i grew up being told, "You have to watch the news. You must know what's going on." alas, i learned the news bad for my health, physical and mental. the reason: it really has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with SPECULATION. what i'm given on the boob tube is never what is happening but what may happen, and it's always scary as hell. like everyone, i like to drive slowly past a car wreck, looking for blood and bodies. and yet, to have it in my living room every night makes me bolt the door and crawl under the covers.
once i get there, i know what to do. read a novel, about life in another time, took at art works, listen to classical music, in other words, desert the information age for the age of stories, of episodes in history having meaning, perhaps simply by being purified. i need to experience love stories, happy ending or not, epics of bravery, even if the hero killed. i ride on the wings of song like a magician on a magic carpet. underneath the blankets the world becomes bearable. even tragedy lifts me up. i can face the violence and stupidity of our age by visiting that in another and knowing civilization survived.
as for my own age, of course, death is the only solution. sooner or later my decrepritude will subsume me. and in the mean time, all i can do is escape into exercise, fiction, conversations, travel, hoping when the time comes i will still be able to master my own fate. alas, the general population doesn't want to pay taxes for the arts. everybody enjoys them. in this period of being house-bound, what sustains them but music, movies, books, adventures in fictional time?
and now i watch the election results with horror. RED means i will not pay for the society i live in, hospitals, schools, symphonies, traffic lights, asphalt to fill the potholes. I WILL NOT BE A PERSON OF MY TIME. what irony! what good has all that news done but make misers of the voters, they grasp their pennies as if they would save them from global warming. avoiding the public good, they put themselves in danger. how do they not know it? maybe human ignorance is bottomless. staring at the screen, i see a vast void behind it.
at the same time i can go back to old stories, old pictures, and find hope. other ages have been far more disastrous than our own. peter the great leveled whole cities and massacred the population, attilla the hun didn't do much better, and the romans raked carthage into the ground. we survived the middle ages and recent terrible wars. not that we're in the clear. still, it helps to know history. that is news that stays news, as ezra pound said about poetry, the news people die from not knowing. i always speak for the arts. they really need no reason. yet i have to say something to keep from going mad.
