So they’re auctioning off the entire contents of the late Elizabeth Wurtzel’s apartment. Most of it is actually kind of ugly and not cool (she has a weird amount of framed art from CB2?) but for the low, low price of $85 (as of now), you can get her AA sobriety chips! In the words of AC, “This feels cursed.”
Look––I’m not saying it’s wrong to consider the linguistics here, or to push back against a human-centric worldview, but… do we really have so much time on our hands that we are worried about the language we use around sharks? Are we really concerned that vast swathes of people are developing speciesist views, and that this will have some kind of measurable negative impact? Or that sharks are being actively persecuted because the average person (who interacts with them… not at all?) uses the wrong terminology? In the nicest way possible: log. the hell. off.
Have you ever noticed something that is objectively incorrect, and it really irritates you, and yet the wrong thing is in a package that is either a) not interested in being correct and/or b) is kind of ridiculous and inconsequential? And yet still, the urge to correct this wrong thing feels really strong? I’ll give you two examples from my own life, not because I am going to use this phenomenon as a jumping off point to discuss something actually important, but because I just really want to point out how wrong these dumb things are in the public sphere. The itch is too strong not to scratch!
First, a long while ago, I watched a movie on Netflix Called Private Life, about a couple struggling to conceive a baby who hire one of their nieces (?) as a surrogate. It was… fine. Anyway, in an early scene, the couple, played by Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giametti, are in a fertility clinic waiting room filled with characters who are supposed to represent, I don’t know, some panoply of New York City life. A Haredi couple nearby, and the wife is affectionately rubbing her husband’s arm. And of course, I was like, um, no way! A Haredi couple would NEVER touch one another in public! Where was their Haredi advisor, ahem?!
I was reminded of this particular kind of irritation when I recently watched––wait for it––the M. Night Shyamalan movie Old. My understanding from the little I read of the reception was that it was a silly, very Shyamalan-y movie. That wouldn’t be enough to put me off, because I can occasionally get into the silly, especially if it’s horror-related, but a friend of mine whose taste I really respect told me she thought it was actually Good. So I decided to watch it as I was doing household chores.
It was, again, fine. Sort of what you would expect from a Shyamalan flick. The ending was wildly dumb. In case you aren’t familiar with the premise, it goes something like this: a group of seemingly random people staying at a tropical resort are taken by a tour guide to a beach, where they begin to age rapidly. They quickly figure out that on this beach, time moves at some exponentially faster rate than it does elsewhere. Insanity and decay ensue.
One of the people on this beach is a rather tense-seeming British cardiologist (or maybe cardiothoracic surgeon, which I’m sure is different in some way that it is above my pay grade to describe). There are references made throughout the early parts of the film to his being “stressed” and to dealing with tension at work, which manifests in erratic behavior: he slashes another beachgoer with a knife, he loses his concentration in the middle of a tense moment and starts babbling about film. So my first thought is, obviously, some kind of dementia, that his family (also on the beach) was in denial about. But then at the end of the movie, another character reveals that the doctor actually had paranoid schizophrenia.
I GUESS you could make this work, but it’s just way less sensible than having him having some kind of dementia, which would also potentially cause erratic behavior. First, the guy is in at least his late forties, and schizophrenia, in a majority of cases, develops in late adolescence or early adulthood, around 16-20. So this means this guy’s backstory is that he either developed schizophrenia in middle age––again, unlikely––or that he developed it in the typical range, but then made it through university, medical school, and potentially more than a decade of work in a high-stakes field only to then develop schizophrenia? Meh! Also, the way his familiars on the beach are talking about the “pressure” sort of implies that his schizophrenic break came about as a result of his job stress. I would never deny the impact of external circumstances on mental health, but that’s not really how schizophrenia works.
But so here’s the thing though: this is a cheesy body-horror flick from M. Night Shyamalan, the guy who brought you “I see dead people” and Mel Gibson running through cornfields looking for aliens or Jesus or whatever. It’s probably more dumb of me to expect medical textbook-level rigor from him than it is for him to choose the less-logical malady for one of his characters to suffer from. (Also, the movie is based on a graphic novel, so perhaps the original character had schizophrenia and Shyamalan felt locked into that.) I can see how a certain type of person might feel the need to go on a crusade about this, but personally I just feel like the odds that this misstep has any real consequences in life are so, so slim. And yet still, the urge to correct prevails, because here I am, ranting about it on the Internet.
One of these days I promise I will get around to writing my essay titled “Against Therapy,” but until then, here are two satirical (but possibly very effective!) modalities of therapy I’ve invented. Feel free to practice them on yourselves!
1. Radical Death Therapy
This therapy involves a patient speaking continuously for forty-five minutes in a manner typical to normal psychoanalysis/therapy. At the end of the session, the therapist smacks the patient with a rolled up newspaper and yells, “Don’t you realize you’re going to die some day?!”
2. Internal Rock Therapy
This is a kind of mindfulness-based therapy that involves the therapist encouraging the patient at every turn to imagine a large, immovable rock inside of them, that cannot be hurt by any external force. Problems in your love life? Think about the rock. Boss treating you poorly? His taunts can’t hurt the rock. Feeling like a piece of driftwood at the mercy of the forceful river of life? You are the rock. You see where I’m going with this.
Would children really find these fun? And if the answer is yes, for how long? Do Scandinavian babies have some kind of special gene where wood is endlessly mesmerizing to them, and American kids are born with a susceptibility to toys with garish colors and blinking lights and gratingly cartoonish voices? Honestly just buy me this mushroom basket.
Recommended video for me. I honestly would be curious to know the answer to the above question (if an algorithm could pass judgment, that is).
Remember this post? I had another idea: anti-vaxxers. @Cklosterman (that’s how this works, right?)
“Then she’d smelled spaghetti. Byron had a tincture of this artificial odor on his desk, for sniffing when he ate his meals, which were flavorless nutritional shakes (the shakes were weird enough, but Hazel also couldn’t understand how the only food smell he used was spaghetti. “Don’t you want to smell something else, for variety?” she used to ask him. “A cinnamon roll? A bucket of chicken?” He’d blink once, twice, then shake his head no.) Aside from these shakes he really didn’t eat, preferring to get weekly transdermal supplements via pneumatic injection guns. Eating grossed him out; he felt it was antiquated and menial. He’d want to get a implanted in his abdomen where he could delivery daily sustenance to his stomach via a gel or blended material, some texture just bulky enough that his digestive organs wouldn’t atrophy, but he’d decided against it since eating is such a metaphorical act across all cultures. Byron worried that it might affect his business dealings if others, particularly foreign partners from European countries that didn’t romanticize efficiency, found out he did not participate in calorie swallowing and traditional digestion.”
Made for Love, by Alissa Nutting (which you should definitely read right now)
So anyone who knows me knows I have a knee-jerk horror of all the ways Big Tech attempts to hack human’s essential animalness. Eliminating death, freezing your eggs and implanting them when you’re 80 and unable to put in 15 hours a day at Google so you can give birth to your grandchild: that kind of stuff gives me the willies. And yet, and YET, I think I maybe coming around on the whole let’s-get-rid-of-food thing.
This is undoubtedly due to the fact that I’ve been home with all three other members of my family, responsible for 97% of meals (save the breakfasts my husband makes––that’s the easiest meal of the day, though––and the very occasional evening we order out for dinner) since March 9th, when schools closed and life as we knew it ceased. That’s a lot of meals. Particularly for someone who from the word go, finds food pretty dull.
I mean look, it’s fine. It’s just a whole lot of work (and time! and money!) for fine. If I could eat 1-2 enormous meals of my favorite food every day, I probably would basically like it (3 meals is a bit of a to-do for me). If someone brought me a bagel sandwich or a plate of sushi or a steak with French fries and spinach whenever I was ravenous, that would be cool. But given where we are right now in the world, it’s taking all my creativity to pour cereal into a bowl. I think the other day I gave each of my kids half of a stale bagel with a pat of cold butter smushed into it and a cut up cucumbers and told them to get lost.
So the other day I was wondering if there are any times in human history other than Soylent when people––scientists, wackos, wacko scientists––tried to eliminate food. I don’t mean anorexics. Even Gandhi or that chick Naveena Shine, who tried to go 100 days living on sunlight (she made it 47), aren’t really embodying what I’m looking for. I’m not into eliminating food for either destructive or transcendent reasons: it’s solely just to avoid constant drudgery of deciding what to eat, procuring it, cooking it, cleaning up after it. It’s just a bit much! I’m hoping for a neat little pill, or that brown (but apparently tasty?) mush from Defending Your Life. (Feel free to throw other cinematic or literary references my way.) Unfortunately at the moment Soylent is really the only option out there, but it’s a little too corporate for my tastes. There’s a whole DIY Soylent movement (hahahahaha people are so weird!) apparently, but now we’re asking for more of a time commitment than I’m comfortable with (it also has a whole “get healthy” agenda and again, I don’t care about that––I’m not out to optimize anything, just eliminate one more thing to do).
When I was a young anorexic, in my second hospital program, they gave us Boost, commonly marketed toward the elderly, as replacement calories when we declined to finish a meal or snack. This was not a unique feature of the program: the previous program I’d been in did the same with Ensure, and the one I went to after this one actually put you on an all-liquid diet if you came in below a certain BMI. At this particular program I’m talking about, the Boost was meant to act as a punishment: even if you didn’t finish, say, one pretzel from a bag of pretzels, you’d still get an entire can of Boost, so obviously the calorie intake doesn’t at all even out there. And yet at some point, for whatever reason, all the girls in our program decided that Boost was by far the easier way to go. Forget the anxiety inherent in slicing your meant, the awkwardness of trying not to eat as fast as your neighbor, all those intrusive textures and flavors and temperatures, the occasional time we had to actually choose what to eat (the horror)! Just make it all the same and get rid of all the headache.
Eventually a therapist caught on to the fact that we had stopped thinking of Boost as something to be avoided and had started actively replacing our food with it (I think they overhead one of the girls saying offhandedly that it “tasted like cake”). The main therapist, who probably smoked three packs a day and had the voice to prove it, gave us all a big lecture, but honestly, she should have just saluted us: we were the way of the future!
Or now.
Earlier on in #quarantinelife, I was a virtual ideas machine. Seriously golden nuggets were just falling out of my mouth every time I spoke. I actually was a little annoyed, because I had more ideas in the span of eight weeks than I had in the previous three years, when I actually had at least a little free time to execute them. Now that time is basically over, which is sad but also perhaps freeing, in its way.
One of the ideas I had during the brief moment of intellectual fertility was to interview the performance artist Tehching Hsieh about what he has to say about how to live under quarantine. Hsieh is famous for his series of One Year Performances: for one year each, he punched a time clock every hour on the hour (sometimes called Time Clock Piece), never went indoors, lived in an 11’6″ x 9′ x 8′ cell (Cage Piece) and remained tied by an 8-foot rope to fellow performance artist Linda Montano (Rope Piece), with whom he was not romantically linked at the time and actually didn’t know before the piece began (this feels important to point out).
The one I thought spoke to the most to our current moment was the performance where he lived in the cell, because of the obvious comparison that while we were all feeling cooped up, he was quite literally cooped up: no Netflix, no sourdough starters, no Times digital subscription or Quarantine Chat or anything at all. He didn’t even make eye contact with the visitors who were allowed in every three weeks (totaling nineteen times a year). This is how he described his life during that year:
Thinking was the focus of this piece and was also my way of survival. While doing this piece, thinking was my major job. It doesn’t matter what I was thinking about, but I had to continue thinking, otherwise I would lose control not only of myself but also of the ability to handle the whole situation. It was difficult to pass time. I scratched 365 marks on the wall, one for each day. I had to calculate time; although I may have broken the rule of no writing, it helped me to know how many days I had passed, how many more days I had to go.
More:
What I needed was the use of my confined body to carry out the work, while at the same time, my mind, detached from the confinement, was free to think and to advance. I am as free in the cage as outside. My work here is not focusing on political imprisonment or on the self-cultivation of Zen retreats, but on freedom of thinking and on letting time go by.
He also talked about dividing his cell into different “rooms” in his mind, and breaking up his day by going on a walk “outside” (aka around the cell) and then returning “home” (his bed).
But then the more I thought about this, the more I realized that for me, actually the most analogous situation was the piece he did with Linda Montano. I am, after all, not alone in my quarantine, but inside a decently-sized-for-NYC-but-not-big apartment 99% of my time with two small children and my husband (so actually, my version of this would be being tied to another artist and two young monkeys). I’m sure some young-and-in-love types would hear about this piece and be like, “Oh, that sounds so lovely, being with someone all the time!” But my response is: OMG no. And it turns out that actually, Hsieh and Montano ended up really disliking each other. Hsieh puts it diplomatically (“Linda and I were exposed to each other. That brought complexity.”) but Marina Abramovic, in supplementary material provided for the publication of the book Out of Now, which chronicles Hsieh’s work, provides more insight:
But with Tehching and Linda there was no love. I was really puzzled by scratches above their two separate beds where they slept. Later on, I heard that they didn’t get along and in frustration they scratched the walls with their nails. They had made this promise and they are both very fatalistic in their work so they didn’t want to break it.
Interestingly, my husband felt like the piece that best mirrored our current times is the Time Clock Piece. Why? Because he is being asked to “clock in” without any sort of actual supervision and without actually going anywhere, I think was the gist. Not to say that Hsieh didn’t have people to whom he was accountable––usually lawyers or other third parties were in charge of making sure he was doing what he agreed to. And my husband also pointed out, intelligently, that the homeless populations in cities affected by COVID-19 might be represented by the piece where Hsieh stays outdoors entirely for a year, as many might be trying to actively avoid shelters, where crowding makes contagion even more likely.
So I wrote to Hsieh, asking him if maybe he’d be willing to be interviewed and tell me a bit about how he feels his art relates to this moment, etc. And he responded quickly! And nicely! And said no.
The beginning of his email read: I’m open to the connection you are building between the current situation and my work, at the meantime my work is about passing time, rather than how to pass time, I’m afraid it won’t the best for me to talk about my work in relation to the current situation.
Which reads a little like fancy art world speak for, “You obviously didn’t get my point, plebeian” to me. But yes, of course I do understand that allowing time to continue on passively is not the same thing as figuring out what to do with your time (eye roll emoji). That doesn’t negate the obvious question here: what on earth did you think about for an entire year?!
Hope you are doing well, although we all feel constrained in a way, at least we still have free thinking.
Said a person living with two toddlers… never.
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