Manufactured Obsolescence
Joanna Ruocco
I am
tired of reading stories where a single thought, a woman’s thought, generates a
whole system of thoughts. The woman
thinks her thought through and the story is just this thinking through of the
thought. Sometimes there is a little
framing material external to the thought.
The woman is sitting at her desk, her desk at home. She is the kind of woman who sits at a desk
at home, a woman without a regular job, an unobligated woman, a woman like me,
only I sit at the kitchen table. I like
to eat snacks when I am sitting. It
bothers me to have food where it does not belong, on my desk; however, it does
not bother me to have a computer on the kitchen table, or papers, or pens, or a
stapler, or scissors, so I sit with these things and also food at the kitchen
table. It bothers me to have coins on a
kitchen table, and coins on a desk do not bother me, but I can sit without
coins nearby.
The
woman sitting at the desk is writing, or filing bills, or reading the small
booklet she found attached to the cap of her moisturizer, and then she begins
to think, or else she is sitting thinking, doing nothing, and either way, the
material world external to the thought slowly becomes part of the thought, and
the woman, thinking, becomes part of the thought, and so do the skin bumps the
moisturizer would otherwise relieve with extra-rich emollients. The skin bumps are part of a system of
thought, and the woman no longer needs the moisturizer. The skin bumps are at the same level of
thought as the skin and, therefore, the skin is smooth. Of course only the woman, thinking at her
desk, finds this to be true. As soon as
she leaves her house, her skin is not smooth.
She has bumps, her hair has thinned, her teeth are stained, her figure
is not tidy, the clothing she wears emphasizes her displeasing proportions, she
smells like her cat and like the scalded milk she feeds to her cat, a musty,
souring smell, and this is how she appears to others: awkward, rumpled,
stinky. She can’t appear to herself;
that’s not how eyes work. She can only
appear to others. This is good for the
woman: to appear to others and not herself.
It works like this:
Say
the woman sees another woman exiting a bungalow across the street. The bungalow is even less lofty, less
imposing than the average bungalow. It’s
a below-average bungalow in every way.
One story, no porch, no dormers.
The woman is pretty sure it’s off plumb.
It is a crooked shack on a patchy dog-pitted quarter lot, but there are
no shacks in the woman’s neighborhood, so, no, it is a below-average
bungalow. The woman exiting the bungalow
is hard-working and well-groomed. She
doesn’t sit at a desk in her bedroom.
She has bills to pay and a body to maintain. Her hair is dark. Her scalp is clean. She takes care of business, this woman. No one has given her any breaks in life but
she is smart, ambitious, attractive, and willing to put in extra hours. She makes her own luck. There she goes, exiting the bungalow, walking
fast, no time to waste, even though her footwear is impractical, worse than
impractical—constrictive, steeply pitched highly unstable platforms limiting
blood flow to the toes and stressing the muscles of the lower back, the sort of
footwear that might be confused with an implement of torture if described by an
anthropologist unfamiliar with the culture—and she’s eating a handful of
almonds as she walks. This woman can’t appear
to herself any more than the first woman can appear to herself. She strides down the sidewalk and she appears
to the other woman, the horse-faced, cat-smelling woman who has exited her
adorable Victorian and who now appears to her.
Each is the appearance of woman for the other.
The
woman whose thought generates this story does not have to worry about taking
care of her own body. She does not have
to worry about grooming, dieting, exercising, dressing, because she understands
that the other woman is the form of her appearance in the world. She has gotten the better end of the
deal. Her system of thought has subsumed
the world, and in that world the other woman presents the toned body that gives
her flabby body form. It isn’t
fair. The woman whose thought generates
this story doesn’t do any work. That’s
the class bias of philosophy.
In
this kind of story, that’s a conclusion. That’s the end of the story. It’s over.
I’m tired. Okay.
Weather.com
Joanna Ruocco
The temperature that allows you to go about not noticing you are
naked is the most perfect temperature and then less perfect are the
temperatures that allow you to go about noticing you are naked, sticky or
shivery but not instantly heat stricken and dehydrated or frostbitten and
hypothermic or even profoundly uncomfortable, and then less perfect than these
temperatures are the temperatures that allow you to go about in some kind of
covering, a cotton layer or a denim layer or a wool layer, or some combination
of these layers, and then less perfect than these temperatures are the
temperatures that allow you to go about in highly engineered versions of these
coverings, lightweight heat-wicking breathable polymer layers, or insulating
heat-trapping chemically-treated semi-permeable but waterproof layers, and
unfortunately you can’t just look outside and gauge the perfection of the
temperature based on other peoples’ nakedness or level of coverings like you
could before legal and ethical and aesthetic systems were developed to regulate
peoples’ nakedness, as though nakedness did not vary, historically, with
temperature, as though nakedness has nothing to do with temperature and has
some sort of meaning in and of itself.
These days nakedness is bad, so even if the temperature is
perfect, you will see people with coverings, cotton and denim layers, the kinds
of coverings that might once have indicated a slightly imperfect temperature, a
dank wind too bracing for bare skin.
However, semi-nakedness is good, so even if the temperature is quite
imperfect, significantly flawed, requiring the use of highly engineered
coverings—for example, it is a wicked frost-biting temperature—you will see
people inadequately covered, people covered by one cotton layer, or a satin
layer, or a spandex layer, shaking violently and rubbing their palms on their
arms behind the red velvet ropes on the sidewalk outside the nightclub. These days we can’t rely on people. We must rely on the internet to tell us the
current imperfection of the temperature, and the chances of its perfectibility
over the weekend, over 3 additional days, or over 10 days, though the
information made available by the internet for temperature during the outer 7
days of the 10 day range is often disparaged because it rarely pertains to
specific perceptible manifestations of temperature in that time period and so
is really just a placeholder for the idea of temperature in general. We’ve all learned that temperature is the
motions of the particles that constitute matter, and we all assume that matter
will continue to exist, not forever perhaps, but for 10 days certainly, and so
the idea of temperature in general being around us and in us doesn’t add to our
ability to prepare for the future, because it only tells us there is a future and we’re all preparing for
that anyway, the idea of it, that is, generally.
Nonetheless I like to look at all 10 days in the predicted future
of temperature that are made available to me on the internet. Sometimes I look at the 10 days of the
predicted future of temperature several times an hour. I also look at other things. People are free to be naked inside their
houses because houses are private and different legal, ethical, and aesthetic
standards apply in the private versus public domain. If you look through peoples’ windows the
peoples’ nakedness or level of covering will let you gauge the perfection of
the temperature, but only inside those peoples’ houses, where the temperature
is also private and has nothing to do with the temperature outside the houses
or inside any other house, however close by.
Knowing how perfect the temperature is inside other peoples’ houses does
not tell you how to prepare for anything but entering those peoples’ houses,
and legal and ethical regulations are in place to prevent that. Here’s another thing: because temperature is the motions of the
particles that constitute matter, if you move around vigorously temperature
changes and in this way you can adjust the perfection of the temperature, by
moving more, or moving less, vigorously.
Across the street from my house, there is a house and I have
observed a girl dancing in her bedroom in the house. She dances naked and this is her way of
adjusting the temperature without using coverings. I know that if I entered her house I would
have to wear coverings or I would have to dance as vigorously as she dances,
quite vigorously, bouncing and undulating and shoving the air and also elbowing
the air and then pummeling the air. I
want very badly to enter her house but the one time she saw me through her
window as I stood looking at her though my window she ducked down and the light
in her window went out. I turned out my
light too and stood again at my window but my eyes did not adjust sufficiently
to make her out through the darkness between and in our houses. It is more exciting to adjust temperature
with motions instead of coverings and she understands that and so do I but we
are forced to make motions separately, each in her private realm, because to
each other we are public people, strangers, and the regulations about nakedness
and entering apply.
Sometimes I dance vigorously in the night behind my illuminated
window. I look at her dark window and
hope that she will turn her light on and dance vigorously, and I dance so
vigorously that the temperature in my house becomes imperfect, so far from
perfect that I need to be even more naked than naked to continue the vigor of
my motions. I need to remove the top
layer of my nakedness. I need to cut my skin, just the lightweight, tough outer
covering, slide off the covering, and keep dancing, pummeling the air, for her,
because she is there, watching, in the darkness in her house, dancing in the
darkness, to make it perfect. I begin by
cutting vents in my skin, at the armpits, groin, knees, leaving the covering in
place, because, cutting, I dance less vigorously. I keep dancing, but I have to
sway instead of bounce, cut instead of pummel, and the temperature adjusts so
that I no longer need to remove the whole layer; it’s perfect with the
perforated layer, that is, until I stop cutting and start dancing, really
dancing, vigorously. Her window is dark,
but there is motion behind the glass.
The girl is pressed to the glass, bumping the glass with her hip or her
fist. The girl is gleaming behind the
glass. The window is filled with her, a
dark shining. The window reveals
her. The glass is slick and backed by
this quivering. Like me, the girl needs
it, a deeper nakedness. She needs to
open more widely to the private temperature she has perfected, dancing,
cutting, watching. I see the flash of
her palms on the pane. When I am too
tired to dance, I twist myself in the curtains.
They spot all over and stick, drying in place like a part of me, a
smocked layer of organdy not unlike a sundress, which any girl would be proud
to wear outside.
Joanna Ruocco co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal, with Brian Conn. She is the author of The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press), Man's Companions (Tarpaulin Sky Press), A Compendium of Domestic Incidents (Noemi Press), and Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych (FC2), and DAN (Dorothy). Toni Jones, her more athletic alter ego, recently released her first novel, No Secrets in Spandex, from Crimson Romance.
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