Nothing (28 page)

The effect is not destruction, but reordering, renegotiation of the content and interaction with our
other household
, the electronic rooms where we store not only our digital identity information (credit cards, numeric values, browser cookies, even background wallpaper and design), but also the more abstract or self-negotiated tokens (Word files, pictures, image of self). The computer, in some way, has become the most direct avatar of the user—show me your desktop and I can likely glean a dozen things about you, from sense of order to priority to interests and ideas. A computer is, in some sick but honest way, a child—an amputated mirror of the self we interact with via buttons, cameras, microphones, and light. This is not the case for all bodies, surely, as some can hide out, but it is more the case than at any point before, and perhaps more so than we’d like to imagine. Even JODI talking about the overlay interface of
OSS
seems like some handbook to a waking: “There is no About or Read.me file, just this grid of folders. It is a stress situation, some people try to deal with it, others want to get the CD out as fast as possible but then realize there is no CD icon and it gets even worse.”
¹⁸⁷

Brian Eno explores this sort of self-mesmerizing concept even more demonstrably in his sound and video project
77 Million Paintings
, which combines an enormous database of randomly combined generations of color, light, and tone to create an aural chamber. The work is composed actually of only 296 works that in collage and juxtaposition, along with the layers of sound, develop a field that seems to the viewer (and the creator) to be ever-shifting, but is actually mathematically rather small: a mistakenly finite infinitude. According to Eno, one would have to watch the program for 450 years to see a repeat. This confined but massive rubric, he says, drums power from a reversal of “the supposition that you can always hear something again. We’re so used to recordings. The last 120 years of human history have been this tiny little blip . . . where suddenly we could have identical experiences again and again.”
¹⁸⁸
In this way
77 Million Paintings
models an insomnia enslaved, the endless spooling busy brain of a sleepless meat at night, parsing and reparsing the same terrain into new glyphs. As though in the head the parsing ramifications and wrinkles rooms seem to go on and on in all ways therein forever, ultimately the branching and unbranching all leads back to the same center, the brain space occupying a negligible 2 percent of any human’s weight.

Though it has always been this way—translucent rhizomes and complex histories set on any air, and the brain endlessly wanting and not succeeding in defining itself within—the package of the junk from which we might select our elements grows only larger, and more readily awaiting, and more there. The internet itself becomes another realm of endless hive meat over the always waking 24/7/365 bright-lit gorge. Not only are we now dealing with the hours of our experience and seeing, the residues of every person’s person hung like unseen curtains over every inch where we inhale, there is also now a second, electronic looming, rooms buried and married to all rooms, a silence seeping of some nothing, renaming names inside our sleep, or at least gone. Toggling between the Google SafeSearch feature’s levels of access—two modes adaptable by any user, with a third offering “moderate” coverage between the two—quickly reveals the onslaught of fuck and feces connectable to most any search. Google
mother
and in the first page of image results (at the time of this writing) you get a picture of a nude dude ramming his cock into a young girl’s face while another, older woman lies back on the bed to watch. This next to a picture of somebody’s grandmother with a thank-god-someone-still-loves-me face, holding flowers and wearing pearls. Though we no longer need to remember all the information we once had to store inside our heads in order to make it useful, the definitions we might gather in the same name are all gyrating.

From enough distance overhead everything appears the same. The way on Google Maps the cursor’s tiny outstretched hand clenches the earth before you drag—the leaning diamond-shaped eye hidden over each and every one of our houses, capturing that air in database-made air. The weird looming patches of gray blank space over new area as the browser waits to load. Google-mapping “hell” actually tenders a result: “We don’t have imagery at this zoom level for this region.” A search for “heaven” returns 2,894 locations. Photographs of photographs, to be zoomed in on or out from, made into directions, toured, printed out.

For all the hours held inside us, and the vertices of potential other ways those hours could have been spent—a splitting unto infinite splitting—there are also all the doors and paths held over us, on our exterior. Watching. Waiting. When. For what. That there could never be an answer becomes as well the innards of the question—the bloodlight of the word itself. Because you wouldn’t want to know. Because you could not. Because, given the answer, the light inverts. Becomes a no light. And then these houses—folding on a fold. “I can’t jack off without history peering in,” writes Johannes Göransson.
¹⁸⁹
And too, the air and walls and endless doors—and the out-of-doors. The excess breathing, the history of any dot, or any word around where it’s been placed.
¹⁹⁰
Here where after erasing the word “mother” in the search bar and instead typing the address of the house where this sentence is being written into Google search leads me to hover over the terrained image of the house, inside of which, one might imagine, I could also be sitting, in my underwear, glowed on by this screen. According to the current map, there are three cars parked outside my house. Two of colors I don’t recognize. Another waiting in the street. This moment frozen in representation of the place wherein which my body matured, grew older, large.
Who said you could have that? The roof over what is mine. Why doesn’t Google see inside the house, forever? Google Attic. Google Mind.
Enmapped: a rash of trees like enormous broccoli grown over a section of our roof. Whole sections where trees cover the screen from end to end entirely—a huge crudded maze of green. Other cars on other streets unmoving as if we all went still at once. What people hidden in this picture, beneath these roofs or blending in. What, unknowing, is contained—like the Magic Eye paintings sold in most every mall, which I’ve never been able to make work.
Look again.
Out of this chaos might emerge a landscape. Within this skin there is a seam. A watching without a blinking. A kind of map of sleep that does not sleep.

Down the street here in this rendition of the miles around where I grew up there is the church where I was baptized, where later the troop leader of my Boy Scout group showed me his stab wound to prove how I should listen. Staring at the church’s image here again today from this false overhead, I can’t help but want to move further there into—to crease the page of screen and enter. I zoom until its face is wholly splotch: pixels larger than their data. The window tonight is not cold. The light inside the house against the night again makes it difficult to see anything but me. I see my face there, as if through the window looking in, as if waiting for me to open the glass and allow entry. My eyes. The size of the church since then has at least doubled—the way all modern churches seem to, eating $$$$—you can read its new countenance from the street, the pervading hulk of it that much larger, longer, as if it’s adhered to the air it once only inhabited, in surround.

Further down along the browser, dragging, from the church there is the driveway where a nine-year-old girl once threatened me with a hammer. The house where during third-grade afternoons we imagined war with sticks, and concrete in the backyard of a kid I helped learn English from his Portuguese—he who since then, right after high school, drowned in his parents’ bathtub in Brazil with a girl. The cul-de-sac where some kid I’d never seen before and would never see again showed me the origami woman he’d folded into being, complete with vagina lips cut and pasted out of a dirty magazine—such moments somehow rendered in my nowhere, made of other people, less of me. Every hour of this caught inside here unremembered but by my temporary brain—a brain that can’t even catalog all of that it holds or has hid.

It seems I’ve hardly grown since all of when. Perhaps my mind has. Perhaps, in confabulation of the distances the world once held, and the amount it seems to hold now, packed full, the air indeed has been pushed in, the same way time as we get older seems to go faster despite its eternal measure, with each new second held that much slighter in contrast to the bulk of all the years. If time and space are not enough to fit my incidental reconnaissance to the Google Maps image I’ve so recently drawn up to write of herein, this night I will go running off into it in nothing but the rhythm of my breath and the sloppy smacking of my feet upon the pavement, perhaps in some pattern of repetition over where I’ve run before, the misted night above me abstruse with such glow and the hung bulbs here making the sky by now resemble one large silent box, of a silence I can’t help but think of as an image, of dimension, screaming silence, white on white in other air, which from underneath and right there seems as if somewhere above me it must come at any minute to sudden end, a day contained, a thing photographable from some distance, a thing contained. If I am asleep or awake right now, I can’t remember, and it hardly seems to matter.

]

]

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Today while trolling through various web results for deeper sleep cures, I find a man in a video titled “All Hypnosis Is Self Hypnosis”
¹⁹¹
who offers to hypnotize me right now—through the machine, via recording. Underneath his up-close, centered, smiling head is the URL of his hypnosis vendor site, along with a message beneath it telling me to visit the site and relax even more. The Google-supplied ad over the message under his ad under his head says “Learn to Hypnotize Anyone,” and then it changes yet again
.
The man tells me to close my eyes. “Because there is nothing for you to see,” he says. He’s staring. I press pause and stare back into the pixilated lidded whites of his small head. The ads around him go on blinking. While he’s on pause, I get new e-mail—I see it appear as a number annotated in another open browser tab, and when I click over to read, as I now must, by impulse, I find a new automated message sent from Facebook, letting me know someone has commented on my latest status update: a Ben Marcus quote that appears also earlier in this book. The message says the comment says:
I like that sentence, too.
I delete the e-mail. I refresh the page and see nothing else. The paused video on the YouTube tab sits behind the fold of this tab waiting. In total I have six tabs on my browser open: Gmail with all the not yet archived but already read mail compiled;
¹⁹²
Facebook home with all the updates of the 894 friends I supposedly have;
¹⁹³
a Wikipedia page on the Ziggurat of Ur, which I can’t remember why I have open;
¹⁹⁴
a long essay on the rhizomatic riddle of Stanley Kubrick’s
Eyes Wide Shut
a friend sent out on Twitter,
¹⁹⁵
for which I’d closed Twitter to have room to fit all the tabs comfortably on one screen and still be able to see when new e-mail arrived; one of countless pages today selling hypnosis CDs;
¹⁹⁶
and the video of the man—each of them in some way selling something, information however hidden
¹⁹⁷
—and each waiting in their own silence, folded, to be again brought to front or dismissed.

Before going back to the video again, I open a new tab on my browser and load iGoogle, which holds my Google Reader, tracking the hundreds of RSS feeds that get continually updated and tracked and fed into me through the day. I see a friend has shared a link to an article on Gizmodo.com that claims how each year each American consumes 34 gigabytes of data (including internet, TV, radio, and reading), accumulating in a national sum of 3.6 zettabytes per year (a zettabyte is one billion trillion bytes, the article explains).
¹⁹⁸
Within this, per day, there are slightly more than one hundred thousand processed words, through movies, music, books, and TV, though the internet speech dominates them all.

At the far end of the house I hear, in my gaping, someone opening a door. Seconds later, my cell phone vibrates in my pocket, tickling the thigh flesh, radiating cells. Without taking out the handset, I press the button that makes the vibration stop, sending whoever is in there on the far end to a recording of my voice asking him or her to leave me a recording of his or her voice.

I go back to the video of the hypnotist and I press play. The man is again speaking, as if he’d never paused at all. His head is gloamed white and slurred with purple. He has eyes that sometimes roar, but held confined in this clunky, bitmapped image. A music comes on around him—the same blank synth spread through all the other hypno-wanting videos and mp3s and websites with embedded sound. He begins to speak into me, saying the same things all the others have, asking again that I relax, that I go deeper on into my softing, that I forget the whole rest of my whole life, my future, my glow of nowhere, that I turn on my unconscious mind, “because our unconscious minds know all of the things we have experienced in the past . . . all of the information from our past . . . perfectly acceptable for you in every way . . . and in a moment you might have a new idea. . . .” The words do what they want coming at my head. I’m kind of glazing over, but not, I think, in the way he means—I’m fucking bored, but no more tired than I had been, or groggy, or wide open—at least I think.