The undertow of the banal.

Living in a culture of simulation. In two parts.

This Southwest Airlines airplane has lost a screw. Yes a screw. The screw is required to be in place before we can take off; it cannot be missing, it must be replaced. Subsequently we passengers are trapped inside this metal cylinder until a mechanic retrieves a new screw from somewhere mysterious and installs it. It has been 45 minutes so far. Still waiting. This is when one realizes, or rather is reminded, that technology is capable of letting us down; progress is not infallible. Such can be the mundanity of daily life.

As W.H.Auden said “suffering takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window.” Sitting on an airplane waiting for a screw to be replaced can hardly be called suffering but someone, somewhere, was surely opening a window or eating, as we were all sitting there. There would be people Googling recipes for dinner, buying tickets to Fifty Shades of Grey, watching soaps on TV, ordering a book from Amazon, gambling on lottery tickets. Just think of all the mundane possibilities.

The screw was installed and after takeoff the pilots informed us that they “would do their best to make up time.”

What is time anyway? If the airplane had left ‘on time,’ I would have arrived in San Jose by now. Did I lose any of that “time”? No — it was spent waiting for a screw to be delivered. Those on this flight who will miss their connections have been given a hotel for the night — at the airport. Therefore they will endure more ‘time’ in airports than they had previously expected. I can think of nothing more banal than a night spent at an airport hotel.

I ask myself then: do humans strive for, even enjoy, the mundane? (And I don’t mean inconvenienced airplane passengers.) If not, what makes us fall into mundane routines, and consequently, are all routines mundane?

My own example of but one repetitive act: Every morning without fail, if I’m at home that is, I brew coffee in a stovetop espresso maker of Italian descent. First, I boil the water in the kettle. (I learned this from a Barista who told me that it was beneficial to the taste of the espresso to have the water forced through the grounds quicker, pre-boiling it in other words. I have no idea if that is true, yet I do it.) I then pour the pre-boiled water into the canister of the espresso maker, add the coffee grounds to the filter, screw the top and bottom of the vessel together and set the whole contraption on the gas burner. When the boiling water has been forced through the grounds I pour water, that is just shy of the boil, from the kettle to half fill a mug, and top it off with the espresso; an Americano. Occasionally I take it as a Machiato, fluffed with whole milk foam, and softened with a tiny amount of brown sugar. Bellissimo!

Yet here is the puzzle; it is a routine, an everyday-ness of my own machinations, all pieces of an unbroken cycle in an attempt to rid the cobwebs of my sleep. Surely, if repetition is the undertow of the banal, my being succoured every day by an exotic layer of Crema, perched atop a brassy braze-brown liquid, ought to lead to mundanity. It is as if the delight and the expectations of such an experience should come but once a year like a birthday, not every day. But no. For me the resulting experience is strong enough to break the bounds of banality.

All of this espresso making usually takes place between 7AM and 7:25AM. No real reason for that, it just does.

I mention it only because this timing coincides with the passage of the number 55 bus. A bus dotted with commuters all bathed in dim interior lighting heading towards downtown Portland, every rider’s face lit ghostly by mobile devices. The same people, doing the same thing, every day. Doing the requirt, as Riddley Walker might put it. The punctuality of this bus is remarkable. It reliably passes my house at 7:20AM each weekday. Except on snow days. (A snow day may be an anti-mundane day the more I think about it.)

The Hungarian director Béla Tarr, rather bleakly and no doubt intentionally, captured the mundanity of everyday life when he was asked to describe his film, The Turin Horse.

He replied, “You are doing always the same thing every day, but every day is a little bit different, and the life is just getting weaker and weaker, and, by the end, disappears. This is what this movie shows you.”

Life, disappears. Thanks to the mundane.

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Part 2.

Technology has a history of making human action and activities ostensibly easier, yet not necessarily more rewarding (the espresso maker excluded.)

Consider the shopping mall — everything you don’t need packed into a mundane citadel geared toward self-satisfaction. No doubt it was hailed as a marvel of technology in its time; soon enough you will be transported to the modern mall in the next-level marvel of technology — a robotic self-driving car. Plain sailing one would presume. Yet still, the end result, the reward for visiting the mall for most people, is a lighter wallet, self doubt, and pain pangs somewhat soothed by self-satisfaction.

Meanwhile, here we are, slavishly addicted to social networks. Millions of pockets buzz incessantly as Facebook Messenger, SnapChat and WhatsApp alert us to our own self-importance. As Benedict Evans put it in a Tweet recently: “You check your phone in case there’s something urgent but use it to waste time. Everything and nothing is urgent, maybe.”

Another Tweet, this one from Chris Rock, had a similar sentiment: “You only live once, so don’t forget to spend 15 hours every day on the internet, desperately searching for the validation of strangers.” What could be more mundane than that?

I am guilty of being distracted by digital white noise, but when seen through the lens of progress technology brings many benefits — advances in the world of science and medicine; the cost-cutting benefits of 3D printing; the “disappearing” of things such as cars via Uber and unused rooms via Airbnb, and so on. Let’s not forget Craigslist — it brought us benefits too — we can choose to downsize or upsize our clutter at will. On a personal note, the App that I’m using to write this essay, IA Writer Pro, is a tiny miracle as far as I’m concerned.

Yet an obvious downside to social media distraction (with its parallels to the mind numbing of television,) is the ongoing lack of awareness of the neutralization of dissent. Even dissent in the Arts. Don DeLillo called it “this culture of simulation” when he addressed it in a 2005 interview with the French magazine, Panic.

He said: “You know, in America and in Western Europe we live in very wealthy democracies, we can do virtually anything we want, I’m able to write whatever I want to write. But I can’t be part of this culture of simulation, in the sense of the culture’s absorbing of everything. In doing that it neutralizes anything dangerous, anything that might threaten the consumer society. In Cosmopolis [a character] says, “What a culture does is absorb and neutralize its adversaries.” If you’re a writer who, one way or another, comes to be seen as dangerous, you’ll wake up one morning and discover your face on a coffee mug or a t-shirt and you’ll have been neutralized.”

Think the Occupy Movement, of whose rise DeLillo foretold in Cosmopolis. And yes, the interview was ten years ago but I don’t believe things have improved.

There has been some alarming changes in Middle Eastern culture for instance. In a post-9/11 world Al-Queda has been bested by ISIS, an Islamic rebel group intent upon creating a Worldwide Caliphate. In turn, the West’s media is struggling with how to handle the endless stream of online media being released by ISIS. It is not going well.

Here is Paul Waldman of the Washington Post on ISIS and ‘The War on Terror’ after Obama had requested combat troops to battle ISIS:

It would be nice if we could look at each new development in this conflict and make a rational assessment of what it actually changes, how it affects the United States, and what we should do, or not do, in response. But brutality overwhelms rationality, just as ISIS intends. A couple of hundred thousand Americans die every year from preventable medical errors and the response from the government amounts to “Gee, that’s too bad,” but all it takes is a few videos of brutal executions 6,000 miles away to spur a wholesale reexamination of American foreign policy.

It appears that ISIS is winning the media war by absorbing and neutralizing its adversaries in the West; DeLillo was more prescient than even he himself may have considered.