One
Edge of the End
We're all working
together. Working together even to
the extent that we meet face to face. And by face to face I mean in the flesh,
so that one of us could even smack the other on the shoulder at any time or
note a pimple on the other's chin.
And yes I should point out that we even dare leave our domiciles in
order to meet and work together, now while it's still safe and the air can be
breathed. But how long this will
last none of us know.
There's Bill, from New
York, Dan from Sheffield, Steve and Trent, both from Canada, and now Stew from
Liverpool. Like Bill, I'm from the
States: a place called Wisconsin.
Steve from Canada had
gone home early on the night in question, so he doesn't enter into this brief tale. And Dan was off talking to others in
the pub, so he too was out of the picture.
The pub is called
simply the Tavern. It's in Taipei,
Taiwan, where we're all working to teach English, the language of the Empire. The pub's walls are covered with video
screens to keep pubgoers updated on football games happening on the other side
of the planet. We ourselves are
all from the other side of the planet too, from over there where the Empire
started. We're here teaching the
Empire's language.
I'm not going to
narrate much on this page, so you shouldn't expect much. In fact this page will just be a memo
of sorts: a record taken of part of one conversation that night. The words said were such as will probably
not be heard in the Empire for very many years longer, if even the Empire
survives that long given the state of the air. So I've decided to make note of these words: otherwise
they're liable to disappear.
Sitting at the bar that
night, Stew from Liverpool and Bill from New York had started an
altercation. It seems in the
afternoon Stew had planned to meet Bill in the latter's office at the institute
where we all work. Stew had
arrived on time for the meeting, but the institute's front door was closed and
locked, a massive impassible steel front door, you can't be too careful in this
day and age.
So Stew began to pound
on that steel door and to kick it.
He began to kick and pound.
In fact Bill was inside
the office, but from where his desk is one can't hear such things as kicking or
pounding on the door. So Bill sat
there wondering where in hell was Stew.
As Stew meanwhile abused the door, to no avail.
"If you'd had a
cell phone you could have just fucking rung me up and I'd have come and let you
in," Bill said.
This was a barb aimed
right at Stew, since Stew is known to resist getting a cell phone on principle:
he loathes the devices, sees them as another step away from true humanity,
another step in our decline here in the Empire. And let me note that presently, the year 2004, Stew's
principled refusal to get a cell phone seems almost as eccentric as if a man
had steadfastly refused to use shoes back in the 1980s: "I've never worn
the damn things and I'm not going to start wearing them now no matter how many
restaurants put up signs."
Such a man becomes a hassle if you're ever planning to go out to dinner.
"Have you ever
heard of a fucking doorbell?" Stew asks Bill. "Why don't companies have fucking doorbells any
more? Every time I want to enter a
place am I supposed to ring their fucking phone? Sounds like an excellent way for the phone companies to make
money, don't you think?"
"Well, the fact
remains that if you'd had a phone like everybody else you could have rung me up
and I'd have let you in," Bill says.
"And even if I wasn't in the office for some reason you could have
found me."
"Oh, yeah,"
Stew says. "That's a great
notion of liberty you have there.
Make sure anybody can find you and bother you no matter where you
are. No way to escape."
"I used to think
that too," Bill says.
"Before I got a phone.
Now I realize it's not an issue.
I get about five calls a day, at the most, and if I don't want people
reaching me I just turn it off."
"Sure, then you
have to make all these excuses about why your phone was off."
"You're gonna get
one eventually," Bill says.
"So why don't you just do it now so you don't have to keep
bothering other people to use their phones? Why don't you just fucking get one?"
I have great sympathy
for Stew's position in this argument, but Bill has a point here. If Stew while out at the pub asks to
use someone else's phone to ring up his bird--as these Brits say--well then he
ought to have his own phone. And
yes, I've heard Dan talk on other occasions with a tolerant grin about how Stew
is always asking to use other people's phones but he's too principled to get
one himself.
"I'm in the middle
on this one," I point out.
"I kept from getting a phone for a long time just because of what
Stew is saying. But finally I
realized I was wasting too much time.
I'd have a class to do on the other side of town, say at three p.m. or
so, and I'd leave my house in the morning and the class would be
cancelled. They'd call my home
phone to cancel, but since I'd already left I'd never get the message, so I'd
end up going all the way across town for nothing. Now it doesn't happen."
"Yeah, but there's
an opposite side to that coin too," Stew points out. "Since people have cell phones
nobody's willing to make a commitment any more. They can never fucking say 'I'll meet you at such and such a
place at five o'clock.' Instead
it's always 'I'll ring you later and we'll set it up.' And the plans get changed five
times before you can actually meet."
"The fact remains
it was you standing outside that steel door today kicking it like a
monkey," Bill says. "You
can't fight a new technology. You
just gotta accept it, that's what I think."
"Fine, Bill, so
maybe ten years from now you'll be walking around with a fucking computer chip
sunk in your fucking wrist and the government will know twenty-four hours a day
where you are," Stew says, holding out his right arm belly-side up to Bill
and indicating the place where the Empire will presumably want us to implant
the chips. "And then you'll
be one of the ones telling me it's for my own fucking good to let them implant
the chip, that I shouldn't fight against the technology."
Stew is clearly
riled. His gesture with the arm
held out and pointing to the underside of the wrist is a significant one that
all of us understand. The gesture
is so established by now that Stew can make it without really having to think
about it.
But what is the
genealogy of this gesture? It is
composite: a sign made up of different elements.
First off, there's the
fact that the Nazis chose to tattoo the ID numbers of concentration camp
inmates on just this area of the wrist.
(The Nazis: one of the Empire's earlier forms.) The concentration camps are thus an
allusion, whether latent or conscious, in any talk of planting ID chips in the
wrist.
Second, there's the
fact that most of us, Stew included, wear a timepiece strapped around just this
area of the body. (The wristwatch:
one of the Empire's earlier control devices. The wristwatch attaches the machinery of schedule
directly to the body itself.)
Third, the wrist is
what you slit if you want to kill yourself. (Suicide: maybe the only surefire way left for the
individual to escape the Empire's steady encroachment. Suicide: the rash act of someone driven
mad by the meaningless technological rampage that is modernity.)
By holding out his
right arm and pointing at the underside of his wrist Stew intends to throw all
these meanings at Bill as signals of the latter's foolishness: he is the
collaborator, the wage slave, the one driven to self-destruction by his own
obsession with technology. This
gesture is meant to stand as the final word in their argument. It is Stew's most essential point.
But the fact remains:
It was Stew who was maddened and kicking the steel door (steel: one of the
Empire's greatest triumphs) while Bill sat in the office smoking, typing up
lesson plans, and occasionally watching birds on the sidewalk below.
As I've indicated above, these notes do not really narrate all that
much. They only make for a memo of
one conversation: an altercation the likes of which the Empire will not
tolerate for much longer. Yes,
it's almost certain that the Stews will be absorbed by the new technology and
the chips will be implanted sooner or later.
But what does it all mean? What is this slope we are slipping down? That is something that remains opaque to us.
If you are still able to breathe the air fifty years from now and if you are still allowed to read this, you may be wondering with a wry smile at our quaintness here in the first years of the twenty-first century: how we blinded ourselves to A or didn't understand B. You may, on the other hand, already be idealizing our lives as part of some Golden Age, a time when there were still real pubs and when men still traveled around the globe to work and meet face to face, before the risk of viral contamination made hermetically sealed living quarters standard: a time when humanity was still humanity. In fact here in 2004 we can only speculate about your future reactions to such a debate as that between Stew and Bill. For my part, however, and regardless of these last considerations I've typed, I don't much wonder about your reactions to this memo. Because I suspect you will not be reading this at all fifty years from now: the air will have gone and you and the Empire will have gone with it.
Eric Mader
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
---------
This page is at http://www.necessaryprose.com/
---------