I love it, but I’ll only have it on my own terms.
This is about Helen Hoover Boyle. Her haunting me. The way a song stays in your head. The way you think life should be. How anything holds your attention. How your past goes with you into every day of your future.
That is. This is. It’s all of it, Helen Hoover Boyle.
We’re all of us haunted and haunting.Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.
Laughter of the dead comes through every wall.
These days, this is what passes for home sweet home.You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound. You don’t win with a lot of treble.
This isn’t about quality. It’s about volume.
This isn’t about music. It’s about winning.
You stomp the competition with the bass line. You rattle windows. You drop the melody line and shout the lyrics. You put in foul language and come down hard on each cussword.
You dominate. This is really about power.Old George Orwell got it backward.
Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed.
He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled.
And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So just relax, Helen Boyle told me, and just enjoy the ride.You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you’ve tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.
There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it.Anymore, no one’s mind is their own. You can’t concentrate. You can’t think. There’s always some noise worming in. Singers shouting. Dead people laughing. Actors crying. All these little doses of emotion.
Someone’s always spraying the air with their mood.Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn’t see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love.
Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy them, but now they call this free will.Down through the ceiling comes a fire siren and people screaming that we’re supposed to ignore. Then gunshots and tires squealing, sounds we have to pretend are okay. They don’t mean anything. It’s just television. An explosion vibrates down from the upstairs. A woman begs someone not to rape her. It’s not real. It’s just a movie. We’re the culture that cried wolf.
The only biodiversity we’re going to have left is Coke versus Pepsi.
It’s just my generation trying to destroy the existing culture by spreading our own contagion.
In this heap of jewels, Helen Hoover Boyle would say, are the ghosts of everyone who has ever owned them. Everyone rich enough to prove it. All of their talent and intelligence and beauty, outlived by decorative junk. All the success and accomplishment this jewellery was supposed to represent, it’s all vanished.
People who believe in reincarnation are just postponing their lives.
To justify any crime, you have to make the victim your enemy.
After long enough, everyone in the world will be your enemy.After listening to Oyster, a glass of milk isn’t just a nice drink with chocolate chip cookies. It’s cows forced to stay pregnant and pumped with hormones. It’s the inevitable calves that live a few miserable months, squeezed into veal boxes. A pork chop means a pig, stabbed and bleeding, with a snare around one foot, being hung up to die screaming as it’s sectioned into chops and roasts and lard. Even a hard-boiled egg is a hen with her feet crippled from living in a batter cage only four inches wide, so narrow she can’t raise her wings, so maddening her beak is cut off so she won’t attack the hens trapped on each side of her. With her feathers rubbed off by the cage and her beak cut, she lays egg after egg until her bones are so depleted of calcium that they shatter at the slaughterhouse.
This is the chicken in chicken noodle soup, the laying hens, the hens so bruised and scarred that they have to be shredded and cooked because nobody would ever buy them in a butcher’s case. This is the chicken in corn dogs. Chicken nuggets.
This is all Oyster talks about. This is his plague of information. This is when I turn on the radio, to country and western music. To basketball. Anything, so long as it’s loud and constant and lets me pretend my breakfast sandwich is just a breakfast sandwich. That an animal is just that. An egg is just an egg. Cheese isn’t a tiny suffering veal. That eating this is my right as a human being.Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can’t understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our generation, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation’s clothes and hair suddenly retro.
I just love everything the same. Plants, animals, humans. I just don’t believe the big lie about how we can continue to be fruitful and multiply without destroying ourselves.
Building with wood, building on fault lines, building on flood-plains, each era creates its own “natural” disasters.
I say how maybe God didn’t start out by attacking and berating everybody who prayed. I say, maybe it was after years and years of getting the same prayers about unwanted pregnancies, about divorces, about family squabbles. Maybe it was because God’s audience grew and more people were making demands. Maybe it was the more praise He got. Maybe power corrupts, but he wasn’t always a bastard.
And maybe you don’t go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don’t do.
And from outside the locked car, muffled and fuzzy, Oyster yells, “You can flush me, but I’ll just keep eating shit.” He shouts, “And I’ll just keep growing.”
This is the life I got. This is the daughter I knew I’d lose someday. Over a boyfriend. Over bad grades. Drugs. Somehow this break always happens. This power struggle. No matter how great a father you think you’ll make, at some time you’ll find yourself here.
The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don’t participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of the audience.
All you can do is hope for a pattern to emerge, and sometimes it never does.
Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I’d always hoped for something better than that.What I’m talking about is free will. Do we have it, or does God dictate and script everything we do and say and want? Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we’re born? Do I have it, or is my mind under the control of Helen’s spell?
Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value. Imagine travelling the world until you’re bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melodramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away.
Do I really want a big house, a fast car, a thousand beautiful sex partners? Do I really want these things? Or am I trained to want them?
Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now? Am I just under a spell that says nothing is ever good enough?Mr. Eugene Schieffelin and his starlings, Spencer Baird and his carp, history is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.
“So if reality is all a spell, and you don’t really want what you think you want. . .” She pushes her face in my face and says, “If you have no free will. You don’t really know what you know. You don’t really love who you only think you love. What do you have left to live for?”
Maybe acts of God are just the right combination of media junk thrown out into the air. The wrong words collide and call up an earthquake. The way rain dances called storms, the right combination of words might call down tornadoes. Too many advertising jingles commingling could be behind global warming. Too many television reruns bouncing around might cause hurricanes. Cancer. AIDS.
We’re living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we’re left with this cluttered world of language.You are the culture medium. The host.
Some people still think they run their own lives.
You are the possessed
We’re all of us haunting and haunted
Something foreign is always living itself through you. Your whole life is the vehicle for something to come to earth.
An evil spirit A theory. A marketing campaign. A political strategy. A religious doctrine.
