THE F L Y BY NIGHT
Freshman year I committed myself to a winter alone. It was a kamikaze mission, for boredom and loneliness were as sure as daylight. For the most part I practiced my signature and visited city parks. But there was also a visitor: my cousin, Valbona. This is the Valbona who gave me a well-wrapped hatchet for my 19th birthday, and who (though she doesn't know it) will be getting a taxidermied alligator for her 24th. Together, we are Thing 1 and Thing 2 with a penchant for gag-gifts and trespassing. Separately, we are grade A citizens. So, when this Valbona withdrew cash from the Bank of America, I collected carbon papered deposit forms--an impulse unknown to the grade A Stela--and saved them for a pen pal project I was concocting. A few days later, I put on some gloves and wrote the following tale of betrayal and lust:
Dear Alonso, It's time you got out of your coma; councilman Vallone1 is pressing charges and I need a witness. I hope, my darling, that you can come around. Still, things are looking up: Tony will never know about us. At least, not while he's in Bayview.2 -Your Victoria 1. The name of a real New York City councilmember. 2. A New York City prison.
Finally, and this was the only moment that hesitation reared its nondescript head, I chose a lipstick to mark the envelope, a Lancome Lipgloss. I branded the envelope many times, convinced that no one could resist opening a lip-stamped envelope, even if it was clearly intended for a certain 'Alonso.' There’s always pride in well-crafted deceit. Finally, I found a brownstone on Stuyvesant Street and threw it in the letterbox. I wrote the full address on a library book that's since been returned. These are traces I leave like Horcruxes. Anyone who reads the address also becomes involved in this messy production. Clearly this ploy not only satisfied my love for all things Telenovela, but it also took care of a need for human interaction. So much so that the recipient's reaction became a burning question--one that Valbona and I would never be able to answer. The mystery I inflicted on some New Yorker is now a con I play on myself. Since leaving my hands, the letter has assumed a deception of its own. For all of the scenarios I imagined, the letter may just as well have remained unopened. Much like Lacan in Made You Look, a trivial hoax is the gift I give myself. wink*,
There's no shame, I've been told, in hiding a garlic clove in your sock or in your bra at the prom. It was a night of itches. But it was my mother's wish. Garlic cloves are, of course, Albania's remedy for the evil eye which can be transmitted through compliments, smiles, or silent admiration. "Mos e ha me sy," they'll say as you stare at a pretty baby. Literal translation: Don't eat her with your eye. The old world resigns a lot to the evil eye--a terrifying superstition not because it is undetectable but because it is involuntary. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once said, "The true function of the organ of the eye, the eye filled with voracity, is the evil eye." In one fell swoop, he removed human will from the
eye—an uncontrollable organ that devours without prejudice.
The potential for incidental voyeurism was too much for the playful-at-heart Lacan. In1955, he installed Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du Monde--a vulgar, anti-erotic painting of a vagina--beneath an abstract carving of the same subject. When guests entered his library, they were asked to describe the carving, often inspired visions of barren trees and winter landscapes. When applied to female genitalia, as Lacan surely did, these descriptions were laughably vulgar. Now, just as Lacan's contemporaries, you will be presented an image that is coupled with a more startling companion piecer e v e a l e d o n l y w i t h a c l i ck.
It is redundant—silly, even—to bring up how pivotal social media has become. Social media, Facebook especially, gives us our own little corner in the cyber cloud. As a result, we have risen to the occasion and constructed the impression we want to give to others. In M. Butterfly, a play based on Puccini's opera, Rene Gallimard, a French civil servant, falls in love with the Chinese singer, Song Liling. Liling becomes Gallimard's lover of twenty years only to be exposed as a spy--and a man. His performance was as well executed as any internet persona. 109 years later: Constructing a new identity has only become
easier. In Catfish, Yaniv Shulman finds out that a woman has created several online personalities, including one as his virtual girlfriend. In older news, Napoleon commissioned artists to paint a taller, handsomer version of himself. The world wide web is like that giant tub of ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s: as terrifying and nauseating as it is self-indulgent and delicious. And we are simply continuing a legacy of falsehood that not only betrays the spectator (as Liling's masquerade surely did) but also accomplishes a bigger dishonesty: deception of the self.
TFBNGHT COM