I caption home-renovation shows and an educational program for third graders about careers in science. I caption Australian Family Feud and MasterChef Australia and a true crime show that tracks the grisly murder of a beautiful young woman in such detail that I have to periodically step out of the room to scream into my backpack. I caption soap operas and infomercials for revolutionary sprinkler systems and an awards show for innovations in contemporary design and a show called Gardening Australia about gardening in Australia and a show about a crocodile who loves guacamole called Crocamole.
I did not drastically alter the structure of the book when editing the manuscript after the larp. The story still seemed like a world-machine that I could not intervene in so much as decide how to portray. And the most crucial event that occurred in the book occurred in the larp, too.
The pages in Proust's long novel describing a first-ever telephone call are often admired for their rare sensitivity to the experience of a new technology. It has no equivalent in any contemporary fiction I know when it comes to an account of a first email read, or first social networking profile posted. Even so, it can't tell us much about what we may really wish to know about technology: never mind losing your virginity what is it like to live with someone?
A drama is being played out in these lines, and I suspect that Eliot is thinking of another text as he recasts the latter’s drama in his own terms. The text is the Bhagavad Gita, which I had read at the age of 17 or 18 in Juan Mascaró’s translation but forgotten by the time I met Gay Clifford. The Gita’s paradoxical thesis about “detached action” a kind of work that is undertaken for its own sake.
Does what used to lend meaning to our lives make sense any longer? Of course everything will return, but it will return just as weak as before, and fall just as easily as soon as some thug takes a swing at it.