Tonight’s one of those nights I could easily stay up until tomorrow, work each minute, and never get it all done. The same could be said for the next three weeks. So tonight, instead of driving straight to the studio after seminar, I parked my car near home and took a walk.
The air was lovely. I wore shorts and a jacket and the breeze that ran between my legs felt like nights in Spain or Nantucket. Like places that I’ve never had anything to do but walk and remember the air. I walked down Maryland, lined with dozens of peopled tables with empty chairs I’d have been happy to occupy, taking up any given conversation in its current form. Yet I didn’t want to talk, I’d rather talk with my eyes to each person that looked. I’d rather think about what their eyes said to me.
I turned on Euclid and walked between shadows and street lamps, peeking at the new leaves in the dark cyan sky, inspired by the ease with which the evening exhaled upon itself. As if the street itself was warm and docile with two glasses of wine. I stopped by a store that sold mainly things, and in the display window encountered a presentation of inflatable globes, fur swans, and rubber duckies. Each lined in alternating rows.
For maybe three minutes, I watched those manufactured gems not move, tranced by Mr. Ben E. King faintly whaling from the patio of a bar across the street. No I won’t, he said. The ducks did nothing but stay. Be afraid, he continued. I loved the strings in that song, always had. Just as soon as they swelled I remembered the way I used to see things, as a kid. The mountains and trees were places beyond the pale of reality, but places that really lived. Where campfires, romance, and the infinite took place, in the fading hours of evening. Behind lakes without names and laughter with my sisters.
Now I know those places aren’t real. Not the way I knew them. Back then my belief in many things was borne out of the Hollywood stand-ins I was given in the form of VHS tapes made real by Rob Reiner and Steven Spielberg. And time was all mixed up, some part of me believed that if I drove far enough into the trees I’d reach a place that looked like the thirties, where all men wore hats. Sure I knew they were movies, but I also knew that the Man from Snowy River was off some place working things out, and that if I wanted, I could take a trip down the tracks and sing shimmee-shimmee-cocoa-pop, shimme-shimmee-rock into the deep forest with River Phoenix and the rest of them. My life was pretty enough for me to ignore the difference between it and its fantasies. I was living decades before the word simulacra would mean anything to me. Authenticity wasn’t a notion either, much less the impossibility it is today. Magic was real and I didn’t call it magic.
Life could always be like the movies, until the childhood notions that mixed the two were given a name. They told me it was called nostalgia, and growing up made me hate those feelings with a love that would never let me forget them. Maybe like the way some people despise Jesus even though they still barely believe. Or like the way we hear thunder when it’s close and new, almost as if it were the first time. But we never let on, we refuse to animate ourselves with the thrill inside. It’s only thunder, and thunder’s old. I know I’m not the only one with what they call a child inside. I know you play songs over and over, I know you lose yourself in the first movies you ever saw, no matter their quality. Yet it’s a religion made of solitary individuals, hidden from daily view, and laughed at when it’s loud.
These people, we fools, are young but growing older. Our childhood is full of cinema and not books. And for years now, we’ve been coping with a reality that the movies never promised. Or, we’re slaves to new forms of simulation we’re entirely unaware of. Be it a news source, a spouse, ownership or religion. The theater taught us how to believe.
Is there any such thing as authentic experience? Are there any vestiges of the pure? I suppose there may be, but the moment we find them our expectations of authentic and pure instantly taint them before they can begin. And the most sacred moments are the most ravaged of all. In the case of love, try a first kiss without letting your subconscious refer to every romance you ever saw. In the case of nature’s sublime, try not playing music in your head. Try to see with your own eyes rather than the camera that watches you encounter the vista. Go fight a war without heroes or Nintendo. We’re all but incapable, and the youngsters won’t even understand the crisis. The only true vestiges are the oldest generations, their vision uncorrupted.
My eyes though, and the younger eyes below me, soon to rule, belong to something else. The omnipresent screen hasn’t killed our imaginations as the books promised. No, it’s sold it, recycled it, replaced it. An imagination of hyperlinks. A reality without one node that points only to itself. Baudrillard, that bastard, was right.
Just last year, in an ice cream parlor down the street, I told a girl she could be certain our story was finally through. We agreed that it was there, as a particular song coincidentally played, and we tried our best at bittersweet friendship, that the end-credits would roll across our face, coming up from the floor. A tear-jerker with no sequels guaranteed, the very best kind of story.
It must have been my third minute of ducks, swans, and inflatable globes in the window that a stronger breeze interrupted my thoughts. My brain told itself to shut up, for God’s sake, and it tried its very best. The music made it easier. Mr. King still whaled and I finally heard the chorus, a repeated line that I had momentarily forgotten. Those three words that hit me with memories of the things I’d see when I’d drift to sleep with the tape playing through. Some moonlight love I’d have when I grew just a little bit older, where proclamations of courage and forever would be made. I wouldn’t cry either, like the song promised, so long as she stood by me. She being some mixture of Tracy Gardner and Hollywood’s most prominent beauties. My darling darlin.
Course as a kid, the song seemed a bit apocalyptic, I never thought the sky would tumble and fall. Now that it can, and now that the mountains in my mind have truly crumbled to the sea, those three words mean all that I never expected. Cause now that it’s so hard to be stood by, and sometimes so hard to stand at all, I realize there is but one remnant of the real. One legacy to keep the hearts of those who’ve truly confronted today’s quiet horrors. And that is companionship. Love between two souls may be the most simulated thread of human experience, but it’s also the only thing that holds any two souls from true despair. If the last century can be known for its death, and ours can be known for its greedy embrace of capital, I’d say being stood by can be counted as life’s finest treasure. It may not be the sun, but it stands a chance of being the dim and feeble light on Plato’s cave wall. It’s the true companion that always saves us. We’re only automatons if we can do without each other.
It only took a song, a top ten hit in 61 and 86, to remind me. A song that accompanied a movie, a song that accompanied a five-year-old. A song produced and packaged for me and a million others. But it was only me, on that exquisite night in 2006, finally aware of the space on either side of him. Mr. King sings that chorus so many times, he asks and asks. As if she can’t hear him, as if she isn’t there.