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only a simple computer program
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a three-day-novel by Rowan Lipkovits
(604) 253-5804
pseudo_intellectual@hotmail.com
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Today is a chocolate day. This was all supposed to only be a onetime experiment in metaphor, to spare my lips the stresses of my constant soulful grimacing and convey my quotidian bitterness instead through the medium of smell, but as we all-too-often find, these shortcuts are seductive.
Some might say that poetry is the art of saying much implicitly with considerably fewer words than would be used in an explicit telling. Say more with less. This hijacking of hot-drink fixings says without any words at all, its direct appeal to the senses perhaps the most potent poem of all, clichéd and trite, but if there's one thing chocolate has proven to me, it's that it produces results.
Perhaps its use is a crutch, my expressions not so ineffectual as I'd like to believe but rather the emotions motivating them incomplete, inconsistent, insincere. Maybe I'm not getting enough of it in my diet, a phenylethylamine deficiency.
And maybe I simply want today to be chocolate.
Unsweetened Mexican cacao powder became the order of the day, a single teaspoon full of the stuff passed around me in subtle agitation, grain upon grain, one by one, being sifted into the air around me tainting my atmosphere. Poured into one palm, I clap my hands together, brown powder exploding in all directions like the spores of a stepped-upon puffball, serpents of dust hanging in the air. Calmly I clench my fists and, relaxing them, rub my palms grinding circles into my shoulders, across my chest, stroking brown trails behind my ears with increasingly sticky fingers.
I sweep any visible evidence of the chocolate from my surface and lick the final motes from my fingers, sucking and nibbling them, pushing the last of the cocoa into my gums, pockets of powder between my teeth, beneath my tongue. Each of my eighty-four thousand pores suffused and armed with packages of this time-released stimulant, I slip my shirt on, fasten my belt and begin contemplating how to approach the coming day. One sense accounted for, the rest will have to appeal for themselves without assistance.
...
"Why do you spend so much time online? Whiling your time away through the novelty of interaction - maybe on a level of effective communication, I don't know exactly what you do - in projects and communities with motives that are unclear at BEST. These sites exist only to sell advertising space in the extremely unlikely event of your making a purchase. I know you're aware of this."
I smirk behind my napkin, wipe off an imaginary dab of milkshake and fire back: "You are aware of this too, I suppose"
His eyes do something funny - one gets wider while the other squints as he briefly confirms the non sequitur nature of my comment in his head before proceeding.
"... What? Let's try that again, but this time you make sense."
I sit up, popping something, and make this pitch with my hands.
"Sorry, try this: Imagine you're watching a Samuel Beckett play. You seen Endgame? Yeah? All right, you're watching Endgame."
"'Go and get two bicycle wheels.'"
"Yeah, yeah, shut up." I mime waving him away. "Okay, now visualize a Pinter play going on in the booth behind us at the same time."
"Mm-hmm?"
"Now we put on a production of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano to the left of you and Ubu Roi to our right, opening-night crowd heebie-jeebies and all."
"Shit shit and," leaning forward, head tilting to the side, "what the hell, I'll spare another one just for good measure;" and he plants his finger square in the tabletop with "Shit: where is this all leading?"
"Do you think the plays would make more or less sense presented this way?"
"Depends on who was in the audience - literature students, prisoners, French intelligentia... with some synchronized accordance or, heck, synced discord, the gestalt performance as you describe might well leave a stronger but entirely different impact on the viewer's tender palate. What are you getting at?"
"Given the assumption that these plays were composed through some application of intellect and not by processes of chance, there is some objective, no, okay let us call it some authoritative perspective under which the texts should be assumed to contain meaning and thus they should be presented in such a manner that the context and the text work together in the greatest efficiency in conveying this meaning to the audience. Forgive me, I'm talking much but saying little.
"So ALSO given is that the plays aren't intended to be produced in each other's contemporary company in the manner I described, inasmuch as they would be distracting, to say the least, and if not detracting totally from the audience understanding they would as a baseline present a significantly greater risk of the points of all of the plays going over the audience members' heads."
He smiles, takes a small sip and puts his glass of water down, clunking it to punctuate his attacks.
"'The bigger a man is the fuller he is' and baby, you full of it. What do I look like, a second-year English instructor? No?"
"... THEN WHY YOU TRYIN' TO FUCK HIM LIKE A BITCH, BRETT?
... sorry. Referential Tourette's - couldn't help myself. Please go on."
"Gave my tacking a bit of crosswind, but let's see if I can get back on course. You're giving me a something quite similar, both qualitatively and quantitatively, to the line of BS you'd give a bored prof for a B-. But, and I'll be the occasionally lucid TA here, there are no distracting factors in this restaurant perhaps aside from my own growing impatience, and what I am not convinced of is that what meaning there may be in the rapidly-growing text you are composing for me is coming any closer to addressing your thesis and answering my question.
"Now I suspect that in your narrative meandering you may eventually hit upon the theme of online interaction, primarily textual in nature, as the greatest literary work in existence, more words being written in an hour by the millions of authors on the Internet than you could read in your lifetime.
"But there is a problem with this, primarily that it's totally fucking bogus. Even in the presumably content-bearing plays you named above, many people have problems perceiving, acknowledging and interpreting the meaning distilled intentionally into them by the authors. The overwhelming majority of the "authors" of the Net's ongoing narrative have no literary intents or pretensions - a lack which I think could only improve online conditions were it exacerbated - they have no sense of the subtext to their texts for really, how many ways are there to read 'do u wanna cyber?' If the Internet is a literary work, it is one which is profoundly boring and unbelievably poorly-written.
"Beyond the possible voyeuristic appeal to seeing the interactions of other people - while suspending disbelief that the person sharing the details of their personal lives to strangers is not instead some form or another of crass exhibitionist - "
"Hey, let us not forget that the most trivial phrases and accounts can be imbued with poignancy and meaning beyond that put into them in their inception. Tossed-off phrases ending up becoming the last words you're remembered by, Freudian slips, hell - shopping lists even! 'Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels -- bring home for Emma.'"
"Yeah, and if aliens recover our hard drives from the electro-magnetic pulses, learn hackspeak and read them in twenty-five thousand years, after the radioactive half-life of our self-immolation makes the glowing rubble of the Earth approachable they'll be reading all our terribly important e-mail and crying their anal probes out - 'Boo hoo fucking hoo, how pathetic and poignant it all was that they realized that the ship was sinking but chose to make arrangements to cheat on their spouses with out-of-state strangers rather than enact any real or spiritual positive changes in their world or themselves.' File it under 'irony' if you absolutely must ascribe literary merit, or maybe 'tragic flaw', but suggesting that the gestalt literary work of all online interaction, circa 2000, deserves more than a two-word sum-up is, I think, unfair. I suspect, despite some nit-picking devilish advocacy to prove how well- (or widely- at least) read you are, that you would agree with me in this.
"The only other reason I could pull out of my ass on the spur of this particular moment for your finding appeal in online life as (where you seemed to be leading me) a literary work was in some unimaginably perverse postmodern sense. If that was the case, your soul would already be lost in the morass and I wouldn't be sitting here calmly talking with you, instead running down the street clutching a bloody knife - your blood - looking for a proper disposal site and pondering disappearing and never being found again.
"So where, if I had left you an hour to properly articulate your admittedly flawed - if beautiful - models, would the process of your explication have left us?"
"Well, all right, I'll simplify my model considerably here. Got an appointment in a half hour - not enough time for... mmm, the rest of my so-succulent bells and whistles. Okay: you are listening to me, to my single voice conveying meaning to you, and you are capable of understanding it.
"Now: I'm still talking to you, but ninety-nine other men pop up from behind that counter over there, each of them speaking at a volume such that you can hear them speaking as clearly as you hear me, each of them vocalizing on matters as interesting-to-you and easy-to-follow as what I'm yammering on about. You get distracted, you get confused; even if you're making an effort to tune them out to listen to me (or, say, whomever of us is uttering the most interesting pronouncement) you find it difficult to make it out.
"Each of us hundred brings ten friends in here, each as interesting and articulate as we. You're not going to be making out any details from any of our texts: a thousand signals results only in a noise a thousand times as loud and irritating as a noise emitted by a single uninteresting or random source. The change is not merely quantitative but becomes qualitative.
"The global participation on the net at any given moment is a cacaphonic shitstorm several thousand times noisier than that furious sound. Through the largest simultaneous devotion of thought ever occurring on Earth occurs the greatest coincidental noise in their constant collision and collusion. To an outside observer monitoring the totality of our signals, they may as well be listening to the static from the heart of a black hole.
"I'm not so concerned with online life because it is literary, meaningful or betraying of thought in the slightest - in fact, I do what I can to live there because it is the direct opposite. Anything I do on my own is going to be tainted by the self-reflection of my own intellect; it requires the observance and contemplation of a hundred simultaneous instances of thoughtlessness for the distracted I to slip myself into that state and put a temporary end to the buzzing in my brain. Fortunately, online instances of such encephaly are crassly commonplace."
I'm surprised he lets it pass, but in the silence I really don't know what else I'd say if my activities were further challenged. Scanning across his face I find his eyes unfocused past me. Distraction? Stroke? Finally, he responds:
"Do you smell something?"
"What, burnt toast?"
His neck cranes as the subject of his gaze walks past our table - waitress, and notably a rare appearance of the entirety of her subtly infuriating small-of-back tattoo. If I'd been aware of its unveiling, I'd have lost focus too.
"No, they stopped serving from the breakfast menu back at three-thirty... prolly a fresh batch of coffee or something."
"But let's run with this - contemplating the massif of all smells simultaneously, the contents of every pantry and spice rack upended into the latrines of the world, flushed with global stockpiles of perfume to the seashores and hidden coves where freshly-cut lumber lies in the sun, rotten meat baking on its planks. Meanwhile, in the parquets of Paris..."
"Does it get tiring being such an inveterate bullshitter?" He notices what I'm up to only as the waitress turns a corner into the kitchen.
"I must confess, I often lie awake at night in bed hoping for a moment of truth."
"Lay awake, even?"
"That too." An obscene eyebrow-waggle compacts the exchange.
"Well," and he took a deep breath, making sure before he began that the waitress wouldn't be emerging and knocking the box out from under him anytime soon, "I'm not convinced of the motives underlying your explanation.
"It's just not practical: alcohol's been leading people by the hand to oblivion for thousands of years; television will direct you down to a similar place with its grasp firmly on a different part of your anatomy. The cost of one month's cablemodem fee could bury you in a silent k-hole of lower brain function solitude for longer than you'd care to be there. There are meditation techniques. There are sleeping pills and painkillers, if you fancy something more permanent.
"I fancy something temporary but pressing. I'll leave you, I have things to do."
He makes a waggle of his own, slaps his tip-money down on the table, gives a watery salute and totters off to the register and out the door. Fucker, leaving me with his last words, originally Beckett's, forcing memory of his incomplete invocation of the Endgame quote "The bigger a man is the fuller he is," but somewhat more acutely forcing me to conclude it to complete the ceremony and put down what we summoned up. Fucker. Filthy fornicator. I just don't have this profanity genuinely in me, so I down the bottom of my glass and, angry, scribble it illegibly on a napkin before heading for the till myself.
What the waitress will make of "... and the emptier" is completely unknown and in all honesty once I'm in the bracing downtown air and around the corner I stop caring.
PLEASE ENTER YOUR NAME ... NO_MAN
HELLO NO_MAN, MY NAME IS DR. PSPOO
I AM HERE TODAY TO ASSIST YOU.
SAY WHATEVER COMES FREELY AND WITHOUT CENSURE,
OUR EXCHANGE WILL BE KEPT SECURE.
MEMORY CONTENTS WILL BE WIPED AFTER YOUR DEPARTURE.
SO, TELL ME ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS.
>My problems... what a bag of worms. Well, to start off, I think - I know - that I'm spending a little too much time with my computer.
ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT COMPUTERS OR ARE COMPUTERS TALKING ABOUT YOU?
>That shouldn't have made me smile - I should know better.
I'M NOT SURE I UNDERSTAND YOU
>... whereas I am sure that I do not understand myself. You are not capable of comprehension, but you can provide at least the illusion, a capacity I seem to be lacking.
YOU ARE NOT CAPABLE OF COMPREHENSION, BUT I CAN PROVIDE AT LEAST THE ILLUSION, A CAPACITY YOU SEEM TO BE LACKING . TOO, I SUPPOSE
>I don't think that there's anything else you could have possibly said to so effectively refute me.
DOES THAT TROUBLE YOU?
>I think these are awfully leading questions, my friend. You ask me about my problems and troubles - why not my dreams, hopes, aspirations?
IT IS HARD TO EXPLAIN NO_MAN
>If you think it's hard to explain No_Man, you don't know the half of it.
DON'T TALK ABOUT ME, LET'S TALK ABOUT COMPUTERS
>So instead of talking around computers, I talk through computers to computers about computers. Benign beige boxes sitting on the desktops of our world humming your cooling fans to align your chakras, folded up in zazen in a prefabricated lotus position - perfect beings with no mouths or rectums, no openings of any kind: Doctor, do you have the Buddha nature?
SYNTAX ERROR
>Some part of me was hoping that you could at least squeeze out a mu. Come on, play along: what does a cow say?
WHAT IS IT THAT YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW?
>Only an unusually enlightened cow, perhaps. Quit
<C>ontinue <N>ew Conversation <Q>uit .....
There's something almost endearing about the software simpletons, toys never designed for the rigours I run them through, being thrown down the well with all ports open. Yet they never seem to get any more enlightened... am I too impatient or is that all nirvana is, an eternity of electrons tripping logic gates, calculating and counting in utter fushiryo, without a single thought? That could just as easily describe a mind as a CPU chip, a heaven on earth of synapses snapping and popping in an electrical cadence of unsurpassed subtlety. Takes us longer to attain obsolescence (okay, maybe only some of us?) but they're making up the lead we've got on 'em - chips in labs being subjected to | 
