Multiplicity
We spent a couple hours at immigration yesterday, waiting in a largish room with a lot of other people who, like us, needed to get something stamped or looked at or otherwise processed. CNN was on -- the Columbia disaster report, an Israeli attack aimed at Hamas members who got away (an elderly man and his donkey were killed instead), and Bush delivering, to the American Legion, a test-run of his stump speech. He sounded defensive.
Compared to Boston's immigration mecca, this was a breeze. There, you really feel like part of the huddled masses; it's as though the entire globe is being processed. The wait can take up the entire day; a day of watching for your number, with a hundred to go, and eavesdropping on the individual dramas being enacted in front of immigration officers. No, this paper is not valid. You must come back. This is not valid for your uncle/wife/brother/grandma/friend. This is not valid for you. Where did you get this? Who told you that? They gave you the wrong information. No, we can't fix it.
The palimpsest of voices, languages, backgrounds and experiences is antithetical to narrative, yet it's composed of narratives. Depending on mood, it can be exhilirating or terrifying. A friend many years ago told me that she found the experience of listening to crowds of people in public places to be "melancholy." She didn't explain, but "melancholy" was a good word. Crowds are depersonalized; they resemble a natural phenomenon. Radio noise, the sunspot cycle, the stock market, the weather -- something that may demonstrate patterns but is essentially purposeless. The apprehension of impersonality and purposelessness generates sublime melancholy; at least the Romantics thought so. It can also trigger hostility and violence.
There's a great recording of John Cage performing one of his Thoreau-based compositions -- the words are transformed beyond recognition, so he's intoning a series of syllable-fragments in front of an audience of Italian university students. Restive to start with, they grow increasingly adversarial; by the end of the tape, they're chanting soccer-team anthems. My own response to depersonalizing experiences seems to be changing with age -- they now make me feel disoriented, centerless and edgy, whereas they used to give me a buzz. Depersonalization can mean transcending the self and it can also mean awareness of the self's obliteration.
Yesterday was a more low-voltage affair; the main source of disorientation was CNN. Our number was called just as a mini-debate was heating up between a Britney Spears lookalike (okay, Britney in about fifteen years) and a dour think tank type, the bimbo telling us all that "partisanship stops at the water" and the think-tanker trying to coax an admission that the war was based on false premises. I would have liked to catch the rest, but it was our turn, and they don't wait.
5:15:48 PM 
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