Acceleration

In the end, I couldn’t stay away for more than one week. What follows is an updated version of a piece I first published in 2015. It’s a commentary on the ever increasing tempo of life, complete with stage directions. Even as I am personally moving more slowly, everything around me is accelerating at a fantastic rate, sometimes dissolving into a blur. I am considering a companion piece to be entitled Deceleration.

[Read slowly]  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 languidly across the ocean with the fickle winds. The captain of a sailing vessel idly mentions to his first mate that he has heard tell of 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 cling 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. Information is power. No one knows anything.

Photo by Katherine McCormack on Unsplash

[Pick up pace slightly] 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. In this way, the pain and the stain spread like red dye in a load of white laundry.   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?

[Pick up pace again] Still, the excitement of sharing the story is spreading and the tempo is picking up. 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. More and more people are swept up in the erotic energy of the automobile. 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 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 the desire and popcorn-infused air.  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 there will also be more disinformation, more merchandising, more fantasy, more self-doubt. 

[Somewhat faster]     But all this is only the prologue 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 breakneck speed.  Information is power, but is it oxygen? Can you breathe it? Which brings us to December 2023.

[Very fast] Once again, blood in the streets.  Gaza, Kibbutz Be’iri, Ukraine. Don’t forget Ukraine. Refugees, hostages, settlers. People who don’t belong where they find themselves. People who are not wanted or are wanted somewhere else. Elon Musk, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Hamas, Hamas. People with agendas that do not support life. That do not feed or heal or educate. Insurgents and counter-insurgents. No one can stop the carnage. No one can parse the wiggly line that separates free speech from hate speech. Meanwhile, democracy decomposes in the blistering heat, drinking water dries up while people are shopping and wrapping and mailing chunks of plastic to one another in frantic gestures of communion. People desperate for love, singing the alto part in joy to the world, remembering their long dead kindergarten teachers while seven people are shot in seven separate incidents in my new home town of Minneapolis one night last week. While real books are swept off the shelves of libraries to make way for rising seas of artificial intelligence and avalanches of ignorance leaving us in thrall to devices that can remember Andrew Jackson’s second inaugural but not your mother’s smell. People all over the world turning to someone named Donald or Vladimir or Binjamin, someone loud and greedy and corrupt, to drown out their sorrows, to protect them from their nightmares. Someone to bring an oblivion as certain as a double martini. Because really some days we are exhausted and we’d prefer to languish for eternity without dinner on a sailing vessel in the doldrums.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In December, we look forward to a contribution from Carmen Victoria Rossi. Carmen, originally from Puerto Rico, now happily lives in Minneapolis, MN with her rescue dog Reyi. She does not consider herself a writer but loves the solitude, deep reflection and insights that writing offers, same applies to her long walks with Reyi. All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething, have access to the archives, and become a contributor to Many Voices. Your ideas are always welcome.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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