Vernal Verbiage: Hesse and the Canadian River by Cassandra
Re-reading the book recently, I was reminded of the Canadian River. The Canadian River is a geographical feature of the Texas Panhandle (where I grew up) which is not Canadian at all and which is hardly a river. Flowing (actually, "trickling" is more like it) across the High Plains in a shallow valley, the Canadian River is spoken of by locals as "a mile wide and an inch deep." Obviously, an expression with wide application to any number of cultural phenomena, from television to the contemporary art scene to the highly paid received wisdom of so-called professional athletes. All easy-- and deserving-- targets. Very recently, in geological terms, people have added another feature to the Texas Panhandle, which may mean we need to update that old expression. Just a few miles south of the venerable if shallow river in question lies the notorious Pantex plant, the government's semi-secret facility for final assembly of all American nuclear weapons. For some time now, environmentalists have been on Pantex's case for various alleged safety violations, including possible contamination of Panhandle groundwater and aquifers. Which leads Cassandra to wonder: Perhaps the modern Canadian River is not only a mile wide and an inch deep, but also dirty as sin. Who knows what long- and short-lived products and by-products of nuclear technology are meandering, excuse me, trickling across the Great Plains of North America? You look at the Canadian River today and it seems pretty much the same, a vast expanse of red dirt, cactus, with a bit of wetness way out in the middle. But given a thunderstorm or two, it can become a pretty good torrent, carrying whatever esoteric radiological isotopes some good distance across the continent. Hidden local harm becomes bigtime planetary poison. Analogy time. (No way you're getting off with another easy environmental dirge.) Back to Hesse. What, a hundred years ago, he perceived as a flood of meaningless verbiage, has now become such a deluge that it is truly biblical. Noah had to float around for only 40 days and nights.And Noah's flood went away after a while. The waters receded. For us, the media flood appears to be permanent. If not permanent, certainly persistent. Another difference from Noah's flood is that we can easily, very easily escape our flood. Turn off the TV. Stay off the Internet. Do we? No. We splash, we gambol, we dive in (mental picture: diving head-first into the inch-deep Canadian River), and we give such a convincing impression that we are not only having fun but we're getting RICH at the same time that people around the planet come rushing down to the river, eager to dive in themselves. Hesse saw and identified the river as so much verbal and graphic garbage. Mental noise. Psychic static. What he didn't see (and we don't either) is the radioactive mud beneath the water. It sucks you down, and the longer you stay, the harder it is to get out. The wide, shallow, dirtied river becomes the world for us. It permeates our life, contaminates our life, defines our life. It becomes, for us, life itself. How does Cassandra know 1) that this is so, and 2) it ain't a good thing? There are many tests. The easiest is this. People get the leadership they deserve. Look at our leaders, not just the Americans, but around the world. Everywhere you look: incompetent, exploitative, greedy, expedient leaders. What better proof do you need of shallow, pervasive corruption? All well and bad, you say, but where is the true hidden poison implied by your analogy? We come then to the elephant in the room. Not only does no one talk about the elephant. We also have convinced ourselves that it's not there. In this sunny age of expanding affluence, growing wisdom, and acclerating progress, what could crazy Cassandra be going on about? The fact that you have to ask indicates how well we have convinced ourselves. Let me give you a hint: This poison that leeches out what little meaning our own flood of words and images may have, this invisible poison hides in 40,000 specially built death chambers around the world. We call them "silos," don't we, as if they instead held life-nourishing grains. Ah, Hermann Hesse, wherever you are now. your crystal ball was good, but not good enough. END
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Almost a century ago, Hermann Hesse started his strange
futurist novel, The Glass-bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi) with a
long lamentation about the flood of words and images inundating the world in the early
1900s. So many statements, he moaned, and so little substance.