Acceleration

 Each paragraph of this piece should be read faster than the previous paragraph.

Acceleration

Imagine the fall of the French monarchy at the end of the 18th century. Blood trickling down the cobblestone streets, heads in powdered wigs toppling like melons from the apex of a pyramid of produce. On this side of the Atlantic, no one would know about it for weeks, maybe months, as news drifted langorously across the ocean with the fickle winds. The captain of a sailing vessel idly mentions to his first mate that he has heard murmurings about a Corsican of short stature whose influence is on the rise in Paris. After the ship docks in Boston, a pre-industrial game of telephone ensues, so that people in Hartford hear that a Sicilian midget is waiting in the froggy imperial wings. By the time the rumor reaches New York, the upstart has become a short-haired Maltese, causing some people in New Jersey to hold fast to the belief that the new Emperor of the French will be a cat. News of events beyond the salons of Europe never reaches America at all, the only thing entering the country from southern latitudes being microorganisms nesting comfortably in the fetid clothing of sailors, much like their swine flu descendants only at a more leisurely pace. Information is power. No one knows anything.

Now along comes the 19th century with the mournful aria of the train whistle keening across the empty prairie over the percussion of the locomotive clacking along the tracks. News of the California Gold Rush travels fast enough to stimulate the salivary glands of bankers in New York. Steamboats on the Mississippi bring cotton upriver and slaves downriver, each one with his own story, her own song. In this way, the pain and the stain spread like red dye in a load of white laundry. Crusading journalists seize the opportunity to mold public opinion. People who have the advantage of literacy swallow newspapers with their morning pancakes. They argue fervently about abolition, about the Union, about the future of the young country. The telegraph and the transatlantic cable drive the pace of information, now mechanized and encoded for the first time into dots and dashes. A certain distancing creeps in. The French and the Germans are fighting again. What else is new?

Still, the excitement of sharing the story is spreading and the tempo is picking up. Promenading above the scramble for bread there is a class of people with access to an instrument that can be held up to the ear and mouth enabling the miracle of disembodied conversation. Lives are saved. Gossip travels more rapidly across town. A box on the kitchen table sings to you and transports you across the miles to the scene of sporting events. In short order, the box replaces the table itself as the altar of family life. On the ground, horses are put out to pasture as more and more people are swept up in the erotic energy of the automobile. It takes you where you want to go. It knows no boundaries save the water's edge. You can have sex in the back seat. And if that's not enough speed, soon you will cruise over the grid of cornfields and dairy farms of the American heartland and at night over the glittering mica chips of the electrified cities below. Soon, every town will have its Bijou or Roxy where people more beautiful than we are will hold sway in the dark, all eyes fixated on their exceptional faces, all hands mining for pleasure in the adjoining seat, all mouths struggling to breathe in the desire and popcorn-infused air. After the Second War that some of our fathers fought in or nearly starved in, there will be television and soon there will be images of maimed soldiers and refugee marches and orphaned Asian children in your living room on your Zenith. There will be more information, but also more disinformation, more merchandising, more fantasy, more self-doubt.

But all this is only the preamble to the torrent of data that will come when the entire country, indeed the entire world, becomes enmeshed in a web of bits and bytes arriving simultaneously from all directions, all of us gleefully interconnected all of the time to the global anxiety of the 24-hour news cycle, the world-wide pornography market, the opportunities to make money or lose money at spectacular speed, the images, the videos, the blogs like this one, the tweets. Information is power, but is it oxygen? Can you breathe it?

Now, blood again, everywhere. Brown blood, white blood, black blood, all red. People in ugly Christmas sweaters stuffing cookies in their mouths gunned down by Tashfeen, our first A-list mass shooter who also happens to be a mother. Tashfeen and Syed, rampaging out of the southern California nowhere with their arsenal of semi-automatics. Video cameras scanning the horizon, documenting rafts stacked with bodies sinking in the freezing Adriatic. A caliphate rising out of the rubble as xenophobic Europeans close their borders to refugees and nativist Americans work to disinfect our country from the perceived Muslim infestation. Screaming, fear mongering, chest thumping like drunken football fans, all of them. Giant Macy's parade inflated balloons of ISIS jihadis, Trump, Assad, Putin all pumped full of testosterone hovering above the desperate, the hungry. Everyone who is anyone macho posturing. Oceans rising, drought advancing, whole species vanishing. Ukraine not even worth a few column inches. Black men executed in the street. Guns in every kitchen cabinet cuddling up to cornflakes. Life is cheap and even we who were born lucky into white America are drowning in the dystopian deep end and a lot faster than we were before. Is it possible to dam up the river of incoming information for just a week, a day, to shoot the shit instead of one another, to talk about nothing much?

Acceleration is a version of a 2012 piece. The last section has been updated to reflect the current news noise.

No Time Like the Present

Let me tell you about seventy. It's a time approaching the outer reaches of the imagination, nesting between your hard working middle years and the coming depredations of old age. You are visited by a gathering party of imperfections, eyesight dimming, conversation punctuated by the what? what? of hearing loss. You wake up with a stiffness in the thoracic spine, a dicey corner where the backbone meets the neck. To get past this stiffness, you are required to do a series of stretches, one that you're partial to because it makes you feel like a Balinese dancer which you most assuredly are not. Nouns, especially proper nouns, have deserted the sinking ship of your brain. In your more philosophical moments, you explore the deep meaning of this, the way the mind retains verbs, the act of weeding the garden, but does not always recognize the word trowel. Verbs seem to be primal, how you move, what you do, a window into your animal nature. Nouns are the window dressing that you can do without or look up on Google.

Nonetheless, you have somehow succeeded in writing a novel entitled Otherwise. This book dives headlong into the murky swamp of your past, dragging it kicking and screaming into the unsuspecting present. You visit fictionalized versions of your Upper West Side Jewish family, the airless narrow passageways you navigated growing up in the well-dressed sliver between Central Park and Riverside Drive, the biggest small town in America. You watch in amazement as tsunamis of sixties sexual exploration, political upheaval and spiritual searching wash up on the shore. You see your protagonist, Lily Ginzburg, make a life for herself using the materials at hand, an unmarried aunt "part ragpicker, part chorus girl," an Irish Catholic spiritual director who urges her to invite God to lunch, and her Italian-American husband, who in his being demonstrates daily that a great world exists outside of her own limited experience.

You had to arrive at seventy to articulate these themes, to reach out and touch Otherness. Despite forgetting the names of people you meet on the street in Stockbridge, you seem to have an enhanced memory of the sense of things from the past. You can feel the claustrophobic space of a self-service elevator where a teenage boy assaults a little girl. You can smell the stale air of the Amtrak train where Lily first meets Charlie. You can taste the Christmas Eve arancini and see in your mind's eye Charlie's slow motion  fall from the ladder he had climbed to decorate the sukkah. You can explore your inner vision, even while your eyesight is weakening.

The line between life and art is becoming blurry as well. Here you are in the glory of your grandmahood sending out your novel. The familiar cloud of uncertainty, the sense that your life was dripping down the drain, that you had failed to make something of yourself, has suddenly cleared. It occurs to you that you always wanted to be an archaeologist. You always wanted to dig and dig, interpret and interpret. And now, here you are at seventy somehow enjoying the opportunity to make meaning out of your own life, an antidote to the mayhem all around you. But you cannot make meaning if you keep the past tied up in ribbons of nostalgia. You have to unwrap it, examine it, play with it, shape it and give it language. You have to make art. You could not have done this when you were younger. You did not have the courage. Now, it seems, there is nothing to lose and only awareness to gain.

This piece was originally published in The Berkshire Edge.