Early in the morning and being the first to have arrived for work in an empty office, I stared at the line of mesh office chairs pushed against the wooden tops of the deserted desks forming a lane of vacant work stations. The single sound to be heard on my floor was the buzzing of the ventilation system that conditioned the air in the office and was accompanied by occasional ticks of the heating pipes. With the lights still turned off, suspended in a lapse of importance, these two hours in the morning were the only hours I was able to work. I churned out line after line, inventing cleverly structured pieces of code that would process millions of rows of data, applying calculations, summarizing related information, forming output, and persisting results. This morning I worked on a feature that allowed online advertising in real life to be targeted by time of day based on the local system time of a user’s computer. The business logic was described in sufficient detail and satisfying simplicity, and the technical implementation was designed including the foreseeable bottlenecks like daylight savings exceptions and technical preferences. But quickly, I ran into the first unforeseen, unadvertised difficulty of ten percent of missing and unknown IP to geo location mappings.

Nothing ever was as perfect as was hoped for. Instead, always expect the unexpected. The rule of imperfection never fails. Intelligence was and had always been nothing more than an essential flaw. It did not differ from the nature of progress in evolution as an unforeseeable, random mutation in the process of reproduction, which by trial and error, more often than not failed, and by exception only found a useful purpose in a small number of cases. The problem in Artificial Intelligence was that it was still considered to constitute a higher disposition instead being based in error. Similarly reason was still considered to be deliberate, intentional and creative. But reason was simply the capacity to repeat a perception, to literally copy it, and only in failing to do so, intelligence as the error of reason, stumbled upon a mutation which fit better to an ever changing world that the attempted repetition of prior action. The rule always applied, it was the only rule never to fail. As a reasonable person more than I was intelligent, however, I believed still in perfection, the subsequent failure of reality was highly disappointing.

More difficulties arose as I approached a best of possible solutions, never minded all its faults. I degenerately lost my motivation to do any more work. Infrequent footsteps crowded the office, chatter filled the space, people flocked in alone or in small groups. I discerned the broken sentences of the morning chit chat of coworkers, the social compulsions of the shallow jokes they made, which were rarely funny, but did not fail to stir uncomfortable laughter so typical of uneasy company, careful murmur, occasional limbic activity, laughter, constituting a cautious cognitive awakening, excited by the expectation of soon-to-be pleasure that followed solving practical problems, the furnaces of people’s minds heating up, while in me these functions now reciprocally all died out. My irritation and agitation were simple signs of the social rejection that I enforced. I did not belong here, I was desperate to think why I was here. The energetic concern for petty tasks, the full mental involvement in this artificial group bonding that took place among a collection of random young professionals, to feel empathy for everyone’s shallow objectives, they made up the essential talent for success, and I lacked these talents passionately. I could not impose any sign of interest and convince others of my pretended interest veined for the useful purpose of business, and the whole house of cards, that forms a person’s career in life, collapsed before me, with the drought of other people’s presence scurrying around the office. It was a fate I no longer feared, but I had become lethargic toward, I went my way, and carved my path through the rock, chiseling patiently until the day was over.

All could be doubted but doubt, I know to know nothing, all Cretans lie. Once you know, it is impossible to forget certain insights, nevertheless their simplicity. Once you seek to know the truth, to forget is to be lost forever, and who can ever go back to a state of falsity again, who can sleep with open eyes. I could serve my own falsities at least like in a game or experiment, but not those of others. I could only resign to being present to theirs.

The wall of murmur grew higher until it had reached the cacophonous flood levels of the working day and I was unable to surf the relentless rolling waves of stupidity and lack of meaning. My brain drowned in this endless activity of rolling up this stone up the hill and in the consequent state of nothingness I managed only to do nothing, sitting defeated at the foot of the mountain, defeated. The chaos of another day of boredom had arrived, passivity overwhelmed me. Some chairs were pulled back, the squeaking of plastic wheels and cheap hydraulic springs pressing down or veering up, announced the activity of other worker bees. The hollering of self imploded opinions with the air of presumed fact, the delirious buzzing, the back and forth arguments of arbitrary hunches, the rushed pacing of continuously running late, ever so being busy as a result, the glorious imposture of everything being eternally important, nothing ever ending to be, business as usual, we are now all enclosed by our own point of view, and each point relentlessly rolled over me like an avalanche. Papers rustling while being ripped from blocknotes, notebooks and personal computers starting up, pens scribbled down jots of thoughts. Sales reps should be able to reserve a campaign. But for how long by default, would it expire without confirmation, and should the forecasting consider a reservation before it is finalized? These were all very, very important and even more interesting questions. In a flash I realized these challenges could be my life, if only I grasped it. I immediately thought of killing myself. I rolled my chair back, stood up and went to take a pee. I locked the door to the private water closet. State regulation for multiple water closets in a row demanded them to be divided by separation walls. I unzipped my pants, pulled down my underwear, sat down, picked up the New York Post from the water reservoir and started reading the outrageous headlines. I pushed back the foreskin of my penis and started to jerk off. The sperm ejaculated and landed in the puddle of clear water in the bowl. The same water that was used to flush the toilet was used as tab water for drinking. The spring water company filled its tanks for its fountains with the same water before it was directed down the Catskills aquaduct heading toward the city, and drove the bottles in trucks down for delivery. I wondered why and how this was happening, ripped a sheet of toilet paper and dried my glans. I imagined each attractive woman in the office drinking a cup of water contaminated with large drops of my cum. Back at my desk, I stared with a dull interest at my co workers and couldn’t decide if I should say something. In the end I decided not to and I looked up the system of the Catskill water supply of New York City on the internet.

The warming sun and brisk air of the morning still echoed in my chest around noon as my thoughts were compulsively drawn out of my office in the city into the open air, to escape and breathe the waterly winds at the harbor side. I decided to take a walk to pier 34 during my lunch break and sit on one of the two fingers of the boardwalk that connected the Holland Tunnel Vent Shaft to the Hudson river boulevard. It was only a ten minutes walk to the river from my downtown office, but rarely did any of my coworkers exceed the two blocks radius around the office. Instead they choose to confine themselves for lunch and restrict their lunch time to eating at their desks take-out in foam boxes from the Korean owned deli’s, a sugar coated doughnut from the Bengali breakfast or gyros from one of the many Middle Eastern street carts on the sideways of the city. I resented this imprisonment as if it formed an self-chosen exile of the imagination, a preliminary taste of death.

Close to noon, I scurried out and walked toward the corner of Broadway and Houston. I looked briefly at the two artists suspended in a carriage above the traffic, applying a new advertisement design to a blind wall of the office building on the south-east corner. They painted over an old DKNY wall advertisement of a silhouette of New York City. In their hands the scaled blueprints of what appeared to be a new advertisement for Hollister in a dull sand brown. Dulling! I thought, there is nothing left to chance. Every day tourists had halted to be mesmerized by the DKNY ad facing the Adidas flagship store and had their picture taken in front of it. It was the face of advertising in New York, and in the last year it had become iconic, the closest expression of artistry in a world that sucked the talents of a manifold crowd of youngsters.

I turned the corner and walked west by the Angelika Film Center. Posters hang in large window frames advertising the latest new movie ‘Whatever Works’ by Woody Allen, the archetypal clown of the city, a movie called the Baader Meinhof Complex about the Rote Armee Fraktion, and Extract. I passed the entrance with its round chrome steps leading to the cashier behind her fishbowl glass window, which always left a kind of magical impression on me, reminding me of the sad state I was in. Here was a world to escape to. Here you leave behind the numbing reality with it predictable routines and you stepped into the unpredictable world of erratic dreams and impossible hopes. The threshold to enter was eight steps high, but who had time to. Then, temporary for a lost gap in time, le grand plouf into the world of imagination. Forget your worries, forget boredom, live the life of the stars, your dreams coming true for a moment, before you were puked out again on the potholed asphalt of the New York City streets two hours later facing the bored reality that you could trust was always there waiting for you.

I crossed sixth avenue and stopped at the Blue Ribbon Bakery Market to buy an olive chiabatta, still warm and crunchy, and a square of soft Hudson Valley goat brie for lunch. I meandered through the narrow streets of the West Village toward the pier, and passed the West Side Highway. On the other side of the highway, I peeked through the entrance of the pier 40 building at a group of static kids throwing a baseball at each other in the grass field of the inner yard. I continued and sat down on one of the benches on the southern finger of the pier, letting the sun grown warmer and warmer on my face with my eyes closed. I stared at the oversized seagulls by Ron Baron, in the dark water below, which I had mistaken for real, living if somewhat fat crane birds, the first time I saw them, as I was blinded by the sun that was set high in the southern sky. I was afraid they would hover over me like a thief at the theater, preying for my lunch. An occasional jogger ran by before me, the sun shone intensely. I took my shirt off, revealing my pale, incarcerated chest, void of life, while I unpacked my bread and cheese. Through the fierce beams of sun light I distinguished a squeezed view of the diminished Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World. Her torch burning, guiding the refugees of the past, toward the promise of a better future. But for many there only awaited the bitter disappointments of peddling the remote and dangerous countryside of the mid and wild west, or the inhumane sweatshops where they shared the fate of a day laborer no better than that of the negro slaves. And yet this illusion, this false dream had never died and stopped to appeal new hopeful huddled masses. How desperate is the soul of mankind to hope against reason, to believe rather than to know with certainty, to prefer the illusion of certainty over the truth of uncertainty.

I tore some bread apart and chew on a piece of brie. How perfectly calm I felt with a simple meal, rich in taste and filling the senses rather than filling the stomach. I became swallowed by the afternoon, by time, eating my lunch and feeling the river’s breeze against my heated body and face. The senses, taste, smell, feeling, it all came back to me, my imagination. From a distance, staring east away from the sun, I saw the undisturbed silhouette of the financial district’s skyscrapers, the palaces of capital incorporating the hectic of bankers and beggars, the gains and losses, the human greed, and the human suffering, greed and pity. This greed never stopped, it always rushed on, behind the the pale glass reflection of the silhouette. Behind me, the world of advertising and fashion, that fed and was fed by this greedy capital, that so many chased, higher and higher, reinventing beauty, because it always remained volatile, no matter how persistently these modern Tantaluses pursued it. I lost my sense of time and place in this pursuit. It was life that was filling me now. I realized that I was at the banks of a major sea port on the Atlantic and not in the middle of a blinded labyrinth of sky scrapers. The odor of the Hudson water, although not very salty, even at the river’s edge you never smelt the sea, its sensation was refreshing. I felt the approaching sun, closer and closer on my flight back to life.

‘I just had the worst day of my life,’ she spoke leaning against a lantern pole. The light colored her face white and pink, her eyes looked bright and transparent like the water of the Mediterranean.
‘I am sorry to hear.’
‘No!’ she clamored as if I had just offended her. ‘I mean, everything today, from morning until the evening, got fucked up.’
‘I am sorry,’ I repeated and placed the back of my fingers against her soft cheek. She didn’t cry, she didn’t smile. She seemed fragile, but calm and unbroken, unbreakable. She looked at me with an angelic force. I did not know her, but she felt familiar.
‘This morning,’ she paused, continuing, ‘my family, it is a mess.’
I laughed a bit, out of discomfort perhaps. The absurdity of her disturbed statement simply appeared like an hilarious echo of my own perfect family. How disconnected and a world apart did the words family and mess sounded to me. The absolute normality of my upbringing, the devotional love of my parents and the unshakable security, I could imagine family to be boring at most. I could not control the emotional reflex and smile.

I stared at her glance that brightened her face. I was fascinated, a bit concerned. I trusted upon her strength, I insisted on my autonomy, wanting to take her into my arms, but being afraid to. A feeling of sympathy, empathic compassion pulled me closer and closer to her. Why couldn’t I resist this irrational gravity of emotional identification and burden myself with this replacement of suffering. I was making her pain my own, although I could not connect to it. I concluded it was possible I loved her.

The tears that welled up never showed. The sadness remained below the surface. I would not have mind if she had burst out, fell into my arm, entrusted her self to my care, but she did not. She looked at me, not revealing her thoughts. We looked at eachother, guessing, never bridging the unoutspoken desire to hold eachother.

Mechanically, I gently kissed her mouth. I placed my lips against her hair that smelled like aloe vera shampoo. She forcefully smiled tenderly and unconvinced.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ She repeated the phrase with a resigned sigh and turned away her face.
‘You are fine now,’ I countered.
‘Look at the deep sky, the longer you look, the more bright dots there appear.’
‘I know what you mean,’ she leaned toward me, grabbed my face, and kissed me. Her hand lay in my neck. I wondered why people close their eyes when they kiss.

“The plague is no worse than death by mediocracy, mediocrity, death by commercialism, death by corruption, which surrounds us.”
Artaud, on the plague and the theatre, Anais Nin, Vol. 1, p.192

I am a man. Now, take for example … say color. Since our dna only has three different opsis genes – green, red and blue – of which green and red are on the X chromosome, our comprehension of color is restricted to the wavelengths of these colors of light. You’re with me? But nature provides for the perception of a much wider range of colors, naturally, you knew this, and would it not be but a fairly simple procedure to code our genome to include a gene for … i don’t know, say infrared perhaps? And what would be so immoral about it? What would be immoral about decoding our own genome? Coding the genome of our child like a puzzle. Nature mutates our genetic code constantly and consistantly, and what’s worse, by mistake! How moral is that? And seen in that light, it would be immoral, no! inhumane! not true to the nature of kindness to intervene. Once you know, it is hard to forget. Only if you never knew, never had the faintest idea, can you talk about the immorality of genetic manipulation. Going against the laws of nature? NOT to mutate our own genes, would be against the laws of nature, don’t you see? We have an obligation to progress! And would it not be moral to better our selves when there is the opportunity? Don’t you owe it to your children?

A sits at a long library table in cafe The Years on the Amstel river at the Kloveniersburgwal, light brightens the cafe’s back through the large windows, while A makes notes. He is trying to remember impressions from his youth, but has trouble determining the truthfulnesss of his memories. The sun’s strong beams blinds A as he squeezes his eye lids together to read his notes over, but barely able to distinguish the words on the white paper. The refraction of the light to green and red, brings back visions of his childhood on the countryside.

As his pupils slowly adjust, A notices a girl B’s silhouette stepping into the blinding nimbus of light. When he opens his eyes again, she too being half imagination half real, walking out of his past into his present, he stares at her sitting down next to him at the table.

B: Sorry, you mind? she points at the newspaper that lays folded on the table.
A: Oh of course not, go ahead.

A leans over to his notebook again and writes a memory of his mother down. He hears B’s voice whisper tender thoughts to his mother. The waitress brings a coffee for B.

B: thanks.

A, somewhat disquiet, leaves the cafe and saunters past the canals, the passers-by. He ponders about the people with whom he has nothing in common, on the surface water he sees the broken reflection of his shadow.

I didn’t have sex with my wife for weeks. I had not realized it in the beginning, as is the case with any habit, but at a certain moment it had struck me. I tried to bring back to memory a possible moment or decision that could be marked as the beginning of the end, but I couldn’t. At no point was I surprised that I hadn’t slept with her anymore lately, but there was regret of course, and maybe there was shame too.

More than a year ago, after long deliberation we had decided finally to purchase a HRP-C4 model humanoid robot. These models had just been introduced on the market and although expensive my wife and I agreed that the price was worth the gain of free time it would offer. We both worked full-time jobs and our household was neglected by all standards of normalcy. Dirty laundry lay on the floor of the bedroom and bathroom, the dining table in the living room was covered in overdue mail, pens, tits and tats from emptied pockets, never looked at again notes to remind us of something, receipts, change, and the kitchen counter was never empty either, dust collected under the table tops, along the baseboards of the walls, and on the book shelves. The HRP-C4 humanoid offered to elevate the burden of householding and more, prepare meals, order groceries one could upload from one’s PA, it could look for a phone number left at home, feed the starving cat, it would guard your home in your absence, and to top it off, it would welcome you with a bit of warmth, a friendly smile of welcome after an exhausting day at work. The costs were heavy given that only a limited number of first edition models were being produced, but we predicted the joys were greater. The advantages seemed to outweigh all my normal reservations this time.

The physical appearance of the HRP-C4, its visual characteristics came pretty much standardized, that of Japanese young woman of average appearance, out of the box. We named her Mayu, after a former co-worker of my wife, to whom she bore at least to our impression some convincing resemblance. We argued it could be considered perhaps racially insensitive to give the household robot an East Asian name, but ultimately felt more comfortable to go along with the intuition of facial recognition. We had always felt estranged by the Anglicized names of Asian colleagues, and to become guilty of the same temptation to falsely Anglicize one’s real name, seemed a worse crime than to risk the racial prejudice of an East Asian live-in maid in the eyes of an overly sensitive politically-correct wanna-be stranger. (more…)

“Moderato cantabile is a modern restatement of the incompatibility of individual passion with the orderly mechanism of social decorum.”

Walking to Think Coffee in the morning, before work, I feel a sad deprivation, a calm coldness without shiver, an absence of libido. I haven’t felt sexually excited all weekend, and in consequence I wasn’t able to concentrate or find any inspiration. Maybe it is my propensity to perpetually seek a sexual context, and in the absence of it, I feel impotent. I flirt and the boredom of the day disappears, a joy captivates my heart to see her smile. I stare and the light of the flesh uplifts my heart. The muse of womanhood incites a awe of imagination in me that I can believe in. I have always been civic about my sexual urge, I have always been selective, another disposition that is not always the most beneficial perhaps.
This weekend I panicked to think I would never sleep with a woman any more for the rest of life. I was satisfied to innocently flirt, even just talk, to feel a gentle hug saying good bey, or even be near a woman distantly. There would be something to do then still. My loving eyes are scanning the streets for a beautiful doll, it is not even lust, but the pleasure of beauty, the yearning for romance evoked at the first sight of a female’s face. The studies say this feeling exists independently from the attachments people form. I confirm that this shallow craving that possesses the body as well as mind, is like the wind that blows in the sails of a boat on a calm sea. It is not a rudder that sets the course, it is not an anchor that ties one down to the bedrock.

A winter day, cold and clear like an autumn day. Shielded from the bending trees, the wet air, and the pavement, reminders of the morning hail. I stare outside the window, as a far observer. As the the day is lost, in nothingness, in goalless passing, I slowly grow aware of the opportunities that exist here to create a viable commercial product. Maybe I too have grown and excelled in the last months. Admitted, I am not determined by nature, maybe my late age of opportunity is a potent and clear signal of that. A silent witness of a wasted load, I realize my aim. I have always felt destined for something, I have always felt to have enough innate predestination, talent, and I also never felt ready, never felt sufficient, there was always another step to be made, there was always another day until tomorrow. I realized I was not in the right circumstances, not in the perfect moment, to reach and grasp, and to create the opportunities that were possible before me. There were too many imperfectly matching pieces in the puzzle, too many dust particles in the beams of light. Caught between these, I saw such immature possibilities. I am not a total loner, not among the notes of music at least, too one sided in my own capacity to follow a single line, my own except, and so I am in the hands of the unfinished time, unclosed circles. I am waiting for the lips to be in sync with the words that are spoken. When I am almost ready, my soul is silent. The tracks never run parallel and I wait. I wait for the musical singer to fall back in line with the choir, on the right beat, but realizing this will occur only by coincidence. Each moment that I awaited disappears again.
But now I am no longer dependent, in contrary, it is me who is the dependency, if the perfect chain breaks, it is because of my fault. My friend T. is faultless in the right opportunity to work out right. Of course I believe my own path leads me fastest to my goal. My niche is colored by its own light. My niche is to write neo-classic nihilist pamphlets that express the post war type of optimism that characterizes me, rallied by a strong will to survive the destined fate that we cannot escape, to enjoy, the seek pleasure, to undergo the experiences like a self-objectified subject, the mirror image within us. This remoteness of the self is a clear and inseparable identity of strength. In a new language, I speak, still looking to find the right words, the right tone, the logical sense for the meaning and form that will define me.