Still Sundays
August 5, 2012.
Digital Dark Age. Walt Whitman.
It’s a summer Sunday drenched in humidity. The scorching heat season just began in New York. In August. Almost two months later than when summer is supposed to start. We turn our clocks back and forward to catch time, when will we turn our calendars forward for climate?
The recent full moon was a chisel for a hardened past that needed to dissolve to dust.
I used to write, “If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please click here,” and provided a hyperlink that took you back in time to what I then understood. How naïve! How human to have these preconceived ideas about what things are and how things should look and what they might become. I now treat these essays like one ought to raise a child: with love, unconditional love, for whatever he or she “becomes,” as long as one is capable of supporting the child. I experience this love from my mother. How lucky, indeed. What can one not do with that kind of love?
When you tap into this mysterious source of Stillness anything is possible if you stay long enough.
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Yesterday I went on a bike ride. It was my first time in Manhattan. I am still enjoying the exhilaration: the triumph over traffic, no dragging of joints on a hot summer day, skipping crowded buses and the delayed trains. Riverside Park is huge! I had no idea. It has layers upon layers too. It meets the Hudson River at one end where there is an amazing bike trail but up the hill there are other trails underneath a canopy of lush green trees.
Every time I think I am ready to leave New York City something happens and I ask: where will I find so much variety again? The answer: everywhere, especially California. Why do we live where we live other than friends, jobs, family? Maybe certain places are indeed our karmic debt land. But karma is constantly changing. Or so I am told.
Prior to the bike ride I had a coffee—two—and a croissant at the Silver Moon Bakery in the Upper West Side neighborhood. No matter how many cafes are available they can never scratch the itch for Paris.
There I overheard different conversations:
“We are not product people.”
“I am switching my holistic hair dresser.”
“It isn’t that I don’t like her. It is just hard to see how she nags Scott.” To this the listener, the friend seated across, responded, “That’s because she is his wife. That’s what wives do. You mean you dislike her because she reminds you of yourself.”
One day I will ask my Fiction 8 Ball in which story do these phrases belong?
It’s all one big story.
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I don’t have cable television anymore. I still get internet and the basics. It’s still too expensive. As long as I get NY 1 I am good (a typical New York statement).
Anyway, to my surprise, I discovered that Al Jazeera news channel was included in my minimal package. I have read news articles via Al Jazeera but have never watched it. What coverage! I was most fascinated by the fact that it was still sad, horrifying bad news (beyond the United States), but I didn’t feel sad, bad or anxious when I heard it. I couldn’t pin why this was until I caught one of their music shows where they cover development of music scenes in other countries. Al Jazeera’s news coverage was devoid of opinions. There was just reporting. There were no pundits with their views and when this was the case it was not considered news. What a concept! What a relief. I don’t have to skip out on an aspect of our current human reality.
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If I was a kid in the future reading the history books describing our current era as the “Digital Age” I would be very confused.
In my kid-mind digital sparkles and blinks, like a glow in the dark watch. The events reported would reference yet another dark age. The original dark ages were characterized by “the concept of a period of intellectual darkness and economic regression.” Believe it or not —I didn’t want to—there already exists coinage of “the digital dark age” but it is only characterized by not being able to find anything uploaded, recorded, stored in a digital format. In the August issues of The Sun Magazine there was a short brilliant article that is a must read: “The Things They Googled.” It originally appeared here and you can read it there in its entirety.
I have thought about exploring a fiction piece on this theme about the day after the Internet. Whether or not I actually write it, the germ cell now exists for anyone to create it to completion. Ideas are not stolen necessarily, they are taken care of.
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Gaby Douglass’s mother filed for bankruptcy. Ryan Lochte’s parents house is being foreclosed. No amount of Olympic gold medals can provide them the security to just live. Some would say this is America, you are on your own here, the American Dream is all about making things happen for yourself, may the best man or woman win.
I think about these American Olympic gold medalists and I suppose why should their families’ personal lives alter for the better just because of winning a gold medal or setting a world record? There are many others from countries where electricity, running water, and even malaria remains a problem. There is no reporting about their parents living in shacks.
Maybe I shouldn’t think of them in the same light given this is the grand United States of America, the most developed, powerful, country in the whole Universe. But I can’t help it.
I also think about a time when education was about learning, not getting into top tier schools that don’t even provide a vocation now unless you know someone.
I didn’t drop out of college because education was very important in my family. My parents came from a culture where education was esteemed highly and set aside for the privileged so they were grateful for an opportunity where anyone could become anything. That’s because their upbringing and schooling in third-world-left-over-top-British academic institutions was synonymous with higher learning, associated living, questioning.
Where are you, America?
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich.
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
(“America” by Walt Whitman)
What would Walt say? I think he said it all while he lived. I wish people still used literature as self-help.
This hyped noise about self-publishing and independent publishing: does anyone not recall the history of Walt Whitman?
I consider those who read my words leaves of grass, singing their version of a song of myself, under the splendid, silent sun.
What more can I ask for?
Gratitude.
~a.q.s.
Where are you America? To some extent, America is in waiting. It has yet to fulfill its original promises. But it’s there in those promises that many have struggled to fulfill. That’s something. But I prefer not to call this the “American Dream”. That phrase, to my ear, is corrupted.