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By Root 948 0

to recapture their “glory days.” But we can also exist in the future: we can, as Heidegger says, “project” ourselves. The play on the word “project” here is important, as well: to “project” is to cast-ahead (as a projector does with an image, or I might do with my voice when addressing a crowd); but we project ourselves by setting projects for ourselves, tasks we mean to work on, goals we strive toward. In becoming lost in the moment, we do not project ourselves into the future; both future and past fade away, and we exist only in the “now.” Now never becomes the future or the past; instead, having emptied myself into the present, time stands still: I am held “In Limbo.” Held in limbo in the present, I fall into the world—“I spiral down.” Is the narrator of “In Limbo” not right to warn me, “You’re living in a fantasy world”?

Nice Dream

Let’s own up to something: we live in our fantasies because they are more pleasant than the hostile world of reality. What catches my attention in “Karma Police” is the line that immediately follows the first round of “For a minute there / I lost myself, I lost myself.” It appears in the liner notes (significantly) as: “(Phew) for a minute there / I lost myself, I lost myself.” It signals a sense of relief, as if the burden, the responsibility of “choosing” oneself, has been suspended. Heidegger describes a related tranquility: “Through the self-certainty and decidedness of the ‘they’,” we are encouraged to believe “that there is no need of authentic understanding or the state-of-mind that goes with it. The supposition of the ‘they’ that one is leading and sustaining a full and genuine [read “Fitter Happier”] ‘life’ brings [us] a tranquility, for which everything is ‘in the best of order’” (“Everything in its right place,” as it were). Falling into the world, which Heidegger calls a “temptation,” “is at the same time tranquilizing” (p. 222).

But if inauthentic falling into the world is “tranquilizing,” we should by no means assume that it is idle. Heidegger continues:

However, this tranquility in inauthentic Being does not seduce one into stagnation and inactivity, but drives one into uninhibited ‘hustle’. Being-fallen into the ‘world’ does not now somehow come to rest. The tempting tranquilization aggravates the falling. . . . When [the inauthentic subject], tranquilized . . . thus compares itself with everything, it drifts along towards an alienation in which its ownmost potentiality-for-Being is hidden from it. Falling Being-in-the-world is not only tempting and tranquilizing; it is at the same time alienating.

Getting “lost in the moment” is not simply to drift quietly in the stillness of yogic repose. The times in which we are the most “lost in the moment” tend to be the very busiest of times: commuting during rush hour; rushing to meet a deadline at work; running errands over our lunch break. At our busiest, we “fall into the world,” giving ourselves over to this “uninhibited ‘hustle’.” “Ripcord” really puts it best:

Aeroplane do I mean what I mean?

Oh it’s inevitable, inevitable, oh aeroplane.

A thousand miles an hour

On politics and power

That she don’t understand

No ripcord, no ripcord,

No ripcord, no ripcord.

The “relief ” that comes with “losing ourselves” is at the same time the emptying out of ourselves, the giving-over of ourselves to the demands of an impersonal society. And in shirking our responsibility to “choose” and “win” ourselves, we become alienated from that very world in which we are lost. Heidegger calls this movement the “downward plunge” (p. 223) and makes the central metaphor of “Ripcord”—falling out of an airplane without a parachute—no mere coincidence. It recurs frequently in Radiohead’s work; “The Tourist” gives expression to the same idea when the narrator says, “They ask me where the hell I’m going/At a thousand feet per second/hey man, slow down, slow down.” That feeling of falling, of flying by, is the feeling of alienation; stuck in the limbo of the present, the world is nonetheless moving too quickly, and we cannot keep up.

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