Shuttlecock
I was swiping aimlessly through TikTok, when I found myself looking at the blue-gray prow of a naval ship, set against the open sea wrapping around the earth’s curvature, with the horizon stretched in the distance. Placed in the foreground was a smooth, featureless monolith painted the same monotone as the ship, approximately the size and proportion of half of a shipping container, upended and tilted back at a sixty degree angle. A disembodied female voice provided a continuum of clipped, incomprehensible narration, up through the moment she dispassionately instructed an unknown counterpart to “fire”. The mechanism remained tranquil before coming to life, enacting a sequence of silent gyrations, taking perhaps a second and a half to perform, before finding its mark and ejecting a metal disk from an interior silo, followed instantly by the emergence of a missile, a narrow, stemmed-shuttlecock, leaving the firing mechanism in a low flaming arc above the sea to disappear over the horizon.
Other than the mechanically-tinged voice chronicling procedures, the operation occurred silently and seamlessly. It was exquisite in its orchestration and I watched it a dozen times in fascination, before reluctantly swiping it away.
There was a seductive beauty to the video. Framed with the compositional skill of a modernist master, the palate was soothing in its muted hues. Beyond the fractional waves of the otherwise calm waters and the balletic moves of the firing mechanism, all was still. Void of context, and reduced to formalism, meaning was nearly stripped from the mechanics of the operation. The digitized alchemy, having converted the machinery of violence into fifteen seconds of calming escapism,followed by a non-sequitur of absurdist proportions, enough to make Samuel Becket blush.
My escapist foray has been pressing upon my thoughts, with an attendant awareness of persistent mayhem just an app away and in the world beyond my iPhone. The ease with which I was able to lose sight of the implicit violence of the fifteen second TikTok, is both glaring and distressing, given how easily the high production values had allowed for it to nearly slide past my contextual goalie. It gives me pause to wonder in what other instances, and how often and readily, I allow myself to be seduced away from moral clarity.
Of course, it’s possible that what I had seen was a training exercise, with the ordnance firing into the sea; or a military operation with military objectives. It’s hardly relevant, as it is equally plausible that what was shown was the preamble to civilians becoming collateral damage or who were, in fact, the primary target. With nothing being known about the objectives of the missile, once it disappeared over the horizon, all can in fact, be assumed.
It makes the beauty of it that much more terrible.
Closer to home, the ability to swipe away from the realities that we confront on a daily basis eludes me. As I write this, my fourteen-year-old son came home yesterday afternoon to report that his school went into lockdown due to a gunman on the block where his school is located. Fortunately, no one was harmed. He reported the incident with a peculiar nonchalance, as he grabbed a snack and went to his room. Elsewhere, the ongoing tragedies are devastating. The bodies lie in the markets, the schools and the subways and pretty much anywhere else you care to name. The grief, incomprehensible, and all too agonizing, continues to persist, rippling into every corner of our country, giving no quarter to those of us who have no place to avert our gaze. It’s beyond me, how the implications of daily violence continue to be obfuscated by priorities that, frankly, seem insane, all for the sake of fetishizing and elevating the bits of wood and steel and polymer that seem to maintain primacy and sway beyond reason. We appear to be lost in a thrall to an abstraction that has allowed for violence of an all too concrete nature, to become a daily occurrence, placing it beyond our capacity for salvation, beyond the horizon of our own making.