Thursday, April 23, 2015

Drop Your Screen

I’ve got to find a way to write myself out of feeling like my current collection of pure, worthy, beautiful moments is too thin and feeble and stand up to the collection that is marked and removed and even harmful.  Addiction to screens is making me sick.  When I’m not absorbed into my own, which is, admittedly, often an act of will—something I force myself not to do, the way you force yourself not to eat a piece of birthday cake, or smoke a cigarette after a couple drinks when everyone around you is exhaling joyful streams, or lay around all day ignoring the sink and clothes and counters—I watch other people totally absorbed into theirs, everyone always in some other place.  No one is ever anywhere.  And none of this is real.  We are missing things—so many little things that we have no image or opinion of the actual world, as actual as it can be anyway, because our senses are all divided, and we receive absolutely everything in glimpses and flashes, gone again, replaced by another one and another one… And when there are opportunities to truly experience a thing, we can’t do it without sharing; we’re so obsessed with recording moments (I am the capturer!—ME!) so that we can share them, that the full picture is further compromised—and that means we never, ever see a single thing.  Nothing registers.  How could it?  Nothing is slow.  We are impatient, overburdened, over-stimulated, desensitized, and we are sick.  I’m sick.     

I’m exhausted by the economics of sharing information — the photos, the videos, the online events and invites, the rsvps and the comments on that rsvp, the misinterpretation of flat words typed on a screen and the way that multiple-meaning can even become a manipulation strategy for people who are good at it, the advertising oneself or one’s cause, the pleas for money and prayers and “likes,” the need to be the one who discovered this joke, this artist, this song, this quote; the proving it—I was there!  SEE?!  All of this shit that apparently makes us a part of the world takes us away from actually being in it and doing the things that bring it color and motion.  At our shows, if people come at all—since Netflix and Facebook and video games and Instagram and tagging and hashtagging and commenting and postingpostingposting are so easy and so addictive—many of them are either hidden deep into the other worlds that those screens offer up, or they’re holding up those screens to us to record what we’re doing, so they can then post it, tag us and tag their friends (the friends who are doing the same thing) as proof, over and over again, that they are HERE…Here now, always, doing things out in the world, SEE?  But they’re nowhere because they’re already in the next place, and the desperate need to capture and share this moment has already carried them away to another one… And I don’t see a way out of this.

Last night Khris’s sixteen-year-old cousin, who is a sweet and smart and loves horses and writing, brought me a gorgeous pink peony to the show, the stem wrapped in a bit of damp paper towel, warm from clutching it in her hands on the drive over.  She was nervous to give it to me.  That gesture and the flower itself was the most alive part of the night.  

As an artist trying to make a living from a craft that enriches already stable lives, which is nothing like making a living providing food or water or fuel, or making and repairing shelter, I spend more time shouting about it, building a fortress around it that people can see for miles, polishing its windows, keeping up the grounds, than I spend living and working inside of it, creating the only thing I set out to create: they’re simple songs.  I write words based on the life I’m actually living (the bits of it I’ve strained my eyes to see), and I use my voice to sing them.  Suave and I physically sit down with his guitar, without screens, and we talk about what matters to us.  It doesn’t have to be serious — it’s often totally ridiculous.  But it is real.  It has to come from someplace of either observation or imagination.  And if all of our time is spent being distracted and obsessively sharing the things that distract us, there is nothing to observe and nothing to imagine, and our whole castle is empty.  I cannot live that way.

Give me Moby Dick—long, sprawling scenes that transport a reader into the ocean on a boat with a mad captain and a vexing, unpindownable beast.  Give me Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” with its pages and pages of run-on sentences celebrating the sweat, stench, and profane beauty of Life.  Give me an afternoon on my belly in an overgrown lawn watching ants work and blades of grass twitch in the wind.  Give me a yoga class that is near-silent and slow and long and makes my muscles shake and asks me to take the deepest breath I’ve taken all week.  Give me a day without tasks and miles and trying to catch up and tough plans and incessant blather.  Let me feel this day: it’s seventy degrees outside this old hotel in Greenville, South Carolina, the sun is shining through delicate scallops of cirrus clouds, there’s pollen on the pool, my stomach is growling, and I’m biting my nails between these words while Suave works on a Spanish-sounding riff on his guitar beside me, knowing that I’ve been feeling desperately unsettled.  He’s wiser than I am; he just keeps playing, fuck everybody else, and he’s always creating.  He doesn’t share every step of the process with the world through screens; he shares a song when it’s complete and we’re on stage where he can connect, human-to-human, sound to ears, live and for real.  I’ll never stop learning from him.


I feel this need to apologize for my “negativity,” because the persona I’ve created doesn’t do this.  According to no one but myself, I’m supposed to see the best parts, and I’m supposed to relay them.  But I look around and see a world of people trapped in their screens, addicted to this split way of existing, missing everything, no one ever anywhere, and I’m sad.  And even sadder still is that if you’re reading this, you’re in a place where you really aren’t.  Drop the stupid fucking screen, and go the fuck outside.  Get a bug bite or feel the cold or smile at someone or engage in confrontation or flirt with your librarian or try a cartwheel or sprint across a parking lot or shout something obscene or just look up at the sky with your arms outstretched and spin around like an idiot.  Put it down.  This very minute.  I want to get well with you.  I hope our eyes will meet.