The Word and The Body
by Greg Ritter
This work is copyrighted 1995 by the author and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
I was sitting in front of my Macintosh when word came: Michael Current had died.
Actually, word had come several hours before but it was resting in a miniscule space on a hard drive on the mainframe in an air-conditioned room on the university campus, existing only as a particular arrangement of magnetic particles. I, on the other hand, existed as a puddle of overheated flesh and blood in an un-air-conditioned apartment in Richmond, in the summer between being an adjunct professor of English and going back to graduate school full-time. The summer session had wound down, and though I was still waiting tables part-time, most of my days were spent wasting time on the rapids of the James River or wasting time surfing the Internet.
Odd how things come full circle, parts of your life that you thought were long over, parts you thought had ebbed away returning like driftwood on the tide. I gave up computer science to major in English only to find myself years later researching and writing about computers and composition pedagogy, found my research being guided and led by information coming at me via the Net, especially via electronic mailing lists. An e-mail list is a strange hybrid, a rhetorical cross-breed that shares characteristics of both conversation and correspondence, but doesn't follow the rules of either one. Hundreds of these lists exists, organized around topics ranging from computer programming languages to depression to rock musicians to philosophy.
Imagine sending a letter to an office where some diligent secretary photocopies it and mails it off to everybody who has "subscribed" to the list. They check their mailbox and find a copy of your letter, as well as copies of letters written by other list members. They can reply to the whole list by sending their letter back to that overworked secretary, or they can reply to you individually by sending their response to your personal address.
Now imagine all of this happening instantaneously. No secretary, no postal carrier, no mail truck, no mailbox at the end of the driveway with the red flag that signals outgoing mail. The secretary is replaced by a computer program that automates the whole process, the photocopies are replaced by electronic copies transmitted as packets on the Net, stored as magnetic patterns on tapes and disks, the mail truck and mailman replaced by wires that carry your words around the world in far less time than the days or weeks postal services demand. Press a button on your computer terminal and in seconds your letter has arrived in the electronic mailbox in the computer accounts of everyone subscribed to the list. This instantaneous quality leads to a spontaneity not found in traditional epistles--mail arrives, you shoot off a quick, often poorly thought out, response which generates another quick response. Not quite the give and take of spoken conversation, but neither is it the slow paced turnaround time of the postal service that earned regular mail the Net slang title of "snail mail."
By that summer I'd had Internet access for almost a year through the university, and I'd grown to rely on e-mail for correspondence with distant friends, and on e-mail lists for intellectual stimulation on subjects both within and outside my discipline. I'd subscribed and unsubscribed to many lists, but it the only one I had stayed active on for more than a few weeks was the first one I had ever subscribed to, a list called FutureCulture. Discussions on FC (as it was abbreviated) center around the direction of culture, often focusing on how computer technology affected culture and the future, but often becoming far more broad--and sometimes far more personal--than that. FutureCulture is a high volume list, dozens of messages coming across the wires on an average day. I'd developed the habit of checking my e-mail several times a day, sometimes on campus, sometimes by calling in from home.
I usually checked it early in the morning, right after I woke up, but that July 23 in 1994 I had slept in. By the time I booted up my computer and dialed into the university's mainframe it was already well into mid-day and I had already made plans to spend the day baking my body at Texas Beach, a particularly rocky stretch of the river. Scrolling through the new mail that had arrived that morning, I stopped at one message from Alan Sondheim, an art critic and frequent participant on FutureCulture. It had an innocuous title--"A little something"--and a wrenching first line--"I just got a message that Michael Current died. I checked his home in Des Moines and it is true." He had died from a heart attack. He was 31.
Sitting in my apartment reading the announcement of Michael's death, I felt the kind of clutching sensation you feel when a friend dies, the choking, the welling up of something inside that needs to be released. And I stifled it. I pushed it away.
I'd never met Michael Current, nor was he anybody famous. Just someone else on the e-mail list. He was an unemployed scholar, the true kind--someone who lived for philosophy simply because he loved it, not because of tenure. For months I had known very little about Michael, not much more than the information in his .sig file, the file that some mail programs automatically tack on to the end of e-mail messages: his name, his e-mail addresses, his postal address, even his phone number. I thought it was strange at that time for people to include personal information like a phone number or home address in a .sig file; one of my strong attractions to e-mail was the slim chance of somebody being pissed off by what I wrote and calling me to give me hell for it. Michael had also written a terse estimation of himself in his .sig: "Specializing in Philosophy, Queer Studies, Depression & Unemployment :)" The ":)" symbol at the end (called a "smiley" because on it's side it looks like a smiley face) always seemed like an attempt to undercut some of the sadness in the description's admissions.
On a few intellectual corners of the Internet, though, he was a fairly well know personality. Michael acted as moderator for several philosophy-oriented e-mail lists and contributed regularly to many more like the lists dedicated to the postmodern philosophers Lyotard, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari, as well as other, less specific lists like Walkers-in-Darkness (a support list for sufferers of depression), Cybermind (a list about the psychological aspects of cyberspace which he co-moderated with Alan Sondheim) and FutureCulture.
I had always kept myself distant on the Internet. I knew there were people who developed relationships over the computers; one friend of mine, a black woman from Philadelphia, had fallen in love over the computers with a man from Sweden. Their love made me suspicious; I never trusted it--how could you fall in love with someone you had never touched? People talked about cybersex and I tried it once--I wrote erotic messages back and forth with a strange woman in a realtime computer conference, but couldn't stop myself from breaking into laughter when she typed "Oh...oh...OH...I'm coming, I'm coming!" It was entirely virtual--there was nothing real to it.
For me, it was all about words. Pure rhetoric. E-mail combines aspects of writing and conversation in a strange way. In an essay you can take the time to craft your words and sculpt your ideas, avoiding the dangers of conversation: the imprecision of speaking off the top of your head. But in an essay your audience can't respond; there's no monologue, it's just your voice speaking to a faceless mass somewhere in the void. E-mail exists somewhere between these two. It gives the author the space to craft the writing, though you can fire off a response off the top of your head, too. The turnaround time between responses isn't as immediate as conversation, which often allows for tempers to cool (or build), but also stretches the amount of time it takes to clarify what you've said.
E-mail seems so natural to me. Words have always been the only part of my life where I consistently feel powerful and confident, from my high school days on the debate team to my current life as a writer and teacher. I can handle them spoken, in debates or in classrooms, but I'm most comfortable at the keyboard of my computer, building sentences on the screen. I know how to use the words better than I know how to use anything else. It's not always easy but sometimes I can make the words do backflips and somersaults, make them vault into the air. And sometimes they get me in trouble, too, sometimes I'm a rhetorical bully. In a debate, I'll bury my opponent in words, refuting them point by point, piling on examples, laying verbal traps--lures I want them to snap up so I can position them where I want them for the kill. It's where I have control, it's where I can manipulate, it's where I'm invulnerable.
Sitting in front of the computer in my boxers, still sweating in the summer heat, I kept scanning through the messages on my computer. After Alan's post, listmembers poured out their emotions onto the list and as I read I felt the distance between me and them growing.
Debra Richardson: "Sitting here, having never met Michael I found myself in tears...crying for the death of a man I've known only as words on a screen. Crying as much for the loss that those who were close to him have experienced."
Nick Gold: "Christ, I don't know how to react to this. It's like this terrible sense of confusion, a wave flowing over me. I'm totally overwhelmed by this, which might be weird in itself, considering I had only directly communicated with Michael a few times. But over the past months of being here on FutureCulture, mostly lurking, I have always been moved by Michael."
Shawn Wilbur: "i've been walkin through a soggy, warm night here in the ex-great black swamp, under a full moon, tryin to figure out quite how to mourn someone i never 'really' met, but who touched me as deeply as Michael did.... i've cried a lot tonight, and i'll cry more before i'm through."
Troy Swain: "I'm at a... I don't know how to transcribe? translate my emotions... Fuck."
Together Alan and Michael had created and co-moderated the Cybermind e-mail list. Alan had been in close, regular contact with Michael, by e-mail as well as by phone. In my mind, he "knew" Michael better than anyone on the list because he had actually heard his voice. Part of what he wrote:
I miss your voice and the backtracking of ephemeral words on the screen, and now silence alone is unutterable....At the limits of the body, speech is abandoned, death sinks in, the Net is hidden speech. And at the limits, cries and murmurs are heard. Broken, disconnected, this is all we have to offer.
But maybe the most frustrated post was Heath Rezabek's. On an e-mail list people will often send a message with just the word "ping" in it to see if they're getting through. In a post with the header "michael current and the meat" Heath wrote:
this is visceral. words words words words meat
this world is too FUCKING ABSURD
ping ping PING DAMMIT PING
nothing to say. how many WORDS do i need to yoke to what really amounts
to a PING to check and know that at this time, in this place ["PLACE"]
you are still there and i am still here.
i am still here, wish i was there
ping, dammit. ping, ping, ping. not in some many words. ping.
As I read their messages, something negative grew inside me--disdain, I think. Didn't they know it was just all words? It was ridiculous to feel this way over the death of someone you didn't know, I told myself. Someone you had never laid eyes on, someone you had never spoken to, someone who only existed in your life in words on a screen, not even words on a page that were permanent and solid and tangible, but just electronic impulses, abstract representations that disappeared forever when you turned the computer off. Which is what I did. I turned it off. And the announcement of Michael's death disappeared, the form and substance of those words lost as I deprived them of the power they needed to be real.
I had encountered Michael first on the FutureCulture mailing list, where he posted fairly regularly. I must have read his messages--I at least scanned most of what was sent to the list--but I have no solid memories of him until around April Fool's Day, 1994. In the last week or so of March, the discussion of FC had turned to suicide. Chuck Adams, another FC regular, had shared some of his suicidal thoughts with the list. It was a discussion I stayed out of. I didn't know how to respond to these people (including Michael) who were suddenly piping up with confessions of depression and suicidal tendencies in a forum that was usually dedicated to technological and sociological discussions. Those discussions got heated sometimes, certainly, and even progressed to "flaming" (netspeak for ad hominem attacks), but I wasn't used to or comfortable with the expressions of fear and uncertainty in the suicide thread, nor was I comfortable with the responses, the level of understanding that some of the list members seemed to share. I began to wonder what I was doing here in the midst of this group of people seemingly so eager and willing to discuss their fears and traumas, the desire to end their own lives.
On March 30, Chuck Adams (who often signed his posts with the semi-pseudonym "Chuck Dammit!") cross-posted a message that had been sent to Leri, another e-mail list with loose affiliations to FutureCulture. It was a rant with the less than grammatically perfect title, "I KIDNAPPED BY THE STATE!!!" from someone calling themselves Diablo. At the time, Diablo was a student at Cornell University who had been contemplating suicide. In is post he admitted that and described how he had posted messages to several Usenet newsgroups. (A Usenet newsgroup is similar to an e-mail list, but instead of imagining it as receiving letters in your own personal mailbox, think of it as a bulletin board where you tack up messages, other people tack up messages in response to yours, then you can go back and look at it again later and the process continues.) On the 12th of March, Diablo had posted messages to "alt.romance.chat" (a newsgroup for chatting about romantic problems) regarding his suicidal feelings, and had posted to the "alt.drugs" newsgroup requesting information on what drugs would be most effective to take his own life.
Two days later, Diablo said, two police officers accompanied by a mental health professional from Tompkins County showed up at Diablo's door. Somebody had read his post on the alt.drugs newsgroup and notified the administration at Cornell that one of their students had posted a public request for information on how to kill himself. The officers told Diablo he would accompany them to a hospital for "an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half." When asked what they would do if he chose not to go, he was told he didn't have a choice. Diablo's account of what happened afterward is peppered with expletives and accusations of being kidnapped by the state, and it's hard to determine what part of his story is accurate and what parts are clouded by the fit of rage he seemed to be in when he wrote it. According to him, the police drove him to Tompkins County Hospital where he was kept waiting for several hours only to speak to a doctor for several minutes. Shortly thereafter, he was informed he was being transferred to the mental ward. He said he told them "something to the effect of fuck you I'm not going anywhere" which, accompanied with expressing his hope that one of the orderlies "suffered the worst kind of hell," got him strapped to a gurney and loaded into an ambulance.
By his own account Diablo continued to berate the orderlies with obscenities and comparisons to Nazi death-camp guards on his way to Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hospital. He was admitted to the hospital (under protest), put into hospital clothes, and put a room in the wing with manic-depressive cases. Diablo spent a two nights at the hospital before being released. He said he was forced to give blood samples, had to eat food that "sucked," was "confined in EXTREME boredom," missed classes, tests, papers and lost money on investments.
Chuck Dammit!'s repost of Diablo's rant initiated a hot debate on FC. The Net has a strong libertarian bent, and many people jumped on Diablo's bandwagon, cursing along with him a government that could allow people to be detained without their consent for merely inquiring about ways to kill themselves. In his rant, Diablo kept saying that the "Internet was not safe," and it was to this another part of the list (including myself) responded. Who ever said the Internet was safe? Newsgroups and e-mail lists are public forums accessible by just about anybody with Internet access; requesting information on killing yourself from a Usenet newsgroup is not significantly different than going into grocery store and asking people in the aisles if they know of a good way to commit suicide. "So?" cried the libertarian side. "Shouldn't we be able to do that if we want?" Maybe. But considering that attempting suicide is illegal in most states, should Diablo have been surprised that he got a response from officials after stating his intent in a public forum?
The debate carried on for days, dozens and dozens of messages being sent back and forth. Two days after Chuck dammit!'s repost of Diablo's rant, on April 1, a listmember named Michael Roberts posted this message to the list:
I would just like to take this oppurtunity to publickly announce that I am crazy as a loon and will kill myself by drinking drano in the Kings Common here at Northern Illinois University at exaqctly 9;30am tommarow. Unless, off course, I am stoped by a group of helping professionals.
Bite dat tree,
Michael Roberts
The next day two police officers and a mental health professional from Northern Illinois University approached Roberts. Somebody had read his post on FC and notified the administration at Northern Illinois that one of their students had posted a public statement of intent to kill himself.
That somebody was Michael Current.
Michael Current hadn't been following the thread about Diablo closely. Late the same night he checked his mail from FutureCulture and saw Michael Roberts' post and wrote to the list:
Um. . .Shit.
Is this for real or am i missing something? My mail delivery here is still somewhat erratic.
Is anyone up who knows the scoop on this - or that there is not scoop on this?
As a person with a long history of major depression who is often suicidal, this troubles me very much. My instincts tell me that I should assume it is for real unless/until I know it isn't.
So, if I follow my instincts what am I supposed to do? Call NIL and get this person carted off to a hospital - possibly against their will?
I tend to think suicide is a right. I also tend to think most people who threaten it, and many who succeed, don't really care about exercising their right - they just want help. But this person's name is not even familiar to me
Michael - are you on to get this? I'm gonna assume that you are serious, and say that I am not a helping professional, just a guy who knows about feeling suicidal. At the very least, I'd like to be there to listen to you before you do something so drastic. My phone number is in my sig. If it is busy, it means I am on line so u can reach me by UNIXtalk or e-mailing me. Any time is o.k.
Any other FC'er on to discuss this with me??????
Michael
With what I learned about Michael after this incident, I try now to imagine what going through his mind as he read Roberts' post. Was he remembering his own depression, his own thoughts of suicide? Was he remembering the beating that left one hand partially paralyzed, a beating he received for no other reason than his sexual preference? Was he remembering standing over the body of his cousin who had taken his own life, a man Michael called his "only childhood friend"? Was Michael remembering the phone call he got at four a.m. one morning, arousing him out of a sedative-induced sleep, from the mother of a friend who had killed himself a month before? The phone company had told the mother that a call to Michael was the last call her son had placed before hanging himself. She wanted Michael to tell her what her son's last words were--but the call was only a distant memory to Michael. While Michael read Roberts' post was he remembering that he could tell this woman nothing, that he couldn't remember anything that was said, that he could offer her no solace?
Michael Current explained what had happened next. It was the middle of the night in Iowa when Michael replied to the FC list, inquiring about Roberts' suicide threat. "Middle of the night" means very little on the Internet when people are sending messages from California, from New York, from London, from Vienna, from Hong Kong, from Melbourne. But either no one read his message or no one thought it necessary to respond. Getting no response from FC, Michael waited until eight a.m. Iowa time, two hours before Roberts had said he was going to kill himself, and called Student Affairs at Northern Illinois University.
He spoke with someone in Student Affairs and was called back a little later by one of the university's counselors. Michael faxed a copy of Roberts' post to the counselor who agreed with Michael that it was impossible to tell if Roberts was serious or not. Michael wound up faxing another copy of the post to the campus police who began searching for Roberts. They couldn't locate Roberts so they sent people to King Commons to see if he showed up--which he did at ten a.m. Roberts told the police that he wasn't serious, that it had been a "philosophical experiment." The NIU officials called Michael later that afternoon to tell him Roberts never had any intention of committing suicide; his post had been an April Fool's Day joke.
Unlike Diablo, Michael Roberts went with the officials peaceably to talk with a counselor. Like Diablo, however, he posted back to the Internet, to FutureCulture, angry at the inconvenience. "It never occurred to me," he wrote, "that some basket case from Iowa would be driven by his own personal demons to call the thought police clear over in another state ranting and raving about a bad April fools day joke. "
Roberts' post generated another wave of debate on the FutureCulture list. Was Michael Current justified in taking an action on a potentially ambiguous post? Roberts could have protected himself merely by the use of a "smiley." It's a common symbol used on the Net to indicate that someone is joking, a quick fix when the tone isn't clear through the words alone. Roberts was depending on context for his meaning to be clear, but when someone like Michael Current--who hadn't been following the conversation's thread--came across Roberts' post, the lack of context magnified the rhetorical weaknesses of Roberts' joke. Suddenly, another context took precedence--the context of Michael Current's life, the context that wouldn't let him take the chance of sitting by and watching somebody else take their life. . . again.
The Internet had been a game to me, or a big library, or a collection of pen pals chatting about future culture, about American Literature, about R.E.M. For Michael Current, the Internet had become something else. Some days Michael would spend hours upon hours on the computer, writing and responding to e-mail, talking with people in real-time online conferencing sessions. Here was a a man marginalized from society in so many ways--he was gay, he was clinically depressed, he was unemployed, he was diabetic, he had heart problems, and his passion was philosophy--something contemporary society has little use for because it doesn't boost the profits. The Net became Michael's community.
There a Net aphorism: "On the Internet no one can tell if you're a dog." Perhaps it only refers to physical appearance, but a mutant German Shepherd who typed fairly well could interact with "regular" people on the Net and no one would be any wiser. It cuts around a lot of the social barriers we construct for ourselves--race, sex, appearance, handicaps. You reveal as much about yourself as you want, conceal as much about yourself as you need. It's easy to be somebody else, it's easy to pretend you're a different kind of person when all the evidence of your being consists of charged particles in the wires, on the screen.
What Michael did was harder than that, though--Michael chose not to pretend. Michael chose not to conceal, to step right past the screen and present himself for who and what he was, and to take the responsibility for that risk.
Alone in the summer heat in my apartment, reading the outpourings of emotion to the list over Michael's death, I had shut down my emotions and told myself that it was ridiculous to feel that kind of grief over the death of someone you didn't know, someone you had never laid eyes on, someone you had never spoken to, someone who existed in your life only in words on a screen, not even words on a page that were permanent and solid and tangible, but just electronic impulses, abstract representations that disappeared forever when you turned the computer off. Which is what I did. I turned it off. And the announcement of Michael's death disappeared, the form and substance of those words lost as I deprived them of the power they needed to be real.
I wasn't ready to stop pretending. I wasn't ready to step through the screen.
When Pip Holloway came to visit the week after Christmas, I was still reeling. In the ten days before she came to Richmond I'd been fired from my job and my girlfriend had dumped me. Everything seemed off kilter. I felt like I'd been knocked on my ass, and now someone was asking me to get up, clean the apartment, and welcome a stranger into my home.
I couldn't get away from the word stranger. Pip was another list member on FutureCulture, but not someone who I knew well, even in that limited way I let myself feel familiar with people on the list. I felt familiar with Alan who dumps so much of his own pain and confusion into his posts, I felt familiar with Dwayne whose posts I could have recognized without his name by his one-line responses buried within the mounds of quoted text of whoever he was responding to. I felt familiar with Siegfried, the Austrian worried about his English who wrote better in it than most of my American freshmen. For awhile he and I had traded six-page or bigger letters, an ongoing debate about whether it was worth fighting to make a better world or giving up on all the rest and looking out for number one.
Pip posted less frequently to the list than many people, much more than most, though. Less than myself. Her posts were often political and always to the point, different from my rambling rants that could go on for pages. She was a doctoral student in contemporary history (almost an oxymoron) at Ohio State and a lesbian. She focused her studies on the history of the South and on legislation regarding sexuality; Jesse Helms was a frequent target of hers. As with lots of people on the list, though, she often posted with an openness I found disconcerting. Several months after Michael's death, Pip had written about her first experience with Mosaic, a program that allows a graphical interface for the Internet--images and sound and video, as well as the words. She wrote:
It's 8:20 a.m. The computer labs with mosaic just opened for the semester, and I had 15. min before class, so I thought I'd dash over and start to figure out how to use mosaic. I've never used this software before I'd saved a list of places to try to connect to , mostly gotten from fc, but I didn't think Id be able to figure out how to use this software in 15 min. Let alone connect anywhere.
But I just tried it. Copied marius's address for Michael's page, pasted it into the "load url window" (just a guess). And pop. Poof. Wow. There's a picture of Michael.
I've been in the lab <10 minutes. I'm still sweaty from biking up here. Its the first day of class in the first quarter of my doctoral program. Its the first day I'm t.a.' ing and Im about to meet the class Im gonna grade for and I've got tears in my eyes and my mind is BLOWN from seeing this picture.
Wow.
Originally, Pip suggested the fleshmeet. What a word, fleshmeet. It's Internet vernacular for a face-to-face meeting. It has a sort of lurid appeal, though, a sensuality. And thinking on it now I understand it's qualification that I didn't understand then then--the assumption that some kind of meeting has already taken place, that the face-to-face meeting is somehow a posteriori. There would be no need for a separate term for meeting in the flesh if some other meeting was not already assumed.
Pip had e-mailed me several weeks before Christmas. Her family lived in Charlottesville, an hour from Richmond, and she was returning there for part of her holiday break. She suggested we could get together, either in Charlottesville or Richmond, the week after Christmas. We bounced e-mail messages back and forth to each other. "Are you coming?" "What day of the week is good for you?" "Can you come here or should I go there?" We agreed she would come visit me in Richmond; my car was old, running poorly, and I didn't trust it to make even the short round-trip from Charlottesville to Richmond. Before she left Ohio we traded phone numbers. She was going to be without e-mail access while in Virginia. Cut off.
It was the first time I had given anyone on the Internet my phone number. Quickly and easily I sent it off to her, before she had given me her parents' number in Charlottesville, and then immediately wondered why I had done it. Odd. I had given my number--and even more personal information--out over the phone, without a moment's hesitation, to dozens and dozens of people I didn't know: credit card representatives, doctors' receptionists, car mechanics. Never a second thought. Those strangers were far more likely to abuse the knowledge of my phone number or my credit card number or my social security number than Pip Holloway was, but when I e-mailed my number to Pip I almost immediately panicked. Now I'd done it. Someone on the list had my home phone, and if I posted something that really pissed her off there was nothing stopping her from picking up a phone and calling me, nothing stopping her from inserting a living voice into my life. Not that it would have been any difficult task for anyone on the list to have picked up their phone and dialed information in Richmond to get my number. I remembered how surprised I had always been that Michael had included his home address and phone at the end of every e-mail message. I always felt like he was reaching out--like he wanted those faceless people to enter his life. And I never understood that.
Two days after Christmas, early on a Tuesday morning, Pip left a message on my answering machine while I was at the coffee shop. I called her back when I got home. Her father answered the phone.
"Can I speak to Pip, please?"
"She's out right now. She should be back around one."
"Um...can I leave a message? Can you tell her that Greg called. I'm a friend of hers in Richmond."
I had identified myself as a friend, and I felt kind of odd about that. Had she told her father that she was going to drive to Richmond to "fleshmeet" with someone from the Internet? Would he think it bizarre that I had called myself a friend? I found it bizarre that I had identified myself as a friend, but how was I supposed to identify myself? A "fellow surfer of the Internet"? A "pen pal"? A "professional colleague from another university"? Those were all more accurate, in my mind, than "friend," but they all also sounded ridiculous to say aloud in that context. "Hello, Mr. Holloway, I'm a pen pal of your daughter Pip's...." Hadn't used that term since seventh grade. "Hello, Mr. Holloway, your daughter Phillippa and I are colleagues in related disciplines in the humanities who share a good deal of theoretical interests, and we were thinking about getting together over the holidays to talk about deconstruction and New Historicism." Yeah, right.
Pip called back later that afternoon. "Hi, Greg, it's Pip." Her name is a point, and she says it like it's the dot at the bottom of an exclamation point. She punctuates herself with her name. I'd heard her voice on the answering machine, and, until now, it hadn't even registered as the voice of a person whose words I had read but never heard.
"A voice to go with the words," I said to her.
We spoke on the phone briefly, made plans for Thursday. Originally, when we had e-mailed each other, the plan was for her to come to Richmond, we'd have lunch, hang out a while. The plans changed to breakfast--she wanted to be back in Charlottesville by the afternoon to spend some time with her brother. I remembered posts about her brother to the list, how close she was to him. It's information like that--short asides buried somewhere in the messages--are what bring texture to relationships on the Net. I didn't remember where or when or in what context she related the importance of her brother, but it had stuck with me.
Some time during that phone conversation I told her my girlfriend had broken up with me the day before. Most of my close friends were out of town for the holidays and there had really been no one to turn to when that relationship ended, so maybe I was desperate to talk about it with anyone. I had only discussed that break-up on the phone with a couple out-of-town friends, and by e-mail with two friends--one in Seattle, one here in Richmond. E-mail and phone calls were not my normal mode of unloading, and I found new things happening. The phone calls were brief; long-distance costs prohibited long conversations. The e-mail conversations were something else entirely. Long rants on my part, long responses from my friends. Sometimes I labored over those e-mails like I would labor over my short stories, developing and expanding and clarifying, yet still I wasn't clear. The damn medium is so imperfect for working out problems. If you speak vaguely face-to-face, the person you're talking to says, "What? What the hell are you talking about?" In writing, though, even with the apparent transitoriness of computer-mediated communication, the word has more permanence, the word has more weight. It goes out over the wires and ends up in someone else's mailbox, and no matter whether it was a post you labored over or words spewed off the top of you head, it's read with solidity. It is read as what you mean--not sort of what you mean, not approximately what you mean, but simply what you mean. If the word isn't perfect, if it isn't exactly what you mean, the margin of error gets magnified.
I was trying to explain to my friends what the break-up was doing to me, the frustration and the changes it was bringing about, but I couldn't get it out in the e-mail. I'd write something and think it made sense, only to realize when the response came that I hadn't been remotely as clear as I thought, that this word or that word had been a degree too ambiguous, had been misunderstood, and the whole response was based on the misunderstanding, the ambiguity. In e-mail you can't stop someone in mid-response and say, "No, what I really meant was..." The word is final.
I hadn't posted that bit of personal information--the break-up--to FutureCulture yet, though I eventually did. I had told the list about being fired as a way of explaining what I was doing sitting at the computer all afternoon writing messages to FutureCulture. Not that any of the other people who were doing the same really felt the need to offer any explanation for themselves. Out of work, on academic break, my "real life" friends out of town--bouncing messages around the world had become into a stimulating way to spend an afternoon. So Pip knew I'd had a lousy week, and when I mentioned the break-up, I could feel the silence on the other end, brief, but tangible, like she was wondering why I was telling her this. She asked if I wanted to change the plans, but I told her no, that I was looking forward to her visit as a pleasant diversion. In fact, I was glad that she was coming to Richmond. I had started to feel like a stranger in my own life, like I'd transferred onto the wrong bus and wasn't in a familiar neighborhood. I wanted to feel like the host, and to be on my own stomping ground, able to point out the landmarks so I knew my map was accurate.
I spent Thursday morning straightening the apartment, then sat at the kitchen table listening to NPR, waiting for Pip to arrive. The door's buzzer rang right on time--nine a.m. exactly. I went downstairs and answered the door, peeking through the window for my first look.
I can't remember now exactly what I had been expecting her to look like; that original image of her, constructed only out of her words, is muddled by having actually seen her. I know I originally thought she would be taller, I thought her hair would be darker and straighter, her eyes narrower. She is, instead, short, her hair short also, a light brown and curly, her eyes bright and wide, and she's an amateur bodybuilder. (Some time after our meeting, in a post about going to gay bars with gay male friends, she wrote of her frustration and disgust at being hit upon by gay men who mistook her for a young boy.) She speaks with a punchy rhythm, and when she said hello to me there on her porch, I remembered the straightforward, monosyllabic punch of "Hi, Greg, it's Pip" on the phone. She smiled, a just barely crooked smile, and we shook hands.
Upstairs we sat at my kitchen table. I was having orange juice and offered her some. We talked for awhile, the uncomfortable meaningless banter that I usually find myself having with clerks in a bookstore or the counter girl at a coffee shop I've never been to. We talked about her punctuality (which she assured me was accidental), her drive, the weather, NPR. I felt like I was on a blind date.
"Do you want to show me your computer?" she asked out of the blue. I pointed her to my desk. "So this is where it all happens," she said.
I turned on the computer and while it booted up went back to the other room to get another chair. We sat down next to each other in front of my screen, and I dialed into the university mainframe system and logged into my account. There's nothing exciting to see. Text on a screen. No pictures, no bells and whistles. Plain alphanumeric characters scrolling past, and here are two people sitting in front of it, as if it were some kind of oracle that was going to offer up its wisdom any moment. I had a flash of ridiculousness, the same kind of feeling I had when I first read the notice of Michael Current's death. Why is this all so important, it's just words?
We sat there, reading together a few of the e-mail messages from FutureCulture through my account.
"You know," she said, "when I first started reading your posts I thought you were a lot older. Not my age."
"Older?" I said. "How old?"
"I thought you were probably in your forties or fifties."
I laughed. "Good god, why'd you think that?"
"I don't know. Something about the way you wrote. I was really surprised in some post when you said you were twenty-eight. I had to rearrange my entire picture of you. What did you think of me?"
"I thought your hair would be darker," I said.
She looked puzzled, almost disappointed. "My hair? Why?"
"I don't know," I said. "I just always pictured you with dark hair. I don't know where I got that idea from." She was silent a moment; the answer hadn't seemed to satisfy her. I could tell there was something different about the way she and I formed our views of people from their posts. Her expectations were framed by the tone of my words--she constructed a persona for me out of the words. I, on the other hand, had constructed a body for her from her words, had tried to, literally, flesh them out.
"Should we send a message to FC?" she asked. It was tradition at fleshmeets to send a joint message to the list, to let people know a different kind of connection was taking place. The connection from my computer to the campus wasn't very good, so I told her we could stop by the university later and post from there.
We left my apartment to go get some breakfast. I was driving, and as we got to my car, Pip said, "This is your car? It's not as beat up as I thought it would be."
A couple months earlier there had been a long discussion on FC about cars and how they affected things like urban design, our concepts of space and distance, or concepts of neighborhood and community. I'd been a heavy proponent in that thread of less dependence on cars, citing my own neighborhood in Richmond, the Fan, as an example of a community that wasn't totally dependent on cars, a place where it was possible to live without a car. Somehow a description of my car, a fourteen year old Oldsmobile, had worked it's way into my posts.
As we drove through the Fan she commented on how accurate my descriptions of it had been. She had been there before; her parents used to bring her to Richmond to shop when she was a child. She tried to describe a deli somewhere in the Fan that her father always took her to in those days, but I couldn't pin down which one she was talking about by her description. We drove past my old apartment where I had been living when the urban design discussion had been going on, and I pointed out the buildings on the block I had written the list about.
We had breakfast at the 3rd Street Diner, a 24-hour greasy spoon kind of place in downtown Richmond. The sun was rising higher in the sky by now, and a shaft of sunlight shone onto our table. As we talked, it moved toward Pip, up her body until she was squinting against it while we spoke.
We talked about the people on FutureCulture. I was not her first fleshmeet. She'd met a couple other list members--Fran and Spud, a couple who had fallen in love across the wires. Fran lived in Montreal, Spud in Baltimore. They kept in contact by the computers, visited each other every couple of months. Fran showed her pictures of Alan. She described these people to me, but her descriptions of them have faded from my mind by now. They can't compete with the images of these people I've grown from their posts, the pictures formed by the tone of their words. The only information that stuck in my mind is that Spud is short.
"I keep in pretty frequent contact with Fran and Spud," she said. "You're not one of the FC people I feel like I know really well. I mean, I read your posts, but we haven't had a lot of private e-mail, and I have with some of the other people. Fran and I have talked about a lot of stuff." I nodded. She was right, of course. There weren't many people on the list I'd had private correspondences with.
We talked about where we had gone to school, what we had studied. We talked a little of the paper she was working on, a little of the thesis I was working on, about writers that we had both read. She asked me about my other writing, my non-academic writing. What did I write about? I told her some about my short stories and about the idea for the novel I wanted to find the time to write.
"And just recently I've been thinking about writing about Michael Current's death," I said.
"Michael? Why? What about him?"
I tried to explain. How when he died I purposely didn't post a response to his passing like so many other list members had. How I had just pushed it aside as "one of those things," until a week before.
"Last week someone asked me 'When was the last time a friend of yours died?' " I said. "And I surprised myself by answering, 'Last summer.' It was Michael. I answered without even thinking."
My carefully constructed wall had been broken down by my own vulnerability. I'd lost a job, a relationship was ending. I was nervous about actually meeting someone from the list. Maybe even the Christmas season had something to do with it. I'd never allowed myself to consider people from FutureCulture as friends before, but suddenly the connection came bubbling up from my subconscious, and I began to realize that I'd been holding back grief over his death for months.
"And I'm going to write about you, too," I told her.
"Me? What are you going to write about me?" She seemed intimidated.
"You're the first person I've ever met that I knew first by the Internet, second in person. It's all part of it. You're the first person from FutureCulture that I've been able to touch. You have a body." And I reached across the table and touched her forearm.
It was an invasion. I could tell as soon as I had done it. She didn't recoil, her eyes didn't widen in horror, but I could tell from the expression on her face that she hadn't expected me to touch her. It was different from the handshake an hour and a half before--that was a social nicety, a ritual devoid of content. My arm moving across the table making contact with hers, though--it was intentional. It was communication. It said "You are real and I am real and we are here together and there's no denying it." Despite the e-mail list, though, Pip and I were strangers, and strangers don't touch each other uninvited. Even sitting in a diner, a few feet away from each other, there had still been a screen between us. We could move around each other, keep up the patter of conversation, maintain that shield of words. The words didn't have to pass through a computer or through a phone, but they still had to pass through the air. The only real thing I said to her that morning was the touch. The fleshmeet.
There was an awkward silence. I tried to fill it, saying something more about my writing, but it was just a ritual devoid of content. She brought her hand up to cover her face. "The sun is in my eyes."
"Let's go," I said.
We left the diner and stopped by campus. It was break, so no one was around. I let us into the English Department's computer lab and logged my account onto two computers. From my account she dialed in across the Internet to her account at Ohio State, and there we were, the way we were used to. Sharing a space on the computer, not a physical space. But we were there in the same room. We were writing to each other on the screen, her words starting on her terminal in the computer room in Richmond, moving by God knows what route to her computer hundreds and hundreds of miles away in Ohio, and working their way back across the wires to my terminal a few feet away from where she sat. The computer-mediated communication was practically instantaneous, but it suddenly seemed remarkably inefficient. We took turns at one terminal composing a message to send to the list.
As she moved around the table from the terminal she had been working on to sit at mine and work on the message, I watched her walk. She sways a little when she walks, a little side to side. And it struck me that she walked like she wrote. I can't explain it any more than that.
Later, after we had left campus, I remembered what Pip had written about seeing Michael's picture. I thought about that post of hers as she drove away, back to Charlottesville. My university didn't have Mosaic or any similar program up and running yet, there was no way for me to see the photo of Michael. I had seen Pip, heard her, touched her forearm to know that she was real, to know that she was. But for Michael--for the time being I had to be satisfied with his words and with the image of him I built out of them.
I have no physical evidence of Michael, no physical evidence of Shawn, of Marius, of the rest of them. A writer whose name comes up often on FutureCulture is the anarchist essayist Hakim Bey--but the name Hakim Bey is known to be a pseudonym. As the body disappears, paranoia sets in: could it be conceivable that this is all a conspiracy, that there was nor is no Michael Current, that he was a pseudonym, a creation of a clever group of writers perpetuating a grand hoax on the list, on me? I mean, I've spoken to Pip, but I never spoke to Michael, I've never spoken to Fran or Marius or Siegfried--all I have to prove their existence are words that appear on my computer screen. They could be anybody.
A few weeks ago I came across a book in a used bookstore--Post-movement Art by Alan Sondheim. I remembered at some point Alan mentioning to the list that he had published books of art criticism in the seventies, and here I was standing in a bookstore in Richmond holding one of them. Suddenly I realized I could trust Alan; he actually had published art criticism in 1973. Physical evidence of the words. It hadn't struck me before then that I didn't trust him. I have no real reason to distrust him or any of the people on FutureCulture, but I find something distinctly untrustworthy about this medium. I always have this gnawing suspicion that "in real life" these people aren't what they represent themselves to be on the Internet. I think I have the gnawing suspicion that in real life, I'm not what I represent myself to be on the Net.
I write fiction. I know how easy it is to use words to lie, to misrepresent, to distort the truth.
Andy Hawks founded the FutureCulture mailing list. He was just a kid, a college undergrad caught up in the cyberpunk and rave culture when he started it. It was cool to talk about the tech and the hardware and the future and Do-It-Yourself and anarchy and street culture and punk. And somewhere along the line that changed, and the people started talking about each other. About what they feared and what they wanted and what they were doing and what they believed. And then Andy trashed the list. He didn't like the way it was going, he didn't like it's direction, and he figured since he started it, he could end it.
But it kept going. Someone else took over. And then there was another problem and someone else took over. The list address moved from computer site to computer site and every time it was threatened with extinction someone else in the list community volunteered to find the space to keep it going. It's been over three years since Andy tried to destroy what he started, and it's still going strong because the people involved didn't want to let it die.
In the days before he trashed the list, Andy wrote a piece called "I feel those wires...", a plaintive manifesto of connection. Andy was showing a friend how to use IRC (Internet Relay Chat, a realtime conferencing system); she had never "talked" over computers before. She wound up sending a fairly serious message to a stranger as Andy watched, sitting next to her. He said:
i've said before, i feel those wires. i felt it then. i could see myself in wherever this total stranger was, receiving this message "talk to me, i'm here, i'll listen, i care"......a heartfelt tug and quickly the invisible walls of cyberspace take over...the anonymity of the wires prevails, and a subtle but innate feeling of power, the constructs of a patriarchal society become realized in reactions to a one-line text message on a random computer screen
His friend had been a victim of rape. And as Andy watched--and tried to stop it--this stranger started writing back to her "about the size of his dick, how he couldn't cum, all of his sexual frustrations played out to some anonymous recipient." Andy wrote:
he didn't know. that's what hurts. he didn't know the oppression he was invoking by the freedom she was showing towards him.....his intentions, as far as he was concerned, and as far as he could search within himself, were good. he just wanted someone to talk to. he just wanted someone to be there. and yet again, my friend became dust under the doormat, as far as feeling is concerned. he didn't know. he stayed behind his wall, he didn't want to feel the wires....these are walls cyberspace too oft seems a double-edged sword, in that we are given so much freedom to pick and do what we want with this information....connection is at minimum a two-way thing. so if you ask yourself "are you connected?", the question is do you share or not.
He said he could feel the wires, an extension of himself connecting him to the others. This message gets posted on FC every time there's some kind of crisis. It's always made me nervous, though, because that's exactly my problem--I do feel those wires when I'm talking to people over the computers. I can't shake the veil of the medium, the interface that keeps us separated from each other. I worry about this because sometimes that veil parts for an instance, and I see the people on the other side. And I realize that too often I am that guy on the wrong side of the wall, the one who sees this as all a game. The one who sees it as words.
How do we define community? Community is considered a group that is somehow physically proximate. Space and the body have been our ways to identify our communities, our relationships--we must have sensory data to believe. See the people, touch them, hear them. There have been exceptions--in previous centuries correspondence by letter was common, the limitations of long-distance travel and communication necessitating (for the literate class, at least) communication by the written word. In nineteenth century Europe the mail came by messenger several times a day, and within a city it was possible to carry on a conversation through writing over the course of a day, short messages being shuffled back and forth between correspondents through the London fog by weary-footed couriers. The flesh-and-blood version of an e-mail list, but inseparable from the body: the courier knocking at your front door, the smell of the city, the unique curve of longhand script that a machine cannot forge.
But, eventually, the telephone has replaced that, returning sensory data, the sound of a voice, to long-distance communication. It made us believe once again in the eminence of the body.
Michael Current wrote was a short piece, a page long, his first attempt at fiction, called "Care of the Body," a title reminiscent of Care of the Self by the French philosopher Michel Foucault (Michael moderated an e-mail discussion on Foucault). He mailed it to Alan with the header "A little something..." To the best of anyone's knowledge, it was one of the last things Michael wrote. When Alan posted the message to FutureCulture confirming Michael's death, he appended "Care of the Body" to that message. Michael's piece began:
A stranger writes to me of the body. Of his concern for the body. Answering my e-mail he tells me he is skeptical of e-mail, concerned about the detachment of thought and affect from the flesh, bones, and blood. An ethical matter, a concern that we will abandon our environment, that our being-in-the-world will be replaced by being-in/being-with/being-one-with/becoming-with the machine. . . .
It is a short scene. The narrator imagines the stranger who writes to him of the body, imagines him composing the message in the dark of night at the computer, imagines the stranger thinking about him, the narrator. Imagines the stranger moving from the computer to the bed, and laying there having erotic fantasies about his first girlfriend, about "the tanned boy who mows the lawn," about the narrator. "We must not abandon the body..." the narrator imagines the stranger murmuring.
But did we ever have the body to begin with? Can we abandon something we never had? The body of the stranger that the narrator imagines is not the actual body of the stranger. The body of the narrator that the stranger imagines is not the actual body of the narrator. We've always lived in virtual reality since the beginning of consciousness, shadowy simulacra of other people, of the world, even of ourselves, constructed in the space of our mind. Every time you think of a loved one, every time you imagine what you will do tomorrow, every time you pick up a book, you are stepping into a world constructed virtually in your own mind. You donÕt think it is such, because you believe in your senses.
It's not that computer-mediated communication is really any more mediated than any other form of communication; it's that it's not. I find myself distrusting the computer medium because it's new, because it's unfamiliar. I'm sure the monks illuminating manuscripts in dim abbeys distrusted the book in Gutenberg's day. I haven't learned and absorbed the syntax and grammar and rhetorical forms of the computer medium; they're still nebulous, still emerging as the forms try desperately to keep up with the technology. The representations are still opaque, and I'm still a skeptic. I feel like the little boy at the end of the fairy tale, "The Emperor's New Clothes," shouting "Hey! What's the matter with you people? Don't you see that this is all just phosphorous dots on cathode ray tubes?"
But that's not really what bothers me. That's not what frightens me. What frightens me is the questions I have to ask myself next: Don't you see that this is all just patterns of ink on white paper? Don't you see that this is all just vibrations in telephone receivers? Don't you see that this is all just light rays hitting your retina? Just all imagined images inside your head?
I'm finding out it's not computer-mediated communication that worries me. It's mediation itself. It's the fact that I'm crying over Michael's death, that I'm rejoicing over Marius' marriage, that my first memory of a post on FutureCulture is a man named Trond Buland announcing the birth of his child, and I can still feel those wires. Computers are a young medium and we haven't learned how to not feel the wires yet, but when I feel the truth coming over those wires, when I feel myself making connections across them, it begins to remind me of the other wires. The telephone wires. The cable TV wires. The coil of words on a page. The twist of the optic nerve. We've learned to how not to see all those wires, we've forgotten about the media that we've become so used to using in everyday life. I don't like to think about that, but feeling the imperfect wires communicating over the Net reminds me of the other wires we use to connect with each other, the wires where weÕve learned to ignore the imperfections.
It's really all just mediation, and we're all just living in a virtual reality, but somehow we still manage to connect. I know--no, I don't know--I believe that there are real people with real bodies and real feelings and real lives behind the words, on the other end of those wires. It's the knowing part I have to give up on. It's the believing part I have to accept.
It's spring now, several months since I met Pip Holloway in the flesh, just now a year since the April Fool's suicide joke that brought Michael Current to my attention, and this summer it will have been a year since he died. And it has been several months since the university had Netscape, a program similar to Mosaic, installed in the computer labs, several months since I've had the ability to look at Michael Current's face.
And I haven't done it yet.
I not sure I can really say why. I started this essay in the meantime, never intending it to go in the direction it has. I thought I was going to write about Michael and his death and how it affected me, but what I find myself writing about is the medium, not the people. I feel like I'm digging a hole for myself. I want to know, to be sure. I'm a good liberal, postmodern academic type; I'm not real comfortable with all this "believing" shit.
I'm scared. I feel those wires, and they're leading me somewhere, to the face behind the screen, to the veins behind the wires, to the body that we must care for. Leading me, but mediating me, just like everything else.
This is what it means to care: to be frightened that I will cease to know the people I know, either because there is a screen--a shield--between us or because they leave or because they die. I doubt my own ability to believe in these people on the Net, and in doing so I begin to doubt my own ability to believe in other things as well.
What is this medium doing to us? Is it drawing us together or is that just an illusion? Behind the veil what is there? I have all these ideas about what people on FC look like. Their images are a hodge-podge of my imagination and pieces of description I've picked up here and there. I imagine Alan as gray-haired and wearing horn-rimmed glasses. He dresses younger than his years (which I think are over 50). Marius is skinny and frenetic, edgy. I see him with spiky black hair, tight jeans and a t-shirt that remind you how thin he is. Fran has red hair and lots of it. That's all I can think of when I think of her. Spud: I know he's short because Pip told me that, and I think he has a shaved head because I vaguely remember seeing a picture of him while browsing on his World Wide Web pages. When I think of Spud, I think of Charlie Brown; I don't know why. Trond, like Marius, is from Norway, but I see him as more of a traditional Scandinavian--tall and blond and square-jawed, light blue eyes. Dwayne, the wisecracking Australian--tall but stocky, dark-haired, blue-eyed. Siegfried, my Austrian correspondent--broad shouldered, wide-bodied, light hair, dark eyes.
This is all taking place in my head. I've never seen any of these people. I don't know what they look like. And it doesn't really matter. What matters is that I'm learning to allow myself to believe in them.
When I think of Michael Current, I've always pictured him as serious; his posts were always so serious and. . . gaunt. He wrote as if he were gaunt. I picture him sitting at his computer--a crewcut, deep-set dark eyes, thin lips. He is tall, but very thin; almost frail. I know where these images come from--from his admission of depression and suicidal thoughts and from his openness about his illnesses.
It's late one weekday evening and I'm leaving the English building, walking past the office of Michael Keller, director of the English department's computer center. I stop in to talk to him about something--I forget what, it doesn't matter. We're sitting there talking and I'm looking at his computer screen. He has a high resolution screen, a souped-up computer that displays the best graphics in the building.
A thought occurs to me. I say, "Can I use your computer to check something out on the Web real quick?" Sure, he says.
I know where to find Michael Current's picture; Marius has it on his Web pages. One line typed in, a few clicks of the mouse and there it is.
The picture doesn't come up all at once. It kind of fades in as the computer (kind of like the rest of us) first constructs a rough image and then fills in the details. The first thing I notice are the eyes. There is nothing gaunt about them, nothing depressed, nothing ill. They are large and dark, and seem to fill up the screen. And then there he is. His face turned toward the camera, a smile spread across it; until this moment I don't think I had ever pictured Michael Current smiling. He's young; he doesn't look thirty-one in the picture, he looks like a kid.
Most of all, he looks alive. And he was. Michael Current's was a real life made no less real by the fact that he used a computer to share it with some of us instead of a voice, a touch, a glance. And that computer--that's okay. I'm realizing that's no reason for me to not mourn, no reason for me to not miss him.
I become conscious that I'm just kind of staring at Keller's computer screen. I thank Michael Keller for letting me get a glimpse of my friend for the first time. As I walk out of his office, Michael Keller says, "Good night, Greg."
And I say, "Goodbye, Michael."
Greg Ritter
Richmond, VA
May 1995