Comments on: Retreat http://jhfarr.com/farrfeed/2008/07/06/retreat/ Living Planet Mystery Tales Fri, 9 Jan 2009 21:24:04 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7 hourly 1 By: K.J. Webb http://jhfarr.com/farrfeed/2008/07/06/retreat/comment-page-1/#comment-1472 K.J. Webb Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:51:28 +0000 http://jhfarr.com/farrfeed/?p=514#comment-1472 You fellows, John and number 6, are in a great American tradition - of striking out for the territories (or longing to do so) and getting shut of "sivilization" with its corruptions, false delicacies and inauthenticities. I love that tradition. It produced some of our greatest classic writers - Melville, Twain, Thoreau, Whitman, R.H. Dana, James Fennimore Cooper - not to mention more recent ones like Snyder and Kerouac. The young guy in "Into the Wild" was in that tradition, minus the chance to grow old and get it down in writing. When I was a youngster I wasn't reading that stuff, of course, but I WAS reading the tales of the mountain men - Jim Bridger and Kit Carson and Jedidiah Smith. I was reading about the settlement of the West from Texas to Oregon, all by renegades, misfits and seekers. That impulse to break out and drift westward goes back to the earliest days of the Republic. Our grandfathers and greatgrandfathers (we who grew up west of the Mississippi) broke away from the crampedness of the Eastern seaboard. It was too much like Europe and everything that had made THEIR ancestors leave THAT continent. They couldn't endure the constraints of cities or working in shops or never knowing what lay in the back of beyond. They wanted land and independence and adventure. (Of course they ended up getting those things at the expense of the Red Man, but that's another story.) This tradition doesn't exist at all in Europe, where all the people who didn't vote with their feet had to make do with stumbling over each other, several generations in the same dwelling, every man slotted into his allotted role in life, all drinking each other's bathwater (intellectually and otherwise) generation after generation. All this made Europeans realistic and socialized (in both senses). Americans it made lonelier and freer. Is the internet a way of mitigating that loneliness - the loneliness of an American living either literally or spiritually in the territories? A way of finding kindred spirits without searching for them endlessly, Whitman-like, Kerouac-like, on the open road? I share the ambivalence of both of you about it all. It's too damned easy to be deep. Nevertheless, I keep coming back. You fellows, John and number 6, are in a great American tradition - of striking out for the territories (or longing to do so) and getting shut of “sivilization” with its corruptions, false delicacies and inauthenticities. I love that tradition. It produced some of our greatest classic writers - Melville, Twain, Thoreau, Whitman, R.H. Dana, James Fennimore Cooper - not to mention more recent ones like Snyder and Kerouac. The young guy in “Into the Wild” was in that tradition, minus the chance to grow old and get it down in writing.

When I was a youngster I wasn’t reading that stuff, of course, but I WAS reading the tales of the mountain men - Jim Bridger and Kit Carson and Jedidiah Smith. I was reading about the settlement of the West from Texas to Oregon, all by renegades, misfits and seekers. That impulse to break out and drift westward goes back to the earliest days of the Republic. Our grandfathers and greatgrandfathers (we who grew up west of the Mississippi) broke away from the crampedness of the Eastern seaboard. It was too much like Europe and everything that had made THEIR ancestors leave THAT continent. They couldn’t endure the constraints of cities or working in shops or never knowing what lay in the back of beyond. They wanted land and independence and adventure. (Of course they ended up getting those things at the expense of the Red Man, but that’s another story.)

This tradition doesn’t exist at all in Europe, where all the people who didn’t vote with their feet had to make do with stumbling over each other, several generations in the same dwelling, every man slotted into his allotted role in life, all drinking each other’s bathwater (intellectually and otherwise) generation after generation. All this made Europeans realistic and socialized (in both senses). Americans it made lonelier and freer.

Is the internet a way of mitigating that loneliness - the loneliness of an American living either literally or spiritually in the territories? A way of finding kindred spirits without searching for them endlessly, Whitman-like, Kerouac-like, on the open road?

I share the ambivalence of both of you about it all. It’s too damned easy to be deep. Nevertheless, I keep coming back.

]]> By: Number 6 http://jhfarr.com/farrfeed/2008/07/06/retreat/comment-page-1/#comment-1470 Number 6 Sun, 06 Jul 2008 16:35:50 +0000 http://jhfarr.com/farrfeed/?p=514#comment-1470 you're not the only one John. on a regular and increasingly more frequent basis i feel the same way, though still being plugged in to cable tv exponentiates the feeling immensely. the constant unending barrage of myopic homogenized conformity and groupthink endlessly screaming at you "BE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE!!!!! DON'T THINK ABOUT ANYTHING!!!!!! AND BUY MORE NOW!!!!!!!!" makes me want to go completely off grid (and pick up & move out there to the middle of nowhere with you. i can't of course - too many responsibilities here, including both parents here at home terminally ill). everything in "consensus culture" and its expression in corporate media is all about narcissism and ego and acquisitiveness and the most shallow depraved basest aspects of human existence. but i know what you mean - you just hit that threshold of tolerance where you just don't want to deal with ANY of it anymore; it's too much, too overwhelming, both in the concentration of self-absorbed self-reinforcing stupidity as well as just sheer volume. i feel like the line in the old '80s movie "WarGames": the only way to win the game is not to play. "Too much information Running through my brain Too much information Driving me insane..." --The Police you’re not the only one John. on a regular and increasingly more frequent basis i feel the same way, though still being plugged in to cable tv exponentiates the feeling immensely. the constant unending barrage of myopic homogenized conformity and groupthink endlessly screaming at you “BE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE!!!!! DON’T THINK ABOUT ANYTHING!!!!!! AND BUY MORE NOW!!!!!!!!” makes me want to go completely off grid (and pick up & move out there to the middle of nowhere with you. i can’t of course - too many responsibilities here, including both parents here at home terminally ill). everything in “consensus culture” and its expression in corporate media is all about narcissism and ego and acquisitiveness and the most shallow depraved basest aspects of human existence.
but i know what you mean - you just hit that threshold of tolerance where you just don’t want to deal with ANY of it anymore; it’s too much, too overwhelming, both in the concentration of self-absorbed self-reinforcing stupidity as well as just sheer volume. i feel like the line in the old ’80s movie “WarGames”: the only way to win the game is not to play.

“Too much information
Running through my brain
Too much information
Driving me insane…”
–The Police

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