Surviving Modern Times: Meditation Through Status Updates

In the summer of 2016, I was suffering from what I sensed was a condition so prevalent it seemed redundant to give it a name, but because I need to write about it now, I’ll simply say this: I was having trouble paying attention. I picked up books and in a matter of minutes—even seconds—put them down. I opened the document that contained the draft of a major project I was supposed to be working on, tinkered with a few sentences, and minimized the window. I stared into space. I visited Twitter and Facebook and Flipboard and Deadspin and the <em>New York Times</em> and Pitchfork and CNN and my local paper’s website, scrolling frantically wherever I landed. After all, it had been 15 minutes since I’d visited the Internet, which was pumping out new and dreadful headlines as fast as I could read them, and it was very possible that I might’ve missed something.

2016 was Black Lives Matter. It was the Pulse nightclub shootings. It was Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. It was Prince dying. It was David Bowie dying. It was Muhammed Ali and George Michael and Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds and Alan Rickman and Gary Shandling and Florence Henderson and Morley Safer and Gene Wilder and Nancy Regan the mom from Everybody Loves Raymond dying. It was a zookeeper shooting Harambe the gorilla. It was strangers walking through your neighborhood, holding their phones at arm’s length, playing Pokemon Go. It was the Chicago Cubs winning the world series. It was fake news and Brexit and Syria and the Zika virus and Flint. It was a menagerie of absurdities, each one as bizarre and unpredictable as the last. Every day, headlines delivered more shock, and then November 8 came and went, and slayed the notion that anybody anywhere had a fucking clue.

It was in the midst of this chaos that I began to post short, collage-like essays to a popular social media site. I feel sheepish saying this, but writing little exploratory essays and posting them as status updates felt oddly subversive—and, at times, exhilaratingly so. I hadn’t used social media as a place for quiet meditation—in fact, it seemed like a venue that had been reserved to record the outrageous, or to express outrage. I didn’t normally share unpublished writing with random people, and I certainly wasn’t used to using the space of the status update as a staging ground for works-in-progress. Nor was it my habit to employ the kind of improvisational, collage-like style that I found myself drawn to, though I had to admit that doing so had allowed me to acknowledge that the writing I liked to do, and the writing I liked to read, was the type where anything seemed possible: where the language felt mobile and alive. In talking about such writing, Amy Fusselman asks, in her new book, Idiophone, “Why can’t you leave one world and move into another?” I hadn’t read that line in 2016—in fact I just read it this morning—but that’s exactly what I wanted to do. Go, at least on the page, wherever I wanted.

The more I recorded the things I paid attention to, the more significant paying attention—or not paying attention—seemed to become. In writing these essays, or whatever they were, I tried my best to let go, and let the world in. I allowed myself to be led by association—but also by juxtaposition; if I felt the need to record the time a moth landed on Cristiano Ronaldo’s nose during the end of a soccer game and he didn’t bother to swat it away, I included it in the space of the essay, and let the next thing in right after: a crow pecking at golden kernels of popcorn outside a movie theater. I began to regain trust in the power of my own curiosity—and of the Internet to satiate said curiosity. If, during my daily writing, I had a question—about Patches the horse, who rode in a convertible and was fed hamburgers by his owners, or about the time Geraldo Rivera hosted a show dedicated to Satanism—I paused to Google—and then document—it.

I don’t know that much has changed about my ability—or inability—to pay attention. Every once in a while, I’ll stumble across a book that I’ll spend all day with (Catherine Lacey’s The Answers, or Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, or Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest & Relaxation come to mind as recent immersive experiences), but my life, more or less, unfolds much like a collage: status updates of friends and acquaintances and people I’ll never meet, a recipe for lentil stew, a catalogue of items every cyclist needs, watching my son express incredulity after suffering a headshot in Fortnite, texting my wife a grocery list, washing the dog bed our geriatric boxer urinated on, reading the bio of a band I’d never heard of on Spotify, transferring money from one bank account to another, and forgetting the majority of what happens in my life, unless I happen to be present enough to write it down.

What follows is an example of one of many of those updates.

Spoiler Alert

I can’t stop recommending Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons, and when I do, I always provide the following three examples to illustrate the treasure trove of oddities lurking within its pages: 1., a couple who, not long after receiving a miniature hand carved coffin with their picture inside, climbed into their car, where they were repeatedly bitten by nine giant rattlesnakes that had been injected with amphetamines; 2., a whorehouse in New Orleans that served cherries—cooked in cream and absinthe—from an octoroon’s vagina; and 3., a movie star who once played “You Are My Sunshine” on a piano using not his hands, but his penis. These were, according to Capote, real things that happened. Another real thing that happened: I attended a meeting with my department chair and a woman whose research examines the attempts to preempt and eradicate biological danger; together, we brainstormed activities for an event called “Viral Imaginations,” one that would include a reading and craft talk by author Justin Cronin, who wrote a series of very long books that I will never read about a vampire apocalypse triggered inadvertently by military scientists, who inject twelve subjects with an experimental drug made from a virus taken from a South American bat, which grants to the infected psychic powers and a thirst for blood. Far more interesting than vampires, though, was the description the women provided about real-life guinea worms, a nematode parasite that can gain entrance to your body if you should ever drink water containing water fleas, who themselves have been infected with guinea worm larvae; a year later, after the larvae attach themselves to your intestinal wall, where they mate, the male dies and is reabsorbed into your body, while the female migrates through subcutaneous tissues and begins to emerge through your skin, the effect of which causes a blister and, I’d have no choice but to suppose, a great deal of distress, once you realize that a tiny worm is burrowing very slowly—it can take as long as several weeks—out of the flesh of your arm or your leg. “You should YouTube zombie insects,” the expert on biological danger told me, and though I haven’t yet, I probably soon will, though I doubt I will binge on those videos as voraciously as I did Stranger Things—a Netflix series about the disappearance of a boy in a small town and the appearance of a girl with supernatural powers who escaped from a government industrial complex, and who might be responsible for opening a portal between our universe and another, thus giving birth to a hideous Alien-like monster. The teenage girl who tried to shoot the monster—a bipedal thing whose body appeared to be covered in scales secreting slime and a head that opened up like a carnivorous flower—reminded me, when her forehead wrinkled with worry, of an ex-girlfriend of mine who, with her brother, had been killed instantly when an eighteen-wheeler rear ended them after it had failed to slow for traffic produced by late night highway construction; at the funeral home, I peered into their caskets to say goodbye, and noted that they looked, what with their shining hair and purplish, sparkly make up caking their faces, like a pair of storybook siblings who had drowned, but might, at any moment, be revived. I recently downloaded the soundtrack to Stranger Things and because the music is mostly keyboard washes and looped arpeggios, it has the power to inject otherwise ordinary events with import, making, for instance, a single green turd floating in the yellow water of a toilet bowl easier to imagine as a display of some hovering varietal of space rock that’s able to grow its own golden aura. I figured that this perceptual shift might also be blamed on having played No Man’s Sky on Playstation yesterday; I wandered a virtual planet shooting various flora and fauna with a mining ray-gun, and observed a giant, turd-shaped rock floating inexplicably above a mountain that swished greenly with virtual grass. After coming home from church, where I read aloud to the congregation a passage from Hebrews in which the writer says that he doesn’t have time to tell all the important faith stories from scripture, which include those “who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight… were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented, wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground,” I noted that though I had mown my lawn only three days before, the grass was nearly tall enough to warrant being cut again. I remembered that the couple who recently moved to our neighborhood had claimed that it was so hot and dry in Colorado that keeping a green lawn alive for a month required more water than an entire household would use during that same period of time. It’s easy to forget that lawns, like so much of what we live with, are an invention of man; in the Jacobean era of the early 17th century, lawns were a sign of wealth and status, and proved that its owner was wealthy enough to possess property that wasn’t being used for animal grazing. And while having a yard of one’s own can certainly feel luxurious, especially when walking barefoot over just-mown grass, I’m willing to bet that neither Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump has ever mown a lawn, much less tried to fit a mower into the back of a Honda CRV, so as to transport it across town for repairs, which is what I did over two weeks ago; once the mower’s fuel intake system has been rebuilt, I will fork over a sizeable amount of money for its release, and the man I pay will, I know, from having paid him before, have no left hand, merely a stump where a hand had once been, and I will wonder, as I always do, whether repairing machines with dangerous whirring metal blades is his way of proving to the universe that he’s mastered the very thing that disfigured him—and that having successfully done so, he now has nothing to fear.

From Permanent Exhibit by Matthew Vollmer, courtesy BOA Editions. Copyright 2018, Matthew Vollmer.