another motel voice

The night is young and so are you, for now, though life drips away like sweat condensed on forehead, lips and back of neck.

Suspended arc on tungsten wick refutes the undeniable decay. Sophistry like magic worked with desiccated wood, your skin still sings a nocturne when transcendent hustles come off quick.

A fleeting blush of foolishness, physiognomy first kissed with promise, with confabulation brought to mouth like air sucked in by lungs that nearly drowned.

Tonight I mourn for squandered moons and crossings of the Thames, when bright with city’s cast off light the river shone purple, red and blue, true sodality in friendless night.

With drunken tear filled rippled depths and whispered dreams stashed on its banks, the black furrow flinches with the tide as I expel all abhorrence of my self. Retching done I grip the balustrade

Will Shade, "I Can't Stand It"

It’s easy to be cynical about the feting of the New Year, especially in the United States where the imperative to make New Years Eve an “event” is repeated as part of yet another monumental marketing campaign. Americans seem to have collectively lost the ability to think outside of their commodification. 

When I was younger I was cynical about New Years celebrations (and so many other things), feeling it was an arbitrary spectacle. And it is arbitrary – all of the ways in which we mark the passage of time are in an absolute sense. The act of marking time is, however, a social custom that is anything but arbitrary. To ignore that, or to reject it, is to deny something important – it is to separate oneself from the social rhythm. Even when that separation is needed, desirable, we should keep it in my mind – or I should.

We mark the passage of years in many personal ways – birthdays and anniversaries – but the celebration of the New Year is our most widely shared ceremony for marking the passing years.  The New Year celebration acts as our collective reminder of the passage of time, of the treasures that time steals as well as the promise of new experience awaiting us. To celebrate this is to affirm our human condition. We regret, grieve, resent and long for the past. We fear, hope, reject and put faith in the future.

Today I decided to celebrate the New Year alone, quietly, working and reflecting. Despite finding the celebration of our passage through the world worthwhile, beautiful, the imperative to make an event of the last evening in December pushes too hard, too fast. I was not ready to be pushed from one year to the next with such haste.

Just finishing Slowness by Milan Kundera, I was struck by two passages addressing the relationship between memory and speed.

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.” 

“When things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself.

When I described Madame de T.'s night, I recalled the well-known equation from one of the first chapters of the textbook of existential mathematics: the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting. From that equation we can deduce various corollaries, for instance this one: our period is given over to the demon of speed, and that is the reason it so easily forgets its own self. Now I would reverse that statement and say: our period is obsessed by the desire to forget, and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed; it picks up the pace to show us that it no longer wishes to be remembered; that it is tired of itself; sick of itself; that it wants to blow out the tiny trembling flame of memory.”

Kundera’s insight works on both the individual and social level. For me, I needed to savor the passage of years not speed through them, to remember rather than forget. I have been living fast for so long – in Kundera’s terms – because I have been trying to forget, have been giving myself over to the demon of speed, to avoid a confrontation with myself. 

Haste is a form of resentment for the past – and most resentment is born out of fear. There is much to fear in the past, I suppose. It always threatens to constrain us, yet at the same time the more we struggle against the past or deny its resonances the tighter it grips us, our self-constraint grows more profound. And while dwelling too deeply in the past is its own pathology, I think there is something to be said for allowing ourselves to linger, to look upon ourselves and our connections with some distance, a sense of the ambiguous nature of our selves and our experience. Trying to abandon the past or to analyze it in order to transform it both reinforce the bindings that tie us – I think the only way of approaching the past is by abandoning the control we seek to have over it. The feelings the past generates and reinforces can fade or change in a breath; the actions we thought necessary and right can seem rash and foolish even more quickly than our protean selves are reconfigured in the rush of our present experience. My 2012 was filled with experiences that I tried to run away from, experiences which pushed me back even further into my own past, which terrified me – but now, I am able to linger.

And why can I linger in this year with such ease? With such a laid back style? The answer to that connects these loose reflections to the social importance of Kundera’s observation. I am able to linger because the future seems inviting, open, promising – those feelings give us strength. Socially, in all the places I find myself that sense of promise seems lacking, it seems hope has been exhausted and that exhaustion has led to more haste. If we don’t know who we are, and are afraid of who we might be as much as who we might become, then Kundera is right that we have no choice but to give ourselves over to the demon of speed and move through this world, through our own lives, breathlessly and without stopping to linger to gather our strength; the strength we need for remaking lives and whole words in the years that are still awaiting our arrival – and eventual departure. 

“Singing don't let me into this year with an empty heart (with an empty heart). Don't let me into this year with an empty heart.”

Driving around Denver the past two weeks has reminded me how even the most simple daily activity – getting around the city – has a profound effect. When one is used to walking it is easy to take for granted the time you have to experience the people and objects we share our world with, the time you have to think and take in the world around you. While you’re driving there is no time for this. When we move at an inhuman speed we lose the details of the world. Over time we build the world around that inhuman speed – in Denver if you walk outside of downtown you quickly realize that nothing is made to pedestrian scale; it is a land of cars and those of us who might want to travel on foot are trespassers.

  To fill ourselves up we need to move more slowly. To feel strong enough to linger over the past we need to feel the promise of the future in our breast. To joyfully enter the future I find that I need to let myself fall apart and in piecing it all back together get to know the person who has emerged while I was too busy, moving too quickly.  

Many years ago I was a young man (maybe 19) in love with a young woman who could not open her heart to me. But I treated this unrequited love like a sin to be confessed, like a malignant growth to be removed, such that admitting it to myself was its own liberation – a liberation I found walking home on a cold 1st of January morning – much like today. I wrote a song about it:

“I want to do everything, live a thousand lives in one, to be scared, to take chances, the possibility of failure and pain. 

I’m walking home on New Year’s day. It’s been a long long time since the trees seemed so tall and the sky seemed so wide. And everything is full of possibilities.”

But even that youthful hope was poisoned in its way, by my too sure sense of my mastery of both past and future. My sense that my love was destined to be stillborn led me to feel heroic in admitting to it despite that inevitability (already a proto-Nietzschean), rather than to see that I maybe didn’t know my self so well and that for all my intelligence maybe other people could surprise me. It’s a funny logic that takes our lack of self-worth as the source for our sense that we have superior insight into how the future will work and a sure handle on the past. So, I suppose the other virtue we need to be able to linger and to find promise in the years to come is humility – a willingness to be surprised by ourselves and proven wrong by others.