Nothing (27 page)

Other sites offer webcopy spellspeak, mistyped modern babble relics of the home remedy, likely generated by a head behind a desk to make a couple bucks, or out of boredom. Try actively accommodating this:

Wrap handfuls of uncooked oats and dried camomile flowers, and a pinch of mandrake in a square of cheesecloth and filter a hot bath through it. Light some Egyptian kyphi incense and bathe while deeply breathing the aromas. In bed, envisage yourself in a field of camomile. . . . Think of lying down in the fragrant daisies, lulled to sleep by their fresh, sweet smell. Beneath the ground, the underworld; and above, in the blue sky, Witches and rainbow-hued elementals fly by on unimaginable missions. You lie drowsing in the fragrant flowers, following one of the passers-by, then another, tracing their patterns in the ether and following to the tunnel leading to the deep blue yonder.
¹⁷⁹

Or:

For a full-blown case of insomnia, put a head of lettuce into a blender and reduce it to a liquid. Gently rub this on your forehead and temples for a few minutes before going to bed. If you still can’t sleep, liquefy another head of lettuce the next night, but drink it this time.
¹⁸⁰

As sorry as these are, you can believe there are those who’ve tried it—as in the grips of the shit you might believe in any idea as a potential out, or on a long night concede the doubt on the off chance it might somehow do the job.

What becomes even more confounding in the online forums of these methods is the constant sales pitch sunk into the jargon—if not simply the jargon in and of itself, being a commodity of canned language and expected soundtrack. In the margins of the search results, Google offers columns of paid ads: “Waking up at 2AM?, Highly Effective. 100% Guarantee, Get the Rest You Deserve, Phone Hypnosis or Online (Only $50.00 until Nov. 30th receive custom CD or MP3).” Here are endless options, copies of copies. While you are looking here, see also here. Listen when I’m talking. Know this. Eat this. Over here. Even would-be film clips and audio installments of the actual hypnosis bookend their sleep-made message with more dot-com blurbing and copy talk. Today a YouTube video titled “Hypnosis for sleep and relaxation”
¹⁸¹
comes with not only the inlaid ads of the corporate sponsor YouTube (again owned by Google), but also the semi-opaque overlays that now adorn the bottom of any video you watch (they can be can be x-ed out if you click them, though be careful not to click the ad itself), as well as further comment ads the video’s creators have inserted to supplement with extra information the text ads that make up the introduction to the video itself, an elucidation of the elucidation, all set up before you get to the meat that’s supposed to help you go to sleep. Beyond all of that, on the same page, is the video’s description message, which contains more URLs and jargons, in addition to codes you can use to share the page, and below that, links to other videos by the same creator and those of a like interest (this particular clip goes to a whole palette of videos with words like relaxation, meditation, sleep now, hypnosis, hypnosis, hypnosis, on and on). The YouTube ads even have little placards beneath them—“Advertisement,” in small gray font—in case you somehow didn’t realize, and really need to know. And there beneath the label of the ad, another ad.

These days we never are alone. My father, in his old age, not computer savvy, watches NASCAR, the ad-laden machines circling and circling a flattened hole. For others, there is baseball—men throwing spheres and running; genre novels—caricatures of caricatures; yardwork—the fringe and silent growths of architecture—a strand within a strand of endless strands. A sleeping or waking spinning while standing still, or unseen stairwells, numbers counting none. Even in the light of homes there are these boxes and the wires and the doors. We diagnose ourselves. We know ourselves and others through the pictures and the language and the sound. As of this minute, DomainTools.com estimates there are 112,606,155 active websites. There are 373,749,730 names of shells of sites once active, now
deleted.
In the past twenty-four hours alone there have been 74,463 new created and 84,167 deleted, and 82,045 already-existing sites transferred to new owners. A constant creation, recreation, decreation, destroyed. The space for expansion approaches endless, with no current maximum cap on the potential number of characters in a newly registered URL. Some browsers may not be able to parse the string (in 2006, Microsoft stated its max was 2,083, though Firefox would carry up to 65,536 characters), making the site difficult to access, but as far as privatizing the space, all gates are open—an unlimited field of nowhere directives, inxs no land.

Any name, too, is subject to variation, sub-indexing. So you can’t have insomnia.com (though, as with other sites, you can have all other kinds of info about who owns it, including their name, address, telephone number, and e-mail, by which means you might conduct a deal), but the potential registrar isn’t by any stretch ready to let you give up then and there. Instead of insomnia.com, DomainTools.com suggests the following privately owned but up-for-purchase URLs (as of November 6, 2009):

SevereInsomnia.com, $588.00

NewInsomnia.com, $1,410.00

TotalInsomnia.com, $1,688.00

InsomniaZone.com, $1,050.00

InsomniaGames.com, $708.00

InsomniaCoffee.com, $1,588.00

Beyond these already begotten name tags, there are the endless reams of potential doppelgängers, poised to slink out of the void for somewhere around $9.99. The registrar’s suggestions in lieu of insomnia.com spill on for pages, each yours quickly, at a click, though by any instant also perhaps sucked up by another buyer, the eLandscape changing, becoming tamed:

FREETURMOIL.COM

BIGTURMOIL.COM

TURMOILLIVE.COM

EASYTURMOIL.COM

TURMOILONLINE.COM

NEWRESTLESSNESS.COM

TURMOILSTORE.COM

HOTTURMOIL.COM

MYRESTLESSNESS.COM

TURMOILPRO.COM

TURMOILFORYOU.COM

TURMOIL4YOU.COM

TURMOIL4U.COM

TURMOIL2U.COM

BESTAGITATION.COM

HOTWAKEFULNESS.COM

WAKEFULNESSPRO.COM

WAKEFULNESSFORYOU.COM

WAKEFULNESS4YOU.COM

WAKEFULNESS4U.COM

WAKEFULNESS2U.COM

YOURSLEEPLESSNESS.COM

NEWSLEEPLESSNESS.COM

MYSLEEPLESSNESS.COM

BESTSLEEPLESSNESS.COM

FREESLEEPLESSNESS.COM

BIGSLEEPLESSNESS.COM

SLEEPLESSNESSLIVE.COM

EASYSLEEPLESSNESS.COM

SLEEPLESSNESSONLINE.COM

SLEEPLESSNESSSTORE.COM

HOTSLEEPLESSNESS.COM

SLEEPLESSNESSPRO.COM

TURMOIL4YOU.INFO

TURMOIL2U.INFO

TURMOILFORYOU.INFO

TURMOIL4U.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESS4U.COM

SLEEPLESSNESSFORYOU.COM

SLEEPLESSNESS2U.COM

SLEEPLESSNESS4YOU.COM

BESTAGITATION.INFO

YOURINSOMNIALIVE.COM

YOURINSOMNIAONLINE.COM

YOURINSOMNIASTORE.COM

YOURINSOMNIAPRO.COM

YOURINSOMNIA2U.COM

YOURINSOMNIA4YOU.COM

YOURINSOMNIAFORYOU.COM

YOURINSOMNIA4U.COM

NEWINSOMNIALIVE.COM

NEWINSOMNIAONLINE.COM

MYINSOMNIALIVE.COM

NEWINSOMNIASTORE.COM

MYINSOMNIAONLINE.COM

HOTWAKEFULNESS.INFO

WAKEFULNESSPRO.INFO

WAKEFULNESSFORYOU.INFO

WAKEFULNESS2U.INFO

WAKEFULNESS4YOU.INFO

WAKEFULNESS4U.INFO

YOURSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

NEWSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

MYSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

BESTSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

FREESLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

BIGSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESSLIVE.INFO

EASYSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESSONLINE.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESSSTORE.INFO

HOTSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESSPRO.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESS2U.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESSFORYOU.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESS4U.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESS4YOU.INFO

YOURINSOMNIALIVE.INFO

YOURINSOMNIAONLINE.INFO

YOURINSOMNIASTORE.INFO

YOURINSOMNIAPRO.INFO

YOURINSOMNIAFORYOU.INFO

YOURINSOMNIA4U.INFO

YOURINSOMNIA4YOU.INFO

YOURINSOMNIA2U.INFO

NEWINSOMNIALIVE.INFO

NEWINSOMNIAONLINE.INFO

MYINSOMNIALIVE.INFO

NEWINSOMNIASTORE.INFO

MYINSOMNIAONLINE.INFO

Any one of these suffix- and prefix-affixed strings is potentially yours, a waiting doorway into somewhere to be developed or resold, or otherwise resigned to the middle ground of registration. Some of these may once have perhaps been bought and built by others and then abandoned, in the shape of houses haunted by what was and now is not. The skeletons of these once-entered and since-abandoned electronic rooms still abound here, archived, if not in brain meat or old caches, until somehow those archives crash or are erased, by some furious weather or magnetism, some god act. So much of nothing these days ever is deleted—copies of copies, zombified. What is spoken from any platform might appear in mirror sites at anonymous addresses without permission, culling text simply to feed search engines, traffic, endless spool: a silent congress, a morphing backlog, electronic window, every hour in your home. Spam folders stacked full of language piling up without an eye, sent by machines to millions of accidental or magnetized addresses, sometimes sucking actual unique messages into its vortex, claiming presence in the blank. The result here, with such influx, is that there’s so much being made you’ll never see—throes of constant building and recycling—an endless tunnel, corridors upon corridors of code. Many of these sites, too, are aimed at particular persons, in subsets of language. What will be missed. How does one choose. Soon it is the flux itself that is the identity, perused as unconsciously as one passes ads and grows old.

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“The more our daily life appears standardised, stereotyped and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption,” writes Deleuze, “the more art must be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition, and even in order to make the two extremes resonate—namely, the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death.”
¹⁸²
Expression in the age under computers and endless replication continues to further and further incorporate the inorganic spread into its flesh, turning in on itself as would more and more mirrors, a reflective and variating outer shell—there are more nodes alive now than at any other minute in history, no matter when you read this sentence, no matter how long this book survives, until there comes some Other [pause] Meditation. And yet the light is on inside us, drinking. The light sees, eats, absorbs all. It “connects the tableau of cruelty with that of stupidity, and discovers underneath consumption a schizophrenic clattering of the jaws, and underneath the most ignoble destructions of war, still more processes of consumption.”
¹⁸³
And, grown out from this light, the outer scrim grows thicker, both holding out and holding in, silent in meditation, ever-present. So much is about an often unconscious but continuously updating manipulation of the existent, finding new doors hid in large maps, milking the error up into replication and recreation. There is virus, hacking, glitch. Within each of these, the thread continues spreading, knocking out new doors inside itself to keep up with the coming fold.

“You have to get people very quickly,” says JODI, an award winning duo of video game mod artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, specializing in video game mod and web browser crashing art. “You need to give them a karate punch in the neck as soon as possible. And then—of course—they don’t get to the details, and the site will just sit there for the next five years or ten years, or maybe 100 years. And maybe their children will have the time to explore the details . . . [(laughs)].”
¹⁸⁴
JODI’s work, like forced waking, and silence musics, spurts in manipulation of the error in a creation. Their piece
My Desktop OS X 10.4.7
(2007)
¹⁸⁵
is simply a zoomed-in view of a user negotiating a Macintosh OS X desktop screen at rapid pace, scrolling and clicking and blipping back and forth through various folders, programs, access points; copying and pasting glyphs of command text; causing the system’s error sounds and movement usage tones while a synth-dictation voice spells out each move in collaged glitch. The result, while at first startlingly commonplace in appearance for the ubiquity of the computer screen as realm of art (and after all, we are probably viewing this video on our own desktop, a screen inside a screen), becomes quickly claustrophobic and manic in its process, made more so particularly because of its very banality and any day, everyday, but supermagnified terror sound.

The very fact of much of JODI’s work being indistinguishable but from certain stretched moments of daily integrated electronic experience is what makes it, as an entity, so effective—like the strange light of certain scenes in
Inland Empire
, there and not there, like ours but slightly off. JODI’s modded scenes of popular games like
Wolfenstein 3D
and
Duke Nukem II
catch the user’s avatars in glitch boxes made of colored space that interrupts the body and the air—sheets of architecture folding into limbs and breathing space around the user’s only tool inside the codeworld—while the errored sound of the game inside the game goes on. Another project, simply titled
OSS
, comes on a CD-ROM, which when inserted in the user’s computer immediately overwrites the desktop with a pyramid of 317 files. The effect, unlike the string of viruses and spam popular throughout the ’90s, is not to cause dysfunction, but to “manipulate the surface of your system. An interface is a translation of code and your understanding is what you believe and that’s all there is to a computer, it’s a language.”
¹⁸⁶