Exercise #4: Technologies of Togetherness
Stephen King, Elaine Scarry, Stacey D'Erasmo, Zachary Doss, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Gabrielle Hamilton, Aimee Bender, Amelia Gray, Karin Tidbeck
Hi all,
Hello and welcome! I hope this newsletter finds you and your family and friends healthy and safe.
Since shelter-at-home started, I’ve been in a mode of intentful re-experience, returning to books and movies and video games that I already know and love, in part because having an experience for the second time just requires less brainpower than a new one does. Some of the stories I’ve returned to—for instance, Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, which I’m now once again 3.5 books (and about 1500 pages!) into—count among my own earliest inspirations, texts that increased my capacity to dream and imagine and wonder. All of this returning to my imagination’s roots—and it is amazing but not surprising to be reminded of how much stronger the influence of things I first experienced at 10 or 15 or 20 was than those I found at 30 or 35—made me think of Elaine Scarry’s slim book On Beauty, which begins with a meditation on the imitative pressure that beauty generates:
What is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird? It seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication. Wittgenstein says that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.
Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.
I’ve always loved Scarry’s book (which I first learned of from an unforgettable lecture on the nature of beauty by Stacey D’Erasmo), and I like to apply its lesson broadly: anything you find beautiful, whatever that word means to you, might demand some kind of a copy from you, in writing, in conversation, or even just in the imperfect replica that is memory.
In times like these, where so many things are difficult or scary or anxiety-inducing, I’ve been trying to focus not just on the beauty in the art I consume but also on the everyday phenomenal beauty around me: the small but noticeable moments of wonder in the natural world, in the interactions of my family and friends, in the self-generated pleasure that writing produces when it’s going well, sometimes something as small as a surprising turn of phrase you didn’t know you had in you, the way that writing can always add beauty or pleasure or delight to the world, whatever its current state. Recognizing those moments makes me want and hope for more of the same, and that wanting and hoping can become a constant comfort.
As always, if you write something you like using the exercise below, feel free to say so on Twitter! You’re also welcome to pass this prompt on to others, if you’d like, either by forwarding it or sharing it on social media. If do, know that I appreciate it!
Be safe this week, be kind to each other, and good luck with the exercise!
Happy writing,
Matt
www.mattbell.com
What I’m Reading:
“Bespoke” by Zachary Doss, published in Puerto del Sol, now collected in his Boy Oh Boy, just out from Red Hen Press. I loved Doss’s writing, and this is a great example of his incredibly smart, moving and inventive fiction: written in the second-person, it’s about a seemingly lonely man who replaces his android boyfriend with a newer model, one custom-built to his specifications but who turns out less perfect than he’d hoped. Zach passed away before his debut collection could be published, but I’m cheered whenever I see someone sharing one of his stories or talking about his book. He deserved to have all the fans in the world, and I hope that you’ll become one of them, if you’re not already.
“How to Pronounce Knife” by Souvankham Thammavongsa, originally published in Granta, now the title story of her just-published debut story collection. I hadn’t read Thammavongsa’s work before picking up her collection, which someone on Twitter recommended to me. I pre-ordered it on that recommendation, and I’m so glad I did: this is such a smart, touching story, about the relationship of the young narrator and her family to the English language. I can’t wait to read more of the book. I also loved Thammavongsa’s essay in Granta about her writing process, which includes this easily-recognizable writerly combination of worry and affirmation: “When I make things, I know they are taken to be quiet and small. I know there may be no place for them. I know no one is waiting for them. I know it may be that no one wants them. But I must make them. I must.”
“My Restaurant Was My Life For Twenty Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?” by Gabrielle Hamilton. This essay by the owner of NYC’s Prune is maybe the most moving piece of writing I’ve read that’s come directly out of the coronavirus crisis so far. It begins, memorably and horribly: “On the night before I laid off all 30 of my employees, I dreamed that my two children had perished, buried alive in dirt, while I dug in the wrong place, just five feet away from where they were actually smothered. I turned and spotted the royal blue heel of my youngest’s socked foot poking out of the black soil only after it was too late.”
Exercise #4: Technologies of Togetherness
Like that of many other people who’ve found themselves suddenly working and socializing entirely from home, my daily life has become a nonstop deluge of electronic communication, through Zoom, email, text and phone, and Twitter, with very little in-person interaction to break it up. (I’m lucky enough to be working at home with my wife and cat, but I know this time has been harder for many other people.) The other day, I was in student conferences and class in Zoom nonstop from 1-8:30 pm, then on the phone for another hour afterward with a friend: my brain, not quite built for such a stretch, felt exhausted for two more days afterward.
But despite the exhaustion of interacting primarily in these electronic ways—I’m sure I’m not alone in having read a half-dozen articles already about how hard nonstop videoconferencing is on our eyes and our psyches—I’ve still been grateful to be able to keep teaching my students, to see my friends, and to be in touch with distant family. I’ve also been thinking about how relatively new some of these technologies are, and how if this same situation had occurred thirty years ago, we would have been in a different and likely lonelier place.
All of this is a long preface to arrive at today’s exercise, in which you’ll be tasked with inventing a new technology of togetherness, a previously-unknown communication medium that the characters in your stories will use to be with each other, to send messages, or to share news and gossip.
There are of course endless examples of such technologies in fiction and films, some literally technological and others fantastical or natural. Fantasy novels like to use animals—the ravens from Game of Thrones, the admissions-letter-delivering owls of Harry Potter—or else crystal balls, like the palantíri in Lord of the Rings or the wizard’s glass from, uh, Wizard and Glass; science fiction contains a limitless array of handheld communicators and light-speed ansibles and ear-inserted babel fish translators; history and myths offers brave runners flying fleet-footed between Greek city-states, as in the story of Marathon; modern video game dystopias are all empty corridors where audio logs left by vanished persons wait in the shadows under every bench.
Some other examples:
In Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, young Rose Edelstein can tastes the emotions of the people who cook her food, even the people who harvested the produce or worked in the industrial factories that manufacture junk food. Eating her mother’s baking, she says, “I was having trouble trusting her cheer. I knew if I ate anything of hers again it would likely give me the same message: help me, I am not happy, help me—like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.”
And in Amelia Gray’s “Thank You” (from her collection Gutshot), two women begin by exchanging thank you cards, in the mode of “thank you for your thank you,” before moving on to other more esoteric modes of mailed gratitude:
A postal tube arrived and the woman opened it to release eight disorientated white mice. They tumbled out in a line and scrambled for safety. She gave them water and sliced up an apple but was confused by their presence until later that evening when, save for one, they seized and made tiny bowel movements which produced the alphabet beads T H A N K O and U. The last one was uncomfortably constipated in a life-threatening way until she took him to the vet and had the Y extracted at the expense of forty-five dollars.
For this exercise, you will, like all the writers referenced above, invent a new mode of communication for your characters to participate in, something they can use to bring themselves closer to each other, to reach out to people who they can’t contact in any other way, for some plausible story reason.
As you’re writing, consider some of the following:
In an interview, Karin Tidbeck (author of Jagannath, one of my favorite story collections), once said that “Worldbuilding to me is taking the consequences of an idea. All my stories and worlds spring from the basic principle of being a slave to the premise, to follow the consequences wherever they may lead without taking any easy or comfortable ways out.” The second task in this exercise, after the invention of your technology of togetherness, is to play out the consequences of your idea, as Tidbeck suggests: in a world where your technology of togetherness exists or becomes necessary, what else would necessarily have to be different?
Obviously, your technology does not actually have to be technological, as the word is usually understood: it can instead be fantastical or mundane or surreal or whatever else you can imagine. You might want to think about limitations as much as capabilities, as so much of the dramatics of communication originates there: that delay between sending someone a text in which you bare your soul and receiving a response? That’s where trouble lies: the drama of all true magic is in its limits.
You’ll probably need to write at least 500 words, but feel free to write more if you’d like. Have fun with this, looking for the delightful and surprising unintended consequences of communicating in your new fashion, playing those problems out to create opportunities for plot reversal and revelations. When you’re finished, considering sending your new story to someone else, someone you think might enjoy reading it—because what else is a story but exactly the sort of technology of togetherness we’re discussing here, one of our oldest and best ways of being close to another person, even or especially a stranger, suspended in the shared space of a tale brought into being by the writer and the reader, imagining asynchronously but as one?
Good luck! See you in June!
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Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House/William Morrow in 2021. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.