Alone Together
Thom Andersen states in Los Angeles Plays Itself, “Movies have a few advantages over us: they can fly through the air, we must travel by land. They exist in space, we live in dying time.” Films are romanticized because of the different perspectives that it gives the viewer. However, reality demands that we see the world from street level, and Southern California demands that to be from the confined insides of our vehicles. The automobile is an enabler. It is a dream chaser. A symbol of freedom and adventure. It allows us to feed our busy dreams. Reyner Banham states in his writing of Autopia, driving on the freeways “become[s] a special way of being alive” and brings on a “heightened state of awareness that some locals find mystical.” Many times said by those seeking a new beginning “I packed all that I could fit in my car and came out here to start again.” It is a symbol of new chapters. There’s no sensation that approximates that of driving away and seeing your small town in the rearview. Or of that of being on the highway blasting your favorite music after a long day of work. A place for contemplation, and reevaluating past conversations. Sitting in traffic alone yet together.
The perfect example of this is artist Mindy Alper. Acute anxiety, mental disorder and devastating depression has led her to be committed to mental institutions and undergo electroshock therapy several times which caused her to spend a 10 year period without the ability to speak. Her hyper self awareness is what influences her work that expresses her emotional state with powerful psychological precision. Alper discusses how life can be seen differently through life’s traffic jams. Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405. Traffic is her remedy. It is the time she feels the least lonely, yet she is completely alone. Sitting in traffic on an LA freeway, to most Angelenos, is maddening. To Alper, it is bliss. A time and place for her to slow down, to recap her emotions and thoughts, a place for inspiration. Perhaps we took the jams for granted. Perhaps it was the only time any of us ever slowed down throughout our days to not perform and just to be. Perhaps it was 37,935 hours to stop and look around for once. Perhaps the extraneous circumstances of COVID-19 is just another metaphoric traffic jam.
In The Politico, the rules we’ve lived by won’t all apply, Astra Taylor writes: “All along, evictions were avoidable; the homeless could’ve been housed and sheltered in government buildings; water and electricity didn’t need to be turned off for people behind on their bills; paid sick leave could‘ve been a right for all workers; paying your mortgage late didn’t need to lead to foreclosure; and debtors could’ve been granted relief… It’s clear that in a crisis, the rules don’t apply—which makes you wonder why they are rules in the first place. This is an unprecedented opportunity to not just hit the pause button and temporarily ease the pain, but to permanently change the rules so that untold millions of people aren’t so vulnerable to begin with.” This is the picture of capitalist America. Where does community happen? Where do our narratives merge? Seems as though the savior came disguised as a beast. The silver lining of a pandemic is that we have ripped off our societal masks, we are forced to be empathetic, to think worst case scenarios not just for ourselves, but to look beyond into our communities and how they will be affected. What seemed to be alienated communities, COVID-19 shows that community happens in the middle of the storm. Where people have time and space to build relationships, time and space to look beyond our own navels. Space to revive the narrative of being human. Lower class meets upper class, young meets old, art meets sport, individuals meet community, and this time, quarantine is our host. It seems as though we are able to locate our humanity in the times of most need. As Dallas Willard once wrote, “Solitude well practiced will break the power of busyness, haste, isolation, and loneliness. You will see that the world is not on your shoulders after all.”
Whether humanity is like this because it is still in development or because our natural condition has been overlooked. Whether the cause is greed or neglect. The fact remains that it has a barrier. Unseen, yet felt. We have nothing that makes us seem human except our proud high postures. Against the bright lights, silhouettes fighting to be seen. Buried in the brokenness of isolation. Buried in the memory of what used to be. Like newborn sinners, we fight for new lives, for better lives. Condemned by what it was, yet we fight for what it can be. We seek the chase. A second chance. The empty cities that we believe will give us what we want. Though the question of the matter is: are we chasing the right things?
Socrates once wrote, “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” While we sit like a child on time out, the universe has been replenishing itself without our footprints. The running around town slowly fades each day that passes, and now the only running around is from room to room in our homes. It is hard to imagine us going back to what used to be, but then again, the human heart is a creature of habit. For a quarter of a century, this is the first encounter of a new model of society. The pastimes have changed from accumulating void goods, to filling our time with that which fulfills our minds, bodies and spirits. Should this not be the model from which we thrive upon? We have been given a chance to refocus our endeavors and our emotional investments. A chance to reverse the barrenness of our busy lives to that of a rich and mindful one. As Brene Brown once said, “'Crazy-busy' is a great armor, it's a great way for numbing. What a lot of us do is that we stay so busy, and so out in front of our life, that the truth of how we're feeling and what we really need can't catch up with us.”
What has really changed for us during this self isolation? Aren’t we still producing the same as before? Still stuck behind the screens that dictate our lives? If anything, the only change has been our setting. We have been limited to certain walls. It is not isolation that is affecting anyone, it is the fact that we are being forced to face ourselves without any distractions. Henri Nouwen once said, “In our production-oriented society, being busy, having an occupation, has become one of the main ways, if not the main way, of identifying ourselves. Without an occupation, not just our economic security but our very identity is endangered."
Perhaps we are all Theodore Twombly from Spike Jonez’s film Her. Set in a futuristic Los Angeles, Jonez tells the story of a man that resembles more a machine and an operating system that seems more human than him. It is a story of how the machine rescues him from his solitude, lifting him up from his loneliness and back into life. Like Theodore, we have become a society that is more fond of retreating from people and jumping into a machine world. In “Her,” Jonez isn’t asking whether machines think, but whether human beings can still feel. Jonez portrays the story in the smoggy Los Angeles we all know and love, though without the presence of vehicles. He displays Theodore in a world of constant crowds of the streets, the trains, the offices...though the isolation is evident with everyone with their ear pods in and speaking down to their navels. Isolation is his default state. It is a world where people are more plugged into their machines than to people in their lives.
In 2013, Jonez made this prophetic narrative that seems to be fitting more into our realities today. Even more so during these times. Among the negative there is still good, finding our humanity is the greatest gift COVID-19 is giving to us. Our relationships are being held by the powers of technologies, though even that has shifted from the superficial polished posts to a more openly raw connection. Sherry Turkle professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT wrote in the Politico, “This is a different life on the screen from disappearing into a video game or polishing one’s avatar. This is breaking open a medium with human generosity and empathy. This is looking within and asking: “What can I authentically offer? I have a life, a history. What do people need?” If, moving forward, we apply our most human instincts to our devices, that will have been a powerful COVID-19 legacy. Not only alone together, but together alone.”
Bibliography
Andersen, Thom, and Encke M. King. Los Angeles Plays Itself. , 2014.
Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2001 (1971).
Brown Brené. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Avery, an Imprint of Penguin Random House, 2015.
Jonez, Spike. Her. 2013.
Nouwen, Henri J. M. Making All Things New: an Invitation to the Spiritual Life. HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.
Stiefel, Frank. Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405. 2016.
Tannen, D. (2020, March 19). Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here's How. Retrieved April 4, 2020, from https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/19/coronavirus-effect-economy-life-society-analysis-covid-135579
Willard, Dallas. The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesuss Essential Teachings on Discipleship. HarperOne, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2014