WYSIWYG

We fell in love with easy answers and forgot the important questions

In 2018 I attended The Association of Writers and Writer’s Conference held that year in Tampa, Florida. Being in Tampa allowed me to spend time with my foster mother who lived in the area and gave me the chance to catch up with friends and colleagues I hadn’t seen in person in years. One day I sat in on an early morning panel about translation. The artist and poet Don Mee Choi talked about auto-testimony. “Auto-testimony,” she said, “reenacts tragedy—how we have died and how we remain living.” Translation is the process of converting the meaning of a written message (text) from one language to another. She spoke about how difficult it was to remain just one person when translating the auto-biographical poem.

Grocery lists look like auto-biographical poems to me of late.

Distilled water, Vitamin D, Band-Aids.

Take a serious look at what has happened to depth in our culture.

That’s the sentence I wrote on a slip of paper alongside a list of possible purchases I needed to buy right before the recent eclipse.

Eclipses occur when the sun, moon, and earth meet in perfect alignment, they happen when the moon passes in front of the sun, blocking daylight. For a laugh I read my horoscope in New York Magazine: At their core, both Virgo and Pisces are healers — Virgo through precision and Pisces through transcendence — so this eclipse is a profound moment to reflect on what true, holistic wellness looks like for you.

In my yoga class in a room full of people I listened to my body as we bent forward together into a long-held pose, a difficult asana. Reminded by our teacher that this kind of movement through space in time in our bodies was a spiritual practice. Reminded to observe not to judge.

I sighed when I heard her say that, and I cried too. Fully back in my body listening to my breath as it moved in and out of my chest, throat, nose, mouth, and belly. In the know as they say about the power of judgement, the necessity of judgment in my life and in our shared lives.

Observing my own thoughts as I breathed in and out.

In anxious observation. Knowing in my body the precarious danger we are living within. So much like my childhood. When all I could do was watch. Watch and listen. Plotting my escape. One day I simply refused to get back into my rambling mother’s car. I said No. Made a judgement. This is not good. This is not okay. The fierce sword of compassion the Buddhists call it. There is a “no” in acceptance. The powerful “no” of recognizing wrong. Leaving destructive families behind. Refusing to humanize the inhumane.

Coming out of denial. Returning to bodily consciousness.

Denial is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) fronting a deeply monstrous reality.

Coming out of denial looks like banishing the soul sickness of too much isolation as my friend Maylan recently reminded me. It looks like fate, to be alive in this time after so much childhood turmoil. It looks like Karma with a capital K the way I live day in and day out missing my only born child, missing him perhaps the way my own mother missed me. It looks like purpose to recognize who I am and who I have become, to know what matters to me at last, to write about becoming, and overcoming, and to find meaning in what remains.

Lately I’ve been struggling for words to describe what it is we are living within. The simulacra of the moment. Simulacra is a word I learned in graduate school. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary online says: There is a similarity between simulacrum and simulate. Both words come from simulacra, a Latin verb meaning to copy, represent, or feign. Simulacrum is the name for an image or representation, and simulate means to look, feel, or behave like something. A simulacrum is a kind of masquerade. From a hard copy Oxford English Dictionary, I find the word masquerade means: an assembly of people wearing masks or other disguises (often of a rich or fantastic kind) and diverting themselves with dancing or other amusements.

In 1993 in the editorial library of the Los Angeles Times where I worked as an image librarian I opened up a search engine called Netscape and began to search. Amazed by the ease of it. From DOS to WYSIWYG. Wow. Did I need to get one of these at home? For what? I hated ugly electronic devices. Had recently ditched my answering machine for an answering service. Not exactly attractive those beige plastic push button boxes. On rounds through the newsroom picking up old negatives to refile I walked by computer after computer on every desk. Text prompts glowed from monitors left on while someone grabbed a coffee. Nobody knew what they were doing with all the new devices half the time they were left on all night.

Dead in the morning. Hard to reboot.

One older editor in the Calendar section complained the day the tech department set his computer up, plugged it in and measured him for ergonomic corrections to be made later. “This is like pumping your own gas for God’s sake!” the man screamed. I could hear him down the hall in the editorial library. “Next thing they’ll have us sweeping the bloody floor.”

And we all laughed.

But I got what he meant. We all did. Just one more mediation. Meaning indirect communication through an intermediary. In this case a glowing screen promising an answer. Another layer between the questioner and the query. Setting us all on an endless search.

The search for gold. For youth. For power. For love. For sex. For money. For recipes. For relatives. For answers.

We fell in love with easy answers and forgot the important questions.

Who could resist? Never again to be lost or stranded, to miss that life changing message. No more questioning in the dark. Never again alone with your own thoughts. The box was there. Bright and beckoning. With guiding arrows and hot links.

A deep-sea change. A shift in the search. From truth to facts. From wisdom to information.

Facts. Data. Disinformation.

The debate topic my senior year while in foster care was about the pros and cons of curtailing unilateral military intervention. I was on the debate team. Reading reading reading. Preparing arguments pro and con. Pulling good quotes and writing them down on 3 by 5 index cards. Building arguments. That’s when I learned that a winning argument could be made even for the worst ideas. As my poet friend Abigail texted me recently: That’s the discussion of the Greeks and Romans—rhetoric without philosophy never a good idea.

There be monsters. There be monsters in the binary answer box.

Inside the answer box anything can happen. And we all knew it. Back in the early nineties as the newspaper’s database was constructed nightly by human beings to be searched by human beings to put the daily news into historical context. Journalist and their researchers still did that back then. In the middle of the night, searching, searching, searching. Looking at digital images, scanned negatives. Chasing answers in the answer box. Turning questions into answers. Backspace. Delete. Backspace. Delete. Looking for a way into the mysterious whereabouts of wrongdoing. Looking for causes and quotes and verification of what we the people needed to know. We knew the answer box was not the world. Not in the streets where we live. In there. In Those. Binary bits of light. Merely access. Not truth. The media not the message. We knew. They knew too. The tech guys and the reporters, the editors and the indexers. In their gray hearts, in their doubting minds they knew the twist they felt in their intuitive gut was true. True but not yet ready for print. Will it ever be? After the final on screen edit hit send. And the words go off to be set in print. In the newsprint while it lasted. Once upon a time in an ink press room in the bowels of the building the clank of metal against metal. The stink of ink. No more. Now more and more its off into the ether. To a digital press on a different floor. Higher up and closer to the business side. The money makers. Underneath the publisher’s suite. Posh rugs and receptionists. Higher up. Further from the street. Where all the news is made. News comes from the streets. The lives we live on. Closer to an unhoused person than a billionaire. Closer to working class, the needy, the poor, the people some call parasites. Or customers. Clients. People. Closer to the earth we walk upon. Closer to the meaning of life. Makers of art. Makers of poems. Makers of meaning. Makers of tangible goods too. People. Concerned with objects in the world and the subjects moving those objects around. Always asking themselves questions.

I’ve always been the nerdy girl asking questions. Eyes in a squint trying to see what’s in front of her. Needing to understand. What you mean when you say what you say.

Twelve schools in seventeen years; from California to Missouri and back again, I lied to everyone about what was going on. All the do-gooders on the lookout for the wrong bad things: in Missouri they asked where we attended church. In California, they played acoustic guitar and worried about the world. But they all spoke with one voice. Blindly wondering why I wasn’t achieving, why I wasn’t reaching my full potential. They never talked with Mama; they just read their statistics, added up chances and predicted a lousy outcome: bad family life + low grades = no future. In the end, they had nothing to say but ‘sorry.’

“Where is he?” I asked the girl behind the reception desk, some blonde from third-hour English ready to give me the once over.

“That’s a bitchin’ belt you’ve got on,” she said.

Around my waist I wore a souvenir from a roadside stand west of Yuma—machine-beaded chevrons and phoenix heads dancing around the word, California. I brushed my bangs aside, a nervous tic designed to shield me from scrutiny, and watched the minute hand on the round clock above her head click toward the bottom of the circle and back up again. I wasn’t there to make friends. I was there for an appointment with the guidance counselor. This one, the principal said, I had better not miss.

“Bitchin’ ring, too,” the girl observed.

Baby Brother had stolen it for me from a gum ball machine.

“Does bitchin’ mean you like it?” I never knew the cool word for anything.

“It means bitchin’,” the girl answered. “What’s wrong with you?”

I backed up. Huaraches squeaking. I’d found them outside Jacumba, a desert town on the California/Mexico border where we’d stopped to refuel.

“Hey!” Seeing me leave, the girl got serious about her job. “You’ve got an appointment, remember?” Pointed toward the clock.

I nodded just to let her know I’d heard and then ran out of the building and back down the covered walkway toward the street. Away from the bitchin’ girl, the counselor’s partially open door, and any further assessment. It was time all right—time to meet up with Moody Sister. Besides, I knew what the counselor guy would say before he said it. Right down to the opening line about grades and gaps and helping me help myself.

No thanks and forget about that.

Forget about anyone who thought they knew what it meant to be me. Coming of age in the sixties when three leaders promoting peace and an end to poverty were gunned down. That did it for me. That taught me to pay attention. To look below the surface. To watch what people do not what they say.

“I don’t want to be understood,” my first mentor told me. A one-armed woman from the South cool as creek water. She strapped on a fake arm and taught us all how to see past the religion defining what meaning could be in the Bible college where I went as soon as I’d aged out of foster care. “Sometimes where there’s fire there’s nothing but strawberry Jello,” she said once in an art appreciation lecture. What I took her to mean was this: sometimes what we think is the five-alarm problem is merely a cold wobble of weakness screaming fire across a crowded room. And sometimes it’s a horror burning through our lives.

How to discern the difference when interpreting the difference could be lifesaving.

My teacher is long past teaching now and yet she still teaches me. She pays attention to the birds the deer the trees outside her window. Remember we are depth of meaning. We are physical bodies in this physical world. Reality is our writing prompt. Our clarion call to resist. Resist erasure by the regime masquerading as a government. We are the words censored by this regime. Our neighbors. Our friends. My family members are defined by the words censored by this regime. We must. Resist this erasure. Come out of denial. Double down on what matters to you. Pay attention. Remain alert. Be your own translator. Critique the twisted totalitarian language machine blasting into the data sphere on a daily basis. Use every translation tool you have to disable the hate.

Beware the rubber conscience and the concrete heart.

Read through the WYSIWYG. The superficial lies. Because.

What we are able to see through will define us.

For myself I am going to make what is left of my life an auto-testimony to the power of human overcoming.