Date: Mon, 29 May 2000
From: Paul Ford
Subject: Scamper Advice Column: Advice Needed
Dear Scamper Advice Staff,
It first happened when I watched a television advertisement for Nissan cars and instead of reacting to the commercial as a whole product, I imagined the team of copywriters who worked on it, the broadcast designers, sound designers, voice over artists, all striving hundreds of hours in their unique disciplines to craft a 30-second product which they assumed would cohere before the eyes of viewers like me.
But it didn't. It simply splintered into its different aspects: sound, image, motion, rhetoric, salesmanship, language, voice. I looked at the wall and saw paint over plaster over brick made from clay dug from the ground created by the earth's relentless ecological grinding of its minerals, formed from heat, formed from starstuff; I opened a book and saw Goudy or Garamond or Times New Roman arranged into confusing patterns, and when I backed my eyes away and saw the page as a whole, I perceived only blocks of grayness formed from the variate repetition of selected letters, like a photo made from tiny dots in a newspaper. Where before the forests had congealed from multivariate trees, I saw only the trees, and the trees split into repeated, recursive patterns assembled from brown bark and green leaves, and each of those components split into cellulose, into cells with nuclei, mitochondrial threads like those in a biology textbook, and so on smaller, until I saw quanta spinning wildly. I do not /understand/ biology or quantum physics; I just know that they exist, and to consider them in ignorance traps my mind, and I can't get back up and out.
Still for a time I was able to think and interact, but every conversation degenerated into an ignorant analysis of rhetorical constructions and linguistic patterns, and the sonority of the speaker's voice. Every chain of thought play-acted Zeno's paradox, as I went halfway to a conclusion, and half again, and then again, always dividing my analysis in two to find another discipline, another body of knowledge a thousand books tall and a million books wide, waiting with all possible conclusions hidden inside of it. My apartment became a filthy mess; I couldn't see the difference between order and structure, and I rested on a bed filled with books, clothing, papers, my vision narrowed to a centimeter's aperture, my auditory responses trained on single word.
Still I was alive and could even still work, with great effort, until I picked the long mirror from the floor where it had fallen over a month ago and stared at my face in it, my body split by a crack. I witnessed there that what had happened to my world had now happened to me. I was absolutely without personality, without an identifying self. The identity that formed me - the pressures, guilts, angers, affections - had evaporated. The self I had perceived for most of my life was burst into thousands of tiny sections of individuality, rolling around like animacules shaking in a waterdrop, caught in the fever of Brownian motion, absolutely unwilling to cohere.
And this brings me to my question for you. All of this division and subdivision has impaired my faculties for logical decisions, and it has become impossible to decide what films to rent on Thursday and Friday evenings. In my prison of reduction, I am forced to choose rental films based on the quality of the print production on the video boxes. I have thus seen "The First Wives Club," "McBain," and "Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace," each of which had excellent 4-color box printing, one with reflective inks, and the foul quality of each has sent my animacules of despair reeling. Please suggest a pathway out of this terrible theater in which I find myself trapped. How can I choose which films are worth seeing when my aperture is only one centimeter wide?
Thank you, Scamper Advice Staff.
Paul Ford
Paul Ford,
The challenges before you, Mr. Ford, are banal. That's what we thought when we first read your plaintive screed. However, we were soon to be proven wrong.
Questions to scamper.com are immediately directed to our hungry team of scientists, and your own verbose offering was no exception. No, what was exceptional was the response of the scientists to your letter. Rather than actively hampering resolution, willfully compromising security or cleaning their instruments to masturbatory excess, your letter instead stirred their imaginations. We began to hear such phrases as "dissociative abstractionist dysphoria" bandied about excitedly during scientist lunch breaks. But this excitement was short-lived, and soon the general mood took a decidedly dark turn. What had first appeared to be another case of psychological misfortune - your own, Mr. Ford - now looked more like the symptom of some malign truth manifesting itself through the diaphanous gossamer of reality.
As a child we would often imagine ourselves to be hollow, plodding giants, our eyes observatory windows lined with onlookers. We would observe our deliberate movements abstractly: through our eyes, yes, but removed from the process. We are reminded of that time now.
Several weeks ago, with the scientists now dissecting the evidence at hand, and our elite force of detectives scouring the field for more, we were able to catch up on some much-needed rest. Dreams then: shadowy figures asking us what defined our world. We responded: Reinforcement through persistence, which allows for assumption, instinct, objectivity. Without these things, we lose the basis for our understanding of our perceptions. The shadows stirred: But what then when you find yourselves faced with a truth you are not prepared to assimilate into your world view? How do you maintain composure when you find woven into the tapestry of truth a thread of some alternate truth?
 |
Death. Conservatism. Denial. All are the contemptible children born of such a pairing.
Still, we think now, in the latter case there remains the possibility of acceptance and understanding. It is for this reason that we write to you now. Do not deny what you are seeing. You must resist the urge - for you will feel it - to turn away. Do not turn away. No. Look now and face your truth.
We ask you this, unfortunately, in the wake of the scientists' exodus [fig. 1]. For, leaving their documents and modeling clay behind, they effected their escape as we lay sleeping one afternoon. We'll spare you the account of our emotional state and resultant savagery upon discovering this betrayal and present to you now what we believe to be the upshot of their findings.
Among the most persuasive pieces of evidence is a thumbprint of yours lifted from the underside of a a toilet bowl [fig. 2], one with which you are, it would seem, on intimate terms. This print, collected by our eager-to-please detectives, was immediately sent to the scientists, who obsessed over it for a period of five days. Using techniques we can only barely grasp, the scientists were able to resolve the original print into something which can only be described as an additional print [fig. 3].
 |
 |
This additional print was the catalyst that sent the scientists into a kind of waking fugue, for clearly it was not wholly organic. They refused both both snacks and naps as they drew closer to some unifying truth. Poring over their notes now, it is evident that a devolution occurred that escalated in proportion to the amount of evidence they had to work with. But at the same time their hunger for more evidence intensified, and they requested that forensics begin to collect skin and hair samples. The results of the scientists' analyses were something for which they had not prepared themselves.
 |
Using a scanning tunneling microscope they analyzed cells deftly collected from the inner lining of your eyelids [fig. 4]. By this time the lab floor had become a blur of activity, and their work habits deteriorated. Their notes became disorganized, and scuffles broke out. On the third day of the third week one of the scientists became feral and started urinating on other scientists. Not knowing whether these acts were merely a ploy to gain our attention, we maintained an aloof, distant disposition that we'd learned from ex lovers. The scientists spent the bulk of the third week refining the data they'd amassed. Using methods which would be abusive even to relate to other scientists, our team was finally able to resolve their first micrograph into an accurate image [fig. 5]. This was to be the last piece of evidence delivered to us.
 |
The papers accompanying this last item refer to it repeatedly it as a "hyper-advanced cell-depleting nanoprojector." Apparently each of the cells in your body, Paul Ford, has been conscripted by a force yet unknown to serve one of two roles.
The first is to bombard your sensory receptors with artificial stimuli, creating for you a waking, sleeping, lifetime virtual construction that you believe to be the outside world as it truly exists. This is actually not much different from the perceptions of someone who has been socked in the groin with a broom handle after making a derogatory comment about a construction worker while taking his photograph [fig. 6].
The second role, one we find particularly unnerving, is to project to those around you - friends, family, sycophants and passers by alike - a false representation of yourself through all five senses.
 |
We don't pretend to understand the dynamics or logistics involved with this, and neither do we know why you've been placed under the aegis of these malign entities. But we do put our full trust into the deductive abilities of our rogue pack of escaped, disloyal scientists as we conclude that nothing you know is, in fact, true.
Bearing this in mind, we propose that you rent the following movies about love, tragedy and the tragedy of love: The Remains of the Day, The Piano, Angel Baby, Carrington and Breaking the Waves. The designs on the video boxes for these movies is nothing to inform the mothership about, but the movies themselves will, at least, pitch you safely into melancholia.
-scamper.org