Before Eleanor, Jean was the only woman who had truly touched me. She was my first love and you only get one of those, no matter how long you live. To my lasting shame and regret, it was I who had driven her away. I was too full of myself in those early days, too wonderful for my own good.
I spent about a year with my new toys creating works about Jean while trying to uncover my theme. I sped through a number of motifs: unexpected attraction, energetic eroticism, identification with the body, jealousy, spooky union, fights, obsession/compulsion, self-hatred. Eventually, I realized I was attempting to re-create a young man’s palette. And though that makes sense—Jean and I had been young then—now I was old.
This realization only spurred my efforts. I was deeply engaged in the hunt. My former routine was in shambles. I left it to Skippy to send me food every few hours in case I was hungry. I lay down on the nearest couch whenever sleep overcame me. It was almost like the good old days.
As I zeroed in on my vision, I eliminated media that didn’t seem to serve my purpose. Rejected were the iteration sequencers, photonic wax, and gene splicers, the robotics, and most of the holography equipment. Eventually, I narrowed my media down to one old one and one new. I decided to do a rather conventional, flat portrait of Jean in oil paints. For this I even retrieved from storage some of my beloved old boar-hair and sable brushes.
The new medium I chose was an organic gestalt compiler of the sort used to record emotive slices for hollyholo sims, like your Jason and Alison across the way.
The very first time I set brush to canvas, a title for the piece popped into my head. I would call it “Her Secret Wound.”
Well now, I thought, I wonder what that means. What wound? Why secret? I didn’t have a clue, so I mixed some browns and umbers with thinner and set about firing off quick sketches on paper to try to discover Jean’s secret wound.
I hadn’t handled a brush in over a century, and I had to relearn how to paint, but it came back, and soon I was knocking out little story boards of our ancient life together. The ups and downs, the miracles of understanding and the betrayals. After two months of this, I picked up my head one day and saw it: the wound was actually my own, not hers. The wound was loneliness.
What is loneliness, Myren Vole? I am speaking of the garden variety, the kind we all encounter. No matter how wrapped up we are in our lover’s embrace, it manages to slither in for a short stay now and then, eh?
In truth, there’s not much to say about loneliness, for it’s not a broad subject. Any child, alone in her room, can journey across its entire breadth, from border to border, in an hour.
Though not broad, our subject is deep. Loneliness is deeper than the ocean. But here, too, there is no mystery. Our intrepid child is liable to fall quickly to the very bottom without even trying. And since the depths of loneliness cannot sustain human life, the child will swim to the surface again in short order, no worse for wear.
Some of us, though, can bring breathing aids down with us for longer stays: imaginary friends, drugs and alcohol, mind-numbing entertainment, hobbies, ironclad routine, and pets. (Pets are some of the best enablers of loneliness, your own cuddle-some Murphy notwithstanding.) With the help of these aids, a poor sap can survive the airless depths of loneliness long enough to experience its true horror—duration.
Did you know, Myren Vole, that when presented with the same odor (even my own) for a duration of only several minutes, the olfactory nerves become habituated—as my daughter used to say—to it and cease transmitting its signal to the brain?
Likewise, most pain loses its edge over time. Time heals all—as they say. Even the loss of a loved one, perhaps life’s most wrenching pain, is blunted in time. It recedes into the background where it can be borne with lesser pains. Not so our friend loneliness, which grows only more keen and insistent with each passing hour. Loneliness is as needle sharp now as it was an hour ago, or last week.
But if loneliness is the wound, what’s so secret about it? I submit to you, Myren Vole, that the most painful death of all is suffocation by loneliness. And by the time I started on my portrait of Jean, I was ten years into it (with another five to go). It is from that vantage point that I tell you that loneliness itself is the secret. It’s a secret you cannot tell anyone. Why?
Because to confess your loneliness is to confess your failure as a human being. To confess would only cause others to pity and avoid you, afraid that what you have is catching. Your condition is caused by a lack of human relationship, and yet to admit to it only drives your possible rescuers farther away (while attracting cats).
So, you attempt to hide your loneliness in public, to behave, in fact, as though you have too many friends already, and thus you hope to attract people who will unwittingly save you. But it never works that way. Your condition is written all over your face, in the hunch of your shoulders, in the hollowness of your laugh. You fool no one.
Believe me in this; I’ve tried all the tricks of the lonely man.
THANK YOU, VICTOR. I was parched. Now, where was I?
I had my media, my subject, and my title. I set myself to work. I mixed shredded processor felt with my oils and painted a life-size portrait of Jean. This took half a year to get right, but when I was finished, it was, in my humble opinion, sublime. Jean’s expression was sweet and sad—just as I remembered her.
Satisfied with the base painting, I began to layer on semitransparent washes of refractive oils to create a sense of depth and motion. It wasn’t exactly holographic; it was still only two-dimensional, but as the viewer’s eyes moved across it, Jean’s image seemed to tremble with life, seemed to breathe and blink, as though she were right there, holding her pose behind the frame.
It was terrific. I loved it. Yet I knew my real work had yet to begin. I had embedded all of that blank processor felt in the paint, and it was time to give Jean her secret wound.
There was enough felt in the paint to supply the canvas with an index of 1.50 or 1.75 on today’s mentar scale. That is, of about the same mental complexity of my Skippy at the time. I could have initialized the painting with a personality bud and thinking noetics and used it as another valet. But instead I wanted to imprint it with a single emotion.
Now, Justine, I don’t know how much you know about sim holography, but those hollyholo sims you enjoy watching are special hybrids. When you cast a sim of yourself (or proxy, for that matter), the simcaster takes a precise picture of your entire brain state at that moment. A slice, if you will, or a gestalt map. This is sufficient to model a software brain that can think. But feelings, unlike thought, are epiphenomena of brain states, and there is only one brain state mapped in your slice, one that captures what you were feeling the moment you press the cast button.
Am I losing you? Please bear with me. I only mean to say that your sim or proxy is capable of feeling only one emotion, the emotion that you, yourself, were feeling when you cast it. So, how do the hollyholos you enjoy watching seem to experience a wide range of emotion? This is made possible by casting millions of slices and stringing them together in emotive cascades. The novella actors who cast these hollyholos spend most of their time sitting in studio booths emoting on command, over and over again: I am happy, I am sad, I am ecstatic, I am miserable—a broad spectrum—and all the while staying in character! (I suppose they earn the fortunes they’re paid.)