A long time ago, I watched a video I can’t find now about how a printer works. At least in my memory it was incredibly detailed, showing the process by which the printer picks up a piece of paper using air suction and ever-so-carefully feeds it through, lays on the ink one layer at a time, and spools the paper out. Until then, printers had only come across my conscious awareness when they were being inconvenient. Printers seem to have a preternatural sense of when you are trying to print a term paper or a final exam, and refuse to work when they are most needed.
But when I realized what really goes on inside a printer—the incredibly complex sequence of moving something from digital into physical space—I appreciated them much more. Especially when you consider the fact that paper is inherently irregular, coming from natural wood fiber, it’s amazing that these machines work at all, bringing our irregular thoughts and digital hallucinations to order, laying them out on a rectangle of paper that looks uniform to us. The printer presents as orderly and ordinary; it makes things orderly and ordinary. We only notice it when it does not work, but it’s a miracle it ever works at all, because at the tiniest level (and at the biggest) there is nothing truly orderly or ordinary.
I have had the privilege of seeing three great DJs in my life. (They are also pretty much the only DJs I have seen in my life. It turns out that I think all DJs are great.) The first was in a Montréal shopping mall. Some friends and I were dining in the high-end-Montréal-shopping-mall version of a food court, and in the drinks area there was a young twentysomething with messy brown hair and big headphones, playing music for the patrons. No one was really paying attention to him, and what struck me about him was how he clearly didn’t need them to. The music was buoying everyone up at this food court—conversations were flowing around us, including our own, and occasionally I looked over to this DJ and his big headphones and realized that he was in a world all his own with the music, but he was drawing us into his world.
The second great DJ was not a professional DJ. I was at a Hillsdale wedding—one of those weddings where old college friends get together and dance on Turkish rugs to Vampire Weekend—and a friend of the couple’s had been put in charge of the music. At many weddings, no one dances, despite everyone’s best intentions. There has to be some perfect alchemy of lighting and space and crowd and music, and though I always hope for dancing, I am frequently disappointed. But at this wedding, the DJ smoothly moved from track to track in the old Hillsdale dance party playlist—from Diane Young to Dance Yrself Clean—with a few classic swing dances thrown in for the parents and Lady Gaga to bring it all back down to earth. We hadn’t seen each other for years but everyone on the dance floor was laughing, teasing one another, moving back and forth in time with the sound. Someone brought their baby to the dance rugs and we danced in circles around her. It was at a Hillsdale wedding where freestyle dancing first “clicked” for me, where I realized you could just throw yourself wholeheartedly onto a dance floor and the point of doing that was to see if, for a few moments at a time, you could let everything go. That night, everyone did, and we played like children, not caring what we looked like, forgetting the cares of adulthood.
I wonder how often DJs experience that moment when the group and the song are one organism, breathing together. So many things have to be exactly right—one blue-toned bulb, or judgmental great-aunt from out of town, can throw off the whole delicate system. Like printers, DJs are synthesizing a thousand tiny little details in order to make something chaotic, complicated, and dramatic into an ordered whole—even if just for a moment. Often wedding dances, like printing jobs, don’t work. But when they do, something mysterious has happened, and it’s unforgettable.
Last weekend I went to a true dance party—complete with rave lights and a fog machine—and there was a “real” DJ there, not stringing together pop hits but styling a coherent narrative from beats and fragments of popular or forgotten songs, aware of the crowd but also completely lost in his own little world. We moved to the music and through the fog of the fog machine (someone was wearing blue Christmas lights). With music like that, you can be in your own world—letting images come to mind and fade away with the melodies—while also with other people.
It’s like being at a symphony. Music generally is very ordered, and we don’t think about that much. But there’s something in our chaotic selves that resonates with that order, that feels right when the beat carries on regularly, predictably, no matter how crazy and artistic the rest of the music is. The regularity of the beat roots us, like the formality of the sonnet form in poetry.
Sometimes living within the rules allows you to actually become creative. You can build something effective when there are some conditions under which you must work, using order to bring chaos into a synthesis. I think that’s what it’s like to be a DJ or a printer—to consider what can be done under the conditions that have been given to you. It’s also like being a human being. The order continues—the sun keeps rising and setting, the seasons keep sloping toward the colder months, the traffic lights keep blinking green, yellow, red. In the meantime, you fall in love or suffer grief, chapters end, wars begin. This is the order that you must conform to; this is the chaos that you are stuck with. What do you do now?
That moment on the smoke-machine clouded dance floor was fleeting. Perhaps our DJ was too lost in his own world, or perhaps we weren’t good enough at letting go of our own worlds to join him in his. Or maybe we just got tired. As the night wore on, most of us wandered from the basement rave room up to the main floor to play MARINA and Britney Spears, talk and lean against the wall. I could still hear the bass downstairs, and somehow I knew, even if no one else was there, he was still there—moving to the beat.
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Here are: two poems by Wallace Stevens about order.
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