Fifteen Minutes: Endpaper: Things Past

My brother's cut-rate encyclopedia, suspiciously slim volumes that I would ransack for sixth-grade book report roughage, featured an innovative learning tool under the entry on the Human Body: seven consecutive pages of transparencies, each devoted to a different organic system. Page 1's skin'n'hair'n'nails fit neatly over Page 2's spindly circulation road map which in turn lay on Page 3's inexplicably adipose-yellow GI tracts or Halloween skeleton man, and so on. At a glance, you saw and saw through man instantly, as through, yes, X-ray specs, a three-dimensional simultaneity of vision and understanding.

I like to see and live the world with such vistas opening everywhere and in everything--in time. Whether a practice or an object, I like to pick it up and see its history, its predecessors, its equivalents, and to question obsolescence as often as possible. It's not retro or "classic," it's not Luddite, it's not fetishization or nostalgia, nor noodling trivia-mongering, nor slavish creative anachronism.

I just want better eyesight.

Cast a wide net, scrabble up and down from period to period, a scale intimate like Proust's madeleine and yet grand and popular. How did people do this before? Should I Mach Three today, or go for a barbershop shave with strop and blade? Send someone a letter, or an e-mail? Do I touch-type it up, or take out the typewriter, and probably wrangle with the ribbon far less than I'd sweat blood over a smug squat printer? But, no, it isn't just efficiency, isn't it the pre-modern satisfaction of unfamiliar physical immediacy--actually crunching out the letters, tack tack tack, not beholden to mysterious will o' wisp electrons? Why are we so far removed? Do you know how all the black boxes in your world operate?

Those newbie key cards, barely 10 years old, or keys?

To avert devolving into a sub-Nicholson Baker riff, we can shift into lamentation. Sad, sad, sad: New is better; pop culture is disposable and laughs at its ancestors; masturbatory fashionistas dictate and bulletproof their fopaganda. Where can we access the past, without fear of reprisal or dismissal? Ad firms parallel the AI race for the perfect chess computer, in their appropriation of our precious individuality and irony, engineering the perfect corporate android to convince us to match the image in the mirror--the billboard, the TV screen--the one now and forever, until the next profit margin rolls around. Who has time for the old time?

Wherever I live, I throw a blanket over any TV or computer screen not in use. Nobody 80 years ago had to deal with this ugly glass orb staring all day long, bloodshot with potential demands and static, so why should I? Why doesn't it bother people more?

Someone not very nice once succinctly enumerated our contemporary tendencies "toward the literal, the conformist, and the amnesiac." Although the first two trends are probably guiding your dismissal of this as weird and poorly written--and much of it is--I've been dealing mainly with the last one. I can exhort you now to learn about your institution. It's not the biggest news, but go comb through the Crimson archives and find out that students picketed for hot breakfasts in the '70s, that a Funk Concert Happening did it in your earhole in Dunster a decade ago, or that Terrence Malick '66 was busy with his Husserl and Heidegger thesis before Badlands. When was the Red Line extended to Harvard Square? And do you know your American history? That is, ad campaigns from the '50s?

When I have been fortunate enough to travel to London, I hear the many dialects but see through to the German and Anglo-Saxon roots, the transparencies just beyond. The idiom is more immediate, or in an alternate-universe way. How did we settle on "Call me" instead of "Ring me"? "Putting me on" instead of "having me on"? Drugs money, way out--the Latin "exit" just wrenches you ever after! When you are frustrated by a friend, do you say, "it really does me brains in?" Will you next time, instead of "it bugs me?" For me?

I don't look to the past for authority or for validation; I don't need a purpose, and I don't always have one. You could probably kill me. It's just fun to play, not limited to the same crib of the now (sorry). And realize there is no need to see through everything externally--look at yourself. How were you as a child? Play-full? Do you embrace only the handed-down adult games now, the formalized convoluted expressions of drives that you used to express by yourself? Do you skip? Is there a place for unfallen sexual play in your life? Or just fucking? What would I have done 300 years ago for the equivalent shock tactic of a swear word? Why is free and unpredictable movement so threatening on subways? Should I mind when a toddler hurls itself at my crotch and vomits on my wide-wale corduroys? No.

Have you heard people say they don't like black-and-white movies? What on earth could they mean by that? Why do I prove literature's equivalence to now? Why aren't we showing now's equivalence with literature, or the past? Do you listen to music at parties, or just recognize it? What if you don't recognize it? Can you dance to anything not four-on-the-floor?

The postmodern joys of the Information Age are that we finally know everything about what's happened, and we can choose from vast databases and with great ease. For the answers, we have the scientific straight and narrow if we wish, or we can page through literary traditions, or social practice, or minutiae. Our critics can tend to be our history-keepers if we're not careful, simply because they bother to remember what happened more than five years ago.

Do not be hesitant to diverge. Do not as cognoscenti lord it over people, practicing the poker-face, the bored tyrant. Do not order people around. What was the first occurrence of any given thing? Onomasticon whatchamacallit?

Divergence through detournement and derive. Situationists taught us among other things to reappropriate and reinvent the spaces around us. Do you know the escape routes from any given point in the street? Or how to be in your castle on a sidewalk? You, too, can do this. But let's draw that closer to our original point: as well as the time that swirls around everything, the history that should be inescapable we sadly can lose in the blister-wrapping on everything. Why not question why everything is so, how it was otherwise so, and perhaps toss off some universals along the way.

The Miller's Tale, pop culture referencing, shaggy-dog stories, sitcoms, absurdism, or one-liners? Why can humor be so fascist or dismissive?

I met a famous person last week who told me the best way to make money writing is ransom notes.

Thank you for your time.

Nicolas Rapold '99-00 lives in Lowell House.