The Observable Universe E-Book

Heather McCalden

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 395

Beschreibung

Are we ever truly lost in the internet age? The Observable Universe is a moving, genre-defying memoir of a woman reckoning with the loss of her parents, the virus that took them, and what it means to search for meaning in a hyperconnected world. When she was a child, Heather McCalden lost her parents to AIDS. She was seven when her father died and ten when she lost her mother. Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1990s, her personal devastation was mirrored by a city that was ground zero for the virus and its destruction. Years later, after becoming a writer and an artist, she begins to research the mysterious parallels between the histories of AIDS and the internet. She questions what it means to 'go viral' in an era of explosive biological and virtual contagion and simultaneously finds her own past seeping into her investigation. While connecting her disparate strands of research – images, fragments of scientific thought, musings on Raymond Chandler and late-night Netflix binges – she makes an unexpected discovery about what happened to her family and who her parents might have been. Entwining an intensely personal search with a history of viral culture and an ode to Los Angeles, The Observable Universe is a prismatic account of loss calibrated precisely to our existence in a post-pandemic, post-internet life.

Leseprobe

3‘Part meditation on loss, AIDS, and viral transmission, part howl of grief and fury, The Observable Universe spells out better than anything else I’ve read the transformative power of the internet. It felt like Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts meets Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, and is easily the equal of both.’

— Gavin Francis, author of Adventures in Human Being

‘It isn’t pain itself that inspires great art; it’s the frenzied avoidance of pain that pushes an artist to do something, anything, other than feel pain. This book is what arises from that practice: the artifact of one writer’s solitary, complicated grief. With every carefully, thoughtfully written page, one feels the unwritten grief thudding behind it, beautiful and monstrous. And in the end there’s no true story, no solution to the mystery, no final coherence. But there is this marvellous book.’

— Sarah Manguso, author of 300 Arguments

‘An extraordinarily intimate record of grief in connected times, The Observable Universe is poetic and precise, tracing the spiralling connections, but also the empty spaces, the mysteries and emotional complexities the past leaves behind. This book is haunted, and will haunt its reader, too.’

— Roisin Kiberd, author of The Disconnect

‘How is it possible to fit the whole universe in a book? Heather McCalden has miraculously combined far-flung ideas and stories to show the interconnectedness of all things. Bodies and technologies, selves and societies, histories and futures, memories and speculations – McCalden reaches far and wide, and brings it all home. This book is brave and unique.’

— Elvia Wilk, author of Death by Landscape

4‘Heather McCalden’s The Observable Universe exquisitely undoes our concepts of illness, attachment, and entanglement. This book is not about HIV/AIDS, or about loss: it is born of them both, and so made of them. McCalden asks: if a virus is part of us, is it separate from us? When people die, are they still inside us? Strands of obsession, contagion, and radical inquiry braid together into lyrical meaning, without ever settling into moralistic conclusions or assessments. This book is explosive and profound, unusual and timeless. I believe deeply in the beautiful work it’s doing.’

— Cyrus Dunham, author of A Year Without a Name

‘The Observable Universe both soars and tunnels, a feat of kaleidoscopically structured thought that moves with the glowing force of McCalden’s voice. It flew me around the world, drove me through my favorite city. It is a smart, supple, nuanced companion through the twinnings of grief and growth, and the ways we forge our lives not despite these, but because of them.’

— Johanna Hedva, author of Your Love Is Not Good

‘Heather McCalden has constructed a masterful debut – it is a work of confident craft, razorwire wit, and unflinching courage. This meditation on virality (in the body and on the internet) as the central metaphor of our time is canny cultural analysis all mixed up with devastating personal investigation. Mixed-up is its central formal feature, in the best way: The Observable Universe is a mixed tape, a photo album, an archive of what’s lost and what’s left and the fragmented work of sifting through it all for a story we can live with. May this be the first of many books by McCalden.’

— Jordan Kisner, author of Thin Places

‘A remarkable book.’

— Noreen Masud, author of A Flat Place

5‘What does it mean to lose two parents to AIDS, to inherit a load of heartbreak? What forms can we invent to write unruly, keening, immoderate subjects? This book is catchy, a contagion of feeling, transmitting in all directions from McCalden’s taut and ghost-ridden mind. Its effects are sly and accretive. Beautifully researched and achingly tender, The Observable Universe filled me with awe.’

— Kyo Maclear, author of Unearthing

‘Last night I dreamt I was Heather McCalden again. Which is nothing to be wondered at, when she has written a book which, just like the phenomena it seeks to record – viruses, grief, the internet – has the power to stealthily spread through and reconfigure perception and sensation, shape our experience. But is also very much to be wondered at, because I’m not sure how she does it: like the photo album that The Observable Universe is modelled on, the effect is immersive and cumulative, and seems to defy any sweeping understanding. It strips us of intellectual hubris, returns us to a place of awed humility. Maybe the only thing we can, and should, observe is that this book is like no other.’

— Polly Barton, author of Porn: An Oral History

‘A gifted writer’s brilliantly innovative approach to autobiographical non-fiction, syncing a narrative of profoundly personal emotion with the invention and evolution of today’s cyberspace.’

— William Gibson, author of Neuromancer6

7

THE OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE AN INVESTIGATION

HEATHER McCALDEN

8

9

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Metaphor is halfway between the unintelligible and the commonplace.

— Aristotle, at least according to the internet10

11

DIRECTIONS FOR HOW TO READ

This book is an album about grief. Every fragment is like a track on a record, a picture in a yearbook; they build on top of one another until, at the end, they form an experience.

12

WEIGHTLESSNESS

The precondition for all things that exist in albums is weightlessness. Images and songs have zero mass, stamps are mostly surface area, and autographs seep into their surfaces, becoming indistinguishable from them. The function of albums, long before the advent of photography or recorded sound, was to secure the particles of everyday life that might otherwise slip under the radar if not captured and pinned down: letters, old receipts, birth announcements, cookie fortunes, postcards, hair, pressed daffodils, and movie ticket stubs are items that might evaporate if not carved out of space and glued into a new chronology; albums impose themselves on their contents. There is always a beginning, middle, and end, a first place and a last place, and so the eventual arrangement of information might say more than any one object on its own.

13

SEASHELL HEAD

I covered one ear with one hand, and my forehead with the other, and gently twisted my face down into my clavicles, folding into a seashell. The bartender asked what I was doing.

‘Hiding,’ I said.

‘You haven’t even had a drink yet.’

This wasn’t true exactly. I hadn’t had a drink in this bar yet, but I had five beers at the art opening and a shot of gin, beforehand, to get me there.

‘Who are you hiding from?’

‘Ghosts.’

The bartender then extracted his body from the space he was occupying and slunk down the bar, somehow leaving the impression of his outline hanging in the air in front of me as a sort of decoy. From his new location he proceeded to slide – on a single fingertip – a menu in my direction, as if I might be leaking something. ‘I’m going to leave you alone now,’ he said, ‘with all that,’ swirling his hand in a loose figure of eight to suggest a host of spectres around me.

‘They’re not contagious,’ I said, but maybe what I should have said was, ‘I’m not contagious,’ except before I had time to correct myself he was gone, flirting with someone else.

I didn’t normally run my mouth like this to strangers, or anyone really, but the exhibition had left me with a horrible vacant feeling. It featured a series of black-and-white portraits of naked men. They were taken with a pinhole camera the artist had placed in her vagina. The less said about this, the better.

When the bartender returned, I ordered a double shot of Basil Hayden with a single ice cube. I theatrically 14raised my drink towards him in a toast at which point it finally dawned on him I was three sheets to the wind. I wasn’t just some loon who had accidentally wandered in from the street, but a person genuinely trying to wind the night down, after being stuck to a wall somewhere else. He clinked an imaginary glass against my own and then left me to my thoughts, which were black.

The bar was heaving with bodies jutting out at every conceivable angle and voices cascading in thick, jagged murmurs. Despite the noise I somehow caught a piece of a story being told in the crowd behind me. A woman suffering from intense, undiagnosed leg pain visited a temple in Cambodia for a possible cure. ‘A monk there told me that my heart was too heavy for my legs to support,’ she said, ‘so he walked me over to a tree and pointed. “Leave it here!” he said. “Bury your heart under the roots. When you go home it will not be inside you anymore, and after some time, you will forget where you left it.”’

I chugged the rest of my drink, threw on my coat, and shoved my way onto the street.

Outside, the London air stung my face and I clung to that bitter sensation until I lost track of everything else. It was late, I was shivering, and drifting like a piece of seaweed through town. The story of the woman and her legs swam in and out of my mind, and I wondered about putting my own heart into the ground when I looked at my feet and noticed they were no longer moving. It was unclear to me how long I had been stationary, but when I came to I was standing in front of a decrepit phone booth thrown off its axis by a car accident. The red exterior was severely dented and covered in a rich film of dirt. When I opened the door the inside was full of dried leaves, wadded-up McDonald’s bags, crisp packets, and cigarette butts. Ads for phone sex hotlines peppered every 15available surface. The booth seemed to have most recently been used as a urinal, but I walked into it anyway and closed the door behind me, the bronzed faces of Crystal, Violet, Alana, Tiffany, Tiffani, and Amber Rose staring at me from ceiling to floor. In slow motion, I picked up the receiver and held it a few centimetres away from my ear. I could barely make out a dial tone. It was faint, but it was there. It sounded like a song.

16

LA MARATHON PHOTO

My mother, Vivian, ran the LA Marathon sometime between the late seventies and early eighties. The only evidence I have of this is a photograph in a coffee-table book celebrating the Los Angeles bicentennial.

The dust jacket, glossy and jet-black, shows the city skyline piercing the night sky. Inside, postcard-worthy images of Angeleno city life, of Olvera Street and the Hollywood Bowl, interrupt thick passages of text glorifying urban planning innovations and architectural feats. At the dead center of the book is the marathon photo. It features a sea of tanned runners, fit and glistening in tangerine light. They wear headbands, wristbands, and tank tops with piping in primary colors. Their numbers billow across their chests like sails pulling them forward to the finish line. Near the center of all that color and motion is Vivian flashing her megawatt grin directly at the camera. The other faces, absorbed in purpose, look forward or down at their feet, and some blur, appearing in frame only as streaks of motion.

17

NETWORK

Several links form a network, like a tethered bank of office computers hissing and pulsing with electrical static; the computers are joined, ‘linked,’ but are also tied into a configuration, into a relationship, with one another. ‘Link’ is a verb and a noun – an action and a situation.

We might ask how information travels in such a situation. It flows. Like blood. It circulates down veins and chambers. It spreads.

18

LOS ANGELES REFRACTION

Running underneath Los Angeles are several currents of myth. They propel the city forward with the same force as the material ones of traffic and population density. Their motion generates a field of visual distortion and all the images ever taken of the city rise out of the concrete like heat waves and bleed over rooftop pools and stucco houses, Bel Air mansions and strip mall parking lots, taco trucks and palm fronds, canyon roads and chain-link fences, and the consequent haze disorients. It both enthralls and repulses, confusing traditional navigational strategies. Tourists get nervous as hell when they can’t locate the geographic center of town. It means they can’t traverse it in any normative sense, and so the landscape fails to assemble itself in any familiar manner. Los Angeles is then written off as ‘weird,’ ‘nightmarish,’ and ‘impossible,’ and while it is all of those things, it is also a place where anything can happen. Most things, in fact, have.

19

ORGANIC MATTER

When a person you love dies from organic matter and not from a car crash or a gunshot wound, the matter goes straight into you because: it continues to survive. Your loss creates a vacuum and the organic matter – say, a virus – rushes in to fill it. It exists there then, underneath your sternum, below the cartilage, mutating, evolving, spreading, as if it were a living thing, so you let it invade your nervous system, your organs, and just like that it becomes part of you, part of your story – a virus after all is made up of letters, just like words, and it serves as an unbroken transmission broadcast through time saying: I go on. I go on. I go on –

20

OLDEST KNOWN SPECIMEN

In 1959, a blood sample is taken from a man in Léopoldville, the capital of the Belgian Congo. Thirty-nine years later, during a global search for the origin of HIV, the sample will test positive for the virus. To this day, it remains the oldest known specimen of HIV in the world.

21

TO HOLD TO

‘Observe,’ according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, originates from ‘late 14c., observen’ which means, ‘to hold to (a manner of life or course of conduct), carry out the dictates of, attend to in practice, to keep, follow.’ This suggests that what we calibrate our minds to creates a bond, a physical connection to the thing observed: a holding. Observing religious ceremonies, holidays, tax laws, anniversaries, solstices, weather patterns, reservation times, and shopping mall hours forms points of contact between the self and external phenomena. By extension, it follows that the whole world might be collected through a series of links –

22

JAPANESE PHONE BOOTH

I heard a story on National Public Radio about a telephone booth in Ōtsuchi, Japan. A man in his seventies built it, painted it white, and placed it on a hill in his garden where it overlooked the sea. The interior of the booth held a black rotary phone, a pad of paper, and a pen.

The man, who had been a gardener, began building the booth after his cousin passed away in 2010. The two had been close, and there were many things left unsaid. In interviews the man explains the idea for the project came to him because his ‘thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line,’ so he created a poetic cord of transmission, a direct connection to the ether, where words and sentences could diffuse into the atmosphere.

The booth was completed shortly after the 2011 tsunami, and then people just started showing up to use it. They used it to call the afterlife. They used it to call their missing parts. They called landlines and mobile phones. They twisted digits into the rotary and then paused, listening to phantom rings before speaking.

The radio segment played recordings of these conversations. The clips ranged from casual updates, grandchildren informing grandparents about math test results, to speechlessness. Some people hurt so much nothing came out, except, somehow, I think I knew what they wanted to say. I could hear it in their breathing, in their tight inhalations, and though the segment didn’t communicate this, I imagined people also called their own old lives, wanting to hear the way the world used to sound when it still made sense. I have the feeling old dorm room numbers were called, and childhood homes, and other numbers that have long since been disconnected but maybe, somewhere, still ring.

23

MAN–COMPUTER SYMBIOSIS

In 1960, J. C. R. Licklider, a psychologist and pioneer in the field of psychoacoustics, writes ‘Man-Computer Symbiosis.’ The text describes a future where humans and machines are harmoniously intertwined:

In the anticipated symbiotic partnership, men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much more effectively than man alone can perform them.

24

ORIGIN

I was born in Los Angeles in 1982. In June of 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention observed the emergence of a new ‘cellular-immune dysfunction’ passed via sexual contact. The findings, published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, cited an unusual cluster of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) cases as the evidence for this new condition. The cluster, located in Los Angeles, was formed of five men aged between twenty-nine and thirty-six, all described as ‘active homosexuals’ with no ‘clinically apparent underlying immunodeficiency.’ This was the first official account of what would become known as AIDS. During the early nineties my parents died of ‘AIDS-related complications.’

25

PHOTOGRAPHS

Eight or nine years ago, at a second-hand shop on Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn, a friend and I combed through boxes of old photographs. I went elbow-deep into some of them and pulled out a handful of gems. Remarkably, one of those finds has stayed with me all these years and I go back to it every now and again. ‘George and Dora, 1947,’ according to the elegant script on the back.

The two stand in front of a pale house. George has his arm around Dora’s waist. Dora tilts her head towards George’s shoulder. Autumn leaves spread out before them. A breeze catches the corner of Dora’s skirt and lifts it where it has remained frozen ever since.

There are few things in this world that make my heart work in that way where some small part of it, located deep within its ventricles, shifts and dislocates itself. It pumps all the time, but those subtle movements where it crawls to the front of the ribs and waits, fluttering – those moments are infrequent. Oddly, photographs trigger these rare instances. In short: a flimsy two-dimensional object can do what no living person can: incite my emotional defense mechanisms to lift. Looking at a picture I can be vulnerable and exist beyond my own chronology. I am able to achieve the age-old dream of being in two places at once.

Looking at George and Dora now, my heart does its thing. Everyone is innocent in a photograph because the future hasn’t happened yet. It remains an undefined quantity hovering somewhere over the horizon. Fate, chance, whatever you want to call it, is staved off for a few seconds when the shutter is depressed. George and Dora are probably gone now or dealing with the effects of age. Maybe this was their only photo together, or one 26of thousands. Perhaps they lost touch after that autumn afternoon, or it could be they lived together happily until George succumbed to a myocardial infarction in 1974…

These possibilities churn around me like real, definite things while actual life slithers away the moment I peel open a text message. I am somehow always out of step, but a photograph offers a way out: a piece of life is sealed in an image, the image is sealed in a photograph, and I seal the photograph through my vision. I observe things in it, confirm them somehow, and while nothing ever becomes solid, I manage to at least, sometimes, catch myself.

27

TELEPRESENCE

Strictly speaking, nothing is happening on the internet. It is an arena where people recite, replicate, and broadcast information, but the events themselves happen elsewhere. Maybe you react (viscerally) to a tweet – a thought plucked out of someone’s mind – but the reaction occurs in your own brain, not in a shared, breathable reality. Your reaction is to a screen and it is siphoned through a screen that removes traces of hair, skin, and teeth. Biological debris. Things indicative of a living presence.

Without the touchstones of biofeedback, we become apparitions. When I engage directly with someone, my physicality changes and a chemical adjustment occurs. Online nothing changes or needs to change despite the immediate connectivity, so I can’t quite place or cognitively organize what is happening. This opens up a new category of experience: awash in nebulous clouds of data, I acquire a disembodied orientation, the closest frame of reference for which is that of the spirit world. Ghosts, poltergeists, wraiths, things that haunt – but we don’t yet know the consequences of existing as such for extended periods of time. Top Google results for ‘long-term haunting’ include:

Haunting Is the Newest Dating Trend You’ve Definitely Encountered…

Three Things You Can Do to Stop Being Haunted by Regret…

Haunted by Your Own Ghosts: Dealing with the Past and…

28

INTERGALACTIC NETWORK

In 1962, Licklider becomes the inaugural director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in Washington, D.C. In this new role he issues a series of visionary memos detailing an ‘Intergalactic Computer Network,’ or a global system of interconnected computers that facilitate sophisticated information exchange.

29

G IS FOR GUMSHOE

I have a distinct image of my mother, almost like a photograph, but then it moves. Vivian sits in bed reading, propped up by a collection of pillows. A perfect wedge of light emanating from a lamp on the nightstand catches her before spreading out over the wall. The angle of light creates a corresponding wedge of darkness above it, and for the hair of a second the two shapes are held together like a large abstract canvas. Vivian then flicks a page neatly with her index finger, and the scene ripples as if a stone had been dropped into it. After a moment, stillness resumes and my attention lands on the cover of her book, which features a large, yellow capital G. I attempt to trace the embossed curve of it with my eyes until she folds the book down on her chest and stretches her arms out to me. Then the image freezes again, in my mind’s eye.

30

NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE EXISTS

No material evidence of viruses exists in the prehistoric record. Certain endogenous retroviral elements in the human genome are the closest approximation we have to fossils. It is not the preservation of an original virus, but of its echo cast through time; if we trace back the echo, we can (maybe) compress it back into something resembling the original sound. The human genome is 8 percent viral, which means that every time viruses have penetrated our germ line we have mutated in response to them. Our evolution has thus been driven in part by negotiating with viruses. They have changed us and we have changed them, and while nobody has any idea what any of this means, or where it will lead, our destinies spiral around each other, not unlike a double helix.

31

AZT

Anticancer drug azidothymidine, or AZT, is developed with a grant from the National Institutes of Health in 1964. AZT’s purpose is to combat cancers caused by ‘environmental retroviruses,’ but clinical trials in mice show the drug to be ineffective. It is shelved and forgotten about for the next twenty years.

32

HOW TO SPEAK OF THE DEAD

To survive loss you, like the virus, must ‘go on,’ but: how to speak of the dead? What tense is appropriate to use? We are gathered here today for our dearly – present tense. They were so full of life – past tense. In the reel of my memory currently unwinding they are laughing – 2:42 a.m. (GMT). They are ingrained in my nerves, my senses, their way of thinking siphoned through the network of my mind, their manner of speech caught swimming in my mouth – and I am still alive, still ticking, so how dead is this really? Aren’t they still echoing through my DNA?

33

THE PARTY

My parents met at a party in Santa Monica or Venice. It was a new, money-filled decade. It was summer. The sun shone in the sky for twelve hours straight.

Recently divorced, she drove a midnight-colored Porsche. She was older than she looked, and was pursuing a second (or third?) degree in psychology/public health at UCLA. He had left the UK because he was in trouble with the law. He sported a mustache and was taller than almost every other man in the room.

They exchanged some words, which led to a casual relationship, which led to a weekend in Vegas, which led to me, which led to them both being dead a few years later, at the beginning of another decade.

I don’t know how I know about the party, or the trouble with the law. I don’t even know if any of these things are true or if I fabricated them over time – except, I do know about the Porsche, and the affiliation with UCLA, and the weather. The weather, at least, hasn’t changed. The sun still burns.

34

A CONTINUOUS LINE

What is a lineage? A ‘continuous line of descent’? A downward cascade of information? A passage of traits lowered from point A to point B? We conceive of lineage as the most basic of geometric forms, but inherited characteristics alter as they pass in and out of flesh, as well as time, and: isn’t a line actually representative of unchanging circumstances? Doesn’t it just show, on closer inspection, the perpetuation of a singular configuration – a point – simply shifting position through space?

35

GEMMA

I listened to the story of the phone booth at work. I was stationed in the attic that afternoon so I let it play freely off my phone knowing I would be alone for several hours. I had been tasked with hand rolling three hundred posters and stuffing them into tubes that would be mailed to shops across the UK for the promotion of a new product. It was a thankless, mindless job, but I was ever grateful for it, always keeping at the back of my mind a list of truly miserable professions I could be doing, and for less money.

When Gemma showed up to evaluate my progress, I had the legs of the story running through me. I saw her ebullient, curly bob bounce up from the spiral staircase and all the feelings that had surfaced during the last twenty minutes instantly dissolved. She stayed for the better part of her lunch break to ‘help’ me because she found some aspect of my performance unsatisfactory. The only deficiency I could identify was simply the fact that I was doing it and not her.

While we rolled and stuffed I did my best to lay out a series of pleasantries I hoped might evolve into a stream of conversation. After several dead ends, we eventually fell into a rhythm where I asked a question and she would provide me with an exceptionally long and detailed answer, almost like an etching. From this I learned that Gemma was going through the migraines of home renovations: her kitchen was ‘in a state’ due to the installation of under-floor heating, which not only displaced the rhythms of the household with her children and husband but caused nerve-shredding noise. I wanted to ask what sort of hours the contractors were keeping because I couldn’t figure out when she would be around to hear any 36of it since she was always at the office, but I refrained. I attempted to lighten the mood by bringing up how exquisite her feet would feel come winter, but she could only respond by remixing all she had said before, finishing off with the phrase: ‘This is the worst thing ever.’

I endeavored to take her seriously. I wanted to absorb what she was saying through my skin and hold it as a delicate confidence someone had entrusted me with, but I could not. Instead, I kept thinking about the phone booth, the wind telephone, they called it, and how it would feel to lift the receiver. I kept thinking about how the line from living to dead is just that, a line, the smallest of separations.

37

MESSAGE BLOCKS

In 1964, engineer Paul Baran, working for the RAND Corporation, designs a communications system capable of surviving a nuclear attack. Unlike telephony, his system does not work through pointed, centralized channels, but through a dendritic network that allows information to be spontaneously rerouted via different pathways. Crucially, information is transmitted via ‘blocks’; this means messages are segmented into smaller units of communication in order to travel more efficiently through the network. Baran refers to this concept, rather unimaginatively, as ‘message blocks.’

38

RECORD OF THOUGHT

Music and photo albums appeal to different sensory faculties but their purposes are the same: to present a record of thought. An album, regardless of species, crushes experience into matter. The raw data of a life is converted into a visual/aural document for safekeeping, but in the face of everything, what could be a more feeble gesture? Doesn’t an album just show how we try to hold on to the things that leave us, and don’t they just leave anyway?

39

MINITEL

The Minitel was an ‘electronic phone book’ popular in France during the eighties and nineties. It consisted of a CRT monitor and keyboard that could be plugged directly into a telephone jack. In other words: it was a primitive PC with online capabilities. The device was launched by the government in response to a report titled ‘The Computerization of Society’ (1978) which provided a grim analysis of the French technosphere. Widely recognized at the time for having the worst telephone network ‘in the industrialized world,’ the report advised digitizing phone lines and overlaying them with a graphical interface. The logic behind the inclusion of visual information was to rouse citizen engagement, drawing attention to the wonder of French innovation and reemphasizing its place within cultural identity; the report also begrudgingly acknowledged the increased presence of American tech in the workplace. The tonic for all these issues was believed to be the Minitel, which would also eliminate the extravagant cost of annual phone book reprints. While constructing a machine for mass distribution was perhaps an idiosyncratic solution to save on paper costs, it was one heavily flavored by the era’s enthusiasm for telematics, ‘a combination of telecommunications and informatics.’ The future, if it was anywhere, was flowing over screens.

Minitels were free and made widely available. Usage, however, was charged per minute at fluctuating price points. Once logged in, typical phone book information appeared along with cinema times, weather reports, stock prices, and personal banking information. Certain features could even handle ‘natural language requests’ which enabled users to purchase theater tickets or 40make train reservations in real time. Despite this particular advancement, there was no ‘app’ that facilitated peer-to-peer communication until a teen hacker took it upon himself to develop something akin to AOL Instant Messenger, or so the story goes. The renegade feature caught on like wildfire and became so popular it was formalized within the network. Official chat rooms were born. Unsurprisingly, as humans were involved in this endeavor, a great number of these chat rooms took on an illicit bent. An adult-themed subculture called Minitel rose, or Pink Minitel, emerged, and, without question, became Minitel’s most lucrative aspect. An entirely new workforce blossomed to man it. People were hired to impersonate ladies of the night and to message with customers for as long as possible. Sexual chat went by the name of messageries roses.

As the internet and World Wide Web rose to prominence, the Minitel faded, with senior citizens becoming the device’s primary demographic. However, it survived until 2012, such was its popularity.

41

MYSTERY!

Every parental figure or guardian has their own set of fixations locked inside objects left round the house. These objects are evidence of a private life in which you play no part. The framed concert posters, pine cone collections, matryoshka dolls, amps, gardening tools, and vintage whiskeys are germs of an autonomous, adult identity, and yet these germs leach out into the environment. As a child you absorb them. They inform your visual field.

When I try to think of Vivian as a person and not as a mother or wife, I scan our household and look at the shelves. I study the contents of her closet, leaf through her suits. I examine the cassette tapes she organized by color. I scratch at my memory for what held her attention, and I circle back again and again to the stack of paperbacks she kept on her bedside table, mysteries written by Agatha Christie, Tony Hillerman, and Sue Grafton. These were the books she read for pleasure and so she kept them close. They did not cross the threshold of the living room to be displayed alongside Bulfinch’s Mythology or The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but as far as I know, this wasn’t for appearances’ sake because as I continue to glide through the memories of this period, I see that when she wasn’t reading mysteries they were playing on our television. Essentially, if a show had a case to solve, even if it was medical in nature (Diagnosis: Murder), chances are Vivian had it on as a background track while she balanced her checkbook at the dining room table. The courtroom/cop variety were fixtures of daytime programming, while the armchair detectives dominated the evenings. Reruns of Perry Mason filled the late afternoons, its black-and-white images running disconnected in front of my eyes. Something about the show’s lack of color made it 42impossible for me to latch on to faces and so the plots became impenetrable. The only discernible feature of the experience was the theme tune with its dramatic brass overture blowing a few ominous notes before dissolving into a melody that invoked the feeling of swirling a scotch at five o’clock.

I start to hum the tune now and slowly ease myself out of memory lane and into research mode. I google Perry Mason and read several episode recaps. From what I can gather they follow a strict formula: week after week, in the city of Los Angeles, criminal defense attorney Mason takes on a client falsely accused of murder. An investigation is carried out, shenanigans ensue, and then in a climactic courtroom scene Mason unmasks the real killer, inevitably on the witness stand. Mason’s client is thus exonerated, and everyone goes home happy. Wikipedia notes that the closing line of each episode is always a ‘humorous remark.’ I now understand why the show may have been ideal for a young viewer.

Televised mysteries are, by nature, preposterous. How events are dramatized to operatic levels and then dropped neatly into a fortuitous sequence is so unlike anything in real life it’s basically comedy. Despite any wrong turns or false leads the plot nevertheless moves forward. Then there are the exposition sequences where, always in front of an audience, the detective reconstructs the crime narrative for the sake of the audience at home. For a brief moment Murder, She Wrote flickers in my mind. While not quite as predictable as Mason, certain elements appeared with such frequency that my grandmother, Nivia, once remarked, ‘I’m never inviting that woman to dinner,’ because people were constantly getting offed at the dinner parties Mrs. Fletcher was attending. But this is exactly what I mean: why does the murder always occur where 43the detective happens to be dining? And beyond these improbable conveniences, there are the detectives themselves to contend with: Poirot with his unusual, clipped gait, the refined yet restrained Miss Marple, the married duo Tommy and Tuppence, in search of adventure and money…

I remember these eccentrics from Mystery! on PBS along with muted color palettes, and gray London light filtering through drawing rooms, setting them into a pearlescent murk. But more so, underneath this, are the shivering lines of Edward Gorey’s intro animation for the series. I pull it up on YouTube and watch the black ink strokes carve out a sequence of mutating scenes: a pterodactyl flies out of an urn, lightning bolts erupt from a densely thatched sky, and a gravestone cracks into pieces as a widow figure casually sips a glass of red wine beside it. Next, a trio of coppers walk on tiptoe swinging their flashlight beams into the dark, only to accidentally discover a pair of legs sinking into a pond… I feel the memory of these pictures echo fathoms below my skin.

I quit my browser and stare at the high-res nebula on my desktop. What was Vivian’s attraction to this genre? If I could know this, then perhaps I could know something of her thoughts. Was it the distraction that appealed to her, or the strange absorption these stories offered? Mysteries have the curious effect of pulling you in before you’re aware of it. Suddenly you’re inside the plot without having made any clear decision to get involved. The reaction is automatic. Our brains seem wired to correct the disturbance caused by a mystery right alongside the detective. Perhaps this is what the popularity of the genre ultimately reveals: a cognitive predisposition towards balance, maybe even harmony.

Metaphors also point towards this tendency. The 44configuration of a metaphor forces a misalignment of ideas which irritates the mind; unable to fluidly classify its components the mind is provoked, unwittingly, into resolving the glitch of information. In doing so, the meaning of ‘All the world’s a stage,’ or ‘heart of stone,’ emerges, although not in words. Strictly speaking, the meaning of a metaphor doesn’t exist on the page. It resides only in thought, and when we catch ourselves moving through our thoughts and discovering the meaning, it creates a small moment of effervescence, of delight.

45

RADIOLAB HIV

On Sundays when there is nothing to do and my phone looks like a limp creature jacked into the wall that will never ping or vibrate ever again, I listen to podcasts to pass the time. Today’s selection is about a scratch, a splitting of the epidermis that occurred 120 years ago. The setting for the event was a stretch of rainforest in southeast Cameroon measuring approximately one hundred square miles. Enclosed by three rivers and a mountain range, the territory was virtually isolated from the rest of the world except via waterway. According to the podcast, it was here, over a century ago, where a hunter floated downstream, perhaps on a canoe, and made landfall. He then entered the forest and proceeded to execute the tasks of his profession, including the slaughter of a chimpanzee. It is inferred that during the hunting or butchering process, the hunter cut himself and blood from the chimp’s carcass dripped or ‘spilled over’ into this abrasion. Along with the chimp’s blood, however, came a virus. As the genomes of humans and primates are nearly identical, the virus barely had to adapt to survive. Simian immunodeficiency virus simply mutated into human immunodeficiency virus. When the hunter returned to civilization, he brought this new viral strain with him where it now had infinite vectors to spread…

A cut to a hunter must be an occupational hazard so common it escapes perception, and yet, to think the whole world turned on something perhaps no larger than an eyelash crushes the air right out of my lungs. I need a moment to search for my breath, but the podcast hosts steamroll on, unfazed, tracing the fateful SIV spillover strain back to its genesis, to find the ‘true origin’ of the human pandemic. After an intensive search, the strain is 46located, plucked apart, and analyzed by scientists worldwide. But of course, there’s a twist: the analysis reveals two other strains of SIV embedded within the genome of the origin strain. This finding leads to yet another theory: