This has been my experience, in any case, and it isn’t exactly pleasant. It is instructive, though, I think, to step outside future-directed life, to feel the past slip away, and to confront who you are unmoored from history and intention. It can be frightening. You’re left with very little when these things go. But it opens some brief window on the phenomenology of being alive, of living inside a head, and it offers a fleeting glimpse of the metanarrative unmasked as demiurge, as idol, which if you’re like me you must punish from time to time, smash and sweep from the Ka’aba. The pristine emptiness, when you’ve done this, can seem to verge on holiness.
The worst part of a trip, we can probably all agree, is the moment when you’ve come down enough to realize you are not down all the way. Gabrielle and I are throwing a Frisbee in the yard, watching it glimmer metallic shades as it zips between us, when this moment comes. Gaby lets the Frisbee fall behind her without making any effort to catch it.
“I’m going to do yoga now,” she says.
“Okay,” I say, and because I dislike even thinking about yoga, I decide to take a walk instead of chatting with her while she limbers up. I put on a shirt. I get my phone, some earbuds. I pick out a podcast to listen to. I feel briefly lucid as I set off down the street. It is a lightly wooded residential street, with a few people out front watering their lawns. The occasional car passes slowly by. Once I see the people on their lawns and in their cars, however, and realize they see me, I am flooded with the certainty that they know I’m on drugs, which now that I’ve left the equivocal sphere of the house it seems I really am. But I compel myself to focus on the podcast, on Terry Gross’s familiar voice, her warm, brisk personality, and for about ten seconds I feel fine. I manage to smile at a father and daughter playing catch without, I believe, appearing unambiguously psychotic. And yet I can feel a small worry taking shape in me, a worry I can tamp down but not entirely ignore, and which takes the form of the following question posed to myself: Haven’t I been walking on this street an insanely long time? The right way to put it is that I have no idea how long I’ve been walking on the street, and being unable to reconstruct the experience with any temporal dimensionality feels akin to having been always walking on the street. It is not a long street, I know this for a fact. In either direction it runs into a perpendicular street and ends, measuring along its entire length at most eight hundred feet, a distance a world-class sprinter could cover in under twenty-five seconds. But because my walk is an iterative action and not a coherent experience — because it is not a walk so much as all the component parts of a walk — it does not seem possible, or at least inevitable, that I will ever reach the end of the street. And the more anxious this realization makes me, the more closely I attend to my progress, the rate of which, as a consequence of this heightened attention, seems correspondingly to diminish. And it is right around this time, experiencing the first licks of panic, that I realize my walk has become Zeno’s paradox.
I don’t remember how I made it back. I must have turned around, but honestly it’s all a blur. A blur not because it went by fast, but in the sense that the recording of a voice slowed down sufficiently no longer resembles a voice. I credit Terry Gross with getting me home, the grounding cadence of her speech, a metronomic standard by which my subjective experience of time was kept from veering into a fatal adagio. And soon enough — or, you know, whenever — I found myself back in the sunny yard, watching Gabrielle articulate her body in serpentine asanas, listening to Terry interview an author I like, and then an actress I like, as happy as a puppy and at peace, because what I understood just then was that Terry Gross’s voice was the voice of the metanarrative, demotic ur-parent, Catcher in the WHYY, the call of the shepherd returning me to the pastures of solicitude and moderation, that cultural plane on which the day’s horrific news — ecocatastrophe, civilizational conflict, postcolonial scarring, and our legacies of violence and extortion — was not diminished or ignored but existed in a strange vaporous adjacency to yuppie mores, triumphalist life narratives, midcult art, and an anachronistic fixation on jazz, this narrow-bandwidth refugium for temperamental decency and civic virtue and a heartbreaking reasonableness that seemed less and less like the earned wisdom of life than a tragic hope laid over it.
You should not have grown wise before you grew old. Was it my grandfather speaking to me, telling me to persist in my folly, the best way out being through, unless you happen to be standing right by an exit? Is what inaugurates an avant-garde really more than the moment when how it feels to be alive has deviated too far from our operative metanarratives, from what we have to understand and draw significance from the ceaseless welter before us, and when it seems no adult or authority is any longer capable of restoring order or putting things right because we lack even a language with which to name the problem, to place it before us, and to talk together as friends?
That afternoon, as the mushrooms left me gently in the sunlit grass, as I felt the old hierarchies reassert themselves — so that the things I could act upon came forward and those I could merely contemplate fell away — as time regained its normal speed, a speed that seemed almost a trance or deadness, the returning cognizance of how my life was changing felt to me like waking up into a dream. I would write books; people would discuss what to that point had been figments and private reveries, idle inventions — or so I hoped. And I do not mean dream in the sense of nightmare’s obverse, not a long-awaited joy or fantastical delight, but rather dream as pseudo-reality, as what resembles life but has no commerce with it. For if the substance of my work purported to be communication of some sort, the exploration and expression of what I found meaningful, my unshakable premonition was that its result would only be to clarify my perversity, deepen my sense of being misunderstood, and thereby accentuate my loneliness. If so, the prefigured fantasy was just a false dream of home. And I looked at Gaby, wondering again whether I hadn’t attached the wrong labels to my emotions long ago, as though I had puce and mauve backward, had never been corrected, and now were chasing some impossible chimera because I failed to see that all the things I felt for Gaby were love, full stop.
But it was not a moment to make reliable judgments, I suspected.
We spent the night in a nearby city, a pretty harbor town where, truth be told, I had once been born. We drank Belgian dubbels in a cellar bar where the decorative stonework peeked out of the walls and made a piping over low arched passageways. We discussed fame, celebrity, renown, what these things were and why we sought them. The beer had washed any last hallucinatory tincture from us, trading mistake for imprecision, and because we had both failed to read The Power Broker for the same class in college, an omission that ever after established Robert Moses as a favorite figure of informed discussion, I now raised his example as a perhaps-instructive case.
Me: Moses was a famous person. Powerful. People would have known who he was when he walked in the room.
Gaby: People were interacting with the idea of him as much as with him. Maybe even more so.
M: Right, and that’s clearly an important aspect of fame.
G: You’re a representative of the idea of you. Not the other way around.
M: Which is pretty fucked-up.
G: Especially when you consider that you’re probably only fractionally responsible for that idea.
M: But with Moses, right, short of his leading some truly lurid private life — which, having read the Caro, I think we can agree he did not — it’s not like people wanted to buy magazines to read about who he was dating, whether he’d gained or lost weight, his taste in vacation getaways.