Mass Disorientation

 

He’s gone. This never happened.

Don’t tell me I’m the only who’s noticed. That would mean I’m having a psychotic break, into a state called dissociation. But I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. What I’m referring to is bigger than a solitary breakdown because it takes in too much to be one man’s delusion, no matter how vast his imagination.

What I’m talking about is an increasing sense of unreality in the everyday experience of an entire population. No, not just a sense, an atmosphere that involves all the senses. Nothing looks, sounds, smells, feels, tastes quite right, and even time is out of joint. There are still connections, some glue that binds pieces together but the connections are twisting, torquing, breaking and reattaching in new ways. There is movement through time, but even the ticks of the clock are changing speed and pitch, mocking us all individually and collectively, so the only thing we can be sure of is that reality itself is becoming the globs in a Sixties lava lamp, and depending on our perceptual biases we are either fixated on the changing shape of it or turn away to avoid losing our balance or succumbing to nausea. 

People may be experiencing this in different ways. These are only visual examples, suggestive images best viewed with the sound on mute. Supply the music or the voices from the personal and media memories that are winding through your head all the time now whether or not you’ve been choosing to hear them.

Like our world is being folded up into an imprisoning box…

We can’t remember how but the world, life, ourselves are not 

at all today what they were yesterday or a week, a year ago.

And whatever today is, tomorrow will be different, because in some 

very real way reality itself is melting, no longer able to maintain

structure and shape and identity, sloughing away before our eyes.

Take note of what these visions are not. They’re not the endless distracting catastrophic fantasies of war, earthquake, fire, invasions by armies or aliens or celestial bodies. Not the SYFY trope of  the Statue of Liberty swept away by a tsunami, the Golden Gate plunging into the bay, the Eiffel Tower collapsing on Paris, Las Vegas leveled by a solar storm, or Los Angeles finally torn apart and hurled into the ocean by the biggest quake of them all.

This kind of disorientation is no shocking event. It is a kind of wave function, or at least an incremental temporal function, marked more by step changes than apocalyptic stompings. And we are all experiencing it in our own different spheres of action or influence. Lies that make no sense. Repetition of repeated redundant stupidities by people who profess to be smart and good and thoughtful. Emotions that are so extravagantly overblown they make grown men and women resemble the teenagers who deserve what they get in slasher films when the victims can’t remember to stay in the car or not split up for the next attempt at escape. Explanations and excuses and ideas that are just completely obviously wrong when we hear them for the first, second, third, fourth time in exactly the same words in exactly the same superior, lecturing inflection. Behaviors we never heard of before, which if they were going on before, no one spoke of them, let alone boasted of them, advocated them, and sought to destroy anyone who stood up to object. Impossible things, that is things which cannot and never happen, happen all in a row and the people on TV tell you about them on the same handsome studio sets in the same expensive suits and faces they always wear as if this is the way things have always gone on and maybe you were just too dumb to know it’s no big deal. Yesterday’s truth a lie. Yesterday’s lie a scientific fact. Yesterday’s hero a dangerous criminal. Yesterday’s criminal a role model for millions. Yesterday’s perversion is the road to the new Damascus. And the blur of such all-enveloping incomprehensibility is perfect for making everyone in the audience feel dumb.

That’s the Twilight Zone part of it. You’ve tuned in, if you have, and this is the show, and what seems odd is only the 22 minute narrative we’re telling you in this episode, and the only anchor to reality you need, the real reality as it were, is the commercials that still come like clockwork and still rely on you to buy things you can’t afford to buy or afford not to buy if you want to remain rooted in the reality that is dissolving so swiftly under your feet.

Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. You know. The old movies that are now unwatchable because they are so naive and optimistic they make you feel stupid ever to have admired. The old music that used to seem rebellious and now seems so dated that even listening to it makes you feel like an obsolete artifact of a discredited past. The old pastimes that once nourished you and are no longer part of your life — reading a good book by the fire, conversations about ideas not Internet social transactions, family dinners that aren’t elaborate hoaxes of nonexistent warmth and intimacy, work that was fulfilling and consisted of more doing than politicking… I'm sure you all have your own lists of what got lost along the way unnoticed and now seems to hit you in the face when you get the odd reminder of one of them. No one else remembers dial phones and not knowing who was calling when they rang. Where’s my wheelchair? Don’t fret. Everyone feels this way. They’re just in varying stages and ages of admitting it. There are people who can’t believe no one remembers what a laser disk was. They don’t talk about it. In big ways and small, absolutely everybody is d-i-s-o-r-i-e-n-t-i-n-g.

The period of mass disorientation is a passing phase. That’s the good news. It’s serving some deep subconscious purpose that keeps us quietly paralyzed while the huge physically real catastrophes are still in the making, building to the fatality of civilization itself. Ironic that we have for so long been distracted from recognizing our own individual disorientations by the gorgeous CGI disasters Hollywood has been building for us at great expense in the movies.

Money well spent. They are coming. They will kill a huge number of us, but the worst ones have been left out. The famines, the overreaches of science that will annihilate us with their harebrained solutions to misdiagnosed problems, and the slow ending of human creative response to challenge by a species that was once brainy and brave enough to survive by hunting mammoths with pointed sticks to feed children who took nine months to be born and nine years to be able to produce as much as they consumed. 

How do you hobble a valiant, vital, persistent species like that? You confuse them to death. 

To quote our even more damaged Brit friends across the pond, “That one’s done and dusted.”

I have no solutions to offer. All I have is a small arsenal that has kept me alive and combative in the teeth of madness for many years. It works for me. But probably not for everybody. You’re welcome to have a listen: My Life in Music (and Vice Versa).

Oh. Why is this happening now. I already explained and nobody read it. Here.