Future Lies

One particularly cold winter evening in college, I came home to find my roommate sitting on the floor, ear pressed against the stereo speaker, finger poised on the rewind button, and a handle of half-drunk Smirnoff next to him. I was as interested in the Smirnoff as I was in determining what he was doing on the floor pressed against that speaker. He paused the CD -a found copy of The Best of Elton John- grabbed the bottle by the neck,and summoned me to sit with him.

“So I’ve got most of it.” He says.

“Most of what?” I say.

“It’s ‘where the dogs of society howl, you can’t plant me in your penthouse, I’m going back to my plough,’ but the rest. No idea.”

I agreed.

I had heard “Goodbye Yellowbrick Road” a thousand times in my life and probably thought about the lyrics to the second verse at some point, but in the moment it became urgent. Next to the vodka, the most important thing in the room.

We discussed the possibilities. We drank. Rewound. Relistened. Discussed, drank, rewound, and relistened. Some variations made sense. We agreed on “Back to” but from there, anything was fair game. Our conversation would drift, of course. Our guilt over missing another lecture for our War and Society course. How the reading list -The Reason Why, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, The Debacle, Sites of Memory Sites of Mourning, and Kaput- seemed to eponymously embody our loss of motivation that semester. We vowed to attend that week’s lecture and start the midterm essays. As soon as we figured out what the hell Elton John was saying. Other topics probably arose, lost to time. Perhaps it was the cheap vodka, but after a couple of hours, we agreed the nonsensical – “Back to the hadda-a-hadda da doo, sumthin’ the hadda back t-yow-ed”- was as good as anything. We were ok with it for one night. We’d find the CD jacket and hope Bernie Taupin’s lyrics were printed there. We’d get it another day. Or maybe not. It didn’t matter. It was a damn beautiful song whose meaning held infinite interpretations with or without the second half of the second verse.

That was twenty-five years ago, but it feels like a different universe, at the least, an alternate reality. Does anyone else miss it? Not knowing? The trivial, inconsequential particularities -a song lyric, a movie line, an actor’s name, the exact date something happened. The not knowing that could spawn endless digressions and discussion that would happily or raucously fill an evening. All of the things so easily resolved now with a four-second Google search. What do people talk about handcuffed to smartphones- the great liquidator of quiddities?

This is hardly Keats’ “negative capability”, and maybe I am old-fashioned but the internet bores me with its knowledge- so instant and unearned. So algorithmically trite and true. I miss human error and ten-dollar bets that could take weeks or months to settle until you finally found that CD insert, or had the chance to re-rent Dog Day Afternoon or Pulp Fiction and watch and wait for the line in question. Even then a debate could persist (see some of the more ridiculous confabulations of the “Mandela Effect” from a few years back).

The absolutism of Google, illusory or not, has done its damage, and I realize I am stating the obvious when I say that the internet and its varying media have created an impulsive culture and deprived us in some ways of what makes us human. A culture of know-it-alls who may know nothing, and worse don’t know they know nothing. An impatient culture that fetishizes instantaneity, and obliviously tries to mimic response times of algorithms that may eventually erase whatever capacity we have left for negative capability.

I see it firsthand with many of the students I teach, who value speed and certitude, and affirmation (through letter grades and standardized test scores) over inquiry, gradual realization, and the beautiful discomfort that comes with the mystery of actually existing.

We have probably reached the point of no return. But is this where we’ve decided our future lies? It makes me think, I should have stayed on the metaphorical farm. That I could go back to my plow, and “back to the howling, old owl in the woods, hunting the horny-back toad.” Whatever that means.

 

Ken Malatesta is a teacher and writer from Chicago. He lives in Skokie, Illinois with his wife and three sons. His work has appeared in Book XI, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Hopper, The Compressed Journal for Creative Arts, Fatherly, Goat’s Milk Magazine, and Motherwell Magazine. His essay “Puzzling Toward Oblivion” was named a Notable Essay of the Year by Best American Essays 2023.