‘This is water’

American novelist David Foster Wallace began his brilliant 2005 graduation speech with a fish story which goes: “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”

One Saturday not so long ago, I spent an afternoon with a visiting friend, walking across bridges and on cobblestone streets, with thousands of lit-up pigeons providing a glorious finale as the evening enveloped the Brooklyn sky.

At one point, our conversation turned to hipsters, those much-maligned lumbersexual denizens of the neighborhood where we found ourselves drinking sangria on a factory roof, among grapevines being grown to produce New York City’s first-ever urban vintage.

I had never paid much attention to the hipster subculture and, truth be told, I really didn’t know much about it. Yet I carried this negative image of those whom I perceived to be part of it.  After all, who could get past those big, bushy beards?

My friend, always very gracious, remarked that he had been spending a lot of time with these so-called hipsters and that they were actually not that bad.  They hoarded experiences, not possessions.  They were about expressing their truest selves, not acquiring riches. They bought second-hand clothes in rebellion against consumerism. They shopped at local farmers’ markets, not to be trendy, but to support the local economy. They rejected cars and rode bikes because they cared for the planet.

I reflected as I listened to him, and I realized how totally wrong my image of these hipsters was, and how they in fact seemed to live and breathe the values I held dear.

Many consider these hipsters a continuation of the Beat culture and hippie movement—those fascinating postwar collectives of romantics and truth-seekers who rejected materialism, explored Eastern religion and spirituality, and believed strongly in nonviolence as a way of life. Jack Kerouac, perhaps the most prominent of the Beats, in “On the Road,” which happens to be one of my favorite novels, wrote: “… [T]he only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…”

They are the ones who, paraphrasing one of the most played songs in my playlist these days, when their time has come, could say, “I owned every second that this world could give, I swear I lived.”

The next evening, I was a guest at the “Poetry Brothel,” set up in an abandoned-looking warehouse in a part of Brooklyn that has not yet been gentrified.  It was a windy night and the only people on the street when I got out of the subway was this couple with white, clown-like faces staring into space and puffing a smoke as they sat on a dilapidated couch by the sidewalk.  A few feet above them was a huge sign with lights flickering that said “House of Yes.” I felt I was in a David Lynch movie.

Inside, reached through a secret door, the show had started, with poetry whores (their term, not mine) dressed as burlesque performers giving a sampling of their offerings—poems about love, loss, lust and life. Audience members could then hire them to do one-on-one “private readings” for a fee. It was decadent and virtuous at the same time.

My younger self would have looked at these people, the hipsters and the poetry whores, and instantly judged them as anomalies, just because they looked and acted different. When we perceive another as not the same, most of us tend to judge him or her harshly. That’s just how our mind works. Abraham Lincoln said: “I don’t like that man, I must get to know him better.” It is a quote of which I keep reminding myself.

A behavioral study from Switzerland in 2010 had soccer fans as participants. They were told that the person in the other room, an actor, was either a fan of the same team or a rival team.  They were then told that the person was to be given electric shocks and they could help him by taking some of the shock themselves. The experiment showed that the participants were much more likely to help when the person was introduced as a fan of the same team. Even more interesting was that the action of the participants could be predicted by their brain scans.

The “trick” then is to get our mind out of its default setting and to instinctively perceive others as being “just like me.” This is where mental training becomes important. Awareness is key, as well as the constant reminder that we are all the same and we are all connected. As David Foster Wallace said, we must remind ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

Joel Villaseca ([email protected]) is a lawyer living in New York City.