Canaries in the Coal Mine

I’ve been thinking about the tradition of carrying a canary down into the coal mine. The custom requires that when miners descend into the mine they carry with them a caged canary. If dangerous gases had collected in the mine, the gases would kill the canary before they killed the miners. These noxious gases cannot be perceived by human senses until the consequence of their existence occurs in either an explosion or suffocating deaths. Because the canaries are so small they are susceptible to a much smaller concentration of the gases in the air they breathe, though they, too, can perceive only effects and not the presence of the gases. The canaries serve as an early warning system that something is dangerously amiss: for the miners the death of the canaries was a clue that they should leave the mine immediately or suffer the fate of the birds. The idiom ‘canary in a coal mine’ refers to something that is so sensitive to adverse conditions that allows it to serve as a warning that unsafe conditions are impending. There is something in the air that the death of the canaries portends. It is in the air that the deadly gases float unseen.

I consider Raymond Williams and his concept of structures of feelings: a sense of things before that sense can be articulated, a sense that something is in the air but is pre-linguistic. That something is felt before it can be named. A structure of feeling, paradoxically, is a ‘structure’ but its nature is sensual and inarticulable. A structure of feeling is a phenomenological event: I can feel it but I can say it! Williams writes, “For structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution.” A structure of feeling says that something is in the air, and perhaps when that precipitate falls out it will appear in a physical structures that can be seen or heard. Cultural productions—writings, art work, music, television and film— are the precipitates of such structures of feeling as also would be material structures in fashion and architecture. A structure of feeling suggests to me on the one hand invisible but poisonous air of the mine that will kill the canaries.

For the past seven years, the blustering dishonesty, even criminality of Donald Trump, the abhorrent calumnies that emanated from his foul mouth and soul, have soiled the landscapes of our beings. We lived down in the dangerous mine and not a few canaries died. Every morning I awakened to the violence Trump enacted and inspired. I felt bruised. The craven, sycophantic Republican members of Congress bowed in obeisance at the feet of the man who would be king. Or maybe they delighted at having found a leader, corrupt, lascivious, and vulgar as he might be, who would allow them to come out from under their sheep’s clothing and be the wolves that they were. I believe that the appearance of Trump was a precipitate from a pervading structure of feeling that disdained civility, abhorred diversity and difference, and at a minimum awarded crudeness and violence.

But today I have this feeling, vague and uncertain though it may be, that a new structure of feeling is coming to exist and that there are elements of hope in the air. I perceive that the canaries are surviving, and that there exists something not deadly but compassionate and even life-giving is in the air and might be heralded. Perhaps all will be well again!

I would offer two very recent precipitates from this new structure of feeling and about which I can speak. The first is the recent film Licorice Pizza, from the director Paul Thomas Anderson. Now, there are no licorice pieces dotting the tops of pizza like slices of pepperoni; in fact, there aren’t even pizzas in the film!  There is really no such thing as a licorice pizza. But perhaps that is the point: neither does the world of the film yet exist. Set in the 1970s, in this film and in that setting everything turns out for the best. Fifteen-year-old Gary and 25-year-old Alana run through the film just avoiding a serious relationship though together never threatening their growing friendship. Gary has been lucratively engaged in show business as a child star and Alana is still testing her environment: we meet her first as an assistant to the photographer on high school photo day. Gary is immediately smitten with her and vows that Alana will be the girl he will marry. She rejects the idea immediately, but over the course of the film the two grow more and more attached until at the end they declare their love for each other. Whether they will marry is unimportant: what is significant is their improbable and unconventional but wholly acceptable relationship. In the film with Alana’s support Gary opens a successful waterbed business but when that fails (with few or no ultimate consequences), Gary opens a pin-ball emporium. Alana has taken a job idealistically with a young progressive politican who reveals himself to be closeted and socially duplicitous. AT Gary’s emporium despite the crowds gather yet despite the noise and tumult, the drinking, smoking and noisy overcrowding at the emporium, no police arrive to stop the opening celebration that continues volubly into the evening. Despite a few precarious situations, no tragedy occurs in the film. The world of the main characters, Gary and Alana, remains uncorrupted and seemingly incorruptible though the world outside of them is sordid, dirty and dishonest. Adults, politicians, celebrities, all, all are venal, but the world of Alana and Gary remains ethically sound and secure. Was the film an anticipation or a reflection?

And then I point to the world in the novel by Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway, that seems to me an important canary in this debased world. In that novel though tragedy seems always imminent, in fact events almost always culminate in a positive light. Yes, bad things occur—Emmet, Duchess and Wooly have done bad things though as it is narrated committed without malicious intent, and they are confined to a youth work facility from which Emmet has been recently released and from which Wooly and Duchess have escaped in the trunk of the Warden’s car as he returns Emmet to his home. These three men all in their early 20s, travel through the novel trying to right a few wrongs, albeit sometimes by committing violence on people who have been cruel to them. Sometimes they even invite people who they think they have wronged to enact revenge. Remarkably, their goal an innocent one: somehow they all want to get home! And the moral compass that seems to guide each of the characters is essentially positive. The innocent is Emmet’s eight-year-old brother, Billy, whose character remains throughout the novel uncorrupted, even incorruptible, just as his growing wisdom, learned from Abacus Abercrombe’s book of heroes that he carries in his backback, guides his world view, informs the behaviors of the older boys with whom he travels and gives counsel and direction to their actions. Whenever in the novel it would seem that something terrible will occur—Pastor John’s attempt to throw Billy off the moving train, for example—that horror is thwarted, in this instance by the presence of African-American Ulysses who also is riding the box car heading East and who protects Billy by throwing his attacker off of the train. Emmet’s dangerous traverse across the tops of the box car (just as in Western movies when the hero or villain, gun drawn and often firing, engages in a dangerous chase) ends in the discovery in the caboose car of Packer and Picker, two drunk, rich young men, who have been all night partying and who do not turn Emmet in as a trespasser but hand him enough food for he and Billy as well as handing him a fifty-dollar bill. There is sufficient fare for even Ulysses to partake. One reads The Lincoln Highway expecting tragedy, but none occurs until the very end when the deaths of Wooly by suicide and of Duchess by drowning dampens the mood. But the two have escaped a return to imprisonment that would only have returned them to Salina work farm with certainly increased sentences. But even those sad events are softened by Emmet and Billy and (I believe) Sarah’s start on the Lincoln Highway on their way to California loaded with Wooly’s bequeath to them of his inheritance.The three will certainly make it to California and begin a new life.

There has been, of late, other canaries: The Good Place, Ted Lasso, C’mon. C’mon . . . evidence that something is in the air and that the precipitates portend that we may just survive. It has been a long, lonely winter and many of our canaries have died. But perhaps . . . just maybe, these precipitates suggest that the air is clearing.