Excerpt
This is not a substitute. This is not virtual. There is no second degree, but the pain is exponentially amplified, exponential. There is no simulacrum, no mimesis. This is tangible computing. There is no window, there just is.
,,is, is, is
Write about father, mother, family, ancestry, write about things you haven’t let yourself think about, the violence that you carried out on your brother, the violence your father carried out on your mother, the violence that the air, the sun, the men continually carry out on you.
The things you carry out
Far exceed what you carry.
Even now, the delete button is so close, so easy. That key is a cube of strategic vulnerability, of side-maneuvering the personal to the uncritically societal. It is a key of stagnation, of the present-indefinite, of lost past, of murdered future.[1] It stops time. The easiest key to use, box to enter.
There is grave disgrace in this refusal of that box. Disgrace to my ancestors, a losing of face. I am losing my face. My family is being stripped of their faces. Flesh in their place. A raw act. A violent one. I think my fingertips are being stripped of their prints, which fall off my hands like snakeskin. What lines I have are all left on this page.
The things we carry out
Are more painful than the things we carry.
But “nevertheless the mild narcosis induced in us by art can do no more than bring about a transient withdrawal from the pressure of vital needs, and it is not strong enough to make us forget real misery”[2] and it also brings about a withdrawal from the vital pressure of needs, until there is nothing left, except the pulsing, the rotational motions, the oscillating function of the waves, the sea.
The positioning of a confessional text must be the same mass-delusion of religion, Freud was wrong about one thing, it is not a mild narcosis, no, it is not a transient withdrawal, no, it is strong enough, it is strong enough, I think. So then, in writing this, am I, too, finding god?
Am I hoping that a piece of writing will absolve me of my guilt? Am I finding god? The same tide? That oceanic feeling. Limitless narcissism.
I thought I was being brave, but maybe I have only found a different house for my cowardice. A secular ocean for extreme narcosis, a young psychedelic god that I can induce with much less effort than that which is required by prayer.
“[W]ith every tool man is perfecting his own organs…or is removing the limits to their functioning.”[3] Then the keyboard must be the perfecting of the liver.
The liver’s function is to erase.[4] Past crimes. The drinks you drank, and, ostensibly, the sadness that made you drink the drinks you drank. There is a liver in a box, the delete key, at the upper right of my keyboard. I am looking at it right now. It means forget.
[1] Charles Yu. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010).
[2] Sigmund Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents. (New York: W.W.Norton & Co, 1961), pg. 31.
[3] Sigmund Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents. (New York: W.W.Norton & Co, 1961), pg. 43.
[4] Influenced by Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely