‘The notebook is a handy object if I need an alternative to the computer.’
(Sergio Chefjec, Forgotten Manuscript)
For a week or so I’ve been trying to create a personal website (even though my ideal is to create a completely impersonal website, which continuously but imperceptibly obliterates itself, eventually destroying any trace of its existence). I’d been led to believe by a friend, Elena (who I’ve been in love with for years) that this would be extremely easy. Anyone can do it, she said, even people like you who have vague but firm aesthetic preferences and no technical ability at all.
– I don’t think you understand, I said, I can barely write an email.
– Come on, my dog could do it.
– Let’s call him.
– Just talk to the screen. It does it for you.
That evening, after Elena sent me a link and a quickstart guide, I got into bed with the screen and asked it to create the website for me. I gave what I thought were extremely clear (and friendly) instructions: ‘Please create a pared-down, subtly suggestive portfolio website. Include a biography, a photo, and links to my work.’ The screen replied that it was glad to, it just needed a bit more information: who was I, what did I look like, what were these ‘works’? I said: thank you for asking, but please cool it with the personal questions: just do it.
The results were strange, and I can barely begin to describe them here. Let’s just say everything was false, tasteless, dull, a bit deformed. After several iterations, and a series of increasingly simplified requests – ‘make the text bigger’; ‘blur the background’; ‘redo all of this but better’; ‘add colour, not too much’ – everything was still off. The palette, the font, the layout and even the text itself (which I’ve now deleted so can’t recapitulate here) weren’t anything like what I’d asked for.
I was at a loss. My eyes were beginning to hurt, they quivered and felt dry. I rummaged around in my notebooks, where I’d sketched out several possible designs for the website, none of which quite matched what I was after. I could continue asking the screen to tinker with it, but decided it would take just as long to learn how to do the whole thing myself from scratch. As the screen was thinking about how to integrate my latest request (‘start again, this time actually try’), I closed it down. When I opened it again a couple of minutes later, after a cup of coffee that was stronger than I’d planned, all the drafts had been lost.
*
I called Elena to discuss my difficulties. She didn’t answer (I guessed she was at one of her son’s piano recitals). I drafted an email to her instead:
Elena,
Look, I appreciate your encouragement, your faith. But I really don’t think you understand. When I look at the screen nothing makes sense. Yes, I’m a thirty-something-year-old man, and I’ve more or less managed to keep up, enough to keep myself employed. But nowhere near enough, not at all. Still: I used to be inside the screen myself. And my fondest memories, and the last time I really understood what was going on (or didn’t feel the need to understand), are from the summer before I went to secondary school. I barely remember sleeping that summer. My dad turned up one evening with a desktop computer, which he put on a rickety desk in his bedroom. It took about twenty minutes to turn on and whirred away like mad. I enjoyed that wait.
More than that, I enjoyed my time with Microsoft Paint. I spent the days drawing little stick men and women, dogs, trees, spiders, the sun. My dad slept all day in the bed behind me. He snored deeply, he tossed and turned and talked in his sleep, though I never heard a word he said. I was immersed in my painting. Sometimes I gave the stick men eyes, sometimes not. I used thick lines, wavy and uncertain lines which didn’t quiver. I drew pleasant garden scenes and then scribbled all over them in red. Yes, back then I knew what was going on, I enjoyed myself. Occasionally a woman would sneak through the door and join my father in bed for an hour or so. I’d carry on with my stick men, inventing, contorting and mutilating them, bobbing up and down on the creaky desk chair, as the computer whirred away…
I stopped typing. In the end I didn’t send the email. Why bother? The words I was trying to type weren’t coming up on the screen at all. Instead, there was a swarm of black and blue dots.
*
Since then, I’ve more or less been lying here in bed with the screen. Ideally I’d be writing about this little failure in my notebook. But then I’d quickly fall into my usual habit of chronicling my failures (sexual, psychological, spiritual, intellectual), making pointless lists and sketching away endlessly, which I want to get out of the habit of doing. In fact I’m trying to get out of the notebook altogether: it’s become a private and provisional hell, and a kind of screen itself.
The only thing I can say in the notebook’s favour is that in there I can distinguish between truth and lies. I can write: ‘I have failed to create a personal website’; ‘Elena will soon realise she is in love with me, she’ll come, slip under the duvet and never want to leave.’ And I know that these sentences are true. I can draw a stick man and know he’s just that: sticks. But here, no matter how delicately I put it in this screen note, which is the first work to be added to the personal website which I failed to create, nothing will be accurate.
If I narrow my eyes and squint, I can just about type that it’s true that I would prefer to be in the notebook, and that I don’t want to get out of bed. It’s also technically true that for the past week or so I’ve been trying to create a personal website. But the following is true too:
- Tonight I can’t differentiate between my eyes and the screen.
- I’ve lost my notebook. It might be under the bed.
- I have been writing on the screen, but I can’t write, I can’t read.
- I’m here under duress, which I can’t say more about right now.
- I’ve asked the screen to help me, but it refused. Sorry, it said, no – that’s enough for today. You should sleep.
So I’ll sleep.
*