The Madness of an Autumn Prairie Cold Front Coming Through (For Zo)

It's out there. It travels in pulses. No, it travels in waves. No: we don't know. Its mystery is like light itself. We just know it's there and we feel it. It enters us, jerks about, alters our thoughts, our actions, leaves us, and momentarily we feel the peace again, sitting on a riverbank or hugging our grandparents or running at 1 in the morning down a down a street with friends, and then it's back again.

Where does it enter? And how? Is it more prevalent in certain parts of the city? At certain times of days? In certain months? Do we control it? Is it us? When we turn everything off and sit in a dark room, do we still sense it?

Oh, this vibe that's out there and in here. How it shapes us!

-----

We are nervous.
We are out of jobs.
We can't quit the jobs we ha(t)(v)e.
We should have gotten our degrees sooner, damn it.
We (don't?) want to be bourgeois.
We pale in comparison to our elders.
We sentimentalize them, we know, we know.
Look: we can only be us.
We think it's all meaningless anyway, and we live passionately for vivid moments.
We can't sustain the passion nor the moments, however.
We know we shouldn't drive so much, but how else am I going to get there?
Maybe we should just stop caring. Screw it all, right?
But we can't. We've tried.
(We'll come back to that idea, though: "Maybe we should just stop caring.")
We don't believe in God.
We can't relate to those who do.
We want to. We want to believe in God, in SOMETHING, and we want to relate.
We know: just think about the moment.
We know: don't forget the past.
We know: set goals for the future.
We know: the purpose of life is to live it.
But.
But.
We're just trying to get the most out of all of this.

-----

Sixty-three years later, we still are Auden's "Age of Anxiety." No answer even remotely on the horizon. The existentialists would tell us to create our own meaning, but HOW? we would howl at them if they were still alive.

Jonathan Franzen gives us characters who don't know what to do, how to live. "Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake."

Arcade Fire yearns for the past in which we used to write letters, we used to wait, but now the homes we lived in our falling fast, or they're going to couples who don't copulate, creating lovely cities with no children. In one song they howl at us, "Now our lives are changing fast / Hope that something pure can last."

According to The New Yorker, the movie, "The Social Network," "hints at a psychological shift produced by the Information Age, a new impersonality that affects almost everyone... Karl Marx suggested that, in the capitalist age, we began to treat one another as commodities. 'The Social Network' suggests that we now treat one another as packets of information."

Some art respond nostalgically to the anxiety: Sufjan Steven's birdy-like voice and album covers; Mad Men's fetished aesthetics of skyscrapers, alcoholism, and power trips. Some art responds with irony. (Look how sad and absurd all this is!) LCD Soundsystem laments the boringification of New York while singing in a voice and melody reminiscent of Kermit the Frog; Breaking Bad asserts that the only way to get ahead in America now is making drugs.

The film, Up in the Air, responds with no answers, no tone at all. At the end of the film, the protagonist has all the freedom and solitude a man can have, but he absolutely no clue how to live. He has reached a ceiling of individuality and the vibe that's in him is a vibe that pesters us gradually and gradually more violently: Is it my selfishness that got me here? If so, how else was I to have lived?

-----

I wonder, in America, what weapon will better battle back this misty beast, this vaporous vibe, this smoky mala onda: money or art? A return to what's important or a new reckoning of what's so? And do we have the tools to do it, and do we have the will?