#90til50, Day 3
Author: jamietoth
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My Mother’s Hands
#90til50, Day 2 (89 left).
My mother abandoned me when I was three years old during an extremely traumatic event. So I thought I didn’t remember her hands. After all, how could I?
Through my childhood, though she was disparaged in so many other ways, the one thing that I was always told is how talented she was when it came to fabric and cloth. My paternal grandmother, who raised me, was a crocheter who often expressed jealousy at my mother’s talent with knitting needles. Or, when she was struggling with the tissue paper of patterns, would comment on how my mom could make her own patterns.
And here I am today, in the midst of making my own patterns to make clothes for people. I’ve been able to see my clothes get years of wear, and have even patched / mended things I’ve made because they get so much wear. Honestly, there are few compliments higher than that.
It’s when I’m sewing, or knitting, or crocheting that I do feel I can see my mother’s hands, that I remember what they were maybe like.
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My Dinner In The Matrix: Thoughts on Simulations and God, Simulacra, and My Dinner with Andre.
(Day 1 of 90til50)
I feel as though the title really says it all. I recently sat down to record a podcast about My Dinner With Andre, one of my favorite movies. As I rewatched it to take notes, I realized that it struck quite close to some themes from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. Interestingly, both the movie and Baudrillard’s work were released in 1981, which makes me wonder if there was something in the water.
Before I go on, you should probably watch My Dinner With Andre, there are a lot of ways to do so online (many are very low-cost!) and it’s a great movie and worth your time. You can read this without reading Simulacra and Simulation, as the concepts I was struck by are described below (but I certainly recommend it!).
I’ve been wrangling with what I think of simulation theory for a while. It’s honestly the biggest reason I no longer identify as an atheist. I know I can’t prove that we aren’t in a simulation. If there’s even one iota of a chance that I think it might be a simulation, that means it has a creator. Thus, certainty fails me, and I fall back into agnosticism.
I don’t think there’s a god, but I’m ultimately not certain.
But that’s not exactly what Baudrillard is talking about with simulacra and the like. Baudrillard’s argument is that our reality has been replaced by symbols and signs, and what the philosophical implications are (if any) of us living in this not-reality.
The collision of these two pieces in my mind happened as I watched Wallace Shawn walk through the streets of New York to his narration. I realized that what I was watching wasn’t My Dinner with Andre — it was Wally’s, and even then, it wasn’t. Because we weren’t at his dinner with Andre at all, but a retelling—or, for my purpose, a simulation of it.
René Magritte – The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe), 1929, photo: CC BY-NC 2.0 by Thomas Hawk. For Our purposes, Pipe Simulacra Phase One. Or – This is not our dinner with Andre. Nothing could make it more obvious than first person narration. We had our ideas of who Wally was—and who he was meeting—before we laid eyes on Andre. Once I realized it was a simulation, I quickly reminded myself of the phases from Baudrillard’s work, and quickly found a meme that summarized it:
- The first is that it’s basically a picture of an actual thing. A representation of a truth or reality.
- The second is that it is a distortion or a pervasion of that basic reality.
- It masks / perverts the absence of a basic reality.
- It bears no relation to any reality whatsoever.
And here’s the meme:
But what Baudrillard argues happens is eventually all these simulacrum replace the realities that they were meant to mask, and we live within them (Twin Peaks fans should feel a little Twin Peaks tingle here, right? The dreamer who dreams and lives within a dream, except Baudrillard is arguing (I think) that we are also replacing ‘reality’ with our dream.)
And I think he’s saying basically that the reason that the simulation of the place called America can exist is because we have Disneyland, a simulation that allows us to believe that the reality of America is elsewhere.
Let me back up for a second. He references a story by Borges, about a kingdom that created some maps. The story, called ‘The Exactitude of Science‘ is a paragraph long and worth the read:
On Exactitude in Science
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
So you have this whole group of people whose entire lives were lived on the map and not within the Empire, and after the fall of that Empire, all that was left was the map – referring to nothing, yet infused with its own meaning and truth. Yet, because we aren’t living in the real, reality is slipping away, and the illusions we hold to ourselves are having an impact on us.
Living in a simulation, in a world full of lost references to truths long eronded, gives us an existential form of ‘sim sickness’ and is a state of ‘hyperreality.’ This loss of reference is, essentially, a death of authenticity and the real. Forever replaced. We’re disconnected, and left yearning for a thing that is removed from reality.
If you’re thinking “living like that must be bad for you” my goodness you are correct. And those symptoms range from the loss of authenticity, the lack of feeling of purpose, of being passive and allowing content and ideas to just fed to them, feelings of fragmentation and alienation, and the erosion of the sense of self.
If you’ve seen My Dinner with Andre, you are going to know exactly where I’m going with it, because this echoes / rhymes with some of the later-stage conversation Wally and Andre have. Andre even says it during the famous electric blanket conversation – what happens when we’re able to live beyond something like the seasons themselves?
Baudrillard and Andre both refer to modern life as a kind of prison, where the reality of experience is so far outside our grasp we can’t conceive it. Andre early stories, in which he is chasing down a truth of pure being, indicates that he is grasping for something real beyond ‘simple’ being – or cravings for comfort.
Some of their conversations hit directly to some of Baudrillard’s points. In one part of their conversation, Andre likens New York to a prison that is created in the minds of those who live there, making the prisoners the wardens and architects of their own prison as well. In another, he says “We go to parties or dinners like that all the time. And these evenings are really like sort of sickly dreams, because people are talking in symbols—everyone is sort of floating through this fog of symbols and unconscious feelings: No one says what they’re really thinking about; they don’t talk to each other; because I think people are really in some sort of state of fear or panic about the world we’re living in, but they don’t know it. . .”
And that’s sort of the crux of it, right? That we’re so removed from our reality that we’re not able to connect with it or each other and instead just float through the world, making our lives a liminal space between nothingness. That sometimes the pursuit of goals themselves can turn our brains off as we are ‘on autopilot, focused on these goals and plans which are also not reality.’
Andre and Wally talk about the importance of art and theater, how they are used to connect to reality, while also commenting that if done wrong it can be used to deaden the audience in a different way. It asks the questions that we’re still seeking answers to – Do we have to take people to Everest in order for them to wake up to the reality of the world? Are we so far gone?
Wally just can’t believe that is what it takes. “But I mean, the main thing, Andre, is, why do we require a trip to Mount Everest
in order to be able to perceive one moment of reality? Is Mount Everest more real than New York? Isn’t New York real? I mean, I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, it would blow your brains out. I mean, isn’t there just as much reality to be perceived in a cigar store as there is on Mount Everest? What do you think? I mean, / think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest,I think there’s nothing that different, in a certain way. I mean, reality is sort of uniform, in a way…”Andre’s response to Wally’s increasing worried and stressful response to the state of things is to say “Well, I agree with you, Wally, but the problem is that people can’t see the cigar store now.” (Phase / Stage 4).
What’s incredible is how much these two works still have to say about our current state of existence.
“…that this is the beginning of the rest of the future, now, and that from now on there will simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there will be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts. And that history and memory are right now being erased, and that soon no one will really remember that life existed on the planet.” That sure sounds like a simulated life to me.
Of course, then he starts talking about UFO’s.
Look, I’m not the brightest person in the world, but there’s obviously a truth that both of these pieces are bringing to the table that still rings true to this day. I think it’s the same core of truth, if not identical certainly a similar philosophical concept that they are striking at.
At the end of Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard goes into the nihilism that living in our post-modern reality leads us towards. But I prefer to think of it this way: in a world where nothing may matter nothing is truthful, and it all might be going to hell, I can just as well determine what matters to me.
Other Resources / Original Inspirations:
Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard
https://www.thelivingphilosophy.com/p/baudrillard-simulation
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90 til 50: A Brief Personal Challenge.
This post, in particular, is not for you.
In 90 days, I’ll turn 50, and I feel like I should do some sort of thing about that, even though I’m practically queen of telling people that it’s ok, and life may not particularly have a purpose.
I had a lot of concepts about who I would be and what I would have accomplished at 50, and I suspect over the next 90 days, I’ll at least be examining what it all means, but hopefully it’ll be in a series of essays about … just, stuff. Because the one thing I’ve learned about myself is – just don’t define it so much. 90 days, 90 essays.
For the next 90 days, every day, I’m going to try and post. I’ll probably fail, often, but I won’t fail 90 times in a row. And I suspect I can’t write 90 terrible things in a row, either.
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Schrödinger’s Girl
There are times I feel alone and I know I shouldn’t. I’m aware this is more my fault than anyone else’s, and it’s born of the fact I feel so unnatural that there’s a gap between me and ‘normal’ people. I can’t bear being around people because it reminds me of that gap. A fundamental failure.
There’s a growing, wild part of me that just doesn’t understand why I should bother when I’m so different. It asks, what’s the point, functionally, when at the end of the day they won’t really understand? I KNOW that’s not good. Humans are social creatures, blah blah blah – regardless, that’s the crux of the thing. At the end of the day, everything else rotates around that gap.
That feeling of being separate, of not being associated, has made it so I do this where I can be there in physical form but actually mentally living in some other space in my brain. I’m not talking about daydreaming or something like that. It’s also not that yawning empty where feelings are supposed to reside but don’t, which is another emotional cosmic horror to unpack another day.
This is different. A blankly lucid space where I can just be for a moment and not be touched or feel or anything. An unending room of nothing but plain grey and me. Present and absent. Schrödinger’s girl. Nothing and me all at once.
I just slide right out, into some recess in my brain, leaving some other part of me to respond while the emotional center of me is actually in some sort of liminal space. Two realities, one brain.
It’s like some tragicomedy thing with me – tragic because I know there’s something just off about the whole “me” thing – comic because I feel like no one else notices and maybe they should? Because, of course, the deal with Schrödinger’s cat is one of observation – it is both dead and alive because the result is unobserved. Is this some function of me feeling unobserved, when often it’s what I want most?
But then it leads me to questions. Like, wouldn’t you notice if someone would just slip out of the door in their head while talking to you? I’d like to think I would. The second I think someone feels bored I change the conversation to something more engaging, the trauma response from having to be the entertainment or the big ‘or else.’ I can sense when other people glaze over – disassociative girl recognizes disassociation (film at 11).
Maybe I expect too much? Maybe when I use the word empathetic and others do it’s a different thing. When I use it, I mean to be I’m able to imagine what someone is feeling so profoundly I can taste and see and smell and feel through them. Sometimes the gap makes it so empathy is the only mechanism I can use to something real.
It’s why I’m struck to my core watching someone else. It’s why performances – movies and TV and stage and video games – are so important to me, why the only real moments of release can leak out while I’m watching other people. Because in those moments, I can connect to what they are feeling in a way I can’t connect to what I should maybe be feeling. It reminds me of this passage I wrote once a while back – a zombie-human hybrid practicing blinking in a mirror so she could pass as human. The not-quite-girl in a girl skin tries to learn to blend in.
It’s not that I’m cut off from my feelings. I feel them. I understand where they come from. I’m more than painfully aware of where my body keeps the score. I can analyze the ‘right’ of them – that this leads to that and A leads through B to C. It’s that it doesn’t matter as much to me when they’re mine. I still just think of myself as this wandering roving thing, some outsider to the entire ordeal of it all. Given it all, receiving none of it. I was taught that, in a way, that I wasn’t worthy of the air I breathed and my existence was some weird anomaly that came down to ‘[my mother] was a whore.’ On this endless repeat until I got out at 17 and figured out the best way to never go ‘home’ again (and I never really have, because what is home, anyway, really?).
That space of liminal lucidity is how I can smile so big and say “But I’m filled with rage all the time,” in what feels like the ultimate expression of inappropriate affect. This strange faucet of simultaneous feeling and numbness that is always open. And after I feel that way, living this quiet, inexpressibly ultimate truth, it leaves me feeling drained. Not empty, just drained and like I’ve been filled with something else. Disdain? Disappointment? Dissatisfaction?
Some sort of dis, I think. Disquiet, perhaps. Maybe it’s just that. That I’m the restless one, wrestling my own rest. The answer, if knowable, if it matters, is somewhere. Maybe I’m searching through languages trying to find that word, trying to pinpoint that experience, a massive a-ha moment where I can recognize these strange un-feelings and pathologize them and in doing so finally understand what was done to me to make me that way. To finally glimpse inside that darkness that even I’m too afraid to look too long at because that abyss – it would surely swallow me whole and maybe I’d never crawl out of that. I’d just be stuck forever in that past sadness, unable to escape and do anything at all, and too overcome to do anything but tremble from the truth of it. Maybe then I’d be still instead of struggling forever against a void that might actually be truly inescapable.
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Rethinking
When I first set this site up, it was with a totally different intention than I really see things now. Originally, I was going to start a crafting company, if you can believe it! Then, I found myself wanting to have a niche, which is what they always tell you to do.
Ultimately I’m bad at doing what they always tell me to do. For instance, starting a blog in the post blog world.
Anyway, it was listening to the insistence that I niche-down that this domain ended up languishing. It’s also partially due to the fact that I have times when I just fall out with some activities while I focus on other things. I’ve been very focused on keeping up the writing for collective.world so the idea of writing in-depth about movies when I’m off work just wasn’t something I was interested in doing.
So I want to give myself a space in which I write, but I don’t want to be held to a niche or I’ll never do it. I want people to be able to read it, but I don’t want to be dedicated to advertising it, or have an entire separate site to house it.
So now? Fuck it. Let’s do this thing.