Page Two: Getting Our Bearings
The world is far bigger than it might seem
By Louis Black, Fri., May 7, 2010
April has long been noted as the cruelest month, but for any number of years now it has been instead the most frail and least assertive of months, lacking definition and characteristics. For a couple of decades, every new year has been dominated from its first day by the build-up to South by Southwest. Consciousness, having been overamped, clings for a week or two after the Festival, though by the beginning of April there comes a certain blankness, as though all five senses have gone on vacation. Although nothing has definitive form, as all blurs into shades of gray with some splotches of color, it is not blindness. Although it is hard to hear, it is hardly deafness, as it also is even harder to understand whatever has been heard. Senses are not lost; they are used up. They need to recharge.
Just speaking neither brings answers nor seeks cure. More often than not, it is meant to disrupt the quiet, though the quiet and stillness were deliberately sought. Desire at first encourages speaking, way too much, and then sends it away. Writing is not speaking, as words and sentences dictate different rhythms and silence can't be heard.
Now, May 1 is an artificial marker – but a marker nonetheless. All things come back into focus: It becomes immediately obvious that winter is over, spring has begun, and summer is near.
For many years, these days in Austin served as a prelude to a total tonal change during the summer months. Then, the pace of life slowed down. Austin was smaller, so the fact that there were far fewer students in town was noticeable to all. There was a style to living with heat – a style not based on daily siestas but on a general slowing down. The world shifted to a slower speed.
When I lived in Vermont three decades ago, snowstorms in the winter changed the pace, structure, and goals of day-to-day life. It was understood by all that snow was never an excuse for dishonesty (if one could make it to work one did – not having one's life disrupted by the snow was a badge of identity Vermonters prized). But it was also understood that if travel was foolish, then travel should not be undertaken.
The extremes of heat and snow were regulators of lifestyle, especially ambition and expectation. In the middle states where I was raised, the heat was rarely enough to stun one into slowness; the snow, though briefly intense, was never so consistent as to change the style of daily life.
Now Austin has changed. The summer affects, but only as an affectation, a mild hobby, or as if one had left something crucial at home that is not remembered until later in the day. It is there, and it can be a factor, but it no longer swathes the town in purple silk to be swum through at a more leisurely pace.
Textures have been more or less obsessing me of late. In so many ways, rather than cataclysmic events, serious political and social crises, and/or staggering life changes, they seem to be shaping life, perception, beliefs, and human interaction far out of proportion to their magnitude. There is no way not to acknowledge a deep, widely held nervousness or fear or uncertainty (whatever you will) currently seeming to be affecting much of the population. There have been terrible and terrifying economic upheavals, natural catastrophes seem to be far more routine than in the past, racial and social tensions are as obviously more pitched than they've been in decades, and the world situation feels unusually perilous.
Whether this is actually so is open to all kinds of debate. Whether there are actually more cataclysmic natural events is open to the sources you use. In general, there seems to be agreement that the number of earthquakes is normal, though the intensity and frequency of hurricanes is open to more discussion. Many interpret increased natural upheavals as being connected to divine intervention. In China, past generations believed in the "mandate of heaven," which dictated that if what was perceived of as an unusual number of natural disasters and unanticipated weather extremes occurred, it meant that the powers that be in the heavens had lost faith in the current emperor or empress. Dynastic change was not out of the question.
In the West, the occurrence of accelerated and increasing numbers of natural disasters is interpreted by different religions in different ways, but almost always they are taken to indicate the deity's conscious intention, tied to some kind of significant change. The current, seemingly crowded calendar of natural disasters is taken by many as a certain sign that the end of days and the rapture are near.
Isolated from history, it may seem like an inordinate ringing of the bells of chaos and disaster is occurring. But history does nothing if not leaven the present. The idea that natural events were tied to the mandate of heaven occurred in China around 1000BC. Since the earlier days of Christianity, as well, natural and political events have been taken to indicate that the end of days and rapture are at hand.
Begin by keeping in mind that Jesus Christ is regarded as just one in a series of dozens, if not hundreds, of false messiahs that have arisen within the Jewish community over the centuries. Beginning about the same time that Jesus was preaching, there have been any number of false messiahs – many in the Mideast, but it seems like there were even more once the Jews were exiled, mostly ending up in Europe. There have been any number of post-Christ, false Christian messiahs as well. In the New Testament, several times there are very specific warnings of false messiahs.
The argument here is that, for the most part, false messiahs and apocalyptic revelations have probably not cropped up during relatively sedate and settled times. Undoubtedly, most were tied to periods when events were so consistently tragic and consequential that it seemed as though divine intervention had to be near, because life was so difficult and oppressive.
There is little reason to believe we are being given any more clues now that the end of time is near than anyone has ever been given before. Almost any prediction of massive or apocalyptic change is most often based on anecdotal evidence. Technology and media have made the world smaller; the current generations receive far more news about global tragedies and disasters than any generation has in the past. Reporting bears not much relationship to occurrence.
In many cases, the anecdotal trumps statistical accuracy. I was astonished to hear folks claiming that in the last presidential election, Congressman Ron Paul must have had the number of votes he received suppressed, because certain people insisted all their friends were voting for him. Growing up in New Jersey, I had a friend who was convinced that Creedence Clearwater Revival's song "Lodi" was about Lodi, N.J., because that was the Lodi he knew.
The world is far bigger than it might seem, history far more complex, and an elephant far too complicated to be fully realized by six blind men. Consider all of this an introduction to The Caine Mutiny, with a concentration on the film directed by Edward Dmytryk, produced by Stanley Kramer, and starring Humphrey Bogart, José Ferrer, and Van Johnson. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is just as appropriate, but I've seen the film more often than I've read the book. A very good film with terrific performances, it is one of the most important works of contemporary culture to show how empty and unsupportable conclusions developed from anecdotal evidence can be.
