When I started writing this column my intention was to compose an ode to the audio sent by WhatsApp, to play postmodern, to stick a knife in what everyone hates – “audio is the end of communication” told me practically everyone asked – and instead of dipping into the wound, fill it with glitter. I wanted what almost everyone who wants to be happy sometimes can’t help but romanticize horror. I remembered the first time I thought I saw a flash of poetry in an audio: I was 22 years old, I was selling life insurance over the phone in a parched Madrid, and a potential client left me a message on my cell phone, saying: explained why it was me. t will be able to buy that for sure. This wail of insecurity and apology was mingled with the chimes of the Church of La Concepción in La Laguna, Tenerife, where the client lived. The same ones I heard every day from my childhood home until I moved to live in Madrid. Tears naturally came to my eyes. I kept that message and listened to it from time to time. In my attempt to praise our decadence, I wanted to highlight the audios that my friends have sent me over the last year that I have been living outside of Spain, telling of the beauty, how to hear the clinking of glasses, the noise from Madrid at night, while it was noon in my life, it was 20 degrees below zero and the snow didn’t stop falling. I tried to bring those moments to the fore, to keep the dirt in the background. But I could not. Because as much as it pains me, a large part of the communications I send and receive on social networks are the result of the dissolution of life, the hurry and the desire to cover everything. I don’t deny that there are times I continue to extract beauty from the tone of a friend walking down the street and drowning, on her way to I don’t know what stress. But as I stand back and watch, a question scratches in my brain about this game of ubiquity that we haunt and haunt: “Are we going to keep going like this until we die?” The question isn’t mine. It appears in Little Is Said About It by Patricia Lockwood, a brilliant and thorny novel published in Spain by Alpha Decay.
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When I think of the audios, the posts, the ideas that get thrown out in heaps, the signs we throw out hoping someone will pick them up, I rephrase the sentence June from The Handmaid’s Tale has in a bedroom closet found a proposition that it required an inner strength to move forward. Nolite te Instagram bastardes carborundorum, that is, don’t let any stupid Instagram freak you out. Let’s not kid ourselves: behind every photo of water, sun, summer and friendship posted on social networks, there is a more or less intense cry for help. The never-ending audios are a cry for help, asking to put this unmanageable mass of ideas, this jumble, in order. I say skein and think of this wonderful photo of Almodóvar helping his mother straighten the yarn, straight hands placed in front of each other and the red yarn wrapped around both of them. And it occurs to me that if there’s going to be a breakup, that work has to be done in flesh-and-blood conversation.
Little is said about this, the book by Patricia Lockwood I mentioned earlier perfectly conveys the overwhelming and false sense of fullness that social networks and communication through them offer. It begins with a list of everything its protagonist finds in the morning when he opens “the portal” (a kind of social network that shows content): “Close-ups of elaborate manicures, a boulder from space, the compound eyes of a tarantula, a storm like peaches in syrup on the surface of Jupiter, Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, a Chihuahua on an erection (…)” and ends the paragraph with the question: “How could it be that the portal conveyed this feeling of Privacy if you only went in if you wanted to be everywhere?” This last question leads us to that sense of false ubiquity and world domination unraveled by the Korean-German philosopher and essayist Byung-Chul Han in his book No-things. Bankruptcies of the world today (Verlag Taurus). “Given our almost symbiotic relationship with the smartphone,” Han says, “it’s now assumed to be a transitional object.” That’s what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott calls those things that allow the small child a safe transition into reality. According to Winnicott, transitional objects (a stuffed animal, a blanket, a box, any object baby prefers that will calm him down) build a safe bridge to reality, to the Other. The childish fantasy – childish? – to have the world under control. This leads us directly to the mobile experience: our voice directed towards an interlocutor who must listen to it (although it can do so by increasing the speed and turning us into squirrels), our jokes exposed in networks, our brain drinking information, the cell phone as a drawbridge to a frightening reality, the audio as a desperate cry – mama! mama! – who asks to make a contact that is not quite like that. I meet someone I have spoken to many times over audio on Instagram and pour joy and warmth into each other. The meeting is lukewarm, full of mutual shyness. “I thought we were friends,” I think afterwards. But not. Nothing is fixed and tangible. “The distinction between true and false has been leveled out,” Han writes.
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While I was writing this column, my cell phone suddenly broke. I don’t know how long the situation will last. Freedom. However, at times I also get a slight dizziness, a tingling sensation in the phantom limb, invisible at the end of my right hand. Practical life is full of communicative stumbling blocks. I feel like a dodo, an injured Iberian lynx, the last thylacine. It seems to me that if the situation lasts one more day, I will disappear. When they finally fix my phone, I pick it up and fall, ecstatic to have the world back in my hands. I fall because of course I look at the phone because I’m everywhere. While stumbling, I float between two worlds. And immediately, falling to the sidewalk, I’m in one place more than ever: the ground. The blood that begins to flow from my knee is my body’s with me, my spirit’s with me telling me “Be here”. I’ll take a picture of the wound and send it to a friend.
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