I woke up a few hours ago from a vivid dream in which you were the only other human being. it took place down in the dining room here at 1218 mifflin. you were in town for a visit. everyone else you might have cared to see were out at various social functions, so we had the house to ourselves. you were asking questions, trying to get a feel for how things were going with me, and all I could come up with were somewhat banal examples and allusions to this or that piece of canonical literature. finally, exasperated, you sprung towards me mid-sentence and forcefully put a hand over my mouth. you expressed some dissatisfaction with all of this indirect information and asked for something unmediated, something raw from my own personal stockpile of descriptions. I was unable to comply, and felt a heightened sense of psychic bankruptcy and depersonalization. you were characteristically gracious in the face of my failure, and the dream sort of faded out from there. the final image was of me sort of ironically sweeping the room with a gesture, conceding the infinite number of possibilities, incentives, locations, lures, and personal drives that might lead a person to leave the house, have experiences, and thus have something to talk about.
not really such a stretch from my relations with people in general these days.
this past week I've been quietly and rather uneasily transfixed by 2 works by the french writer michel houellebecq. have you heard of this fellow? apparently quite the sensation in europe, going back more than a decade. after doing a little research, I decided to procure The Map and the Territory, out just this year, and The Elementary Particles, from 1998. the others were described as more or less b grade porn.
wow. these works blew me away. they capture very viscerally something very soulless and desolate about certain contemporary worldviews and lifestyles. his characters tend to be solitary/isolated academics and artist types. I identified very closely at times. that doesn't necessarily speak well for me.
I think I need to read more fiction from the past couple years. I've gotten too bogged down recently with what might be termed the "antiques." the contemporary world, as well as its literature, has been slipping more and more from my grasp. I read journalistic accounts from time to time, but watching a subjective, flawed, semi-fictional personality navigate this fragmented landscape of ours is very helpful for an out-of-touch person such as myself. I can access alot of information from the comfort of my room, but how to interpret and sift and prioritize such information- well, I usually feel pretty clueless. there is also, of course, the sense of living vicariously, which came out in the dream aforementioned.
I sent you a text regarding gmail chats. have you ever done this? I have a real fetish for not being overheard on the phone, and we live in such close quarters up here. beyond that, there's something charmingly deliberate, slower, and thoughtful about this type of exchange. also, as writers and readers, I think it has a certain vocational value as well. also, the conversations are saved, if one so wishes, and can be revisited later. for aspiring playwrights, this could also serve vocational interests.
so I suggest this not as a distancing or depersonalizing measure, but as a legitimate mode of communication- something to supplement our phone conversations.
it is astonishing to me how completely my life has been turned over to the computer this past year or so. I downloaded a kindle app for my pc and have come to almost prefer reading on it. hands-free, large font, can read in a dim room, can jump around, can easily cut and paste for the mash-ups I described in an earlier conversation. so not only now with reading and writing, here I get my news, here I listen to music, here I watch occasional movies, here I sometimes revisit graphic art undertakings, here I communicate with my friends- I am now one of the truly atomized and disembodied human types! if only I could get my caloric/nutritional needs from this thing, the metamorphosis would be close to complete. . .
the computer insect emerges. . .
(only the uneasy dreams would fall outside its dominion)
(or would they?)
with fragmented love,
matt
