Books and Reading and Street Sounds

The library was filled the other day when I returned my books. I was the only person with a book in hand. Every person at the reading tables faced a computer, and almost all of those computers showed the familiar profile of Facebook.

For all of the focus and silence of reading, there is something less disconnected from other people about a person reading a book than about a person working on a computer. It is the same as the difference in relative realness between a long and intimate email and a short hand written note received through the mail. Interacting with the physical lends strength to physical living? Perhaps.

Perhaps it is that there is something innately comforting in the sight of a person interacting with something that is as tangible as a body. Or, that there is something discomfiting in the sight of a person interacting with something that is by definition bodiless.

The street outside is filled with the sound of shouting people. There are only three of them, but their voices are traveling through my windows with the force of a home run. There is goading and insulting and every now and then a conversation in the alley drifts across the others and I am confused, combining conversations into: “I’m walking in the alley, man!” “Are you gonna buy this?” “Where’d he go?” “Come out here! I’m on the porch, I can’t see you!”

It is all very not of me, and all very human, very physical, very much happening. The streets outside my building are quieter than I think they ought to be given the number and variety of people who inhabit these buildings and homes. A woman I spoke with suggested that once inside after supper, everyone goes to the Internet and just stays there. I don’t know if that’s true, but it could very well be. The streets are thus emptied of conversations and giggling and secrets and people walking and I don’t know if anything has taken their places. From what I hear it is quiet.  But like I said, it is really quiet.

I’ve been thinking about the dangers of isolation – about how you can go crazy always being in one place talking to almost no one else. Paranoia is easily spread in people who have no experiential proof of an outside that is not filled with cutthroats and gangsters. The more paranoid people become, the less likely they are to venture out. And the outside has room for the violent and disturbed because there is no one to provide the kind of social pressure that’s needed to keep that behavior out of the realm of public interaction.

It’s an old social dilemma. What city street has not known violence? What neighborhood has not feared for its children and elderly? How do you keep the crime off the streets where it is socially disruptive and lends to damaged people leading lives outside of a sustainable community?

Pretending that there is a way to end crime is extremely naïve and unsettling. Humans are asshats and always have been. The best you can hope for is a strong community ethic that does not have to rely on Community Contracts or fascist walled neighborhoods and prohibitive rules of behavior developed from advertisements for socially conscious economically irresponsible upper middle class families. I may not dig being poor (low-income, baby) but I have more freedom of movement and less social restrictions on my travel and activities than I remember having when the world I moved in was less, um, economically restricted.

I’m thinking that I may start going to the library just to read. I’ll pick out a book that may or may not be there the next time I go, and I’ll take notes in one of my little books for that purpose, and I’ll just read. I will be a human body interacting with a textual body in a place filled with other human bodies living their lives.

Eco & The Temporalz [sic]

The note on my phone reads: “Temporal dissonance [sic] exists, however there is no rule that it is required to live in one time frame at a time, the deciders of the dominant time frame” I could not take the time find the semi-colon, or apparently to spell words correctly, or to finish the thought before I couldn’t recognize it anymore.

I live in the world by walking and construct the bits of ideas that I leave for my memory and creative resources in ways similar to sign posts or intersections or landmarks. They are built with the intention not of telling me where I am or where I was when I thought the thing, rather they build for me a world out of images and sounds and references to things no longer at hand, but frequently retrievable wherein I can locate the trail of the thought I started to have before I was required to do something like board the bus.

Also, I forgot my pen. 160 characters do not do very well, but they can sometimes be made to see reason.

That thought joined the germ of a different but similar thought that float into the baggage of my travel experiences over the winter. My traveling companions and I remarked on what looked to us like overlapping time periods: the clothing and transport of what is usually called a bygone age next to and frequently in conversation with that of what we think of as contemporary. They do not ignore each other, they are not isolated from each other; they exist side by side. I refuse to say that it is comfortable or without problem. Partly the refusal is sheer practicality; partly it is a lack of any meaningful experience in the middle of those interactions. Traveling can very easily befuddle the mind. I was fortunate to travel with very well-defined beloveds and so escaped many of the flights fantasy offered.

I have found that something like it is a fairly pervasive thought, not unfed by the kind of conversational statements that remark on how quickly things move in modern times, or how Mrs. Devonshire down the street seems stuck in the 20’s or how very chic the living room of the lovely young couple next door is, and how very 50’s they seem (barring the period’s overtly represented misogyny and racism as they are a mixed race lesbian couple)(civil engineers, no less).  Nostalgia holds such a place in conversation and personal definition that I won’t even bother myself with examples.

Today it was Umberto Eco’s fault. And that, my loves, is always a good thing. My bus reading was from his collection of essays titled Travels in Hyperreality. Once you get past the cleverness (which is still brilliant and pointed and thoughtful, but clever is clever), you find yourself knee deep in Middle Ages glop and delightful muck.

The essay titled “The Return of the Middle Ages” proposes 10 different ways that the Middle Ages have been and are still defined and used by various personalities, movements, etc. In it, Eco also reminds us that there are two different and distinct time periods referred to when speaking of the Middle Ages (one cool, one overexposed)(my opinion entirely)(but you know I’m right). The essay is exquisite and I highly recommend its reading.

The passage that got me started pecking away at my dying qwerty is this:

“Assuming that the Middle Ages can be synthesized in a kind of abstract model, to which of the two does our own era correspond? Any thought of strict correspondence, item by item, would be ingenuous, not least because we live in an enormously speeded-up period where what happens in five of our years can sometimes correspond to what happened then in five centuries. Secondly, the center of the world has expanded to cover the whole planet; nowadays civilizations and cultures and various phases of development live together, and in ordinary terminology we are led to talk about the ‘medieval condition’ of the people of Bengal while we see New York as a flourishing Babylon.(74)”¹ (emphasis mine)

Temporal dissonance without a uniquely determined time period distributed to individuals. I can live in a world without the internet and with my Snoopy touch tone telephone with its lamp (sorry, my sister, but after this long, it is totally mine). I can see still dirty and smelling of horse cowboys in a mall talking on cell phones. A man on a motorcycle can stop to chat with a man driving oxen pulling a cart. Veiled women walk down the street talking to women with bare heads. It is not simply a cultural thing, is it?

We place tradition firmly in a time period. I am of the 70’s academic world, because that is the tradition that raised me. In this home, there is nothing sleek outside of the boy cat.

I digress.

The dominant time period. It is a very giving-in-to-the-notion-of-patriarchy thing to say, and I recognize that, but as a model, it does provide some illumination. I find the easiest expression of that in fashion. What time period does your fashion represent? You cannot say that it is classic, because that is as fluid as hemlines and pant-leg widths. What time period does your boss’s fashion represent and how successful is that person in your field? What about your mentor? Your family? Your best friend or worst enemy?

What about your attitudes? What time period did you dig them up in? Antiquity. Define it. Post-war philosophy. Which war? And, more importantly, how do these attitudes work within the context of your day to day life? Do they and you come into conflict with people dressed in the style of a different day, behaving with the expectations of a different tradition?

My thesis is still unformed, but it has to do with the rejection of the dominant time period among those who have the resources to rebel, and the innate inability of others to participate in the dominant time period based on the resources available to them and the specific traditions of their jobs, living places and relationships. It is a very rude thing, after all, to dismiss the opinions of those who believe themselves better by declaring that they are temporally meaningless.

¹ Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Harcourt Brace & Co., New York, 1986. 307 pages.