefer her on the entertainment pages, as an option-- not a newsworthy topic.

I can't help resenting the time-wasting 'panning' for information nuggets the media has required of us-- the massive sea of self-serving posts that blind and distract us like Halloween costumes on a subway. It's hard to know not just what is real, and harder to see what is right.  This takes a toll.  Even the pandemic which has shrunk to a lower priority level, still insists on some kind of daily media real estate. 

In the midst of yet another utterly senseless mass killing, the pressing migrant issues which the city is visibly wearing, a young teenage boy drowned in the East River; a man tried to jump from a bridge.  On the West Coast tonight, the actor Matthew Perry ended his life in a tub of water.   

While I never watched Friends, I am aware of the actor's long and public struggle with substances-- with emotional and mental challenges- -with happiness and disappointment and things that most of us don't get to think about, because we are busy surviving-- providing for children, riding a bus to freedom and opportunity, or fighting for our lives.  And still, this news shakes our human core-- the very celebrity largesse of it-- the way we all sigh and gasp and feel sad. 

The utter horror of the first nuclear bombings is beyond human comprehension of terror-- beyond the bloody, gratuitously cruel and violent Halloween movies, a genre of which I could never really fathom a purpose.  The aftermath and the historic future which followed seems to be rife with parallel issues, a world which is so uber-informed and so widely ignorant.

I read an article this morning written by one of David Foster Wallace's ex-girlfriends.  He was wracked with emotional issues, depressions, suicidal behaviors.  Some of them manifested in his work.  Many of us relate to these cultural heroes to whom we refer in solitary moments, like a dark room.

The church of Sunday, for those like me who are fortunate enough to be out of harms way, is a blessing in itself.  I file away the confessions of others, alongside those of my own, realizing I have become, as was suggested of David Foster Wallace, a lesser curator of loneliness.  I wander the rooms of other thinkers who were more clever and deeper than I, with a kind of universal prayer that somehow their lessons and failures will rise to the surface of our daily fare of global disappointments, that they will penetrate and become a window onto the blacker rooms of this moment.