Casavaria.com :: Joseph Robertson

I can be no more than I am; in the end, I can be no more than I was, and there is a faint solace in thinking it that way. I am a vanished individual. The logistics are somewhat complex, their planning anonymous, and it has been a long night of figuring before I could ascribe a name to my loss. It has very much to do with language, speech, the human project as (ideally) a proliferation of truth and understanding. In the new incarnation of the vigorous old presses, in the mechanics of media, I was a workaday cog, a body criticast, a voice.

At first, I was a voice with passion, supported by knowledge and lucidity. Then, crashing into my worldly debut, coming unfortunately to the fore, writing all-too-impertinent news, I became a voice lost amid billions (and countless reflections) of others. I learned that other voices were really my own voice repeated and disguised, my own words turned dark and empty.

I learned that virtual voices were the signal that someone, a speaker, in a place of often esoteric vocal origin, was drowning. I even learned that there was so much decay 'in the world' that one individual's voice, each time it was heard, even with each repetition of the same hapless comment ('soundbites', they said, and always more soundbites), is just a series of chance utterances making their way into the public domain. Politics a game, reportage a show, a staged performance, a re-enactment of widespread perversions.

One voice could not, in fact, help but become a number of voices. In this way, the old ethical scale ranging from decency to hypocrisy was jettisoned as a tool for passing judgement, in favor of a game of improbable positionings... and so consensus opinions could be crafted, or 'achieved', by way of repetition of the same. Truth be veiled. Repetition made good. Virtue is in the numbers, you see.

If a public figure is quoted first in New York papers, then on New York TV news, then on three national networks, he or she then achieves possession of a minimum of five voices beyond his or her own. When TV news shows the video of a statement, then quotes the statement in a newscaster's mouth, then shows a textual transcription of said quote, the multiplication is furthered. The average 'citizen', if the term still really applies, is lulled exponentially by quiet waves of awe at the virtual omnipotence of this one point of view. Nevermind that this one view is really just one individual in one moment, most likely taken out of context.

We are governed by rampant mistakings and misinterpretations of ambiguous and carefully constructed phrasiologies. We are sinking thus inevitably into blandness, atrophy of the cultural wit. With the onset of blandness: tastes, values, and with them meaning itself, all vanish, the vanishing unseen.

And I have become one of the most direct victims, a vanished individual. When I was 'growing up' (when 'up' was where we all aspired to meander in life), it was still taught that education, when properly undertaken, could lead, should lead, to the development of a free and secure individual. Along the way, a band of marginal and unidentifiable merchants came to pre-eminence. For all their anonymity, they had an unsnuffable chorus at their disposal.

Billions of voices, many verbal, most visual, came pouring down upon us from 'up' there, wherever they were. They were the Information Giants. We knew there were figureheads: men with unfathomably dull looks, cheap eye-wear, frumpy haircuts, the richest man in the world, and his favorites. Sometimes women who looked like you could trust them to make your money into something greater than itself. There were faces, names, factoids, but there was no personality, no sharp spines that could reach out and catch your heartstrings, just grey suits and factoids.

We're still not sure they came from on high, but it was generally assumed. (It is hard to rebuke assumption, when assumption is all there is.) They had a magic quality about them, a kind of ethereal glow, vibrating with human aspiration. They taught us, in our most comfortable and impressionable moments, in our own living rooms, that learning was no longer necessary. Think!? Why?! Whyever, indeed. It would be so much easier if we just gave in. They would see to it that we stayed well informed. The Information Giants!

Never mind the common knowledge that larger means slower, less efficient. They were the Giants, and we were the industry fodder. And, though we didn't know who or what they were exactly, we found their chorus of billions not only deafening but convincing. Many believed that if all the old insufferable syrup about 'meaning' and 'values' would just go away, they might not have to use their brains so much. (All the endless hours of energy exhausted in trying to nail some elusive grey matter to the walls of reason!)

And if their brains could just be a little more idle, then maybe life would be a better thing. Yes! Oh, yes, what brilliance! So much better if the print news only spoke second-hand about TV news. All the more delectable if print just tapered off, merged with the Web. Everything Virtual. Everything easy. Everything less and less weighty than it was.

Who thought-up such a divine strategy? Probably no one; people couldn't really think-up collective numbness anymore. Deliberate tyranny was as impossible as meaningful freedom. Too much information. Too much? Too much to answer for, too much to react to, too much to engage and to filter and to unravel before meaning emerged. Blandness had arrived in epidemic proportions.

It's a good thing that everything known could in some sense be known, but it was never available openly and freely. It was always conditioned, shaded, narrowed and softened by a kind of commercial choking off. And that choking off invited endless and unnecessary parroting, and the general public wasn't prepared to handle all the goddamned retro-retro-active, self-re-inforcing, semi-unilateral highly cacophonous information. These choices. (!!!) One needed a mind. Where was the promise? Those bastards. Who were they? Nobody knows, Hansel. It all just evolved.

I have not seen my family for thirty-nine months. I had two daughters, a boy and a dog. There was a woman who loved me, who warmed my nights. They were airlifted from my life, or I from theirs. Sudden jump-jet calamity. One morning, I awoke in a room which looked similar to mine, everything in its place, everything hauntingly 'as it would be' in my own home, but it didn't feel like my inhabited space; then, one glance into the surroundings, and I shuddered with grief.

I had been whisked into a half-life. I felt explosive, unstable. I had no wallet, no money, no identification; I'd been stripped. I found myself in a village, on the edge of some unnamed desert, only beginning to live. I had pushed the envelope of connectivity with the force of reason, and it had burst. Or rather, let me say that it had opened, and I had slipped out, and I had fallen out into a kind of dim luminous buzz, conveniently out of the way.

Six times I have set out to cross the desert, each time re-kidnapped in a foreign tongue, brought back to the impoverished salvation of this arid place. I have one room, a low roof, thatched with long grasses, and a sink. Here, I found this ink and paper; here, I set out within myself to affirm the necessary link between the human and the individual.

The sink drips and drips, and they keep changing the rules. I'm running some kind of mind-mill here, but no one's told me what to turn out. How will I know when I'm done? Ready? Everything is mood and the improbability of getting away and the feeling of a need to motor on, to travel ceaselessly toward the burning horizon. But no matter how much gasoline I use, how much time I spend collecting it from the pools and tins where I find it waiting for me, no matter how fast I go or how far, I'm always at the same center of the whole thing... like a hamster on a stationary wheel: running, gasping. It feels like there's no forum to receive what information I might turn out anyway.

We have always been a society (I try to believe there is still some bridge, somewhere, to my former self) where great experiments are tried and lived, where lives are tried by experimentation and denial. And now, in this pale furrow of inconsequence, I am their new experiment. The bastards, Hansel. I have been nullified, erased.

You wouldn't know me, you couldn't, because I don't have a valid form of 'I.D.', I don't show up on your sidewalks, and I don't appear in virtual space. It all ceased to exist. The personhood, the citizenship, the ordeals... in a puff. I live scantily, in my little oblivion, on the margin of personhood.

I have had to take this pen in hand, this antiquated thing, because it is the only meaningful (dignified) way by which I can attempt to perpetuate the details of this injustice, this commanded impotence. I have taken to writing this tale in hopes that a more 'official' being might make a printed essay of it.

The information is everywhere, but people forget about the mechanical hum beneath the soundbites, that soft whirring of radio air without which no contemporary of mine can even guess at sleeping. Wired buds spouting low resonance lullabies, keep the sense of calm wherever they can be insinuated into daily living. Quelled by this hum, people forget their senses, forget the numbness, forget what it was like when life was sensible and sensory and full of ideals and passion and survival.

A man named Huxley once wrote a book, and he called it 'soma', what we call 'anti-depressant' or 'eye-candy'. An ancient tradition, a future promised, a communal calm. I first began to be afraid when at a dinner date with five friends I was the only one who was neither already taking such a drug nor wishing to try it 'just for fun'. I'm not saying that therapy is or was ever useless, but rather that the attitude toward personality-altering drugs had become absurdly lax.

I can recall a time when people fought to establish and maintain their identity. Now... then... around that table, in that moment and from then on, nobody seemed to want to be bothered by the ordeal of selfhood. Very few immediate discomforts or side-effects to its usage, but then again its purpose is to calm people already so frustratingly frantically idle that further calm could only become either total addiction or a gnawing imitation of torture.

No, I refused it when they offered it to me. "But you'll settle in better. You just haven't 'adjusted' completely." This a close friend told me. No advice, Hansel, no emotional consultation, just a prescription, from friends. Just go along, just write what they want you to.

I worked on a newspaper, so I turned to colleagues to replace the shut-offs who couldn't converse anymore. We had already stopped using newsprint. People wouldn't pay even the sunken prices of twelve to twenty cents a rag, so when the word 'editorial' came up, I got to the terminal and put out a 'leaflet'. One leaflet on one leaf on the whole infighting irrepressible proverbial family tree of cultural discourse. (In that family, it shouldn't be forgotten, incest and cannibalism were the norm.)

My suggestion that people sit back, turn off each of their various household monitors and THINK for a moment or two a day registered with the popularity of Prohibition. It was considered an affront to the 'independence' both of readers and of our publication. I was ousted, disconnected. If I had sent it out under the brave signal Anonymous, there may have been less of a penalty, but to use the paper's letterhead! To 'put it out there'! Unforgivable.

A matter of windows... I chose the wrong window. I made the plea that this was all in keeping with a long journalistic tradtion. Oh, and that all other rags had sold out to ours and nobody ever read Anon-columns anymore because that sort of commentary was all-too-obviously much-too-meticulously stretched out on silicon (i.e. authored) by crazies and dissidents. Outcasts. No faces, no names, just the perilous, seditious 'thought' process.

How to trust such a structure? Nevermind that all the faces were masks, and all the names so well known and repeated a maddening digital melody of stratification. It was Outcasts versus In. The paper was in, cast into the still waters of super-high-speed cyberspace. No time for dissenting opinions, Hansel. Gotta keep up. Gotta know where the populace stands. I mean, if a given Mr Dominguez was quoted two-point-seven billion times yesterday alone on the web, due to expertise in a certain field, or to his holding high political office, and I can know all this additional data the first time I read his quote, why should I listen to some crazy Anonymous leafletter. Vote Dominguez... he's got the numbers.

Have you ever thought, Hansel, reader, vestige, about where you want to be in five years? I can tell you where you'll be. It will be a simple repetition. The web can only diverge so many times before we force it to double back on itself, into fifth and sixth dimensions of implication. We'd like that better, I think.

So, I'm writing this as a plea to reason. We can't be so many bugs in a file heading for the abyss. It's just not right. THINK, I say. I said it before, and I was vanished for my trouble. Erased. They can't do it a second time; you're either here or gone, so now I can shout it with free penman's lungs. THINK! Whom do you want evaluating the quality of the meat you eat, at what point in its production and refinement? Does it matter what 'quality' a hot-dog is rated if they're all made from the same parts and those parts are... (whatever they are)... unspeakably... likely to be discarded under normal circumstances?

Does it matter what you want to vote, what you wish or hope or look forward to, if the votes only add up to representations of careful voices multiplied to mind-numbing exponential powers by free-flowing-funds and the right to be counted is... variable? Where is the idealist? He is here, with me, in this biteless, chipless, webless night, using the cunning of simple ink and paper and the hope of another web of open ideas and talkative contemplation.

We go forraging together for tarnished trinkets and scraps of food. Those weird, faceless merchants started out their run along the margin; they bought out some conscience or another; now I forrage with Hector, the idealist, and I speak to you, my unknown distant, Hansel, as you make or find your way to —Joy at this possibility!!— points unknown.

You have wandered long, by now, along the surf of all an unwrit astronomy of information, a chorus of billions. Perhaps you have slipped and fallen below the surf, HEARD the marvelous ear-splitting roar of the New Humanity's chorus of cacophonies, uncounted, perhaps secretly ingenious, and hyperconvening.

Perhaps you'll have met my wife and family and will tell them to send for me where savannah meets desert. Perhaps you belong already to a distant future and will forget me as soon as you find my words. Anyway, I think I can touch you with this, because the basic humanity still resides in the very breathing and pulsing of the body, maybe make something new of the residue of some past humiliation of your own, distill and enliven the juice in your marrow.

Someday, long beyond the dying embers of my own legacy, you will be moved —this dream is my mirage oasis— to print this in a proper typeface, so that the further generations can hear this little anecdote of informational terror. I am hoping to slip back in through the tiniest slit in the envelope. Hello to you. My name was Edgar Stevens. My sense of self has been narrowed and confined to this enforced vanishing... but I persist in wanting, no more than I am, to let you know that as you are, as you persist, so do I, so might I... make this pale furrow of inconsequence a something viable.