FROM THE 18
OSCAR MARDELL
‘GoldCard’ imagines, as the Bandcamp description puts it, ‘a future vision of a city so vandalised by private interest that its citizens wander the suburban sprawl in demented fugue states’ (this is not, I think, so very hard to imagine – indeed, this ‘future vision’ bears an unsettling resemblance to the current state of affairs); amid this strangely familiar hellscape, ‘a dispossessed narrator… catches public transport’ not to go anywhere, but ‘as an act of psychic self harm’ – i.e. as a masochistic attempt to rob himself of certainty and security. Hence, the chorus simply repeats: ‘Who am I? What am I? Where am I? Get ahead’. Here, the perfect neoliberal subject – stripped of identity, dehumanised, deterritorialised, and in constant competition with everyone else (‘get ahead’) – is conflated with the GoldCard-using dementia-sufferer whose brain has gone to rot (‘get a head’). The 18 is one of three routes which the song mentions explicitly – the others are the 14 (which runs from Westgate to New Lynn via Henderson, and back), and the 76 (which runs from Glen Innes to Britomart via Orakei, and back). The additional jokes here are that a) the passengers who take these routes are usually aged either 14, 18, or 76, and that b) as teens whose prefrontal cortexes are works-in-progress, or as geriatrics whose synapses are clogged with amyloid plaques, these passengers are often subject to a kind of temporal displacement – one which makes them both commuters and laissez-fairists par excellence: they are, as ‘GoldCard’ puts it, ‘running round in the present tense’, not progressing through any linear timeframe but repeating infinitely on loop. Hence, the song concludes (if ‘concludes’ is even the right word here) with the continuous, haunting refrain: ‘Same again / Same again / Same again / Same again /Same again / Same again /Same again / Same again / Same again’. In this respect, ‘GoldCard’ is probably best understood as the antithesis of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. In the Queneau, a single bus trip is described via ninety-nine different ‘styles’ (‘Notation’, ‘Double Entry’, ‘Litotes’, etc.); in each entry, the trip itself is the ‘Same again’, but the ‘Style’ of Queneau’s narration – and hence, the flavour of the reader’s experience – is radically, thrillingly different. In ‘GoldCard’, by contrast, each trip is understood to be ontologically unique, and yet the narrator (and, hence, the listener) experiences them all as a single, endlessly recurring phenomenon. How might I do the same? How might I reduce the 18 – i.e. all iterations of the 18 – down to a sole entity? To one dense singularity? When I personally ride the 18 up and down Great North Road every day, to and from work? And when I know full well that the sum of these rides constitutes only the smallest percentage of the total number of journeys made by the 18 (which runs in both directions: Monday–Friday, every six minutes during peak hours, and every twelve to fifteen during off-peak; Friday and Saturday night – i.e. Saturday and Sunday morning, 1AM–3AM – every hour; and Sunday, every thirty minutes)? A note on etymology: ‘To commute’ comes from the Latin ‘commutare’ meaning ‘to change together’. ‘To commute’ once meant to buy and use a ‘commutation’ ticket – an American term for a season pass (so named because the season’s worth of daily fares were ‘commuted’ – i.e. ‘changed together’ or consolidated – into a single payment). In one sense, then, I have already achieved a certain degree of reduction: each year, I make more than four-hundred different journeys on the 18, yet all of these rides are ‘changed together’ or consolidated into a single, recurring commute. There is so little variation between these rides, moreover, between each instance or iteration of that commute, that I feel confident in saying that any one of them could happily stand in for the entire multitude. It probably goes without saying that the route itself is always, as ‘GoldCard’ puts it, the ‘Same again’ (though, of course, reversed for the return). But the passengers, too, are almost always the same, and they often sit in the same places: the young woman in the headphones and the hijab who spends the journey compulsively fixing her already-flawless makeup (front left); the schoolboy with the bottletop glasses who moves neither his eyes nor his fingers away from his game of Candy Crush (middle right); the bald man with the gold canines and the perfectly regular hiccups (back middle). My problem, however, is that this sameness, this relentless and unwavering uniformity, rather than allowing me to hone or to clarify my view of the 18 has lately been obscuring it. How so? The second and third times that I rode the 18, I felt something akin to déjà vu – a sense of having already experienced the 18. Now that I have ridden the 18 thousands of times, however, I am starting to feel instead a sense of having already experienced a sense of having already experienced the 18 – a sense that I am not simply repeating the trip but locked within an ever-looping cycle of repeating the trip – that I am going through the ‘Same again / Same again / Same again / Same again /Same again / Same again /Same again / Same again / Same again’. This cycle, moreover, does not simply achieve, say, some sort of Shklovskian Defamiliarisation (ostranenie) – it does not just make the sight of LynnMall, say, or of the bald man with the gold canines, feel strange or novel again. Far from it. It divests those sights of all importance. It renders me incapable of seeing what is interesting or significant about them. In this respect, my commute approximates not the uncanny but the dhikr: ‘In order to lose themselves in God,’ explains the unnamed narrator of Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Zahir’, ‘the Sufis repeat their own name or the ninety-nine names of God until the names mean nothing anymore’. Every day, I repeat my bus trip until its constituent parts – i.e. its route and its passengers – likewise ‘mean nothing any more’; until I lose all sight of the 18; until I no longer even register that I am on the fucking thing. In doing so, however, I also, like Borges’ Sufis, ‘lose [my]self’; I am reduced to wondering, like the dementia-sufferer in ‘GoldCard’, ‘Who am I?’ My problem, then, is not just that my view of the 18 is obscured, it is also that I am not even around to do the viewing anymore; it is not just that my glasses are blurry, it is also I am not here to look through them. In Greyhound, Joanna Pocock employs a parallel strategy, retracing a bus trip that she made across the United States, from Detroit to Los Angeles, seventeen years prior. The retracing allows for a degree of self-examination, a sort of auto-autopsy. As Pocock explains:
Marc Augé, the late French anthropologist, sees these revisited ‘places of memory’ as opportunities to face ‘the image of what we are no longer’. A place can offer a palimpsest of one’s past and present: the superimposition of our current selves onto the memories we have of a place allow us to be, in Augé’s words, ‘tourists of the private’.
But what when we repeat a bus trip more than four-hundred times a year? When we revisit – even if only for a few seconds, and from the shelter of our seats – New Lynn, LynnMall – the Brickworks, Portage Road, etc., twice each workday? We do not just face a single ‘image of what we are no longer’ – but an endless rogues’ gallery of such images. At LynnMall alone – which I have been haunting for twenty-four years now – I have been: a truant schoolboy tagging the toilet cubicles, a hungover teen throwing up in the food court plant pots, a learner driver practising twenty-five-point turns in the carpark, a desperate uni student submitting empty CVs to shops with no job vacancies, a naïve and fresh-faced recruit shopping for cut-price professional-wear, a cesspit of Covid-19 taking swabs up the nostril, a haggard parent collecting my sick child’s prescriptions – plus, an infinite number of gradations between these stations (i.e. between different shades of failure). During those twenty-four years, moreover, every cell in my body has been replaced at least three times. I am a walking ship of Theseus. My DNA remains mostly stable (aside, that is, from occasional glitches, mutations, changes in how it is expressed, etc.), but I am not really even the same organism – more like a bad clone of myself, a cheap bootleg that has gone through the xerox machine a few too many times. The superimpositions of selves here, then, are so many, and so densely layered, that it is hard to say where each one ends, where the next begins, and which, moreover, constitutes my ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ self. It is hard , in fact, to maintain any faith in the concept of a ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ self at all. If a once-repeated trip allows us to be ‘tourists of the private’, then the commute is a tourist-trap, presenting us with a psychic terrain so deep and so muddied that it is incoherent, disorienting, foreign – a terra incognita whose dizzying vistas stun us into self-abnegation. Does my commute, then, allow me to ‘lose [myself] in God’, as it were? Not quite – for it is in fact no true commute: Auckland Transport no longer issues Season Passes; all iterations and reiterations of my journey are paid for as one-offs. And while it is true that I am locked within an ever-looping cycle of repeating my trip, it is also the case, then, that I am never, in fact, repeating any trip at all, that I am simply taking many different trips, each one entirely disconnected from the others. Though I have managed to ‘lose myself’, and though my commute’s constituent parts ‘mean nothing any more’, I am still no further through any kind of sequence, and hence no closer to any deeper level of meaning. I am in total despair, complete anhedonia – or, at least, I would be were it not for the fact that the bus is not simply the problem but the solution, not simply the cause of this crisis but its cure as well. When the bus enables us to glimpse this unnavigable and godless interior, this meaningless and unparsable excess of the private, the solution is simply to stay on the bus – i.e. to take shelter in the sheer publicity of public transport. When it becomes impossible to look at myself (or myselves), I can always find some degree of solace in the thought of how I must look to my co-passengers – plus, a further degree in the knowledge that they are likewise finding solace in the thought of how they must look to me. As Paul puts it in Richard Hell’s Godlike, ‘He was confused and full of errors like everybody on the bus. People could only understand him on their own terms and the same was true of him regarding them.’ Today I am wearing a pair of shoes with the heels worn out, odd socks, my partner’s shorts, and a jacket which, I have just this second noticed, still has mayonnaise on the collar – which is to say, I probably look like a failure to them as well. Happily, I fit right in.
In his Nineteenth Sermon, Meister Eckhart expounds on Acts 9:8 (‘Paul rose from the ground and with open eyes saw nothing’):
I cannot see what is One. [Paul] saw nothing, that is: God. God is a nothing and God is a something.
The 18, too is a nothing: merely a mental abstraction, a purely theoretical grouping of thousands and thousands of different bus trips linked only by a loosely-observed itinerary and an arbitrarily assigned number. And it is something: all of these trips share, if not a common essence, then at least a family resemblance. But how to even glimpse this nothing/something? When I can only take about ten or twelve of these trips a week? Perhaps by removing the ‘I’ altogether (in grammatical terms, to form the infinit(iv)e, simply subtract the first person). As Eckhart explains:
What God is, that he is entirely … When the soul is unified and there enters into total self-abnegation, then she finds God as in nothing.
Happily, there is a further mode of self-abnegation enforced by the bus, a second way in which it anonymises its passengers and renders them incapable of answering the question ‘Who am I?’ In addition to presenting me with a vertiginous excess of selves, the 18 also inflicts on me a paucity of selfhood: from the moment that I climb aboard, I am assimilated; I am forced to forfeit my essential integrity and to become instead a partial fragment of the greater cargo. To phrase this slightly differently, we who ride the bus are ourselves ‘commuted’ – i.e. ‘changed together’ or consolidated – into a single load (it is to this process, I think, that Pocock is referring when she writes, ‘Travelling on a Greyhound bus, you can disappear’. It is on account of this process, moreover, that I have lately become so enamoured of the subreddit ‘If you could be any Auckland Transport fabric pattern, which would you be and why?’: it asks us to personally identify as an aspect of an experience which subsumes our personal identities; of course, I have no way of knowing if the subreddit’s other contributors are bots or not – that is, if they have ever possessed personal identities at all). The experience, moreover, this process of disappearing or being assimilated, is a cause for some euphoria. When T. boards a bus in Godlike, for example, he ‘felt a suffusing pleasure for having subsided into this new crowd of unknown people. It was like being reborn to be one of the number defined by the capacity of the bus. He was no one no one no one.’ This subsiding, however, this being miraculously and unheroically reborn, like Odysseus in the Cyclop’s lair, as ‘no one’ (outis), is rarely just a case of mentally reconceptualising myself, say, as some segment or shard instead of as an autonomous individual; instead, the process is often tangible, bodily — the actual membranes that separate me from my co-commuters are physically breached. The urine left in my seat by its previous inhabitant has now soaked through two layers of my clothing been absorbed into my dermis; I am sitting here, soggy, wrinkly, cold, stinking of ammonia, and unable to say where I end and where the previous inhabitant begins. A gaunt and acne-ridden schoolboy walks past me in the isle and the canful of Lynx Africa in which he has just this morning dowsed himself fucks me so hard and so suddenly up both of my nostrils that my private interior no longer feels private or interior but like something to which all aboard, including the schoolboy, can help themselves as they please. I pay him back by farting: flooding his nasal cavity with the rankest, sourest particles blown from the very pit of my rectum, and in so doing I absolutely crush his (already fragile) ego, reducing him to a sulking heap, indistinguishable from my own sulking heap. For the remainder of the journey, the two of us (and, for that matter, everyone else who can smell, and/or is contributing to, our sweet-sulfuric stench) form an indivisible union otherwise known only to lovers, to torturers and their victims, and to siamese twins. ‘Lives that have no business mingling with one another,’ muses Salman Rushdie in The Satanic Verses, ‘sit side by side on the omnibus’. Side by side would be a luxury. The sweaty businessman on my right is not simply lurking at the edge of my personal space, but has colonised it altogether. Here, too, the experience is so dehumanising that the immediate question is, as ‘GoldCard’ puts it, ‘What am I?’ As we pass St Joseph’s in Grey Lynn, it occurs to me that I am simply a growth protruding from the sweaty businessman’s stinking armpit, an extension of his vile and alien flesh. If I still possess any trace of humanity, then I have lost it altogether (rest assured, I am doing important work on this: in my spare time, I have started sitting reCAPTCHA image identification tests – click on all of the squares containing kittens, etc. – in order to practise being more human (just kidding, I do not have spare time)). I take the opportunity to stare at my right leg, observing its hairs, its pores, its veins, its scars, its spots. As we approach Karangahape, the leg feels less familiar to me, less like a part of my own body, and more like a phantom limb, maybe the sweaty businessman’s. The rub, of course, is that this leg has always been this way, that it has always been alien to me, and that I have simply forgotten this fact because I have gotten used to seeing it attached to the rest of my body (and, moreover, only to the rest of my body). This is, I think, what Biljana Popovic was referring to in the title of AT-bus-themed installation, I Don’t Have to Sell My Soul / You’re Already in Me: I do not have to relinquish my real self; the self, for the most part, is a priori constituted by the other. Am I finally permitted, then, to see the 18? Given that it forces me out of the way? The additional rub here is that, however fictional or abstract or remote my real self might seem, I can never fully relinquish it; some stubborn part always remains inalienable. However deeply the schoolboy penterates my olfactory system, I derive a modicum of self-confidence from the fact that my own scent is superior to – or, at least, less ridiculous than – his; however thoroughly the sweaty businessman steamrolls my personal boundaries, I continue to long for him to get his disgusting neck the fuck out of my pretty face. And this stubborn part, moreover, this modicum, this longing, is, again, obstructing my view. Flannery O’Connor describes the phenomenon in her prayer journal:
Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and myself is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.
I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.
My ego is murdered by the 18, and still I cannot transcend my rabid egoism. I am completely overwhelmed by the 18, and yet I manage to compute nothing of the 18 beside my own experience of being completely overwhelmed.