why are facebook posts and comments always lowercase? why is punctuation almost never correct, unless it’s a question mark, or a sentence in the middle of a paragraph (which is itself rare), or a one-line caption (often one word) to a newly uploaded photo?
BECAUSE WE ARE ALL TOOLS, THIS IS WHY.
Dear girls who wear scarves:
Why do you never talk to me?
I fucking love you. I see you sitting in coffee shops, reading a book, or on your laptop, and you just look beautiful. A little hipster, yes—but I dig the hipster aesthetic; I secretly wish I were a hipster. You are one, and so I secretly wish I were you; or, at the very least, with you, that I might bathe in the glow of your irony.
But why do you never talk to me?
I try to meet your gaze, I mutter “excuse me” as I squeeze by the chair in which you sit, I turn around standing in line and awkwardly acknowledge the fact that you, too, are standing in line and that we are, as such, both standing in line (who’d have thought!); I perhaps compliment you on your shoes as I wait for my medium coffee with two add shots of espresso (though this only if I’m feeling confident, and I’m only feeling confident if I’m at the level of caffeination where I clearly don’t need a medium coffee with two add shots of espresso), and you, waiting for your small chai tea latte with soy milk, perhaps smile and say, “Oh, thanks,” and that’s the extent of it, the conversation dies, and I go back to pretending to inspect some writing nearby, either on my iPhone, the newspaper rack on my left, or the list of today’s Panini specials on my right.
Why do you never talk to me?
You’d love me. I promise. I do so many artsy things: I act in plays, I read postmodern novels, I’m majoring in philosophy—I mean come the fuck on!! How fucking artsy is that?! Plus, my roommate recently helped me buy jeans that fit me, instead of my previous pair that sagged down to mid-thigh, because I’ve lost a decent amount of weight recently—hey, that reminds me—I’ve lost weight recently! Look at these reduced love handles! Look at my one-and-a-half chin! Look at these biceps that you can kind of make out if I hold something heavy and position my arm at a forty-five degree angle! Can’t you tell?? Well, I guess you don’t have a ‘before’ to compare with this ‘after’—but still, I look good! Sure, the jeans are from Express, but like, I don’t even know why that’s something you’d say ‘sure’ to preface, because I literally have no idea how clothes or brands work, but like, as best I can tell your denim/twill/leggings did not come from Express, so like, I’m sorry, but I can change, seriously, I can change—unless you don’t want me to change—in which case, fuck you, no way in hell I’ll change! (Wait, do you want me to change or not? Shit.)
Yeah, I wear plaid shirts. Yeah, my mom picked some of them out. Yeah, they’re mostly from Target. (Why are you so focused on where I got my clothes, anyway?) Yeah, I can’t afford a nice watch. Yeah, my sunglasses were $2.50. Yeah, this is the only pair of shoes I own. (How many pairs of shoes do you own?)
Wow, you and your friends sure do have a lot of fun—I can tell from all of the pictures on facebook of you guys hanging out and smiling and looking attractive in various locales, most of them either outside in beautiful sun with nature, or at night with red Solo cups and well-groomed men. By the way, how in the hell does one friend group contain so many ungodly attractive people? Who can all afford to go on weekend trips to cabins at the drop of a hat? Is attractiveness contagious? What about wealth?
I feel like each of your profile pictures are from a trip to Europe that you and your friends took after waking up on a Friday morning and deciding you’d like to spend the weekend in Paris off of your parents’ allowances.
Out of curiosity, where did you get that necklace?
Oh.
(That’s why you never talk to me.)
Hmm.
Well, I guess we all need to be loved on some level.
So, I guess I don’t really hold it against you.
I do dig your scarf.
by Giorgio Agamben
In the inaugural address at the University Institute of Architecture in Venice, delivered in February 1993, Manfredo Tafuri evoked the “cadaver” of Venice in no uncertain terms. Recalling the battle waged against those who proposed to host the World’s Fair in the city, he concluded, not without a note of sadness: “The problem was not whether it was better to put makeup and lipstick on the cadaver, thus making it look so ridiculous that even children would have mocked it; nor was it what we—the powerless defenders, the disarmed prophets—ended up with, that is, a cadaver liquefying before our very eyes.”
Almost two decades have passed since this implacable diagnosis, penned by a person with ample authority and competence, whose accuracy no one could possibly challenge in good faith (not even the mayors, architects, ministers, and the rest who, then as today, had and have, in Tafuri’s words, the «indecency” to continue to doll up and undersell the cadaver). To the careful observer this actually means, however, that Venice is no longer a cadaver, that if it somehow still exists, it is only because it has managed to move beyond the state that follows death and the consequent decomposition of the corpse. This new state is that of the specter, of the dead who appears without warning, preferably in the middle of the night, creaking and sending signals, sometimes even speaking, though in a way that is not always intelligible. “Venice is whispering,” Tafuri writes, though he adds that such whispers are an unbearable sound to the modern ear.
Those who live in Venice attain a certain familiarity with this specter. It suddenly appears during a nocturnal stroll when, crossing a bridge, one’s gaze turns a corner alongside a canal immersed in shadows, as a glimmer of orange light is switched on in a distant window, and an observing passerby on another bridge holds out a fogged-up mirror. Or when the Giudecca Island almost seems to gurgle as it drains rotten algae and plastic bottles onto the Zattere promenade. And it was yet again the same specter that—thanks to the invisible echo of a final ray of light, indefinitely lingering over the canals—Marcel saw enshrouded within the reflections of the palazzos in their ever-darkening obscurity. And prior still, this specter appears at the very origins of this city, which was not born, like almost every other city in Italy, as a result of the encounter between late antiquity in its decline and new barbarian forces but rather as a result of exhausted refugees who, abandoning their riches behind them in Rome, carried its phantasm in their minds, to then dissolve it into the city’s waters, streaks, and colors.
Atoms make up my irises—
I’m begging you to split them.
The world, from its beginning,
Since the Earth fell out of the sun’s womb,
With gravity as its midwife,
Had already started smoking at thirteen,
Already dropped out of high school,
Already sold its body for that next line.
Destruction written into its DNA.
A whimper and not a bang,
Because when God stares you in the eyes,
You don’t crack a fucking joke.
A whimper and not a bang,
Because when that bullet pierces your brain,
You still bleed out slowly.
And when Hiroshima comes back,
When it reveals itself,
When the curtains part,
When the orchestra starts playing,
When the lights go up on the ghost behind all things,
It will steal
Its whimper
Back.
Forcefully.
On the last day,
We will sit on chairs of rubble,
Sip from goblets of bone,
Hold what remains of each other’s hands,
And say a prayer.
Darling, dear, lovely John Calvin,
Of course you were right all along
(As our sons’ blood starts to coat our throats)
And the era you lived in was golden
(As our sons’ flesh gets stuck in our teeth)
It was immortal,
It will never leave,
As long as we are here,
Because it ended.
It had its whimper.
Your absence is so present.
Love,
The remnant—
But when the sun goes up on the field of Armageddon,
After that crazy party the night before,
With all of our favorite bands playing all of their greatest hits,
With tabs of acid for miles and miles,
With about five or six girls who were each the love of our lives,
With the air so thick with smoke and chemical and burning and napalm—
We won’t remember a thing.
The clouds will fade away,
We will look at each other,
Wipe the soot from our foreheads,
And start cleaning up,
Each with the hangover
Of a
Lifetime.
And the sky will be Technicolor,
And we’ll all start joking,
And start telling stories: creating myths,
Worshiping idols,
Inventing religions,
Trying somehow to explain just how the hell we got here.
We’ll make families,
Have kids,
Form towns,
Build cities,
Name mountains,
Sail seas,
And create for ourselves our own little history that we will teach to our young in schools, in churches, and in town halls.
Technology will happen.
“In the beginning, the planet tried to kill the star,
But no daughter can murder her mother,
And no mother should bury her daughter.”
Entropic ecstasy, ecstatic entropy—
I can’t wait to fade away.
Look me in the eyes.
I don’t think I’m an alcoholic
But I kind of wish I was
When the review of my life gets published in the New Yorker
(As it surely will; the author’s quite well-known)
I can’t have it uninspired, predictable, dull, mundane
(The review, not my life; no one will read my life)
The prose needs to move, it needs to sing
It needs to smack you in the fucking face
It needs to look you in the eyes and laugh,
And say, “Sorry, but that seat’s taken”
It needs to cheat off of your chem test
Make you uncomfortable changing for gym
Laugh at you while you’re running the mile
Ask the girl you like out to homecoming,
In the biggest and best way possible,
In front of the whole school,
So that everyone knows,
She’s with it.
(The prose)
Because all my goddamn fucking life I’ve been just writing for glory
All my goddamn fucking life just trying to tell a story
To my best friend texting his girlfriend
To my teacher writing her rubric
To my cousin smoking his sick sticks
To my grandma laying dying
To my god sitting and waiting
To myself
To myself.
I’ve got to edit
“Begins with promise”
[Change word]
“Fluid and imaginative”
[Restructure paragraph]
“Loses direction then
And again midway through”
[ADD SENTENCE HERE]
“Partially managing to hold your attention”
Do it across a couple of days, the editing
[Cut section]
Till you start to lose it
“But then drags”
And decide
“Ultimately proves tried”
It will be okay no matter how it goes
At least probably
But probably is better than improbably
“Takes no risks”
(Probably, anyway)
And the thought that it won’t, scares you
And you (probably) start to drink
A little more than you
Were used to
Drinking
—But it’s okay
I’m totally fine
You don’t need to worry about me
“Potential left unfulfilled”
I don’t mind compromise
I got started late
“Artlessly unresolved”
And may be ending too early
But I honestly think it’ll be okay
I really think I’ll be okay.
This is easier anyway.
(I didn’t love her,
But I lost my first love too.)
The prose needs to find you in a bar one night
It needs to get you drunk
It needs to take you home
You both don’t remember in the morning
But it leaves its number on the bedside table
The goodbye is awkward
As is the first official date
As is the first dinner with the parents
As is the honeymoon
As is the birth five months after the wedding
As are the confrontations when it starts coming home later and later
And leaving for Chicago on business trips
For days, then weekends, then weeks
Then ends, because it’s not even home when it’s home
And SUDDENLY GOD COMES THROUGH
THE ROOF AND INTO THE LIVING
ROOM AND YOU WAKE UP AND
EVERYTHING FALLS AWAY AS
TRUTH STARES YOU IN THE FACE
WITH ITS DEAD
SLAUGHTERHOUSE
FLOOR
EYES
I don’t think I’m alcoholic
But I kind of wish I was
Failing to find meaning
In failure finding meaning
[Burn manuscript]
Oh
And
By the way
I thought
You’d want
To know
That
The review
Is written
Really,
Really,
Really,
Well.
I don’t think I’m an alcoholic
I’m sitting still
In the background
Of the photograph
Where people in the
Foreground are all
A flurry of legs
And arms and I
Think that maybe
I’d like it if you
Could not even
Frame it, you
Really don’t need to
Go to all that
Trouble, but if you’d
Be okay with it
Up on your wall
In your room where
People can see it,
And then if they
Ever saw me, they’d
Know that I knew,
Know that you knew,
that I knew
You
It’s because I talk too much that I do nothing
Emily Floyd
At the same time that he created his throne, God created a writing table so big that a man could walk on it for a thousand years. The table was made of the whitest pearl; its extremities were made of rubies, and its center was made of emerald. Everything that was written on it was of the purest light. God looked upon this table a hundred times a day, and every time he looked upon it he constructed and destroyed, creating and killing… . At the same time that he created this table, God also created a pen of light, which was so long and wide that a man could run along either its length or its width for five hundred years. After having created his pen, God ordered it to write. “What shall I write?,” said the pen. “You will write my wisdom and all my creatures,” God answered, “from the world’s beginning to its end.”
—The Book of the Ladder, chapter 20; epigraph to “Bartleby, or On Contingency” by Giorgio Agamben
This was written in one twenty-minute burst. It has not been edited. It blatantly rips off David Foster Wallace and Giorgio Agamben. It is also written in highly pretentious diction/syntax, because that’s what’s easiest for me to default to. Nice.
If humans have some kind of fundamental emptiness (a lack of an essential nature, an essence), if we are always looking to give ourselves away to something, then I think you can understand the adolescent/post-adolescent/adult urge to find other adolescents/post-adolescents/adults with whom to have sex as some kind of attempt to fill that void; to find someone else to give one’s self away to. For some people this might be in lieu of a more sustained relationship (which society, or conventional wisdom, would probably say is ‘more fulfilling’ than a random hook-up); for others, it might be something in fact preferable to a sustained relationship—perhaps this is why there are those certain types of people who never seem happy in a relationship; perhaps this is why people cheat: they wish to give themselves away completely to something, to thereby forget the fundamental emptiness, but find that the attempt to do so in a relationship still leaves something to be desired; they still feel empty. If boredom, being the absence of anything with which to preoccupy oneself, opens onto a more primordial pain, a dull but ever-present ache, then that for which we truly search is something loud enough to drown out the white noise of the fact of our existence. Sometimes this, literally, is loud: think frat parties. Think the mass of people, the mass of visual stimuli, the sheer mass of it all. This too explains the alcohol consumption accompanying these types of excursions. Alcohol lowers your ability to focus on specific things; it is freeing in that way. We thus see in drunk people an opening onto a more general sociality, a directedness not toward one thing (and definitely not that painful white noise we mentioned), but if anything a lack of directedness. (And yet, conversely, perhaps the pain of the solitary alcoholic is an inability to focus on anything but this pain. Or, perhaps alcoholism is born out of a wish to permanently drown out the noise.) But the frat party, simultaneously, exhibits a very special kind of single-mindedness, a type of sexual tunnel vision. In this case, alcohol results in a focusing of the attentive binoculars upon other human beings (see above general sociality) to whom one is sexually attracted. (If alcohol closes us to a more intellectual foundational aspect of ourselves, it may also open us to an ‘animalistic’, instinctive one.) There thus plays out a type of infantile drama (if we grant the admittedly not uncontroversial assumption that this sexuality is somehow more base than other aspects of the human) at the frat party. Boys and girls alike attempt to exhibit a type of defiant, unwavering confidence. We are seen with popular, attractive people; we thus are popular, attractive people. We are desirable. We are wanted—but we do not want. Because, for this drama to work, for the romantic ‘game’ to be played, a type of closedness must be projected to the world around us—we must appear as a mystery to be solved. The male desires the female who takes no notice of him, the female who does not need him. This provides a goal; it provides a challenge. (For the more ‘desperate’, this is not necessary—but I would argue that this results from a more manifest insecurity whose being-overcome provides challenge enough.) The female, too, desires the male who does not appear desperate. (Put aside my blatant heteronormativity for the moment.) The female dances with the male who approaches the prospect of dancing with just the right level of nonchalance, of disinterestedness. Yes, level of sexual attractiveness here also plays a part, but note that this type of analysis opens us to a new explanation for why this is the case: it is not that the female desires the tall/dark/handsome male because he is tall/dark/handsome—the female desires the tall/dark/handsome male because his tallness/darkness/handsomeness means that other females will desire him, other females who must be beaten out for his attention, an attention that could oh-so-easily be redirected toward another female. There, then, is the game. There is the challenge. There is the object toward which we direct ourselves so that we may forget our general lack of directedness.
Can we, then, find a way to go about directing ourselves in a way that isn’t so tragic? Because, tragic it is—no matter how hard we try, we will always fall back into pain. We will always sober up. The party will always end. The music will always fade; and we will be left with nothing other than the white noise. And this problem is made all the more difficult (trying to get out of the tragedy) by the fact that it is our attempt to get out that leads us right back into the problem.
Let us then become tragic heroes. Let us become romantics. Let us seize our lack of substance, let us grasp our emptiness. Because, while this profound sadness leads to so much pain—it is also responsible for everything throughout the course of human history (and the course your specific human life) that has been good, and happy, and right. The first novel was written so that that author could try to find a way out of his day to day life. The first painting was painted, first sculpture sculpted, first song sung, that that one singular, ineffable, ungraspable human, could try to ease the pain. And why do you, as one human in the course of history, do what you do? Why did I devote myself to speech/debate/theater, to philosophy and history and music? Because doing something is somehow, miraculously, more soothing than doing nothing. So, let’s not stop going to frat parties—directing yourself to your studies instead for those several hours on a Saturday night, while admirable, is just as sad; it’s the same attempt to forget—and you’re not going to get that much done anyways, most of the time. Let’s keep going out. Let’s keep getting drunk—but let’s do it knowing what we’re doing. Let’s celebrate our emptiness, and relish it. Let’s bring it out into the open, and just do something to do it, not because it will act as a salve for the wounds of the soul (Mark Twain’s words, not mine). And, most importantly—let us do this together. Because, as best I can tell (as a singular human being), no one has it figured out. No one has overcome the white noise; no one exists without it. So let’s sit back and listen to it together. Hell, let’s bang on cymbals and strum guitars and yell into microphones until the neighbors next door call the cops! But listen for how the white noise pervades each rest. How in-between every click of the hi-hat, how in that silence before every bass drop, we have a companion who will never leave us, no matter how we’d like it to: that white noise. Our white noise.
An empty room save a single string suspended from its ceiling
Square, frayed
(room, string)
Walls pockmarked and acne-scarred
Floor dirt and soil, dirty and soiled
And it goes like this:
A smash a crash as wrecking balls the walls dash, first that corner and then toward the floor, on the floor, sweep the floor—the floor no more—light streams in—from where?—the string, a slender thread, slender as strands of hair, still there.
Silence as dust/gravel/rubble/rabble settles and a hundred million Jacob’s ladders find partners and partners pair off into bigger beams with bigger beams finding brothers and brothers making families and families finding friends and friends remaining friends until it all ends and it ends as the (former) room is full of light.
Waves, occurring, reoccurring—rungs
Rungs, climbed, rungs
Rungs, ride, rungs
(rode)
And froze, the waves, at the top, at the very top
The ladder, thrown away
And we sat on a cloud and surveyed the scene
For on that string
String we could
Could have played
But
The ladder fell as night, as actual night, light’s invisible waves crashing against the earth, washing all in surf
No mirth.
(rebirth)
Some things you can’t repair
Some strings that were your hair, fell and now can’t fall. Over your cheeks, over your eyes, it dies.
And I will have faith that this (all) will continue to revolve/somehow resolve
But right now
I can’t feel it.
Right now
There’s no revolution
(earth)
And it’s dark
(night)
And everything looks empty.
And everything looks empty.
