DATELINE–The Western States

I dreamt that the world we live in was being reduced to a towering grid.

The ground was still thick with moist grass, the loam was fertile underneath, but the area all around us was divided up, suddenly, as if by force of earthquake, into tiny, square towers of land. It was as if the world had become a video game grid: we were all Q-Bert; cyborganic chess squares.

These ever-expanding circuits of land left people in a panic, jumping with both legs from one narrow patch of refuge to another. The air was filled with the sounds of a dozen languages all struggling to communicate simple but impolite intentions. A quiet river rushed through this apocalyptic world of earth toothpicks. Then the constant movement of individuals hopping across yawning gaps, standing anxiously atop narrow confines, speaking in their native tongue to no one in particular (save, perhaps, their own and only gods) began to take on an almost nationalistic order.

I could sense that groups of especially motivated jumpers were calling out to one another and occupying squares in conjunction, as would armies. They began forcing stragglers out of their way. They were becoming a brutal wave of movement.

Being forced off the ground, finally, by the spread of one particularly noisy Japanese technology company, I wondered what would happen to the local cultures that once settled and developed at their own pace across the great, undivided expanse of our natural geographies. Would they, too, be forced to leap into the ether only to barely miss the edge of their next destination, falling blindly into an unknown river of time? That was my fate and I recall that the waters underneath had no temperature of their own but were, nonetheless, crystal clear.

After struggling to shore in a land that resembled the Vietnam I’ve come to know in Hollywood pictures, I set upon a retroactive effort (I was dreaming, after all) to keep this land from being divided out of existence, geometric piece by piece. I gave a stirring speech in a brightly-lit auditorium to what seemed like a crowd of multi-colored Olympic athletes. I talked about this and that, but, in the end, when the meeting had been adjourned, I confessed to my dispersing audience that what was really necessary in order to prevent another apocalypse of vertically extruded and horizontally colonized grids of land was some semblance of cultural homogeneity.

I WAS DRIFTING OUT OF SLEEP AT THE TIME. I knew that homogeneity had to be some sort of a symbol or stand-in for a world where people not only understand one another’s habits and tendencies but also adopt some of the same for their adaptation to an ever-changing environment. What I have come to realize is that the future of this planet and its human inhabitants is tied up with the life of border towns all over the world and throughout history. In short, the Global Village is nothing but a border town, filled with all the strife, all the noise and all the special perks of border towns elsewhere; places like Tijuana, Berlin, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Miami, Morocco and Los Angeles.

WE NO LONGER NEED TO “MAKE A RUN FOR THE BORDER” as the border has already made a run for us, to us and at us.

WHEN I AWOKE THIS MORNING, THE POWER HAD BEEN RESTORED to California. The lines are back up. According to a spokesman for Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), power companies learned a valuable lesson from the total blackout which paralyzed New York City over two decades ago. Were such a catastrophe to occur today, as it did yesterday, power would no longer have to be restored to the entire grid all at once. Instead, certain subdivisions (there are 18 per local zone) would have power restored almost immediately whereas others in the same community would have to wait an indefinite period of time. Last night, half of my city block had power, the other half did not.

WE, TOO, HAVE A VALUABLE LESSON TO LEARN from yesterday’s blackout. However, our lesson will not be derived from the suddenly silent absence of power, but rather, from its equally subtle reappearance. For a brief interval of timeless time and formless space, the lines of power which constitute the invisible geometry of our daily experiences came into focus; briefly, they drew themselves out into the darkness of night, the bright contours of our increasingly grid-like society.

WHAT SECRET ORDER COULD BE DISCERNED from their meandering approach – why was this streetlight off but the next one on?

WE LIVE IN A THOROUGHLY ELECTRIFIED WORLD. We surround ourselves with the sounds of machines left to their own devices. Lights flicker and buzz, refrigerators purr and, sometimes, groan. Telex terminals dispatch information, ATM’s dispense both good fortune and poverty. Yesterday, we took down the power lines in California and for almost eight hours, the world we live in relaxed its shoulders and put down its heavy hands.