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provdence in the fall...
September 28, 2004
Several years ago, I was on a plane from D.C. to Austin. I was early to the gate, as usual, one of the first on the plane, so I was able to watch the other passengers file on. Bags and t-shirts and expressions filed on and filled seats around me. In some freakish mishap, the other two largest men on the flight would sit on either side of me, and we laughed about it a good deal of the way home.
At some point when my bulky seatmates settled into their naps and books, I put my own headphones on and relaxed. I was always kind of amused at the fact that I had to shut down my personal CD player before the plane took off. Somehow, the idea that Soundgarden or Tori Amos or even Stereolab could bring down a Boeing 737 airliner is at once amusing and bemusing to me.
Boeing lists the maximum seating capacity of a 737 at 189. Despite being sandwiched between two large men, the flight was not quite full. It occurred to me that the group of people on the plane with me was perhaps the size of a typical village in a hunting and gathering society, and was maybe even larger. I looked around at my fellow passengers, and imagined us as isolated, as members of one village. Something primal in me saw the correlation, saw the problem.
In a balanced world, with man as just another animal running around the landscape, that village of 150-200 was a practical size. But I lived in the moderate sized city of Austin, with around 750,000 other people. Most of those people, including myself, were tied in by mass media, the allure of images on the television and the internet. Our village, my village had grown beyond the capacity of our social natures to handle, and I wondered at how it must effect us, to have so many distractions, so many choices that threatened to overwhelm us.
How easy in a small village to know all that the opposite sex can be, and how easy to know your choices and know that yours was the best. Sure, there were bound to be conflicts, a handful of figures that for reasons right or not reigned supreme over the lust and love in a village. I knew others had realized it before, but this was my epiphany, that as we grew larger and more disparate as a society, that love became, perhaps, more precious, more elusive, maybe improbable, maybe impossible.
So now, the confession, the embrassment, the revelation. Last week, watching "While You Were Out" on TLC (The Learning Channel), I fell in love, with Gina. She was the target of the show's trick, seen only in a handful of cutaways during the course of the one hour program. But nonetheless, I picked her out immediately, as if I'd seen her across the packed dirt of our small village as a child, as if I had recognized my place and hers in an instant, destiny written in a dusty midsummer moment.
Yeah, I know this is wacky. I work downtown. I get out plenty. I see a lot of attractive women. I've been fortunate enough to date some of them. So why this, why now? I used to believe in something more in life, something more in love. I believed in soulmates until one left, until I lost her. That was a long time ago, almost a decade now. Since then, I've let go, I've dated a lot of great and beautfiul women. Long ago I left the habit and compulsion, of comparison to her. Relationships came, and they went not because of her, but because so often that flash of recognition, that magic, was not there.
At 35, "magic" has been discounted, by friends, by parents wondering what's up, by popular wisdom. But I think the belief in that magic is too central to who I am. What I love of life is music, writing, feeling, the things outside our intellect that give us the moments we can't adequately explain in terms of cold logic, psychology and physiology. Sometimes I give those truer loves up to live, to make a living, to live as someone who can pass as relatively sane. But it is always there, denied or not.
As the show went on, I was amazed at how Gina continued to "fit." I saw in her a singular compassion and grace, and the initial spark of recognition became a bit of enfatuation that frightened me, that I hadn't known since I was so much younger. I told one friend about the experience, jokingly, and dismissed it.
I know what this all sounds like. I still have my grip on reality, don't worry. Maybe it was some curious misfire of just the right neurons at just the right time. Maybe it was a trick of psychology. But how much worse to think that it was a genuine moment in the life of a heart, of a soul, a moment and an epic that might be lost in the expanse of what has become the human experience? How much worse to think that what is sacred to us is prey to numbers and distance?
I write this, and like all good, sane people, I will let the moment go, having gone too far in speaking of it at all, in chronicling it here, perhaps for the ridicule of all who read this.
But please, stop a moment, in the safety and solitude in which you might read this - don't you want to believe it, too?
Posted by Rob at September 28, 2004 10:30 PM