Solipsus at 3 AM

It’s 3 am, again I’ve crawled back to the pit where I’m supposed to sleep, listening for sounds from a deserted dust and dark, hoping for something more than the sporadic crickets and cock crows hollering like broken jingles in the night; never escaping my perpetually recounted mind, the noises soothe these hands tired from tapping, float as faded memories through lonely scribbled time. I’ve felt the unconditional dance, heard and sang its wandering music, yet (still) I cannot understand one beat, one note — I attempt belief in beautiful ideas: rhythm resonating between two dying words, dusty moonlit shoes chasing and fleeing one after the other, my yellow flickering ghost that hums, hums and hums.

Nocturne

Having insomnia is is like having Tourette’s — your brain races, appraising the world after the world has retired, touching it here and there, everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. Your brain becomes a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its paranoiac importance — as though if you were to blink, then doze, your world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which your obsessive musings are somehow fending off. 3 am knows all my secrets.

To Be a Caveman Again

I’ve recently seen Sean Penn’s critically acclaimed Into the Wild (2007), and I couldn’t help but think a lot  about what it must have been like to be a caveman. Not so much in terms of the primitivist “I hate hate civilization” angle, where I’ve been trying to re-construct their social organization or talk about their ecological footprint. Something much more elemental than that. What did it feel like — from the inside-out — to be a caveman? What did they think about? What did they believe?

The reason I am interested in these questions is that I share a mythological image of the caveman common to our culture (whether it’s accurate or not), of him being this sort of pure unadulterated “authentic” human — someone untouched by all the poisons of later civilization, history, ideology and the rest of the detritus that we have collected as humans, the pack-rats of history.

Inherent in that vision though, I recognize the assumption that in thinking of the caveman as this “pure” form of the human being, that I see myself as an impure version. I see this as a rather dangerous assumption, the evidence for which needs only to be verified by looking at the massive self-hatred and personal destruction that so much of the world seems to be involved in. Towards that end then, my experiments in reconstructing some image of our lost caveman ancestor is not a hopelessly romantic retreat back into the past as it is a rescue mission: go back in time to retrieve a treasure that was lost to us somewhere along the way, in order to make our current lives better, in order to rehabilitate how we see ourselves and one another.

The CSI Approach to History

The role of the historian is to catalog and interpret events which have occurred in the past and to weave them into a meaningful narrative for people in the present. Typically we think of history as the broader story of a nation or of a people. But history is made up of minute interactions between individuals on an everyday scale. And it is these everyday interactions between people which forms the basis of police work.

As we are taught by countless television crime dramas like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, police try to solve criminal cases by looking for perpetrators who have the means, motive and opportunity to commit crime. What this means in a broader sense is that police investigators are a type of historian. They look at events in the past (crimes) and try to explain them in a meaningful way. We call the conclusions and meaning that they derive from their historical investigations “justice.” Justice is a genre of narrative or story-telling in which a person (or group) is victimized in a crime, and in which the person responsible is found and punished appropriately. If the plot points conform to this narrative within reasonable parameters, we say “Justice is served.” If not, then we worry about things like a “miscarriage of Justice.”