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28 :: playing with the toy for narcissists ::
[posted 2/19/01]
It's time to reply to her. He 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 moves on. A flurry of hand movements and words appear 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 what he's written, touches his index finger to his lips. Considers the impression that it might make. He wants to make a good impression on her. (Him?) Apparently someone can develop a crush based on fifteen words and a link.
He knows why. E-mails leave out a lot. And he knows that people tend to fill in the blanks with whatever details they would find most favorable; this is why people find themselves falling deeply in love with someone they've only been e-mailing for a couple of days.
What you're really in love with is a screen that talks back to you.
Thomas has already begun to think that this woman is like him. It's an assumption. But at least its an assumption that he knows he's making. 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 they have to say. He's worried before about whether he has narcissistic tendencies, whether that's part of why he hasn't managed to make his relationships last. His experiences of listening to drone music are experiences of immersion and introspection: perhaps they indicate a certain overabundance of self-love? 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 absurdity of that desire. That didn't stop him from wanting it. He's deep enough into his investigations that the acquisition would make sense. 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—
He types: 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 tendency to 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.)
He types: 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 and 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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