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Maria Worton is a Montreal writer.
In a bar the other night there was the mindless ssssssss of the treble, playing on my nerves. Which I complained of to a friend, who’s stoic and said, “You can’t filter it out?” “Filter it out?” “No,” I thought, with surprising irritation, “No I cannot filter it out, nor do I want to.” Even though, being mostly adult, I thought perhaps I should filter it out, and stop whinging. After all what’s one more distortion? “But why should I have tofilter all the time? Why should I?” And as I sat there that night, passively filtering, poor company in the smoke and glare, I spun a list, and saw how filtration sums up the way I live life. I saw how little I may know of my true nature. The list, like an untroubled, unnatural web still grows and grows. I wonder where it will end . . . every time I pour water. Water, the source of life. The source I’ve lost sight of and, in a way, don’t ever expect to see it again. Unfiltered water comes only in bottles.
Some filters need do no harm: take ozone and clothing. But the spectrum is broad as the planet is wide, includes common, everyday household filters, as well as the institutional kind: Nationalism, citizenship, consumerism, competition, (the Dollar Store fix), merchandising, psychotropic drugs, narcotics, television, law courts, MPs, government decrees, glossy magazines, mirrors and makeup, cars and catalytic converters, West Wing, newspapers, coffee filters, cigarette filters, psychiatry, sun, air, earth filters, product labeling and tiny print, religious, ideological filters, art, text, glamour, probability, style, norms of behavior etc. etc.etc.etc. Conditioning to norms can lead to the following: narcissism, objectification, neglect, abandonment, desensitization. Filtration is a state of mind as much as anything else. I often wonder if it’s what we want, or what we get. .
So ubiquitous are filters that I imagine archeologists far into the future, casting their eyes back over the remnants of our civilization, whilst embarking upon a comparative exercise in Customs and Cultural Artifacts of the C21st. I’m presuming here that these archeologists will hark from distant fields of the universe. I’m presuming that they’ll have sufficient objectivity to see most filters as the aberration from nature they are, which might conceivably prompt the question, ‘From where did the human animal truly come? For surely no indigenous species could believe itself so ill adapted to its own environment. Did human only kind of belong here on earth?’ The filters we use now, I believe, will testify truthfully in the distant future. They might even be newsworthy by then. .
The thing now about The News is, it’s doing a great job of filtering, say what you like. Even when you actually understand the news to be a kind of filter. For many people, including myself, have knowingly enjoyed being filtered to. It’s relaxing, or at least it feels that way from time to time. It’s just a feeling you can’t quite trust for any duration. For once the magician’s trick is sussed you start looking for what you can’t see. Even if you’re not deliberately looking you start seeing it anyway. .
But sometimes I can’t help but wonder what an unfiltered broadcast would look like. I wonder how many unfiltered remarks I may have ever heard over the air. There was that remark by Woodrow Wilson in 1919, then 28th President of the United States . . . .
Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not
know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?
This seems too big to have passed through any filter? What were Woodrow’s
true motives? How did it happen? Well, the war had ended. And unfiltered facts
do emerge from time to time. You might call them truthful, and the truth will
out they say. It will, won’t it. Because there’s so much of it,
isn’t there.
This seems too big to have passed through any filter? What were Woodrow’s true motives? How did it happen? Well, the war had ended. And unfiltered facts do emerge from time to time. You might call them truthful, and the truth will out they say. It will, won’t it. Because there’s so much of it, isn’t there.
There are filters, sepia colored filters that give the impression the state serves as community. All the community you need. This is where TV comes in. Take West Wing for instance. A kind of comfort zone, like home should be. Featuring a cast of characters and personalities we’d choose as friends. Are they not somehow reassuring? Do they not present us with the possibility of real, sane, caring and accountable people in high places, what with their quirky ways, ethical quandaries and earnest philosophical questioning. Some people might be forgiven for thinking Uncle Sam is a real uncle. I don’t know how many people actually tried to vote for Martin Sheen in the last US election. All I know is, he didn’t get in.
It’s funny . . . sometimes we mourn the demise of community, yet other times we could quite cheerfully bury it. And we do. People say losing local government will save money, which in a way is rather like saying if we don’t wash we’ll save on soap. It is true, but . . . It seems the kind of community we have more time for is the wavy kind, that filters out warts and odors, by wiring us into webs of people-not-in-person. You might feel the effort it takes, like never before, when talking to people-in-person you don’t really know so well, who don’t actually do exactly what you do, who might get the wrong impression and call you up any time. Community in the abstract is rather more user friendly. But when your neighbor, who’s friendly enough, knocks on your door wearing nothing but a green painted face and requesting a bucket, what do you do? You’re really very unprepared. So you call the authorities. For a different kind of takeaway . . . Then what?
A recent study shows that 1 in 5 people are flipping, burnt out or seriously depressed. A finding which raises a few questions for me as to the causes. Since filters are probably implicated at every level of our lives we should at least consider whether we are filtering the right stuff? Are we using too many? Have we overdosed? Not enough?
Some people say that, despite clever filtration, we might be choking on our own exhaust: ideals of freedom and democracy forced through filters of consumerism, and commodification. The iconic image of endless highway stretching through our nature, our wilderness, all the way to infinity, with lots of new features to boot . . . life is a highway . . . I’m gonna ride it all night long . . . yeah!
In reality, even time itself is heavily filtered. Certainly there’s less of it. You’d think something were intrinsically wrong with time, the way it’s in such short supply. We strive and plan to find time to ourselves, we chase snatches, not stretches. You’d think forces were intentionally withholding time to artificially boost its market value? ‘Start Life at 50!,’ is a pension plan promise. Heh, I’ve only got 10 years to go, doing whatever I’m doing now. Which is what? The limbo?
Even beauty is cosmically and cosmetically tied to time, so there might be less of that too. Redwoods and rainforests. Naming trees takes time that I never took. To behold beauty takes time, does it not? But with this persistent sense of time running out, how much do we care, how much can we care? ‘Truth is beauty and beauty is truth.’ Truth might also lie in the duration of things. Didn’t some top US scientists recently say the planet, our planet mind you, was in big trouble? Something about vast tracts of nice real estate soon to disappear under seas and sand? Something about the right stuff not getting filtered in? or out?
We are sending our species ever deeper into space, requiring filters of ever increasing complexity. We send them so far we must simulate gravity. We send them away to extremes of pressure and sound that are subatomic. But subatomic is subhuman, is it not? We are, after all, bigger than that. Yet it seems that governments always require us to shrink, to go beyond or below that which we naturally are in substance and location. Whereby to move without gauging some death defying filtration wizardry, might be to perish. This capacity gives some of us hope. We’ve inherited this sense of ourselves spinning round the galaxy, understand that we are invisible from a great distance. I admit that at times this impression has put all my problems into a manageable perspective.
These days though, I can’t help but feel that mechanistic, impersonal, transcendent idealistic impressions of ourselves might be the walls of a prison, dictated through the language of cultural imperative. What?! Yes! I feel that. And I can’t help but wonder what we’re like when we’re just left alone.
So much so that my real adventure is now about returning to the real. I’m an ancient astronaut, can no longer feel liberated by the possibility of extremities of weightlessness, speed, depth and height. I hunger for a life untrammeled by filters. I wonder what it looks like. I’m intrigued by the possibilities. This feels like the big adventure to me. But it might just be me, right? My problem. I might be living on the wrong drug. What’s wrong with safari park holidays anyway? What’s wrong with the world as theme park? All themes are drugs really. The filtration theme even. Most drugs are recreational. As for those US scientists and their doom and gloom, was that just a theme they were on? Were they on drugs when they said that?
When I was traveling in countries where people live minus some of the filters I’d grown accustomed to, my phobias of birds and rodents nearly disappeared. Shortly after returning to the world of more plastic, greater emission, hi-tech poison and repair, I noticed my fear of pigeons and mice return to haunt me as though they were unreal and ghastly, found me cringing yet again in a corner of my mind.
Big is the human voice unfiltered, the force of live acappella, moving me to weep inexplicably. The force, the simple truth, of lives unfiltered. Documentaries about nature comfort and move me. When I feel more time, I try to understand what it all means, I read and dwell on the possibilities of this world, and share my space. With less time I write in agitated bursts, I call poetry. Often I only find enough time to read an article, look up new words to find new meaning, if not sense. With less time, my memory is not good, does not serve me well, though sometimes I’m happy. Sometimes happy is a drug.
When those alien archeologists dig a little deeper they might find the less tangible harder-to-get-at-filters such as norms and anti-terrorist bills. I imagine those aliens, if they have the resources and inclination to dig deep enough, will find a little piece of somewhere called Afghanistan, a big bomb shell, and something large, needle-like, covered in something sticky and crude.
So many of us condemn the veil worn by women, the way it filters her and everything she regards. The thing is, filtration processes are so uncanny it’s hard to see our own veils. You think you’ve found one and someone says, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” So true a statement, and so convenient, it too could be a filter.
The answer is, “Not enough.” The question could be, “Why are some people so fat they die?” Or “Why are many people so thin they die?” Yes. Not enough. Something crucial got filtered out. Of the living recipe. It’s hard to imagine surviving without filters and yet impossible apparently for many to live because of them.
In a dream I saw a giant egg timer, slowly flip, sending all the sands of the world raining and reigning down upon our heads, turning the skies above Afghanistan blue again. I awoke, gasping, saw blue sky past my window, wiped the sand from my eyes. And I wondered . . . with so little community, what will we do about that? Who will we tell? How will we make them hear us?