roaring water and an overwhelming post-pandemic world
how I'm feeling now: fields of lavender, anxiety and exhaustion, hyperpop, eat pray love, Karl Marx, Phoebe Bridgers, airports, the earth and the sky, rushing waters, and buddhism
I am offended by sensation. I bought a bunch of lavender for my desk to calm myself and every time I get a whiff of Provence I want to vomit. I do not open my windows due to the loudness of the engines revving up the hill I live on. The traffic comes and goes like the tides, endless and cyclical. I wear noise-cancelling headphones whenever I am awake in my apartment and foam earplugs whenever I am asleep in my apartment, and I spend most of my time in my apartment doing one of those two things. I sleep with a white noise machine of rushing ocean sounds, trying to drown out noises outside of my control with noises I can control. I do not leave the house during the day without sunglasses, as the intensity of the direct sun feels like an astronomical affront. I cannot tolerate either the crunch of cartilage or the doughy chew of solid animal fat, and I often eat vegetarian because of this. I can barely handle music with screeches or metallic sounds or Sophie’s influence.
I’ve been increasingly unable to tolerate the cacophony and relentless pace of our post-pandemic moment. Hyperpop and the noisy clashing too-muchness of today’s streetwear, screeching train tracks, roaring jet engines, the smash cut montage, the rushing intertextuality and ephemerality of TikTok, the obligation to sign a lease immediately after viewing a San Francisco apartment because somebody else will, the need to be scrolling and doing and adding your bit to the ledger of everyone else’s endless scroll as if any of it will amount to anything more than noise and dust and dead pixels. Marx wrote of modernity as a process in which “all that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Things didn’t quite work out this way. Modernity did not bring any sobriety to our senses (instead we got wine bars inside grocery stores and pandemic drinking problems), any truer sense of the real conditions of our lives (instead we get endless filters and online echo-chambers) or any closer communions with our relations (instead we got anomie and atomization and years of social distancing). We did, however, get two things Marx predicted: the profaning of all things sacred and the feeling of everything solid melting into air.
I wish the world’s noisy air and odors and colors were the only thing I felt were whirling out of control, but even more intolerable than those external sensations are the internal ones. Sometimes things feel broken and jagged in my stomach. I feel at once like everything has the unbearable speed and noise of a jet floating through the meaningless clouds and that everything is as unchangeable and heavy and weighted with ancient cryptic meaning as Stonehenge. Everything is changing too fast, but it somehow also feels like my certain unhappinesses and discontents will never change. The world and I are lurching out of a pandemic and there’s emotional motion sickness all around. The rest of the world and my own pleasures and joys are already roaring on that jet plane, but my awareness and my sorrows and my flaws remain halted in an interminable unmoving TSA queue. We are grounded, but feeling everything except that.
I cling to the belief that if I can still the outer world and my senses, finally grasp a moment of stillness and deodorized silence, some clarity will emerge, like how the many bronze faces of Abraham Lincoln finally come into focus when the rushing of the fountain’s water stops and the surface of the water stills and you can make out the individual pennies at the bottom.
In Eat, Pray, Love the narrator has a dream where her guru asks her to find a way to stop roaring of the ocean. She designs convoluted devices for doing this in an engineer’s drafting notebook, considers how to redirect the moon’s gravity. She fails, of course. She then hears her guru breaking out in
“laughter, bent over double in delight, wiping mirthful tears from his eyes.
‘Tell me, dear one,’ he said, and he pointed out toward the colossal, powerful, endless, rocking ocean. ‘Tell me, if you would be so kind—how exactly were you planning on stopping that?’”
I too have tried many designs for stopping the noise and the pollution from the rushing outer world and stilling those waters. I am not sure noise-cancelling headphones are the answer.