Andrei Codrescu

Dear Meat
December 21, 2021 Codrescu Andrei

Dear Meat:

What’s your point?

Yes, you were ahead of your time when you presented your dystopia to the class, but nobody applauded. That was one hundred + years ago. It was hubris. It was the same hubris that propels you now, but it is no longer prescience or vision, it is just kvetch.

Your body got there along every other body, though yours is experiencing extreme ennui. Been there — in my mind. There is a bitter-sweet quality to retrovisionary ennui. If anything, one-way meat was always planned obsolescence.

Look at me now: I move, I sing, I fuck, and I feel no pain. And I don’t have just one body, I have many, of every sex, color and dimension. What do you mean it doesn’t smell? See that little icon of a huffing nose with expanded nostrils on the right side of your screen? Push it and the effluvia menu pops up. Smell to die for wafts out. You’re in the bubble bath of infinity smelling like a rare orchid or a vile cabbage turd. When you had your meat-body you never had such olfactory possibilities. Here are one million orgasms impossible in meat-space. Death has been abolished.

When you move into the virtual world, you don’t need much. No clothes, no furniture, no shoes, no school. You simply walk into the blidingly white screen holding your tablet. When meat dies the memory of you stays behind within the meat-memory of those who knew you. They will soon follow, tablets clutched like genitals at an army physical.

When your meat body dies, you won’t: there will be enough copies to elimnate the embarassment of regret — as a copy reaches another copy there is no need for tears. I am you.

Our lives, as narrated by enginners, are a still unsophisticated now. The will get better when they bots will understand neurally how we think. My first reality-replacement was the light-switch in our apartment: I turned it on and it wasn’t night anymore. I lived with that all my meat-life, keeping two realities in mind simultaneously: it was night and it was day, too, it was dark and it was light at the same time. The reality-replacing machine made things interesting. For animals it is always dark at night — unless they live with us.

There is no such thing as an avant-garde body, only a mind located in meat.

Suicide is the only avantgarde. With the flesh gone, we live forever.

 

haifa

it’s amazing how little ennui I’m capable of
just one unstimulating day though pleasant
i’m climbing the built-by-my-inability-to-drink wall
on the other side are three countries at war and a placid sea
how much of the emptiness around is filled
by others who must feel even emptier
when I count the steps of the baha’i gardens
within missile range israel is my age
it’s all the things I am minus US citizenship
if there is a place to be serious this may be it

Andrei Codrescu (www.codrescu.com) has been a commentator on All Things Considered since 1983. He is an homme-de-lettres whose novels, essays and poetry have been infiltrating the American psyche since he emigrated from his native Romania to Detroit in 1965. He is the author of forty books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and the founder of Exquisite Corpse. He has received a Peabody award for the PBS version of his film Road Scholar, and has reported for NPR and ABC News from Romania (1989) and Cuba (1996). His new books are The Poetry Lesson,(Princeton) and Bibliodeath: My Archives (with Life in Footnotes) (Antibookclub).