Clouds can archive. My fantasy is a landscape. Sometimes I
daydream about merging my body with my computer so that I can
more fully enter the landscapes of Google Earth, lush surface world
without pollution or traffic, planet seen from the vantage point of
space and roving surveillance vehicles, a motionless field, magnifying
the normal imperfections and irregularities of the earth so that the
planet is rendered transparent, misshapen and yet intoxicating in its
languishing differentiation from the real. Where are the palm trees
swaying toward tonight? Standing at the beach nothing fails to come
to mind, but out of blue prevalence thinking comes in waves. Am
I my own vision? I feel stretched beyond, but beyond that, other
oceans we hadn’t known, lost continents restored in binary code.
Where should we enter? The point where the digital camera clicks
to record dusty boys playing by the side of the road? Weather in
Google is fixed.
•
The prime directive of fantasy is aftermath. In A.I.: Artificial
Intelligence, the world is covered in ice, above which an alien species
excavates the image of our future together. Our life in remains,
trinkets, Coney Island, all of it submerged in water memory. There is
no future that isn’t also an excavation of some present. In A.I., aliens
float past the twin towers of the World Trade Center. In the future,
are they restored? If only Stanley Kubrick had lived to make his
movie. He might have known that climactic precarity is an economics
of gloom, predicated upon a system of consumption that, in our lives,
became a hostility normalized in time. In my vision of the future,
the resurrected Stanley Kubrick reshoots A.I. as a second parable of
the contemporary moment. Since every science fiction is a reading
of the period that produced it, the new movie ends with the robot
boy discovering that his only job was to promote the male family
member, hobbled by impotency, to his symbolic function as Father—
and not to love and be loved in return. The boy is abstract
.
wealth synthesized into a Haley Joel Osment-identified body, the
cork in the void of loss. The aliens, who have come to earth to
find us permanently lodged in the landscapes we manufactured
for ourselves, do not return him to the dream of family life in
which the mother’s love is the focal point of his experience; rather
they return him to the dream of labor. His mother greets him,
then goes into her bedroom and locks the door. Landscapes are an
economics. Toil over the earth as we always have and eventually
it will toil over you. Will we meet in our mutual fantasy? Will I
finally be your employer?
•
I once lived in a house in upstate New York owned by the
disinherited son of the publisher of the famous porn magazine
Penthouse. In the winter, the snow used to freeze level with the
porch, which was raised about a foot up from the yard, creating the
illusion that you could walk off it onto solid ground. Once a friend
stepped off the ledge, forgetting that he wasn’t walking out onto
our yard and fell forward and disappeared. In those days, winter
was eternal. And I was the friend I’m telling you about.
•
In Los Angeles, I stayed with a girl who lived near a storage center
for the Bureau of City Lights. When we walked to Intelligentsia,
we passed by the fenced lot of the depot, which stretched an entire
block. My friend suspected that it had been abandoned, but my
friend is not always the most careful observer of her environment
so I couldn’t be sure if this was true or not. The mythos of one LA
(there are many) reinforces this fantasy of abandonment because
L.A., unlike other urban spaces that have been largely abandoned,
cultivates its dereliction. I was struck by the huge array of lamps
lying on the ground, a scene that felt like an incidental rejoinder
to Chris Burden’s Urban Light at LACMA. I read a news article
recently about how LA is the city of the future because it is
improving its mass transit. I think it is the city of the future because
it takes the basic result of urban decline (i.e. decrepit infrastructure,
abandoned buildings, deregulated public space) and uses it to
propel itself forward. It plays its apocalyptic self-image against
the plasticized glamour of Hollywood, producing a dissonance
that one time gave me a panic attack while I walked through the
.
public gardens in Pasadena with Kate Durbin. In this regard, one
LA (there are many) seems to me designed as a science-fictional
space, a patchwork of competing visions for how to structure our
lives: into irrigated hills, domesticated flatlands, outer and inner
social loops, transit brackets. It is a lesson. In the future, the future
has ended and the present will happen behind a velvet curtain in a
nightclub at the bottom of Griffith Park.
•
In its comprehensive styling of known geography, Google Maps
seeks the All only to find it cannot exist. Structured by the lack
that a totalizing effort cannot contain, Google Maps is informed
by a matrix of fantasy and its correlatives, the between-space of
representations of the real, altered and unaltered by Photoshop,
a surveillance technology designed to render a fixed image
of a changing field. In some time down the line, when certain
landscapes erode beyond recognition, the most convincing
evidence of their former existence will probably be Google Maps.
I’m not a futurist except in this regard. Later, with a multitude of
mapping technologies that will eventually render it obsolete, the
original map will itself become a kernel of the real, distorting our
perception of everything that we experience when we experience
the so-called natural. Together we will watch the present unfold
from afar. Glaciers, mountains, fields: we will understand them
only in terms of our seeing them represented online, consigned
to the archive because their original, transitional form will have
entered a delay between phenomenon and absence. I mean to say
that these things are going away. Of course the bison we watch in
northern Montana should graze free of our having to see them to
know they had ever been there at all, but that isn’t the case.
•
language is landscape
every word dissipates into its mountains
valleys, and oceans.
Laurie Anderson once said
virtual reality
will never be convincing
until it has some dirt in it. This is also true for writing
base unit preference: the vowel over consonant
.
consonants are buildings; vowels their foundation
vowels and consonants are organized
into words organized into commands
language is weather, too. The water came up to 20th street
and 10th avenue in Chelsea
at the height of Hurricane Sandy’s
storm surge
I played a drinking game until the power went out:
one shot of whiskey for every time
the CNN newscaster said “surge.” Thirteen-foot surge
drink
higher than expected storm surge
drink
the East Village was evacuated in boats
Long Island, Staten Island were partially destroyed
in the surge
drink. What does not change /
drink
•
You are fugitive. I am reverie!
•
No mistake is made without permission first. At sea, I have been
this, with you, thrown into the pile of things moving across us
in rhizomatic bliss. Do you remember the early passage in Joe
Brainard’s I Remember where he describes throwing his glasses off
the Staten Island Ferry? To re-enforce blindness with behavior, I
return to this moment so often because I have thrown my glasses
into the harbor, too. Melancholy, even in its most cloudlike state,
is never invisible to others; it is only ever abstracted to its absolute
and most potent normalcy until it becomes the environment you
exhaust yourself in. Like taking a train upstate mid-summer to be
by yourself and finding that the entire train is full of people doing
the same thing. Pollution is extradition of the everyday, detritus
deterritorialized and spread across the mechanisms that create daily
life in the first place. Joe Brainard washed ashore of this landscape,
among the floating nuances of newly depleted resources like love,
kindness, memory. How many modes of production can we fit into
this sentence? Disaster is tremendous and overwhelmingly narrow
in its concern. Can you name it? And does its name stick?
.
•
I once saw the city of the dead in Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss,
an ethnographic film about the Hindu burial practices in Benares,
India. The city of the dead is not only filled with the dead, it is
filled with the living who arrange the ceremonies of the dead and
lay them to rest in the Ganges. I saw this film a long time ago
at Bard College and can no longer remember what the forest of
bliss refers to. Perhaps it was ethnography, the central point of
the film being its silence—lack of commentary—and therefore
the redemption of the anthropologist in Western liberalism.
Perhaps a bliss is the post-ontological lack after death, things
like personalities hovering over the void. I watched bodies get
dumped into the river as professional mourners gathered to say
goodbye. Today the forest of bliss is on fire. And though I am not
dead, someday I will be the flowering death that burns down the
temple that pays homage to it. Light of the country beyond me, in
monsoon time, perhaps the forest of bliss will be a film that plays
its demise then turns to ash, which we will stuff in our mouths.
My death will reach everyone who has met me, whether they
remember me or not. And my death will walk across the plains to
the city of the dead to meet me in the forest of bliss and together
we will cork the void that is this mysterious landscape it demands.
•
In black swan theory, the event that disproportionately
redistributes the weight of our attention—scales on your eyes,
etc—is always within a range of predictable options for the present
but is usually unavailable to thinking before the event occurs. The
new philosophers will spend their last days locked in their cars. It
shouldn’t come as surprise. It should come in Kansas, the ripple in
the wheat of an ideology made of recycled paper. It should come
when we make plans to meet on Saturday for a drink but cancel
because neither of us wants to bother meeting in real life. It is
easier to text than to upend the present situation despite its roving
paradoxes. There are clouds in my windowless bedroom. If I
mention semio-capitalism, what kind of poet does that make you?
Doze at the sight of its flowering, wear what is available, wherever
you find it. Mercenary delight has already invaded the next world
and is finally pushing back into this one. These signs point to the
future but to nothing else, and therefore what do they mean? That
.
when I finally bought a mirror I smashed it within minutes? Palms
freeze, the world is covered in ice, aliens come from space. The
future is traveling furiously toward you at incredible speed and will
beat you to your destination to surprise you by its resemblance to
what you have already seen. This is how the world works itself into
a groove. This is why I chartered a plane, piloted by aliens, to see
the city covered in ice. It was, after all, just behind a curtain I could
easily part.
