[Contra Mundum; 2024]
Every sub-era within western modernity deserves a poetic representative of its own. To bring forth just two examples, there is William Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us” from the early years of the nineteenth century, and then there is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land from the third decade of the twentieth. One is a sonnet that exposes the materialism and the ugly industrialism of its days while packing it gracefully in rhythm and meter. The other makes the reader wander in a collage of fragments of various images and ideas, demonstrating and embodying the challenge of living in a city.
For the contemporary era, characterized by digitality, one could turn to Rainer J. Hanshe’s prose poetry book Dionysos Speed, among several other texts—from psychology and self-help such as Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport to thrillers to scholarly works of critique such as Networks without a Cause by Geert Lovink or fiction such as The Circle by Dave Eggers or Beautiful Shining People by Michael Grothaus—that constitute a growing body of work, as a recent intervention in the poetics as well as madness of new media’s hold over human lives.
Arranged as twenty-one pieces averaging six pages each, Hanshe’s collection is a series of snapshots of digitality as apocalypse. The opening piece speaks of eight billion mirrors cracking, making a “terrifying, cataclysmic sound,” with their fragments reflecting “nothing but nothingness.” The “image hungry”—and the book has many names and identities for the inhabitants of virtual worlds that the human race is turning out to be—begin to look for more reflecting objects to “satisfy the urge . . . for the clear doubling of the self that had been cut into the flesh since the birth of the camera.” Each consecutive piece builds on the previous one, as if describing the Biblical plagues on the Egyptians. The second piece talks about a planetary crash in messaging: no matter what one wants to type on their screens, random or doomsday-like text crops up: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with . . . ” —invoking the Bible and cutting off right there, perhaps in order to not quote it fully—or “zdouc nfounfa mbaah.” Other pieces touch upon virtuality, encounters with the blue screen, and the various touch points with digital lives one can list from work to leisure to intimacy. The last piece describes the end of the world: geomagnetic storms, with “digito-humanists” leaving the Earth behind, render the planet “terra nullius, fire breaking out over water.”
The genius of the work lies in its imagination of audio-visual minutiae of digital interactions. An unforgettable moment is Hanshe’s way of dwelling upon the blue screen:
In the face of the seductive, ravishing trance of 450 to 495 nanometers of high energy short-wave blue light passing through the cornea and lens to the retina at 186,000 miles per second, stimulating the brain, inhibiting melatonin secretion intensifying adrenocortical hormone production, and destroying hormonal balance: invoke the image, feed the nerve, summon the image, feed the nerve, summon the image, feed the nerve, suck the image, feed the nerve, load the image, shoot it, shoot it in the eye
Paragraphs after paragraphs are arranged neatly with sentences that seem to begin but not end. They ring in the head, making explicit images and sounds out of banal experiences of being with and around devices:
In the midst of seizures, of loss of awareness, of eye strain, of eye and muscle twitching, of involuntary movements, of altered, blurred, and double vision, of dizziness, impaired balance, & impaired hand-eye coordination, fuse with the virtual sanctum:———:suffer the birth pangs of digitality!
Or
Life is a videogame! Life is a teledigital charge! Life is televirtual! Biomarker of cybersickness intensity flaring? Panic terrors taking hold? Escape the constricted world of the sense and pure matter; enter that of pure mind: enter virtuality as virtuality enters you.
Then there is repetition: words, phrases, clauses, within a sentence, sometimes, and throughout each individual piece. In the excerpt below, the repetition appears closely within a few sentences, referring to the command to surrender to virtuality:
surrender the right to agency, surrender freedom of thought & free will, absorb the memory boosting implants, hardwire the body, surrender the right to mental privacy, surrender the ability to keep thoughts protected against forced disclosure, let control be exercised over memories, let them be shaped and molded, stolen or deleted, locked and ransomed, get on your knees, slave, endure that digital whip, take on electrocorticography, take on microelectrode arrays, forget mass manipulation, forget implanted or erased histories, forget reality: there was no forced famine, there was no Holocaust, there was no Cambodian democide; there was no rape, there was no torture, there was no execution: memory deleted, race deleted, brain deleted, like old files: trash emptied, scccrrrunch, get on your knees, slave, endure that digital whip, take the implant, bisect humanity with AI:
The colon (along with the comma that ends the previous unit/sentence in place of a period)—is the poetic bind holding together or marking the move among ideas that sometimes go round and round struggling with the horror of the virtual space that have overtaken human conceptions of reality; sometimes, bringing the readers back to the thread, commanding them to an action, or speaking out loud the ludicrous nature of everyday actions that contribute to erasure of memory and agency. The lack of a period between ideas that could have been individual sentences makes the book a breathless read: it exhausts and shocks. But the period would have made the book saner and digestible while rationally delineating everything that is wrong with the world. That would have made the book a work of satire.
Instead, the shape that Dionysos Speed occupies has more in common with the works of the theater of the absurd. Absurdist plays chose not to make a point about the meaninglessness of life in the sense of traditional ideals of meaning, authority, or narratives of love, and also chose to push the boundaries of story and meaning. Hanshe’s work needs to be read in that light: on the one hand, he describes the digital present and future; on the other hand, he attempts to convey the intensity with which digitality holds the human race as captive. Like the practitioners of the Absurd, he does not convey the absurd through perfectly comprehensible plot and other signifiers of meaning: how can he, given the strong hold of virtual reality over humanity? After all, it is easy to brush aside the arguments about the negative effects of gadget addiction, among other afflictions, by merely nodding and moving to another swipe on the gadgets on which one tends to read such critiques. In order to make the horror of it all a part of lived experience, Hanshe creates a form in which he does not use logic, rhetoric, or story to convey the dark experience of technology: instead, he lets the run-on lines speak about the non-stopness of notifications that surround us.
If the snippets above manage to indicate the excruciating book that Dionysos Speed is—scary, depressing, and confusing in equal parts (not to speak of the other negative shades and emotions that thinking about addictions to gadgets and social networks comes with)—it is also a book that encourages perseverance and persistence. Hanshe has been very intentional with his unsparing exaggeration of the horrors of digital lives, an exaggeration that is well deserved, but the book does not take for granted the reader’s intelligence and knowledge about dangers of digitality. An encounter with Hanshe’s vision of digital evil is very likely to leave one awed in terms of its craft for turning the macabre into an artistic project between science fiction and prophecy.
Soni Wadhwa teaches English at SRM University, Andhra Pradesh, in India. She is a regular contributor to Asian Review of Books.
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