Dreaming the World

A lovely day after an evening shower.The Mediterranean blue of the morning sky is broken by thin, whispy clouds. Most days are noticeably cooler. In the evenings our yard and trees are filled with sparrows who chatter among themselves. The rabbits appear to have moved on and no longer appear for an late snack. We are still running a precipitation deficit for the month, but it is not severe, and we are promised rain this week.

We have been walking through the conservation park that runs along the river a few blocks from our home. There we have been greeted by small flocks of birds, obviously moving south. There have been pairs of eagles and small pods of osprey. It’s likely the osprey are juvenile males getting ready to migrate: they are the late departing members of their species and the end of August is about as late as they are likely to stay. Happily the fishing here appears to be good for both eagles and osprey.

Saturday evening we noticed terns, gulls, and cormorants fishing together just off shore. Schools of small fish had gathered in shoals that sparkled and formed murmurations. At one point larger fish, perhaps blue fish, joined the feed and the fry leapt from the water as they sought to escape.

Things clamed down and we walked to the benches overlooking the marshes, where we began eating our very messy dinner sandwiches. There I was, trying to hold my slowly disintegrating sandwich together, a task requiring both hands, when the birds returned for an intense feeding frenzy immediately in front of me. I was torn between grabbing my camera and not losing my dinner, so I just watched and wished.

I’ve been reading The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything by Kathryn Jezer-Morton. Her thesis is that our use of social media has taught us to perform our lives in a Foucauldian drama of self observation and control in an attempt to avoid being punished for straying astray from increasingly rigid social norms. In the process our stories become homogenised and emptied of real life.

I’ve been thinking lately about the complexity I experience when writing blogs, sharing music, or just writing notes to friends. I wonder which of my many selves is presenting material, and whether that self is socially acceptable. I often find a range of internal voices trying to police my sharing, worried that whatever I present my be disliked, or worse, may offend.

Anyone who has done theatre knows that, in a Shakspearian sense, we do perform our lives. The act of surveilling and adjusting one’s actions is a normal aspect of being social. Even Nori the cat frets about whether whatever she is up to is acceptable. Jezer-Morton argues that we have lost the notion of performance as metaphor, replacing it with a more authoritarian, heavily policed, sense of enforced performance in which the self is hidden or lost.

Still, when we are constantly aware of our actions it can be very difficult to be creative. Looking back over my many years of working in the arts I see clearly that my work was most interesting, and rewarding, when I wasn’t concerned with an audience, real or imagined. In this age of continual social control and self-surveillance we should not be surprised that much “art” seems banal.

And so, even as we fret about the state of things, the year turns and we find ourselves on the cusp of meteorological autumn. Tomorrow we enter September, and Autumn.