“The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” -William Blake
I often wonder about the damage I’ve done to my brain; the myriad follies that have led me down dark and ominous roads, eviscerating memories and knowledge, stoking the flames of a metabolic paranoia too abstract to put into words. I worry about the obsessive-compulsive nature of innovation and advancement—the more, more, more! tempering the less, less, less!—the notion that what already exists isn’t good enough, could be better, or resolved by being removed altogether. I wrestle with the effects of technology on our collective ecology—the boons, the drawbacks, the forever unpredictable outcomes. I speculate the ubiquity and pervasiveness of screens—digital and figurative—and the global supply chain’s reliance on them: that entire nations risk sudden collapse in their potential absence. I fear the future like the fool who fools nothing. I fear being anything but the fool. I lament the facility of disassociation, but cannot imagine a world wherein such a door doesn’t exist.
In essence, I, like so many others, contemplate the absurdity1 of life; the negative space where stars go to die; the infallibility of poetry and the demiurgical figure of death; the crucible of modern identity politics and the subversive transmogrification that takes place on a daily basis—via artificial intelligence or our own conscious and subconscious behavioral patterns.
Furthermore, I ponder about the commodification of imagination; the gaming of love; the aiding and abetting of mass consumption, of overconsumption, of pollution; the war on drugs and the incarceration of countless innocent beings; the old wars that evanesced into new ones, that never really ended, that were never truly resolved; the anatomy of the soul and the hypotenuse of desire; Time and Space; Taoism; sex; the demise of democracy; hypocrisy; art; the flanked system that is Web 2.0.
What the f*ck just happened in the last 25 years? Are we burnt toast? Is that it? Is Web 3.0 just another gimmick cosplaying along the “New Age Consciousness” spectrum? Do you ever wonder why you’re not dead yet? When was the last time you spent an entire week without a screen? (I can’t recall the last time I spent a full week without one.)
These questions are nothing new; their brooding omniscience exists in the corners of our minds and quotidian routines, sometimes, more overtly: in the eyes of someone we love or loathe, in the smallness of a gesture we weren’t anticipating, in the shock of a headline, or the cruel reality of one’s dwindling capital (literally and figuratively).
I’m no philosopher, nor am I a scientist, literary scholar, internet guru, or evangelical theosophist. I am just another unsolicited voice on the internet, someone who sometimes classifies herself as a writer, though most of the time, in much more vague proportions, using euphemisms and dysphemisms and dark humor to avert the social classification system altogether. I like to break my own rules and entice people with a careful mixture of truth and abstraction.
Think of all the ways you’ve ever described yourself—to your friends, your family, your peers, your colleagues, your crushes, your lovers, your internet community; on your job applications or in your academic or creative bios; on your dating profile(s) or in the deepest depths of your journal. Perhaps, for some of you, there is consistency, e.g. “I’m an artist”; “I have a fancy degree”; “I am a highly organized, detail-oriented, innovative problem solver with xyz credentials from xyz companies and over 10 years of experience working as a (name all your titles)”; “content creator”; “(proud) father and husband”; or, my favorite, “I’m ‘still figuring it out’”. To all of you who’ve maintained a level of consistency: At what point, if ever, did you feel you were pretending, distorting the truth, or flat out lying?
And to those of you whose profiles and bios and résumés and ‘spiels’ to the ever-dreaded, uninventive question: ‘what do you do?’ have morphed and evolved and zig-zagged and inflated and deflated and flipped inside out: When do you feel most connected to yourself? And how does that feeling play into the words you prescribe to your self-image, your current one?
I was sitting down yesterday afternoon to write my weekly bit, my brain somewhat fried, my body energized but dehydrated (though I hadn’t drank anything the night prior), with about twenty plus tabs open—everything from job applications to Wikipedia pages to two different gmail accounts to two different are.na channels to the 7-day free trial run of Paramount+ so I could finish season 40 of Survivor (Winners at War) to the Mars cazimi in Scorpio to the Merriam-Webster dictionary to an interview between Nathalie Handal and poet Raul Zurita to god knows what the fuck else.
I was supposed to have eaten by this time, exercised, left my house. It was Saturday. The light of the day was already dimming. I was still in my pajamas. Half a cup of coffee was sitting beside me. I spent the morning sleeping, awakening, not meditating, not reading my book; responding to emails and texts, reheating yesterday’s coffee, drinking my ACV water and gulping down my daily probiotic and other stolen supplements from Whole Foods. I lost the day to the screen that I still face. A child cries across the breezeway. The tree that hugs my bedside window looses more of its leaves.
I signed up for a new credit card called Bilt that I can use to pay rent and earn points with—because when you have points, you get tempted to spend more money you don’t really have!!!! I looked at my Unemployment Insurance portal for the umpteenth time to see if money would ever appear. Finally, after two months of patiently waiting (and blowing through my savings), I saw dollar signs. Payment had been processed for one week. And the two weeks in October I wasn’t paid? I’d have to pray to the UI gods and goddesses otherwise known as Mercury and Abundantia. Good thing I’m an esoteric mensch. I thought about Mexico in February (I like to dream) and the future of GNOSES and the fact that I spent nearly three hours on Friday typing up a technical partnership agreement as if GNOSES was now a business. I grimaced. What am I doing? I only checked Instagram once that day and neither dating apps currently installed on my phone. I thought about deleting all of them for good.
The mind continued spinning, making excuses for the vices that love to creep back into my life, uninvited. Then, like a zephyr floating through my snowglobe mind, came the non-word thespianage. I smiled, ruefully, as ruefully as any seasoned thespian or spy would smile, as if having discovered the hidden key to the hidden lock that exists somewhere within us all.
The evening prior, my roommate Samantha and I had been discussing our mutual admiration of Willem Dafoe and Joaquin Phoenix—‘real thespians’, she called them. We both found these thespians terribly good looking. Terrifyingly handsome. Grotesque, but in a smoldering, compelling kind of way. I was eating popcorn I had just made on the stove. We were in our kitchen, it was nearly midnight. The two of us discovered we’d taken parallel, albeit disparate paths home following her poetry reading in East Village—at a screen printing studio called Works in Progress. How fitting, I thought. I left before her. Hungry and indecisive. We each wandered the streets, me further downtown, her further uptown, and stopped for a slice of sustenance in the form of pizza; we each took the 4, whose electricity suddenly went out as we snaked our way from Wall Street to Borough Hall. The desultory fluorescence of the 4 had suddenly transformed into a thrilling scene out of a Dario Argento film—the blues and reds of the tunnel signals flashing moodily throughout the subway car—and yet, nobody flinched; they just sat there, unfazed, almost silent, but deep down, maybe just as beguiled or fearsome as the person next to them. I was waiting for my life to end, to at last return to the embers from whence I came, to be yet another casualty at the behest of technology gone awry—this notion of being a deceased victim of a shocking headline flashed through my mind—and then, the lights returned. The woman to my left ruefully smiled at me. I ruefully smiled back.
In those whirring moments of darkness, in two separate train cars, one behind the other, at different times, Samantha and I felt something. A de-robing of the collective spirit? A subversive form of cosmic subterfuge? Blind possibility? It may not have been thespianage, but it was something perhaps like it.
Thespianism is a fancier way of saying the art or profession of acting—or ‘pretending to be someone you are not’ and getting compensated for it’.2
Espionage is a fancier way of saying the art or profession of spying—or ‘intelligence gathering’, particularly when it comes to secret or confidential information.3
And then we have THESPIANAGE…
Thespianage is the tragicomedy that is life that is modern times that is me and you and us and them and it; and the circus and the ring of fire and the stage and its various props and all the interlacing emotional rollercoasters from birth until death. Starring: Deception and Vanity in the leads; Will, Grace, Depression and Entropy as the supporting characters. And a small cameo by Tomfuckery and his playmate Lust. Thespianage is written by Love. Directed by Woolgathering. And produced by GNOSES.
To be continued…
In the Latin sense of the word, which means ‘out of tune’.
Compensation in the form of payment—or bragging rights.
In the U.S. we have two forms of ‘legal’ espionage, one that is mandated, when “in the service of a government, company, criminal organization, or independent operation,” and the other that falls into pretty much all things Web 2.0 and the technocracy that surrounds it.
this was an amazing, electrifying read. can't wait for more!