The
Brady Archive
True
Destinations
By
Robert Brady, (KJ
49)
Some folks still think
of life in the old-fashioned way, as a river flowing to a majestic sea,
or as a long open highway leading to a wondrous destination, and either
metaphor can still capture in a sort of word-amber what is becoming
an increasingly packaged process. I can’t help it; even though
I don’t commute anymore, I still tend to get systematic. I realize
now that back in my commuter days, after commuting for only a short
while I subconsciously began to view life, modern life, modern urban
life, ok, my modern urban life, as more like a loop line. There was
something manically repetitive about it, something worryingly cookiecutteresque,
and every day I felt more and more like a cookie and it wasn’t
my recipe. There was an unfamiliar aroma to my future, an artificial
flavor I couldn’t help sensing when I crowded onto the line and
began my daily loop, soon falling asleep from the carbon dioxide level
and waking up to look out the window only for the name of the station
to see if this was where I was supposed to go, it was only a name I
was supposed to go to, could have been any name on the line, depended
on where the corporation was. For a while it was one name, then I changed
offices and it was a different name, there was something accumulatively
deweydecimal about it, a catalog of places into which I was filing my
numbered days, all linked by a macrocosmic infrastructure that took
me where I had to be and then took me home again, whichever way I went.
It can take a lifetime to leave the loop line, if you ever get to want
to. Lives lived in a standard place (however eclectic) at a standard
pace (however frenetic) acquire a virtual quality, the buildup of habit
and pattern and repetition forming layer upon layer of time after time
slipping by, chronically laminating over the actual life until it resembles
a sculpture standing on a platform waiting for a streetcar. Time isn’t
as big as we think. Fortunately I didn’t set out on this career
thing until rather late in life, so I only commuted for a comparatively
brief while until I departed for the countryside and the joys of actual
solitude, part of which joy is talking aloud to yourself, finding out
what kind of a conversationalist you really are, confronting the vast
secrets to which you carry the keys. It can only happen off the loop
line, where you wake into a morning like when you were born, and go
out into the fresh new world with true destinations in your eyes.
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