Nocturne II: The Crowd

NOCTURNE: THE CROWD

[vinyl settles into muted jazz]

There.

[low brain-wave tones enter]

Supposed to disguise the construction noise.

Or improve cognition.

I forget which.

Right.

Now—

[keyboard]

what to call it.

The Crowd.

Yes.

The crowd.

[jazz begins to mingle with a low drone]

Power feels biological.

Older than politics.

Almost older than thought.

In an alley wedged against concrete, the patrons flowed like dark water.

One moment there was room to walk.

Then there wasn’t.

There were very few lights. Poor part of Rio. Broken glass along the wall. Music coming from somewhere I could not see.

It felt—

unbridled.

That’s the word.

[brief silence]

Canetti begins with the primitive fear of being touched by the unknown.

Which sounds scholarly until an unknown hand touches you.

Somebody has hold of my shirt.

I don’t know who.

Let go of my shirt.

But inside the crowd, Canetti says, that fear reverses. The boundary around the body disappears.

Rank.

Property.

Separateness.

Even the burden of being yourself.

Gone.

He calls it the discharge.

An electrical snap.

For one radiant moment, everybody is equal.

And I believe I felt it.

Skin and sweat and nails and feet. A frequency forming. Not the movement of people.

The movement of the crowd.

It needs us.

It wants to grow.

Remain dense.

Acquire a direction.

It needs somewhere to go.

Something to oppose.

[the drone deepens]

I can no longer move my arms.

There is pressure against my lungs.

What was precarious and amusing has become—

No.

Not amusing.

Never amusing.

I must have thought it was.

I wanted everybody safe. I believe that.

But first—

first I wanted to be the one still standing.

[long silence]

The powerful person is the one who remains standing while others fall.

That’s Canetti.

The ruler’s secret fantasy is not to govern everybody.

It is to survive everybody.

I had forgotten that.

No, I had forgotten reading it.

My body remembered.

Flames appeared farther down the alley. Then flashing lights. Polícia forcing their way into the mass.

Men on the ground.

Men in uniforms.

Commands moving downward.

Down.

Down.

Down through us.

Canetti calls that the sting.

An order enters the person who obeys it and stays there, waiting for the day he can give it to somebody else.

I saw one officer’s face.

Or I think I did.

Thirty years will improve a face.

Make it mean whatever you need.

But I recognized something.

Power reproducing itself inside an ordinary man.

The tyrant doesn’t have to remain in the room.

Eventually, we speak for him.

[record skips once]

Fire.

Teeth.

Hands.

Entrails.

Forests.

Packs.

The dead.

The survivor.

Canetti moves among them like he is decoding the recurring dream of the species.

Might be full of beans.

Whole stretches of him.

I don’t know if it’s scholarship. Might be a fever with footnotes.

But I know that alley.

There is no comfortable line between the crowd and the ruler. They appear opposed—the many against the one—but both are trying to escape the vulnerability of being a single mortal body.

The crowd becomes innumerable.

The ruler remains after everyone else.

Winston, are you getting any of this?

[brief silence]

No, don’t organize it.

That would defeat the purpose.

The strange thing is, after Canetti, a stadium chanting never looks entirely innocent.

A procession.

A rally.

An audience applauding in unison.

People moving toward a door.

Civilization starts to look like a thin arrangement laid over our terror of touch—

isolation—

obedience—

and death.

[jazz stops]

[the drone stops]

[crickets]

Thirty years.

I thought that book was gone.

Funny thing.

It knew where I was.

[long pause]

[whispers]

...oh you see what this does to me. when i get wrapped up in the work. i forget things. mercy. i even forgot what I was saying. oh. no. no. what was it?

Right. [laughs]

Another dispatch from Scott Evers. Read for you by Geezer III.