I want to launch this next phase of Carv’s Thinky Blog by acknowledging these are difficult times. The worst among us have been promoted to underserved power by simpletons and oligarchs. Despite that, our woes are still relieved by hope, joy, friendship and clever entertainment. I was reminded of that this week in a most unusual but powerful way.
I’ve been sleeping poorly of late, the result of an altered work schedule and a nagging cough that hits hardest in the middle of the night. To combat the latter, I’ve pumped any number of over-the-counter medications into my system, and the night before last they conspired with my exhaustion to produce the law-abiding citizen’s version of an LSD head trip.
I dreamt my wife Amanda and I were on a luxury cruise to some paradise island, biologically tropical but architecturally Adriatic. The theme of that cruise was sensual pleasure — not in a late-night Skinemax vein necessarily, but more in the realms of beauty, surprise and deliciousness. It offered such whimsical activities as a run through powdered snowdrifts to a luxury wine and beer tasting. At one point we were fed marinated pasta while floating in a warm mineral bath. I remember the 3D, full-360, Technicolor panorama of a charming cove below me, with Cinque Terre-like villas stacked up behind me, all viewed from the cool, idyllic comfort of a glass-walled infinity pool. It was as beautiful as anything I’ve ever witnessed in all my actual life.
This fantasy cruise served up pleasures created and priced for the superrich, to be sure, not middle-class travelers like Amanda and me. But dreams are the likeliest lottery win, and clearly my subconscious has been longing for an opulent getaway. Having said that, life itself is a cruise through unpredictable waters. It offers a banquet of beautiful moments to sustain us through horrors, offenses and everyday outrages.
Home-cooked meals. Inspiring music. Gentle caresses. Birdsong. Laughter. Bonhomie. I know the 2020s don’t distribute such pleasures equally, but remember they aren’t far from most humans’ reach.
It seems to me that dream was trying to show my conscious self something important enough to record here as a reminder to both me and you: Life is better than we commonly perceive it. We are anxious, self-absorbed creatures programmed to notice and focus on difficulties, but the deafening jangle of all those reflexive alarms can dampen the intensity of what should properly be delightful experiences.
We must take a moment now to realize and reflect on the fact that literally none of this should be here. I mean none of this. Nothing! The universe should be a cold void brightened only by the occasional sparks of drifting molecules that bump in the vast cosmic night, and long after we’re gone, for most of its multibillion-year lifespan, that’s probably what it will be. The odds of that thin soup producing anything fantastic are basically too long to calculate.
If you believe we’re the creation of God or some godlike game designer, more power to you, but the odds of that superbeing existing and possessing the power to launch all this on a whim are even greater than the odds against unguided miracles. We may be a part of what happens sometimes when incomprehensibly voluminous chaos gets clumpy over eons of random happenstance. In mich saber way snowflakes form in clouds or regular prisms took shape on the Devil’s Causeway, we animals might be fortuitous accidents that appear to be intelligent design.
However we got here, though, by golly, here we are. Every moment we’ve ever enjoyed was more than any of us had any logical reason to expect. Forget hypothetical afterlives, we got actual life!
Over the course of my own life, I’ve enjoyed a fair number of atypical ecstasies. I’ve signed copies of novels I wrote and saw published. I’ve been hugged by the trunk of an impish, juvenile elephant. I’ve walked the red carpet at Hollywood movie premieres. I’ve canoodled with my wonderful wife and best friend to the hubbub of Venice’s Grand Canal traffic directly outside our hotel window. But let’s not overlook the many minuscule miracles available to most human beings.
Right now, you can search for and read, for free, the collected works of William Shakespeare, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Mark Twain. Via YouTube, you can ride Shanghai’s stunning adaptation of Pirates of the Caribbean or watch Willie Nelson croon “Rainbow Connection.” Almost every American community offers tacos — and thank you for that, immigrants both documented and un! You can access performances of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” or John Williams’ rapturous film scores. We live in a decade when a whole planet’s burden of conflict, malevolence and foolishness crowd their way into our social media feeds, yes, but those same devices give us immediate, intimate access to friends and loved ones we may not have seen in person in years. As Paul Simon noted before even the mixed gift and curse of the Internet, “These are the days of miracles and wonders. This is the long-distance call.”
My country, the United States, has spent the last decade in the clutches of autocratic narcissists, but nevertheless, my state and community persist in pushing back. I’m sure I’ll continue to comment on and bemoan such sorry circumstances as I strive to understand and improve them. But I’m reminding myself (and you, too, perhaps) that existence as a person, a mind who can fall in love and appreciate a sonnet and choose between varieties of peanut butter and jelly, is a miracle as unlikely as magic itself. Never allow yourself to be blinded or distracted from that. It’s important, as important as anything, and it matters because it’s the truth.
I’m writing this essay from seat 20F inside a steel tube designed by human beings to gather air beneath itself and propel us across the continent at speeds and altitudes unmatched by any other multicellular lifeforms. Is that not worth celebrating? We DID that! Human beings! Crafty cousins to chimps and bonobos! Fantastic!
Amanda has a conference in Philadelphia next week, and I’m tagging along to celebrate her half-century birthday tomorrow. We’ve already outlived Jimi Hendrix, Eva Cassidy and, if tradition may be believed, Jesus of Nazareth himself. And that, let us never forget, is over fifty more trips around the sun than any clump of ex-stellar innards has any right or logical reason to expect! After the conference, we’ll weekend in Manhattan, where Amanda will get her first taste of Big Apple bagels, a show on actual Broadway and a cruise past a certain French immigrant who lifts her torch to welcome shorter new immigrants. And via this blog, I hope and plan to share a fair sampling of all our sensory pleasures with you.
Make no mistake, this website remains a not-so-subtle advertisement for my efforts in fiction and narrative performance. If you like it enough to help me run it at less of a loss, please and thank you vis-a-vis the virtual tip jar I recently added. In months to come, expect further enticements toward Rock Stars, a trilogy of light-hearted space opera novels I wrote between March 2020 (yes, THAT March 2020) and this spring. But otherwise this site will be free to read, just like the Internet of old. I’ll use it to document our many excursions, creations and rabbit holes of intellectual and sensory curiosity. I want you to know this about me most of all, Gentle Reader: I’m curious about everything from quantum mechanics to cosmology, I value art over commerce and I shall never succumb to despair. Life and consciousness are precious gifts all of us should steadfastly refuse to take for granted.
Take a moment. Take a breath. Recall something lovely. You’re here, right here for years on this unbelievably marvelous world. You are conscious. I’m here, too. We can feel ourselves feeling the experience of being alive. That is personhood. That, for the lack of a better word, is what poets and clerics call soul. Use it to be curious! Use it to model love and empathy! And for Pete’s sake, go find something delicious to eat! You deserve it!
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