DRIVING FORCE

"All the world's a stage," wrote William Shakespeare, merrily tapping his foot in pentameters as if to the rhythm of life. Nowadays we've commuted the individual life to a sentence of greater good: all the nouns and adjectives working together to push the action forward, "moving" as the constant verb. The show must go on. It's a compelling notion, especially applied to individual fulfillment in America, where even life is biggie-sized to be larger than itself. We are obsessed with entertainment and new technology ushers wave after wave of venues for us to present ourselves as entertainers, from reality TV shows to blog sites, and there are no small parts, only Danny DeVito....

FRIED GREEN TOMATOES was filmed in Juliette. Lovely town. About nearly erased by kudzu before the movie in 1991. I visit every year because my great great grandfather begat ten children in that town, and the begotten of the begotten be getting together for a picnic that’s happened every year for more than a century.

The summer we arrived in 1991, just after the movie filming, pulled up at the church and looked over in the cemetery. Couldn’t that many people have died in the past year! There weren’t even that many people in Juliette. At least twice as many more gravestones popped up in twelve month’s time. They were fake. They were Styrofoam. My, what funny pictures we had from that year’s family reunion: little old aunts lifting great monuments above their heads, snickering smiles on their faces that would hold up the world. We got to keep them, the fake tombstones, take as many as we liked. We loaded up our trunks and then went to redecorate our friends’ yards when we got home. You can’t stop death, but you can have some fun with it.

Juliette might have faded into the kudzu entirely after the movie came and went. Oh they opened the “Whistle Stop Café,” and it drew a two hour wait for lunch, longer if you want the sheriff’s booth, the place where he ate the barbecue. But you can spit from one end of the town to the other and still overshoot the downtown district. Then Atlanta hosted the 1996 Olympics. The interstate twenty minutes outside of Juliette got six-laned from the Macon by-pass to Peach Capital. Then Juliette became bedroom community proper, houses sprang up like they’d seeded the fields in two-by-fours. Juliette maintained its inner city’s core, but the exterior is pastureland of McMansions. It’s still a good two hours south of Atlanta by interstate, but that ain’t nothing to a city with the “highest annual per-capita gasoline costs in the country” (THE NEW YORKER, April 16, 2007). And what’s there to explain that kind of travel time, severe addiction to books on tape?

We live in these triangles. We depend on motion for our very object of being. We don't live where we work, we don't work where we eat, and we don't eat where we live. Something like that. We are alive only when in motion, constant motion, lateral motion sometimes, we just have to be going somewhere, making a discernible path, even if it is down.

What happened to the efficiency of the one room house? Now we've got to have many rooms. Square footage is the index of home value, stretching out hallways as a grand indicator of wealth. And so we have to drive from one room to the next in our mansion of life, as if the greater our commute, the more opulent our life. But the wealth is making us miserable. We spend all our time rambling through our mansion jam-packed with isolation. The communication devices--cell phones and e-mail--become props to our loneliness; we rely on their potential instead of using them as tools of human interaction. Life becomes the collection of errands we run on the way to our own funeral.

“Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste...” sans driving.