EPISODE 611: THE GROUND HAS TAKEN ITS LUNCH BREAK
Jacques Derrida as a Sixteen Year Old Girl
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Important Statement: The world can never have enough Tears for Fears.
(Random aside: Today after writing this sentence I went down a Tears for Fears rabbit hole so mighty at the end of it I looked like this.
Go Straight to the End to see where That Led Me.)
Someone asked me how I was doing the other day. Which was a big accomplishment, because we were actually in the same room when this happened and also not wearing masks, and none of that is a thing I had been doing lo these last fifteen months.
(I went to a coffee shop for the first time in over a year last week as well –outdoor seating only, I am not a monster. Two people eventually sat down behind me. It was clear they were meeting in person for the first time—I have no idea what the term is for that event anymore, both because pandemic and 21th century. Almost immediately they began sharing their favorite movies. Pauly Shore and Brendan Fraser figured prominently among their favorite actors.
To which I thought, a) Oh my God, is the reason I feel safe the fact that I’ve slipped through a crack into 1993?
And also, b) Los Angeles is definitely starting to turn its very tanned and well defined neck back toward normal. You may call it Slouching toward Burbank.)
So the person who I am with in person and without masks and it is okay, it is okay, everything is okay asks me how I’m doing and this is the image that comes to mind.
Except, imagine that slide is much longer first and it has a roof on it so you don’t know that the end result is going to be flying into space, and wait one second what was that water slide I just sent you anyway.
For a little over a year, I stayed in my room, you stayed in yours. (Is it weird that my word for home is “room”? It is, isn’t it? Five decades of institutionalized living, how the heck are ya?)
And it was awful, but also then at some point it was kind of Oh, So Life is Like This, Then. And it was. And really, mostly I was okay. Ish. In fact I just wrote a piece about it for the National Catholic Reporter.
(Have I ever mentioned that Shameless Self Promotion was the name of my middle school D&D character? He was a paladin, and he had an 18 on charisma.)
But then this here vaccine doohickey showed up (why am I talking like a guy with a handlebar mustache on break from playing the pian-er), and suddenly everything started to change. Personally, I mean. Like I’m not totally sure how to be now. Honestly, I’m not so sure I know who I am.
I’m not saying this to worry you. This is not a cry for help. Please do call Lassie, though, I would like to meet her.
I’m just saying in in case maybe you’re feeling it too. It would make sense if you were. In a way it’s like we’ve all been pushing against a wall for a whole year, trying really hard to hold it up. And now suddenly the wall is gone or going and so of course we’re falling through where it was and I guess maybe we’re mimes in this analogy, and if that is not a reason to be confused about our self-identities I don’t know what is.
People like to use that phrase the ground has shifted. But to me it feel more like maybe it’s gone and you can’t quite figure out where it went to.
It’ll come back. I feel all too confident about that. Probably it’ll come flying at us like a swimming pool of death after your older brother made you climb twenty stories with a surprise, it’ll be cool, before shoving you through a hole that turned out to be a slide into the upper atmosphere.
Older brothers are the worst.
But for the moment, yeah, no, the ground has taken its lunch break.
And maybe that’s a good thing. This is what my friend who agreed to sit in a room with me and not appear afraid said. As Jacques Derrida once wrote, Deconstruction is awesome!
I don’t know. I was proud of the fact that I was able to realize what I was feeling at all. Usually all I feel is hungry.
(For some reason my spell check just corrected that to “hungy”. I take comfort in knowing that even spell check is having to go through a period of adjustment.)
Someone else I was speaking to in person, because I live with 35 people and am now trying to actually interact with some of them in person, a little—still instinctively quite a challenge, though after one apparently very powerful nap I did awake with a much greater comfort about going to meals—had his own analogy for this moment.
“We’re in the bardo”, he said.
The Bardo—it’s not what Shakespeare’s bros call him, though good guess. No, it’s a Buddhist term for the liminal (aka in between) state between death and rebirth. Basically, it’s limbo.
Yikes, no, not that.
Also, not that.
(Am I the only one that finds that version actually more disturbing? Why is Jesus a giant? And why are the people all old bald white men?)
No, limbo—an in between state.
Now you might have thought, I just did a year of “that in between state”. But actually that’s not quite true. The last year was not an in between, it was a whole thing. The in between is the getting out of it, the readjustment, the chaos inside that is hopefully creative.
Also I just like the idea that I’m in the Bardo. No reason, but it comforts me.
Words can make cells but they can also make great telescopes and throw pillows.
This is just a small thing: On Friday I finished watching Foyle’s War. And for some reason it being over has also completely messed with me, so much so that I can’t seem to figure out what to watch, which is a very new feeling, and I am actively considering starting the series over again.
Seriously, I just don’t know a show that speaks to the present moment quite like Foyle. In fact I wrote something about it for Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture.
(Did I mention my paladin rode an Arabian named Fabio?)
In lieu of links, we end on that most important of topics, Tears for Fears.
FIRST OF ALL, please watch the FIRST TIME HEARING guys listening to “Everyone Wants to Rule the World”. Their “Our bodies can’t help but starting moving at this” is pretty much everything I feel when I listen to that song.
THEN, A Crazy Reveal: You know that song “Mad World” from Donnie Darko?
Yeah you do. Demi Lovato just put out a cover.
Well, it turns out before it became the song for one of the great strange movies of all time, it was a 1982 Tears for Fears song. In fact, it was the subject of their very first video.
And it has a very different vibe.
The guy dancing in the window is everything you need to know about 1982.
(One of the comments below the video: “When you're depressed but you're also an unstoppable dancing machine.”)
That ending is spooky as hell. Is it me or does the sound feel like a precursor to early American Horror Story?
Maybe I’m pushing too hard here?
I actually prefer the Tears for Fears version, I think. Enough with dark and spooky, please and thank you.
Insanely, last April Tears for Fears lead singer Curt Smith posted himself singing the song with his daughter Diva. AND HE DID THE DARKO VERSION.
(I do love the harmonies they do.)
I will say, Gary Jules’ music video from the Darko version is very cool. Check this out.
I have no need for the return of Flash Mobs, but I would love it if a post-pandemic world had room for more videos where large groups of people make body collages.
Have a good week. However you find yourself, try to be gentle. It’s all part of it. We’re on our way.