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Obliviation. I define it as the act or process (obliviating) of becoming oblivious to the world around you. It can be an active process, but is mostly passive. I think it is not relevant how you reach that state. Many circumstances and behaviours can lead to the state of obliviation.
It is not in my dictionaries, but the word has been similarly coined by others.
I came face to face with obliviation last week.
Walking in midtown, I spotted a penny on the sidewalk. I knelt down and picked it up. I stood up and found a woman looking me square in the face, smiling and wide-eyed, her eyeballs quivering like JACKPOT!
Looking right at me she said “LUCKY YOU! CONGRATULATIONS! THAT SHOULD BE ALL YOU NEED!”
I looked at the penny, then back at her. I started to say “Whaaaa?”
Then I recognized that look in her eyes: Vacant, nearly psychotic. She did not even know I stood two feet in front of her. Her eyes moved away from mine and I saw that she was talking into a cell phone headset.
I have been blankly yelled at like this by others whose use of their cell phone headset effectively eliminates the reality around them. In certain circumstances I consider it borderline psychotic behavior.
That was the first time someone like that address me in a seemingly meaningful way, commenting on the one cent I had found by congratulating me and thereby initiating a fascinating conversation.
For a few seconds I thought there was some attempt at communication. I was genuinely intrigued. Was it brazen sarcasm she blasted at me, or something more profound? I actually wanted to explore her point of view, to see if she had some world view where happiness and prosperity were attainable through nothing more than a penny found on a sidewalk.
Did she want the penny? Did she place it there as bait of some sort? Was this a set-up for a radio or television show?
No. There was no communication here. None at all. Just a vacant, bug-eyed stare directed at someone far away.
I remembered the first person of this ilk that I encountered in New York. It would have been 1990 or 1991, at a McDonald’s on the Upper West Side. Crowded and noisy, a woman sitting next to me sat talking in full voice. I caught something about “Goddam problems? I get up at 4am every day, I’m a fuckin’ whore, lemme tell you about my problems…”
For a moment she looked me square in the face and delivered her seemingly coherent diatribe. Thinking she was addressing me I said “What?” She did not stop talking. She gesticulated around her words, crushing a coffee cup to punctuate her anger, and as her eyes drifted past me and back at the table I realized she was babbling. The talk about getting up at 4am turned into “Goddam cocksuckers at the post office walk like pigs” and then something about Woody Allen.
Now that I think of it the “walk like pigs” line puzzles me. I am no connoisseur of racist spew, but I don’t think I’ve heard anyone accuse their enemy of walking like a pig. I remember her saying it, though, and how my mind rambled with strange images of postal workers waddling about like sow.
Somehow I never questioned that phrase until now.
She was obliviating. At first I felt ill at ease, but she simply did not know I was there. The discomfort partly disappeared because of that. Our eyes met for a full 2 or 3 seconds, though. When I said “What?” I swear I detected a glimmer of recognition. Recognition of the circumstance, and even an ounce of pity for me and the confusion in my eyes. I imagined the incoherence existed on one level and a guiding sanity (which gave her her freedom) sat on some other level, supervising.
I may have fully invented this.
I wanted to sit and listen.
I obliviate all the time. Unlike the woman at the McDonald’s I am not disturbed, at least not demonstratively so. And unlike the woman last week in midtown my path to obliviation does not require a cell phone or any technological intervention. I simply let my brain clatter with the noise of anxiety, and I suspect that bewilderment follows me more often than I know.