I’ve been reading Fight Club and pretending that I am on the beach.  I am envisioning my favorite beach in Hawaii—one where the dolphins swim into the protected cove.  The Dolphin Communication People then run into water with fins and masks to greet them; they are paunchy, middle-aged mainlanders from places like San Francisco who want to forge interspecies communication through psychic bonds.  The dolphins always beat a hasty retreat.  And for some reason, this spectacle made reading a pleasure.

If you haven’t read the book, you in all likelihood saw the film.  Fight Club is a story of an unnamed narrator caught in a classic psychomachia (that’s a fancy word for good angel/ bad angel dilemma).  The man is a drudge of postmodern culture, a cog in the wheel of the corporate machinery—a functionary—who knows very well the world of artificial sweeteners, of hotel rooms, of airplanes.  Everybody knows this kind of person (if they are not themselves this person)—someone who is valuable enough to corporate America that their life seems glamorous to everybody but themselves.

These folks—caught in this rat race–tire of this kind of life.  They dread the pre-packaged, artificially-sweetened world it represents.  My brother is this kind of person—a CFO of a successful corporation—who has spent many years, a hermit crab, in the shell of this life.  Whenever he flies, he flies first class (but he hates to fly).

Me:  flying is a novelty.  I am a child this way—easily amused by shiny things.  Sure, I sometimes get to go on a trip where everything is comped—an academic conference—but this is still such a novel pleasure that I run around the room, exploring everything:  the snack bar and the room service menu, the small soaps and the chocolates that they lay upon each perfect white pillow.

It is a result of the familiarity with the emotional vacuum of this world that the narrator feels a profound emptiness inside—one that forces him to seek feeling almost as if he were a guerilla rebel.  He goes to Support Groups for those dying of all manner of diseases in order to be able to embrace another human being.  He engages in extreme activities like the Fight Club—a place where men batter each other in order to feel emotionally present.

There is something erotic about the fighting.  Okay, let’s not pussyfoot:  it’s pretty gay.  And this makes sense:  the author Cuck Palahniuk only came out to his reading public many years after the publication of Fight Club.

So woven into this discussion of the general emptiness of postmodern, corporate life—the world of cubicles and apartment loft highrises —is something that is quite the opposite:  not the emptiness of losing touch with your very being but the eroticism of knowing full well that you occupy a body–that your desire (uncontrollable, fugitive, real) must surface like the breaching dolphin in a glassy ocean before it returns to its depth.