There is a man who sunbathes in the yard next to the building where I do my part-time job. When I walk in at 1 p.m., he's out there, slightly oiled, arms behind his head, face tilted sunward like a satellite dish. I envy the recline of his indolence because I have to go sit at a desk and be bathed by cathode rays from the computer screen and dead-white fluorescent lights. At five, when I leave, slightly perspired and hungry, he's gone in; I imagine his body giving off a fragrant sachet of oil and the sweet dry buoyancy of the sun.
The contrast between his indulgence and my necessity made me think about how often in our modern lives we are bathed by things we haven't chosen, things that are designed to lull us into an easy submission, and how rare it is to have enough freedom to conspire with the sun. Take advertising, for one obvious example. How many ads, of any kind, are we laved with in one day? We might guess a few hundred, but several studies have shown the answer to be thousands. We are washed in the flood of the Word and expected to pay accordingly without question.
We daily battle floods more virulent than Noah's: food additives, pollution, lawyers, television, presidential primaries, Muzak, the CIA and FBI. By necessity we have to shut ourselves off to some degree or our organisms would overload. But our society has exploited this necessary biological amnesia into a policy of narcosis - we are doped by the news, by our schools, by our corporations so that we'll genuflect without murmur before the necessities of the powers that be.
There are ways to fight this sleeping sickness, small things in the daily round. I've been concentrating on my breathing, changing it slightly so that I'm breathing from my abdomen and not my chest. It's amazing what a few more pints of oxygen to the brain can do. Kids hand out a lot of hints as well. One of the ways they clearly delight themselves is to give their bodies over to gravity. Adults don't trust gravity. We try to stay either horizontal or vertical, keep a fixed axis. So I tried walking upstairs while turning in a circle, something I'd seen the boy downstairs try. It was marvelous. My stodgy balance mechanisms had to dust off gravity vectors it hadn't used in years. Suddenly, stairs were a means to delight rather than a bit of carborundum in the daily grind.
Small things, yes - but they break the wave, become a small reef of awareness that cuts the conservative swell of the ocean. We needn't be so washed-up, so to speak. If in small ways we can draft our imagination into the service of delight, we can educate it for the larger orbits, the things that really threaten to make us bland and pliable sponges for the masters.
Voices From The Street
What We Need