The White Noise Problem

There’s a passage in Don DeLillo’s White Noise where the protagonist, newly aware of his own mortality because of the chemical spill, marvels at the fact that anybody is able to go on with their lives.

How can we wake up in the morning, piss, wash the dishes, go to a yoga class, whatever, faced with this knowledge that we are going to die?  That everyone and everything we love will, in time, be taken from us?

This is the fundamental problem of trying to make art about death and transience — the white noise problem.

On the one hand the subject seems so weighty that no superlative is unjustified.  What else could possibly matter, after all?  On the other hand, somehow, impending death is the most banal subject in the world.  Most of us have no problem pushing the fear of our own looming mortality aside, into the white noise of our lives, and carrying on with the daily grind.  

Make coffee.

Stand in the queue at the grocery store.

Buy something online that you don’t really need.

Cook dinner.

Read the news.

Drink a beer.

And so on.

As an artist one can write about death, create images that attempt to make the transience of all things a little more palpable.  But the white noise problem persists even in this pursuit.  Are these works heightening awareness of the fundamental condition?  Or are they just another distraction to divert the audience’s attention away from the heart of the issue?  Is art — including serious art — just more white noise, no different from the endless chatter of tabloid nonsense about 5G towers and Hillary Clinton’s secret alien sex dungeon?  For that matter: is the act of creating art itself a kind of white noise, a frivolous distraction in the face of looming death?

I think about these things from time to time.  I don’t have any answers; I suspect that the questions interest me more than their answers would.    

The cars drift past on the highway at night, the endless rumble of traffic.  The furnace hums.  The refrigerator clicks off and I’m suddenly aware of the silence.  Only it isn’t really silence; it’s just another layer of white noise, slightly quieter.

Wake up in the morning.

Make some coffee.

Make some art.

Go for a walk outside.

Listen to the way the wind rustles the leaves on the trees.