Cruelty and the Sublime

juxtapositions

My sons make good-natured fun of me, how I rant about things, how if we’re sitting down for lunch, let’s say, apropos of nothing I’ll say, Did you hear about the guy who was killed by firing squad? and what they really want to hear is something like I’ve made a reservation for us to have steak dinners and martinis at Musso and Frank or I’ve bought you season tickets to the Lakers and the Dodgers. My sons send me memes that make fun of mothers who say the same stuff that I do. Honestly, I remember my own mother calling me up from three thousand miles away to tell me about someone who lived you remember, at the end of the cul-de-sac, Elizabeth, the one with the five children? (who I absolutely don’t remember), who has a rare cancer, she tells me, and she asks (always the rhetorical question) Isn’t that terrible? I suppose it comforts my boys to know that I’m not the only one going a little crazy right now, that memes are made of mothers all over the world who are exclaiming that a man on death row in South Carolina wore a tee-shirt with a bulls-eye on it to his execution, that three volunteer prison workers shot him dead on a dark March morning in 2025. Right before I heard this story told almost blithely — honest to God — on the ray dee oh when I was driving home from work, I heard about the 200th birthday of composer Johann Strauss whose famous “The Blue Danube” waltz, recorded at a special concert by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, will be broadcast to Voyager 1, a spacecraft that is already in interstellar space. And the reason for this is that “The Blue Danube” was mistakenly left out when humanity sent 27 of its greatest songs into space in 1977 in the Voyager Golden Record. The song, if you remember, is also blasted out into space in the Stanley Kubrick movie 2001, and I guess it’s considered one of the world’s great cultural goodies.

Here’s a bit for your listening pleasure, which I highly recommend you keep on while reading so that you, too, can experience the strange and many juxtapositions that floated through the space of my tiny little mother mind™ while driving home from work, strapped in my Kia Soul: the tee-shirt with bullseye (placed by a medical official on a man strapped into a chair with a hood on his head) with the dreamy introduction of the orchestral waltz, the stationing of the killers behind a wall with an opening through which they will shoot the prisoner (21st century American) with the lush, sweeping sound of the orchestral waltz, evocative of a river unfolding, a blue river (19th century Viennese), and the 15 feet measured between the hidden shooters and prisoner, the sudden staccato gunfire with the serenity and energy of the river’s journey, blasted out gloriously into the vastness of space.

What is this world? I might have said to my boys, even as I dipped the last chip into the guacamole and put it in my mouth.

Juxtaposition: the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect (Merriam Webster)