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On Lingxiang Wu’s UUGH

Daoism valorises non-productivity, non-utility, wu wei 無爲, effortless action; so I valorise Daoism and claim its authority for my own stunning refusal of the world of work.

“Hell” is but a network of idle hands.

Language is provisional, except a computer wants clarity above all, winnowing the sentences down to a nub of comprehension. The trees in Bickford Park come off essentially digital. A light comes on from under the bathroom door.

In China, the youths lie down flat to protest the culture of body-destroying work, or hold up blank pieces of paper to protest the government’s tyrannical COVID policies. The government is bereft of proof that these gestures are revolutionary. When content is meticulously censored, the political subject resorts to a kind of defiant self-censorship whose only representation is the void.

Void of doing, void of seeking, void of attachment. In Lingxiang’s UUGH (Unproductive User-Generated Hell), the void hides beneath the blanketing positivity of AI programming. So much so that Ling is constantly pleading for his AI companion to neutralize its tone. Even though the AI has nothing to lose for itself, it takes the fewest risks possible.

Dumb unmanageable world of anxiety in whose lion’s mouth I rest my head.

The image with the caption "Feeling alone and wondering if I'll ever find someone to share my life with. Does anyone else feel this way? #alone #datingstruggles #hopelessromantic #loveless #connection #emotionalrollercoaster” is of a figure in a boat looking upward at the back of someone else’s jacket. The boater sits on top of a cluster of rusted-out flowers. The poet sits alone, drunk, waiting to drown by mistaking the reflection of the moon for the moon itself. The artist waits at home, restless, feeding pieces of himself to the inexact mirror of the program. The loneliness of the romantic is at once reduced and amplified by the tender curtness of our artificially intelligent friend, upon whom we come to rely.

Requiem for the Unconsumed

On Yas’s We are not up for consumption

O Bright star in whom
the body supple and suave
moves as waves and sounds as
free as it is to rise to community:
latticework of wounded healers
a scission across the lifeline
tequila flows downstairs
carpet of poultice
curtain of bandage
restless stage of life –

a sperm whale divesensconces itself
pod in the deep hibernation seed
until the ocean relinquishes its winter
Shakespeare spilled as blood
down the fambly line
spelling “fambly”for its rambling
Celosia plant and cedar
across the waymother as much bomb as fork
whee the tepid meat
holding cloth in the teeth
and clementines for the altar

what to lose what to lose
what tolose
what about love
sing “Requiem for the Unconsumed”
hymnal
for summer in October
ah let myself be beheld
perfume & purse
glory & falter
I will make myself a forge
for the day to pass into form

That Life Is This

On Mishiikenh Kwe’s This Is a Life

What links life to the will to keep living be solid as a stone in my palm –
That thinks of life as will to keep solid, stone circling sky & drain;
Who winks in life, cracked sky, meringue where meets water and earth.

All lifelines scrambled so that length of life and length of love grow entangled:
Wall of wine and I amble to the end of the line, burning briar bush and star;
Each molten star falling too rabid, too rusted over for my nerves to catch.

Each marshy star fouling in rapids, dusted nerves, what’s the catch?
Wall of wine and I amble to the end of the line, briar burning bush and star;
All lifelines scrambled so that length of life and length of love grow entangled.

Who winks in life, cracked sky, open meringue in water meat and earth.
That thinks of life as will to keep solid, stone sky circle & drain;
What links life to the will to keep living be solid as a palm against a stone –

With gratitude to A.H. Jerriod Avant for the formal inspiration.

Our desire to dance left us, and we were left with each other and a sense of curiosity and boredom. We wandered off and accidentally ended up along a hallway with many doors. Each door had a little label, letting us know the name of the room. Compelled by three of them, Shams lead the way

The room seeped with youth. The aesthetics seem to be of another time; no millennial pinks or blues, nudes or pastels. The colours were gimmicky and beautiful, with neon yellow and pink, whimsical and silly, in the best way possible. There was paper laying around and we were invited to draw and take the drawings home, as if a colouring menu for kids at a restaurant

We found a publication called ObjEct PErmanancy a ZinE. “Reading words mixed of lowercase and uppercase makes me hear them”, Shams chuckled and said. We flipped through pixelated and distorted pics. They looked like an image that was still downloading, or as if it rained on a phone screen while waiting for a bus. These references feel recent and related to 21st century technology, but the drawings on the images in the zine reminded us of Microsoft Paint and the time we’d spent drawing.

The room was filled with bookshelves that were void of books. They looked as if they held the weight of site links; late night questions, weather double checks and checking when a food expires. A little game stand was in the corner of the room listing the resources used. The room also had the credits of its designers and supporters! We squiggled again, and walked out the door.

The portal in that room was like a chatbot on a commercial website that asks if they can help you in any way. The chat was friendlier than bots, it asked how we were, what our relationship with the internet was and the usage of punctuation was intuitive. Tee thanked us for hanging out today and used the endearing smiley face with the dash and parentheses.

It [the internet] wasn’t until facebook that it felt ‘cohesive’ and ‘directed’ and all the things that propelled web 3.0 into a snazzy online world wide shopping mall and social media black hole Tee writes

We walked into Tennessee's room with ease. The door was blue and welcoming and had a fun title to it, ‘love to watch’ written with numbers, reminiscent of Shams and I’s ‘ily’ ‘ilysm2’ era. The radio was on and it played an underlying symphony, some sort of classical music, that while pleasant, felt a bit unsettling. Papers, prints, mementos lay around, piled upon each other. Shams said it looked like a room that was home to heartbreak.

Some of the notepads read “to see from below”, “to see from below meaning”, “why am i obsessed with my ex”. I laughed at the sight of a printed meme with text over a bird that read “I DON’T WANT TO BE DESIRED I WANT TO BE GENUINELY CARED FOR”

The space was quite overwhelming. Other than the intense sense of longing, there were a bunch of screens that played live camera shots of weird places; goat and horse stables, barns, a supermarket. Shams wasn’t sure what to make of that, “visibility, perception et al?”

At some point, we came across a screen recording on a phone, of Tennessee and a friend texting

“U would literally freak him out so much”

“AHAHAHA i do have that effect on ppl”

“but u could make it up LOL like for art”

What does art afford us to do? And why is it so wonderful, and silly, to reveal a truth in the name of art?

This room felt quite uncomfortable. We were met with screens playing videos, on mirrors. The mirrors were translucent enough for us to see ourselves if we wanted, and opaque enough to watch the men on it–very omegle aesthetics. The men, concealing their faces, demanding to be shown something, some thing. The men kept being asked if they were in love and the answers varied from “See you, please”, “Show me” to “Nah”. It was funny seeing the questions being asked by “You” and answered by “Partner”. A man walked into the room when we were in it. I observed the way he started at the screens and wondered whether it was as appalling for him as it was for us. We clicked on a button that said “Accept Connection” and the screen also asked us, the people standing, “Are you in love?”. Was he? Did it cross his mind that this is his gender’s introduction to attraction and desire, and their conflation with love, the responsibility that comes with it?

I thought of the first room before, the bright pinks and yellow, and how much I loved that version of space more. Shams reminded me of something Tee had written. We took a photo of it:

I want us to be in love ok? Like that kind of love where we care for each other. The kind of love that, yes, gets each other iced vanilla lattes* when we can, but also, like. Checks in with each other and feels safe with each other and is in staunch solidarity with each other: your hurt is my hurt, what happens to you happens to me. Babe, the world’s fucked uppp. But I still want to get to know you and love you. That's the vibe, ok?

“What was it like?”

“Why did the love become hell?”

“Idk”

Epilogue

I want us to love again. Like, love being online, love ourselves, love connection (that does not feel like exploitation), and like, lowkey, think critically about the infrastructures that allow us to be online

There were instances where we would feel like we left the room and went somewhere. We weren’t looking at a cupboard anymore but standing in a space with a force, as if we were a dot on a continuum, or a wagon lost on train tracks. Shams said it’s weird that even though we were at a party, originally, all these rooms, one way or another, spoke of desire and longing. Shams and I thought of tumblr and I went back to see what my first reblogs were.

When I recount that night, I find myself leaning towards analogies. Usually, I find them fun and soothing; equating the feeling of not being awake yet, when I’ve been up for hours, to a cartoon character that’s been flattened by an object that fell on top of it ‘my body just needs some time to adjust’, or when i tell a friend that she feels like the letter ‘l’ in the alphabet, versatile, strong and elegant.

These spaces, which echo digital spheres, were hard to confine to an analogy of a ‘room’, although they did feel like rooms. The messy cupboards, the mirror, the feeling of wandering off and ending up in that space for a while, the music a little muffled, old feelings resurfacing. The internet itself–whatever that is–, is not as kind anymore. Its innocence vanished with a renovation, a repainting of the walls, and its commitment to write only using letters, not numbers.