He let out a sigh and gazed down at the ground for a moment. “I am happy,” he murmured.
“I want you to know something,” I said. “I love you. And I’m never going to lie about you or be ashamed of you or anything like that, okay?”
As I’ve said before, the Imaginary Intern talked like a kid, so you had to wade through — just to give you a good example — all his diffident phumphering, all the “he was like, Blah-blah, and she was all like, Blah-blah-blah,” all the whatevers and the my bads and the LOLs before you realized that he was quoting from Mao’s November 15, 1956, Speech at the Second Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China about the suppression of counterrevolutionaries. This all came up because he’d said, relative to our idea of nonexpository autobiography, that literary-style anecdotes were like “little Chiang Kai-sheks,” and needed to be “executed,” and I said, “What do you mean by that?” and that’s when he, in his diffident phumphering way, quoted Mao: “They [the counterrevolutionaries] ought to be executed. Some of the democratic personages say that it is bad to execute [these people]. We say that it is good to execute them; this is just a competing show. In this drama we have always been singing in disharmony with the democratic personages. The ones we are executing are ‘little Chiang Kai-sheks’…If the counterrevolutionaries are not suppressed, the laboring people will not be happy. The oxen will not be happy either; nor will the plows, and the soil will not be comforted. This is because the laboring people who use the oxen, the plows, and the land are not happy. Therefore, we must execute some counterrevolutionaries.” But this all had to be painstakingly gleaned through a translation process of which only I was capable, given the propinquity of our thought processes.
Mom, do you have any of that, uh…that, that moisturizer with you? The stuff with the hyaluronic acid? (MARK’S MOM rummages through her bag and retrieves a small bottle of moisturizing lotion. MARK gets down from the table and takes the bottle from her.)
MARK
Thank you. (He squeezes out a few daubs into the palm of his hand, and gets back up on the table.)
MARK
(To the fast-food workers.)
Y’know, when Mao says “laboring people,” he means you guys. (He massages the lotion into his wrinkled neck.)
MARK
Even in my most drunken, obstreperous state, when I’m like a thrashing, sweaty, demented infant…some frothing homunculus…one’s impulse is to embrace me, to hold me in your arms, to stroke my little, balding, translucent skull and console me, “Poor Leyner…poor, poor Leyner,” as one might say to some homesick alien creature or some morose ape in a tuxedo.
I think I was in maybe ninth grade, tenth grade, when I failed shop class after basically just taking a very large piece of wood and planing it down day after day until it was ultimately a very tiny piece of wood… I guess I made a toothpick. That ended up unintentionally being my final project. Other kids had made these great planters and bookends and stuff…I definitely do like cutting things into smaller and smaller pieces…Maybe it’s a core aesthetic strategy of mine, come to think of it — to create a kind of plenitude, not by generating anything new, but by endlessly dividing what I originally had. Perhaps my revenge on the world as a small-statured male (I’m like five seven — ish) is to literally cut everything else down to size. The ant and the mouse (obvious personifications of my stature) have always been my totem animals. I still have an enduring identification with, uh…I don’t know what you’d call them…maybe stigmatized animals…which is reflected in a lot of the poems I post on Twitter, e.g.,
Still looking for homes for:
Muffin, a 7-ft adult tapeworm;
Buster, a 10-month-old Ixodes tick;
& Lulu, a 4-day-old streptococcus bacterium.
So anyway, to make up the credits I lost by failing shop, I took a summer class at a community college, which was fairly close to where we lived at the time in Maplewood, New Jersey. I think it was an Intro to Classical Music survey type of thing, which seemed relatively painless. And the teacher, the professor, offered me a ride home one day, and on the way he swung by his house and offered me a beer. I said fine and went in and sat on his couch in the living room, and he came on to me. And I said, No thanks, and he told me that he’d fucked Leonard Bernstein, and that he could play me like a Stradivarius…I still think about this (and sort of wince, actually) whenever I hear a piece of music that features pizzicato, that rapid plucking of the strings…again I said, No thanks, and he was supercool about it. I bring this all up simply to point out that, although I think now I have the face of an ogre, of some old, Belgian, morphine-dependent, defrocked priest (I have no idea why I said “Belgian” just now), I was sort of cute back then. But, God, how we change! We droop, we prolapse, we…we curdle and decay…we putrefy and deliquesce and melt into these foul, slimy puddles of ourselves…Unless we’re somehow extracted from this evil world…somehow rescued from above.
It’s a great relief, actually, after squinting at the apparitions of pseudocelebrities for almost six decades, to look at yourself in the mirror, to look at your own anonymous, moribund face. In my own eyes, I can see the tiny nuns floating across the boulevard, perhaps it’s just that degenerative debris that floats in the vitreous humor of the eye, but to me, it’s tiny Jersey City nuns. There is something unspeakably consoling in one’s own smile. In that reflection, you can discern the face of yourself as a child and the face of yourself as a corpse. And in this moment, all the fundamental antinomies are reconciled — the sacred and the profane, the analyst and the analysand, the celebrated success and the abject failure. The pilot and the passenger. Writer and reader. Fiction and nonfiction. Past and present. And the mind that abides and the mind that is gone.
The Imaginary Intern and I used to watch lots of lectures and documentaries on YouTube. One of our favorites was by Masakazu Konishi, a Japanese neurobiologist known for his research on the prey-capture auditory systems of barn owls. There was a video we loved about the symbiotic relationship between Hawaiian bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes) and bioluminescent bacteria called Vibrio fischeri, which colonize the crypts in the squid’s light organ (the benefit to the squid is that this illumination offsets that of the moonlight so that it doesn’t cast a shadow which makes it conspicuous to prey)…there was a video of crabs eating jellyfish gonads…oh, there was one depicting a feeding frenzy of deep-sea snailfish (Notoliparis kermadecensis), which are adapted to extreme pressure, total darkness, and cold temperature, and at about the ten-second mark, this twenty-five-centimeter giant white sea-monster crustacean thing (Alicella gigantea) swims into the frame, and even though we’d both watched it maybe a hundred times, the two of us would just sit there dumbstruck! (My old high-school friend Danny Sarewitz — who now edits Issues in Science and Technology, a magazine copublished by the National Academy of Sciences — told me once that I’m an extremophilephile.) But sometimes I just wanted to watch something sort of light and silly, and one night we happened on The Expendables, this movie starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, and Dolph Lundgren. And the Imaginary Intern, using one of his quainter expressions of disinclination, said, “I’d rather watch a person scoop shit out of his ass and frost a cake with it than watch The Expendables.” And what happens of course? We watch it and he loves it, which is, I think, exactly what he was most apprehensive about in the first place. We most resist what we most desire. It’s all an endless reenactment of the incest taboo. We also loved watching — and I almost forgot this one — the video that was recorded during a cystoscopy performed on me by my urologist, Dr. David Samadi (there’s a miniature video camera on the tip of the scope). And there’s a moment when Samadi gets to my bladder and this bladder stone comes into view — it looks like this little golden nugget — and the same thing would happen…even though the Imaginary Intern and I had watched this video I don’t know how many times (and this is one you really should watch high), when that bladder stone would come into view, we’d both go fucking bonkers! I’m completely convinced that endoscopic imaging is the ne plus ultra of reality TV, and I think that once the equipment comes down in price, people will just start sticking scopes down their throats and up their asses, and just sit around and watch that all day. Duchamp spent the last two decades of his life secretly constructing this very enigmatic assemblage called Étant donnés in a clandestine space off the bathroom in his apartment on West Fourteenth Street, leading everyone in the art world to believe that he’d stopped working as an artist…that he’d abandoned art to devote himself to chess. With Gone with the Mind, the Imaginary Intern and I decided to do exactly the opposite. We made a great display of working every day, but we were actually doing nothing. Well…we were tweeting, looking at porn, playing video games (or attempting to, at any rate), watching shit on YouTube, watching old movies on TCM, etc. But we weren’t “writing” per se. And he was always busting my balls about how long it was taking…he was always reminding me that Nietzsche wrote his autobiographical Ecce Homo in only two months as he teetered on the brink of complete syphilitic insanity, so he didn’t see why it should be any problem for us to get this done by…whatever deadline we’d imposed on ourselves at that point. But if it weren’t for Internet porn, I’m sure we would have finished Gone with the Mind a lot sooner. If it weren’t for Internet porn, there’d be a cure for cancer, there’d be human photosynthesis, levitation, time travel, everything…Men spend so much time looking at Internet porn that surely they (we) will evolve into some sort of mutant creature consisting entirely of an eye, a hand, and a penis. And you know what’s funny? Liz Ross, my high-school girlfriend with whom I’ve remained very close over the years, read a tweet I posted that said, Yay! Candy Crush Saga has cured me of my Internet-porn addiction! and she texted me and she didn’t even mention the Internet-porn thing, all she wanted to know was what level of Candy Crush Saga I was on. (Who even plays Candy Crush anymore, right?) But just to circle back to something I was talking about before…I was thinking in the car on the way here tonight about Liz’s selective attention in reading my tweet, about that sort of goal-driven selective or executive attention, which is the…the cognitive protocol, the process by which we key in on task-related stimuli (e.g., info about Candy Crush) and filter out irrelevant or distracting information or “noise” (e.g., my Internet-porn addiction)…and I was thinking about how not only has this kind of executive attention been a hallmark of Liz’s cognitive style since I met her (when I was fifteen, after weeks and weeks of stirring up the courage to call and ask her out, I finally did, and she answered the phone and said, “Could you call me back, I’m watching Upstairs, Downstairs,” which was this British drama that took place in a town house in Edwardian London and depicted the lives of the servants “downstairs” and their masters “upstairs”)…but I was also thinking about how functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has consistently shown that executive attention is mediated by the dorsal/caudal regions of the anterior cingulate cortex (also known as Area 25), and I started thinking, wouldn’t that be the ultimate reality show? Watching an fMRI of your own anterior cingulate cortex as you watch an fMRI of your own anterior cingulate cortex? Shows like Deadliest Catch and The Real Housewives of Atlanta can pull in, I don’t know, close to four million viewers, but I just can’t imagine that wouldn’t be more popular. I mean…it’s watching your own mind watch itself watching itself (which is another way of describing autobiography, I suppose). The Imaginary Intern and I used to say, “The mind going is the mind coming,” which we meant not only in terms of the curvature of space-time (and the cosmic boomerang effect), but also in terms of sexual jouissance.