TNR #3: A Particular Vital Detachment

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers –

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!...

Reading Wordsworth on my birthday morning I wondered – given that he was pissed off about the Industrial Revolution – what he’d make of our current cultural moment, when some young lovers reportedly check their cell phones during sex.

My romanticism shouldn’t be confused with nostalgia, which I think of as a poison (romance to me is more a sort of madness, often cured by a tumbledown progression into livable loving). So I didn’t find myself yearning to return to William W’s 1802.

Yet my b-day began with a wonderful gift from my loving wife – a new Electra cruiser bicycle to replace the one I rode to its demise a few years ago. And for me a bike is for the beach, which is where I go to be with the little in Nature that is ours.

The gift I’d gotten myself was Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars – more poems for a meditative morn. Poetry! It forces us to slow down, sends us back upon ourselves, Moebius strips our time and space into new, unquantifiable configurations. I cannot imagine interrupting a good poem’s read to check my e-mails.

I love and revere technology – could not live a day without it (and oh, those cheery Facebook birthday kisses!), yet: Picture the crowded restaurant with all the people at their festive dinner tables. Would you not avoid the modern-clichéd couples with their faces nailed to their devices, and focus on two humans alight with only the glow of each other’s eyes?

The world is tethered now to our wrists. Sometimes it takes a birthday (miracle: you’re alive!) to make me realize that the moments I treasure more and more are the ones in which I come unmoored from all the information and responsibility and can simply exist in one tiny swatch of that vast universe of worlds alone, answering to no one and nothing else.

What’s romantic, I’m supposing, is this particular exercise of freedom: a reveling in the willful choice to turn away from the too-much-with-us world, not for good, but for now.

 

(All images in this post - by Han Cheng Yeh, Chris Hieronimus, Greg Pths, Wilson Lee, Anastacie Frank, Paul Bailey, Danny McShane, and Richard Stewart James Gaston - come from the exquisite site Saut Dans Le Vide.)

Comments

[Rob in L.A.]

Excellent post, Billy. And a belated Happy Birthday!

Re the people who sit together at their meal tables and look at their phones and nothing else: I'm reminded of that episode of the rom-sitcom "Selfie," when Henry (male lead) learns that social-media-freak Eliza (female lead) is about to meet her Bellamy boyfriend's parents at a fancy restaurant: "Eliza, try to stay off the phone tonight. The only thing glowing at that table should be you."

[mernitman]

Rob: Thanks for the belated b-day wishes. That Selfie line is a good one!

[Rob in L.A.]

If you'll indulge me, I'd like to put in another good word for a line from "Selfie," in the same episode.

At the dinner (in a seafood restaurant), Eliza realizes that her boyfriend isn't her soulmate. When the waiter comes to take the orders, Eliza emotionally asks him about the wisdom of "committing" to ordering a salmon dinner, while the audience knows that she's really talking about committing to her boyfriend. And the waiter answers, "There are plenty of other fish in the sea."

Out of all "Selfie's" episodes and scenes, that, I think, was the sitcom's best moment.

[E.C. Henry]

Happy birthday, Mernitman! Glad you have a new bike to cruise the beach with.

As I was reading this post I couldn't help but think, that the tension that arises when technology clashes and ventures to threaten the romance between two people is very fallow ground for comedy spots in romantic comedy storylines. What I mean is that an exploration and a take off the conflict that technology brings to romance IS a place that some modern-day comedy that people can relate to can come from. Have you seen people trying to use that in the rom-com material?

As for me, I'm at the point in my life where I need to technology up. I'm still using a flip cell-phone from like 6 years ago. When I bought a new car recently the salesmen was at a loss with how to get my Verison flip phone to interface with the state-of-the-art GPS navigation system that this car had which supported hands free phone calls.

Anyway, great post. You're a real master at saying a lot, and not using a lot of words. See, all that poetry reading is paying off.

[mernitman]

Rob, SELFIE is in my queue now.

EC, I think HER was about that conflict, as is the current EX MACHINA (though it's not a comedy). Certainly fertile grounds for rom-commery.

[Barbara]

This is such a wonderful post dearest Mernitman - Yes, yes to all that you say about poetry.