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Life Within the Simulacrum: None Of Us Are Truly Together

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Life Within the Simulacrum is a featured column focusing on technology & social media, travel & literature.

BY DALLAS ATHENT

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It was 2:43 which meant in 17 minutes I’d have to call my Uber to get out of Paris and to the airport. The light poured in through the balcony, causing our sausage sandwiches and olives to glow. We had just picked them up from the local market full of people screaming at us in French about sausage links and cutting cheese by the kilo. Reminiscing, my friend Malik reminded me of a Four Loko party we went to long ago on a rooftop in Bushwick.

               “Yo that shit was lit.”

               “Kids don’t party like that nowadays,” I said.

               “Ha! Kids!” he remarked, as if we were so old.

               I reluctantly look at my watch again and said abruptly and with purpose, “I have to call my Uber.” He said he’d accompany me downstairs. “Ugghh,” I began, “I don’t want to say goodbye.”

               “C’mon Dallas. Don’t get nostalgic, get your stuff and go.”

He was right. Malik is wise and knows how to deal with things like sentiments. I, on the other hand, do not.

In the past two years I’ve been to Switzerland, England, France, Scotland, Iceland, Italy, Canada, The Caribbean and more, often multiple times and various cities. Within the U.S. I’ve visited Santa Barbara, Palm Springs, San Diego, New Orleans, Santa Fe, D.C., Boston and Ft. Lauderdale. I have two jobs. I work onboarding project teams into construction software, so I get to visit the construction companies and their projects wherever they happen to be building them. I’m also a writer, which means I’ve made friends with other writers who then work in a community around the world. I’m on a plane every other week visiting clients for work, and often, people in publishing and my colleagues in literature.

Of course, it’s hard to see so many places and not document it. I take a photo each day I’m traveling and usually share it with those in my network. It’s a way for me to communicate my experiences. Most people see someone who is having the time of their life trying new foods (sheep’s brain) and meeting new people (like the owners of a small Chateau in Thiers).

The truth is, each time I leave a place I have to fight off an existential crisis. I can see myself living just about anywhere. I connect with landscapes, be they be the vast abyss of the sea or laced with mountains. I look at the art, like the impressionist paintings with their shapes and pastels in Paris or the totem poles in Vancouver.

But something even stranger happens when you get to know people. You get attached. On a trip I took to Europe this year I started my stay in Edinburgh on the floor of my best friend’s dorm room. Edinburgh is a stunning city, full of crooked alleys and looming stone buildings you can get lost in. You see ghosts and drink in pubs with plaid walls, which provides a certain comfort, but doesn’t necessarily inspire most people who visit to go back for a second week in a year. For me it did, because my best friend Daniel was there, and I missed him.

Our moments together were wonderful and fleeting. We discussed poetry and literature, but every night I laid my head down I knew it was temporary, as this friend of mine was someone I once met with every weekend in New York coffee shops to write and on rooftops to party. Someone, who, in my 20s would bike past me each morning on his way to work as I stood at a bus stop for my commute, and would wave. In those days I thought we’d be best friends forever and we still are, but our relationship is based on sparse visits where we get together and reminisce, and know that time will ultimately bring us apart again. In our new relationship, we’re aware that time is something intangible and mortality will eventually put a halt on the amount of times we see each other.

While in Edinburgh we hung out with his roommates from Romania who were getting their Bachelor’s. They were maybe twenty. As we went out for drinks one of them told me about how he wanted to work in HR on progressive subjects. He was also highly interested in the #metoo movement. He seemed wise beyond his years. As we spoke over pints together in a pub that had live banjos playing and velvet walls, I wondered if the conversation mattered, because I would likely never see him again.

I have so many interactions like this. I make the most of my time in a place, doing my best to be fully invested and not take my luxury of travel for granted. I ask people about their lives, their days. I ask not what the most recommended restaurant is, but which one gives the best feeling. I always offer people to stay at mine if they ever come to New York since so many people do come to visit my city. It feels like a good way to keep the door open. So far, nobody other than those I’ve known for over seven years has taken me up on it.

When I got to Luzern after Edinburgh I met up with my friend Boni Joi, a poet I admire and someone I became friends with a few years ago while she was living in New York. She moved there with her husband, who’s Swiss. Her neighbor, who Boni’s very close with, offered up her apartment since she was away the week I was staying. I had a penthouse all to myself, overlooking the mountains and a small church, but most importantly, the woman left notes for me, saying she was happy I could stay there and to help myself to coffee and beer. The woman had her drawings and fashion designs up on the wall. She had little trinkets from her travels, and stunning kimonos hung in the bathroom. I knew so much about her but she knew nothing about me. I wondered if I’d ever even meet her.

The next day, Boni brought me up the mountains in a gondola, the fog allowing us no vision, which we passed through with time only to arrive on top of the clouds with a spanning view of the alps. The experienced was a reminder of separation, and how many microcosms exist within this one world.

At the top of the mountain we got some drinks in the one building that exists there — a little hotel with a restaurant attached. As we laughed, the sun began to set and we knew it was time – one hour closer to the handful of nights we may have together again.

The more and more I get on a plane, the more and more I fall in love. With cities, but mostly with people. There’s nothing like travel to remind you that you can never be everywhere in this life, but especially that we’re all essentially alone. The existential dread can sometimes be turned into a positive, (like not taking anything for granted, and learning to really listen to people), but it can also become overbearing. I go from airport to airport all by myself. I’ve been dealing with the fact that no matter how close I feel to people, I’ll always have to say goodbye.

When I got to Paris, my friend Daniel flew in from Edinburgh to meet me. We walked around the museums of Impressionists and I saw how they all loved. Many of them had short lives. I wondered if they counted their moments with a lover. If they put a clock against their experiences the way we do today.

My last day in Paris I went the a local market with Daniel and Malik. I was grabbing sausages while my two old friends were across two rolls of stalls, picking out gratin. Malik, now a local, was pointing at what Daniel should pick out. I saw Daniel laugh. I was an outsider, looking in, and yet I was there. I wondered what Malik’s arm pointing looked like from Daniel’s perspective, and if what Malik said that made Daniel laugh was something that would stick with him forever, or was just a moment we were once again sharing. It was a simulacrum I created in my mind–but it was also a real thing happening to two people. I was there, and yet not there. Time pressed down to us having to get back to the apartment so I could call my Uber. A melancholy washed over me once more, and I learned to swallow it, because if I didn’t, I could miss the moment.

–

Dallas Athent is a writer and artist. She is the author of THEIA MANIA, a book of poems with art by Maria Pavlovska. Her work, both literary and artistic has been published or profiled in BUST Magazine, Buzzfeed Community, VIDA Reports From The Field, At Large Magazine, PACKET Bi-Weekly, YES Poetry!, Luna Luna Magazine, Bedford + Bowery, Gothamist, Brooklyn Based, and more. She’s a board member of Nomadic Press. She lives in The Bronx with her adopted pets.

Life Within the Simulacrum: Status Update

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Life Within the Simulacrum is a featured column focusing on technology & social media, travel & literature.

BY DALLAS ATHENT

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If you’re reading this, it’s probable that you follow or are friends with a lot of writers on social media. Perhaps, you, yourself are a writer. You are on PANK, after all.

Assuming this is true your social media feed probably looks similar to mine. Every day I see at least 10+ links a day shared by other writers about how grateful they are to get again have a poem or story published. It usually goes something like this:

“I’m so honored to have [x] published in [x]. Thanks to [person tagged] for being such a force in the literary community.

[insert link].”

I, myself, have posted such statuses. I’m sure you have too.

On each post, the hearts start flying. The tagged individual who’s responsible for publishing said piece will not only “like” the writer’s post themselves, but then comment or reply with an additional “<3” emoji. The rest of us writers will continue to like said post. Sometimes we even love it. Who doesn’t love it when a person we know gets published?

There, technically isn’t a problem with this. I’d be a horrible person if I thought support for fellow writers was a bad thing. (Truth be told, I may be horrible, but for different reasons.)

My bigger question, however, is out of allllll of those likes, how many people are actually clicking the link and reading? Dear reader, I regret to say that I think that number is likely dismal; I personally confess to only going out of my way to read 1/10 of the links that I “like.” While that’s literally embarrassing to admit I know I can’t be the only one adding hearts to things I never have any intention on actually reading.

As I ponder this truth, I even realize I’ve probably liked things in the past that are probably, in fact, abysmal with no idea since I never clicked the damn link!

The thing is, we can’t possibly read everything that comes through our feed each day, but does that mean we should keep reacting to it? In the past I’ve done this to show I’m somehow supportive of the person who shared the post, even if I knew I didn’t have the time nor mental capacity to read it.

But I’m starting to realize this is more harmful than it is helpful.

Being published seems to have become more about having a status update to share with people about being published than having people actually read said piece. So here’s a pop quiz question for 2018:

Which is more valuable to a writer’s career:

  1. Having one person read their work, and really getting something out of it
  2. 100 people seeing on social media that the writer was published but not reading their work at all

Honestly, I don’t know for sure so don’t feel like you failed anything if you don’t agree with me, but it certainly seems like the latter, and that’s, well, just downright depressing. But you know what? I have faith we can change that.

Dear reader, I call on you. Stop hearting things you didn’t read! Join me and stop it.

Stop. It.

Because the truth of the matter is, this does nothing for the literary community. It forces us to live within a simulacrum of success, meanwhile the hard labor we put into writing goes into a vacuum and is swallowed up by yet more links and publications. In a desperate attempt to move literature forward and be noticed not as a craft of the past, we mistakenly believe the more we boost each other’s posts the more we’re giving visibility to poetry and fiction, and this is actually doing the opposite. It’s causing us to have a larger sense of engagement, when nobody is really engaging at all. The best thing we can do is try and entice people who aren’t into literature to read our sites by NOT liking anything we don’t read, try reading at least one thing a day, and then actively commenting on what we thought of it. It may feel as if we’re taking away support, but in fact, it will put responsibility back on the literary community to be strategic, purposefully and create an overall, better experience for online publications.

Long story short, let’s just stop aimlessly clicking in an effort to be seen, shall we?

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Dallas Athent is a writer and artist. She is the author of THEIA MANIA, a book of poems with art by Maria Pavlovska. Her work, both literary and artistic has been published or profiled in BUST Magazine, Buzzfeed Community, VIDA Reports From The Field, At Large Magazine, PACKET Bi-Weekly, YES Poetry!, Luna Luna Magazine, Bedford + Bowery, Gothamist, Brooklyn Based, and more. She’s a board member of Nomadic Press. She lives in The Bronx with her adopted pets.

THE LIMITS OF EMPATHY

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BY JONATHAN MARCANTONI

Anonymous Crime Scene Photo

The body lies on its back, covered in a white sheet turned cream by the street lamp, which we do not see. The sheet covers the body in such a way as to appear, at a distance, like a rolling hill, stretching across the trash-strewn sidewalk before collapsing, in narrow valleys and sharp inclines, upon the cement. The illuminated corpse is not attended to by medics, or shocked crowds. There is no weeping mother. More noticeably, there is no face. The sheathed corpse could be in black and white were it not for the graffiti, a massive S swallowing a P, both in blood red that in the dim afterglow of the streetlight appears maroon, and the fact that these are clearly Latin letters indicates we must be in Europe or the Americas. The buildings themselves are made of brick and stone and from what we can see are in good condition, the graffiti covering only the metallic doors that shop owners use overnight, and so we must be in a business district.

How the mind wanders, trying to pinpoint the exact location of this event? Paris? Brussels? Berlin? Rome? New York City? And why is this body left alone by authorities and ignored by the public? Could there be greater carnage we are not privileged to see? Was this a terrorist attack? And if it is a terrorist attack, and in a white city no doubt, of a white country run by white people, there is no question that the media is eating this up. How many other victims are there? Ten, twenty? In Nigeria there were a multitude; nobody cared. Many more in Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia; nobody cared, and they cared even less when worse happened on the streets of Raqqa and Baghdad.

How this body, alone on a street, lacks just enough details, just enough concrete emotions, to allow you, the viewer, to fill in whatever blanks reside in our soul.

Is our soul made of the enraged screams for justice that permeate the void of social media? Is our soul one that feeds on shaming strangers on the other side of the world, across oceans reaching back to our native shores, crossing our state’s lines and inhabiting our very neighborhood? Could we tell these people to their faces how much we despise them for caring about this body and not one that looks different than they do? That speaks another language? Follows a different religion? What makes this body so special, anyway?

There will be a wave of text filling our screens, disparate voices speaking the same words, words like euro-centric white supremacist misogynistic privilege; that is what this body so artfully represents. The absence of mourning does not make it an object of pity but of superiority, for it is the body of all bodies, singular and dominant, oppressive in how it mocks the millions of others who die with faces naked in the sun.

This body divides us into the tribes of yesterday, tribes of color and class, along lines the enlightened masses of Internet cowardice would like to believe we have transcended as a species so we can enter an age of harmony.

But is harmony human nature? Or nature at all? Sharks do not cry for a safe zone when another shark steals their food, and when a lion loses a fight it does not seek out a therapist. Nature is cold, ordered, so ordered that when the order is disrupted nature lashes out to reclaim the stability it was always meant to harbor. Nature is, above all, encompassing, unquestionable, uncomfortable.

Mankind is not prepared to face the futility of the reality that this body, and all dead bodies, have no ethnicity and no labels, they are merely flesh and bone destined to rot, be ravaged, swallowed up, forgotten.

This body, which we claim to care so much about, was in fact a human being unrelated to us, with a life, a job, a family, and a name, which this body will never speak again. This body, which demands silence, which demands the dignity of the rest of unconsciousness, receives only the noise of all the agendas on our screens, blinding us all to our inevitable fate; this world wide culture that values shame and judgment over empathy and understanding, the silence that necessitates both.

Jonathan Marcantoni is a Puerto Rican educator and author based in Colorado. He is co-founder of the YouNiversity Project which mentors aspiring authors. His love of surrealism and experimentation led to his portrait style, pictured here, and used in his forthcoming novel Tristiana (Floricanto Press, 2016). You can follow him on Twitter @Marcantoni1984 or visit his website jonathanmarcantoni.com.