We’ve dispensed with time, so we’re lost in space.
ITEM: Wells Fargo Bank has introduced a twenty-four-hour-per-day, seven-day-per-week telephone service. You can now pick up the phone at any hour, anywhere, and talk to a person — not a computer — who can answer any conceivable question about your banking needs. This stretches the term banking needs beyond all previous definitions in the eight-hundred-odd-year history of Western banking. Why do my bankers anticipate that I’ll need them at three o’clock in the morning? Partly because there’s no telling where I’ll be: Tokyo, Barcelona, Moscow — desperate to know what my balance is before the market opens in Berlin or Hong Kong. But a hefty percentage of the calls are from Wells Fargo’s home time zone and involve personal, not business, accounts. Which means that ’round about midnight in these United States, a number of demographically ordinary people feel the pressing need to question their banker.
Twenty-four-hour bank call-ins and automatic tellers speak of a people increasingly coaxed to live without pattern, without boundaries. Such things fuzz the boundaries between intimate time and business time, between home and work, night and day, individual and corporate, public and private, environment and psyche. Yet while, as consumers, we increasingly demand to live without pattern in terms of services, we bemoan the loss of pattern in our morality, our love lives, our thought.
If one individual demanded to do his/her banking at three in the morning, it would be considered pretty weird. But when a corporation provides the service, and it meets the demands of thousands . . . then despite what even the most conservative people might prefer morally or politically, their patternless consumerism disrupts the sense of time and space that contained, and gave form to, their morality.
ITEM: Life in Clarendon, a town of about fourteen hundred in the Texas Panhandle, revolves around its several fundamentalist churches. Like many towns in that part of the country, it’s still “dry” — you can’t buy alcohol within the city limits. But not too long ago a twenty-four-hour convenience store opened. It never closes. And such stores flourish now in almost every small town in the country. Why do they need such a store, in such a town? Until recently, in that area you could tune in two, sometimes three, television stations — depending on the weather. These stations signed off around midnight, often earlier. Now, with satellite and cable, you can tune in dozens of stations, and they never sign off. Some show porn in the wee hours. And MTV all the time. And constant news. And movies that no one in this area would ever have heard of otherwise. (Clarendon’s “picture show” went out of business years back.)
So a place that depended for its way of life upon its isolation — upon its strict regulation of what it allowed through its boundaries, upon its rooted connectedness to what it imagines to be the morality of the nineteenth century — has been penetrated by what it views as a service. It is no longer separate in space; it no longer has a farmer’s sense of time.
ITEM: Utah. A place owned and run by the Mormon Church, a place with no separation of church and state. With satellite and cable, late-night porn has become very, very popular in Utah. Which means Utah is no longer Utah at three in the morning.
In America, from big city to tiny town, time and space have become tentative, arbitrary. And this in the most concrete, personal sense. There are instruments in each home eating away at the time and space of people who have become addicted to those instruments. Consciously, these are most often people who see themselves as normal, righteous, and conservative, and they emphatically don’t want this to change. Yet something else is operative in them, some hunger that they follow without thought or plan, in which they indulge in activities that subtly but thoroughly undermine their most cherished assumptions. Politically and socially they are demanding more and more boundaries — yet, by choice, they fill their lives with things that cause them to live less and less within those boundaries. They want these things, these appliances and services — so much so that they measure their success or failure by whether or not they have these things. But their very wanting is subversive to their way of life. It’s fair, then, to assume that something other than consciousness, something deep within them, is doing this subversive wanting.
ITEM: The electric light bulb. An invention barely one hundred years old. In general use for roughly fifty years now. The technological beginning of the end of linear time. Before the light bulb, darkness constricted human space. Outside cities especially, night shrank the entire landscape into the space within arm’s reach. (The moon figures so greatly in our iconography because it was all that allowed one to go far out into the night — when it was bright enough, and not obscured by clouds.) But now there are few places in North America or Europe that are truly dark at night; the glow of even a small town can be seen for many miles. Light gives us all the space we want, any time we want it. Psychoactive events of monstrous proportions take place, like Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies. All those tens of thousands of people in perfect formation are unthinkable without spotlights. Light creates the necessary space, pushing back the boundaries of time. Dream time becomes a time for acting out the nightmare.
ITEM: The car is a private space that can go in any direction at any time. The motel room cinched that: anywhere you go, there will be a space for you — a fact unique to contemporary life and alien to every previous society. But the fact that there’s a room for you anywhere makes less substantial the place where you actually are. Thus you are a transient, without having chosen to be one. Human transience used to be defined almost solely by death. Now the fact of so much choice makes everyone a transient all the time — and, for most of us now, makes any single choice almost unbearably tentative. Why be where you are, who you are, when you can just as easily be somewhere else, behaving differently?
This is a question that even most demographically “average” people ask often these days. How can it not make them more and more uncertain? So, to compensate, they’re craving certainty in all the wrong places. In politics, which has always been uncertain. In metaphysics, which by its nature is uncertain. In love and sex, where certainty breeds boredom and diminishes lovers in each other’s eyes. Many of these people blame the uncertain, tentative quality of their lives on “liberalism,” “humanism,” “relativism,” “the sixties” — when what is really going on is that they were once prisoners of time and space, and they will never be prisoners again, and they miss those prisons desperately.
How long will it take them to become accustomed to the new timeless, spaceless environment? This has become a crucial historical question. For until they acclimate themselves, they will continue to crave reactionary solutions that can only increase the chaos.
This all began, by the way, with Jesus. Boris Pasternak, in Doctor Zhivago, saw it clearly:
In the first [Western] miracle you have a popular leader, the patriarch Moses, dividing the waters by a magic gesture, allowing a whole nation — countless numbers, hundreds of thousands — to go through. . . . In the second miracle you have a girl — an everyday figure who would have gone unnoticed in the ancient world — quietly, secretly, bringing forth a child. . . . What an enormously significant change! How did it come about that an individual human event, insignificant by ancient standards, was regarded as equal in significance to the migration of a whole people? . . . Individual human life became the very story of God, and its contents filled the vast expanses of the universe.
We don’t know how it came about, but we know the enormity of the result. In Judaism, God redeemed a race. In Christianism, God redeems you — an absolute reversal of metaphysics as it was practiced everywhere else in the world. Everywhere else, with the exception of the most highly sophisticated Buddhism, worship was always tribal: people propitiating existence for comparatively small favors. But now Christianism presented an unheard-of demand upon the sacred: that the individual is entitled to the full and undivided attention of the universe — a staggering change in individual space and eternal time.
It took a long time — the Renaissance, the discovery of America, the elucidation of democratic principles, the technological revolution — but the Christianist sense of the individual being the center of the universe has become our daily reality.
Today, through a centuries-long process that culminated in our technological revolution, the West has what it’s been praying for since the birth of Christ: every individual is being addressed directly, and constantly, by an infinite universe. It may be a media-conveyed universe, and the voice you hear may be anyone’s from Mandela to Madonna; images of sensuality and mayhem may confront us wherever we turn (though they are no more violent or sexy than the images in the Bible); we may have asked for the holy and gotten the profane (complain to the Manufacturer) — but it is a universe and it does seem to speak to us, even dote on us, individually. In short, we asked for a paradigm and we got it.
In biblical mythology, this state of being is followed by apocalypse.
But what is apocalypse, exactly? In Revelation it is described as the coming of the beast. Richmond Lattimore’s pristine translation from the original Greek reads:
Then I saw a beast coming up from the sea with ten horns and seven heads, and upon his horns ten diadems, and upon his heads the names of blasphemy. The beast I saw was like a leopard, and his feet as those of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion. And the dragon gave him his power and his throne and his great authority. . . . Then the whole earth went in wonder after the beast. . . . Who is like the beast, and who can fight with him? (Revelation 13:1-4)
From the ancients to Jung, the sea has been the great symbol of the human psyche. So Revelation’s beast is the manifestation, in the waking world, of what’s deepest in the psyche. And it is given its power by the dragon, the worldwide symbol of the meeting of spiritual and sexual energy. The beast is a multilayered, multiheaded image of dissonant simultaneity — a simultaneity which in itself is seen as great power: “And upon his heads the names of blasphemy.” The expectation is that when this psychic beast appears it will challenge all morals, all traditions, all laws.
These fearful writers of early Christianism sensed what had been started: that the new Christianist focus on the individual would sooner or later bring forth the secrets of the psyche — but in ways that would contradict their conscious morality. And they saw this, literally, as the end of the world.
Well, perhaps they were being a mite too concrete. It is the end of a world, certainly — the world in which waking and dreaming are rigidly separate. When this “beast” rises from its “sea,” the surrealities of dream life become the facts of waking life.
In preceding centuries there was a pretty obvious separation between what’s called the subconscious and the conscious. Individual daily life was more or less ordered, however unjust or distasteful. Except for the occasional plague and cathedral gargoyle, lurid phantasms were usually left to the realm of dreams. But now we live in a technologically hallucinogenic culture that behaves with the sudden dynamics of a dream — an environment that duplicates the conditions of dreaming.
What I’m saying is that we in the late twentieth century live not in a city or country, not on a planet, but in a collective dream. Our everyday world is one of dreamlike instantaneous changes, unpredictable metamorphoses, random violence, archetypal sex, and a threatening sense of multiple meaning. For a quarter of a million years we experienced this only in sleep, or in art, or in carefully structured religious rituals. Now, in our electronic environment, the dream world of sudden transformation and unpredictable imagery greets us when we open our eyes. And our response to it, against all our better judgments, is to want more, more, more — more of the VCRs, PCs, car phones, and faxes that create this new surreality. For the long-suppressed psyche is as outrageous in conservatives as it is in bohemians, in capitalists as in socialists, in evangelicals as in atheists — and, through our appliances, it is finally free to feed on the outer world, and so to grow.
What distinguishes the twentieth century is that each individual life is a daily progression through a concrete but fluctuating landscape of the psyche’s projections. Technology projects the subconscious into countless things, and thus duplicates the processes of the subconscious’s greatest artifact, the dream. The surreality, simultaneity, sexuality, and instantaneous change that once occurred only in our dreams now also occur all around us.
So the condition of our subconscious is now also the condition of this physical environment we’ve built for ourselves.
Now we reel between dream and dream. Between the dreams of our sleep that speak to us alone and the dreamscape of the waking world, in which we make our way through millions of dream pieces colliding around us in a collective slam-dance.
It was easy (or so it seems now) to love the world as it used to be, the world of rigid boundaries. That world was a world, it held still long enough to be a world and gave us time to learn to love it. But loving this scary state of flux? We want to love it, we have love in us to give it, but we are frightened and do not know how. Yet daily life hinges on what we are and are not able to love. So this craving not for love but to love, to be able to love what’s around one — it twists itself into a mere, and futile, search for certainty.
Still, we made this world. We gobble up its instantaneousness, and we breathlessly want more. Could it be that our collective purpose is to revivify the psyche by making it deal with its labyrinthine physical image at every turn? Have we created this always-shifting multiculture in order to learn to live within, and use, our own immense and cacophonous psyches? Is this the collective thrust of our history, a kind of genetic demand?
As individuals, we feel that our contemporary anti-environment has been forced upon us. But I repeat: collectively, we made this world. And, both individually and collectively, we’ve eagerly welcomed each separate manifestation of this collective change. The radio, television, telephone, fax machine, VCR, computer, light bulb, airplane, car — all the building blocks of contemporary life, which manifest in reality what were once only dreams and myths — have been seized upon everywhere in the world. It is not enough to blame this on capitalism or consumerism. The very eagerness of the world’s embrace of this hallucinogenic technology by the most different sorts of people is evidence of the deepest longing.
Perhaps it is a longing to let the beast out — for the psyche to flood forth. Or a longing, as in love, to be swept away no matter what. But it may be far deeper and more complex than that. It may be an agonized collective molting: five billion people and the planet itself on the same acid trip, creating together a living, inescapable dream (nightmare though it may seem) after which, when we wake up, we will be unimaginably different.
Nightmares, remember, are often the most telling and visionary of our dreams, the most useful for insight and change.
When I say that at the conclusion of this transformation, if we survive, we will be unimaginably different, please don’t mistake that for new-age goo. The pious platitudes of the new agers are pathetic incantations hoping to tame the untamable. Our transformation will leave humankind different, not necessarily better. It’s just that all of us collectively have decided it’s time for the big change — though individually most of us wish it were happening to somebody else in some other space-time.
What we now know (whether or not we ever wanted to know it) is that the human psyche is one of the great forces of nature. And what is most frightening about our new technology is that it exposes us to this force within us as nothing else ever has. We are standing in the storm of our own being. So we must face the fact that this, too, is our natural habitat. We have willy-nilly broken through all the old rigidities, all the limits we thought were nature itself, and we can never go back. This is a new nature. Since we, too, are a product of nature, it can be said that this is what nature is doing to itself hereabouts.
Dream has become reality. Dream-state metamorphoses have become waking-state conditions of everyday life. And through this fact echoes what may yet be the great axiom of our culture: In dreams begins responsibility.
This essay originally appeared in Michael Ventura’s Letters at 3 AM. Subtitled Reports on Endarkenment, Ventura’s book illuminates shadowy areas of American culture with his brilliant insights. We’re grateful to Spring Publications for permission to reprint. The book is available for $19.50 postpaid from Publisher Resources, 1224 Heil Quaker Blvd., La Vergne, Tennessee 37086, (800) 937-5557.
— Ed.
