Progress
Jan 4 2011


Washing laundry by hand.
Wind the alarm clock
before bed, each night.
Dial one number at a time,
then wait
while it whirrrs back to zero.

Back when TV began
as a point of light
in the middle of a thick glass screen,
then expanding, slowly
into a universe of 3
local stations.
Fiddle with the rabbit ears,
get up to change channels.
A flickering picture of an Indian chief
after midnight,
when every sensible person’s asleep.

Labour-saving devices
that make us slaves.
How we pilfer from sleep
to serve.
There is not enough time in the day
to get things done,
and how work expands to fill
the space available.

And when the power goes out,
in the sudden silence
in accustomed dark,
the universe shrinks
to these 4 walls.
Alone, for once
you make polite conversation
with yourself,
find out if you like your own company
can somehow keep talking.
Maybe even stop
waiting for the light to break.

Do you notice how your eyes strobe
in the unfamiliar darkness,
your exhausted retina
firing at random?
Like static, on that old TV
on the receding edge
of reception,
even at the speed of light.

The phone still works when the power’s out
casting its ghostly glow.
So you turn it off,
immerse yourself
in the dark.
Perfectly silent, and black,
like before time began.




I’m probably guilty of romanticizing the past in this poem. The beginning was clumsily lifted from Ian Frazier’s Family: I heard him read an excerpt (on the Dec 31 2010 edition of A Prairie Home Companion), and couldn’t get it out of my head. (You can listen yourself, by going to the PHC website – prairiehome.publicradio.org.)

The main idea is how, living in a culture of constant distraction, over-stimulation, and dizzying obsolescence, we have trouble being alone with ourselves. And how true silence and darkness are so rarely experienced in the modern world. Even our labour-saving devices don’t do that; they just raise our expectations, and cause even more work. I’m thinking about generating laundry: tossing a shirt in a hamper after wearing it for a few hours, which you’d never do without the machine. And standards of house-cleaning: without a vacuum cleaner, you’d probably tolerate a lot more dog hair and dust. This isn’t an original thesis, and I’ve heard an academic (of social anthropology or home economics or some other obscure discipline) expound on it with much more authority than me. Actually, I’m not sure I totally buy it: washing laundry by hand was bloody hard! But our forbears expected less. And they lived more circumscribed – and not necessarily less happy – lives. So there’s probably some truth here; as usual, the law of unintended consequences at work.

My first inclination was to call it Big Bang. I tried to sustain this metaphor through the piece (I suspect not terribly successfully), since the cosmology of the Big Bang so tellingly impinges on these two ideas – time, and progress. Because this model of the origin of the universe could mean an infinitely expanding one, which ultimately leads to oblivion: like progress, a feverish expansion which ultimately results in a thinner life and more shallow relationships. Or it could mean a yo-yo universe: one that constantly creates, and then annihilates, time.

All in all, kind of complicated and obscure ideas that I tried to make palatable and interesting. I’m not sure how well I accomplished that. So I’d be interested to hear any feedback on how well this poem works. And also what you may have thought it was about, before you had the chance to see what I had in mind.