All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace

I don’t know when it will be. It could be in a few days, but it might just as easily be months, years or even decades. But when it happens, and it will, the reactions are easy to predict.

Woe is us when we find out that the webcams in our laptops, the same machines we so lovingly carried into our houses, cradled in our safe arms, register our every move, and that, likewise, the microphones that came included record our every sound. Woe is us when we find out they’ve been doing it for years now, that big money has been rolling to and fro between governments and corporations, for the valuable data that we provide. Woe is us when we find out, for we will work up a storm in no time, and everyone will be pointing fingers in a big old frenzy, while the CEOs of this world will throw up their hands - in what is by now a natural reflex -, while the money comes cascading out of their stuffed pockets. Woe is us when they will then point to the Terms & Conditions we all signed, when they tell us that these documents were really – it is plain to see! – written in a cypher for a wholly different text, and what we really signed was an agreement to the use and abuse of all of our goings-on.  Woe is us when we sue them and find out that (A) they have the best lawyers (for they have the money) and (B) they have so much dirt on all of us that we are all virtually buried alive. Woe is us when we’ll jest and joke about the laptop webcams, calling them the Eyes of Hell, but nobody will laugh and we will swallow the ensuing silence with sore throats. Woe is us when we recall how we all laughed at the crazy street preacher who heralded science as the new big religion, for we now realize that he was right, that all that has happened is a shift of the burden of omniscience from God to a very small subgroup of our species playing at being God. Woe is us when we finally begrudgingly resign to our fate, forget about the whole matter, and file the overblown media attention as a storm in a teacup.

Because, hey, why be bothered if you have, after all, nothing to hide.

To make a fuss is to confess.

Ghostly Realism

eugène carrière: self-portrait

A few months ago I visited Paris, which I had not done for a long time. While I arrived with intentions to avoid the clichés and, à la Perec, hoped to find beauty in more quotidian choses, I ended up going through the whole touristy charade, and enjoying most of it, despite myself. We did do a lot of gallivanting, and, through our ignorance, ended up in the same places all the time, so in a sense we did follow Perec in an attempt at exhausting places in Paris.

I also visited some musea, though, since I was only there for four days, it was mostly limited to the larger, more famous ones - The Louvre and d'Orsay. While I could write many a paragraph about them, that is perhaps for another time. On the last morning before my departure, I took the subway over to the Grand Palais to sneak in a last-minute Edward Hopper exposition. To my frustration, there was a two-and-a-half hour queue, and I had to abandon those plans.

As it happened, I turned around and found myself walking right into the Grand Palais' little sibling: the Petit Palais. It is one of the things I most loved about Paris, and it goes to show why you should not blindly move from point to point - but instead be guided through the town by the psychogeographical process of derivé.

The Petit Palais held a particularly fine collection, but there were two paintings that stood out for me. These were somewhat unceremoniously adorning the walls surrounding the museum shop. They were by French painter Eugène Carrière. I was overwhelmed by the halcyon feel, the peace that was emitted from the works. I have since found that most of his works are like that. It even shines through in his portraits, such as in his most famous work: the one of poet Paul Verlaine.

eugène carrière: her mother's kiss

I have also since learned that for the majority of his paintings, his wife and children were his favorite models, and most of his work finds them in tender carress of each other - exemplars of idyllic love that do not feel forced because they weren't (forced).

Apparently, he was much loved by most of the inhabitants cultural life of Paris, yet little of that status has been passed through time. Friends of his observed that his way of talking was as soft and tender as his painting.

On a particularly beautiful closing note: on his deathbed, his final words to his children were: aimez-vous avec frénésie. Love each other wildly. When the mayor of Montmartre was unveiling a plaque celebrating Carrière on his former home, they found underneath the white ceremonial sheet, graffitied in large white letters, the following words:

fuck off I love you

A Myriad of Me

The I is the ninth letter of the alphabet and it might just be my least favorite one. It is a pretty hefty subject to take on, and I don’t know why I even bother trying. David Berman once wrote about the way girls would call out ‘love you!’, conveniently leaving out the I as if they didn’t want to commit to their own declarations. (As if that isn’t enough painful truth for one paragraph, for ages I used to think that Georges Bataille’s novel was called Story of the I, and I have always avoided it for that. So I guess in a way this is me trying to read Bataille.)

I do think that the pain of commitment is the primary pain of writing, which is how I came to think of this - I am reading Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño which he claims to be the only novel of his that does not embarrass him, and I can see why. It is as if, to phrase it as the novel itself does, all I can come up with are stray sentences, maybe because reality seems to me as a swarm of stray sentences. The book, to me, is like a crowd of people analyzing a car crash, but one where all the spectators happened to have arrived after the fact. Yet when the TV crew arrives, they all fall over each other to tell the story. The back cover speaks of a few dream sequences, and there might be only one character called Bolaño in there, but I think the whole thing is like a dream and every character is a light shard that is cast off from Bolaño. Which, ultimately, makes me wonder how many light shards I cast off in my time? I am me, yet I feel like I have either yet to meet myself or we’ve just been introduced and are only vaguely acquainted.

“I disagree”, I interrupt myself.

(I’m sorry, this happens a lot lately.)

“Not now,” I retort somewhat petulantly, “I am trying to write something on my blog.”

“But this concerns me,” I say.

“Fine, what’s on my mind?”

“If I met myself only recently, then why do my memories of myself go back so far? I can see flashes of my whole life, and I am in every one of them.”

“Fine,” I admit somewhat begrudgingly. “Perhaps I kid myself. As I said, this is a tricky subject to me. What do I propose then? And don’t say ‘from birth’, that’s too easy.”

“Theory of mind,” I simply answer. “From the moment one becomes aware of the fact that other people can think just like oneself can, he or she becomes aware of the I from an external point of view.”

I do not reply, but instead go for a neighborhood stroll to mull this over. This does not save me from myself - or I from myself, for that matter - and the internal dialogue continues.

“Ok, fine, theory of mind, so why do I feel I hardly know who I am? Or, that there is no me because there’s only constant change. The moment I define myself I have already changed and have to update the definition.”

“You should look at it from my side,” I butt in, from the shop window I happen to pass by. “There’s not just the I and the reflective I, there’s also a Jeroen. Which is the I as people collectively build you up. And it does not... Hey! Wait,” I shout as I nearly move my own reflection into oblivion. I convince myself to halt before the window. People on the street throw me puzzled looks. “Thanks. As I was saying, this Jeroen person changes too, sure, but it does not keep up with the I and the myself. It is far more steady and therefore it is what defines you most of all.”

Pensively, I look at myself for a minute or two, and then I have a flash of insight. I move my reflection in the shop window such that it reflects back in a mirror behind me, creating a Droste effect. “This,” I say triumphantly, quite pleased with my own cleverness, “is how I feel about this. Like I say, I think there is a constant shift of the self, it is never what it was before, and not even the sum of what it was. But I guess there are many selves fading away into the past, like these mirror images do.

A myriad of voices reply, most of me protesting my forthcoming desuetude, though it is hard to make out from the cacophony I create. I suggest to move to a plural form, to unify my voices. I take a vote and we all turn out to be on the same page. Enjoying the peace, we say: “It is so nice that we are all here, and that we are all of one mind. It makes me feel at ease, which is hard for me with other people.”

We nod. “Yes, it is nice,” we say. “No one else can hear us.”

“What about me,” God butts in somewhat imperiously.

“You don’t exist,” we reply.

“Oh,” sulks God, pouting his lips in childish disappointment, as he starts to disappear.

“Wait,” I interject, separating myself from the bunch.

“Yes?” comes God’s voice from far-away. There are faint, white glimmers of hope sticking to his black voice of desperation.

I wanted to tell God that he is just one of us, just another figment of my imagination, another side of me, that he is welcome to join the party, so long as his god-complex does not get in the way (that might be a problem), that he should lay off a bit on the magnanimity, and should just try to be one of the crew for a while, that he might just like it. But, in fact, the desperation is too much. “Never mind,” I say decidedly. And then, adding to myself: “Having to explain myself to God kind of takes the kick out of the concept of omniscience.”

Everyone agrees.

“Now, where were we?”

By the Sighing Motorway

This is the epitome of all the staring-out-the-window songs.
It is a sigh and a slight swooning,
    a sleep and a forgetting.
It is also the only song I know of that is recorded completely in sepia.
Perfect for a quiet day like this.