Watermarks Along the River

Got up this morning, put on some Enya. It’s been a while.

What was my path into electronic music? That’s a storied past, the result of a chain of personal connections. Started with an 8-track of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” that circulated among my uncles; later a buddy handed me “The Man Machine”; Emerson, Lake, and Palmer “Lucky Man” on the radio; Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time”; new wave. Those all primed me. But the one that really broke the dam and released the flood was Enya. She was my gateway into electronic music, and into admitting — in the land of hard rock — that I like electronica.

But someone walked me to the levee.

Like my peers in our small town in the late 80’s, I was an on-fire-for-God Jesus-fish Christian. Didn’t know much about the world, but what I did, I was certain of it because someone told me. At that end of the decade, the Baptists were on this holy crusade against New Age culture (yeah, you read that right). They said New Age was just regular old Satan worship in disguise, using its seductive messaging to lure people into its velvet traps with Eastern mysticism. Because of these lessons, and being a thumb-headed teenager myself, I was hyper-vigilant about its presence in the world. I wanted to find this New Age stuff and destroy it.

11th grade, math class. My classmate Samir was an avowed atheist but a good guy who liked to shake things up a bit by challenging true believers by Just Asking Questions. Being 2nd generation Indian immigrant in a small town, he was on the edge of classroom society and was frequently chatty to make up for it. Finding common interests in music, he loaned me his tape of “Watermark” by Enya. I was hesitant, but I took it home. Liked it. Made a copy on my church’s dual-deck while running sound for Sunday service.

Spent weeks listening, trying to discern if Enya was New Age. Given the provenance of the tape — with me holding so many stupid stereotypes about Samir, who was Desi but squarely atheist — I kept getting the wrong ideas and constantly asked myself questions about her. Later at academic summer camp, my friend Gary and I also asked those questions as we shared headphones on long bus trips. We talked about faith often; it’s why we meshed so well. Ultimately, we couldn’t discern if Enya was New Age or not, but agreed that it was OK to like her anyway.

At that moment, a ripple formed in my mind and I was finally able to let out the slack for a bit and just enjoy something for what it was instead of judging everything so seriously all the time.

Fast forward a bit, I leave my small town and run off to a smaller town with a bigger school filled with people from a bigger world. Of course I grew up, gained more of those ripples, and my own struggle of faith just couldn’t hold up to all this new information. Of course Enya isn’t New Age; she’s Irish, for Christ’s sake, a prodigy from a family of musical prodigies. I released my grip on the bad assumptions I previously crafted from the limited information I had at the time and let them fall into the river.

I understand Samir’s contribution better. We connected in class, and through that he helped me step toward a tangential path to becoming something different. Butterfly effect. I ran into him a few years after I had left the church; he confessed with wide smiles that he had joined the church. He found his own connections. Again, butterfly effect.

People change in surprising ways, but not without precedent and priming. We are the result of our decisions and the decisions of those we share our time with. Connections form our culture. My choice in music here seems like something so vapid and minor, but it’s a watermark of those connections. See here: this is how high the flood waters reached at the turn of the decade.

I like what I like because of the people I like, who also like what they like.

That’s culture.

Soap Boxes

I want people. I miss people. I need people. I spend time with people. But every person now is a preacher. Everybody has a sermon. Everyone has an opinion. I have opinions too, but there is no room for me. No space. Not in this marketplace of ideas. Soapboxes everywhere, in and out of every free speech zone. So many voices. So many voices in my ears, slapping arms into chests in the race up hill. I am so tired. So very, very tired.

Intentional Fan

As I stood up on the bench and pulled the rusty chain of the ceiling fan above the sweltering café patio, I told my friend, who was complaining of the still-air heat, “I am an engineer. I fuck with my environment to make it better.” After a few tugs, the dead fan sprung to life and kicked up a steady breeze below.

This line of action is the finest way I’ve found of nullifying the learned helplessness I’ve been taught along the way. I have agency; I don’t have to suffer. Nobody has to suffer. I can do a small public act and offer a bigger public gift: comfort. And what taught me this? That scene in “Men In Black” where Will Smith’s character loudly dragged the heavy table over to his egg chair so he could write. That intentionality is what saves the world.

Get up and improve something.

Es hat endet

As I predicted and/or intended, I failed Deutsch IV. It was inevitable. I previously swore to myself that I would at least finish the semester so I didn’t get the figurative DNF (Did Not Finish, racing term). Well, I stopped running in the last chapter. Burned out. I was so far behind on my homework, papers, discussions, and readings, that I stopped bothering. Just quit going to class. Didn’t do the chapter test, the final interview, or any of the projects.

I stopped running. Eventually the lag wagon picked me up and brought me to the finish line where I crossed reluctantly to get my participation ribbon.

After grades were delivered, I wrote a note to the Professor to explain to her what happened and where I went. She understood, and encouraged me to continue learning. I might.

But I need a break. I’ve been studying German as a hobby for roughly 3 years (including my stupid daliance with Duolingo). I’m tired from the loss of all that downtime spent on study. Just stop. I’ve already forgotten so much because of the embarrassment of not keeping up. It’s kinda bad.

I hope I can look past that and figure out what it was about learning that inspired me. The challenge? The struggle? The new avenues of society to explore? The chance to travel, to be somewhere else and talk with the locals? To retire in Deutschland?

For now, I’ll have to be comfortable with tourist-level competence. For anything deeper, I’d have to become a resident.

I should’ve taken Spanish.

Party Privilege: Silence

As O’Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.

Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.

‘You can turn it off!’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said O’Brien, ‘we can turn it off. We have that privilege.’

He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the pair of them, and the expression on his face was still indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak, but about what? Even now it was quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he had been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched past, enormous. With difficulty Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on O’Brien’s. Then suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings of a smile. With his characteristic gesture O’Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose.

‘Shall I say it, or will you?’ he said.

‘I will say it,’ said Winston promptly. ‘That thing is really turned off?’

‘Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.’

‘We have come here because-‘

Snippet from “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, by George Orwell

This section — where O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party, is able to turn off the everpresent telescreen in his office for a period of time — hammers something home to me. It’s a thought experiment that gives me nightmares.

Now that handheld and desktop operating systems feature a “Do Not Disturb” button, with optional timeouts, and now that operating systems are being increasingly mandated by law to know who is using it, it becomes obvious, avoidably inevitable, that at some point there will become classes of users who are able to turn off notifications, and classes of users for whom notifications are always present, always disruptive.

Are you in the Inner Party? You and I will never be in the Inner Party. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in the Outer Party, functionaries for the order. Or if we’re really lucky, we’ll be of the proles, oblivious to our lot.

It’s our job, at this critical point, to wrest the controls at the root, inside the OS. Learn which packages to uninstall. Learn which to deconfigure. Find how to redirect the stream of disruptive bullshit. To turn our tech into something that is unable to harm us.

Find the switch. Turn it off.