White Noise - Don Delillo [21]
“There’s Eugene, who’s living with his daddy this year in Western Australia. Eugene is eight. His daddy does research in the outback. His daddy is also Wilder’s daddy.”
“The boy is growing up without television,” I said, “which may make him worth talking to, Murray, as a sort of wild child, a savage plucked from the bush, intelligent and literate but deprived of the deeper codes and messages that mark his species as unique.”
“TV is a problem only if you’ve forgotten how to look and listen,” Murray said. “My students and I discuss this all the time. They’re beginning to feel they ought to turn against the medium, exactly as an earlier generation turned against their parents and their country. I tell them they have to learn to look as children again. Root out content. Find the codes and messages, to use your phrase, Jack.”
“What do they say to that?”
“Television is just another name for junk mail. But I tell them I can’t accept that. I tell them I’ve been sitting in this room for more than two months, watching TV into the early hours, listening carefully, taking notes. A great and humbling experience, let me tell you. Close to mystical.”
“What’s your conclusion?”
He crossed his legs primly and sat with the cup in his lap, smiling straight ahead.
“Waves and radiation,” he said. “I’ve come to understand that the medium is a primal force in the American home. Sealed-off, timeless, self-contained, self-referring. It’s like a myth being born right there in our living room, like something we know in a dreamlike and preconscious way. I’m very enthused, Jack.”
He looked at me, still smiling in a half sneaky way.
“You have to learn how to look. You have to open yourself to the data. TV offers incredible amounts of psychic data. It opens ancient memories of world birth, it welcomes us into the grid, the network of little buzzing dots that make up the picture pattern. There is light, there is sound. I ask my students, ‘What more do you want?’ Look at the wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras. ‘Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.’ The medium practically overflows with sacred formulas if we can remember how to respond innocently and get past our irritation, weariness and disgust.”
“But your students don’t agree.”
“Worse than junk mail. Television is the death throes of human consciousness, according to them. They’re ashamed of their television past. They want to talk about movies.”
He got up and refilled our cups.
“How do you know so much?” Babette said.
“I’m from New York.”
“The more you talk, the sneakier you look, as if you’re trying to put something over on us.”
“The best talk is seductive.”
“Have you ever been married?” she said.
“Once, briefly. I was covering the Jets, the Mets and the Nets. How odd a figure I must seem to you now, a solitary crank who maroons himself with a TV set and dozens of stacks of dust-jacketed comic books. Don’t think I wouldn’t appreciate a dramatic visit between two and three in the morning,” he told her, “from an intelligent woman in spike heels and a slit skirt, with high-impact accessories.”
It was drizzling as we walked home, my arm around her waist. The streets were empty. Along Elm all the stores were dark, the two banks were dimly lit, the neon spectacles in the window of the optical shop cast a gimmicky light on the sidewalk.
Dacron, Orlon, Lycra Spandex.
“I know I forget things,” she said, “but I didn’t know it was so obvious.”
“It isn’t.”
“Did you hear Denise? When was it, last week?”
“Denise is smart and tough. No one else notices.”
“I dial a number on the phone and forget who I’m calling. I go to the store and forget what to buy. Someone will tell me something, I’ll forget it, they’ll tell me again, I’ll forget it, they’ll tell me again, showing a funny-looking smile.”
“We all forget,” I said.
“I forget names, faces, phone numbers,