In the room the women come and go, speaking of Michelangelo

Just by way of a few time-stamped data points from one man’s experience: 

• on 22 March at 1130h, a friendly neighborhood sundries store was open and empty, and nine 8.5x11in signs hung near the front indicating the complete absence of alcohol gel and protective masks.
• on 21 March at 17h, myself and the three other shoppers casually browsed the well-stocked shelves of the mini-grocery a ten minute walk from my house. A certain brand of one-liter bottle of water was actually on sale.
• on 21 March before noon, speaking at the Palácio dos Bandeirantes right here in Morumbi, our state’s governor notified the public that a state-wide fifteen day lockdown would begin Tuesday 24 March.
• on 20 March at 16h, my seventeenth video-meeting of the week concluded. This particular one brought together nearly ninety people. The prior ones had ranged in size: most were comprised of two, fifteen, or ninety two-dimensional persons.

Video calls feel to me like being underwater, like scuba-diving. To extend this simile: the undersea world is stunningly different and beautiful, but the equipment–with the mask’s necessary narrowing of vision, and the regulator’s regulation of breathing–the equipment makes the experience not only possible but profoundly limited. 

Same with the meetings: connecting all these people together on a computer screen thanks to the flow of electrons, each of them somewhat verisimilar in terms of appearance and voice: it’s stunning and, in a way, beautiful. But, quite obviously, the experience of the actual-ness of the other people is severely limited. Gestures and knowing looks are missed, phatic dialogue feels forced or falls away, and all discourse is subsumed by the medium.

The obligation to socially-isolate, the temporary death of several dimensions of our former existence, the inability to connect. The feeling that digital-gathering with others is a temporary and stilted and ultimately mysterious phenomenon. These “rooms.” The men and women, and children too, come and go, speaking, but only vaguely, of all sorts of things. 

Nay, it is; I know not seems!

This world has been thoroughly imagined, as is announced on the very first page of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest:

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair. This is a cold room in University Administration, wood-walled, Remington-hung, double-windowed against the November heat, insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside, at which Uncle Charles, Mr. deLint and I were lately received.

I am in here.

This is Hal, a teenager who, like Hamlet, knows too much and rates as inadequate the sorts of human interactions compelled by the world and constrained by the limits of his own consciousness. He wants more, but he is stuck “in here” — inside, and only with, himself.

He couldn’t connect with his militant grammarian mother, his living-ghost film-maker father, his brothers (one a self-hating libertine and the other a wise simpleton). These unforgettable and complex people whom Hal knew as well as humanly possible (just like Hamlet with Ophelia and his mother, father, and uncle) remained to him achingly distant, worse than their being dead.

Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There

Infinite Jest’s hero’s Don Gately, a live-in halfway house staffer who’s committed to working the program and leaving behind his previous life of addiction, violence, and heartbreak. To give you an idea: he grew up with a criminally negligent mother who herself was a serial victim of physical and psychological abuse, and as a young man he’d do things like rob apartments of furniture, sell said furniture, purchase and imbibe huge piles of opioids and then beat, for example, one bouncer senseless with the unconscious body of another bouncer, whom he had just prior beaten senseless. That last bit was basically his twenties.

Such a life isn’t as glamorous as it sounds and after a stretch in the state pen, Gately lucked upon a sponsor badass enough to convince him to work the program.

Alas, in good novels as in life, no one escapes her/his past, and one of the residents Gately was charged with shepherding makes a series of addict-recidivist-type bad decisions, which leads to an altercation wherein Gately basically crushes the skulls and crotches of two angry, bearded Canadians, but not before getting himself shot in the shoulder and basically having his scapula blasted into tiny pieces.

Recovering from surgery in the hospital, Gately heroically refuses the relief of opioids, which refusal is, in the novel (and perhaps today too) the exact type of dragon-slaying the world needs.

What is it then between us?

The novel takes place in an imagined future. Technological changes impact the characters’ lives but also provide fodder for some more explicit cultural commentary, which of course is not unusual for fiction post-1960. One of these commentorial interludes inheres in the March 2020’s milieu, as it addresses the implementation of video-enhanced telephone calls. 

After the thoughtless glee that accompanied the initial rollout of video-telephony, the narrator declaims, people realized they were “horrified at how their own faces appeared on […] screen.” They began purchasing and wearing “form-fitting polybutylene-resin mask[s]” to enhance their looks during calls, which masks they would hang on hooks near the video-phones when not in use, which admittedly looked “maybe a bit surreal and discomfiting when detached and hanging there empty and wrinkled.”

But this, Wallace’s narrator-historian goes on, inevitably led to “large numbers of phone-users suddenly reluctant to leave home and interface personally with people who, they feared, were now habituated to seeing their far-better-looking masked selves on the phone.”

As it inevitably does, the technology continued to evolve, and a video-caller’s image could be digitally replaced, with the press of a button, with the moving and life-like image of “an incredibly fit and attractive and well-turned-out human being, someone who actually resembled you the caller only in such limited respects as like race and limb number, the photo’s face focused attentively in the direction of the videophonic camera from amid the sumptuous but not ostentatious appointments of the sort of room that best reflected the image of yourself you wanted to transmit, etc.”

The narrator relates that masks and expensive digital-tableaus were ultimately abandoned in favor of a “return to good old telephoning [which was] not only dictated by common consumer sense but actually after a while culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity, not Ludditism but a kind of retrograde transcendence of sci-fi-ish high tech for its own sake.”

The armchair literary critic may lazily conclude that Wallace overestimated both the technologist’s creativity and the consumer’s better angels, but in my view this misses the prophecy as situated in the novel overall.

And the prophecy is, to return to Hal and Don Gately and scuba-diving: What is it then between us?

Closer yet I approach you

In an off-page scene, alluded to but not dramatized, Hal and Gately unite (unclear how, as they don’t know one another in the novel proper), and dig up the remains of Hal’s father Jim Incandenza. They’re hoping to recover an original copy of the samizdat produced by Jim, a film called Infinite Jest, which is purportedly so compelling that no viewer can look away. Infinite Jest was maybe itself a gift Jim created for his son Hal, a boy with whom he never sufficiently connected.

The book nods to this scene, wherein Gately and Hal hold aloft Hal’s father’s skull, which either did or did not contain Infinite Jest, and briefly actually recognized one another, illuminated in the rain by a lightning strike over the shared question: What was this crazy son of a gun up to?