067: typing on a train to berlin

existential feelings, chat groups and friend groups, missed opportunities, typing on a train to Berlin + T.S. Eliot

I am typing on a train to Berlin.

I am typing on a train to Berlin, but it might as well be anywhere because I am looking down at my laptop and listening to the same five Taylor Swift songs that I have been listening to on repeat for the whole time I’ve been traveling—the same five songs on ferries, on cobblestone streets, in train stations, morning and evening. I don’t really hear them anymore, but they set my mood and settle my thinking.

I’m facing west, which is away from the direction of the train, which I don’t usually like, but when I look up, I realize that it means I can see the sunset. Earlier it was raining, but now the last light is streaming through the clouds, flashing gold across elongated fields.

The flatness of western Europe is strange to me, accustomed as I am to the softly rolling hills of New England and the steepness of the Rocky Mountains. The fields are wide, flat and cultivated—inscribed by canals and tidy rows of trees.

With the motion of the train, the scene changes. I see fields of mud, and bridges torn by bomb blasts. I see lines of soldiers and armored vehicles. I think of trench rot and mustard gas and barbed wire. Time passes. I think of blitzkrieg. And of cattle cars.

I think of the person whom I desperately wish was with me.

There are always ghosts and echoes when I travel

The last raindrops skitter across my window as the fields fly by. The light fades. The opening bars of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” start to play again. I go back to my typing.

Nothing online is true anymore. Have you noticed this?

I came of age at the height of deconstruction in literary criticism; I haven’t seen a piece of writing as anything other than the start of a long series of questions since I was 18.

When you study literature, you learn how to deconstruct bias in texts, only it’s not called bias, it’s called things like connotation and framing and rhetorical fallacies. It’s the difference between describing someone as a plucky second amendment advocate and a gun-toting dipshit. Or the difference between saying that a political party has had a good election result because they lost fewer seats than was widely expected, versus saying that a political party has just lost control of half of the legislative branch.

This is my superpower. I used it with Covid research. I used it with the many and various accusations against Donald Trump (and Hunter Biden). I used it to figure out how to buy and fix up a house.

It’s more and more difficult to do this. The writing forms are too simplified and the layers of meaning are too complicated and there are no more schools of thought, there are only memes, and memes about memes.

There is sarcasm on sarcasm. There is idiom and slang that propagate and re-propagate in days and weeks instead of months and years. Shorthand has been shortened to the length of a quote-tweet. Sources I formerly considered mostly trustworthy are not asking hard questions—or any questions. Sources I don’t consider trustworthy sometimes accidentally back themselves into something resembling reason.

A friend sends me real-life headlines, rewritten by AI so as to change the framing to the negative (or positive, you choose) point of view.

They are letter perfect. They are not the words that I want to get from him.

I have so many of my friend conversations are over text now, is this true for you?

I have more chat groups, too, and the conversations are longer and more frequent even though we can see each other in real life again. It’s partly to do with not being on Facebook or Instagram anymore. It’s how I keep up with people now that I don’t rely on their timelines.

People’s texts have a voice that is more authentic than the one we use to post on social. We text one-to-one or in small groups, so it's inevitably more intimate. We aren’t composing a post (caption, Tweet, etc.) for an abstract idea of an audience. There’s no Instagram filter for Signal texts, thank God. We text different things to different groups, sure, but that’s like everyday life—you don’t say the same thing to people at work that you say to your best friends over drinks. In texts there is still a quality of trust.

A couple of weeks ago I was sad about something and sent a voice text about it to my friend. I immediately regretted it because I didn’t want to sound like a baby and be a burden, and tried to delete it but it was too late—she’d already seen it and wrote me back some things I really needed to read. I think it’s good that we sometimes text stuff that is embarrassing or vulnerable. Unlike on social, we can’t completely curate our selves out of existence.

One of my friend’s texts have always been hilariously unintelligible. Between autocorrect and typos, what we used to get from her was something like: i am ducking every wemd tome before her building with the whte thing. soon! yay! These texts were no good for making plans, but super fun to perform as read-alouds at dinner. Then, she started using voice to text. Now, she sounds like the coherent adult that she is.

I find that I miss the friend of the old texts—I liked the comedic inefficiency of her goofy, always-in-a-hurry, OG text voice. But she’s the same person—it’s just the syntax and spaces and punctuation that are different.

When I’m in Europe some of the texts I get on my phone’s native messaging app don’t download unless I am using data. If the person is texting in a group chat, the icon prompting me to download the text shows up as a message from just the sender. But, when I download it, that message disappears and the text shows up within the group. It’s interesting to download a couple of dozen texts that are a week old and two thirds of them are heart emoji or thumbs up emoji on the first ones.

My second to last night of my second most recent trip to Amsterdam, I went with three of my work colleagues to dinner at a place called Vegan Junk Food Bar. As you might have guessed from the title, everything was made of plant-based ingredients, but made into the shape and flavor of ordinary junk food like chicken wings, mozzarella sticks, bitterballen, etc. Which was fine. Junk food is junk food.

We chose VJFB especially because one of my colleagues is a vegetarian and the previous night she’d been given a “vegetarian” entree at an Indonesian restaurant that turned out to be made with meat. My colleague speaks Dutch, German, French, Czech and English and in both the Dutch and the English versions of the menu, her order had clearly been described as vegetarian. So, at first she thought that it was just a good meat substitute. But after a few bites, she wasn’t so sure. She flagged down the Indonesian waiter and asked him, in English, if he was sure that her dish did not contain meat. Yes, yes, he told her, over the din of the crowded restaurant, it’s a dish made for vegetarians. She ate a few more bites and still wasn’t so sure.

She flagged down the Dutch waiter and asked him in Dutch. To our other colleague and me, it seemed like a long conversation. At last, the Dutch waiter left. Well, we asked? It was meat, she told us, but since it is free range, organic meat, the restaurant considers it to be vegetarian.

At this point, I honestly wanted to laugh: the amazingness of language! The multiplicity of nuance and meaning! But my friend was genuinely distressed. We had worked a long day, and she was hungry. She didn’t want to send the food back because she felt it would be impolite, but she didn’t want to keep eating either. We couldn’t convince her to order herself another entree. Finally, I dug a power bar out of my backpack and gave it to her.

I was reminded of a time in the early days of caring about such things, when I asked a farmer at a farmer’s market if his eggs were cage free. It was obvious that he’d been asked the cage free question a lot because his reply was quick and wry: no, his hens were not free—they were tied up and tortured in tiny hen-dungeons with little whips and chains. I remember laughing and feeling a bit bad about asking. Then, he told me that his hens ran around his yard all day long, including meeting his kids' school bus at the end of the lane, but that he couldn’t sell their eggs as cage free, because at night, for their own safety, he put them in a hen house that was smaller than the state’s “cage-free” requirement.

Maybe it was because we were eating vegetables made into the shape of chicken satay and drinking gigantic, pink, gin and tonics, or maybe it was because my work colleagues are all young millennials, but the conversation at the Vegan Junk Food Bar got pretty intense. We got deep into topics of British politics (Liz Trust was still competing with a head of lettuce), the possibilities and risks of the dark web, the complexity and inevitability of climate change, the war in Ukraine, rising fuel prices and my—as the only American—carbon footprint.

At one point I asked them, how come you are laughing? Everything is so dire. How do you bear it?

‘Because I’m a nihilist,’ said my British friend, ‘and that’s a lot of freedom.’ My Irish colleague quickly agreed with him, saying something salty and idiomatically untranslatable that meant, roughly speaking, that ‘it's better to know the truth and live joyfully anyway because what else can we do.’

I am typing on a train to Berlin.

Just now the train went through a tunnel and a train going the other direction came through at the exact same time, causing that thing with light and sound that is so often used to set a mood in films. I can see why filmmakers love trains

The last light is gone, and with it, the hundred year old ghosts. I am thinking now about beautiful young people with their whole lives in front of them who describe themselves as nihilists. I want to find a power bar in my backpack that will fix the broken world for them and for my own kids and for my friends’ kids and for all of us.

I am thinking about the freedom of knowing that we are all going to die and the freedom of knowing how to be alone and about how these are uneasy freedoms.

It seems to me that if the stakes are going to be this high, we should be able to live more boldly, not less. That we should be able to more often say exactly what we mean and more often do exactly what we want.

For what are we waiting? More bad news? Should we wait for the pharmaceutical companies or the EU or the U.S. Congress to give us some more guidelines?

But, there’s this uneasiness that people have about living boldly, as though the best way to handle living in a time of everything happening everywhere all at once is to just keep trying to get to a zero inbox. As though playing it safe will make things any easier. As though repeating all the things we used to know to be true will make them true again.

T.S. Eliot described the work of writing as a “different kind of failure,” saying that,

each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion

Maybe it’s because I’ve become a nihilist like my young colleagues, but there’s something I like about the idea of just going all-in on a military style “raid against the inarticulate,” even if it is with shitty equipment and in an atmosphere of chaos.

It’s that I’d rather suffer the awkwardness and uncertainty of “undisciplined squads of emotion” than live the rest of my life in a state of productive anhedonia.

Sometimes I wish I had something more than “lols” and 😂 and 👀 to help me communicate.

I find myself scanning emoji choices and GIFs to help me reach new levels of intensity or complexity of meaning in texts. I need an emoji for: I’m being intentionally obtuse because it’s fun and another one for: have you noticed that things keep getting worse, but we’re still using the same GIFs?

I need an emoji for: I unironically adore you because ❤️ means: I’m glad you’re my friend and also: this photo of your child/pet/flower garden is so cute! which isn’t the same thing as I unironically adore you.

I need an emoji for: I wish we could do this by phone like we did in the 90s and 00s, when we could fall asleep talking, listening to the sound of each others voices.

I need an emoji for: can all of us in this group chat meet up tomorrow in my kitchen and drink hard liquor out of coffee mugs while watching the first snowfall?

I need an emoji for: you know the answering machine meltdown scene in Swingers? This text stream is like that.

I realize, suddenly, that I am almost out of battery on all of my devices. I must have typed a thousand words on this trip, but my daughter and I haven’t communicated specifically about where we will meet when the train arrives at Berlin Friedrichstraße. I close my laptop, put my phone on ‘extreme battery saver,’ and unpair my earbuds.

There is nothing to listen to but train sounds.

Without my five pop songs, my mind wanders in bigger and bigger circles.

I find myself thinking about what is the emoji for: can we hide away together in my bed in the room under the eaves in the house shaped house, far away from everything that is sad? And about what is the emoji for: no one will care and no one will be hurt because we all care and we are all already hurt?

I find myself thinking about about what if I had those emoji or other emoji like them and what if I sent them to you and you understood what they meant and we had those hours or those days in a room under the eaves and when it was time to go I could put my hands on your face and say what is the emoji for I love who you are and I love who are bodies are and when you are gone I would reach for phone out of habit but then I would put it back down and just sit on a blue couch and watch the light because sometimes what is most real is what is right in front of you and not the ideas and histories and habits and norms that we are told are real.

On Monday I would almost certainly be scrolling again, but something would still be different, and it would not have been because of words.

T.S. Eliot again:

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

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