In 1994, amid the swelter of a Midwest late afternoon, I was robbed. It wasn’t the first time. In the wasteland of Chicago’s South Side, you made allowances for panhandlers, and for such occasions I usually carried a twenty.
I had no money – the irony – I had been heading to a convenience store to get cash. I might have suggested going to an ATM. I was open to negotiation. I knew the routine.
And then it went horribly wrong. After I announced that I had no money, my assailant stabbed me and suddenly we were beyond a point of return. He repeatedly stabbed, kicked and pulverised me for what seemed an eternity. What haunts me is that it happened in daylight, amidst a wary people who dared not intervene, but were acculturated to violence and death.
For a time, my assault was a shorthand way of explaining how I had gotten from Chicago to Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. I called it my Chicago story.
This story, however, paled with the details of a woman, formerly from Cleveland, who worked in building No 25 where we both then worked at Microsoft. Accosted while entering her apartment block, she was dragged to a boiler room, and raped repeatedly over the course of some 36 hours, the rapist coming and going from wherever it is a rapist goes in the time between raping a victim.
In the grace of small miracles, an immigrant Pole, the building’s superintendent, found her. I sometimes played with the concatenation of their intersecting lives, and this Pole, with his American dreams, and what he told them back home in Krakow.
Early on, I allied my own story and this woman’s, in what was then my generalised theory of an updated Pilgrim’s Progress, a westward migration spurred by individualised moments of near-death experience, a series of democratising and personalised assaults that moves one’s politics toward the prescience of a survival instinct to run and not look back.
And so it was at Microsoft, late at night, I committed to documenting that older America, to writing an American eulogy because nobody else seemed compelled to do so, and because I knew that somehow, someday, the flotsam of those left behind, those lost citizens of the industrial age, were going to have one last political stand and attempt to influence what has already been decided, the future
I knew it was shaky ground on which to formulate a theory of social movement, but it was hard to find confidants. We were newly arrived, and yet there was no collective desire to explain the past, to give voice to the miasmic social disorder from whence we had come.
Nobody wanted to hear my Chicago story, or so I learned. It was a remote, dead history. Why was I telling it? For what effect? For what purpose? What we shared was a collective amnesia, more than a collective story in an emerging age that had forgotten how to think historically.
I found it peculiar to the American psyche, a psychological sleight of hand tied to geography – the literal and figurative psychological shifts that define so many states of the American consciousness – the red barn bucolic of Wisconsin’s dairy land, Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes, on into the no-man’s parch of the Dakotas and through the Marlboro man terrain of Big Sky Montana and Wyoming.
These are no United States, not really.
Everything at Microsoft conspired toward a new reality – the foothills of Redmond, Washington, so recently settled. Undeniably, the future was taking shape there.
There was an obvious coincidence of fate. Bill Gates had been born in Seattle and not Detroit. Perhaps that point of reorientation alone redirected an industry, though it went deeper. It took his dropping out of Harvard, an act tantamount to a tacit rejection of the east coast and all that came before. What followed was a legion of geniuses in quiet retreat to Seattle – the Princeton grad entrepreneurial upstart visionary Jeff Bezos and his fledgling Amazon.com, along with Howard Schultz and his Starbucks Coffee, to name but two of the most notable and enduring figures of our post-industrialised world.
But it ran deeper than mere personalities.
In the virgin evergreen hills of Redmond, the zeitgeist of a new postmodern decentredness was already evident in the architecture – in the enclosure of our galactic glass offices amid the tree line that obliterated an inside from an outside, these glass cubes that suspended us without the superstructure of obvious design, so we floated in a diaphanous coastal mist that never quite burned off and reinforced always an eerie state of intergalactic travel.
Everything there conspired toward amnesia.
It so contrasted with the most immediate weigh station of my past American experience – the garish height of the Sears Tower, that towering monolith ode to presence and substantiality, where so many Irish before me had landed and built the Green Machine of a political cronyism of union bosses and aldermen that sustained a blue-collar pageant of menacing intrigue and what had constituted the American experience.
Out here, the world was reconfigured. It was all virgin growth forest, the evergreen tree line imposing an architectural restriction on building heights that reoriented our physical footprint, which in turn aligned us toward an emergent new politics of eco-awareness, indubitably shifting our socio-political reality from humanist, social concerns to global environmental concerns.
We were then caught up in an irrepressible historical moment tied to an irrevocable change in the representation of things, so nothing quite connected as it had once-upon-a-time.
And it went deeper still – the disconnect with all that was left behind – a further decentredness. Microsoft had no official headquartered building – no point of obvious differentiation or ostentation that Building 12 was better than Building 25. It was egalitarian to a fault. Neither was there a statue of Bill Gates, or an immortalising Microsoft M to provide a point of historical context against which a parade of journalists might stand through the passage of years. History had been subtly decoupled from a linear narrative.
The question hung in the air – in this decentred maze, where would you protest if you wanted to? And then the follow-up question: what would you protest?
Here was industry, unencumbered by social ills or the dead pool of past failures. We were in the clicks and mortar model of a new economy, deep in the disentanglement of physical location as the sole mode of creating presence and all that such disentanglement suggested – a collapse of time into a 24/7 access model that disassembled the traditional notion of compartmentalised time in an ever-present ON.
Both the Declaration of Independence and publication of The Wealth of Nations happened in 1776. It was a provocative concurrence that Smith's work should so arrive as a secular economic catechism of supply and demand that eclipsed the Biblical moral dualism of right and wrong, light and darkness – so a new way was suddenly upon a people!
It was a paradigm shift, an abrupt rupture, an amalgam of nebulous ideas taking shape into a new world order that is never planned, but somehow arrives, fully formed. Maybe this was the way of historical rupture. I remembered at one point, noting that during the Age of Reason, both the Declaration of Independence and publication of The Wealth of Nations happened in 1776. It was a provocative concurrence that Smith’s work should so arrive as a secular economic catechism of supply and demand that eclipsed the Biblical moral dualism of right and wrong, light and darkness – so a new way was suddenly upon a people!
I saw it thus. We were then experiencing the great deconstruction and reconfiguration of all that had previously defined us. Our past provided no context, no point of orientation, so we had left it behind.
We were arrived at a new reality, the expedience of a new culture that adopted a dress-down culture that eschewed the garish power suits of the eighties, reinforcing that there were no apparent social or economic differences between us. It was most evident at Starbucks, in the formation of a new public space for socially minded, global citizens committed to pressing issues of the day such as the loss of shade-grown coffee habitat.
This constituted the new politics, or so I was led to believe by my fellow Microsofties, activist lesbian South Africans who were bigtime activists for birds’ rights – birds’ rights not to be conflated with feminist slang, but with endangered songbirds, as my neighbours insisted that I agree to buy only officially sanctioned shade-grown coffee.
I’ve always been amazed at what we’ll not talk about, how utterly off-limits some of our darkest fears are. I wanted to ask them if it was true that South African BMW dealers offered the option of a flame-thrower device to ward off the endemic carjacking in Johannesburg and Cape Town. But why annoy them?
Maybe I was the problem with my irrepressible belief that retrospection is essential to an understanding of a collective future, when the burden of history might just be that – a burden!
What had replaced an older Marxist dialectic was a proliferation of professional jargons, a tower of Babel of industry-specific speak, a linguistic fracture, laid down alongside a concomitant language of political correctness that ahistoricised ordinary discourse through the deconstruction of language and the invention of new words. What it augured, or so it seemed, was the collapse or the unavailability of the older humanist language, a new mode of communication devoid of laughter, a professional jargon that disallowed the possibility of linguistic normalcy ever again.
What struck me most was the indifference, the lack of requiem.
I went searching in literature to reveal this disjunctive break, this loss of language, or to uncover its transfiguration. In the skybox of my Microsoft office, I carted in a cache of my old textbooks.
I went searching through the old standbys, the obvious constructors of a new language, Orwell and Burgess’s respective works, 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, those political odes to a reconstituted language that determine how one thinks in a sort of epi-genetics – a shutting down of biological systems in relation to outside influences – much the same way a kangaroo can prolong a pregnancy during drought or hard times.
I combed through the sucking stones of Beckett’s reductive genius, the logical endgame of his Trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, the disappearance of space and perspective and the jaded fatalism of the line from his novel, Murphy, “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new”, to Godot who framed the proposition of history thus, “I’m like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget”.
I liked Beckett for his exhaustive cause in describing history, his use of language to tease away at meaning. I heard him echo in Camus’ The Stranger, in that opening and prophetic line, “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure,” Camus unmercifully divesting history and the past of any notable point of importance, sundering the remembrance of mother as life-provider, rendering dead the eulogy.
I created a pastiche of lines years ago, signposts through a literary history – Yeats’ “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, from The Second Coming, a single line that all but foreshadowed the postmodernist condition. And then there was the capricious, irreverent genius of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, announcing the death of a traditional narrative, a voice brashly deconstructing ideas of lineage and legacy, declaring:
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it.”
And there, too, was Joyce and his Dubliners and his great intellectual leap from an Irish vernacular in those short stories, to the universalist polyphonic of Anna Livia Plurabelle in his Finnegans Wake with “the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!”
I bumped into a venerable English writer at a party, a literary enthusiast, sailor and a descendant of Welsh coal miners – then the trifecta of my interests. I first brought up Joyce, then moved onto Thatcher as natural points of conversation. I was looking for friends, but he would have none of it.
This writer was self-absorbed. He was investigating the sonar library of Pacific coastal native songs, teasing out the mathematical relationship between soundwaves and an acoustic mapping of the Inside Passage, a sonic mapping achieved through a schema of songs, that allowed these natives, when the mist and fog descended, to switch to a language closer to whale song.
These same natives, these wayfinders, he informed me, had confounded the 18th-century explorer Captain Cook and the British Admiralty in how they had sailed consistently between the Polynesian isles without recognised instruments – when the truth of it was that they had negotiated the ocean currents with their scrotal sacks hung suspended in a one-pointed centredness, assembling data in its aggregate from the stars, driftwood, clouds, seaweed, winds, birds, weather, the smell, taste and temperature of the ocean, interference patterns on the sea surface, and the olfactory sense of an on-board pig.
Who would have believed it? But it was so achieved! What this writer argued was that entire eras are influenced by the aperture of a certain lens, of ways of seeing.
It gave me pause. He was right, of course. We are defined by the aperture of perception.
I remembered back to my boarding school days in the early eighties, to a Bob Geldof song that had so captivated me, I Don’t like Mondays. It suggested an Irishman’s outsider sensibility, keenly registering an American discontent that had no accessible, political language.
In the encapsulation of a single lyrical refrain, he decoded the singular homicidal act of a laid-off worker who followed the American national psycho narrative in showing up on a Monday morning to pick off strangers – this would-be assassin of disaffection, whose actions did not constitute inexpressible economic angst, but rather psychological damage, mental illness, because that was the allowed language – individualised psychosis decoupled from a socio-political context.
I felt the dark matter of a persistent energy pulse in my daily life – this political life within me. There would be the flash of political insurrection in the World Trade Organisation protests under the sway of an anarchist fringe on the streets of Seattle, suggesting all was not well with us, that much was left in the balance of how we might make a livelihood. And then the protests ended as quickly as they had started. And I was left alone again with my thoughts.
And so it was at Microsoft, late at night, I committed to documenting that older America, to writing an American eulogy because nobody else seemed compelled to do so, and because I knew that somehow, someday, the flotsam of those left behind, those lost citizens of the industrial age, were going to have one last political stand and attempt to influence what has already been decided, the future.
In the intervening years, I left Microsoft to dwell again amidst the disaffected and the disenfranchised, those figures that confound politicians, those who simply continue to languish in what will never be recovered in those $12,000 annual income towns.
They raise all the attendant moral problems of what you do with those who cannot visualise a future or a way out – maybe a rethink of the Chinese “One Child Policy” to a “No Child Policy”, something short of plague and apocalypse, because they wouldn’t go away of their own accord!
I’ve called them “Lost Souls”, made the denizens of these towns my muse. I have loved these people for their foibles, for their misunderstanding of where they stand historically. I have lived amidst them, taught them, commiserated alongside them in the loss of their sons’ lives in fighting America’s War on Terror, and I have seen them now stirred by demagoguery in the hateful sense that all has gone wrong, and, yes, much that has gone wrong can be connected to bad trade deals and suspect immigrants! But it’s not the panacea – renegotiation!
My current novel, The Death of All Things Seen, is a transitional novel, the end of a 10-book project, a slow move toward a futurist fiction that I have long anticipated writing.
We are leaving Earth, or we are getting there. The collective genius of the west coast has all but announced it. I like to dwell in California from time to time, in the smugness of genius. Most of those creating the future don’t even go to college, or even high school. They are not part of the political process. They invent and program with their disembodied sense of history.
They are the Holden Caulfields of new history.
I think of the Google car, the autonomous self-driven GPS vehicle, and its possibilities in further uncoupling us from a sense of home, in further undoing a traditional notion of politics as we know it. Who will need apartments or hotels with these mobile living spaces – these mobile pods that will come online just post our reflexive neo-nationalist instinct to build us our walls?
Or more germane and immediate – how will we fill our ERs with the lack of road crashes, with the lack of injured and maimed? How will the insurance industry survive this new actuarial reality?
Of course, someone is considering the ramifications, or maybe not, but I assume they are and aren’t telling us about it. The future will arrive, this new reality without our input, without our knowing, without our vote. It will be un-democratic, and those who create it will avoid the scrutiny of public opinion. They will work outside the political apparatus – these futurists!
So it will go!
I love these futurists’ blithe disinterest in history and philosophy and their possibility to dream other worlds, to outrun history. I love the arrogance of these iconoclastic billionaires in their Bermuda shorts and open-toed sandals as they stand at the Land’s End of what has been a great American migratory westward journey. The truth is – there is no more land, no more western expansion, so logically, they will go upward into the heavens.
But that is getting ahead of this novel and these times.
For now, the Trump phenomenon is a last sideshow of an older politics. His presidency is the aftershock of a battle long ago lost – a red dwarf of final implosion – the last of a populist nostalgia for a past that can never be reclaimed.
Michael Collins is the author of 10 works of fiction, including the Man Booker and Impac shortlisted The Keepers of Truth in 2000. His latest novel is The Death of all Things Seen. He will be discussing his work with Martin Doyle, Books Editor of The Irish Times, at the glór theatre in Enns as part of the Ennis Book Club Festival on Saturday, March 4th, at 9.30pm
