By Marc Porter Zasada
Like many in the present age, I now do much of my work from a bedroom at the back of my home. Often, it’s just me and my small electric window on the world, staring at one another long into the dwindling afternoon.
You might think this a peaceable scene, but of course it’s not. Not only am I engaged, IM-to-IM and flame-to-flame, with colleagues and clients on four continents, but I am by digital extension part of every conflict and tragedy that passes, wavelike, around the globe: Not just wars and riots, but strange killings, stranger escapes, bitter posts in reply to angry posts, and the countless celebrity missteps which appear in scrolling lists and bright pop up boxes on my screen.
Always there are more of these little boxes, but I do not complain. Like privacy, I know that peace is no longer available to humankind. Nonstop terror and distraction have become just regular life, like the weather or old age. In the Middle Ages, only fools complained about the pervasiveness of the Catholic Church. Today, only fools complain about the inescapability of Twitter or Facebook or RSS feeds.
Still, one would occasionally like to push aside the foam and froth, and find the peaceable ocean hidden beneath the waves. Or if not actually to find that peace or see that depth or know any kind of fuller truth—such experiences having become impossible—then at least, to hear again the rumor of their existence.
This afternoon, as five o’clock rolls into six and I light my bedroom lamp, my middle son begins practicing piano. He’s far off in the living room, but the opening of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata radiates through the house again and again, again and again, again and again.
At first I groan about the added chaos. At first I say to myself, “Surely this is the one too many distractions.” To focus my attention, I put on my big, isolating headphones—and soon the voices of far-off colleagues begin booming like spurious gods, directly in the center of my head.
Says Hera to Zeus: “What the hell’s happening with that project in Japan?”
Zeus, gleefully sharing his screen, replies, “Hear my thunder and see my lighting.”
And yes, the Urban Man replies to the gods with dramatic words. And why not? Like the comment-posters on unnumbered websites, I know that dramatic words carry better across the Internet. It doesn’t matter if those words make peace and understanding less possible, because we have all agreed that peace and understanding are impossible.
“The whole thing is f—ed up,” say I into my little microphone.
“You bet it’s f—ed up,” shouts Hera into my brain.
Still, beneath it all—I mean even as yet more colleagues open chat windows across the bottom of my screen; even as some irrelevant new disaster overtakes a country in an upper right hand corner widget; even as I hear of riots passing across a city in a lefthand crawl; even as a pop star gets arrested on a Twitter pop-up and a congressman resigns live on MSNBC—the opening of the Moonlight Sonata just keeps on coming on: that famously dark and pervasive three-note motion supported by the enormous bass chords—a motion suddenly interrupted by Beethoven’s firm right hand as if he suddenly recognized the melody that underpins everything: “Ah yes,” he seems to say, “that was the tune all along.”
And briefly I think, “What if Beethoven was right? What if life is actually not just terror and distraction, but even in the present time, and even if we were to open a thousand windows on our computer screens, including five hundred Facebook pages, two hundred Twitter feeds, one hundred blogs, six dozen YouTube channels, eleven angry strings of talkback commentary, and unnumbered simultaneous VOIP channels—what if some enormous and coherent melody will someday prove to underlie it all?”
What if we, ourselves, could pick out the tune?
Off in the living room, my son returns to the beginning of the Moonlight Sonata, trying one more time to get it right. In the center of my head, the voices of spurious gods continue to shout, but I no longer focus on their words.
Copyright © 2011 Marc Porter Zasada. All Rights Reserved.
Well said, Urban Man. I am glad to see that I am not the only one noting the absurdity of communication that moves to fast to have any meaning. I trust you will continue to tune out the static and bring us clear ravings about our age.
This is great.