Sexistentialism

This Saturday, I had occasion to sojourn (with a group of visiting Americans) to what, according to my source, was a "cocktail bar" called the Walkabout. We found it in one of the less couth corners of Leicester Square--for those unfamiliar with London's topography, Leicester (Leh-ster) Square is just northeast of Piccadilly Circus, which is about as garish and loud as London gets; think 42nd and Broadway meets Japanese gameshow. Anyhow, we came upon the place, and waited in the queue, where the shadows ran from themselves. At this point something crazy happened. I handed five quid to a bald Northman with an ill-favored look about him; and in exchange he lowered a velvet rope and urged me into what, if you pressed me to guess, was either the third or the fourth circle of hell.

It seems that--on a good day, in the smoke-wisped darkness with a few sickly-sweet, overpriced cocktails in you, hell looks an awful lot like a night club. Or, if not a "club", then a "cocktail bar" so closely resembling a club that the distinction is academic at best. Dark, dank, desperate and deafening--it sucks the English youtharazzi down into a place not so closely resembling London.

I took off my jacket, ordered a pint, took some half-measures towards dancing with my girlfriend, and settled in for some people-watching. Much to my disappointment, though, I didn't manage to spot any people. Instead, I caught a side-long, strobe-lit glimpse of what Kierkegaard mornfully labeled "the Public"...what Nietzsche contemptuously dubbed "the Herd"...what MTV CEO Judy McGrath ruefully calls "the Audience".

Somewhere between the seventh and ninth movements of 50 cent's Harlem concertos, I got to thinking about sensory deprivation torture--a little bag of tricks dabbled in by the CIA and Mossad, but raised to the level of an art form by the KGB. No, I'm not talking about the Five Techniques the marines at Git-mo have so recently been pooh-poohed for using--no black hoods or "stress positions". What I have in mind is the much softer, and more diabolical, form of deprivation first studied by D.O. Hebb at McGill University (fucking Canadians). Hebb's and others' findings described a family of techiques aimed at muting the senses, at cutting off the brain from external stimuli. One of the more complex deprivation apparatae has its subjects sealed in a soundproof, pitch-black tank, and placed supine in a solution of water and epsom salts so saturated that it makes one neutrally bouyant. This sensory desert robs from a person even her experience of gravity, and since the air and the water are kept at the same temperature, even tactile sensations are dulled. Alternative medicine freaks herald the tank as a tool for acheiving higher-consciousness and creativity through the prolonging of semi-conscious theta-states, but Hebb and his colleagues originally had quite a different use in mind: that of 'prepping' subjects for brainwashing.

Just imagine you're a Komrad Kolonel in the KGB's Second Chief Directorate. You've recently discovered that a Party boss's daughter has been passing-off state secrets to the American consulate between ballet lessons. Now, she's too high-profile to "take care" of that way, but nevertheless her behavior needs to be...corrected, and her future loyalty to Mother Russia ensured. Your solution: slip a mickie into her Stolichnaya, pump her full of muscle relaxers and Sodium Pentathol, and have her wake up to find that she's lost her body and now exists solely as a free-floating consciousness, alone in timeless, endless, blackness. Chances are she'll be open to...rehabilitation.*

So what does all this have to do with my Saturday night with the Herd at Walkabout? Only this: the Western night club is sensory deprivation in reverse. Instead of withdrawl, it gives you inundation; instead of lulling you into acceptance, it beats you into supplication. Ambient light is taken from you, compressed with a sickening crunch, and torpedoed through the darkness at a hundred miles an hour. Music is boiled; the distillate is NOISE at your eardrums and BEAT in your shoes. Sweat, booze, and ashes, all doused with cheap perfume, play a sort of olefactory zero-sum game, each fighting the others off, resulting in a kind of nasal static. And touch...Well, next time you're in da' club, you make your way through thirty yards of dance floor to the bar, and you tell me that the corridor of slippery fabric and slipperier flesh through which you burrow isn't like unto a birth canal. And like a birth canal, you come out the other side confused, disoriented, upset, and out of breath--and inexorably covered in the sticky residue of humanity.

But to what end, this sensory superfluity? To me, it's obvious. We overload our perceptual gear because we want to forget--to forget what we are: awkwardly embodied selves; weak, contingent, little epistemic beings, unsure of everything, endlessly aware of the schism between Me and You. As Trent Reznor vis-a-vis Johnny Cash sang it: "You are someone else/I am still right here".

So we swim, not in water and epsom salt, but in bodies and ethanol. We close off the dicey world of physicality and endeavor to become timeless, spaceless consciousness, or--since our end in the club isn't higher knowledge of the self but carnal knowledge of others--we aim to unleash pure consciousness of the Id, unfettered by self-consciousness (for how could we grind so arhythmically, kiss so sloppily, or grope so violently without quite literally forgetting ourselves). For a few fleeting moments, wrapped in the Walkabout's burlap bag and beaten with popular culture, we manage to transcend the insecurities, the idiosyncricies, the pockmarks and the sneaking suspicion that there's more to the opposite sex than the crude utility of their flesh.

But, lo, there is nothing sadder than when the effect has run its course: the young chap who's sobered up enough to surmise that the spasmic contortions of his extremities have failed to amount to 'dancing'; the candy-girl who realizes she's been giving our friend just enough of her lips to keep him from wondering off between songs; the older chap who hovers around the periphery, five years too-old to be here, clutching his lager and keeping the beat from the neck up. These are all freshly awakened individuals; bona fide persons--for all the lonliness and ugliness that that entails--broken off from the pack, from what Sartre would call the "Group-in-Fusion" whose neurotic mass have checked their very selves at the door with their coats. They've woken up to the absurdity of these dark, noisy rituals and realized, perhaps only temporarily, that transcendence isn't in cranking up the volume on sense-data, no more than it is in muting it.

And the die-hards--whose stamina and denial keeps them gyrating through the fourth repetition of that Black Eyed Peas jam--call those of us who fall ass backwards into our selves squares or "wallflowers". But I'm fairly sure the Cosmic Joke is on them: we're all wallflowers, some of us just forget where to stand.



NOTES
*If this sounds like a subplot from a Tom Clancy novel, that's because it is.