malaise*lithium

     First in airports and then restaurants I saw them. They hung above my head in public places. Obnoxious things. Next I encountered them in the homes of my friends and then, most uncomfortable and distressing of all, I found one in my own home. They are both pandering and condescending; both beguiling and fascinating. Televisions. Photovoltaic chloroform. Strange wine.

     Many of them I found were playing unwatched. Blathering gobbledygook into the void. The people on the screens were consummate narcissists, acting out their stories about themselves without an audience. None was required.

     Reintroducing myself to modernity has not been what I expected it would be. I anticipated feeling something like a freshly-thawed caveman. I thought I would cower at flashing lights, startle at clatters, and feel a great shortage of attention, but this has not been my experience. Though the daylight hours here are long compared to what I knew, the days slip rapidly away. I am not as troubled by television as I expected I would be, I am more aware than ever of what the true character of television is.
     Florescent lights buzz. Many people with sensitive ears can hear it, and sometimes when the bulbs are failing they can see the light shimmer on the surface of their desk or floor. I can see the light’s resonance all the time. Not all bulbs are the same, and some of them are more distracting to me than others. Some days I even think I can feel the light on my skin, feel it rattling around my open ear like an insect. If I look at the bulbs it’s like a tuning fork to the teeth.
     But being near people again hasn’t bothered me. I feared that dealing face-to-face with another person would be taxing, but it seems it to be no more unpleasant to me than it ever was before, although I am aware that I am probably a little stranger to talk to. It seems, also, that even that is passing. I have not found freeways to be imposing. Nights have not seemed to be too filled with shouts or squeals or sirens to allow me to sleep. And, perhaps alarmingly, I do not feel in any visceral way that my car is an absurd convenience or that my home has too much space or is filled with too many unnecessary things, but I do still think of them as such.

     But I grow wary. I have found that I did not become as unacquainted to the things of this life as I thought I had, and I am concerned that it may be therefore easier for me to become accustomed to them again. It would be easy to abandon many of the new ways I discovered. In returning to some of these old paths, I might forget the new ones.

     Still, time passes differently here. I cannot stop a day at noon and examine it for hours. I cannot drop an anchor in the middle of the night and drag it with me into the following morning. Here the days are too well-fastened; too connected to places and meetings and travel-times. There are obligations both of time and location–trash day, closing time, weekend luncheons, emission testing–none of them are foreign, but I sense that I could disappear into them. How easy it would be to settle into a continuous internal dialog of names and dates, to be entertained by the day to day, to allow things such as radio and new to occupy my mind like a foreign army. To usurp my thoughts. To take me over and demand that this monologue of consciousness rest its voice. How alluring that automatic oblivion is! And how much like waking sleep.

     I thought I would be more wild when I returned, and less likely to accept the way things appear to be as what they really are. I miss that wildness–I could use it now. It would make it easier to change things. That wild man I left behind would throw his elbows in the crowded marketplace of my mind. He would clear a path through cluttered exits and shove and clamber until he was outside and alone. He was not afraid of change. He did not dodge adversity.

     There were things of nature more fearsome than any of this, but that does not mean these things are unimportant or any easier to disregard. Many of the ostensibly unpleasant things about this place–this iteration of life–are useful, too, just as many of the unpleasant things before were useful. The roar of wind has been replaced with the drone of traffic. The snow with rain, short days with days that go by too quickly, and solitude with other forms of isolation. Before, the placelessness was my place. The chorus of my selves was my culture. After I returned I cut my hair. I shaved. I replaced the battery in my watch. I wear it on my wrist again, though time still has little meaning beyond consequence.

     As I look back I want my time in Alaska to exhibit the arc of a story, even if I mean to tell that story to no one but myself, but there is no arc there to find–just a series of events. There is nothing I could do to infuse them with any more meaning they they have already, nor is there anything I could to make them any more abstract. The past is just as near as memory, but it is absolutely changeless as death.

     Sometimes a change of context also causes a change of perspective. Some people seem to think that a place can soak into you, and therefore believe that peaceful surroundings can bring calm within a person as well, but madness can come in the deep silent forest and perspicacity can settle on someone standing on the killing floor. I am very aware of my efforts to remember myself, even as I seem here to say that self and place are independent of each other. Maybe here I am only saying what I need to hear. You can travel as far away as you like from anywhere, but no physical journey of any length can render you clairvoyant.