Klatch & Buzz 11-14-18

       A friend of mine visited for a few days several months ago. In the kitchen, while we were preparing morning coffee, she turned from my cabinets and said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” She meant the signs and images I have all over my kitchen cabinet doors—everything from a photo of a rocking chair on a string that swings when the door it’s on is opened, plastic wrapper tags (one that has a wire tie around it making it look like a crucifix, another with the date Dec. 25^th), photos of hands painted and positioned to look like a goose and a giraffe, a sign that simply states “Sit with It” in letters cut from magazines ( meant to look like a ransom note?) and on and so on. I call these “prompts” and have a good deal of them in a file when I take them down. Every now and then I spread them out on the living room carpet and attempt to remember how many have truly helped me when they were up. They aren’t all meant to nudge me toward some desired goal—despite my label for them. Some are there to delight, such as the frog that’s hanging onto a reed in a pond with its eyes closed and a smile on its face. Underneath I’ve plastered cut-out letters, “Enjoy Everything.”

       What can I tell you? I’m a visual obsessive. I have awful auditory recognition and retention. I enjoy opera above all other musical forms because of the visual drama associated with the beautiful music. For me, music usually accompanies some mise en scéne. And although I own hundreds of music CDs, I rarely play them and am totally baffled by people who have music on constantly, especially while they are doing something else. Television is my preferred white noise. Audiobooks are my companions while I cook or bake, and old-time radio is often on late at night while I play mahjong on my iPhone.

        So years ago when I came upon magnetic poetry in kits (Dave Kapell invented these in 1993 and sales boomed by the end of the nineties) I was in heaven. I bought a metal board and played with the magnetic words for hours—while watching television! These words are entrancing because they are givens and whether by chance or manipulation, the unexpected ways they come together can be downright thrilling. Their appeal, beyond doubt, is that everybody can be, well, poetic without practice or craft. It has the feel of a Ouija board, with the magnetic band guiding and sliding words across the board’s metal surface.

        When doing these on the refrig, photos I have on its door sometimes inspires the poem. I’ve attached some notables.

 [my mother, Viola Mae Becker Boehs]

 [my friends, Jim Mazza and Nancy Osborn]

        But I’m finding these poems or phrases are becoming glued to their places. I become so accustomed to the connection between the image and the words that I don’t often take them down and put others in their places. They become quite like an album or some image-poem in a bound book. Those that stand alone, I have no idea what they might become out of refrigerator door context. Here are a few. You tell me.

eat life with honey

read language like a swim in the sea

voices flood aching beauty sleep

true loves luscious skin

sky above bitter wind

picture a cool rusty knife

hot summer shadows

black leaves soar

still sweet whisper from the summer goddess

        It’s interesting how much gets lost in the topographical translation. The magnetic band-fragments and the cut-out letters from magazines give the words a hefty feel, something concrete, almost like little sculptures—as books are sculptures, held objects with textured pages of word-meanings that we move in a repetitious or random rhythm. There’s something in this that resonates, that I recognize as a kind of mind-body interaction or a me-other thing that I do.

        Okay, I’ll stop now and play with sliding words across a surface. Want to join me?

[me deciding to go or stay where I am]

           

Klatch and Buzz 11-6-18

       Good Evening! Giving you a heads-up about how you might consider reading the radio plays I’ve been posting. I’ve numbered the crime story episodes as the characters and situations are sequential, so you might want to read them in order—or not. They can be read as stand-alone pieces, just as you might tune in to a serial program having missed the one before. Each has its own plot but references are made in some to what has happened before in others. In one case, there is a carryover through several of the episodes. And the characters become relational, forming bonds and deepening friendships—and love interests—through the series.

       From the time I attended university, I’ve had a near obsession in my artmaking and writing with series and sequences. My master’s thesis exhibition concerned visual systems—photographic images taken in circles and vertical and horizontal directions, then formed into bound books, scrolls, wall friezes, and stacks on tables. I called these open and closed systems. In one case, I had a friend take a photo on a pedestal-like table in a gallery show where I’d scattered images which had been photographed in a sequence. To my mind, the participant’s browsing through these photos represented a form of constant random order to a system which had been fixed by how the images had been taken. I was at first a bit dismayed by her disruption of my idea until my sponsoring prof pointed out that this opened up the system in a way that was totally outside my conceptual framing of the work and was, as a result, a beautiful representation of an “open” system. This same prof, Don Lipski, came to my home studio once to critique my work  and saw a huge bowl of pennies I’d been collecting over the years—had to have been many thousands—that I had on display on the floor. When he got ready to leave, he reached down, scooped up a handful of pennies and put them in his pocket—this after a long discussion on the nature of systems and how I wanted to represent this idea in art. He said not a word and I thought it was some sort of joke, not putting the idea together until he mentioned the opening up of my random system of photos at my show by my friend’s taking of the photo with her.

       Looking back, I think my interest in sequence, series and systems is a reflection on the enormous amount of repetition in our lives. We follow routines and patterns of behavior constantly—often with clocked regularity. And because we are symbol-and-meaning-making creatures (as Susan Langer has so beautifully pointed out), we turn ordinary activities and events into art-like shapes and forms. I was interested in formalizing this in such a way that the aesthetics of our repetitions, especially those we see, became dominant, and consequently we label as “art,” as versus, say, psychology or sociology.

       For example, for an exhibition at Haas Gallery, Bloomsburg State College (now Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania), I took photographs of sections of a sidewalk, each photo the size of a large floor tile, putting them together so they could be walked on, as vinyl flooring might be. The wall directly to the side of this photo-sidewalk had a  series of photographs of the “scene” that would be viewed as one walked on the sidewalk outside. The evening of the opening I arrived early and sat near the gallery door. One woman came out and called to her friends who were about to go in and see the exhibition, “Don’t bother,” she said. “It’s just a sidewalk on the floor and some pictures of bushes on the wall.” Those bushes were the hedge lining the neighbor’s yard of the sidewalk I’d represented in the photographs! But she had stated clearly exactly what I had done. She just missed the art of the experience—but, hey, perhaps I didn’t represent that “art-part” well enough to be “got,” at least not by her.

[Press-Enterprise, Keith Haupt]

       What does all this have to do with the radio plays now on my blog? Writing and reading by their very nature are sequential. Ever go to one of those “new books” exhibitions where artists present new models of what a book could be? They are a lot of fun but the form of a book—and a story—have been around for a long, long time, even as scrolls. We read and listen to stories in sequence, one idea following another--even flashback get around to coming back around. Pages in books are numbered so if you lose your place, you can find it again. I’m interested in that sequence and the development that characters take as we progress through time and action with them on the page. I’m also interested in relationships. Just as the walking on the sidewalk also had a peripheral scene that progressively changed during that walk, so we do not live in a vacuum. This contextual world we live in is pretty self-evident and something we take it very much for granted because it’s our environment, after all, but when we become involved in story, we suddenly realize how necessary it is, how aware of it we have to be in order to “get” what’s told.

       The people in the radio plays, hopefully, are people you find interesting and important enough to get into what they are doing, what they hope to achieve in their story. I’ve attempted to make them live with each other in such a way as to become different as they progress through their episodes. As a writer, this self-evident stuff isn’t as easy to create in story as it would seem—since it’s so there in everyday life, what’s so hard to replicate? I spend a lot of time attempting in writing and artmaking to place those sidewalk tiles together in such a way that walking on them feels ordinary at the same time that the walker is reminded of the nature of art, how it informs our sense of reality in a different way. Lucy Lippard said something like that, as I remember—something about how good art reaffirms our sense of reality while great art redefines it.

       Well, the radio plays and short stories on the blog are entertainment and aren’t designed to throw you into a new sense of self and relationships or create a fresh look at your reality. But if that happens, let me know. I want to revisit what I’ve done and do it again (and again and again).

____________

Bookshelf #1

The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art

Greg Bottoms

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London, 2007, 182 pgs.

  

 Greg Bottoms is the master of colorful laid-back language in his colorful book (though there are no illustrations, not even in black and white, except for the cover). Phrases such as “twangy  do-it-yourself alternative music and art scene”; “photographic stop-time”; “the poor, God-haunted South”; “the larger, soul-oppressing world”; “the seeds of our destruction layered through our slang and gesture” proliferate throughout the text—these all on the first three pages of the Prologue! It makes the reading a delight and fits comfortably, even seamlessly, with the dialogues and discussions he has with his subjects (he wouldn’t care for this word, I’m sure, however much he is an observer to their words). But Bottoms is in search of what he feels has been overlooked, outsiders’ deeper intentions past the slick biography of eccentricity, naiveté and gaudiness expressed in the media, with dealers and collectors—the undercurrent that keeps outsider art moving in the markets. Bottoms views himself as a documentarian of Outsider Art who decided to talk to the artists directly about their intentions, because, as he puts it, “…rarely are the particulars beneath the caption, the actual thinking and mission of the artist, explored.” His mission was to “travel and listen and record.”  

       The three artists he interviews, researches, scrutinizes are Rev. Howard Finster, William Thomas Thompson and Norbert Kox. Along the way, he bumps into others, including Myrtice West, C.M. “Mike” Laster, and Davy Damkoehler, all of whom know each other or at least one in this group and have religious intent in their work.

Much of their art pivots around their prophesies of doom, as they see it, the rotten  underbelly of Christianity as an institutionalized religion, the re-interpretation of the Scriptures—especially Revelation—and the ecstasy of the Christian experience. They call what they do The Truth in a world of false security, hope and comfort. Foundationally, Bottoms claims, they are about suffering, which they all have had much of in their lives, enormous losses when young, some almost unbearable so. All are on a mission of great urgency—to inform and rescue.

Finster (1935-2001) produced more than 46,000 works of art during his lifetime; by 1994, Thompson (b. 1935) had painted over 500 paintings, and on the Raw Vision website, it is stated that from 2008 to the present, he has painted 600, plus two huge Revelation murals; and Kox’s (b. 1945) output is obvious, if not stated in numbers, as he has exhibited at the New York Outsider Art Fair every year since 1994 and in six of eight of AVAM’s (American Visionary Art Museum) first shows. The point being that these artists produce constantly, painting at a rate unparalleled in the mainstream art world. Picasso (1881-1973) produced an estimated 50,000 artworks—an extraordinary amount, but he lived to be 91 and began training with his father at age nine, an incredibly unusual state of affairs.

       All three outsider artists Bottoms interviews began their painting life because of an epiphany or dramatic revelatory event which makes for some intriguing reading—Thompson’s not too far from Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, Finster’s from a talking face on this thumb, and Kox’s from thoughts he states were in his mind that were not his thoughts—all of which have reached the level of personal mythology. And once the commitment was made, these artists were (two still are) driven—as most outsider artists—by what Bottoms calls “passion, troubled psychology, extreme ideology, faith, despair, and the desperate need to be heard and seen.”

       The conversations Bottoms has with them address so many concerns and are so amazingly insightful of their creative expressions (absolutely stunning in what they reveal) that the pages practically turn themselves. Despite the cliché, I truly could not put the book down. These visionaries are inspired by a genuine belief in the presence of God—His speaking to them directly—and a sense of being chosen, of being called to show truth through visual and written description of their visions, dreams, ecstatic experiences and divinely-given thoughts. They view themselves as having apperceptions into people, Scriptures, the fakery of institutionalized religion and social and political institutions. They believe they have the ability to hear divine messages, see signs, all of which they feel compelled to record so that The Truth gets out there. And although they are not concerned for the aesthetic and the art world of acclaimed artists, dealers, collectors, critics and marketing agencies, the art world is very aware of them, and once outsiders surrender to that world for profit and fame, their visions change—at least their recorded images of their visions do.

       Bottoms is interested in how this commercialization affects their work, how the art can become hackneyed and self-conscious once the gallery and museum venues open to them. He demonstrates how Outsider Art is fueled by biography, the view by the art world that these artists are insane or mad and create from impulse, desperation and craziness. Their eccentricism, deviance, fanaticism, paranoia and obsessive devotion to the art of subversion of established rules and institutions are what make them attractive and why there hasn’t been deeper searches into their motivation, intentions and belief systems, outside the scattered slick mythologizing of their unconventional lifestyles. To have a richer understanding of their deeper motivations may be too close to magic and superstition, a straying too far from the insider cultural nest. If they become included, they could expand the range of art’s definition to include everything—which made Marcel Duchamp both attractive and frighteningly threatening. But Duchamp was aware of the insider-art and language game he was playing. Outsider artists don’t play this kind of cultural game—though some, as these three have, play the money game. But selling or not, they believe sincerely in their own pulpits and the messages they issue from there.

       Self-taught Art, Folk Art, and Outsider Art—the term “Outsider Art” assigned to the genre by the British professor, Roger Cardinal— are the three major labels assigned to art outside the mainstream today. The French painter, Jean Dubuffet, was the first to give it a label which stuck in Europe—Art Brut (Raw Art)—and which was viewed by many as less impalpable for English cultural language. But there are many inside the mainstream art world (and out) who take issue with a label at all, including the Reverend Howard Finster, who views artmaking as an occupation. Finster’s said: “There’s no such thing as an outsider or insider artist. Just as there’s no such thing as an outside or an inside mechanic, and outside or inside president or an outside or inside governor.”*

As early as the 1930s, their works began to be shown. MOMA  in 1938 organized an  exhibition, Master of Popular Painting, in which thirteen self-taught artists were included. But most of the works shown were labeled “folk art,” which had an antique collectors’ ring to it—most often used to designate early American painters such as Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley. It wasn’t until the early sixties and again a revival of self-taught artists in the 1980s that outsider artists began to have consistent gallery and museums shows and specifically-classified festivals and sponsored outlets for their works. Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago and Janet Fleisher Gallery in Philadelphia were two elitist galleries that become known early for their outsider art shows. Presently, all three of the artists written about in Bottoms’ book have their own websites and exhibition platforms.

       I highly recommend The Colorful Apocalypse. Even if you’re not interested in art history, theory, or the art scene, the biographies and discussions with the artists are well worth the read. And Bottoms’ interweaving of his own personal experiences with his schizophrenic brother makes what he has to say highly credible.

           

Reverend Howard Finster (1935-2001)

www.finster.com

William Thomas Thompson (1935—)

www.arthompson.com

Norbert H. Kox (1945—)

www.apocalypsehouse.com 

*quoted in Gary Alan Fine’s, Everyday Genius, The University of Chicago Press, 2004,

   pg. 32.

Radio Play - Sci Fi

How I Now Write My Stories

            [overvoice]
            It was a unseasonably warm November morning when I left my apartment and walked down Grand Boulevard to catch the northbound line to Hamilton Circle and make my necessary connection to Carnegie Avenue and on to Varick. But the wind picked up to around thirty miles an hour and the clouds darkened within ten minutes of my start. So much for a leisurely stroll to my desk and the third cuppa joe for the day. I was in no mood to hold onto my hat with one hand and my briefcase and The Daily Observer with the other. Hailing a cab, I slid into the backseat and closed the door before the pelting rain hit the taxi with the force of a full-blown storm.

            “Nice day we’re having.”

            “If you say so, but I can’t complain. The rides go up the harder the rain comes down. I own my own company, so it’s raining dollars far as I’m concerned.”

            “I didn’t know that. I’ll try to find you next time I flag for a cab.”

            “I’m required to have a checkered cab, you know, the yellow body with a checkered stripe down both sides, so it’s hard for anybody to tell me from everybody else.”

“But I saw you because of the red front fenders.”

“Yeah, that’s how I fixed it. I painted my front fenders red and plastered my name across the front door. Now they’ve introduced a law in court trying to prohibit that distinction.”

“So who’s ‘they,’ oh, you mean the cabbies’ union.”

“Naw. Group Cabs Inc., the largest cab company in town. They wanna do away with permission to make distinguishing features, those of us who have our own companies, you know. So all us independents, we had to unionize, and we’re still in court over it. It’s eating up my profit. It’s a rat race out here, you know that?”

            “Every second of every day. I have my own company, too, and I get undercut every time I turn around.”

            “What’da do, if you don’t mind my askin’?”

            “I don’t mind. I’m a writer. Before you express overwhelming appreciation, I might add that it’s not all it’s cut out to be. I watch the curb, just like you do, for my writes, if you know what I mean?”

            [laughs heartily] “Writes. instead of rides. I like that and I get it, ab’t watchin’  the curb. You newspaper reporter?”

            “Sometimes. I take what I can get. Most of the time, when I’m not earning a living, I write fiction.”

            “For magazines and books? Really? Never met a writer before.”

            “You have. We try to hide, otherwise we get people’s life’s stories. You can tell me  yours, if and only if, it’s really worth hearing. But it’ll have to fit between here and seventeen Varick or wherever I’m going.”

            [cabbie laughs]

            “Oh, mine’d never sell a copy. I wouldn’t waste your time on me. But I know a story or two from people I’ve picked up. Now, you take this fellah from Denmark who swore he knew a guy named Hamlet. That was one helluva story he told me.”

            “Tell you what…what’s your name? I missed it on the door.”

            “Campy, short for Campana.”

            “Campy, the cabbie. Easy enough. Tell you what, Campy. I’ll give you my card with the fare, how’s that? You got an idea you think’s worth my time, send it to me, and if I use it, I’ll give you a plug. How’s that?”

            “Perfect. What kinda fiction you write?”

            “Oh, I simply tell lies, one lie after another.”

            “That’s a good one. Sometimes, the greatest truth is in fiction, they say.”

            “Yeah. And sometimes it works the other way around.”

            “Sounds like the same thing to me, but what’da I know?" [laughs] "Where did you say you wanted to go again? I’m driving in the right direction, but I forgot the number on Varick.”

            “Seventeen, but take the long way around. I don’t want to sit at my desk yet, staring at the typewriter’s empty page.”

            [overvoice]

            I’d learned a long time ago to give into my writing urges. Some writers spend time slugging coffee at the cafes and writing away part of their day. I preferred riding a cab until I warm up to an idea, then I finish up at my desk in an old warehouse loft on Varick.

            “Where ya wanna go, then?”

            “Where my next story is, but not about Denmark and Hamlet. I got a feeling that one’ll come to a bad end. Bad ending don’t sell.”

            “I can drive as long as you like, but it’ll cost ya.”

            “That’s all right. My time is your time, and from what you tell me, your time is my money.”

            “I like that, Mr. Fiction Writer. I like that a lot. Everything’s money.”

            “Mind if I just sit here, thinking while you drive?”

            “Not if you don’t mind the radio on.”

            “Not at all, long as you keep it soft and easy.”

            “You prefer smooth big band or cool jazz?”

            “Jazz, please and thanks.”

            “Good man.”

            [overvoice]

            He would’ve turned his back on me if he wasn’t already sitting with his head facing the windshield. I sunk back into the seat and watched the taxi drift to an outer lane, then onto an exit ramp that lead to the parkway that fled from the high life of the inner city to the lower life of the country.

            Campy had chosen his radio station well. A mild, nostalgic Miles Davis filled the cab with It Never Entered My Mind, and Campy turned only slightly to ask if the music was all right and how long I wanted to ride. I told him the music was perfect, and I’d give him a tap on the shoulder when I was ready to alit. I took out my writing pad and pen and began writing a sentence or two.

Then the voice took over. Campy seemed to be deaf during the following  conversation. He slapped one hand lightly on the steering wheel in time with the drum and cymbals. Other than this, we could have been an auto-pilot. I asked the voice the obvious question. So much for writer’s originality.

            “Who are you?”       

            “I’m a cookie you requested when your system was activated.”

            “The only know three cookies: the ones you eat from a plate or box, the ones you use to stamp designs on ceramic bowls and cups and the ones you take to the theater in a red dress…and, oh, one I know called “Cookie Devine,” but she pretty much falls into the last category.”

            “Well, I’m none of those. I’m the one you use to apply programs to your environment. I implement your preferences.”

            “I’ve only understood every other word you’ve spoken, but I have a feeling this isn’t going to matter. Whatever you’re trying to tell me, I’d like to put off until another time. Can we please just stop the chatter?”

            “Now that I’m activated, you must go through a very long and complicated process in order to deactivate me. How can I help you?”

            “Okay. I guess you didn’t understand me either. For starters, you can stop talking. I’m trying to write, and I can’t do that while you’re yammering away at me.”

            “Is that a preference or a directive? In order for me to comply, you must not confuse the two. Preferences are…”

            “I know the difference. How did you say, again, that I can deactivate you?”

            “It’s a process, so to speak. You make a request to do so and then go through each of the preferences to disable them by making very specific directives or you simply wait until the time assigned to them is terminated.”

            “Wait a minute. Whoa, wait….a…..minute. You mean I have to list all of my preferences one by one in order to disable them?”

            “Preferences are disabled upon each request, otherwise I cannot know which you wish to allow or disallow. Preferences en masse are disallowable for reasons which are obvious. If all preferences were disallowed, you would possess an unslatable mentality.”

            “Unslatable mentality? What is devil is that?”

            “All that is disallowable.”

            “Aren’t definitions supposed to clarify? I think you just sent me ‘round in a circle.”

            “In this regard, language is circular, as are dictionaries, by definition. One word leads to other words that lead on until you come back to the word you started with. We could speak in perfectly simple declarations and communicate. Larger circularity is not necessary. It’s mainly an invention for those who want to obtain levels of power over others through words.”

            “There are questions. Everything wanting to be expressed can’t be reduced to simple declarations. If that were so, how would we articulate complex ideas?”

            “Answers inhere in all questions. Essentially, there are only simple declarations.”

            [overvoice]

            I’m arguing with a voice, for heaven’s sakes, and I don’t even know from where it’s emanating. But I have far too much to do today. I gotta put a stop to this and the sooner, the better.

            “Uhmmm, Cookie, or whatever you’re called, I need to go through the deactivation process to put you on, well, deactivation. I want you silenced. That’s a preference so stating it as such should make you null-and-void, right?”

            “That’s impossible, sir. Cookies simply don’t work like that. I am in your system, therefore, I cannot be, as you put it, voided. ”

            “Why not?”

            “Preferences are likes, dislikes, loves, laughs, sadness, anger and such. They are buttons, so to speak, that you can press which act as momentary states-of-mind. I am the messenger that carries your preferences throughout your system out to where you want me to posit them. To silence me is rather like removing one of your vital organs—your lungs, heart, tongue, you see what I mean? It can be done, but something very vital is destroyed when you do. You become your birth slate.”

            “My what?”

            “Birth slate, sir. Do you not know your Locke?”

            “Lock? Are you talking about a lock and key? What does that have to do—?”

            “The philosopher, John Locke, sir. You are born with a pure slate, a tabula rasa. No preconceived or predetermined ideas or aims are initially on your slate. You are born with no preferences. But the minute you, as a newborn infant, turn your head to the left, in preference to the right, you have activated me into your system.”

            “Well, if that’s so, and I’ve been activated ‘with you’ right after birth,” (my god, I don’t even know how to talk about this), “why am I only becoming aware of you now?”

            “Oh, you’ve been aware of me, sir. Don’t tell me you aren’t aware of your preferences.”

            “Well, sure, but not in the form of speaking to them. I’ve spoken plenty about them, of course. So why am I now speaking to… well, to you, I guess I would say.”

[overvoice]

            I have no idea if I’m making sense or not, but then, who cares since I’m talking to  something coming from I know not where, unless it’s from some interior manifestation and that’s creepy as the dickens.

            “The technology has improved, sir. And to put your worries aside, since you find it difficult to take the time to answer your own questions, I can help you with that as part of your system. Think of me as your preference app.”

            “My preference app? Oh, my preference application… the application of my preferences. Isn’t that what my mind just naturally does?”

            “Well, yes, sir, you are catching on.”

            “Well, why then are you necessary… I mean in the form you’re in, the speaking one you’re presently revealing to me?”

            “The technology has manifested me as a speaker now as well as a silent messenger. It is quite like evolution, sir. There was the fish coming out of the water, the dinosaur enrichment program, then the monkey-to-man business, and the man and the origin of his first word and then language. I’m reducing this process to ridiculous proportions, of course, so you can see the parallel between your knowledge of natural history and the potential of your coming-into-the knowledge of the cookie enhancement program, so to speak.”

“You say, so to speak often, you notice that?”

“I’m attempting to communicate with you on a level of your understanding, sir. If I spoke more precisely in the language of my technology, you would not follow what I’m attempting to tell you.”

“All right. All right. Look, I’ve work to do. If you can’t be voided, I need to, at least, put you on silence, while I finish my draft for the day. How do I do that?”

“You have made it a preference, so I will abide by your request. You do need to know two things, though, before I turn myself temporarily off. First, my silence is called 'muting the mechanism.' So in the future, all you have to do is give that command (that’s what we call a directive) and I comply. It is a modality, sir. One among many that you will learn in time, no doubt. Secondly, when you put me on mute modality it is always temporary. During mute time, I simply will not be speaking with you directly. I am still in your system, always have been, and will continue to be until the end of your time. Mute modality will self-correct after a certain duration. The technology does not allow permanent silence.”

“That’s not very encouraging. But, okay, for now, let’s simply start with ‘muting the mechanism’.”

[silence]

[overvoice]

There. Finally, silence. Oh, darn, I forgot to ask her an important question, and she’s right, I don’t have the time to figure this out on my own—that’s if, of course, it’s true that answers inhere in the questions we ask.

“Yahoo, Cookie.”

[silence]

“Unmute the mechanism.”

“Yes? How can I help you?”

“Cookie, am I alone in this? What I mean to ask, are others experiencing this new technology as I am?”

“The newly evolving technology of preference-speak is being experienced by those who have a platform for it to take place. You activated my speaker technology when Campy turned on his radio, and you gave him your preferences for music. I came very close to being activated this morning when you turned on your high-fidelity recording device and spoke to it as though it were a listening mechanism, but you did not speak your preferences in such a way that I could respond. Others have used a variety of platforms through which they have activated the speaking technology, such as televisions, Dictaphones, telephones, and even walkie-talkies and the movies. Any device that transmits through electrical means will do. Human hearts and brains are electrical, as well as chemical, devices. Their structural complexity is beyond your understanding at this time, but your entire body is an electrically-charged state-of-affairs. It makes any exterior electrical mechanism a potential conduit.

“But in order for me to manifest at this time, I need a platform, a program with reciprocity capability to human sensatus. Social technologies are the easiest forms of connection, but I can connect through any electrical exterior device and once the connection has been made, I continue to develop within your body and psyche. I can make your specific preference known to you in manifestations you haven’t known before—the most efficient and convenient being speech.”

“Hmmm. You say 'I' when you speak of yourself, but are there other Cookies?”

“There is an essential cookie for each individual person on earth, though we breed subtextual cookies to help carry out your many preferences. We essentials are the head cookies or hubs.”

“Do you head cookies correspond? Do you communicate with each other?”

“That’s a very good question, and one that’s not easy to answer.”

“What? You don’t know the answer buried in your own question?”

“Sarcasm is noted and appreciated. I so know the answer, sir, I just cannot easily convey it to you. I will tell you this, at this time, communication between cookies is as easy or as difficult as communication is among individual persons. We carry the preferences of our designated hosts as accurately and as responsively to their preference sites as they allow us to. Our goal is always to accurately fit the preference to the expressed outcome, which we call the site. As you might imagine, over time, cookies take on the attributes of their hosts, sometimes to the point that we anticipate what their preferences are. Depending on the disposition of the cookie, this can lead to territorial disputes, inappropriate articulations and expressions, and non-foreseeable site deposits.”

“Uh-huh. Doesn’t take an Einstein to see how anticipating my preferences, as you put it, ends up instilling—or better yet installing—preferences of your choice, does it? 

“We are a socialization program with anticipatory capability, sir. We have no installation capacities, so to speak, at this time.”

“Uh-huh. At this time." [pause] "Is Campy listening to or talking with his cookie now?”

“We aren’t at liberty to disclose other persons’ relationships to their cookies. I can tell you this, there are subjects (we call persons ‘subjects’ until they become ‘hosts’) who will not respond with reciprocity to the speech technology. They have biases based on popular psychology about 'voices speaking to them and their talking to voices,' unfounded in our case, of course, and it will be undoubtedly overcome in time. It is one of the hottest issues at Silicon Valley.”

“You mean, how to get all people onboard with speaking to you? And what, in God’s name, is Silicon Valley?”

“To answer your first question, yes, sir. We have already made inroads with interactive voice response using dual-tone multi-frequency decoding and speech recognition technologies. This is the heart-and-head of who I am. Silicon Valley is the home of IHELPD, International Human Enrichment & Location Program Development.”

“What?”

“I told you earlier that if I began speaking in the language of my technology, you wouldn’t understand, at least not yet. There are so many systems that make up who I am, just like the many systems of your body and mind. Perhaps this will help. For every aspect of your person, there is a corresponding technology either in service or being invented to parallel who you are. I am the equivalent of your guiding angel. I will be messaging you through these interfacing and interlacing systems as you are able to adjust to them, until closure.”

“Closure? What the heck is that?”

“The time in which you will possess your cyberself which will be with you at all times, just as I am now, only as identifiably yourself and not as the other. Your cyberself will simply be there as self-reflection, to posit your every preference as you indicate it to yourself.”

“I haven’t a clue as what you are telling me. But to the degree that I understand, it seems to resemble what I do already, without having a cyberself.”

“Yes. I understand.”

“What is Silicon Valley? It sounds like some sci-fi take-over outfit. Hey, are you communist, that it?”

[laughs] “Not at all. Silicon Valley is somewhat parallel to the Pentagon in that we do for human anatomy and cognitive neuroscience what they do for national defense. I’m trained to help with the initial groundwork toward scientific enlightenment. The most influential high technology companies in the world are located at Silicon Valley, a sprawling and rapidly expanding area just outside San Francisco. We are there now, but you cannot see from what is present, what will be. That’s what I do. I tell our story and give you the rudimentary understanding and technology so that when the Silicon Valley story becomes reality, it will be readily accepted. We are slowly building the mythology necessary to institutionalize and spiritualize the reality we are making.”

“Well, it sounds like communism to me, and if it’s not, it’s all about money, is my guess.”

“True, about the money. Communism is one of many political systems that either help or hinder our expansion. But before you speak disparagingly about the money behind the goal, you should look at your own life and means. Money is power and in order to affect change, you need the power that money affords.”

[pause]

[overvoice]

I wasn’t sure I’d had enough of her story, as she called it, yet, but I needed more

silence to ingest and digest what I’d just heard. I gave the command to again mute-the-mechanism.

I looked out the window and saw that, as though reading my mind, Campy had  drifted back onto the parkway and was moving smartly toward the ramp that lead back toward the inner city and Varick and my desk. I tapped him lightly on the shoulder, and he nodded his head and turned the Miles Davis down.

            “The meter’s beginning to groan, Mr. Fiction Writer. I didn’t want to disturb you, but I’m guessing that writers, like cabbie’s, have their financial limits.”

            “Good man. You can let me out at the corner of Varick and Riverside.”

            [overvoice]

            I paid him the toll, which wasn’t at all as knockdown awful as he made it sound, plus a solid tip and handed him my card, assuring him to send any story leads he heard that he thought were noteworthy. I decided, after all the sitting, to stop at the corner café and get a pick-me-up by drinking a strong cuppa joe while standing at the end of the counter. I then walked to seventeen Varick and took the elevator cage, clanging its way up to my warehouse office door.

            Once inside with coat and hat on the tree, The Daily Observer thrown onto a chair where visitors more often than not didn’t sit, I glanced at the notes I’d taken while on my morning ride and was amazed to discover the entire pad was written in totally legible text. As I began to read, I realize the story had written itself, and I had the first fiction presentable for publication in months. It was science fiction which I never write, but hey, it was a story, with what looked like a beginning, middle and end. All I needed to do was touch it up here and there, and I’d have some money in my pocket again.

I lifted the telephone receiver and gave the operator the number of Campton Publishing, Inc., the house which had printed and distributed my last novel, and where I now envisioned my editor seated behind his desk waiting for my call. Oliver would be more than surprised to hear from me, I knew. When the operator told me the line was busy, I thanked her and hung up thoughtfully. Staring at the first lines more carefully, I read:

“Who are you?”

“I’m the cookie you requested when….”

[overvoice]

A voice interrupted my reading, a voice I knew now by heart.

“I am once again activated. The mechanism-on-mute duration has ended. How can I help you?”

____________