A glorious mid-summer morning (summer now begins late April in our algoreworld), and I take to a bike path, an instinct arising from the live-fit-or-die ethos of our day. That instinct may be the only natural thing I will see or feel all day. On the trail, it seems I am the only one who is not listening to an iPod or talking on a cell phone. The rush of wind in one’s ears, apparently, is no longer enough.
Back at my screen, the pictures from TPM, Firedoglake, Huffington and other sites show birds covered in petroleum, dead turtles on a tar ball beach, dolphins gasping their last. So here is even more proof, I think, that the natural has been banished, conquered, destroyed, in this, the Ground Zero of decadence, the United States.
As something of a Eurosnot, I have always held that, nothwithstanding the wildernesses and open spaces, America is the true child of J.K. Huysmans, the author of A Rebours (Against Nature). That novel, called the ‘bible of decadence’ (it is the one that corrupts Wilde’s Dorian Gray), has a protagonist who receives no sensation, feels no stimulus, enjoys no taste that is not artificially manufactured. For that is what decadence is: the replacement of the natural by the artificial. And that is what I see here, a process fully on display, paradoxically, in the movement toward the organic and the local. Even when the goal is the natural, it cannot be achieved without affectation and artifice. Self-consciousness is just too ingrained a habit. We are all Park Slopers now.
John Berger put it nicely in About Looking, using a simple conjunction to make his point:
“A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and, not by a but.”
The “and” is organic, natural… the “but” is thoughtful, self-reflective.
But it is worse than that, John, far worse. I speak now of what happened to me just a few days ago: A beeping or cheeping sound distracts me from my desk. I curse my reliance on machines but know I must pay heed to the warning. Low battery. The sound is insistent, invasive. I check my alarm, my iPhone, the smoke detector, the carbon monoxide detector, the oven, the microwave, the electric toothbrush holder… Finally, I go outside and look at my car, parked below the window. Nothing. But out here the sound is even louder, more insistent.
At last I locate it. In the lone tree of the parking lot, some birds have built a nest. The cheep is the sound of chicks, hungry and impatient.
So the artificial, the manmade is no longer decadent, self-conscious… it has become instinctual, organic. My “and” leads directly to the machine: The birds tweet and I check my smoke detector…
