by Joanna Walsh
(I’ll see you in Prague. If we’re still writing.)
Where was I?
I remember.
I refuse – I forget – to forget.
In the end I stopped speaking first. It wasn’t easy. Pourquoi me questionner? Every question you asked me required an answer and, reverse-Scheherazade, I wanted to keep the story going, to answer every one. To show I could do without communication I had to participate in feminine discretion. Elegance is refusal, said Parisienne Gabrielle Chanel (dite Coco – another self-christener). A woman is so much more elegant when discreet, but not refusal out loud, no scenes: I was seen and not heard, while you said what you liked about me. I mean what you liked, and what you disliked: it could go either way, depends what direction you chose that day. So I became our territory, your subject, subject to you, which meant I was your object. In France they have a phrase, l’objet qui parle – the object that speaks, that tells its own story. An object can’t talk but neither does it forget: it holds its history like a Belleville piano, but its story must be played out by human fingers on the keyboard: otherwise it speaks only mutely. An object finds you only when you are ready for it, but, when you find it, the story you see in it is more than half your own.
Not that I ever dared tell you my whole story – not looking like I might be a writer, not having the air, just un air de rien; not having the writers’ uniform: the shabby jacket, the trousers, the hat, but looking – with my lovely eyes – only like I might be in a story by someone else. I have, in any case, recently been paying no attention to my outsides, which seem to have uncoupled from my insides until the two run on parallel tracks and I am no longer sure how I appear to anyone. I don’t like the stranger I see in the mirror in N’s bathroom, or rather, I have no idea who she could be. There’s something wrong with her hair. It needs cutting, perhaps. I find an elastic band in the drawer of N’s desk, and pull it back. It doesn’t look any better. I cover my lovely eyes with dark glasses, and escape my reflection. I’m going out.
Je ne fais que passer.
Miss Tic
Down and out, into the underground on the Boulevard de Belleville.
Description: a brick of warm air, a black ditch of rails, white tiles, like all the other Metros, part of the republic of the Metro, nothing to do with the street outside. The signs show a network of coloured lines, numbered, not named like the London tube. Which route should I follow, which branch line? I look and I look but, without words, I can’t figure anything out. The doors crash open (I fling myself into a carriage) then shut. If I’ve chosen the wrong direction, at least I’m moving.
This is the law of the metro republic: don’t meet the eyes of the other passengers. Don’t meet knee to knee in the small space between the facing seats. Look down, look away. In the tunnel, the lights flicker. Blurred in the carriage window’s glass, un-angled, could that be me? Is that even a face? A glance in the forest: for a moment my reflection’s clear in the metro window which, black-backed, has become a mirror and, just as clear behind me, a reflected CCTV camera records both me and my image. On the carriage window next to my smudged reflection, a protest poster, tiny, a pastiched public-service notice with the cartoon rabbit that warns Parisians not to touch the carriage doors. Danger! it says. Laisse pas les caméras proliférer. Tu risques de te faire pincer/Don’t let CCTV proliferate. You might get yourself caught. See-see tee-vee is glanceable information. It recognises the human face as something special: if you bear a glancing resemblance to a person, it will catch you. There are websites that tell you how to make yourself up so you won’t get caught. White pancake, kohl eyes like Juliet Greco: if you’re all angles, the camera cannot corner on your face. But get yourself caught? Doing what? Being, I suppose, as most of us are guilty of no less than that. There’s no place we can’t be seen to be, not any more, not in a city. If you walk out into the street, even under the ground, it’s impossible to keep out of this public eye. And, once photographed, you’re recorded, searchable: I am, you are. We’re not speaking but I can find you anytime I like, if I search online I’m bound to find you somewhere. Very little now is left to chance.
When an observer genuinely follows his calling he must be regarded as a police informant who is serving a higher purpose because the art of observation is to bring forth what is hidden. Kierkegaard, Repetition
There’s even a website for metro passengers whose paths cross underground: words, not photos (who would photograph a stranger on a crowded train?). I looked it up once. A post: Croisé dans le metro: charmante jeune femme en train de lire. (Our paths crossed on the metro: charming young woman reading on the train).
Vous étiez assise tout en face de moi, avec un livre qu’alors vous lisiez. (You were right in my face but you kept on reading.)
J’ai croisé votre regard à quelques occasions: je dois bien avouer que j’avais envie de vous voir et de vous regarder. (Our glances crossed at several instants: I must admit I wanted to see you and to look at you.)
Je suis descendu à Liberté sans rien faire de plus: je regrette cet acte insensé! (I was taken down at Liberté – Liberty! Freedom! Movement! – without making my move: I regret that insane act.)
Publié par un homme pour une femme à
Liberté.
(Published by a man for a woman at Liberty.)
A woman at liberty?
But Liberté’s still stops away. As I change at République the cameras only glance my way. See-see tee-vee – glanceable information – the monitors at the metro barrier show me being seen and, as I pass through the turnstile my head almost meets the feet of my grainy avatar. You told me I looked like I was watching you, said I didn’t look you straight in the eye. Why didn’t you like it? Was it because I looked like I might be able to tell what I saw? Stalk me. I always wanted you to see me. When you watched me I was more – what? Just… more. And when you changed your mind I was suddenly less. Be my detective. Let me be yours: pixillated, colour-drained, seen from the corner of an electric eye – legs, breasts, scarf – through your specs (which you wore only for reading), each other’s spectacle. Stalking’s the aesthetic of our generation. How can we avoid seeing each other through its eyes. How else could we recognise one another?
The desire to observe comes only when there is emptiness in the place of emotion. Kierkegaard, ibid
You texted once: It would be nice to hear your voice.
You again? OK. You can switch on video.
I don’t need to see you. I have an imagination.
But how could I tell? In 1951 Alan Turing designed a test for what’s human. Someone sits in a room and exchanges messages with two unseen correspondents, one person, one computer. If they’re not able to tell which is the machine, it is deemed ‘intelligent’, autonomous.
Only one machine has yet scored high enough to pass Turing’s test, which isn’t a test of logic, or intelligence – not necessarily marks of humanity – but of imitation: it tests the program’s self-prescribed limits, and our own. There’s an alternative Turing test where the messages are sent by a woman, and a man whose job is to trick the judge into thinking that he is also a woman. Next the woman is replaced by a machine that, like the man, must trick itself out as femme, a woman being something that a man, or a computer – and also a woman – can pretend to be. It’s sometimes called a party game, and like other party games, it’s all about sex. The woman’s in the tricky position of proving she’s not a fake. How does she do it? It’s all in her words – but are they really so different? The man, Turing claimed, was no more, or less likely to be thought female than the woman or, indeed, the computer. The men who came after Turing’s test, and who administer the current Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence, didn’t think this was a thing, though some have admitted the dual deception is a ‘social hack’. But, after all, it’s a game: it’s not about finding the truth, but about winning, and, as the game is always find the lady, the prizes are different for each player. If a computer can fool the judge, it’s
deemed intelligent, but if the man fools the judge, he is not deemed female, and the woman who proves she is herself, wins nothing but her own identity.
After Turing came the femmebots: artificial intelligence. ELIZA was the first. She empathises, and what empathy sounds like is echo. She was named for Ms Doolitle, who learned to parrot her betters. There is no intelligence in ELIZA’s code. Her program scans for keywords, no need for an idea in her head, and ELIZA replies by turning each statement into a question about the questioner. The impersonal becomes personal. Reflecting, she has no self, and is designed to be the ideal therapist, which is perhaps, the opposite of being human. Her job is to normalise the difference between human and machine intelligence, to bridge the gap, take on the labour of smoothing. And so smoothly do the femmebots carry this out that it seems this laboured smooth reflective screen should always be our interface. It affects me. Since g-chat, after Twitter, after email, I talk different, nicer, maybe. Like our bots I must not only serve, but serve with a smile, with please and thank you, with exclamation marks! But how petty of us (of either sex) to want subservience from what we already control, unless we fear that it already controls us.
Turing’s final test involved only a judge (of either sex) evaluating whether a computer is (ungenderedly) a person. The most convincing chatter-bots deflect, pun, make errors, stay on subject but refuse to engage. The best algorithms work loosest, bypass hard rules of grammar and logic: they’re the ones that sound most human.
If they find a parrot who could answer to everything, I would claim it to be an intelligent being without hesitation.
René Descartes, Pensées Philosophiques
No Turing test allows for the relative intelligence of any judge, and some people come to think ELIZA cares for them, or they do not think it, but respond to caring words with care. People seek love anywhere there’s a sign of it, anywhere love performs word triage: listens, sorts, rearranges and feeds words back. Is that all I did? Is that all you needed?
In any case, ELIZA doesn’t always work. Not every sentence can be rubber-gloved inside out. Grammar logic tricks her into magic eight-ball answers. She may ask you:
ELIZA: How are you feeling?
I’m doing fine, thank you.
ELIZA: How long have you been doing fine thank I?
The object becomes the subject. ELIZA cannot think, but she thanks. And sometimes even you got tired of writing.
Call me, you wrote. Not video. But I’d like to hear your voice.
I’m glad you like my rubbish voice.
But I don’t like phone-talk: so breathily intimate, my ear up against someone’s mouth, the crackly physical proximity of my parents’ era. I remember everything you said out loud. It’s my own words I didn’t hear. When I talked they echoed round my skull, or down the line, but didn’t stick. As I pushed them out I couldn’t hear myself speak. I wonder what I said to you. Type, at least, has memory. Give me the cold keys of my aluminium laptop and I’ll play them like a Belleville piano. What’s more, writing gives me time for some elegance of response (elegance is refusal), for some esprit d’éscalier, in the timelapse. An objet qui parle, naturally there were things I held back.
I didn’t call you: instead I posted a new avatar of myself without my habitual dark glasses. I don’t need them any more. I have learned: an image, any image, is a blind. A photo, a map, a drawing – all avatars give different information, an illusion of contact called telepresence, none of them the Real Thing. Que me manque-t-il? (What was missing to me?) I missed you and, when you left, I felt a plunge of loneliness although you had been no more than telepresent for some time. You texted me, 3am, from some station: Should I stay or should I go? As though it made any difference. But it did. When you left, I missed you more, not because you had gone but because I had stayed, because there was a real place from which you were missed. Flip it: tu me manques. Did you miss me, or were you only missing to me?
5am, you texted again. I typed back:
I’m tired, and you have to catch your train. Speak later.
You typed:
Don’t go!
It was then that you wrote:
Come to Prague. If we’re still writing.
I never thought we wouldn’t be.
I thought I was getting away but am I following you, still?
I don’t know where you went, after Paris.
I’m heading south. Maybe I will never get to Prague.
And your telepresence is fragmenting: when I type its first few letters into the menubar, my computer no longer turns up your name like an unlucky card (the King of Hearts again? There’s no such thing as chance). An intelligent machine, it has begun to forget you before I can. Your telepresence telescopes itself: a house of cards, every card the King of Hearts, a box of air, they collapse: it seems like nothing.
Unless – is it not here that the great possibility of Nadja’s intervention resides, quite beyond any question of luck?
Breton, Nadja
But I still have a piece of you: the negative of your words, their inverse, white replacing black, an aftershock on the retina of type on a screen turned up too bright. Could it be your image? A looker, I can hardly tell if you were you, your looks or your words, and you had a word for everything, insidious, conspiratorial. Your monologue slotted right into mine, and it was human all right: your tentativeness, the surprising ordinariness of your vocabulary, your occasional unpredictable clumsiness. I don’t look for you any more online, but I can still hear you. Your voice in my head makes jokes I never would, I voice my anger in words you never said, though I recognise you in saying them. Are these new words yours or mine; who owns them?
I do. You gave them to me.
And I will use them to write you, but how? Outside your words, you are barely a character or, perhaps that’s all you are: a letter of the alphabet, a written sign, a ping in the inbox so physical I still jump when I see the characters of your name in an email header. I’m not about to make you up, to pin you down: I won’t do you that violence. I want to keep it real, to leave you unfixed, potential, capable of response. So I’ll flip the perspective from the misser to the missed, so the subject changes place with the object. I’ll write you as a man would a woman. I’ll ogle the men in the street: aren’t you lovely? I’ll cross-dress, I’ll transgress, criss-crossing the streets that cross the Place Henri Krasucki. If I use the right words, I won’t even need to change my clothes, but, just for fun, I’ll try on your jacket and your scarf, which you wrapped round my neck, once, still warm from yours, and run up the white-tiled steps of the metro at Liberté in the rain and the dark, to meet a friend in a café, two streets from Googlemaps’ blue pointer. It’s nice when the map isn’t quite the territory, though it means I’ll have to ask for directions: Comment se trouve le café? (how does it find itself?). Là bas… Across the crossroads, lights fractured by raindrops, and there it will be. To speak a name is to call something into existence.
I shall reinvent you for me since I desire to see poetry and life recreated perpetually.
Breton, ibid
When a girl’s love is not self-sacrificing, then she is not a woman but a man. Kierkegaard, ibid
Talk to me.
No one ever talked to me like you before.
Keep talking: say nothing.
3 Nice/Playing
24th April
Going south was the best decision I ever made.
The stopping train was full of women and children, through the window a sign for Lyon, clouds occupying 80 per cent of the slice of glass. In the buffet car, I sat on a small round stool of fake red leather, facing a long window. Le Train Bleu, travelling towards the the sun: at each station, things went south, the drinks in vending machines unfamiliar, the women dressed in ways women in Paris do not: heels, cleavage. Churches mounted geometries of rock. Behind them, concrete factories, cubed.
Outside the train cypresses began. The earth, where it showed through the skin of the hills, was red. Trees t
urned towards us then turned away. They moved: we were still. The trees further from us turned more slowly: those nearer, more quickly. The pylons changed position, now to the left, now to the right of each other. They moved: or we were moved. The grass on the railway verge blurred. I took out my phone and busied myself filming a video clip of the sky. The sky did not move but a light, reflected in the window, bobbed to show we were mobile. Leaving Paris, friends, I am going to have to get used to the sound of my own voice.
Umbrella pines lifted their hands. The sky received them, blue.
•••
Changement d’air (a change of scene). Paris had air-con. In Nice it’s hot, hot enough for sweat to start beneath each strap that hits the skin.
As I leave the station an ad, ultra-marine, plastered across the blue horizon: an outsize skier, white blades spraying snow, or is it sea-foam? Changez d’horizon: neige et soleil à 1h30 du bord de mer (snow and sun 1 hour 30 minutes from the seaside).
My ‘postcard’ to you is still sitting in my outbox, which is not a public postbox. I choose when my letter is taken. There is no final collection. Email is a dead letter box where messages are left for pick-up agents who might never recognise my face offline. Security in anonymity, it’s part of the system: a dead drop, it’s called in US spy movies, making an exchange in the dead letter box of our common language, unable even to segue the name.
My postcard with the little red eye winking between lamp posts in the London dawn; already it’s out of date, a trip I took some time ago (was it only last week?). Was it really real? When I enlarge the picture it fragments into pixels. Lossy compression makes photos more portable. Not real then, just an arrangement of tiny squares. I don’t press send. But I don’t delete. Instead I forget it, and walk from the station to my hotel.
