letter fifteen: screen test

through the looking glass, and what summer found there

Dearest friend, 

This feels like the most tone-ignorant question to ask another sane person nowadays, but how have you been? 

The summer heat has stuck around for me after a painfully brief taste of the cold, though the unreality of the season is at least beginning to give way to a bit more clarity as we move into October — kind of like a camera zooming in and out in an attempt to refocus on its subject. It brings to mind that opening line in Goodbye to Berlin, where the narrator describes himself as “a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” To not think, however, is nearly always the same to me as to not exist. A testament, maybe, to how limited my experience with real existing is, if my definition of what counts as much remains so narrow in my 20s. It is a strange in-between state, to not get a say on what I am witness to and how I receive what I do yet feel all the same like I don’t exist in the world. 

I gave summer an earnest shot this year. I’ve been going on walks. I’ve been sitting in parks and library yards to read. I’ve stayed mostly offline. I’ve been taking care of a housemate’s mini-garden while they’re out of the country. These haven’t changed much when most of the variables that have made existing difficult recently are external and ultimately out of my control, but that also means that to say I’m not doing well because of summer is to be unfair. If anything, I’d probably have a much looser handle on everything that’s gone off-kilter these past few months if not for the moments I’ve been able to get away. From what exactly, though, I’d rather not spare the dignity of naming; I just know that despite everything, summer has been trying its best to help me. Sometimes that’s all you can ask for. That you try, and thereby know for sure that whatever goes wrong, even after everything, is beyond what would have been possible to change anyway. 

I figured meeting summer halfway this year would help me traverse the distance that seems to just get larger and larger between the world and me the more I try to build a bridge. I’m not entirely pleased to report that all it feels like I’ve done is close the lid on some deeper inner part of me, where all the rage from the last time I wrote to you has just bled out and left gray static where so much activity used to be. I’m angry, still, at the world. I’m sad, even more, that things continue to be what it is, and every day is marked by a reminder of how much parts of the world suffer and how I might never recover the part of me that could have someday been convinced there is anything about humanity to love. But I also think I’m just tired, and too aware that I have no grace left to spare the world, and summer has served as the underline in what’s already been in progress for as long as I’ve been writing to you. 

All my usual dramatics aside, I actually started writing to you because I’m in the middle of assessing the tracks I listened to the most this summer, and “California” by CHVRCHES caught my eye. I haven’t listened to the band too intently since my early high school years, but this song was brought to me through a character study of one of my favorite characters from this year and stuck primarily because its final verses kept repeating one single line: 

God bless this mess that we made ourselves
Pull me into the screen at the end and
God bless this mess that we made for ourselves
Pull me into the screen at the end
Pull me into the screen at the end
Pull me into the screen at the end

The album that “California” belongs to is called Screen Violence, and my newfound fixation on this fact has led me down a pseudo-pipeline. Starting last May, I began digging through work that in the past married the haze I associate with summer to my internal image of a kind of mythical California: Eve Babitz, Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman, Mulholland Drive. That pushed me down a slide into noir, trading the excessive sunlight of real-life June to August with the smoke and dirt of L.A Confidential, The Big Sleep the movie and The Big Sleep the novel, moving down the line until I reached Dorothy B. Hughes and, eventually, In A Lonely Place the movie and In A Lonely Place the novel. This foray only reached a dead end when I realized, yet again (I renew this realization every few years; I blame Raymond Chandler), that the singular atmosphere of noir media doesn’t nearly make up enough for the genre pillars you have to put up with at the same time. 

Somewhere in there, I decided to see I Saw The TV Glow alone at a drive-in theatre, and while it definitely severed the final thread tying me into any corporeal awareness of myself this summer, it was also the first work I’ve shoved down my throat this year that made me go — Yes. That’s it. This is it. This is the one. That’s what I mean. 

But I Saw The TV Glow is about a lot of things that aren’t limited to whatever existential spell I’ve been put under these last few months. Its strength is in how well it utilizes all the imagery and music in its arsenal to portray the pursuit of self-realization and belonging, and the terror of being trapped somewhere (and within something) where that’s not possible. It was heartrending. It made me feel its claustrophobia. It made me realize how little I want to be in my body, in my life — but that’s not necessarily in conjunction with the allegory that the film is. 

My desire to crawl outside of my body is entirely my own doing. That’s the difference, I think. I do not want to be here. I do not want to be in here. Yet I am, and I watch the world around this body continue to skip and fast-forward, taking me along with it like I’m a figurine only there for displaying and observing. 

In a now well-known monologue from the film, a character in I Saw The TV Glow says: 

Time wasn’t right. It was moving too fast. And then I was 19. And then I was 20. I felt like one of those dolls asleep in the supermarket. Stuffed. And then I was 21. Like chapters skipped over on a DVD. I told myself, “This isn’t normal. This isn’t normal. This isn’t how life is supposed to feel.” 

I’ve never been much for feeling time pass; it’s hard to feel the transition from age to age when I’ve always been younger on paper than the age I felt I actually was. It felt like I was seventy before I was even seven or seventeen, and whatever urgency I felt in my earlier 20s had been of a purely bureaucratic nature: things I assumed people who were 21 could and should have already done by that age, when nothing could be more arbitrary than expecting a universal way of being a certain age. That urgency is now as alien to me as any concrete sense of time passing. Where time used to feel like it was overflowing in my cupped palms and brimming over beyond what I can hold, time now feels like something that has diverged in path from me altogether. Time and I walk and exist in parallel, and I know which parts correspond to each other should you chart them side-by-side, but it’s as if I’m simply left to watch the time pass through see-through glass, and if I came down to me having to try my hardest to receive custody of reality, I know I could never put up enough of a fight to win.

Maybe I’m not a camera, after all. Maybe I’m behind a screen, watching real life pass me by, trapped but unwilling to be freed into a life that feels much more immediate, much more urgent, much more real. Maybe I myself have become the fiction to real life’s reality. Like that looped line from “California.” As if I’m the one that’s been pulled into the screen, and all I can do is observe as time rushes past and takes reality along with it. A younger, worse-off me might have considered it comforting, to know life does not require my participation to continue on. Life asks so much of you, after all, and it’s nice to be taken along and remain protected, in a way, by the same things keeping you out of your own life. A matter of perspective. Whether or not something traps you or protects you depends entirely on which side you’re looking from. That’s true for the bars of a cage or a cell, that’s true for the inside of a car during a rainstorm vs. the inside of a car sinking underwater, and it’s true for the glass that makes up all of our screens. 

Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971), dir. Jacques Rivette and Suzanne Schiffman. It’s a 13-hour mystery film that experiments with parallel subplots and multiple connected perspectives.

Even if I wasn’t okay with experiencing the world through a screen, though, could I even begin imagining the alternative? Aren’t we all experiencing things through a screen anyway? Our relationships funnelled and sustained through messages, a kind of translation happening twice inside our heads; our awareness of news and life and death received through someone else’s real life; the dichotomy between our real selves and its counterpart beginning to blur when so many of us have become able to be more ourselves beyond where our real-life bodies can reach. You can walk away from something online at any point, even if most of us have dulled the instinct to. So it’s eerie, to me, that if your life is stored somewhere else, even if it’s not necessarily online, that means you can walk away any time, too, from life itself. 

I finally got to an overdue front-lobe-ready rewatch of Serial Experiments Lain this summer, and among the many things about it that keep looping in my mind without latching onto anything concrete, I find myself turning over the idea that the body — that is, our real-life body — exists only to verify our existence. Like a watermark, almost, wherein the things that define us are stored beyond sight instead. May it be the things we like but don’t talk about, the friends we are able to make online despite the physical distances offline, the sense of closeness of which we have no real physical proof except tacit trust that everyone will remain on the same page about social rules and our invisible beliefs about each other. Our obsessions and what feeds them, or the unseen and un-sensed electronic impulses in our brain that dictate what kind of food we steer clear of and what we gravitate towards, the ways we can opt in and out of whether we say what we actually mean. Isn’t that what defines sentience? A being so complex it runs entirely on invisible and not entirely explicable complexities?

Isn’t it funny that no one ever really claims that what’s online is our real selves, even though we all understand our inner life to be deeper than what makes it outside? We see our life online as a further kind of external rather than existing parallel to our inner worlds. Much of the rhetoric around social media has been secure in emphasizing that the photos and lives we see online are so easily doctored, so easily contrived. The words that people feel comfortable saying to someone else through the veneer of cyber anonymity, the things we look up in an incognito window. But often, I wonder if the image and the ensuing artificiality that people work so hard to maintain online also reveal, ironically, what their real-life self considers an ideal worth building elsewhere at all. 

I mean, life is just so easily dictated by iconography, isn’t it? Not just images, but people have this innate impulse to latch onto symbols — whether it’s trends, or words, or unspoken markers of identity, or the delusions we feed ourselves about ourselves. I often see people claim things about themselves that their actions and habits and impulses contradict, and I know they’re not lying, just that the symbol matters more than the complication. I’m guilty of it myself, but don’t know until I’ve had time to reflect on it and realize I should have been more careful in the words I chose, if only because care means being one step closer to honesty. Objectivity is the first lie — the first fallacy, the first impossibility — that any sentient species can tell about themselves. At least I’ve always thought so. It’s because we’re able to think complexly and be complex that there will always be a contradiction somewhere. 

Maybe that’s why, when we have access to something that turns our very lives into a symbol, an object, let alone a commodity, we channel our most human parts, our desires and our ugliest instincts, into that other us — which has no choice but to just be its vessel, its container. It’s not so easy anymore to plug off, because we’ve developed new internal systems for our presence online; we make space for that parallel us, because we know the thing they act as a symbol for matters to a degree. For every person who claims they’re untouched by trends, there’s some puffer bag or Mary Jane dupes they also bought into, same as everyone else; for every claim that someone didn’t like a well-loved book or film, there will always be the accusation that they just want to be different. It’s an irony in itself that it’s hard not to feel detached from all of this, when at the end of the day, those truths still exist outside of the body. They’re supposed all the same to represent who we are to someone else, yet they have little, if any, corporeal residue. What feels real might never appear real, and increasingly so when reality itself is now housed where our real life can’t even penetrate into. 

I also wonder often if the reason so many people struggle to communicate when they’re in pain, or have been hurt/are hurting in some way, is because we want to turn our hurt into something that another person has to interpret. Do we long not just to be witnessed in our hurt in some way, but to be proven worth interpreting, complexity and all? Not necessarily to be saved, but for someone to see us and acknowledge that this thing we feel is real because someone else has borne witness to it in its completion? Have I, myself, turned my own living into a matter of iconography, such that I am left suffocated by the distance between the me that is present in my own life and the me I feel is truer and closer? Why can’t the same glass I feel between me and my life be a mirror instead of a screen, trapping me inside the unreal?

Here and there, and especially so these last few months, it’s felt like I’ll always be in that Georgia O’Keeffe summer. I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again, she says, but what if the summer doesn’t end. I know I exist, and I know who I am, what I want to be, but it’s starting to matter less and less that I know, and this exact thing, maybe, is what makes me feel so far from the me that is living a life I can touch at all.

I’ve known for a while — or, no, I’ve always believed, which I have to remind myself is not the same thing as knowing — that the ease of my life depends upon the hardship of someone else’s. Someone must do the work, and if it isn’t me, it’s someone else. I’m not suspicious of ease because I feel I deserve to suffer; it’s a fact of life and the world we live in (i.e. capitalism and cultural monopoly) that my lack of suffering means someone else has done it for me. Someone else underpaid for something I declare to be overpriced, a bunch of waste left to rot in some other region so it can remain unseen from mine. 

Yet on a much smaller, less important scale, I also get myself through some days by thinking of future me as a separate entity, for whom I must do things, and whose suffering I must aim to foresee and mitigate. It’s what got me out of bed on the days that felt the most impossible, what got me from job to job and class to class. It’s a survival mechanism that has worked very well for me, I know, but as I continue to get older with nothing so grand to survive as what felt so big and life-altering as a teenager, I am trapped in this cycle of thinking real life belongs more to some other me, future or parallel, and not to the present me living it. Sometimes, I even wish my real life would stop intruding on my realer life — the life I live inside, but not inside of me, inside somewhere else.

Tonight, it started pouring heavy rain in the middle of my evening walk. The forecast hadn’t said anything about it. For at least a block, I stared in mere curiosity at the wet splotches that appeared on my arm. When I used to wear glasses, I couldn’t escape the fact that it was raining because the droplets rendered me unable to see. Without them, and born with less sensitive capacities to feel bodily sensations to begin with, I was startled by the sheer dissonance of seeing the rain without feeling it on me in any inescapable way.

I’d hate to be a zombie, I think. I fear I’m becoming one. I’m afraid that I’ll be at the end of a life lived with only the things not worth bringing to whatever comes after this. Life has so many textures, so many colors and sounds and smells, and I’d hate to be immune. Isn’t that horrible? To be immune to immediacy? To be immune to the one thing neither a camera nor a screen could bring along to the other side? It’s the one privilege of living, the one thing summer has above all the other seasons — this tangibility of living. 

Melancholy, I can carry with me forever. Anger, too, I know well. But to be untouched by the things that no thought or emotion can change because they’re as objective as anything in life can get — that’d be beyond awful. And I don’t want the only immediacy I experience to be from things I cannot touch, whether it’s life online, or life in fiction, or life in fantasy. 

For now, I repeat Raymond Carver like a prayer: 

A break in the clouds. The blue
outline of the mountains.
Dark yellow of the fields.
Black river. What am I doing here,
lonely and filled with remorse?

I go on casually eating from the bowl
of raspberries. If I were dead,
I remind myself, I wouldn’t
be eating them. It’s not so simple.
It is that simple.

Writing is still a more emotion-muddled affair than I am used to right now. With the things I wrote to you about last time, but also because the writer closest to my heart has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and the way she wrote about the diagnosis feels rather like someone used my heart as a tuning fork:

Righting oneself against a current that never ceases to pull: the books tell me to pay conscious, continual attention to actions like walking, writing, brushing my teeth, if I want to inhibit or delay the failure of neurons in the brain. It is hard to live within constant striving. It is hard to live within the word ‘degenerative’, which means that, however I strive, I do not win.

Of course everyone is striving all their life. And no one wins against mortality. But there is a difference between striving to (say) learn ancient Greek or do the vacuuming and striving to pay microscopic attention to every instant of a physical act.

Or maybe writing is just hard because I don’t want to keep using it as a crutch when what I mean is that I wish living was easier. Yet there is so much I want to get away from. There is so much cruelty I do not want to experience nor see happen to someone else anymore. But tonight, I end the day lighter after writing to you, and I can only hope that doesn’t mean I’ve passed over the weight I’ve been carrying to you instead. 

I’m currently reading Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, and it doesn’t escape me that I started writing letters to you because of her last book. Alas, the time passes, and all I can do is tell myself that even a creeping sense of unreality is a sign that you know what reality is and should feel like, and there is a part of you, one you cannot outrun, that knows when what you’re living is not reality.

Thank you, as always, for being the warmth and levity on the other end of my words. I hope you’re feeling as real as can be these days. 

Your huckleberry friend,

Sha