problems of scale

It was raining. They were shooting interiors in the first diner I’d tried to go into, and in the few minutes it took me to walk the four blocks to the second diner the downpour had intensified so much that water had started to crawl up the bottoms of my pants. Before I even shed my coat I could already smell the lanolin in its fibers activated, that mustiness that calls to mind wet dogs and houses inhabited for decades by the same things and people. I hung up my tote bag on a hook next to the booth and pulled my belongings out from inside it; everything was at least partially soaked through: my checkbook, which thirty-six hours earlier I thought I had lost; a copy of Janet Malcolm’s The Situation and the Story, bravely withstanding its second late-winter battering-by-precipitation; an old Playbill; a small pouch holding eye drops, lip balm, and other miscellany; a nylon bag; my wallet. W quipped when he got there that it looked like I had moved in. I didn’t laugh. I could feel a bad mood rising and then calcifying the moment I attempted to dry off my tote with a napkin only to watch its dye streak the paper bright yellow. I wadded up the napkin and pushed it to the side of the table, where it stayed for the duration of the meal. We were there because we’d planned to see a movie together later in the evening, but could feel my mood closing the channel through which art comes in and goes out. I went home instead.

I made it onto the B just as the doors were closing and found an empty love-seat and put my earbuds in.

Mahashmashana
All is silent
And in the next universal dawn
Won’t have to
Do the corpse dance

I’ve been listening almost exclusively to this, the opening track on the new Father John Misty record, since I saw him play Kings Theatre a few weeks ago. It’s a good song: long and sweeping, ambitious, and it earns its rather Zen ending. I’ve been saying for a while that I want to listen to more middle-aged music that is also contemporary; this record is satisfying that desire for now. Anyway—I got very swept up in the music and somewhere in Atlantic Station I dropped my Airpods case. I know this because when I got home, I had a convenient little notification in my phone that said the case was “last seen near 2 Hanson Pl,” which amusingly made it sound like the white pocket of hard plastic was on the lam from the law. I opened the Find My app (sorry to break the fourth wall right now but wow do the names of these technologies make it difficult to write elegantly, or maybe my talent simply doesn’t suffice) and had fun watching the case ride all the way down to the end of the line: Brighton Beach. I filed an MTA Lost & Found report, mostly because I was curious to learn what that particular piece of New York City bureaucracy is like (turns out: at least partially outsourced to a tech company based in Carson City, Nevada called Chargerback). I was feeling pretty Zen about it all despite the $100 price tag on my little accident because, well, whatever, why cry over spilled milk and all that, until I noticed on the app that the case was now elsewhere in Brooklyn.

I watched it move around for a few days before settling somewhere in Gowanus, where someone was surely waiting for me to remove the thing from my iCloud account so they could sell it. I’d had fun watching the vaguely anthropomorphized piece of technology move around on a map, but now every time I opened the app I felt sad and disappointed, like fate had conspired to knock down the flimsy carapace of faith—In what? Goodness and decency? Humanity itself?—I’d managed to build and maintain. Any doubt or pessimism I had, which I had been clearly suppressing, I deposited into this random act of opportunism. An abandoned tech accessory is not a rare sight in this city, and what would make anyone think that the owner of such an item wouldn’t have already presumed it lost forever? What was so wrong with someone cashing in on their luck, in other words, even if it was a product of my (very small) misfortune?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the question of scale: the size of our problems relative to our ability to understand them, let alone solve them. Climate change is of course the obvious one; it’s so big that we’ve taken to understanding it piecemeal: displacement, carbon capture, ocean currents, solar radiation management, the list goes on. It’s the only way we can wrap what we might think of as our collective head around it, and it’s also woefully insufficient when held up to the speed with which this particular problem is hurtling toward its only logical conclusion. This question of scale is why we don’t seem to have what we might consider geniuses anymore; what is a genius if not someone whose intellect is commensurate with a given issue? How could any one person be a genius when our issues are not commensurate with humanity? My using the Airpods incident as a repository for my pessimism (I don’t think I need to name the reasons, but just in case: genocide, war, what looks like the beginnings of the dismantling of American democracy, the rise of the far-right across the globe, you probably know how the rest of the song goes; I’m allowing myself some imprecision here, sorry to do the fourth wall thing again) Where was I? Oh yes: my using the Airpods incident as a repository for my pessimism was a way to deal with the question of scale. I myself am only capable of thoughts largely incommensurate with all the problems I just named in that last parenthetical, so there they go, tiny into the Airpods case, and from there they emerge with a question, with the question, the one at the center of how our entire world is organized: what is, indeed, so wrong with cashing in on one’s luck, even if it’s a product of—or the reason for—someone else’s misfortune? Not to put too fine a point on it, but someone probably paid for their child’s education this year with money made from selling a bomb that killed someone else’s child in Gaza.

These two people are locked in a relationship with one another by virtue of systems far outside of their control in which they are either compelled or forced, or somewhere in between, to participate. We might be tempted to allow the asymmetry between these them and the forces acting upon them to render them equal in our minds: both of them powerless and therefore blameless; or, conversely, we might be tempted to imbue the first person with the immorality of those same forces, make them evil in our minds, beyond redemption. Both of these approaches could make for a tidy way of labeling this situation but would hardly provide a sound basis for undoing any of the problems it contains: the relationship, the system, the compelling and the forcing. The truth, I think, is somewhere in between, and finding it depends on figuring out exactly what is so wrong. We might have to start small.