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playing with the toy for narcissists :: 2/19/01
New Msg. To: and a little address card. He types in unseen_girl@yahoo.com. Loops the pointer over the Subject: field, clicks, and types: thanks for the mail. Then he contemplates this for a moment: perhaps he should say something less generic, more clever? He wants to make a good impression on her. (Him?) He has realized that he’s already developed a little crush on her (him?). The existence of this crush surprised him — it developed without his conscious intervention, automatically, like a response to some stimulus that he can’t fully pinpoint. He doesn’t quite feel comfortable with it, and he doesn’t know what exactly he will do about it — although, right now, as he begins responding to her e-mail, he begins to build his own answer. At least he’s consciously identified the existence of the crush; pretending that it isn’t there would be a mistake.
A flurry of hand movements and a pulse of words appears on the screen. Thanks for the information about AudioMulch: I haven’t gotten a chance to download it yet but I’ll check it out soon.
He pauses, looks at the words on the screen, touches his index finger to his lips. Someone can develop a crush from fifteen words and a URL. So he wants to choose carefully. He knows the danger here. An e-mail — a lone e-mail — is the appearance of a few strings of meaning in an otherwise blank universe. A transmission from a person, yes, a single delicate strand of pure personality, but one devoid of nearly all the context that adheres to a person and makes them real. After three days of e-mailing someone, people can find themselves believing that they’re deeply in love, because people have a tendency to fill in those blanks with the most favorable possible context, often without even being aware that they’re doing it. What you’re really in love with is a screen that talks back to you. Thomas tends to assume that the person writing to him is like him. But at least he knows it. This will hopefully instill some caution in him.
Turning a person into a mirror, and then falling in love with that mirror — he wonders if this makes him a narcissist. Janine has said to him that the Web is the ultimate toy for narcissists: it provides the instant illusion that everyone on the globe might pay attention to whatever you have to say. He’s wondered before about his narcissistic tendencies, feared the possibility of their existence, blamed them for his inability to find a lasting relationship. His experiences of listening to drone music are experiences of immersion and introspection: perhaps indicative of a certain overabundance of self-love? (He had a moment recently: reading in the latest issue of The Wire about a band, Reynols, who have released a CD called Blank Tapes, constructed from the omnipresent hiss found on unused audiotape. He’d thought wow I want that and then had had to laugh at the pure surrealism of his life, had had to marvel at just how deep in he was. And he still wants it, too. But sitting there, in his armchair, listening to blank tapes and nodding meaningfully: this image strikes him now as a vivid portrait of self-absorption.) He can tell himself that writing e-mail is social, but he knows that he enjoys it because it’s also introspective: he can pause, contemplate, re-think, re-write—
I haven’t fooled around too much with making my own music; mostly I’m a listener. But I’ve been getting more and more interested in giving it a try. What about you? From your e-mail it sounded like you’d made some music.
OK, he’s introspective. But (he argues to himself) that doesn’t necessarily indicate narcissism. (When he clams up around Janine, retreating from the conversation in order to pursue a circle of thought in his own head, Janine sometimes will prod him with her foot and accuse him of suffering from "male autism," which doesn’t sound great but at least sounds like something other than narcissism.) His withdraw from the world may indicate not self-love, but a surfeit of self-deprecation. (This raises the question for him of whether self-deprecation is not, in fact, the flip side of self-love, the end result of being unable to fulfill your own sense of vanity, which, in turn, is closely linked to the thought that only narcissists bother to take the time to try to dissect whether they are narcissists.)
Anyway. Drop me a line when you can; I’m always looking for people who might be interested in going to see some shows.
He thinks for a few moments about whether to replace "shows" with "performances" and considers the associations of each. In the end he sticks with "shows." He hovers the pointer over Send. Send the message now. Clicks. His transmission goes out. It will be filed somewhere, his energy stored in it as though it were a battery. At some point in the future it will be read. At that moment he will become social.
Further Reading ::
Information Prose : A Manifesto In 47 Points ::
A manifesto, outlining some of the aesthetic goals behind Imaginary Year, can now be read here.
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