Textual Poaching

I find age to be universally interesting. Every age exists on a spectrum that comprises mortality. So every age advances our relationship with life and the inevitability of death. I consider aging the defining process of life, and something very artistically compelling. Films like Dazed and Confused or the music of the Smashing Pumpkins have been important to me. But before those influences, I had JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. I read it when I was young, and was drawn to the protagonist, Holden Caulfield. He voiced concern over matters such as the fate of fish when their ponds freeze over, or his love of the permanence of museum dioramas. It was hard to grasp intellectually as a scrappy youth, but Holden clearly had deep anxiety regarding the ravages of time. He was fundamentally confused about how to react to his approaching adulthood, and like so many others, I felt a bond with him.  

Our assigned essay, How Texts become Real, resonated with my feelings about this book, as well as other works. Catcher went from being a story I happened to especially like, to having its own life in my mind. I have come to feel not only that I can relate to Holden, but also that I sort of know him. Not in the way I know an actual human. Rather his personality, experiences, and feelings are a powerful part of my collective body of intellect and morality. So his experiences have attained a heightened, even mythic dimension for me. And all of this exists outside of the experience of reading Salinger’s book.

Clearly, I love this work. I even felt conflicted about changing it at all. But ultimately I thought I could alter it to express myself as a young millennial. I wanted to keep some of Holden/Salinger’s original intent, but make this something fit specifically to my perception of being a young person in 2016. I think my generation has this sense of uselessness in the face of a fearsome world. You can see it in our politics. Young Republicans and young Democrats overwhelmingly support Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, respectively, who both promise a radical socio-economic reordering. There is anger at the feeling we inherited the debilitating consumerism of the boomer generation, along with their looming ecological disaster.

But it goes further. There is a sense that harkens back to the uncertainty of the early 1900’s when the work of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, along with the horrors of WWI, forced people to reexamine their own sense of reality. The reality of our ecosystem, our nature, changing to something dangerous, and the reality of the Internet redefining social interaction are unsettling prospects. Simply spending so much time on the Internet impacts our perception, and I sought to reflect this in my composition by seeking a disjointed style. Salinger was concerned with adulthood and the loss of innocence. The loss of innocence remains universal, but its context has changed.

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. They're running and they don't look where they're going. The best thing, though, you could go there a hundred thousand times, nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy - Yes, I'm changing. One thousand years of this pass, evenings, mornings, afternoons - countless lives measured out in coffee spoons. If the children don't grow up, and continue to run without looking, their bodies will get bigger, and their hearts will be torn up. They'll be just a million little gods causing rain storms, turning every good thing to rust. Now I'll drown my beliefs, just to cut the kids in half. I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and cut the kids in half. Like a daydream or a fever, cut the kids in half. In the belly of this machine, I said that I would see you in the next life, but - 

Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and still we don't know, just where our bones will rest. Still, praise to the glory of loved ones now gone. 

On a live-wire, right up off the streets that lead you to an overwhelming question, What is it?,

Let us go and make our visit. And I saw in your face, that we're the same when we begin again. Along the stretch of some unnamed plane, we begin again. 

Material from: The Catcher in the Rye, Wuthering Heights, Radiohead, Deafheaven, Arcade Fire, Joy Division, Smashing Pumpkins, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.