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May 15, 2006

what i learned in las vegas

Apologies about the postus interruptus but I was in Las Vegas, NV last week attending an honest-to-gosh bachelor party. I don't have much to report re: the festivities, but I will share that as I drove home I was struck by the number of people that seemed to be living year-round in scorched middles of nowhere off the 15 in NV. (Even google has trouble fathoming them.)

My upbringing in the temperate zones of NYC makes it highly unlikely that I'll ever intuit what motivates a body to park a trailer home within hissing distance of the Mojave. Basic housekeeping in such a context becomes (to me) an indication of perverse stubborness, flash baking newly washed linens on clothes-lines in 105 degree sun, for example, only legible to me as a form of self-abuse. It just seems insane (or maybe a kind of dishonest) to expect a bed made with such sheets to afford one any restful or cooling sleep, ever.

The more trailers I saw (not to mention the three or so actual townlets), the more convinced I became that people who willingly live in such places must be in the grip of powerful, overriding fictions. It has to be fiction; the region's facts - the killing heat, the fickle indifference of traffic and tourist dollars, the dead zone half-lives of war games and proving grounds - strike me as signature drivers of depopulation, mental lightening bolts that only power the abrupt conviction that one needs to get the hell out of Dodge with a quickness. I try to think of what might counter-balance those facts as I drive - i.e., what might make me move to such a desert - and I'm not a mile in before I not so much give up as recoil. I am literally unable to believe it, and that, of course, is the whole game. I mean, I'd just spent several days enthusiastically teasing underlying, largely self-serving facts from every spin of the wheel, spying kernels of the genuine in every cash-related kindness or bought simulation of intimacy. I'm up, I'm down, I really am her most favorite customer ever. So who am I kidding? I obviously not only know exactly what it's like to tell oneself that the heat isn't as bad as folks make out, but I also know how to then make it so via the telling.

This all got me to thinking about the following passage from Michael Taussig's Mimesis and Alterity: (hat tip on Taussig to JC/rupture)

...[M]ost of what seems important in life is made up and is neither more (nor less) than, as a certain turn of phrase would have it, "a social construction." [...]

With good reason postmodernism has relentlessly instructed us that reality is artifice, yet, so it seems to me, not enough surprise has been expressed as to how we nevertheless get on with living, pretending - thanks to the mimetic faculty - that we live facts, not fictions. Custom, that obscure crossroads where the constructed and the habitual coalesce, is indeed mysterious. Some force impels us to keep the show on the road. We cannot, so it would seem, easily slow the thing down, stop and inquire into this tremendously braced field of the artificial. When it was enthusiastically pointed out that race or gender or nation were so many social constructions, inventions, and representations, a window was opened, an invitation to begin the critical project of analysis and cultural reconstruction was offered. And one still feels its power even though what was nothing more than an invitation, a preamble to investigation has, by and large, been converted into a conclusion - eg. "sex is a social construction," "race is a social construction," "the nation is an invention" and so forth. The brilliance of the pronouncement was blinding. Nobody was asking: what's the next step? What do we do with this old insight? If life is constructed, how come it appears so immutable?

[...]

I think construction deserves more respect; it cannot be name-called out of (or into) existence, ridiculed and shamed into yielding up its powers. And if its very nature seems to prevent us - for are we not also socially constructed - from peering deeply therein, that very same nature also cries out for something other than analysis. For in constructions place - what? No more invention, or more invention?

Absolutely, Mike T.. "What happens in Vegas never happened" is not a theory of plausible deniability but of antimatter. Do I leave the anti-particles behind in the anti-city out of a generalized fear of their explosive potential, or out of the more specific, personalized worry they will bind to the mundane (but pervasive) fakeness of my regular life and blow it up, leaving me in possession of the same net-nothing as before, only now painfully counter-pointed by the memory of whole, glittering cities made out of the same unstable isotopes? Which is to say: Is it more Vegas that I need in my life, or just more?

Posted by ebogjonson in brain maintenance, places, sex type, on May 15, 2006 5:38 PM

Comments

Posted by: Piscean at May 16, 2006 6:11 AM