What's That Noise?

I’ve read pretty much everything written by novelist Don DeLillo. One of the themes threating through most of his work is our overwhelming belief in systems. Humans identify nature as wild. An abstract entity which needs to be tamed. His characters embrace the fakery of the rule of law or the logic of economies as if they were not constructs of humankind, but anointed prescriptions from God. As the plots unfold, the cracks in these societal pillars appear. Nature has a system to itself which we disagree with and therefore must conquer. We dam might rivers, split the atom, sprawl our cities, poison our own food chain, accumulate more and more. Humans are not better, likely worse, then any species on our planet

DeLillo knows we are a doomed age, but he, like me, can’t look away. He beautifully captures the sublime moments of a baseball game or a crashing plane, but our species is hardwired to supersize our most base instincts until we kill ourselves or everyone else. Each of his books is a reminder and inspiration of those things outside our control. They shimmer in the sunlight for a moment, but are gone like a school of young barracudas swimming in the dirty ocean…or maybe it was just the sudden illumination of some aluminum beer cans stuck in the coral reef. Hard to say.