I don’t really remember a lot from yesterday. Mostly, I remember some of the messages I sent and got. I got an email that was titled “The Desert.” I opened it, but it was addressed “Dear Friends.” Normally, I would delete an email that was addressed to “Dear Friends,” but I decided to read it since I had such limited access to the world of the internet. It appeared to be an invitation to go to a writing conference or gathering or something in Joshua Tree in California in April. Of course, there was no way that I could go to “the desert” this April because I’m a single mom and teach five classes a semester and I live in the deep south. Also, my son currently has hand, foot and mouth disease, so I had to take care of him today, which made this feeling of “of course I could never do something like this” worse.
I proceeded to read through the email. The part that struck me the most was in the body of the email where the people who sent it wrote, “What are we willing to change about our approaches to the mundane in order to alter that numbed consciousness—and can we usher in a time when the innovation within the arts in this country is less about how we can commodify our gifts and more about how we can use them to fight commodification in our daily lives? Are we truly courageous souls? Can we learn how to say ‘not for sale’….” The email went on. I wondered, of course, how many people this email had been sent to? 10? 20? 50? I wondered if someone who sent the email to “Dear Friends” would have seriously want to know the answers to these questions, or the material and labor conditions that would limit access to this kind of conference or gathering. It seemed strange. I’m not trying to disparage the people who sent the email. I am, though, trying to show you the mind frame I was in. As I said, normally, I would have probably deleted an email with the subject of “the desert” and I definitely would not have read through an entire email addressed to “Dear Friends,” because of the generic and impersonal nature of the address, but reading through the email made me feel more alone and alienated than I had in the previous three days and I thought it was ironic that a well-intentioned email aimed at pulling post-election poets and writers together for a nice gathering had become so irritating.
The other communication that struck me should have made me feel a lot better about myself and less lonely. My friend Natalie Eilbert, who I sent a pdf of my latest book to, (by the way, you should read her poetry!) messaged me to say it was “brilliant.” My friend Brian Blanchfield texted me to say that he had loved the poem I texted him a few days before (read his poetry too!). But for whatever reason, I felt sadder than ever. I think that the last message I sent before I went to bed was to McKenzie Wark and just said “I hate poetry,” to which I got no response. Alex texted, “you seem very isolated and alone.” I told him, “I know. I think that’s the point.” Throughout the day, I also cheated a little bit with my rules. I checked my Facebook messages and personal email sometimes during the day when my rules told me to only check them twice a day.
My feelings of total isolation reminded me of an art project that I put together a few years ago. I wondered if I could be a conceptual poet or like a video artist or something. I don’t know. I set up this thing where I went to TJ MAXX every day either before or after work and took a video of myself talking about, well, nothing in the dressing room.
The dressing room functioned as a kind of confession booth that I went to religiously, day after day. I remember that at first the experiment was fun, but over the course of a few weeks, it became horrific. It became uncomfortable and annoying to go to TJMAXX to just sit there and talk to myself day after day. People in the dressing rooms next to me thought that I was a crazy person. I wanted to know what it was like to go to a place where you are supposed to go after work to make yourself feel better about capitalism (buying things like purses, tops, pants, perfume) but instead just sitting there with it. The project made me feel sad and isolated to the point where reality started losing its bearings. The dressing room made me feel self-conscious and paranoid. I wondered how experience, altered and organized differently, not based on impulses but art projects could bring you to new levels of consciousness.
In no time, fun flipped into something terrifying and now I’m starting to realize that that what’s happening here, right, with my internet deprivation project. The internet was supposed to be fun. Becoming a body of information is supposed to feel amazing! I mean, the internet is fun. But it was also masking a lot of the horrors of capitalism. With all of that information over the last few days, all of that reading and interaction literally drained out of my body, it was hard to know who I was. Happy feelings were replaced by dark feelings, perhaps always there. Without the constant directive of the internet to be positive enforced on an hourly basis, what was to hold back this flood of negativity?
At TJ MAXX, during the weeks of my video art project, I never thought about the, for all purposes, slave labor that made the clothes I was talking about. Slave labor in other countries far away—but I could feel it. I could feel the dead labor—it was all around me. The vectors and specters and vampires and trade ships and ghosts and graveyards and morgues of capitalism, I could feel it all.
The women always said the same things to each other “That looks cute.” The person who gave people the number of items of clothes never said anything bad about anything anyone tried on. If someone emerged from the dressing room, she would say, “That looks cute.” On the outside, things were cute. On the inside, the new reality, organized by a set of principles that I set up completely arbitrarily, was crumbing and scary. I gave up my art project because I thought that I would lose my mind if I didn’t.
I thought too, back then doing the art project, and now with my internet deprivation experiment, that something of the memetic was dissipating or collapsing before me. Both experiments forced reality to be something else, perhaps closer to itself, and that reality wasn’t more awesome, it simply highlighted that both the fantasy and the reality were deeply flawed. With no mirror, with no memetic spectrum to bounce between, at TJ Maxx, I was bored, lonely, hopeless, angry, depressed and annoyed. All of the feelings I had previously gone to TJ Maxx to alleviate by in consumer culture, sat inside my body like a swamp of negative feelings from which I could not escape. I became the alienated labor that I was—that everyone around me was—I had to inhabit it, and it was equally frightening that the mask of ideology, of consumption, was so easily torn from me simply through a few “rules” that I had set up for myself—mainly, that I had to go to TJ MAXX every day and videotape myself in now what had become not the confession booth of my despair but the prison of it.
And so one day, I aborted the project and returned to “normal” consciousness. I can’t stress enough how much this project threw off the coordinates of not only my sense of who I was but what I was. Theoretically, I knew what I was—a mother, a consumer, a late capitalist American bourgeois, but I don’t think I had ever felt it in the way that I had felt it.
My internet experiment had brought me to a low place—that of disconnection, paranoia and depression in a matter of days but I was determined to continue through Sunday, despite Alex’s concern. And I wasn’t going to cheat. I leave you with the last poem that I wrote before I started this experiment, the one that Brian said that he loved:
The Crisis of Capital
Oh how I cathected so much
onto the great Ponzi scheme
Of late-capitalist literature
Watching the dew roll around
Inside a swiveling rose
Trying to retrieve some pleasure
From fucking what may come.
Maybe I was responsible
For the breakup of a marriage or two who can say anymore
what those eyeballs
Blamed on me
And so I cruised the streets more Parisian , More vampire than I cared to admit
Having had enough of the crowds
The blighted yes yes yes
And wanting to fold back into my body the ruin and devastation,
Of the antique centuries
but nonetheless trapped here inside
the ever-morphing architecture
of the deep state
Which is a system of course
More than a structure
The players, coded, who change sides with no remorse
And the military industrial complex
Brain stem from which
There is no way back, the bleak talk of peak oil inside the conference center's monstrous ebb
Since this is all decline as
When the digital subsumed the analog and another
eugenics set in
Simple and sad
These new clocks
Their death sentences
Their ticking mechanics
And what to make of
The mother's death?
The Seine was beautiful and the Rhine
was beautiful too
And the Elbe like the bird
Calls of loons
And being in bed with you was also beautiful even though
we messed it all up with our sad expectations
With our excessiveness
I should have told you I loved you
But I was nervous and wanted you to be impressed by me
And because you didn't love me
It made it worse but maybe you did who knows
maybe you just thought this is the poet
who fucks all the other poets
but what does it matter anymore?
This is the most desperate ransom note to the future–if you are out there—please save us from this–I'm sorry we were statecraft–if it makes any difference, I was a poor agent, a poor analyst, a poor, poor player who knew very little and cried a lot in spaces you aren't supposed to–in the office at work, in the closed down Safeway parking lot at night alone in bed when no one could hear me–made bad move after bad move, made the most embarrassing situations more embarrassing, I was language's poor double agent and to employ me to spy on language took my body in opposite directions and ripped me apart— "I dread the events of the future not in themselves but in their results" hohoho Edgar Allan Poe
so never do this to us again