Monopticon Blues, or, That’ll Never Happen
https://imaginecassandrahappy.substack.com/p/monopticon-blues-or-thatll-never
Dear Mister Nobody—
I haven’t written you in a while but I’ve a good excuse. I was sparring with Frank Exit, who said he needed a partner. As you know, Frank learned his martial arts from the Badger school of combat, ie he’s apeshit in the ring. Even though he promised repeatedly I’d be safe, after I got one lucky jab in, he countered with an aggressive combination that a) broke my pinky toe, b) bruised my ribs, and c) detached my retina.
It was this last that’s had the hardest recovery. I’ll spare you the details but I haven’t been able to see out of the eye for weeks and have only recently been cleared by my plucky ophthalmologist for reading. (This doctor and I have, for better or worse, gone through a lot together as he’d treated previous ailments of unfortunately this repeated site of injury.)
It was the prohibition against reading that brought me closest to the land of the blind so that I felt both the structural ableism of the seeing world as well as my internal such prejudices, being more caught in relief by the new disability.
What do I mean? Well, firstly I explored various technological prosthetics, in particular text-to-speech and so-called “whisper” transcription services. Have you experienced these yet? Their convenience makes me predict, sadly, that we are moving away from the cipher of written language. Largely I think this is because we will come to value the intention behind our communication more than its form, and these transcriptions can be fed into bots which will then render our garble into limpid corporatese for our correspondents (or their own agents).
Poets thankfully will counter that form and content are inseparable, and I’ll be on their side always, but we’ll be in the minority.
Much will be lost in this transition. So much so that I hold out hope that it will be less a complete transition than a spread, a so-called spectrum, with a deluge of new food-in-a-tube boilerplate prose on one side and the pebbled remnants of human linguistic genius on the other. As I write this letter with pen on paper (later to be typed and fed to the omnivorous network), I think true intention is something that appears precisely at pen stroke or key touch, when thought manifests as concrete word. It is individual and heterogenous — and biological. Human. Whereas the new methods will be increasingly synthetic hivemind, sheared of idiosyncrasy. Smooth as mush. All has its season but this another coffin nail.
I already hear the rejoinder: Whatever, boomer.
Or Luddite or dinosaur or relic. Replace with the day’s fashionable putdown to describe those protesting the rushing current.
Or maybe the voice of denial comes first: That’ll never happen.
■
Dear Mister Nobody
— I know your real name now but I prefer your original alias —
after you left me on my island of giants, injured but recovering, did you give me much thought? Or did you simply think me a vanquished trial, disappearing behind you in progress’s infinite wake. Hayao Miyazaki, that contemporary master who draws tales for children, may keep the archetype of the hero’s journey but rejects that of the evil villain. The black hatted bad guy should not be, he argues, depicted as one-note. In other words, the antagonist, too, contains multitudes.
Not being able to read was tough but before turning to audiobooks I tried to have the bot read to me. What I mean is I downloaded ebooks and had the phone’s native TTS engine read them out loud. (I agree with the unpopular view that listening to a book isn’t the same as reading it. Nonetheless, this primer is a very good one for disability studies and also — wotcha gonna do.)
For some cosmic/random reason, the first evening of my convalescence after my surgery, I heard a voice speak of René Daumal’s Mount Analogue. I’d heard this title many times before but something about this instance told me it was the one I needed to read next. Or perhaps it was the spiritual rhyme I had heard in its name with a book that had fascinated me when I stumbled upon it a few years ago: Mike Kleine’s mysterious Arafat Mountain. (Here’s an interview with Kleine.)
Daumal’s book describes a mountaineering voyage to an invisible peak. You perhaps already know it, Mister Nobody? Daumal has a fascinating and somewhat tortured biography, huffing gas to explore near-death as a youth, an indirect acolyte of Gurdjieff, he dies young amidst WW2. He died at the end of writing Mount Analogue — so we can add it to our list of great unfinished novels (eg Soseki’s Light & Dark and Perec’s 53 Days).
(But back to my technological prosthesis experiment for a moment. In this particular case, publishing and technology failed me. The ebook, near its mysterious end, had pages in the wrong order — no doubt the result of a bad OCR scanning job. This was, as you might imagine, a source of great confusion and frustrating symbolism. See above for disability primer.)
Mister Nobody, what I’m saying is I think I should thank you (and Frank Exit) (maybe you are one and the same) for my injuries. I had been at such a fast pace these past few months, hustling on the hamster wheel, the hedonic and anhedonic treadmill both as well as actual treadmills, spread thin and juggling… but then because of you — all of that stopped. I had to stay in bed all day and listen to street sounds and feel the light shift from one side of the apartment to the other. And then I had to spend weeks listening to voices reading books rather than reading them myself. And then I took slow gentle walks through my neighborhood, which all of a sudden was both blurred but held delicious details and wondrous objects and delicate shadows. I was returned to slowtime. …I’d like to stay but already feel the ratrace’s pull. See / catch
you later.
Love,
Monsieur Cyclops
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https://imaginecassandrahappy.substack.com/p/monopticon-blues-or-thatll-never
