Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return by Martin Riker

Author:Martin Riker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566895361
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2018-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

9.

The late seventies through the early eighties was a strange time for television. There were the same three networks (NBC, ABC, and CBS; the Fox network still a few years off), but they had changed in at least one significant way while I was with Henry; they had given up on social relevance. True, M*A*S*H was still around, and a few other early seventies’ holdovers, some hard-line journalistic programs, but the new prime-time programs were all fantastical melodramas (The Love Boat, Fantasy Island), nighttime soap operas (Knots Landing, Dallas), and lighthearted crash-’em-ups (Magnum, P.I.; Charlie’s Angels), things like that. I am sure there was an interesting sociological explanation for this move toward escapist, simpleminded programming, perhaps having to do with the political or cultural climate at the time. But since I had very little exposure then to news or current events, I had no idea what that explanation might be.

Now, you might imagine that this mindless fare would come as a disappointment to me after the relative sophistication I had come to expect from television in the early seventies. The sophistication I had come to expect of myself, I should say, since my finer tastes in television back then had meant, to me, that my own mind had matured and grown more interesting. We had grown smarter together, television and I, or so it seemed to me, and this was an optimistic feeling. So you would think these new programs would disappoint me, and at first they certainly did. I was disappointed, or at the very least surprised. Yet left with no choice in the matter, my expectations rather quickly lowered, and I learned to love these dumber programs just as much.

Love, yes, love. This is what I wish to make clear. For in scrolling back through all I have written so far, which I took some time to do after ending the previous chapter, I saw that I have described several times my negative feelings over the years about television’s hold on me, but have been less clear that this anger was never really toward television, but only toward myself. And post-living, my relationship with television has clearly been something else. With no choice but to attend upon lives that have nothing to do with me, tediously sprawling lives infinitely uninteresting to watch, television has been a blessing and respite. And guiltless—since stripped of the ability to act, one loses one’s guilt at not doing so. Television becomes a faultless pleasure, if not a welcome friend. And this is the sense in which I can say without compunction that 1978 to 1985 (actually to 1989, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself) was one of the better periods of my post-life existence—because I watched more television than at any other time—though the rest of that era is almost entirely a blur.

Following the inadvertent catastrophic death of Henry (though I should back up to explain that I did not kill Henry Nelson, or certainly I tried not to, or chose not to but then messed it up.

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