Dan Fishback: The intersection of life

When the United States attacked Iraq in 1991, Sting was hosting Saturday Night Live. He said, and I paraphrase liberally, "Listen, we're all really stressed out right now. This is a horrible time. So instead of doing a monologue, I'm just going to play a song and try to lift our spirits if only for a moment." He did. The song was positive and mild, uplifting in the way windless air still cushions a feather.

Last weekend, I performed in A Midsummer Night's Dream on College Green. I won't use feather metaphors, but it's a play about fairies, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.

This morning, I put on an ABBA record and danced while brushing my teeth.

Yesterday, there weren't many clouds, and I enjoyed that.

I'm generally a happy person.

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When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, my Grandpa Sam was 20 years old. An optimistic socialist postal worker in New York, he kept a private journal of world affairs, and a separate notebook for light-hearted poetry. On Sept. 3, in his current events journal, he closed his entry, "I won't be writing humorous verse for a long time now."

Last weekend, wishing to stay with his family and cope with last week's attacks, comedian Dave Chappelle postponed his performance at Penn.

For the past four days, the sky has been virtually cloudless, and I only noticed it on one of those days.

I don't remember a time when I've listened to music this infrequently.

Lately, I am a generally tense and distant person.

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We all seem to have two lives now: our lives-already-in-progress, and our crisis lives. In our crisis lives, we try to mentally process the deaths of thousands, and the possibility of a third World War. In our other lives, we do our homework, we play frisbee, we flip from CNN to Comedy Central.

And yet neither life is stable. Each is threatened by the other. In our crisis lives, a voice constantly reminds us of the things we need to get done. In our other lives, another voice constantly reminds us of the monumental historical events flowing through the air.

The intersection between our two lives, the intangible breech between the everyday and the historical, is ridden with confusion, manifesting itself here as guilt, there as stress, here as laughter, there as crying. Our minds must house thousands of ghosts as well as our latest crushes -- our two lives, entangled and bleeding into one another.

It's not ghosts here, puppy-love there -- no one is that compartmentalized. It's death and lust and history and homework all at once: CNN, Comedy Central, MSNBC, MTV, C-SPAN, The Food Network, all playing on one screen, pixels over pixels, a blur of horrifically unrelated thoughts.

And it's driving me crazy -- the constant negotiation between the fenceless private and the boundless world. It's an ongoing life-process kicked into overdrive, as the world, once heartbreakingly distant and out of reach, is now prodding at me for recognition. It -- the World, Life, History, War -- is begging things from us all, and it's maddening because it's invisible.

This attack is unprecedented historically, but not personally. We see buildings blow up on TV all the time. And the death-entertainment industry has gotten so good at replicating tragedy that there is no distinguishable difference between CNN and HBO. We're getting our information from the same place we get car chases and steamy sex scenes -- all we have to do is change the channel.

A front-page caption in The Daily Pennsylvanian last Wednesday: "It looked like it was made from a movie."

And so, while our "real" lives -- our routines, our homework, our friends -- must compete with our crisis lives, our crisis lives must compete with fiction. The gravity of the world must force its way through our desensitized television goggles and make itself known: this is Real, this is Life.

And Life is a single thing, not here a crisis, there a fashion magazine. It's a point of view that must register the real explosions as readily as real music.

We can afford joy in times of horror. We require it. But we mustn't chop ourselves in two, we mustn't ignore reality with a twin consciousness.

If we set aside a "normal" life, then we might retreat whole-heartedly into tunnel-vision and escapism. If we set aside a "crisis life," then we might never visit. We must be strong enough to see it all with the same eyes, to feel it all with the same heart. Only as unified individuals can we truly unify as a people. Otherwise, we're just a herd of emotional Quasimodos, half in the world, half out, torn and crazed, feverishly negotiating with history.

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