To Be Where Your Feet Are, Most of the Time
A cyberpunk noir and a shaggy drunk tale both try to tell the dancer from the dance
Slainte, creatures! In this edition, two novels with a common theme I really didn’t expect.
My prayer cycle reached the 1990s, and so I picked up a book first published in 1987 but which I encountered during those late middle-school, early high-school cyberpunk years, when I wore jeans with electric wires duct-taped to them (my mother banned these jeans) and a light switch around my neck. Pat Cadigan’s Mindplayers is a fun SF noir in which a drifting lowlife chick nicknamed “Deadpan Allie” gets out of jail by taking a job delving into artists’ psyches via machines that allow direct mind-to-mind contact.
Mindplayers is dreamscapey, full of fizzy little futuristic details (“Onionhead marriage is about as weird as you can get without drugs”) and punny, heavily symbolic imagery. I enjoy this book differently every time I read it. Last time I noticed how much it’s about marriage; it’s a comedy of remarriage, sort of. And this time I saw that the marriage theme is related to the worry about identity: Most of the book is about fearing that you’re either too many people, or not enough. In a future where you can buy a “franchised personality” or rent out your memories, how can you be a stable enough entity to promise yourself to anybody? “Human beings have a tendency to rewrite reality,” Allie muses, as she works with a musician who split up with his longtime composing partner. “I don’t love you anymore would become I never loved you to begin with; it’s no good now so that means it never was.” How do you achieve union with somebody who stays distinct from you, instead of just one of you eating the other?
That’s a mystical question, lol it’s the Trinity as well as marriage, and Mindplayers works best when it’s hinting at the mystical elements of the self/psyche instead of trying to explain the mechanics. There’s a bit where Allie wonders whether it’s true that “mindplayers” are unusually mystical. I don’t know what Cadigan intended there—maybe she meant that mystical people would be more comfortable with the shifting boundaries of the self, or even the dissolution of the psyche. But what it made me think of was the mysticism inherent in taking the body seriously. To treat the mind as the locus of identity is unstable: memories are quicksand, states of consciousness alter all the time, we have bad proprioception of the psyche and we project ourselves all over everything we see; nobody ever knows what they’re choosing or how freely, so the person who pays the piper rarely feels like the one who called the tune. To locate identity in the body (that churning surf of cells) is to trust something beyond experience.
Well, and at the same time I was reading Roddy Doyle’s latest novel, Love. This great shaggy book has a pint of Guinness on the cover, the dark body of the drink topped with what the narrator at one point calls the “collar”: the booze as priest. Love it. I loved this book! It’s about a man on a pub crawl with an old friend, and the old friend tells him about an encounter with a long-lost love and how it broke up his marriage—but also how it seemed to open an alternate timeline for him, an alternate history where he had always been married to the lost Jessica. He expresses his conviction that this alternate timeline has some kind of reality by saying he might even be the biological father of Jessica’s grown son.
But this is only one of Love’s portals into a new life: the pub, where the narrator becomes a man; fatherhood, and the death of a man’s own father; the frailty of the body and specifically the brain; emigration and return, the past somehow there and not there when you come back to where you left it. The reality of the place you left, which went on without you, feels like its own alternate timeline, as if around the next corner you might run into the version of you that stayed.
It’s also a book about whether our identity—and therefore our ability to love—is located in memory, thought, dream, psyche, or more bluntly in the body. I don’t want to make the book sound ideological. I think it does answer that question, but in a way that is clearly the provisional judgment of the narrator, a particular man’s response to the life he’s handed down to himself.
I could quote a few different kinds of passage from Love. There’s plenty of the ragged rhythm of increasingly-drunk conversation, the staggering from aggression to sincerity. There’s the lyricism of alcohol also, though less frequently:
We were sober again. It was early winter, afternoon. The sky was clear and the sun was making blocks of yellow and grey—the last few hours before night, the perfect time for drinking.
There’s Irish cultural commentary, which I do not feel competent to assess except to say that I was both charmed and indignant to read a book slagging off Ven. Matt Talbot! Do you know how many lives that preposterous penitent has saved?
But I think I’ll close with this. Again, I don’t mean this hymn to the life of the body polemically. But it’s getting at something real:
Five years ago—about five years ago—we were sitting beside each other, half watching something on the television. The ads came on and there was one in particular, warning the viewer of the perils of unprotected sex. Immediately, I felt it—I was in our flat in Dublin, with Faye, in bed. Doing something dangerous and wonderful, together. Making up our lives—our life.
I turned to look at Faye, and she’d already turned to me. We said nothing and we kissed, and adjusted our older selves on the couch to face each other.
—Unprotected sex, Faye.
I held her face.
—It was the making of us, so it was.
She held mine.
Guinness with Roman collar via Wikimedia Commons.