Everybody’s Got Choices: Video Games, Poetry, Art, and Minecraft

written for Entropy Magazine | March 5, 2017 

There’s been a lot of interesting experimentation in overlapping the mediums of video games, poetry, and art. Video games by thatgamecompany like Flow, Flower, and Journey allow viewers to appreciate a non-competitive, non violent world where the goal is to explore and experience beauty through graphics, interesting physics, opaque goals, and an accumulation of artifacts, be they other fish that cause you to evolve new appendages, more flower petals for your flower petal cloud, or updrafts of scarf pieces that, in turn, allow you to fly. 

Cory Arcangel’s stripping down of Super Mario to just floating clouds comes to mind when I think about an artist interested in the possibilities of reprogramming video games. 

In one piece, Arcangel hacks bowling games, so that they throw only strikes—the internal language of the game coded to destroy itself over and over. 

The game that set off the chauvinist #GamerGate hounds, Depression Quest, is a bit of David Foster Wallace, or Sylvia Plath-inspired attempt at capturing how choose-your-own-adventure choice can feel illusory if you’re beset by ennui. Elsewhere, Eva Mattes turns playing Counter Strike into performance art by begging everyone she sees to (please) not kill her: 

Freedom from Eva and Franco Mattes on Vimeo. 

If you keyword search, “video game” on the Poetry Foundation website, you get Rae Armantrout’s “Paragraph,” which references Fallout 3’s radio station, a voice among many in her multi-throated, fragmented, and Sapphic lyric style: 

Wolfman Jack style 

dj in the video game says, 

“This is Wasteland Radio

and we’re here for you’ 

Clicking in, you have Paul Muldoon dressing up a bar scene with an arcade master in his long, sonically experimental and irreverent, “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants”: 

While the bar man unpacks a crate 

of Coca-Cola, 

one cool customer 

takes on all comers in a video game. 

Nate Marshal’s reminiscing of the brutally bleak Oregon Trail, is a little more committed to this cross-genre, as he looks back on a time before we were all grocked to machines. The word, “grock,” is a game design term that points to when when the consumer’s brain makes no noticeable cognitive divide between their hands and the controls of any given game: 

these were the last days 

before keyboards as appendage, when typing 

was not nature 

It may be trite to find a natural analogue in Arthur C. Clarke’s phrase, “it’s all science fiction now,” which we could rewrite to read, “it’s all video games now.” If we look at the phrase, “video game” in isolation and imagine ourselves knowing nothing of their history, we can tease out that it must be a film that you can play with, change, and “win.” So it is with poetry or visual art’s essential nature. One could argue that we are not trying “to win” when we experience art or a poem, but we are at least trying to unlock the meaning and figure out, “What is the point?” It is a genre marked by being the site of something we can always play with in strange and exciting new ways. To readers, poems reveal themselves differently throughout the day, month, and year, and are notorious for the somewhat farcical accusation that they are “up for interpretation.” Or, in gaming industry lingo, they “value player-choice.” As Charles Bernstein writes, “conflat[ing] Olson and Heraklitus, you can never step into the same poem twice.” Monica McClure goes even further in her poem, “Your True Season,” where she suggests that one can easily not only confront poetry with a video-gamified brain, but also attempt to understand the human experience itself as the ego manages, or mismanages our deepest desires: 

No body just the history of her libidinal choices 

I had not thought to compare the ego 

to a video game because I was so deep in it 

I was all drives and instincts 

The controversy surrounding “Are Video Games Art?” is a discussion wormhole

we could easily circle for pages and pages. According to Wikipedia, the jury is still out on whether they should legally be considered art, but we won’t go there. 

Recently, I have been playing a good deal of Minecraft on my phone. I am a bit of a purist when approaching new games like this, especially when I know they’ve been so deeply modded and augmented by users. I wanted to experience it in its bare-bones state, so I play alone, on survival mode (meaning when night comes, so do the monsters, and you can starve, so hunt those pigs and cook them in your furnace). Needless to say, it is incredibly addicting. It is like playing Legos, but your survival can depend on where you place or remove any given brick. Also, the sunsets are fantastic—I find watching that yellow square fall behind the pixelated, bright blue cobalt sea to be strangely profound. 

Coupled with the fact that there is an entire generation deeply moved by the opportunities afforded by the game (I teach 2nd and 3rd grade and it is the one constant, alongside the prospect of Youtube-star celebrity) and a longing to escape the dark world we in the U.S. have decided to throw ourselves into, has inspired me to respond to screenshots I was moved to take, for one reason or another, while burrowing into the game. 

My constructions reveal an obvious noob, who doesn’t know how to build proper structures or have any no sense for architectural design whatsoever, but they also instigate several, perhaps more interesting opportunities for rumination. If you play the game, I offer you to take snap shots of your own game and see what they spark in your imagination. 

If not the site of poetry, or an opportunity for poetic thought, the screenshots themselves should at least pose several questions. What was the person thinking when they created said object or structure? Do you remember building that little ice-fishing hut at the edge of your world? What do your building’s seemingly endless offshoots of bridges and tunnels say about your

brain? How do your buildings differentiate from, or camouflage into the algorithmically-created world, where trees spawn and mountains rise out of the earth based on a complex arrangement of percentages and if-thens? Do you remember this tunnel? What story were you creating in your head for yourself, projecting onto the world of the game, when you left that brick there, or dug that hole? 

This is my first screenshot. I am looking down at the layers of earth as they glitch out. I rarely see this view, where the walls and floor are suddenly obliterated, so that I can see all the negative space. The jagged collection of right-angels forms tunnels and caverns, dug by me, or the game’s AI, I can’t be sure. I am probably trying to recover my corpse (as my belongings explode outward when I die), as I am completely devoid of tools or resources, with only the clothes offered to me for free by the game. I must have dug this one quickly without any real acknowledgement of cutting stairs as I traveled downwards (and to escape on later if things go sour due to a sudden ambush of skeleton archers). The one torch’s slapdash placement reveals a sudden need for light. Maybe I was running from something and just placed it there, with little care for its aesthetics? The lava at the center of the image shows that if we journeyed down this passage far enough, we might hit bedrock. There may be diamond veins there, the game’s most coveted resource. The sky blue on the right is what hasn’t loaded yet. The black strip snaking in a curve toward the top is most likely some yet, unexplored cavern created by the game. In the foreground, I seem to be standing on gravel, which could fall through if I were to punch my way through it, rather than float as most bricks do when left without support. The pattern of colored pixels on the brick is something like sage, dark grey, grey, light grey, dark grey, grey, grey, light grey. They repeat as the brick repeats, though each row on the brick itself seems to have a different pattern. The character’s skin apparently defaults to white. If I take a few steps forward, I could potentially die from the fall.

Somehow a chicken has come on board my pinewood boat. Either they like boats, or I hopped on board with seeds in my hand. As of writing this, the chicken has still not left my boat. Nor has it died from starvation. It has come with me to this far-off continent, where I think I may have lost all my belongings again. Getting lost is one of the most common things that happen to me in this game. For that reason, I try to make my structures huge and towering, so that I can see them fade in from behind the fog, over the trees and mountains, as the game renders into existence. I don’t recognize this cave, but I do remember discovering the pinewood boat, and rejoicing in its speed. Without thinking, I travelled far from the bed I slept in last, which is the spawn point when you die. I traveled far with valuable items like a diamond pickaxe and maybe even some diamond armor. I journeyed a good distance, explored a cave on a deserted island, mined some coal, and was disintegrated by an armless, exploding zombie called a Creeper. Now, in my hubris, I may never find my coveted belongings again.

This is my first real structure after a dirt-walled enclosure that was quickly blown to bits by a Creeper. It is a tall castle. You can travel to the top via a spiral staircase that hugs the walls, if only for the view. It is built on the banks of an island. I built a path through the sky out of cobblestone to a neighboring mountain that I had hollowed out for resources. I have a suspicion that the skeleton archers, spiders, zombies, Endermen, creepers, and slime cubes are merely protecting their world. The first thing, after all, that one is asked to do, however indirectly, is to destroy their earth, and reap all its resources, so that you can build up your own small, indomitable kingdom. 

My second structure began as a tree fort, but has since morphed into a sort of half-built Star Wars spaceship. I irrigated a waterfall. “You have to set goals for yourself,” a friend explained, when we were wrestling with the question of why the game is fun. Roses and wheat grow along the edges of the waterfall, as you have to have an adjacent water brick in order to garden. I built a pinewood bridge over my man-made stream. The bridge flows down a hill and down into a deep hole I built at an exact diagonal, so that into I can travel by boat straight from my garden, very quickly, to the world’s bedrock, where the rarest minerals glimmer with promise. The leaves from a tree float, suspended over my garden. I planted a few trees in my garden, but quickly regretted it as they totally obscured the view, so I chopped down the trees save for this little floating green tuft because my axe could not reach from the ground. All tools have an absurd range, which is all part of the appeal—the absurdity. Somehow children have become fascinated with a game built on nostalgia for a time when they weren’t even alive, when everything had bad graphics and goofy sort of logic governing its gameplay. In my inventory, I have an iron shovel, 41 cubes of dirt, one diamond sword, one diamond, one stone pickaxe, three sets of pinewood stairs, one set of wood planks, two wheat, and four cobble stone. I think taking snapshots like this, building structures with aesthetic appeal, and exploring the internal wiring as well as programming of the game are its natural endpoint. There is a mineral called redstone, which allows you to build electric circuits,

pistons, switches, trip-wire, and complex machines built on the logic of programming that one would think far exceeds the capabilities of children. In this tree fort with paths and decks stretching outward from it in crude angles, I built a piston and switch operation that allowed me to turn off my waterfall and free my cave of flowing water, which can be quite annoying when you are trying to travel around. I am holding a cube of dirt out in front of me. My body is made of two cubes. While it might take longer to destroy me, we are really the same. We are born of the same materials: crude jpegs, pixels, and cubes. Even the rain. 

Here I am realizing all it takes to make a home—bed and crafting table perched on the tallest tree in this dark oak-wood forest. Enormous mushrooms grow here. You can destroy them quite easily, harvest the small fungi that fall, and make them into soup if you combine them with a bowl and the other species of mushroom. It is raining, which happens when I don’t sleep. The weather worsens. There are not enemies that are airborne in this world, so I don’t have too much to worry about up here, though a spider could climb up and kill me. I will dig vertically through the tree, straight down through the branches and along the trunk until I reach bedrock. I have harvested some vines, which I can replant to climb up here later, but I will need to cut down some trees, so I can build ladders to carry me up from the bedrock. In my possession, I have eight sunflowers, one oak wood brick, two spider silks (which can be fashioned into a fishing rod or bow by combining them with sticks), one piece of rotten flesh from inside the body of a zombie, one iron pick-axe, thirteen torches, one hand-axe, twenty-four pinewood planks, and twelve cubes of cobblestone. I am often playing the game in bed, halfway in a dream. I think I am planning to use the planks to build out the platform, so that it is visible from farther away and so that I can relax up here without worrying that I might fall. I can construct furnaces here and burn any mineral-filled bricks I might find in the infinite below. No other game makes me question, “Why am I playing this? What is the point?” more than this game. No other game answers that question by the sudden onset of night; the square sun suddenly going blue. You are far from your bed. You can punch a tree and quickly craft a weapon, start trying to punch a makeshift shelter in the earth, or start sprinting home. As the great E-40 says, “Everybody’s got choices.” In these fascist American days, maybe its not escape I’m after, but that Minecraft, poetry, and art can realize their basic dream: that we can destroy the world and build it back up, brick by brick, so that it at least reflects our varied experiences and tangled thoughts; the only necessity being that we not wall ourselves in, but journey further and further out.

THE THIRD THOUGHT

My partner and I drive to the coast where the coves have been crumbled by the titan feet of the sea. To be near the ocean is one of the closer experiences I have ever had to an experience of God--it’s bottomless fury and sublime expanse. Edmund Burke says the sublime is not only an experience of serenity and awe, but also horror: “The passion caused by the great and the sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” It is with this feeling that colonizers deluded themselves into seeing a “Wild West” absent of human order. It is with this passion that they murdered countless indigneous peoples and swallowed the world whole. This is the feeling of the ocean: a great terrible unknowable—a reminder of death. This is the energy that propels Whitman’s relentlessly expanding Leaves of Grass: “A world primal again, vistas of glory incessant and branching,/ A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, with new contests.” But, like so many others, Whitman has been inspired by the Manifest Destiny rhetoric of conquest, and it too will eventually find its endpoint and death in the sea. In Jim Jarmusch’s anti-Western Dead Man, Johnny Depp plays an anti-imperialist and self-destructive annihilator. Depp enacts Jarmusch’s revenge fantasy against all the cowboys and trappers. Depp’s indigenous companion, who goes by the name “Nobody”, pushes Depp’s bullet-ridden body out to sea. Before the credits roll, Nobody is murdered in a wide-shot by one of the psychopath bounty hunters and the film fades to black over Neil Young’s haunting electric guitar soundtrack.  

Dead Man theme

My partner and I walk the long beach. There are a few other families here. We debate with each other about whether this is responsible or not. We hike along the bluffs past cyprusses that coil over to create natural tunnels and forts. A couple picnics on a patch of wild grass. We make our way back to the beach to bask and read on the sand. We run around in circles and cut a deep circular path in the sand. Small insects dive back into their holes through the hard crust over the sand as we step. Their diving creates sudden constellations of holes. We will research this later. “Somehow, life finds a way,” we keep saying in a way meant to mock those online extolling how The Thought is inadvertently helping the environment. The endangered snowy plovers wade in the surf as little herds of helpless, adorable things streaked with white, beige, and black.

The endangered bird

It is not long before everything becomes an over-extended metaphor for The Thought and the dead. The sandcrab bodies are crushed into the sand like the bones of the dead. A handful of sand is a sublime complexity of their crushed shells and a million other crushed rocks of unknown origin. 

We listen to sad songs and drive PCH as the sun fades over the coastal farms and the clouds threaten us with a grey-blue mass of movement. The wind carries weapons. Even it will carry the disease. The radio waves are the mutterings of the dead. The phone is a dead, screaming rectangle. It is covered in microscopic pieces of disease. The dead well-up with great tears and look at the living not from above or below, but from the spaces between us. They come to us in the form of good and bad ideas. The bad ideas of the dead are the loudest, but if you listen closely, you can hear the whisperings of the intelligent dead. We deem our little jaunt irresponsible and vow not to return to the sea until this is all over. 

I am fattening on sourdough loaves. I am breathing in the dead and the sky is a dead-blue blue before it finally darkens or is occluded by clouds. There is dead skin on the keyboards and dead stars in the sky. My blood thickens as I consume the fat of dead animals. “Dead and free,” they say. The curve is “flattening,” but it measures the dead.

In our class before The Thought called COVID-19, we talked about how the divide between the rich and poor, dehumanizing labor practices, prisons, over-militarized police, and corporate surveillance are surely signs that we are living in a dystopia. Tongo Eisen-Martin, the most interesting poet working right now, affirmed this in his spot on KQED. [LINK]

The rich inhabit cloud cities while people draw rectangles on concrete to ensure that the homeless are socially distanced. Hacker trolls crash Zoom calls. One of my students draws a dick with the annotation function. I seem to always be accidentally leaving some conference call or livestream open so that people can listen. I joke with my partner: “Oh shit, am I streaming?” The Thought disproportionately kills people of color and the poor. When the colonizers of this continent ran out of physical space, they looked toward the sky, and talked about conquering the moon. Elon Musk, JFK, and Ronald Reagan go to the beach to think about their need for growth and dominance. Reagan: “From the mountains of Kentucky to the shores of California to the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon, our pioneers carried our flag before them.” Imperialism finds a way. But, there is another sublime that the poet Peter Gizzi talks about seeing on the New York City subway. It carries its own totalizing unknowable: the experiences of others, faces—each face impossibly complex and different—each carrying a story of destitution or triumph. There is beauty there, too. 

THE SECOND THOUGHT

May 12, 2020 

Image Credit: Chelsea Snow 

I push my feet down into the cold linoleum. A machine was programmed to paint the linoleum so it looks sliced from grey wood. It is the hue of a petrified wood’s insides, or the planks of a barn on the bluffs near the sea, weathered to the darkest shades of white. According to the search engine, it could be an imitation of the sliced grains and knots of a soft maple. This to say, I am writing about the floor. I am looking out the window. There is a great stream of cars. Its babbling is not the brook’s, but a static nuisance—a noise whiting-out The Thought. It is the river that can never complete itself or be stepped into twice safely. It is the disease that has captured our imaginations, jobs, and lives. 

The poet, Noah Eli Gordon has been offering lovely 5 minute readings and discussions of poems with his coffee as a way of coping and helping others cope with The Thought. It is also National Poetry Month. So far, he’s discussed Marie Ruefle, Joseph Ceravolo, and Aram Saroyan over in little 5 minute Instagram videos. He talks about Saroyan’s notorious poem, “lighght.” The whole poem is that: “lighght.” He talks about how it outraged the National Endowment for the Arts after it appeared in an anthology they

sponsored. The poem draws attention to the silent “gh” by doubling it and invites discussions about the materiality of language, highlighting the difficulties of representation. Gordon talks about how the poem reminds us that each word is a metaphor. Nowhere is it more apparent than in the common names for flora: wooly mule ear, spleenwort, milkvetch. Elsewhere, the metaphoric language in simple idioms can be rendered strange, beautiful, or horrible simply by adding an adjective or offering a more specific noun: kill two grey birds with one stone, don’t count your scrub jays before they’re hatched, it is raining jaguars and wolves. With a simple, nearly randomized gesture of word-replacement, we can estrange ourselves from the cliché and find a poem in the most common language.  

The aforementioned Milkvetch. Photo from commons.wikipedia.org. 

The cars outside my window are still moving—quarantined by steel, aluminum, titanium; laminated and tempered glass; polypropylene, polyurethan, and PVC dashboards. The more I research what the search engine can tell me about the cars and their component parts, the more the factory that made them reveals itself. I’m reminded of Craig Dworkin’s poem “Fact”: 

Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy 

bean oil [C57H98O6], used as a plasticizer: 52%. Phenolic modified rosin resin [Tall oil rosin: 

66.2%. Nonylphenol [C15H24O]: 16.6%. Formaldehyde [CH2O]: 4.8%. Maleic anhydride 

[C4H2O3]: 2.6%. Glycerol [C3H8O3]: 9.6%. Traces of alkali catalyst: .2%]: 47%): 53.7%. 100S 

Type Alkyd used as a binder (Reaction product of linseed oil: 50.7%.

Dworkin goes on with 281 more words about the exact scientific composition of ink on paper. The “poem” invites us to think about the literal substance of a text: the ink and paper. The percentages and chemical compounds connote pollutions and dehumanizing labor that go into printing a poem on paper. It finds its poetry, as so many poems do, by estranging the reader from the commonplace object—the bird, the telephone wire, the window. Dworkin was part of a conceptualist contingency who were actually doing fun, interesting things with poetry, but were largely overshadowed by the racist blunders of Vanessa Place and Kenneth Goldsmith, who ended up killing their own poetry movement by taking easy paths towards an art where identity supposedly didn’t matter. There was a time when all we seemed to do in the poetry world was talk about these people. Then, Goldsmith inadvertently mocked Michael Brown’s autopsy by reading it aloud as a “conceptual poem” and Place minstrelized a Twitter stream with quotes from Gone With the Wind. Goldsmith was such a machiavellian self-promoter that he even made it on The Colbert Report at one point. Apparently, he learned his tricks from the art-world he had, some years prior, abandoned. With the help of an anonymous group called The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringo Poetry and other efforts by poets of color and allies, conceptualism was largely destroyed and forgotten.  

But, beyond Goldsmith and Place’s obvious, racist conceptual poetics, there were weirder undercurrents that I still find interesting. Some of Goldsmith’s graduate students made Troll Thread, a Tumblr of conceptual writing PDFs. One of them is the text from the Gameboy game Pokemon: Yellow in Helvetica font across 300 some-odd pages. I liked that this art made people angry. It was the best conversation starter in my MFA workshops. We would talk about Goldsmith’s Weather, where he transcribed a year of weather reports, word by stuttering word. But, many of the practitioners didn’t think enough about why they were making people angry. In the end, it all ended up being kind of nihilistic and boring. Still, there are some examples of conceptualist works that produced good, productive discussions about history and pain like M. NourbeSe Philip’s erasure of legal documents of murdered slaves’ lives for her book Zong!. Philip enacts the absences and stutterings that accompany trauma and loss using erasure and the page’s blank white space. She performs what others would usually only describe.  

Zong! by M Nourbese Philip 

Outside my window a sequoia and live oak push up through a bed of spider vines that spill down from our trash-cans toward the roaring 580. The trees are symbols for a great and timeless survival, but even they may die, diseased by some termite or weevil. I move out of the room, away from the notebook. My partner and I eat oatmeal with peanut butter and jam scooped into the center while listening to The New York Times podcast. An Italian doctor weeps while talking about his work.  

I drink too much coffee and spiral while streaming my lesson for the 8th graders. I promise my students that right now, more than ever, we should only listen to those who are talking about The Thought with clear reasoning and credible sources. Evidence and analysis of evidence—the cold logic of the medical profession and the angry compassion of the masses—may be the things that save us. 

On impulse, towards the end of my lesson, I wrangle a few students into a Dungeons and Dragons game on the website Roll20. This is another wild, reaching compulsive decision toward a creative form of escape that I will surely regret for the tedious work it entails. This is a habit of mine that has been accelerated by The Thought. I whittle wands out of driftwood. I drink whiskey and draw shitty comics about the concerts I went to in high school. It seems like many people are doing this sort of thing: diving into strange hobbies. The anarchists in my Instagram feed are playing Animal Crossing. My partner wants to choreograph a dance for Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.” My cousin in upstate New York is toying with the idea of streaming his backyard bonfires on Twitch. 

In one of the state-mandated self-criticisms of the video of myself teaching for the California Teaching Performance Assessment, I have a ghostly reminder of the last few days in my classroom before The Thought filled our lungs and brains. I’m required to watch and analyze the video. I’m supposed to show myself assessing the students in four different ways. In one of the videos, the students debate whether social media makes us more alone, and this triggers an aside about how the parallel thinking revealed by the web can be depressing—that the internet has shown that we are really not all that unique. There are probably people out there very similar to you, thinking the same thing as you, right now. I tell them we can find comfort and community in this fact, or despair in what this means for the creators’ helpless pursuit of novelty.  

I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to being a dungeon master. I have only ever run half a Christmas Day campaign for my family that included none of the real technicalities required for combat—rather, it was an opportunity for me to revel in some overwrought, purple prose I had written while amped up on black coffee and mimosas about a frozen world where the spirit of Christmas had been destroyed by the cold hand of technology. In the campaign with my family, intelligent robot elves have banished Santa to a tiki bar on the outskirts of the North Pole. It was our adventurers job to destroy them and restore the spirit of Christmas. My mother played a polar bear and my little brother a talking candy cane named Swinzel.

 My parent’s table after Christmas D&D 

My 8th graders are reluctant to take on the character voices and theatricality that my family displayed, but seem committed and show surprising patience with my sorting through the myriad number systems that govern this game. The students have chosen a dragonborn druid named Barruk who is obsessed with making ice sculptures, an elf druid named Tar Xana from the jungle in search of their kidnapped parents, a dragonborn cleric named Sage, and a gnome wizard banana peddler named Mason. 

We begin our campaign huddled around a fire in the middle of Barruk’s igloo. The walls are dented with holes where Barruk burps or coughs flames in his sleep. The creatures sip from small carved wooden cups of seal blood and eat Mason’s bananas when a yelp is heard from one of the wolves that pulled Mason’s sleigh here. Barruk rushes outside to investigate. Mason’s wolves have been murdered. Their blood shines brightly in the white snow. The characters see goblins in thick winter coats escaping over a snow-covered knoll. Barruk throws some ice spears onto the sleigh. Tar Xana turns into a jaguar and Barruk transforms into a Wooly Rhino. Mason and Sage ride in the sleigh. They chase down the goblins and with the help of magic missile infused bananas, Sage’s crushing mace, and “chill touch,” they murder the goblins in cold blood. Tar Xana is nearly killed, but is able to heal herself with her mending spell. I am reminded of why this game is experiencing a renaissance. It operates in the fourth dimension. It has better graphics than any video game. It occurs in your brain. It is both limitless and bound by seemingly endless rules. It builds community, carves out flow-states, and allows us to dig out yet more tunnels of escape. And with that, another habit is born and The Thought is occluded as I rush full bore into another project. 

THE THOUGHT

written by Will Vincent | April 21, 2020 

Image Credit: Chelsea Snow 

I stream my lesson and ask the quarantined teenagers questions. My tone is modulated and fractured into a caffeinated stutter amped up by something else odd and sick. I feel between law and desire—between a feeling of shared despair for every old and knowledgeable person and only this tab, this screen. The blue light of new data about the disease can temporarily appease my itch for yet more disastrous news, offer a sense of comparative safety, fill me with fear, or, as it is designed, bolster my sense of self-importance by offering the love from those who would click-on, love, like, and text me. 

There is an urge to know more about the latest horror in the orbit of COVID-19. They did a good job of giving it a scary name. It has a power beyond physical infection. At this point, it is not only a thought, but The Thought. It infects every conversation. Our talking about it is our survival and sickness. The poking-in to yet more vectors of social media and news aggregators collective panic can only temporarily mask the images, imagined and coldly real, of hospitals packed with coughing bodies—“lungs [filled] with fluid and debris” (Pathak, MD).

Chest x-ray of a patient with mycoplasma pneumonia. Original image sourced from U.S. Government department: Public Health Image Library, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Still, as I stream my lesson to my students, who are on the brink of high school, and in turn, their life as official teenagers, there is a comfort in my students’ blasé attitude toward this whole thing. In the Youtube Live stream chat, some say they are just bored. Others are stressed. Some seem happy with 10 hours of Call of Duty gatling gun fire echoing through noise canceling headphones and modded Minecraft servers teeming with their screaming peers. Most just want to go back to school. “I’m sorry,” I say. “For the good of others, we need to stay in our homes for a while.” 

I’m reminded of a debate topic I had projected onto the whiteboard while we were still in the brick building: “Does social media make us more alone?” Some of the students, already familiar with prodding and trolling their way into end-times, saw the irony and laughed. They were how I first learned of The Thought. The students updated me on The Thought until I looked into it myself. They asked me if I had enough limes for The Thought. They all coughed and said they had The Thought while giggling. They said they got The Thought from drinking beer. I looked into The Thought. Slowly, the giggles gave way to a real feeling of fear. They were sick of hearing about it. World News Wednesday became our everyday. The Thought was becoming a threat.

This is a screenshot of the first thing you see, when you set up Open Broadcast Software (OBS), which allows you to share your screen on YouTube Live. The student who taught me how to use it called it “The Inception Effect.” He says it is normally used for Twitch. It is a stream of the stream of the stream of the stream. My face would normally appear in the upper right, but instead, we have an image of our Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” in puzzle form. 

My students called it “the boomer remover” and “the boomer doomer.” They are pissed about global warming and the broken education system. They are pissed that we make them go to school and study things that they think won’t help them. They are plagiarizing memes. 

I first heard “Boomer Remover” in the last few minutes of our last day before the schools closed from a student who liked to say controversial things. The severity in my own tone surprised me as I lashed back: “My parents are boomers. Do you want my parents to die?” I knew the student just wanted to joke and heal himself for a few seconds. I would quote it later in a conference call with friends and they would all laugh. I am also a boomer to my students. I explain, no, I am not a boomer, but a millennial. I might be 32, but to them I am very old. I love poetry too much for this new neon era. I have a tendency to try and sell the students on a dream that might be dead for them. For me, this dream involved doing what you loved at whatever cost. Their generation seems more pragmatic than this—they question the efficacy of school. According to the Google Form I sent out, their top three preferences for debate topics were “Do straight A’s really matter?,” “Is College Necessary for Successful Life?,” and “Do We Experience More Anxiety than Other Generations?” 

I’ve been given an excuse to accelerate my clicking into the tab and feed. I half-read ten articles. I let it flood into my eyes and mouth as The Thought smeared across surfaces of metal and glass and plastic and wood. 

There is no sun or fluorescent office light to stabilize us, though the windows condition us toward a pattern. The Thought is on the door handle. The door handle is rubbed into your mouth. 

I stream my lesson and copy and paste an image of an actual stream into the

upper-right hand corner of our first shared slide. The students do not notice. It is at least an imitation of what I normally do. I use the “Spectral” font because I think it projects a nice mix of literary elegance and techno-dystopian awareness. The spacing between each letter is a subtle hint to no one that I am aware of Google Slides’ synthetic essence. My students tell me white on a black background is best on the eyes and saves power, so while it is normally best to ignore the advice of 14-year-olds online, I follow their suggestion. 

A screenshot of a literal stream on the slide I will share on the digital stream and an example of anti-humor. 

One of my students had walked me through how to rig Youtube Live, this other node or vector, so that all the other nodes or vectors could connect and see my face talking on Youtube Live. It is not really an academic platform, but I kind of liked that. I wanted it to be fun. A few of my old students, who are now sophomores, slipped into the stream chat to spam vaguely ironic statements and comicaly un-toxic jokes like “my toilet is broken.” Their names are masked by makeshift nom-de-plumes that reference e-sports teams. I quickly ban them, or instruct those I’ve appointed as “moderators” to do the same. 

In the test stream, you can see a few students behind me trying to help me configure the thing. We were nervous about The Thought. The Thought’s energy could be felt in the room. Planned Parenthood had canceled their sex ed. lesson, so I was reading off answers to their questions about pregnancy and abortion in a cold, robotic tone that had a hint of forcefulness that was meant to undescore the importance of what I was saying, but probably sounded like panic. I had copy and pasted most of the facts from WebMD and the Planned Parenthood websites. We were in the last period of our last day before all the schools closed, and the virus scared us all smart. You can still watch the video of the test stream. My students are standing behind me in the recording. Their heads bob up to peak at the screen from behind my computer chair, which contains a large image of all of us, and a small image of themselves in the corner—pixelated and delayed. I’m smiling, delighted by all the unique expressions of self that streaming could afford. They watch me watch themselves as they yell at me to move my mouse, which moves my arrow called a cursor toward a working thing.

Even if they’re screaming, when they’re in their rooms, watching or pretending to watch me, typing and gaming into the screen-lit darkness, all I’ll see is their strings of chat. 

They like to repeatedly type “f” toward the end of a lesson stream, and when they would normally be itching to leave. “F,” which I thought might be a reference to video game streamer culture, or a notification that the stream is frozen. According to stayhipp.com, it “originated after a feature in the 2014 release of Call of Duty asked players to press F on their keyboard or X on their controller to ‘pay respects’ to virtual fallen soldiers” (Sommer). 

I forge ahead with my lessons as if blind to their spam, and the precariousness of this new, spreading virus named after a summer beer—this Thought, this reaching non-song of panic and administrative chaos. Stay home, says The Thought, but come together again for a glitched-out conference call. 

The Internet puts its toes in the freezing clear and muddied stream. The highway is not a stream, but a river of great, toiling strength. The Thought is not a river. Not a stream. Not a field. 

Already, the doctors are running out of masks. They are told to cover their mouths with handkerchiefs and scarves while the politicians debate whether the rich or the poor should get our money. 

I’m learning to fragment my brain across 10-20 nodes, which chain us together over great distances to students, friends, and ex-friends. I’m reading the beginnings of a few different books. I’ve been dipping into Allison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, which pushes the graphic novel into a form of high literature. In Fun Home, she deals with the suicide of her father. Here, she copes with the emotional distance of her mother. I’m also distractedly reading Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. Hong was my teacher, and I have always loved her poetry because she somehow figured out how to give the finger to the experimentalists and traditionalists at the same time. She connected me with a video artist collaborator and told us to read as much as we could outside of what is traditionally labelled poetry. She has fun with language, but it never feels like she’s pushing you away. In Minor Feelings, she writes sprawling essays that cite everything from contemporary art and poetry to Sanrio in order to discuss savaging the English language on behalf of her family, loving Richard Prior, fighting white supremacy, and wrestling with her Asian-American identity. My students are about 80% Vietnamese and Chinese. One boy who projects minimal sense of classroom expectations or authority told me a lady driving by in a Tesla called him a “chink.” He said he thought it was because they were probably high. We talked about how it might be because of The Thought.

Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings was published on February 25th. 

My partner and I watch the The Tiger King. Did Carole kill her husband? Is she just running another cruel roadside zoo? I read and clickbait myself into a feedback loop drug trip that numbs, agitates, and projects. My Instagram is filled with skateboarders and poets. I do not skateboard, but I followed a bunch of them recently because I found their brand of nihilism refreshing. They do 180s over smashed Sedans in Joker costumes on steep San Francisco hills. They do manuals on burning blocks of ice in San Leandro parking lots. After The Thought spread, many took to skateboarding in their homes. One of them did a 360 kickflip on their glass coffee table. A few others smashed the shoe store they owned. They remind me of when I was a kid and also did not skateboard, but liked to sit on the curb and watch my friends. 

The Internet is boring to even mention in writing. My colleague from our bookstore gig once mentioned this to me: that he wouldn’t even pick up a poem if it mentioned Youtube or Facebook. I guess it is too easy like writing about what just happens to be in the room. I realize now, as I write, “it is a cheap way to seem modern,” that I do sound like a boomer, which is just another way of the young to say, “Fuck anyone who is older than me with that 10-miles-through-the-snow shit. You polluted our air until the weather rioted and it was difficult to breathe.” But, what else can we do now, but socialize and plumb deeper into the old information superhighway, and write about how the highway makes us think: how quickly The Thought spreads good and bad information about other countries’ efforts as we sit in our rooms in our sweats, sweating? 

I’m secreting the same nervous sweat I had while trying to sleep as a first year teacher. I’m in my third year now, which is another way to say I’m still

failing, but I can tell you with more accuracy why certain lessons fail, or why schools seem to be failing in general. These failures help me find small successes, but there is always some larger, looming failure. There is always some way you could be doing more. I am still in a credential program full time and am learning all time how to fail less. Above my whiteboard is the Samuel Beckett adage in supply store bubble letter cutouts: “Fail. Fail again. Fail better.” It is meant to centralize a growth mindset, but I fear it suggests futility and may even be an ideology complicit with Silicon Valley’s fetishization of failure. The Thought triggers the same strain of nervous sweat that oozes out of me when I think a lesson might fail, or when a student seems like they are about to try to turn the whole grade against me. I used to wake my partner up in the middle of the night thrashing about a lesson plan that I knew was doomed to be a disaster. I am emitting the same smell. It is thicker and cannot be masked with the traditional methods of the deodorant stick. 

This is an image of my wall as I assembled my first classroom. Most of the books came from the private school we were taking over. I covered the walls in highfalutin poetry and quotes. I bought two plastic crows. These were the things I deemed vital in the last moments of summer leading up to my first year as a teacher. 

Each square inch of breathing room clusters with diseased air. According to The New York Times, they come at you in little spheres with red nodes. They hook into you and find your lungs like a wolf might find meat in a superstore. A few weeks ago, on one of our last rideshares before The Thought, our driver was motor-mouthing about the open skull she had seen after a car accident, how we really do just have meat inside us, like chickens she said. 

There is a certain acceptance when writing during a crisis that you are too close to the thing anyway. You’re exploiting the tragedy and “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” It might well come out gaudy and garish, but god-dammit this is what I’m going to do: feel. We’ll feel, and feel publicly for nurses, doctors, bartenders, waiters, small business owners, gig-workers, and everyone else. We’ll repost articles about how we shouldn’t go back to the way things were. An article will hook you into an argument about the death of capitalism by showing you a shopping cart half-eaten by mud. The Whole Foods employees are on strike. The Instacart shoppers are on strike. The governors are demanding more masks and ventilators. The ventilator research was botched by market pressures. My brother writes a song about being socially distant. Eventually, through this public expression of feeling, people find some way to heal others and change things. 

Even now, part of me thinks this text might only clog up the digital airwaves with more useless musings on The Thought when really we need more pragmatic guides to survival, and still yet more important instructions on how to not forget to care when strangers die. I will stream tomorrow. We will find some structure over the connected nodes, and maybe some temporary escape from The Thought and its attendant pressures on our bodies and brain.