For the Moment

Strolling through downtown New York is a perilous occupation. At the moment you locate yourself, a crowd of pedestrians swill you into mysterious infernos full of rapacious sellers and frisky animals. Take Greenwich Village: on the surface, a rectangular and organized area, with numerous street-signs and helpful drug-pushers; underneath, where its unconscious beats, is a crazed mass of confusion threatening all sense of direction. Start walking down a road and before long the scenery will change, historical periods will be in flux, and your brain thrown into that charged state between curiosity and insanity.

Needless to say the phantoms of the village possessed me once. I lost orientation next to an experimental theatre, and by the time I orbited past an Algerian delicatessen mind-body severance was complete. As reality bade farewell, I sought refuge in an innocent looking private art gallery, specializing in post-modernity and free deliver. Within its diminutive space, a few day tourists were examining the presented works with quizzical glances; in search of stability, I did the same. My chosen spectacle was a scalding, large picture of the sea. Huge splashes of thick blue paint covered the canvas, rearing out in small pinnacles, and returning into piquant troughs. My expression of bewilderment drew the shop owner--a frail foetus by appearance, in fact a middle-aged man--who collected his phlegm with a unappealing gurgle.

"Does this piece interest you?"

"Uh. Yes"

"I find the sense of loss overpowering. Do you think?"

"I do. I find..." What did I find? All neurons were called to attention. I find, I find, it's very blue and like the sea which is at home oh childhood was nice I must phone home grandma's ill and the cat's on fire so who will water the plants.

"I find it compelling"

His mucus whirred into action. "Tactile ambiguity...subverted representation...deep fear...Neo-postcrypto..."

"Yes." Does food matter when I have three dollars and an empty account oh why are hotels smelly and New York dirty and buses late and politicians angry and vicars tall?

"Do you have it in red?" I pondered aloud. The foetus took affront, proclaimed it a unique work, and left me to examine the wide range of sculpted animal droppings on offer.

Fortunately the Village is small, and its weightless ambience is surrounded by dour poverty. Yet the phantoms are threatening an epidemic, and even the essential cuddliness of Harvard could fall prey. For the moment we occupy in Cambridge a University of beguiling loveliness and reassuring warmth: on cold winter nights as you age and your skin starts to pucker and flop on your body, the landmarks of benighted Harvard will return. Think of the steps of Sever, London broil, Au Bon Pain, and crappy newspapers: how our decrepitude will look back on these with affection.

However, while we paddle in our youthful complacency, the enemies of sanity are arming themselves. Their work is being conducted with utter secrecy, yet excessive drunken reflection has given Gubba the insight. Language, comrades, is being appropriated, and is about to pierce our studied equilibrium. The pincer movement runs as follows. On one side lies the debasing jargon of cinema advertising, which compels innocents to speak in triplets, with a amputated vocabulary. Soon the apocalypse will be upon us, and it will happen before morning class. You go to breakfast. Eggs and bacon await the edibility test.

"John, this is the ultimate good morning experience"

"Yes Mary. Never get up. Never eat food. Never fall in love"

"But it was only once, and once can be too often"

"Two thumbs up to sleep, Mary. Pass the salt."

Such marauding influence is as yet undetected, but repeated exposure must surely dent the structure of the brain. To further our misery, the other flank is being assailed by the composite regurgitations of academe, and its sinful neologisms. Scientists have every right to spend all their time lolling in cafes thinking up fresh words: all those spanking new particles and objects have to be called something. But the sewage of cultural theory and philosophy is a pernicious influence, taking your average happy noun ('problem'), and disfiguring it with a meaningless suffix. Take a few more such words; apply prefixes at will; stir boldly for a decade; before long, an entire generation will have on its tongues an assortment of unaesthetic and utterly meaningless words. And there, comrades, lies the rub. Their complete uselessness means everyone will use them--simply for want of a more precise descriptive term. You'll thematize your timetable, your phone directory will be positively intertextual, and, my lord, is that a bird I see or have I got decentered subjectivity?

Doubtless such jargon has some use, if only to justify the employment of people whom previous centuries would have regarded as socially expendable. But the conjunction of cinemaspeak and jargonese can lead only to the gradual separation of the hemispheres of our brains, and an aching descent into complete madness. For they all say the same: we are what we speak; our language--its metaphors, implicit value judgments--inform our personalities. Caught between the Scylla of cliche and the Charybdis of suffix, our future personalities cannot but disintegrate into a stewing pot of confusion, from which we yearn to return to the wordlessness of the womb.

All very well for the nonchalant, but deeper ruins than folly lie ahead.

Out of this broth of verbal poverty, us poor inarticulates will have no resources to plumb the mysterious chasms of life. On one level all emotion will be encapsulated in words with the expressive power of Kevin Costner's face. On another, jargon will be so empty as to erase all valuable insights. And behind the screen of such an impotent vocabulary, behind all those psychoanalytic terms and cultural verbs, the abyss of violence, hate and hunger in the world will still stretch. To which we will only respond with a live transmission from CNN, and a denial that we can describe it with any meaning; that we can judge it morally; that we can do a thing about it.

Say goodbye to the Romantic Genius. Whoever he or she is, the Genius has been knocked out in the bouts of contemporary language and art. Wild musings on life have been deconstructed, and ethereal visions shown up for the artificialities they must be. And we are left in the land of cultural self-abuse.