Balancing Idiocy

While doing my usual Sunday morning thing today, reading English versions of German newspapers, I came across an interesting interview with the author Umberto Eco (sad to admit, I have never read any Eco [and how many times has an interviewer interrupted Umberto to inquire, "do you hear an Eco in here?"], though I've always liked his remark about the motivation for writing The Name of the Rose: "I wanted to poison a monk"). It seems Eco is curating a new exhibit at the Louvre all about lists in art. He says some pretty fascinating things about lists (among them, "We like lists because we don't want to die," which begs me to ask, "Hey, um, Berto, outside of shopping at Marc's, watching the Browns, and listening to Boston, isn't everything we do because we don't want to die?") all which lead to the interview's last sentence: "If nothing changes, you're an idiot."

Having spent probably a cumulative ten months or so of my life contemplating the cruel truth that the middle word in idiot is "I," obviously this maxim of Umberto's attracted/repelled me. In a world of constant and inevitable flux, I guess the easiest thing to do is just to go with the flow. But then again, as somebody either very wise or having a rather icky job once said, "Only dead fish go with the flow." Which I guess all points to the profundity of the serenity prayer: change what you can, accept what you can't, but above all, figure out the difference, damnit!

I love a lot of changes. I love how the highway west from Cleveland to Chicago turns from stark rural to harried urban right at that left bend at Gary, Indiana. I love how after days of walking on thick slabs of ice on your driveway, one day you hear and feel crackage. I love all the changes in The Beach Boys' incomparable "teenage symphonies to God": the myriad changes in "Good Vibrations" that only get more exciting the better you know the song (and I love how my appreciation of the song only deepens with age, after first being exposed to it via a soda pop commercial in the 1970s), and the brusque change from the dreamy "Cantina" section in "Heroes and Villians" back to the frenzied onslaught of words and music signaled by "You're under arrest!" I love the changes in tone, outlook, and rhythm in each of the four sections in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. I love the change from sophomores to juniors in high school--so much growing up in a year or so. I love the change in my pocket of four quarters, two dimes, a nickel, and four pennies.

Of course, there are changes I despise. The turning of road construction season to winter in the Midwest. The transformation from dusted to dusty. The change from Beatle Paul to Wing Paul. James Gatz to Jay Gatsby. Agile to lumbering, red to gray, 20/20 to umpteen/20. A dime, three nickels, and two pennies.

But these are trifling changes, I know. The bastards are the changes within. And the slippery ones are the changes we shouldn't make, permit, bow to. If nothing changes, you're an idiot. Sure. But if every anything changes, you're still one. God grant me the wisdom to balance my idiocy.

I also love the change from hypnotic drone to sprightly country ditty in the Byrds' "Change Is Now," spurred by the bass that for much of the song is like a relay runner running in place waiting for the baton, and then all of a sudden realizes it is the baton and takes off. And I like how the Meat Puppets' "I'm A Mindless Idiot" doesn't change when you keep thinking it will or should. Echoes of Eco, I guess.

The Byrds-Change Is Now

The Meat Puppets-I'm A Mindless Idiot