15 February '08

It was Valentine’s Day in America yesterday. I say ‘in America’ because there is no other country I have visited that adopts such absurd holidays with the same kind of breathless fervour that the United States does. This country lurches from one celebration to the next. A few days after Christmas, tweaks were made to shop foyers and facades to transform them into citadels of New Year-o-rama. A few days into the New Year, the foyers and facades were tweaked again in expectation of Valentine’s Day. In a few days, I expect there will be further tweaking so that Saint Patrick’s Day, or Easter, or Founder’s Day, or Independence Day can be celebrated in the correct manner. That is, with hordes of inflated balloons, festive hats, emblazoned tee-shirts, novelty glasses, or any combination thereof.

My output, of late, has been low. I feel bad about it, mainly because writing of this nature requires discipline and regularity lest it fall away altogether. The low output has its genesis in a few events. The first—quite concrete—is that a number of friends have made their way through my apartment over the last month. The other, more abstract, is that I’ve sunk into a rather powerful creative and emotional torpor. The origins of this torpor are many and varied and too complex to get into here. And I wouldn’t mention it except as an excuse for a fusty transmission. It is just that in this state the mind is sluggish, the body lethargic, nascent ideas are stillborn and the intellect lists in and out of consciousness and is mostly replaced by a dumb laugh at the foolishness of inane characters on television sitcoms.

Of course there has been much happening. As I have stated and restated and will do so again, New York has no sympathy for idleness. So much of this city is built on the idea of movement and flux—millions of students, travellers, workers drift on and off the island every day—that there is the simple expectation that those of use who are left behind will, like the tides against the moon, be pulled into activity by the immense force generated by so much movement.

For example, last week I visited the Museum of Natural History, where to access the South Pacific Peoples exhibit you must first pass the primates, then the Native Americans, all frozen in ludicrously-natural-and-therefore-all-the-more-unnatural poses. And all testament the evolutionary theories that dominated the nineteenth and parts of the twentieth century and, even today, pervade scholarship and popular opinion with an age-old potency. There was, of course, no exhibit of colonizing white men or even of picket-fence suburbia. The natives, it seems, are still fascinating as static exoticisations.

But more on that some other time. Now there is work to be done to redeem myself from this funk, gain a level, and take aim at something great.