We seek comfort in the never-ending stream of gadgets and digital doo-dads—all those products endowed with a life-force independent of the human touch. The NASDAQ soars or plummets, money talks, your new iMac works for you. All the while the individual is reduced to an inanimate object at the mercy of market forces. On your knees, beckons the radio man, bow down and breathe in that new car smell, the smell that soothes the wounds of childhood. This is what it’s all about, the otherworldly scent of densely pressed aluminum and vinylized leather that brings you closer to God.
This is the spiritual spiral that has led to my scratch-n-sniff experiments, breaking the world up into signifieds and signifiers, the way things smell and how I talk about these ways and these smells.
But I am ready to be healed, to begin to refuse analogy, to deny that everything is connected to everything else. To move across, away, and beyond DeLillo.
This condition, of course, was depicted brilliantly by DeLillo in chapter 39 of White Noise when the narrator Jack Gladney becomes aware of his own cynicism and confronts Willie Mink, the mysterious inventor of Dylar, an anti-death-anxiety drug to which Mink has become addicted. The main side effect of Dylar is linguistic decadence in extremis. When Jack says “Falling plane,” Mink panics and grabs the arms of his chair. When Jack whispers “Hail of Bullets,” Mink dives to the floor and begins “crawling toward the bathroom, looking back over his shoulder, childlike, miming, using principles of design but showing real terror.”
I want to someday say these words and know, in a visceral way, that they are not my own. I want to be redeemed, bathed in the blood of Latin letters. I want to jettison quaint, well-behaved narratives with neat plots and worked-out endings, to feel the incoherency of modern life on a deeper level, to write as a form of religious meditation in which language is the flawed and final recourse to enlightenment.
A version of this entry was originally published in SPEAK 20 (Fall 2000): 12-17.
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