Hearts and Technics
Behind me is the sound of an air conditioner. The pitches waft between 130hz and 500hz exactly as they did when it exited its box in 2002. Back in 2002 my childhood bedroom smelled like fresh paint, blue and the hum of a ceiling fan so constant. A pull chain swung below. I was in seventh or eighth grade, the years blend together and are harder to track over time. I can still smell paint.
Machines have their own voices. Listen to a VCR and you’ll recognize every small mechanical whorl of its moving parts. Scanners are similar but a little more vulgar, break easier. Today it is 2024 and I had to print my current lover’s piece about human trafficking she was to read while being tied up by another woman in front of an audience. The printer scanner I brought was shattered inside. It was a gift from my previous lover’s mother. Life is a daisy chain of mechanical traumas, molecular engines, spinal catastrophism.
Of all appliances, air conditioners are special. Aside from the Freon, they’re built to last. You can still use the same one that has been running for twenty years, more so if you take good care of it. Some people are very bad at identifying things of value. They throw out more air conditioners than they do magazines.
This air-conditioner is special. It was the one in my, specifically middle school bedroom. I remember being anxious about seventh grade girlfriends next to it, reading summer reading books next to it, putting up band posters next to it. The machine is one of the things I am most grateful for.
Behind me is the sound of an air conditioner. I am wide awake in my May 2024 Brooklyn bedroom with my current incarnation of love. She is sleeping deeply, the effects of a what did not turn into another two or three day drug bender. Across this bedroom is my first physical object, a bear given to me when I was a newly born infant. But even Brown Bear doesn’t have the visceral sentiment that the air conditioner does. The machine behind me is potent. It screams. It has a voice. It says what I can’t. I lie down deeper next to my current lover knowing the hum of the machine is better at matching my pitches than I can. Like most Freon air conditioners, it shifts between a high cool and a low cool cycles. The floor lamp flickers when it shifts, as does my rapid elevated resting heart rate. The heart is like a machine. It flickers like the floor lamp. A stopgap between the sensation of upper induced heart attack and the full knowledge as casted through the Akasha itself that I’ve tapped into an external vibe, that my insides are laced with snake venom, that my bone marrow is just starting to produce what will eventually be called osteosarcoma. I can feel it. There is a term for heart cancer but I don’t remember. It’s something. Something that feels like what I imagine an air conditioner breaking down feels like. Inside rust and the slow drop of ammonia out of bird droppings mirror the many multiple and highly caustic small slashes that that can bear down on the heart machine. Like the other machine, the air conditioner, I’ve forgotten why or how the pain persists. All I know is that it’s there but I’ve forgotten how to describe it. Perhaps language doesn’t work anymore. I’ve moved beyond Wittgensteinian capacity to explain anything. I’ve called it a “creeping dread” something Biblical prophets or millenarians must’ve felt when they were certain the world was going to end. The air conditioner speaks truths I am not ready to accept. She is lying.
I lie down and let the hum bridge the space between the now and the origin. I know nothing about the machine can help me. I can detach, remove, check out. When the next indignation comes, the sound intervals of my tinnitus are like the air conditioner hum. Like an Ohm, they’re meditation mantras. This isn’t uncommon. I’ve done this my entire life. People talk a lot about ketamine now. I mastered its effects when I was four years old. Take a moment after sadness, a beating perhaps, something distant. Even as a young child, you can dissociate. Dissociation’s versions take many forms. My mother used to tell me to use my imagination when I sat alone. The truth is, these vistas can take you to many ports and many entryways. You can sit in classroom corner, or deeper, a car, a battlefield, your shared bedroom with your lover, and leave entirely. There are ways you can enter spaces untraveled by most men or women. You don’t need drugs to exit your moment. Merely blink your eyes, listen to the tinnitus tone in your ear, and escape.
I don’t know how to describe what I know. I don’t know how to describe it without feeling split. My mother used to change narratives around me. Insist things did not happen that did or the opposite. Reality was freeform to the inner experience of her whims. If I argued she contradicted. If I tried to understand I came to doubt my thoughts. I pursue a form of total truth. A form, perhaps Pythagorean to approach truth in terms of information and shape and geometry. It must transcend language. It must exist as objectivity. Only there can I find a model of life that transcends the most base of materialism. Truth is a linguistic concept. Truth is a resonance frequency.
AGI is linear algebra. Volumetric integrals are alchemy, witchcraft. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for performing derivatives. Truth is the slow hum of machine noise. Truth is the bite marks and bruises on my lover’s legs when she comes back from the third day of a bender, no communication back. Truth is the whispers and rumors between would be or old friends in a room. Truth is the wide eyed gorgon smile and glint of malevolence in eyes that look deeply into your own and turn your heart itself into stone. Truth is repeated wounds, each deeper than the last from directions as through mist, the smell of her body odors like lilac and the seeds of other lovers.
Cormac McCarthy mastered the art of capturing man’s technics. A hunter knows his path through a shell casing, a broken tree root, the smell of deer musk. The doomed protagonist follows his arc through the electric feedback of incandescent lightbulbs, muffler clicks, and air conditioner compressor shifts. If women track their lives through lovers, men track their lives through objects. Truth is the slow hum of machine noise. Truth is an air conditioner from 2002.