Same Same

by Peter Mendelsund

  But despite the variability of me (and him), and the inevitability of my (our) dissipation, you could say that I’m a small, narrow, pointy man. And so is he.

  A keen man. A sharp man.

  The facts are writ.

  Satisfied for the time being, I decide on some R&R, and so I walk several circuits of the room, my arms folded behind my back like a gentleman farmer surveying his grounds, before arriving at a table and idly reaching for my self-assigned reading: my foreign-language epic. Let’s get a couple of pages under the old belt, shall we? I cast an eye over its jacket (alliterative title in huge type; handsome painting of a small, W-shaped structure nestled in the hollows of a white wasteland; author’s name; blurb) before cracking the binding. I read Rn, as I rarely do, while standing, my finger laboring beneath the words, pulling my reluctant eye along with it. Now where were we…right. Our simple-minded protagonist has met (while up on the mountain where he is convalescing) a whole town register’s worth of characters from all walks of life. He’s seen wondrous sights, encountered groundbreaking technologies and all new manners of thought (meaning that he, and by extension we, have been privy to some real, ear-poppingly high-level debate, none of which seem to make him any the wiser, and at the end of the day he seems as featherheaded as he did when he first debarked onto page one). Deciding once more that I just can’t with this, I put the book back down and now travel the four steps over to my bed. I fling myself onto it, feel its gentle yielding, its expression of its own boundaries and affordances, which awakens a desire in me, and I muse, briefly, on the erotics of objects, before whispering up to full-spin that most intimate of objects, my device. Each time it responds to my call now, I am grateful. The device is throbbing its improved lights and gestures at me, almost showing off, what with its new speeds and sensitivities. Feeling, as it does, the mood in the room, it moves closer to me (or I to it?), and then it pulls up a panoply of images for me to peruse in order to further excite and relax myself into oblivion; the possibilities, as ever, limitless—the device knowing what I require. But now, I find myself looking back at my photos, and Wtf, finding more of them strangely altered.

  More and more.

  Like the pic of the night sky I took from the roof, now white, now, inexplicably, populated by irregular peaks, which may, I am now thinking, be the result of a bug, some failed data integrity, and, of course, my corrupted photo from the airport, but also, harder to dismiss, is yet another altered photo, the change to it being even more uncanny: my secret, sacred, surreptitious pic of Miss Fairfax, the one I use now, with which I am now intimate, there she is, as she is invariably—at the ready, looking the way she does, glasses, lilting posture, hair bunned up and fraying at the edges—but instead of her chic, bespoke uniform, she is now dressed in a decidedly workmanlike manner, scrubbed and exhausted bureaucratic blues, antiseptic whites, tag, clipboard, cuff, tools of the trade—that is, like a nurse.

  * A BRIEF EXCURSUS ON WORDS.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about them (words) lately; as naturally I would be. Whereas before, before all of this, I would generate language as effortlessly and mindlessly as if I were salivating it—now I am expected (required) to choose my words with the utmost care (attention). This is what writers do, evidently.

  But I find it difficult.

  For every word (term) I might want to put to use (deploy), there is (exists) another word which might (could) potentially accomplish (achieve) the same semantic, rhetorical, and poetic result (outcome, effect). Choosing between such words is difficult (arduous, onerous, taxing) and now, when composing (fashioning, creating, manufacturing) a sentence, most of my creative energies are exhausted by having to play out just such long lists (collections, catalogs, compendia) of synonyms. The more I am required to contend with the synonymic function of language, the more the very idea of a mot juste begins to seem ridiculous to me. No word could ever be the one word for a given context; how could it be, when words only mean anything by virtue of their equivalences? (Or small differences, you might counter; though only a cursory glance at the dictionary will tell you unequivocally [unambiguously, inevitably, unmistakably] that words equal nothing but other words, and that these new words, in their turn, equal still other words, and so on.) And I do wonder if my life might be improved if I could only lean upon some algorithm or bot to render my sentences for me. If the platform itself could autocorrect my words: employ its various automisms to change them; throw them into another language and back again, thus creating strange felicities; even predictively choose them, such that they would be granted a kind of aleatory grace, the grace my neurotic overworkings have stripped them of. That is, I wish for someone—or something—to translate my words. Translate them into a better, replacement language. One predicated on…on what? On a word’s (I want to say: rarity? Its oddity? Refinement? Elegance? Bombast, or some other species of stylistic force?). Idk, but Tbd.

  PART IV

  OPERATIONES SPIRITUALES

  38

  A nurse?

  Get a grip, Percy. You are better than this. So obvious, so tawdry. My least favorite of the sexual iconography as well as perhaps the most perplexing to me personally. How does the erotic find a foothold in such sanitary wards? And what are the semiotics exactly: the administration of health and succor, but the aid administered not by a diagnostician, but by a subordinate of sorts, the subordination being hers, but also then, her patient’s subordination to her (or him, but classically, fetishistically: her), the menial patient beneath the menial helper, she upon whom the patient is dependent and before whom he is helpless, dependency and helplessness being important, certainly—the dependency on that figure who is responsible for a certain portion of violence—violence inherent to the job—the violence to the patient, the swabs, the shooting-ups and the drips, the restrainings, the discipline of the regimens, the cleanings, wipings, and infantilizings…so humiliation also (so important, crucial), and then there’s the uniform, its sigils, crosses of Christ and blood and deletion; X-axis health, Y-axis death, Eros/Thanatos, sure, sure—red blood as in lifeblood, or blood which has been bled, vampirically drained, leeched, the patient: pale before the pale nurse, and of course far more important are the white uniforms—white, the whiteness of the nurse, the appalling page-blankness of the outfit, the senseless nothing of it, that nurse’s rig of the collective imagination, the colorless field upon which will be, inevitably writ, a language of shit and blood and lymph and green-graying sputum; that canvas for decline, for mortality and death…But how is this, is this, all of this, what index…of what…to what…what titillation is there in…?

  This picture though. What’s wrong with my device now? What is Miss Fairfax playing at? What is with the uniform?

  Never mind. It does not…never mind. Impossible to analyze. Move on. Get back to work.

  You have wrizing to do.

  You need some commentary. Critical commentary. An explanation, a mea culpa…

  Idk, a set piece. An allegory?

  (THE PAPER CONTINUED)

  A rollicking smack of white, insistent upon entry.

  Piles and piles of paper. Clogging everything; collecting everywhere. But is it too much? Can the metastructure withstand the onslaught? It might collapse. The whole thing might come down. (Can that happen?)

  Luckily, the Institute has put together a stopgap plan for the surfeit, one they are hoping will be a real morale-booster. So we head down to the main quad and assemble on the withered grasses. Boxes of tools are handed out by admins—staplers, paste, scissors, markers, crayons, inkjet printers hooked up to car batteries, string, an assortment of stickers, sparkles and rhinestones—and soon everyone gets busy, constructing kites. (We are taking singular advantage of the paper, evidently, by flying it.) Most fellows work alone, as kite building is a delicate business and it is well known that too many hands at work on a single kite tends to cause tears or lopsided const
ructions. The first builds of the day are motley—strange and beautiful, each one sui generis, each attempting to solve the twin problem of aeronautics and aesthetics in a unique manner—a variety of shapes and sizes; each utilizing a different method for navigation, lift, and propulsion. Some are round and some are tetrahedral. Some small against the desert sky, some huge enough to blot it out. (I later learn that the purpose of a few of the bigger kites is to carry a man or woman aloft. Predictably, all of these kites-as-vehicles fail in spectacular fashion, causing, in some cases, grievous harm to their pilots, though I suspect the clear-yet-brief view of the Institute and the desert beyond from on high makes the fall almost worthwhile.) Most of the kites are just for show though. The sky is swimming, spermatozoal with them: they squirm upward, wiggling, juddering, now falling. Some of the early kites are mimetic, resembling birds, butterflies, cats, dragons, etc., etc., others purely abstract, representing nothing but themselves and their own formal relations to the world. There are huge, flapping things, massive sky-spirals, tentacled, wormy super-beasts, and asymmetric space stations. Some: long and sleek; whereas others: blocky and as square as mainsails. Some kites are weaponized—and there are quite a few “kite skirmishes,” which everyone enjoys. Some kites—that is, some of the most interesting kites—are made, clearly, to subvert the very idea of flight. These are the “crashing kites,” and even more daring: the “ground kites”; those kites which are designed to never leave the ground at all, but to remind the onlooker of the constant and appalling pull of gravity. (Looking at such kites as the “ground kites” which are never supposed to achieve liftoff, and with these, I feel, as we all must, a longing for the air which is all the more intense for its abjuration.) However, several hours into the activity, I see now that many if not most of the kites are beginning to resemble the tried-and-true variety: the basic diamond shape that is, with cruciform struts, and a long, en-bowed tail. The usual that is; the “perennial classic,” etc. This shape and structure has been proven, of course, to be flight-worthy over many centuries—and carries the benefit of a high degree of sentimental and nostalgic value (the benefits of which should not be discounted). Say “kite” and people just expect that kite we all know and love, that standard kite which exhibits the requisite modesty, probity. Which is nothing too flashy (above all, a kite should be sensible). Everybody wants to construct one of these “sensible” kites, and the kites begin, slowly and steadily, to shuck off their heterogeneity and converge toward a norm. At some point, one kite engineer discovers that the very paper he is using to build the chassis of his diamond-shaped kite is in fact a loose sheet from a kite-building manual. It outlines, in meticulous step-by-step detail, how to build the “old-fashioned,” the classic, using tried-and-true construction methods, and so it is not long after this that all the kites, every last fucking one of them, begins to follow what becomes known as: “the textbook build.” Prim and proper. It is difficult to remember now, less than half a day on—given how prevalent these classic kites are now—the degree to which they were, in the first instance, a contrivance. How quickly we forget. I cast my mind back to the early hours of aeronautical experimentation on the lawns here with fondness and regret. I already miss the strangeness of the early kites.

  Of course all the kites actually work now—which is a major plus, don’t get me wrong. There are very few failures. Each kite takes to the convulsive air with a sureness that no experimental kite could ever hope to attain. (True, in a small ripple of last-gasp experimentation, a few fellows begin to paint their kites with crazy patterns, bold colors, dazzle-camouflage, and, most notably: trompe l’oeil of various kinds. Briefly then, it seems as though we might return to the bold and garish times of the early builds, though, of course, we remember all too soon that these wonders are mere effects—that the new experimentalism has yielded truly nothing but impressive surfaces. Too bad, Imho. Too bad.) But as the winches and spools play out their lines, and heads tilt back, everyone seems content. People smile, as though the air were crop-dusted with serotonins; which it very well might be.

  Anyhow, at the end of everything, there is a competition for Best in Show, and the judges (admins 2–6, a few representative fellows, the Director, of course) clearly deplore the formal restlessness of those weirder kites (the few holdouts that remain to be judged), and they (the judges) look with distaste upon (what they consider to be) that previous, avant-garde commitment to novelty, and to difficulty. They do not seem to find this new and almost enforced normativity in kite production blameworthy or even remarkable.

  However, this reactionary conformism in kite design strikes me as rather middlebrow, frankly. I am no snob, but the more I stand here, neck cramping, watching the hot, yellowing air for a new flying contraption of any kind, any “disruption” at all of “the kite-space,” no matter how awkward, immature, or otherwise flawed, I think that we at the Institute may have sacrificed too many species of pleasure in favor of the one, the surefire, the guaranteed, the failsafe. And in doing so have we foreclosed on new ways of navigating the sky? Idk, but I ask this question of 鼎福 the Architect, and he looks at me pityingly and replies, “Flight is what kites are for, and thus also what kites mean.” The Critic chimes in to say that, in his opinion, “one should avoid at all costs—in kite-construction as in life—didacticism,” and that “the only thing more tedious than an argument in favor of one’s own tastes is an argument in favor of an argument in favor of one’s own tastes.” I understood them all then to mean that no matter which side of the kite debate you argued, one could not (as in ethics) turn an “is” into an “ought.” And I felt keenly sad, though this was mostly because I knew that, were I to make my own kite, it would be one of those that never work properly, that don’t even fail properly, and I would probably get paste all over myself, crepe paper stuck everywhere, and everyone would laugh at me, so on, and call me a fraud and an amateur and a charlatan (every kite a conflation of fact and fancy; every kite a diary manqué; a crypto-memoir).

  Brb.

  Anyway, I had thought of the kite projects as a classic case of “nature finding a way”; of our taking the ill fortune that is the paper, and transcending the difficulty through “a conversion of the problematic” (per the admins). I recline on the lawns watching a particular set of kites made from crinkly blue paper, the blue of examination booklets, the blue of fragile paper-gowns. On another note: the last of the turbines has given out, and so all of these kites begin bursting into flames.

  39

  (Q&A WITH LIVE-IN SUPPORT STAFFER, ADMIN52)

  Q: Okay. Let me just make sure the thing is on….So. We’ll start out small: Appetite?

  A: Not so great.

  Q: We can give you something for that.

  A: Food?

  Q: Very funny, Mr. Frobisher. An appetite stimulant. What about exercise.

  A: Not so much.

  Q: Take advantage of the facilities. It’s what they are here for.

  A: It’s just that I’m too distracted. I forget.

  Q: Forget to exercise?

  A: All sorts of things.

  Q: [Scribble.] Are you regular?

  A: Like clockwork.

  Q: Libido?

  A: Still have one. Last time I checked.

  Q: What about your influences? Talk to that point.

  A: Well, certainly I owe a huge debt of gratitude to many who have come before me; those who paved the way. Prepared audiences for works like mine. Done much of the heavy lifting. I can’t neglect to mention the work of, say…well, I can’t think of anyone in particular right now. But you know who they are.

  Q: So, there haven’t been any more of those incidents? Miss Fairfax reported that—

  A: Huh?

  Q: The plagiar—

  A: NO. Sorry. I mean, I have it under control. I’m taking something for that.

  Q: [Scribble, scribble.] De
spite that, much has been made of this idea of your project as a—

  A: Mirror?

  Q: Read my mind. And how does the proposition make you feel?

  A: Queasy.

  Q: So, Percy, tell us a bit, if you would, about the project’s logo-centric turn.

  A: I am having some trouble hearing you.

  Q: Oh. Wait. Better?

  A: Yeah.

  Q: So, where was—

  A: The project’s turn toward—

  Q: Right. Words. Do you find yourself questioning the efficacy of a visual language? Of an aural mode? Of other channels of meaning?

  A: Three times a day, I suppose. Could be more. Should I talk to Miss Fairfax about that?

  Q: Yes. Let her know. Could be nothing, but we should track it.

  A: I’m having wild dreams.

  Q: Also not surprising.

  A: In the morning, I wake up depressed and exhausted. Sometimes I cry in the shower.

  Q: Ha ha ha!

  A: No, I’m being seri—

  Q: My next question, Mr. Frobisher, concerns beginnings. Can you tell us: How did you first come to this work? My audience is endlessly interested in origin stories.

  A: I can’t remember. There was a car. Or a plane. Train? And a mountain. And a hotel…

  Q: Sorry again, we need to change the, uh, thing, again.

  A: Of course. Go ahead.

  Q: …Okay done. Sorry. Any cramps? Indigestion?