On Spitting
♠
We are no longer alone.
Information ague, is that what it is? This feeling, this oppression, this… yes, this.
Do you remember the time when you could walk down a (provincial) street and see no one for hours and if you spoke it was loud like the sun?
Did you speak? To yourself?
Lonely summers spent years ago in small town countrysides and back alleys I’d ride a bike and find what I thought were hidden byways and if I ever came across someone, anyone, if someone looked at me as I passed I’d be silent and unmoving (though cruising) and when I’d clear the person or people I’d let out my breath and chuckle to myself and say something inane. Why? Why, I was afraid.
The grip on the handlebars was always a telling sign (which I’d try to hide) and I’d grip so hard my knuckles would hurt until I was alone and cursing myself. But I’d never be very far from home.
What makes me think of these things is this ad on TV that I have seen and see constantly. Verizon. My network. My people.
And when the cursing was done I’d rev my bike back up like a pony or a stud (for I was a child with child’s dreams and animal needs) and I’d shake my head and spit a perfect globule onto the street. Marking my territory. Taking back mine own. Splat.
I’d only return to my home and my people—my network—when full up with being alone. Because we used to be able to be alone.
Solitude carries a connotation of absence, of need. Though it was not always so. I think of that ad again and I shake my head because it shows something strange, something not new but incredibly irritating. We are no better alone?
A woman walking down the street with crowds of intently focused men and women following, watching, anticipating needs, bringing coffee, all smiling unctuously. And the woman, seemingly, is happy.
Pfui.
Which ad exec thought that this campaign would work? You are being stalked by a company you use. They know everything about you. They follow in your footsteps, they know all your friends, they’ve tracked your orders and know your location, which coffee shop, which boutique, which items you’d prefer. They are watching you. Always. All the time. Absurd. And the smile you smile is as wide as the world.
They are not to blame, I guess. This problem has existed for a little while. Who would have thought that given a path of no resistance, man’s mind would have eased into the grooves of the information byway with as little hesitation as falling on the couch? TV was the problem. Used to be. And now? We have little TVs, sleek, cool-looking, in cars, in hand, easy to use; Mp3s with which to drown out the surrounding world; internet encyclopedias with which to pad the book-weary brain; blogs with which to collect our spittle like spittoons; news rags that have become all headline and little news.
We have become too connected it would seem, and something (what?) has been lost. Alas, a lack. But it’s still the ad I return to as an indication of these times. The way we don’t live now.
There are other ads out there which might be just as bad. Think of the crowded school bus or classroom, alive with childish life yap yap yapping away, playing, getting in fights. The teacher or bus driver looks upon the scene with horror, and out of some hidden compartment, some overhead stowage, flips down a little screen with some popular actor prancing around, monkey-like, at the snap of technology’s whip. The class goes quiet, the bus dead.
We lack the capacity for attention, the advertisers say. Your kids—your kids—they need to be distracted to stay in line. And if you’ve seen a kiddie of these times, you’d probably agree. Their eyes—our eyes—are like moths when someone turns on a screen, enamored by an artificial, and ultimately, deadly light. Who now knows the damage such burns will cause? Will the wounds bleed a Technicolor red? Or will they be as gray as the past that we’ve been so lucky to escape?
I was on a subway the other day, minding my own business, reading some Gerhardie. And I overheard two young girls talking about school. One was loud and talking a mile a minute, the inflection of each sentence, each statement, rising to an inquisitive peak, and though she was speaking to the other girl about things outside herself, each sentence curled in upon itself as neatly as a rhetorical question mark. The other girl, after nodding assent, saying yes, uh huh, yeah, eventually let loose a strangely subdued “lawl.” Did you just say, “Lawl?” (Alack, a lass, and already lost.) El, oh, el, given life as a word and offered up in response to the gentle indifference of a girl.
And I wanted to laugh out loud. And spit.
The most egregious error of a child’s speech—the never ending question—is reminiscent of another, older, Verizon ad: Can you hear me now? Yet the new one is still more revealing, for we’ve known for some time that this age is one of seeking, not knowledge, but reaffirmation. Kids have been misplacing periods and saying, Look at me! for eons and ages—it’s nothing new—and they’ve been talking and whining and ranting and talking, without point, without consideration for narrative or patience, only reaffirmation, and they’ve run their sentences together with ands and no spaces, no pauses—it’s nothing new—or misplaced interjections of fact or opinion and ruined whole stories because they weren’t able to control the flow of information or the plot twists and dramatic strophe and antistrophe of climax and claustrophobia; they’ve been unable to play with the viscosity of inertia of words words words for generations, never trying for heights of meaning (just reaffirmation), until all you’ll have heard from the little tikes is a massive sentence that, from beginning to end, is all anticlimax. It’s nothing new. For kids. But now those kids done grown up and regardless of the bored and deaf ear of parent fed up with the shit coming out of kid’s mouth there are a million waiting ears (they say) a thousand pairs of eyes watching (probably are) a hundred like-minded people out there (probably not) and a whole gang of gagglers waiting on you hand and foot to make sure that what you have to say, write, think, or do can be put out there in the world (which is the internetwork) cause it really matters and you should never be alone.
Shit.
I was complaining the other day about this ad to a friend. His opinion was that the ad execs are ahead of the curve. They provide images of what we will come to want. And we gobble these images up, if not happily, then heedfully. When a train comes barreling out of a subway tunnel out onto an open-air track, and all of a sudden someone remembers, Hey I get service here, out comes the phone, or you hear a ringtone, and all along the train, up and down the cars, people reach in bags and dig deep in their pockets, to check, to call, to text. I’ll be there in ten, or I’m running late, or man, am I excited for this date. You are never, if you’re clever, ever alone, and advertising companies are just telling us what we want to hear.
Solitude used to be the province of reflection. Scholars would retreat to ivory towers, women would retire to private quarters, men would take walks or sit in parks. And the products of these times away from society would be diaries and treatises, self-searching and doubt, terror and frustration—at the very least, good long chunks of time devoted to figuring the self out. Nowadays, in many ways, such solitude is reserved for criminals and naughty children, alone time is mandated so that actions can be questioned—the wayward social soul must whip itself into shape. And the punishment inherent in that concept is that the rest of the world, the lucky devils, need not think of these unsavory things, and instead get to turn the whip the other way out, and inflict their unthought selves on the world without.
This is evident in comment fields for blogs and articles. This is evident in user reviews. This is evident in instantaneous communication of any kind. The absence of thought. And though you could say that the average man has been thinking lightly for millennia, there used to be, in the method of publication, at least a bit of light editing. Letters to the editors, inane as they are, were published to give a sense of community. Others, yes others, read this too. Yet they would not dominate the page, they were not the reason why you paid, they were not what you wanted to read. Ever. But now, with no editing, with the freedom of expression that we all value so keenly reaching a frenzied peak, there are open letters to no one glutting the world. And strangely enough, we fly to these pages, fingers itching, to read, but moreso to write, our own feelings, or own actions, our own impressions, our own thoughts. Placing little bits of mes all over the place.
The modern I, the modern mankind, is defined by position. In a teeming mass of information and human dribble, how does one make a mark? Is it with a carefully considered schema of what I am and what I am not? No. It is, I am, I am, me me me. And in the language of the net you can see a correlation. In order to present yourself to the burgeoning connected world, the vocabulary used must be in the vernacular, it must be recognizable to the nameless and faceless masses you wish to be recognized by. Thus I becomes “i” and you “u,” and the motto that is stamped upon this time more than any other age is “me 2!” Can you hear me now?
There is death in every diary, William H. Gass says. And so what death is presaged by our age? If you have a thought and there is no one around to hear it, it does not die in the sea of unknown profundity of a zen-like tree or clap; you can get on the horn, tap out a text, write up a blog entry or comment on someone else’s. Before the thought has been allowed to mellow, before the words with which you choose your expression have been allowed to marry and inter-relate, the thought’s out there and rethinking is precluded. And the pang you feel from letting loose an idea too early (if you are still capable of such a feeling) is whisked away by the roiling current of other unfinished thoughts. Tap tap tap away on the refresh button on your browser, check for a response to your tee ex tee. Or, failing that, TV helps you forget. A lot. And, as such, I imagine the death our age will suffer will be one of meaninglessness, not in terms of any specific fate, per se. The eulogy would run along the lines of: Here lies a concatenation of flighty and inchoate mes (though we are sure they never lived, who can say for certain that they are dead?).
TV is today’s solitary act. In a room of crowded people, you can zone out to the tube and think of nothing else. Words die on your lips, thoughts meander and list, and the ever-streaming images make you forget; to take out the trash, to check the burning bird in the oven, to burrow into some nameless grief, to wonder about past regrets. It is no wonder, then, that there are programs like American Idol that air not once but twice a week, or, to return to the root, the cause of this thought, ads like the one by Verizon—which I see constantly—where you are repeatedly reminded that your cellphone (probably) is no more than a foot away, and the world is waiting for you to pick it up and cast your vote.
Imagine, say, that the world is a bubble, and at its center, let us imagine further, there lies a nebulous I. I look to the left and look to the right, but since I’m in the center of a transparent bubble there’s nothing to see, save for, perhaps—if I’ve got a discerning eye—the faint image of a dividing boundary between the world as it is and the nothing without. The weak I would say, perhaps, that there is a god outside this bubble, for someone must have had to soap up the ring and breathe a little life through the hole, inflate this empty sphere with this feeling of I. The strong I would see the boundary and make do with what it has, like an animal, and with an animal’s sense of purpose claim for its own the province of man. I exist, this is mine. Mine Mine Mine. And everything that cannot be claimed, whether by peeing or by laying hands on (everything, essentially, that is not contained within I’s bubble) is not me. And for many people, in many other ages, this was enough to be satisfied, if not happy.
We could go a bit further, but for this you would have to imagine an introspective person who says, To hell with this bubble! There are people, and I’m imagining authors and poets, artists and philosophers, who look at all that has been claimed (in youth, with pride, by bodily function and drive) and proclaim, There is yet more to be discovered. They return to that imaginary center, the form of the I, imaginary as a point in space, without mass and without volume; a central point of the deepest darkness, a mirror, if you will, of that which exists outside the bubble, a microcosm of the formless and terror-filled nothing on the outside. They try to reach the center of that point, the most precious kernel, scratching and scraping away at layers upon layers of dark matter (the most petty thoughts, the most terrible intentions, the deepest desires). It is a futile goal—though a lofty enterprise—for there is no arrival expected, no ETA by which to gauge success. Like Zeno’s arrow, it is a never ending journey; though, like travel, it is less about the destination than the journey in the making.
But enter, bubble left, bubble right, and bubble all around, the internet age. Outside the bubble is not some outer darkness, but an outer brightness filled with circuits and chips, a brightness that could be measured on the order of suns, vast, harsh, and glaring. And for every moment that is spent within the bubble, the brightness grows, the world is turning electric, people are getting “out there,” and I is becoming more and more alone. Then, like flowers that know no better, I begins to bend towards the brightness. At first it is merely watching, voyeuristic in intent. Then, bit by bit, curiosity grows, and at the moment when I decides to reach out to touch that outer brightness, the bubble pops, the floodgates are opened, and I is filled with the light of the world.
It is almost religious, I would say, and like religion it is an easy out and a sign of fear. The will to explore the inner I is lost or drowned, and as I thrashes and splutters amidst the surrounding crowds—of opinion, of fact, of fiction—the need to an assert an identity, however falsely formed or inadequately imagined, becomes all the I can see.
So we try to leave a mark on the world and I say we because, like you, I am guilty of this crime. I have wiled away whole hours and days trawling the web, reviling others, and shitting, as they say, where I eat. But it doesn’t matter because with the pile-up of information the shit just flows right along the information stream, and no matter how many blog entries or comments I put out there, no matter how many mes I’ve laid down in my forays to assert my lonely self, no matter how many online communities I can say I am an active member of, inevitably I will find myself quite alone. It is a form of denial, to constantly be in touch; it is a form of dissimulation, to present an unchanging me; and it is exactly this tendency that I am speaking out against. It is exactly this predilection that I fear.
I return to thinking about being a child, riding my bike, shunning nameless human contact, and spitting in disgust and fear. The spittle on the ground, straight out of my mouth, will dry up and disappear. It can never be returned to, and after all, where would the inclination to return be? It is a sigil of what I am not—not me—and it becomes, in that sense, a chip off the inner darkness, nameless fear, a regret passed as you would a kidney stone: with pain, with discomfort, but ultimately, with relief. Vroom vroom goes the bike, a rallying neigh from the stud, and off I go, little old alone me, to pursue hidden paths and forgotten byways, clutching hard on the handlebars, so hard the knuckles go white with the strain, racing after an inchoate and far off dream. And if there was a network man in my way, handing off Gatorade bottles to quench my thirst or offering a Kleenex with which to wipe away the spittle on my chin, I would run him over or perhaps spit in his face, if only to say (when alone and in a shout as loud as the sun), No network will take my I away from me.
—SS