—McSweeney’s, 1998
X
WHAT REMAINS OF MY PLAN
I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room. And I’m the emergency.
—PHILIP ROTH
Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.
—LILY TOMLIN
Micropsia
Twenty-five years before self-diagnosis, the waking dream; I think I was eight when it came. I lay on the cool tile of the bedroom I shared with my brother, in the desert of hours after lights-out, having meant to go into my parents’ room and ask for a glass of water. Instead I fell, incapacitated by the sensation I’m now able to give the name micropsia. The room was dark apart from a night-light, and what illumination leaked in from the hall. I imagine I heard my own heartbeat.
I was afraid but also transfixed. Rather than cry out I lay still, tracing the mental contours of the extraordinary hallucination. My body, vast and ponderous, a felled redwood on the forest floor, a Sphinx poised on a beach. My consciousness, shrunken to gnat-size, a speck, or pinprick of light, contemplating the vast body from a great helpless distance. Any notion that this speck of will could operate the mountain range of body was banished. My fingers and toes were far-off peninsulas, unseeable over the planetary curve of my body, impossible to command. The hallucination was visual, but also kinesthetic; I felt the swollen acreage of my outline loom even with my eyes shut.
That wasn’t all. The sensation had a narrative hook, a built-in epiphany still arriving. As I contemplated the persistence of my body I understood that, however, distended and transformed, it was I, too. I might not be able to operate my carcass in this state—who could move a mountain?—but I could inhabit its dimensions. I wasn’t limited to that feeble speck I’d been a moment before. Or, rather, the speck was free to roam now over the vast surfaces of the bodyscape, to survey the limits where the mass met the tile, journey to those distant fingers. When the sensation receded and I regained use of my limbs I returned to bed, self-enraptured. My secret was something intense enough to fell me but, however irrational, it seemed to me if I could defeat my fear it would become a kind of power. I kept the secret.
The hallucination returned maybe twenty times through my childhood, but was never again so rich and complete, so possessing. Usually it came at night, though on certain lonely sun-splashed afternoons I’d lie on the floor in that same spot and induce the thing, invite it back. I named my mountainous body: the lion. The dwindled observer: the speck. I savored these trippy fugues. When they dimmed and grew infrequent, I mourned. The perspectival shift, from speck to lion, was a tiny mental orgasm, or an allegory of the mushrooming potential of awareness. When I spoke of it to children or adults no one recognized or confirmed lion-and-speck. Others’ confusion confirmed my thing as private and unquantifiable, an involuntary philosophical song of the body. That suited me. I loved knowing the lion and the speck, was proud I’d banished my fear of knowing them, and associated them with what was deep and unique in me, what I’d least want to lose.
I lost them. By college I’d stopped making those mysterious detours. As the lion and the speck left my world I made one gesture of curation, an odd, opaque poem I submitted to a writing class. “I must recall the keys of my quality,” I wrote, “or else become the point as opposed to the lion.” My teacher, who was pretty hard on me generally, scribbled on the sheet that he didn’t understand the poem and that it might be my best. I wasn’t a poet. The poem was placed in a folder and forgotten. The texture of the experience was forgotten, too, and then the fact of it. There was no context for the memory, no prompt. The only thing that had ever reminded me of my hallucination was itself.
Ten years passed without thinking of it once, until one day I read a novelist’s description of a boy’s bedtime terrors: “Suddenly it was as if he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope: his own feet looked tiny, tapering with the distance, the toy soldier nearly imperceptible in his faraway hand. A fascinating change of perspective, making him feel like a giant of geological proportions—” The syndrome in the book had a name, micropsia. The novelist hadn’t made it up. I was joined abruptly to my eight-year-old self. This déjà vu that wasn’t brought me nearer to the lion and the speck than since before writing my dirgelike poem. The whole intensity of that paralyzing first episode returned.
The passage in the novel restored the strange milky jewel of micropsia to my possession and robbed me of it forever. I should be grateful. I might have stumbled across my poem and recollected my lonely wonder. More likely not. But the lion and the speck were now overwritten by banal micropsia, a symptom known to frighten children but considered harmless. Testimony, then, to the extinguishing force of names. The child acquiring a language is a being climbing forever out of the skin of the world, into a matrix of myths and symbols. What dreams Kaspar Hauser must have known.
My only revenge has been to become a collector of literary micropsia, committed by those who never were robbed. It typically hides in books I loved before I discovered it lurking there, Swift’s Gulliver, Barthelme’s Dead Father, Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. From Cortázar’s Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: “But it so happens that the man-child is not a gentleman but a cronopio who does not understand very well the system of vanishing lines that either creates a satisfactory perspective on circumstances or, like a badly done collage, produces a scale inconsistent with these circumstances, an ant too big for a palace … I know this from experience: sometimes I am larger than the horse I ride and sometimes I fall into one of my shoes …” From Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children: “She fell asleep really and woke up shrieking, dreaming another old nightmare that she often tried to describe to them, ‘Hard-soft, hard-soft,’ a dream without sight or name, which her hands dreamed by themselves, swelling and shriveling, hard-soft …”
—1998/2011
My Internet
I have an Internet within the Internet. It is my very, very own Internet, a place like the one that is known to you except that it is not known to you—it is mine alone. No one else may go there.
Actually, not to make things too complicated at the outset here, but technically the place I describe is an Internet within an Internet within an Internet. That is because I am, to begin with, a member of an élite within the Internet at large, part of an exclusive and private “members only” Internet consisting of a hundred people. These hundred were hand-selected, by a leader who, with terrific foresight, conceived the need for this private and smaller Internet in the long-ago days of the “early” Internet. In those days, it hardly seemed likely that anyone and everyone would be permitted to use the Internet, or even that many would want to. Nor was it foreseeable, except by our leader, that so many difficulties would arise—difficulties such as those with anonymity and masquerade and the lemminglike migratory waves of popular hatred that have come to define the Internet. (I mean the larger, nonexclusive one, the large general one, on which, it now occurs to me, you are likely to be reading these words.) It hardly seemed likely that these trends would already have been obvious. Yet our great leader foresaw them.
This was, I emphasize, quite early. According to our leader, the Internet at that time consisted of only (and, for some reason, exactly) two hundred people. Our leader then did something technical (I’m not good with technical concepts myself) in order to split the early Internet in half: a hundred persons over here, another hundred over there. At the time, it was, according to him (these are his accounts; his accounts are all we have), an exactly equal split.
Under cover of an air of frisky provocation, our leader proposed something akin to a game of Flag War, or Humans Versus Zombies. He suggested that the two Internets be thought of as two playfully competitive teams, conducting a playfully Darwinian experiment to see which would flourish. The other hundred, those excluded from our Internet, agreed to his proposal. He had them charmed and beguiled by the apparent equity of the arrangement, so that they barely noticed they were being excluded from s
omething. Then, upon the implementation of his technical alteration, our leader promptly took his hundred persons and, for the purposes of the “other” Internet, vanished. Was never heard from again.
It was this “other” Internet that grew into the one you know so well, the one occupied by so many billions of different persons and, frankly, so full of so many confusing situations. (I can barely use it without becoming confused, though I suppose if I were there more often I’d learn to accept the conditions as normal.) Meanwhile, the hundred dwelled within their quiet, higher Internet under the leader’s cultivating hand. Our leader had only two rules, both brilliantly simple: no money, and no animals. The implications are enormous. Picture, if you will, your own Internet subject to those strictures; I doubt you can. Within our tight boundaries, a million flowers bloom. Boundaries typically occasion beauty, and our beauty is like that of a Japanese garden—it might be worth envisioning ours as a sort of “bonsai” Internet. We have, just for instance, our own way of linking to things, one completely different from yours, with a totally different linkfeel—in fact, as I just discovered in a search on your Internet, the term “linkfeel” doesn’t even exist for you. To put it simply, what you do fast, we do slow. It matters. This and other technical preconditions legislating the nature of our hundred-person Internet were insured by a few deft choices made by our leader at the very outset, built into what he calls “the infrastructure.” Again, beyond my purview.
We hundred rely on our leader for accounts of the early days because in truth not one of us was part of that original action. We came along somewhat later, blundering our way into the larger Internet as anyone else might have done. Yet, as the members of that first hundred opted to return to the wider Internet, or disappointed our leader in some way and were banished, he hand-selected, by covert invitation, replacements for those who left. I was one of those replacements.
Those founding hundred have been sworn to silence on the matter (for all I know my voice may be within earshot of one of them now). So, we current hundred can only speculate on the early days, and compare notes on when it was that we were plucked up by our leader. Our population is quite stable these days, though it does still happen that someone will vanish and be replaced. We all work together to bring the new people up to speed.
Lately I’ve felt the urge for a deeper foray, the need for a more profound exclusion, and it is this which has led me to the creation of an Internet entirely of my own. The motivation, though I hardly wish to speak of it, came when I discovered the unnerving fact that after several recent dismissals from our élite group of one hundred, our leader had taken not to replacing those lost with new participants but, rather, to “making up” people. I mean to say that he was himself detected pretending to be several of our hundred. I don’t know how many, actually, nor do I know for how long he has been practicing such deceptions. Our leader wasn’t, in fact, caught out in this behavior. Instead, he revealed it in a series of increasingly obvious clues, small taunting gestures that, though unmistakable, he refuses to confirm. Revealed it to me, and possibly one or two others, though the possibility must also be granted that those others to whom it is known are actually faces of our leader as well.
Needless to say, the atmosphere among us hundred (although I’m not sure “hundred” is the correct term anymore) has been slightly but crucially altered. People seem to be speaking in “codes.” Where once I would have said there were no secrets among us (every email within our élite Internet being, in effect, “copy-all”), now I’m not so certain. I’m not even sure any longer where “us” begins and ends. I wonder if our leader has properly accounted for how deeply this uncertainty affects our self-definition and our morale around the precincts of our special Internet, given how utterly our strict boundaries have defined us since the beginning. Add money and animals, and I wonder whether we’d be so very different from the larger Internet anymore.
In any event, it is this which has driven me to create my private Internet, an effort of many weeks that is now at last complete. Believe me, for a nontechnical person this was hardly a small matter, and only the direst circumstances could have emboldened me even to attempt it. Unlike the hundred-person Internet, which is, if I understand correctly, sealed in a portion of cyberspace completely quarantined from the other, I have hidden my new and smaller Internet where anyone might see it yet never guess for an instant what it was he had seen. Mine is hidden like a grain of sand on the shore of the larger Internet, which washes over it like surf and yet alters it not in the least. It is here that I can at last breathe free. If “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog” (I had to visit the other Internet to discover this joke, because, remember, as specified by our leader, no animals), then an even more grievous fear may be the unspoken one: “On the Internet, nobody knows how many dogs there are.” On my Internet, however, no one need wonder. On my Internet, you know who you are: you’re me.
—The New Yorker, 2012
Zeppelin Parable
Everybody knows “The Caravan Barks and the Dogs Move On.” Fewer know “The Zeppelin Sails and the Dogs Sniff the Gas Nozzles.” This is how it goes:
The potential zeppelin is in the field, lying sagged and helpless along the grass, a membrane painted with gay colors, struggling to assert itself, expecting to fly, unable yet.
The dogs are kept at bay in the parking lot in anticipation of the great moment. They pick boogers, call their spouses on cell phones, solve crossword puzzles, crack puns, speculate, lap from water bowls, etcetera. In this they resemble the irascible poker-playing reporters killing time as they wait for the execution of the convicted murderer in His Girl Friday.
The gas flows from the pipes, which are laid in long sections of hose and fitted with nozzles. The nozzles connect to the inflow nodules of the vast baggy zeppelin.
The gas comes from underground, from purportedly “great deep secret sources.” The gas would certainly stay underground unless it had a zeppelin to fill, because the gas is by nature bashful, deferential, conflicted.
Slowly the zeppelin inflates, taking succor and inspiration from the munificence of the gas.
Lift Is Achieved.
Ropes Are Loosened.
Hoses Disconnected from Valves.
The Ecstasy of Influence Page 46