Cetaceus

The bulk of the following, the basic form and content, is that of an email I sent a few days ago to a handful of very close friends and relatives. People I expect to still know and know well in 20 years, and who I expect to be seeing on the date listed above: February 7, 2028, 11:49pm.

A very strange thing happened some time after midnight on this past Monday night, or rather, Tuesday morning. I had been in Center City Philadelphia for the evening and the various activities I had been engaged in having come to a close, I hopped on the 42 bus on Walnut to get back to West Philly. Looking up at the scrolling LCD screen thing that announces the stops, I saw that something was amiss. It was this:

The exact date of this occurance was Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 and the approximate time I was on the bus was 12:50 in the morning. However, despite everything else on the red-pixeled digital sign being correct (the names of the stops, that this was indeed a SEPTA vehicle, and that I should be courteous to other passengers) the date and time it showed were completely off.

In fact, the date & time that I saw, scrolling above my head on the SEPTA 42 bus at that moment–indeed a moment of near-revelation and certain bewilderment–was February 7, 2028 11:49pm. None other than 11 minutes to midnight on my 48th birthday.

Upon seeing this I sat up with a start, visibly surprised enough to evoke some sidelong glances from my fellow westerly-bound passengers. I quickly took note of the exact year and time when I first saw this by sending my friend Manya an admittedly cryptic text message with only this date and time on it.

I am not sure if there will be any significance to this ever, and probably my 48th birthday will be totally awesome but otherwise like all the other ones. However, if I am in any sense the same person in 20 years that I am now, I will definitely cull a deep satisfaction from the rememberance of this odd happening, playing up its cryptic and indecipherable nature and talking about it on that birthday. Has it been just another SEPTA-related fuck-up? A message from some future version of myself? A note or even visitation by some kind of Pynchonian Trespassers?

So I wrote the initial email about this, and am now revising it into this post, with a kind of double purpose: to begin the important task of blowing this out of proportions in order to make weird but completely fun claims about secret knowledge, SEPTA, time travel and prophesy on the one hand. And on the other hand to intiate an act of rememberance for both myself and that small but select group of people I feel confident now that I will know, be in close touch with, and probably see in person on my 48th birthday, so that we can then have a good time constructing some kind of story out of it. I doubt I’ll ever run out of things to talk to any of those folks about, but if in the event that we do somehow end up geting boring one day, I have just been handed a great conversation piece for a birthday party as yet shrouded in the mists of the future.

As told, in one sentence, by Thomas Pynchon:

And before them lay exactly the sort of adventure that was sure to appeal to thier too-often-ill-considered taste for the histrionic yet unprofitable.

Pynchon, Thomas: Against the Day page 435; Penguin, 2007.

This paragraph is the intellectual equivilent of kicking the shit out of someone, with various teeth left lying on the asphalt:

What is at work here is the psychologization of religious experience (the ‘disgust’ and ‘horror’ by which the cultured European bourgeoisie betrays its own unease before the religious fact), which will find its final form in Rudolph Otto’s work on the sacred. Here, in a concept of the sacred that completely coincides with the concept of the obscure and the impenetrable, a theology that had lost all experience of the revealed word celebrated its union with a philosophy that had abandoned all sobriety in the face of feeling. That the religious belongs entirely to the sphere of psychological emotion, that it essentially has to do with shivers and goose bumps—this is the triviality that the neologism ‘numinous’ had to dress up as science.

Agamben, Giorgio: from Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power & Bare Life, pg. 78. Stanford University Press 1998

Rittenhouse, that beautifully tiny urban square, daily–seasons be damned–writhing and full-up with the life of the city, remains for me the only uncorrupted location in Philadelphia. The square, moreso than its mirror-image and companion down in Old City, is the stuff that urban-planning spiritualists only dream of and pray for. The park, only a block by a block, simply breathes life out of the grass, trees and statues. Bike messengers perch at the gates, people lay on the grass, the fountain feeds itself.

These have been times of great trials and tribulations. I have personally entered the mirror-world, being subject against my will like some kind of down-on-his-luck timetraveler, to the ravages of an inversion too powerful and overwhelming to resist. I have been swept away by it, away and past people, places and things that had previously shone with a soft affection. All of it now soiled, filthy smelling (the stench of death and decay, like a dumpster outside a meatpacking plant infuses everything I look at) and grayed out. I can’t look, because it is horrible, and that horror is mirrored in every streetlight, every restaurant and every person I see. Streets I once loved are repulsive to me, sickly begging me to walk down them to some kind of sadistic end. I try to be defiant, because–shit–what else does one have in these situations? But it doesn’t always work.

So indeed, the city itself has become a graveyard for me, a junkyard, a bloated corpse. I long for the 5th of August in ways I cannot describe. The only cure for living in a shithole is an expensive airline ticket, a truth well-known to adherents of my faith.

But despite all this, for me, there is a kind of luminous, lucid center in Rittenhouse. Center City in general, to most likely many folks’ consternation, remains more or less inherently pure for me. Oh, it has it’s shadow side too, but for CC that lies on the other side of the mirror still, and I haven’t and will not cross that ravine in this part of town. The pale image of cars, malls and shit can be seen as the damned reflection of downtown, but “east Philly” itself remains more or less a haven now. Again, the center of that is Rittenhouse.

Do yourself a favor and if you don’t live around here, read the linked Wikipedia article above. The place has a serenity and a satisfaction that I cannot describe, except to give you this sort of negative-theology of the rest of the city, and assert with all my strength that this little park remains for me the clearest example of the polar opposite of all this other shit.

I find myself leaving work constantly, every two hours or so, and walking up Walnut on whatever is the shady side of the street, circumambulating the park with a solem joy befitting memories of long-ago walking meditations, and coming back around. On the 15th floor, I settle in to watch the clock, to sit in anticpation for enough time to have passed for me to be able to pull off taking another walk.

It’s that good.

I hope to follow this list up with a list of things I find annoying. I was going to make it a list of stuff I hate followed by a list of stuff I love, but I think that wording is way too strong and “adore” vs. “am annoyed by” are terms at once more accurate and amusing.

Things I adore without hesitation (list subject to change and further complication):

Bears
Jokes or stories involving bears
Pictures of real bears, especially when taken by people I know
Art involving bears
Ancient folktales, legends and myths in which bears figure prominently
Ice cream
Sledding
My sisters and brother
Traveling
Traveling by train, specifically
Buddhist Iconography
Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Iconography
Tibet, in particular it’s general aesthetic (art and culture)
Chinese, the language
China, the country
Eastern Russia
Any other generally enigmatic parts of the world (sparsely populated, seldom traveled places)
Physical geography
Oceans
Mountains
Great Cities
Public transportation
Mollusks (eating them, mostly)
Octopii
Squid
Dogs
The color Red
Soviet aesthetics
Punk rock and hardcore, the former from the 80s, the latter from the 90s
Americana
1930s, New Deal Era socialism (both politically and aesthetically)
Baseball, especially the history of baseball
Great art made by friends (which seems to always be in ample supply)
Hum
Bands from New Brunswick, regardless of genre, especially in its heyday
The deft and eloquent use of the English Language
Puns, references and silly turns-of-phrase
Friends
The Winter
Coniferous forests covered in snow
The northeastern American deciduous forest, especially in spring
Trees, in general
Children, especially when they talk
My siblings’ imaginations
Being able to put a given idea on paper in just the right way (there are few accomplisments more satisfying)
Romanticism
Walt Whitman (arguably the greatest voice of democracy ever, or at least on this continent)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (being, as Americans, our true founding father)
Pre-columbian Native American history
Northern California, when the weather is just right
The Pacific Northwest in general, when the weather is just right
Southern Italy, especially Sicily
Italian-Americans, wherever they might be
Sicilian food
My grandparents
Eastern Europe, especially the former Yugoslavia
Breakfast
Being in a room full of people I care about
Being in a room full of people I find fascinating (these two are obviously not mutually exclusive)
Large crowds of people in general
Certain internet memes
Talking for hours with someone new
People from other countries
Walking

Arguably one of the more beautiful pieces of descriptive prose I’ve come across recently:

Later that morning, together with Professor Vanderjuice, they piled into a motorcar to pay a visit to the municipal dump at the edge of town, gray with perpetual smoke, its limits undefined. “Walloping Wellesianism!” cried the Professor, “it’s just a whole junkyard full!” Up and down the steeply-pitched sides of a ravine lay the picked-over hulks of failed time machines — Chronoclipses, Asimov Transeculars, Tempomorph Q-98s — broken, defective, sorched by catastrophic flares of of misrouted energy, corroded often beyond recognition by unintended immersion in the terrible Flow over which they had been designed and built, so hopefully, to prevail….A strewn field of conjecture, superstition, blind faith and bad engineering, expressed in sheet-aluminum, vulcanite, Heusler’s alloy, bonzoline, electrum, lignum vitae, platinoid, magnalium, and packfong silver, much of it stripped away by scavengers over the years. Where was the safe harbor in Time thier pilots might have found, so allowing thier craft to avoid such ignominious fates?

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, page 408; Penguin 2007.

Emphasis mine.

There has been a heat wave in Philadelphia–and in this part of the northeast in general–for the past number of days. It is as if a large interesting blanket came down from on high feeling some kinda way about all us humans down here, not knowing whether to smother us in its wrath or cradle us in its love. This has been the going metaphor among the usual interlocutors: that we are being wrapped in a blanket, hugged, had and held in the semi-damp and slightly sweet tug of the night. The predictions are that the heat wave will end tonight, but the city looks skyward and side-wards, feeling, again, some kind of way about the situation, the thick air thickened with cautious anticipation, trepidation and a certain sort of special pre-emptive nostalgia for our current sufferings.

Two nights ago, on a Sunday of all things, I attended a noise show at the warehouse that lasted until four in the morning. Watching, waiting, being hot and doing it with 50 other people at a warehouse and on the bleakened, barb-wire ringed and broken-glass strewn streets around the Berks station on the Blue Line took on the tone of religious supplication. There was a bit of the mystical in the strict sense, very much brought on by the heat. We came together, there was union, there was a single, sweltering, sticky, greasy divine being emerged from the group of us and quickly took to lying in repose. In seeking safety, escape, respite, ice cream, the mass of folks piled out and laid themselves down upon the surface of the sidewalk in the styfling middle-of-nightness on 2nd Ave between Berks and Montgomery. It was a human, human sight, deeply moving and beautiful to behold. This pile of breathing humanity, arranged upon the ground, seeking release from the hot sky in something like the cool earth.

Sometime around midnight the ice cream man came by. And while there are no illusions here (nor where there at the time by anyone) about why an operating ice cream man was driving down 2nd Ave in that nieghborhood at that hour, given the length and breadth of the line for truck-ready soft-serve, I can guarentee he made the bank in the legitimate way that night.

So it is possible that this all ends tonight, and that it will rain and cool us off so we can wait with baited breath for the next go-around, which is surely coming sooner or later. Often, heat like this is described in the language of violence (and acted upon in the manner of violence), but let us cross our fingers and pray, humbly, to the great blanket in the sky that as it descends upon us again over the course of the summer, it does not drive us to descend upon one another.

I am also ever so slightly saddened by the heat’s imminent departure as after I got home late last night I discovered a window-unit air conditioner that Lea and Danila left in the closet, which I made haste to install. While the rest of the house baked I, uncharactaristically I should say, slept in the cool, wrapped in real blankets. I tried to keep the thing down to save energy, what with thier being a crisis on, but I couldn’t feature the controls. Honestly, I can’t feature much of anything these days.

[uh-pawr-ee-uh, uh-pohr-] –noun, plural a·po·ri·as, a·po·ri·ae
1. Rhetoric. the expression of a simulated or real doubt, as about where to begin or what to do or say.

2. Logic, Philosophy. a difficulty encountered in establishing the theoretical truth of a proposition, created by the presence of evidence both for and against it.

——————————————————————————–

[Origin: 1580–90; < LL < Gk: state of being at a loss, equiv. to ápor(os) impassable (see a-6, pore2) + -ia -ia]
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

“Hence, too, modern democracy’s specific aporia: it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place– “bare life” [zoe]–that marked thier subjection”

–Giorgio Agamben, 1985: Homo Sacer: Soverign Power & Bare Life, pp. 9-10.

A friend sent me this today, I love it:

The Great Bear is Up There, so to speak.