A Matter of Perspective

The way I write is, I listen to things in my head, and then I copy them down. I memorize conversations and things like that; I seem to be able to do that pretty well. I suppose in that respect there's some improvisation, although I work over the stuff after I've got it down on paper. —Harvey Pekar

Most of writing, in my experience anyway, isn’t so much about assembling crackling, witty sentences as it is finding a topic worthy of crackling, witty sentences. Not that material is scarce, mind you. I haven’t yet written about the joys of playing bass or the miseries of owning cats, so those and their many brethren are still out there queuing patiently the way I expect some folks imagine souls lined up in silent ranks before swooping down from the heavens to inhabit a freshly fertilized egg. The problem is that choosing a topic is the first step in the editing process, and the editing process is where so many crackling, witty sentences go to die. I don’t mind editing, but it’s shocking to see how much material winds up on the floor. I’ve aborted far more words than I’ve allowed to live—probably by greater than an order of magnitude, and I’m hardly the butcher that I would be if I were paid to edit. And while many of those words could easily have served productive roles as the keystone of this essay or that, I can only write the essays I write, and as often as not, that fresh-faced, freckled young joke about the cockroaches in the bubble gum just isn’t the right fit for the tale of how I met my wife or whatever, so out it goes. And because I’m a disorganized mess, the leftovers just pile up like a hoarder’s newspaper collection, forever unused and unread until someone posthumously publishes Fletcher Moore, Notes and Errata, 1986-2069.

Selecting a topic means you have to start shaping things in your head. An essay, like a dog, has a middle and two ends, and as soon as you start thinking of your topic in those terms, you have to start thinking about proportions, lest your dog wind up just a torso with legs—though honestly such a dog would make a great pet; or a head and a butt stuck together—the worst possible pet. No indeed, if you write a forty-page introduction to a two-page argument, you’re going to leave a lot of readers rending their garments and gnashing their teeth. People don’t like things that are awkward and disharmonious. 

Life is often awkward and disharmonious, however, and packing it into neat little forms often feels somewhat dishonest. 

A part of me would much rather just sample from my subconscious like dipping a tin cup into a spring. I’m sure it would make for an atrocious read but it feels right, simply living in the moment and disgorging words as they arrive. It works in jazz; why not for writing essays? I returned recently from a week-long trip to the beach—my first in many years—and while I was there I was very much put in mind of the way in which the moment is just an interplay between anticipation and memory, the present merely providing an interface between the two. Everything is passing, always. Remember the cockroach in the bubble gum joke? History. What’s next? Well let’s see:

The ocean is all about the moment—the relentless, seemingly unchanging ebb and flow of the waves provides an illusion of timelessness, each wave a small variation of the previous one, the cycle extending infinitely into past and future. Of course, it is an illusion, and the oceans will end like everything else. But we can’t see that from our vanishingly tiny perspective. The beginning lies in some remote, unimaginable past, and the end in some remote, unimaginable future. For us it’s all just a torso dog.

Beach meat

Unfortunately this lack of perspective cuts two ways. The reassuring continuity of the crashing waves and drifting clouds tells us the gears are turning and that all is right with the world. In my particular corner, however, as I sat contemplating this on our penultimate vacation morning, I had begun to notice that this beach was a desert. For an hour as I lay on my blanket, scaling the fantastically purple prose of Francis Hackett’s Henry XIII at a luxuriously largo tempo, a cold realization had slowly begun to lap across my senses, triggering ancient alarms in my reptile brain, which my conscious mind finally grasped clumsily: there wasn’t a single goddamn animal within the compass of either my eye or ear. 

Neither fish of the sea, nor fowl of the air, nor indeed fucking cattle, not one single creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth crept upon that silent beach. Had climate change rolled into Flagler Beach, to mix it up with the Trump-flag waving cretins who sprinkle this otherwise lovely spot like mouse droppings on an ice cream cone? Would there be comeuppances and tearful admissions of complacency in the face of natural catastrophe? And then what? What’s the fun of being the guy that told Edward Smith to get his head out of his ass when you’re wallowing around in frigid waters watching the last cabin light go out?

Even as I sat there mesmerized by the collapse of human civilization, wondering whether I’d be part of that cuticle of humanity that would remain huddled around the embers for a few decades more or simply beach meat, a troupe of small white birds tumbled past like confetti. A pelican suddenly shot from the sky, a bolt of gray lightning, spearing some unfortunate fish. 

Ok so maybe it’s not a desert. Is it more of a desert than it was, say, twenty years ago? Well most places seem that way to me, but I know I’m biased and you can’t base public policy on the vague hunches of some rando who writes snarky little essays or, I don’t know, owns a bunch of casinos maybe? That’s what we have math and statistics and armies of ill-paid researchers for. 

I’m making light but those are amazing tools, virtually unknown for more than 99% of a million years of human history. They require seriousness of purpose and a certain amount of mental sweat to use and even to appreciate, but to twist Arthur C. Clarke’s famous formula, we possess technology sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. The great shame of humanity is that we seem to lack the capability to collectively grasp what these tools, these great magnifiers of our perspective, can tell us. It’s as though we stood at the base of a tall mountain, wishing we could see beyond the horizon but never bothering to scale the slopes. 

On Friday morning at a little after 11am, a bright reddish-orange spark rose up from the southern horizon, slowly climbing higher and higher, depositing a razor straight contrail that quickly expanded and deformed under the action of the wind. This was a Falcon 9 rocket, launched from Cape Canaveral under the auspices of the SpaceX corporation, the Weyland-Yutani of our world. It was the first manned mission undertaken by Elon Musk and his army of engineers, and in the contrast between the staggering achievement the technology represents and the trivial purposes to which it was being put that morning resides everything you need to know about the crisis of our time. The capsule contained four astronauts, one professional, the other three amateurs—tourists if we’re being honest—bound for the International Space Station where they’d be spending eight days dabbling in a capitalistic vision of the future; gobbling floating balls of champagne in zero-G. 

Now, I know there are plenty of people who will say that in order to gather the resources to do any of the serious science that keeps us from getting obliterated by an asteroid or, more prosaically, starved to death by the annihilation of bees, we have to cater to the fantastically narrow priorities of a class of wealthy assholes who see themselves as rugged adventurers in the mold of Ernest Shackleton had Shackleton allowed himself to be carried to Antarctica like luggage.

Maybe so, but any system that relies on warping our priorities until they resemble a Klein bottle is definitively not a system that is efficiently allocating resources. That means either that capitalism is a garbage idea or the capitalism we practice is garbage. I’ll leave it to professional economists to figure which is which, but I’ll just remark that whatever system we use to distribute our wealth very well ought to appreciate the miracle of perspective that is available to us (and not solely as it pertains to the price of a coveted stock six milliseconds hence). Or to put it another way: our collective survival is not an acceptable place to deposit negative externalities.

If you’re in a position to do something about this, please do.

Having said all this, allow me to return, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to the topic of topics. I found one and cut it to fit, making what I know is a glum point along the way. Relax. Watch the waves. Remember that the present is not itself temporal and contains within its timelessness an intimation of eternity. Remember that your existence is a process, not a thing. Or perhaps rather an eddy in a process—a set of processes which definitionally will continue forever. And finally, allow me to end this piece like a wave crashing ashore. Watch it flow up the beach, slowing mounting, seeking and briefly touching your toes. And then comes another. And another.

If you enjoy my fortnightly musings, please climb back up to the top of this page and—as my son says—smash the like button. I gather the likes and use them to patch the holes in my house wherein the cold wind attempts to enter and catch my feet poking out from under the blanket. You might also consider leaving a comment or sharing this piece with your aunt in Peoria, the one who collects antique jam jars shaped like bears.