We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.I was standing in the coolness of the dairy aisle at the grocery store. In front of me in neat little rows were colorful cups of yogurt with their prettily depicted flavors. I like to stand in the dairy aisle, so mysteriously lit, cooled, and restocked. Even during winter, it's a pleasant place to be. It's always peaceful, quiet except for the soft hum of the refrigerator system and the music played over the supermarket speakers. Sometimes I even bask in this place, half asleep and half daydreaming. Oh, the fantasies I've had in the dairy aisle.
In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies.
People think I’m spacey, she said. I have a spacey theory about human fear, sure enough. Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed homebody, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood. You spot something out of the corner of your eye. Before you know anything else, you know that this thing is very large and that it has no place in your ordinary frame of reference. A flaw in the world picture. Either it shouldn’t be here or you shouldn’t. Now the thing comes into full view. It is a grizzly bear, enormous, shiny brown, swaggering, dripping slime from its bared fangs. Jack, you have never seen a large animal in the wild. The sight of this grizzer is so electrifyingly strange that it gives you a renewed sense of yourself, a fresh awareness of the self—the self in terms of a unique and horrific situation. You see yourself in a new and intense way. You rediscover yourself. You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment. The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surroundings, alone, distinct, whole. The name we give to this complicated process is fear.
How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed.
The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Overcloseness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works toward sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true.
The flow is constant, Alfonse said. Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
But today something is different. The hum of the cooling motors is underlined by a sharper more distant noise. It sounds like the store is a giant anthill with millions of scrabbling, husky insects working their way back and forth. Something is up. The noise is growing. Louder than the music now. The yogurt cups are shaking in their slots. One that was precariously balanced falls off the shelf with a clatter. I bend over to prop it up and they come around the corner.
It's a mob. Mad! Wild, they are pushing and screaming and shoving, crawling over each other. Blood on some faces, sweat on all of them. Everything is in disarray. They stop in front of the milk, just short of where I stand. Someone is thrown back against the cheeses. Another, a woman, falls and is trampled. They are fighting over the milk. They are demanding milk, screaming to the stockers in the back to bring out more. Several people have actually crawled into the back through the now empty shelves. A gallon of milk in tug of war breaks open and showers the crowd. People lap it up like dogs. A man raises a gun above his head and waves it around like a cowboy hat. he has two gallons of milk in his left hand, but before he can make his escape, the mob drags him down. Someone bites his hand.
Noises are coming from behind the shelves of dairy products. Soon milk jugs are being tossed out to teh waiting crowd. Their hands are stretched forward like an octopus or anenome, like plants gravitating toward the sun. But no flow can match their demand and as the crowd begins to jostle and fight over the jugs, a woman's voice rises above the din:
"They have milk at the supermarket in Sunset Square!"
And like a swarm of locuts they are gone. I am left in the aisle with my yogurt. I pick it up. It is orange creamsickle flavored. Extra creamy according to the lid. I put it back on the shelf, look at the silent body fo teh woman who was trampled by the mob. I decide that I don't want to buy yogurt today.
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