In Which Everybody Dreams of the End

The Appeal of the Apocalypse

by SHAHIRAH MAJUMDAR

"The lives of ordinary people with petty problems who now have a big problem."

- Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange

Everybody loves a good disaster. Everybody loves a little brush with death. One glimpse into the deep abyss and all the petty stupid stuff becomes yesterday's news. Colors look brighter. Air tastes cleaner. For a minute, we forget ourselves and are freshly hopped up on the dearest of highs: oh the sheer sweet joy of being alive.

Crave danger but lack a death wish? Not to worry, I've got you covered. You and I can get hopped up on disaster porn. We can dream of swamps of fire, we can contemplate the sunspots on the sun. We can surrender to wind and water and meet an angel on the run. We can watch a faster ocean sweep a vaster Himalayan sky. We can get our kicks on the apocalypse. Every time a volcano pops, I get a little closer to Zen. Every time the ice cap crumbles, I feel a little cleansed. Let's purge our souls as godheads roll and score it all to some slinky 70s soul.

With 2012 around the corner, Hollywood's throwing an eschatological feast. They've got the end of the world on a platter, the head of a prophet, the sign of the beast. How might God want to destroy us? Let the multiplex count the ways. If not legions of angels bent on destruction, then toxic and whispering trees. Aliens are always good for a villain, and meteors play well in the cheap seats. There are nanites and neutrinos to make it believable, and a nuclear holocaust to make it teachable - it only takes one little red button, you understand, to turn all of this into a wasteland. Don't panic, this isn't a horror show; when the dust settles, we've been promised a hero.

It won't be long until the moment's upon us. The stars are bursting with signs - and, the signs? They're aligned! The twilight of the idols is at hand. But who shall be saved when we're all so depraved? Time to start thinking about redemption. Time to address the sins we confess and take some swift stock of each other. We've got pacts with the devil, gays in the temple and sin cities swimming with single mothers. Rome is alive. Babylon's well. Sodom and Gomorrah are dear brothers. The East's lost our trust; the West's busted up and is needlessly feeding stray animals. Such is the state of these civilized lands; something inside of us yearns for a cataclysm. To raze it all and start us fresh. To ease the burden of human consciousness. Return us to nature. Let the floods wash us clean. Disasters, says Jesus, are just God's way of housekeeping.

We live lives of enduring sameness, trying our best to keep the unexpected at bay. We dream of lives of meaning and wonder in which impossible is nothing and love saves the day. Day winds into evening. Evenings grow thin. But how strange the change a disaster brings - oh how beautiful is catharsis! Don't you feel renewed when the President tells you that it's up to you to handle the crisis? We may be human and small, overwhelmed by it all, but, suddenly our lives swell with purpose. Here's a chance, don't you see, to live as we dreamed: our last moments on earth shall be selfless.

Let me be taken by a ring of fire. Let my release feel like an act of God. Let my name loom large in the titles. Let my face be traced in the stars. Come, let's pick up the slack before we slow fade to black - we're long overdue for a hero.

But, for now, the traffic comes and goes. The old man dares to make a speech. I dream of a coming Atlantis and the mermaids singing, each to each.

Shahirah Majumdar is a contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In Which There Are No Vampires Left In New York

The Once and Future Fairytale

by SHAHIRAH MAJUMDAR

There are those of us who are too stiff-fingered, too hardened by our many years around the merry-go-round to feel the tug of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga. As stories go, this is one that's come around many times before.

We all know the gist by now: first love; a lion and a lamb; star-crossed lovers; suffering and redemption; a life given meaning by the presence of the other. Twilight tacks on vampires, a YA label, and a happy ending? just enough to make this book appropriate for the younger set. It also gives us a boy and a girl so consumed by their love for another that they are willing to endure any sacrifice, any indignity, any bodily pain or mental anguish for the sake of the other's happiness. For Bella and Edward, the complete erasure of the self would not to be too great a sacrifice to express the totality of their devotion. The Story of O doesn't have much on the Twilight Saga. On the other hand, Jesus might.

A couple of nights after New Moon was released, I gave into the onslaught: to Caitlin Flanagan's piece in The Atlantic, to my married cousin's A++ reviews, to K-Stew and R-Pattz with his sanpaku eyes. I read all four books in one stretch and I dreamt hazy dreams which, unlike Bella, I can't remember, but, like Bella, I awoke disturbed, conscious of things unsettled inside of me: subdued desires, long-resigned ideals.

It's pure fantasy, of course, pure revisionist nostalgia, unrealistic not because of its vampires and werewolves, but because of the way it limns that old story, the first fairy tale: that love is the whole history of a woman's life. To enter into the Twilight world is to slip into a lost continent, a Gondwanaland of the hormones that existed for a brief moment before the violence of experience tore everything apart. There is no shading here, neither in the book's thematic treatment nor in the extraordinary literalness of the writing itself. Light pools. Shadows bloom. Skin is either winter cold or burning hot. The story unwinds like the pet fantasy of teenage girl, lingering on every thought and touch and observation. No action is presented without being analyzed. No misunderstanding is cleared up if it can be dragged on for a hundred pages. And, if that misunderstanding is nearly fatal, if Bella can be pushed to the brink of destruction, and Edward can be left hating himself for bringing her so far, so much the better. The resolution is that much sweeter. The "torture the woman" school of storytelling has never gone out of style.

Despite all the atmospheric gloom, this is a universe of blinding emotional and moral clarity. Twilight is no noir; it's a nighttime soap opera in high key lighting. For Bella, Edward and beleaguered best friend Jacob, love is the light that illuminates everything. Pain is the result of confusion, of trying to force things together that don't fit, or of trying to keep things apart that are meant to be together. And the ultimate lesson Twilight offers, the notion that hooks so many starry-eyed girls, is that love will never betray you. That is: The boy will always come back to you. The best friend will be there for you. Even your parents, however much they question your decisions, will melt in the face of any prospective unhappiness and ultimately support you.

The lesson of modern life, in contrast, is rather the opposite. In life as I know it, among all the savvy boys and girls gliding in dark jeans down the Bowery, it's simply not safe to feel the way Bella feels about Edward. We were seventeen once, but now we know better. After years of dating, of crashing in and out of love, of the resulting flattening of the soul, the damaged ego, the imagined humiliations most of us have learned that it is prudent to set the dial low. To love that much, to have one's happiness revolve so completely around another person, is a recipe for disaster. To love someone that much is to give them the power to hurt you, and which one of us wants to go through all of that again?

And yet, I awoke one morning after consuming some 2400 pages of emotional pornography and wondered at the cost of a highly developed instinct for self-preservation. It's that instinct that separates Bella from me: there's a lot I wouldn't do for love; there' nothing Bella wouldn't. Ever the intrepid heroine, neither college, nor career, nor villainous vampires and nor a rib-shattering Rosemary's baby can swerve her from her single-minded devotion. For the millions of Twilight fans, Bella's is an ideal worth emulating. For the pink-sweatered kids among them, well, life hasn't taught them any better yet. As for the others, the mothers and the grandmothers and the young marrieds like my cousin, there somehow still exists a secret self, one that doesn't belong to the drudgery of car pools or cubicles or two-for-one supermarket specials; a secret self that swells in the night, pleasuring itself with dreams of fevered romanticism.

That secret self doesn't question Bella's sanity when she announces that Edward loves her unconditionally and irrevocably and, to be honest, irrationally. It doesn't find Edward's beauty (bronze haired, angel-like, sparkly in the sunlight) as cheap as a Chinatown trinket. Nor does it wince at the lengthy arguments about who loves the other better, nor cringe at the words forever, soul mate and lines in the tenor of eyes like stars or meteors in a moonless sky. As the sold out midnight screenings across America testify, this is a secret self that still knows how to swoon.

The experts say that Bella is a terrible role model, and I daresay they are right. But what they seem to assume is that weaning a girl on feminist approved YA books will set her course straight for life which is not unlike saying that a kid raised on a sugar free diet will always win a battle with an ice cream sundae. As any girl who loved Talking to Dragons as well as Wuthering Heights and still ended up betting it all on the love the first time and maybe even the second time can attest, it's only experience that can work that kind of magic. It takes a broken heart to make lessons about not falling for the wrong kind of guy stick. And then, chastened, wary, more certain of ourselves, instead of mooning over prom dates and first kisses, we learn to focus our energy on work and career, on engaging with the outside world and shaping it in ways we can control. We think in terms of realpolitik. We separate sex from romance. We learn to self-actualize. Some of us do yoga. Some of us are man-eaters. Some of us are in relationships with a good enough kind of guy.

Most of all, we resign ourselves to the knowledge that - irrevocably, unconditionally, irrationally - is only for the crazies. After a while, we forget what it felt like to even harbor that craving. I loved my last boyfriend, though never in the swooning sort of way, and we spent two years together until I decided to take an extended trip outside of the States. I said we'll take a break but then I never came back. This was easy because I never expected us to do anything but fail in the long run; my running out on him was just an accelerated means to an already foregone conclusion.

It is a sign of my apathy that I regard my own romantic history with a certain amount of cynicism. This is in contrast to Bella who catalogs every moment of Edward's courtship and charges them with torrid and terrible portent. I could tell you about my first love (he changed his name after we broke up; I dropped out of school) or my second love (he said, "I can't do this anymore, I need to focus on my art"; I felt my entire existence had been negated) but it's hard to muster the enthusiasm to go beyond the barest details. Somewhere along the way, maybe around the time my best friend called me after watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona to inform me that I was definitely Cristina, or the summer all four of my siblings stayed with me and my boyfriend in our loft on Varick Street and each of them told me separately that they couldn't stand him, or maybe it was just after I quit my last job and realized that I was broke and we weren't in love and that maybe I'd never write a damn thing worth publishing - it occurred to me that love wasn't the most important thing to me after all.

Do you ever really recover from heartbreak? Bella is never unlucky to have to find out. What I know is that the boy from whom you were once inseparable will indeed move on from you, and sometimes good friends, great friends, will disappear so deep into their own drama that they are no longer capable of being there for you. The world spins on. You soldier on. And if you can hold on to your secret, swooning, sweatered self while you do, then so much the better for you. It's not such a terrible thing to wish for Bella's innocence. There are far worse things to face in the daylight.

Shahirah Majumdar is a contributor to This Recording. You can find her website here.

"Everlasting Gobstopper" - Apollo Heights (mp3)

"Disco Lights" - Apollo Heights (mp3)

"Black and Blue" - Apollo Heights (mp3)

In Which F. Scott Fitzgerald Is Suffused With Longing

And One Fine Morning—

by SHAHIRAH MAJUMDAR

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Notebooks

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was a writer and a dreamer and an alcoholic. Early in his life, he was lucky and he believed in what he dreamed and wrote about it and America loved him for it.  A little later in life, the dreams began to tarnish and he no longer believed and he wrote about that too— but, by then, we had heard too much and we began to be bored.

There are a few things that define Fitzgerald’s work and the chief of these is longing— longing for the infinite, the unattainable or the simply gorgeous. Often, it takes the form of a lovely debutante who is a little mad or maybe just marvelously idiosyncratic. It is longing for success, for approbation, for love, for money, for a lasting seat at a moveable feast. And not only the content of the stories concerns itself with longing, but the language also. There are the great gasping sentences reaching for the skies—and, yes, there are myriad skies and stars and eyes and much quavering and quivering and trembling. There is lyrical imagery that spreads itself into a rose-fingered gauze of philosophy. There are passages that are so musical that it’s possible to mark their rhythm. And, on top of all that—despite the vividness of color and keenness of feeling— there are places where the language circles deliberately into vagueness and repetition, as if to say that there are truths here that are ineffable but we shall do our best to get you there.

It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy— they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

For many of us in American high school English classes, The Great Gatsby was an introduction to what a novel could be: something both scintillating and substantial, intricately assembled and yet so sound that it responds even now to our longing like a plangent bell. We learned how a broken clock, a name, a game of golf, a car, a color, an ugly stretch of road could take on larger meanings that infected everything around them. How beautiful it was! And, even as the dream died and its beauty faded at the final pages, the longing for it still remained.

Fitzgerald longed to be as free and careless as Tom and Daisy, and yet he longed to be free of the longing. This tension is so present in everything he wrote that, sometimes, we forget about the characters and wonder a little more Fitzgerald himself. We pick up The Beautiful and the Damned and it’s almost unreadable. All the familiar furniture is there: the lives of the rich and fabulous; the clever dialogue; the polemics about art and writing and the nature of people; the unlikeable hero we're supposed to forgive because he’s just a sad victim of irresponsible times; the unlikeable heroine whose sophisticated attitude substitutes for charm. The book isn’t unreadable because it unfolds like a gossip column; it’s unreadable because it makes a pretense at honesty and pathos but is only a dalliance in poshlost. The omniscient third-person narrator pretends to laugh at these characters, to despise their wantonness and swell at their punishment accordingly— but he wallows too thoroughly through their glittering muck for us to believe it. Is this not a case of the writer doth protest too much? The Anthony Patches’ fall from grace is so operatic that they are no longer just people any more but specters of very personal demons.

Fitzgerald is one of those writers who was always writing about himself and who did so in the pursuit of a stronger, worthier, more beautiful self. It is this that makes him so American, so emblematic of the American Dream. But what Fitzgerald did (and isn’t this dangerous for any writer to do?) is lay his neuroses out like an offering. Nowadays, bloggers do this daily and we either gawk or avert our faces. There is, after all, something riveting about a first-rate intelligence so fluidly curating its own mass of  insecurities. When it’s done well enough—when the characters live and the language shines—we submit ourselves and are moved and even enriched. But when nothing falls into place except the need to just get it out, the attempt turns into a mere exercise in self-indulgence.

I had developed a sad attitude towards sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy, and a tragic attitude toward tragedy— why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.

Fitzgerald tells us in The Crack-Up that it’s loss of faith in himself that did him in— but it’s the inability to stop obsessing over this loss of faith that ultimately undermines him as a writer. He longs for truth and beauty but he cannot accept it when he finds it— not in himself, nor in any of the dishes at that fabulous, jazz-fueled feast. Anything that might last, he must tear down again. He cannot imagine a diamond as big as the Ritz without deciding that it ought to crack into a deep abyss of rubble. He cannot imagine a beautiful girl without dooming her to bring some man to his ruin. He can no longer imagine: he can only just write.

And so out come all the lovely, lilting sentences, the paralyzing self-knowledge, the usual Fitzgeraldian themes... Tender is the Night, the most gorgeously written of Fitzgerald’s books, it is not so much a novel but a catalog of objects and moments and the many fleeting glories of a blonde woman’s hair. We are called to worship quietly at the feet of our author’s past, but, by now, the jig is up. There is so much verisimilitude that all the air seems to have gone out of the room and what’s left is a tapped illusion, an emperor caught without his clothes: the spectacle of a first-rate intelligence still counting out paces and picking up crumbs.

People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.

Almost 70 years after his death, America has reclaimed F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it is not so much his work that fascinates us but his life. Zelda is now a feminist icon. Esquire writes about Britney’s breakdown using The Crack-Up as an archetype. There are biographies, anthologies and screen adaptations for Hollywood. Every summer, Governor’s Island hosts a Jazz Age Lawn Party in full-on Gatsby regalia. We are becoming nothing so much as a nation built on our own nostalgia. And, if Fitzgerald is “borne back ceaselessly into the past” to worry over the same material, to fret over a self that might have been — well, what of it? We know all about dreams now and how they shrink under the weight of our own gaze. But, to mythologize ourselves… now, there’s a fine concept—

Like Jay Gatsby or Dick Diver or Monroe Stahr or Amory Blaine or Anthony Patch, at least we can all be tragic heroes in the comfort of our own minds.

Shahirah Majumdar is a contributor to This Recording. You can find her website here.

Again he had offended some one— couldn't he hold his tongue a little longer? How long? To death then.