Selfie, Suicide

by Logo Daedalus

  “As it says in our mission statement: ‘Every fully embodied moment of humanity’s living self- expression... is an artistic masterpiece.’ In this latest exposition, we have set out to prove this as conclusively as possible. We hope to prove to you that it’s not just the moment which is an artistic masterpiece, so is the culmination of every moment which composes a human life-time. We believe that every single human being’s life is equally & uniquely interesting. Every life is no less valuable than any traditional artwork of supposed genius. This is true because every single human being’s life is composed of such moments of expression & in the patterns that these moments create we can see the universal distribution of a trait that, in less enlightened times, was reserved for a particular subset of human beings. I am speaking of course of ‘genius.’”

  “It does not take a supposed ‘genius’ like Einstein to recognize that this universal human genius is the very source of our complete equality as subjects of human interest, & that is, as works of Art. It is the ennobling i that separates us as individual subjects, though it also includes us in the grand family of our genus. This truth has been hinted at from the very onset of human history in what, in less enlightened times, was called ‘the soul.’

  “It has only been recently that we, as a species, have achieved a state of technological sophistication so advanced & a state of technological distribution so democratic that we can prove once and for all the existence of this ‘soul’ without retreating into the darkness of unenlightened superstition, religion, or dogma. It is only now, in our current age, in which every human being leaves a trail of artifacts, pictures, words... all sorts of data & metadata of such rich diversity & insight, that we have been able to translate the lifetimes of human beings, through a universal curatorial algorithm we’ve developed, into a unique work of art composed entirely of these recorded moments of an individual human’s self-expression.

  “I know, it’s a mouthful. But don’t despair. We understand that you might be skeptical, but, we hope to prove this to you. Do not be afraid. Our exposition is a judgment free zone. There is no need to feel scandalized or ashamed or shocked by anything you are about to experience. All of it is equally valuable & insightful. All of it is Art. All of it is Humanity Expressed. Open your Mind. Open your Heart. & say it with me, loud & proud, ‘Everybody is a Genius: In Life.’”

  “Everybody is a genius in life!” Cairey’s date chirps.

  “Everybody is a genius... in life” he mutters.

  & the elevator doors open.

  Immediately Cairey’s eyes strike upon what he recognizes to be one of the confessional booths that he’d seen, years ago, when last he’d visited the MEH. Only one remains, & it is placed where one would expect a podium in an auditorium, as the rest of the room is outfitted in long rows of cushioned benches, colored like pews in a new-age church of soft-pastel sentiment. The booth is placed above & before these pews, where an altar would stand, & it is flanked by four wide-screen monitors of equal size- two on each side, stacked one atop the other.

  They shuffle to an empty pew & take their seats, joining a scattered crowd, which swells as more & more pour in from elevators on both sides, the new geniuses fitting themselves into the empty spaces among the already gathered geniuses. A faint synth choir plays from speakers somewhere Cairey cannot find. It gives him the feeling of sweating in the waiting room of his therapist, his case-workers, his doctors, & dentists, a sort of calmly carpeted eeriness which parodies his internal alarm. As the last geniuses find their seats, & the flow of new coming geniuses halts, the lights dim, & the voice from the elevator speaks to them all.

  “Good afternoon guests, friends, visitors, & most importantly, geniuses! We hope you have enjoyed your visit to the Museum of Expressive Humanism. The exposition will soon be under way. We ask that you remain silent & reserve your applause for the end of each presentation. When it is your turn to present, please make your way promptly to the stage, & take your seat within the exposition booth until you are given the signal to return. If at any time you feel as if you need to leave or go to the restroom, both can be found in an auxiliary hallway to the left. Thank you, & enjoy.”

  Cairey looks over his shoulder, past the rows of anonymous faces behind him, & spies the glowing exit sign. He wants to run to it. He wants to run through it, run out of the museum, & run as far as he possibly could from it until his weak lungs & legs forced him to quit. But he will not.

  His date taps his shoulder.

  “I’m so excited” she whispers, shaking both her fists in a display of giddiness. Then she drops the fists. “But I’m also nervous. My friends have simply raved about this exposition, but they said it can be brutal.”

  “Yeah” whispers Cairey “I- I just don’t feel so good is all. It’s just-”

  “Oh no” she says, pouting with sympathy, “are you ok? Do you need to go?”

  “Fine, fine,” he lies, against his own will, “I just maybe should have gone to the bathroom before is all- but I think-”

  “Oh no” she repeats while she doubles the droop of her pout, “do you need to go?”

  This display of empathy works on Cairey, despite his cynicism, & despite his alienation from this date of his whose real name he still cannot recall. For some reason, he still does not want to make her overly uncomfortable, to make himself a burden on her, or to embarrass himself. He pities her for trying with him, for having seen something in him worth wasting time, & hope, & effort, & a Sunday morning on. & as much as he’s not attracted to her, & as much as he loathes her, deep-down, for putting him in this position, & as glacial in scope as his submerged antipathy toward her entire sex remains, the warmth of her concern, affected or not, melts his disposition & softens his response.

  “I’ll be ok” he lies, with the lying smile of feigned courage, “I think I’ll make it. I think it was something I ate.”

  & the exposition starts with the lights cutting out & a searchlight passing over the crowd while a major scale plays repeatedly from the ambient speakers. The music ceases & the spotlight too cuts out.

  “Harold Fortier” a voice intones as the spotlight re-emerges on a middle aged man, sitting beside what must be his wife. He looks nonplussed as he sighs & makes his way, illuminated by the spotlight which tracks him through the pews, to center stage & into the exposition booth.

  The lights cut out again.

  All is dark anticipation.

  Then, the top-left screen retrieves a snapshot of a child in a baseball uniform, who grows from youth to adolescence, his jerseys changing colors with the years, his face aging, but its cheesy smile remaining constant. This timelapse repeats on a loop. Then a voice booms:

  “SPRING: Green Grass, Brother”

  The top-right screen retrieves home video footage, marked with a date from one of the waning years of the previous century, its colors overexposed & washed out, granting the clip a rose- hued halo of nostalgia. It depicts the same adolescent in a Varsity uniform cracking a linedrive to center field, at the bottom of the ninth, at tie game, & the voice booms:

  “Summer: Bright Lights, Champion”

  The bottom-left screen retrieves & flickers through snapshots of this adolescent, now a young man, beside what must be his wife, both of whom wear baseball jerseys for the City’s team (The Prophets) in various locations, holding plastic cups of beer aloft, seventh-inning stretching, kissing framed by the data on the Jumbotron, after what must have been an engagement. & the voice booms:

  “FALL: Cheers, Citizen”

  & finally, the bottom-right screen retrieves, in higher definition, more home-video footage, but of a slightly different child in Christmas-themed pajamas, a child who must be Harold’s son, unwrapping a baseball mitt, cheering, & smiling wide with pride at the camera as he tries it on. & the voice booms:

  “WINTER: Victory, Father”

  All of the screens play their scenes in unison as the opaque exposition booth becomes transparent, revealing its subject, a sentimen
talized Harold, rubbing a tear from the corner of his eye. & the voice booms:

  “Harold Fortier, you may rise & depart.”

  & the geniuses in the pews respond with unanimous applause, as a soft light reilluminates the auditorium, & Harold makes his way back to his seat, where he embraces his wife, whose tears provoke his tears, & more applause from the pews. But it leaves Cairey feeling cloyed, even as he claps dejectedly with the dictates of the crowd. His date is more enthused. She turns to him, as the applause dwindles, to say, simply, “Beautiful.”

  & such is the conceit of the exposition. It is a sort of multimedia biographical double-haiku procedurally generated for every chosen genius, deploying images & themes mined from their traces on the web. Geniuses rise & depart from the exposition booth. The process is quick, streamlined, & judging by the perpetual choruses of applause, satisfactory enough. There does not seem to be any further curatorial meaning to the order in which the geniuses are selected- it is neither by alphabet, nor by age, nor by theme that they’re called. But the next few of them pass like so.

  Sarah Brewer, called after Harold, a collegiate gymnast: SPRING: Sunshine, Cartwheel

  SUMMER: Schoolyard, Double Flip

  FALL: Backyard, Balance

  WINTER: Competition, Silver

  Jared O’Hare, called after Sarah, a middle-aged consultant with pitstains on his salmon button- up:

  SPRING: Promises, Hope

  SUMMER: Failures, Resentment

  FALL: Sacrifice, Grief

  WINTER: Satisfaction, Rest

  Elizabeth Leigh, called after Jared, a divorced former model whose twinkling high-heels clack like the long nails of secretaries tapping on keyboards:

  SPRING: Comely, Caring

  SUMMER: Sultry, Consuming

  FALL: Haughty, Punishing

  WINTER: Hoary, Exhausting

  It is Elizabeth’s exposition which is the first not to be met with unanimous applause. Rather, it’s with scattered grimaces, winces, & a silence which echoes only the clack of her high-heels as she scowls her way back to her seat.

  “Wow” Cairey’s date says “That’s pretty fucked.”

  “Yeah” replies Cairey “Fucked.”

  Internally he is panicking, now that he knows what could be in store for his exposition. The first crop of geniuses had offended him only in their banality, their bourgeois conventionalism, their conformity to the sort of scrapbooking bathos that makes one groan, but only in the way one groans at a joke with a punchline one has heard too frequently to enjoy.

  But this exposition? It was not only unflattering, it was bordering on cruelty, rudeness, & precise personal offensiveness. Worse, it had the unmistakable air of truth to it- otherwise the shock of the crowd was inexplicable. Their red faces, Elizabeth’s scowling clack of shame... these were signs of recognition of something more than mere incivility. What sort of judgment was this, which could cut so close to the bone? & oh, what would it make of him? He feels dizzy & ill.

  The lights dim & another genius is beckoned to the booth. His name is Lawrence McBrady, & he appears to be a bartender in his late thirties, wearing a branded t-shirt, tight black jeans, & couture sneakers. The exposition implies some falling out with his family over a problem with substance abuse. For him, the voice booms:

  SPRING: Privileged, Playful

  SUMMER: Rejected, Wrathful

  FALL: Scavenged, Woeful

  WINTER: Neglected, Fruitless

  Then following Lawrence, who sulks to his seat in silence, comes Scarlett Novak, a forty year old nurse whose visage implies a dalliance with cosmetic surgery. For her, the voice booms:

  SPRING: Hayfields, Neglect

  SUMMER: Hornets, Jealousy

  FALL: Concrete, Command

  WINTER: Cockroaches, Envy

  & so it goes for most of the geniuses, who are called to their judgment, & rarer & rarer are the roaring rounds of applause. The mood of the room becomes solemn, until one man, selected by the spotlight & beckoned by the name of Terrence Johnson, makes a dash to the emergency exit. This is met with boos & jeers.

  It surprises Cairey, as he has been comforting himself, as he’s been falling to anxious pieces, with the notion that the solemnity of the auditorium represents some form of comradery against the decrees of the exposition & its increasingly moralistic judgments. He has assumed that the other geniuses, who’d never gone so far as to boo or castigate the judged, were keeping their own judgments silent, out of respect, & perhaps out of skepticism toward the veracity of the expositon’s curatorial regime. He thinks, or tries to think, that their silence in the wake of these devastating exposes is a form of protest- at least, that’s how he’s considered his own silence. But he had nearly cheered when Terence fled! He had only done what he most wanted to do & was too cowardly to do.

  His date turns to him to say: “What a pussy.”

  & before he can reply, as the lights dim once again, & the spotlight re-emerges to scan the crowd- the voice booms his name, “Cairey Turnbull,” & he is beckoned forth to his public exposition. The spotlight on his head is hot & nearly blinds him. His heart races & his limbs freeze. His mouth dries out & his pores weep. He stands slowly, looking down at his date, who nods her head toward the booth, goading him to his inevitable doom. He looks around at all the synchronized faces & heads, swiveling in unison to face him, pinning him with their collective gaze. He is completely surrounded, on all sides, & he realizes that he is already exposed.

  He thinks to flee. He could still flee. Maybe he should flee, but it would change nothing, avoid nothing. It would only confirm their judgment & lose their comradery. The spotlight is already upon him & for this to be undone would require his absence from the exposition itself, from the museum, from his brunch... & it did not end there. If only it ended there.

  What was this mere instance of the spotlight’s fetters but a particular instance of all the eyes that had ever befallen him? What he wants, he knows, is not a momentary refuge from these enemies, some mere counter-instance of invisibility... What he wants is a complete cessation of the light. He wants total invisibility, complete invisibility, even from his own judgment. He realizes, for the first time, that he does not want to die, as he walks his hangman’s mile to his scaffold- what he realizes is that what he wants is to have never been born at all. & he realizes that he has wanted this for a very long time.

  He opens the door to the booth with tremulous hands. His stomach churns & he feels the vortex of his digestion turning inside-out. The door closes, & all is darkness inside, riddled with nausea & suspense.

  Then a vision appears. A screen divided into quadrants raises from the floor of the booth before him. It is a miniature of the monitors that flank the booth. & as it has been for every exposition of genius, the first to display an iconic moment of his life is the top-left corner, & for him, it shows his most cherished & loathed site. It is a house upon a lake where he had vacationed as a child. The voice booms “SPRING”- & it echoes across the crowd- “Fairytales, Blue.”

  This is enough to frighten Cairey out of his wits. He sobs, & leaks tears, out of fondness & fear, as ever his memories of his innocence prompted him. This place was the only thing he had ever missed in his life. He cherished it & loved it, but wished its memories away- as without them, the rest of it, the aimless sufferings, the quotidian routines, the wasted times, the labors, the struggles, the consumptions & sicknesses, the fleeting bouts of anxious energy which cleared his ever-encroaching mist of shame & regret, but for moments only, like pleasant dreams interrupted by the morning’s alarm, by fantasy-fragmenting necessities, these bores & chores, agendas & groceries, these shattered hopes, these botched sacrifices, this unimpeachable loneliness, this emptiness- none of it would stand in such harsh relief against his few fond memories had they never occurred at all.

  It is this illusory precondition of enchantment which pains him more than the disenchantment with which he’s grown accustomed- as this lost world denies the realit
y of his own, or at least it denies its necessity & the necessity of his acceptance of it. These memories condemned him, so he condemns them in return.

  Then, the top-right quadrant lights up, displaying selections of his early illustrations, his ballpoint juvenalia, in all their shoddy craftsmanship- their weak outlines, their warped perspectives, their nightmarish hands. These embarrass him in their naivety. He thought he’d eliminated these proofs of his artistic origins, long ago, on that night in youniversity, when he’d hid in the embryo of his bedsheets, frozen in horror at the pretense of his ambition, which could only be salvaged by destroying its vestiges, all of these boxes of his impudent scribbles hidden beneath his bed were like a rash on his soul that he’d cauterize, & cover with the gauze of true accomplishment, emerging from the discarded ashes like a phoenix. He’d sworn that day a new beginning. He’d announced a regime of pragmatism & practice, of realism & sobriety, under which he would embrace the superiority of his disenchanted world, triumph over the illusions of his innocence with an artwork of true magnificence- a monument of scope & fortitude.

  "SUMMER: Romance, Blue Blue"

  Thus boomed the voice over the salvaged scraps of Cairey’s late-acquired seriousness.

  Then- horror.