voice enigma noise
Scrolling through random pictures on the internet I can't help but wonder what all those strangers sound like. You see, the human voice and the human face are two very simillar things. We all grow up experiencing the two at the same time, connecting both to make out the concept of human, and realizing as normal the interconnectivity of the two, and even further, the necessity of this connection. That's why babies freak out when their dads shave off the beard, and why you feel like a loser calling a sexy hot line. So, with that being said, why has it become so normal to trust people if we don't have a thing or the other, a face or a voice — or only one of the two?
I remember having this Sonic Youth poster as a kid that —, even though I could never pin it to the wall, — I loved to stare at while listening to Confusion is Sex. It featured all four members from the 90's in a really beautiful picture of a live performance, and everytime the bass kicked in The World Looks Red I would look at the picture and see Kim Gordon rocking on stage, imagining myself there, seeing her in real life, one of my biggest idols. At the time I had them all as a clear image in my head. My brain tricking me into making them out as real people since, after all, I had in hands all I needed for that: voices and faces. And it was expecting all that that I went to see them live.
There, front row, I waited for hours until they came on stage, and hated it when they eventually did. Those old rags up there were nothing like my child brain made them up to be. Of course I loved seeing them do all those tricks with the guitars and all, but the whole time it felt like something was missing, and on the car back home I couldn't sleep a wink, realizing how broken my heart actually was. The reason why is something I would only come to understand a few months later with grandpa's death, and the sudden realization that people just change over time. Eventually I came to acknowledge how sick that show was; the true value of that experience; and looking at the poster again while listening to the album made me understand the concept of memory — and the human importance in it.
Any deed in your history — anything that took part in your lifetime — must have signs of humanity somewhere, and in all of your memories it is possible to find a face and a voice somewhere as a point of origin. But recently I noticed how common it became amongst young-"modern" people, the dispensableness of human legitimacy. Yesterday I found this article about this Vtuber girl having a boyfriend, and some people that gave her dozens of thousands of dollars expecting to be their actual partner feeling cheated on. The catch is that this Vtuber thing is nothing but an animated character that someone voices over, most of the time not using their real voice, and still there's people out there who actually nurture feelings for them somehow, and spend whole life savings in an effort to get the littlest bit of attention. And if the person behind a Vtuber came out as a real life person, all those dweebs would jump off the boat in an instant, trust me. But that is, sure, one of the most extreme cases of this preferred lack of humanity. There are many more examples out there.
—id est, me. You see all this stuff I write, right?, but probably never seen my face or heard my voice. You have no idea of what I actually look like, but you might be one of the people that keep coming back and reading it anyway. This time a person came to me and said — in an e-mail — that I am much like they are, that is, in a personality perspective. I responded asking why they would think that, and the reply that came after said it was because of the feeling they get from my writings. And, well, I can understand that. I felt like I was a lot like Kim Gordon as a child, until I read her book and realized I wasn't. Later on I felt like I was a lot like Sua Yoo, and all the memories in which she was involved as a human person proved out my theory to be right. But you, who think you are like me, who think we could be friends, what guarantees you that I'm not an A.I.? That I'm not a Serbian greasy old man typing from the jail's computer lab? You shouldn't put me in any regard, because there's nothing to put in a podium, because I gave you nothing. Me, dreaming a half-hour chat at a café with Gail Ranstrom is no better then the Japanese weirdos fantasizing about the little hologram girl in their computer screens. There's a distinct difference between my near-anonymous posts to a popular newspaper column.
Finding out a — before — anonymous someone's voice or face has became such a big deal (at least for me, don't know about everybody else) that I had to ask why. Throughout most of my life there was always at least a picture to help me figure out my image of everyone. The internet has always had photos of Balzac, of Proust, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and that's why they are way more human then xXPussy_Slayer69Xx from that New Metal forum, who I actually talked to that one time. Anonimity has always been half-assed to me before I came across places like 4Chan and Reddit and random blogs about Taxidermy on the internet. But now almost everything I see here is anonymous, and what isn't, despite the lack of limitation (compared to the previous examples) still shows a half-assed kind of anonimity; as a face with no voice, as a voice with no face.
That is the cause for my lack of new stories when I spend too much time inside, id est when I got sick a few days ago. I can't produce memories looking at a blue screen, I can't feel embraced by a "virtual hug"; I can't care about your 10-day stay at whatever rehab, person I don't even know the name. Nothing virtual really matters to me, for some reason, unless I actually know the person, unless I capture the humanity and understand the value — of whatever it is — inside a memory. But the real question is, shouldn't that just be normal? Shouldn't a preference for reality, for the social, be commonplace everywhere? Half-assed anonimity is an enigma, a whodunit, but not exactly that much fun from a minimalist perspective. and I'll stop writing here because I'm hungry, maybe edit it later.