Video Hell

The omnipresent rectangle rises before us all spurting rows of carefully ordered light and sound. I rarely touch the face of it, revering it like a statue in the darkened interior of a shrine with smoke from ceremonially lit incense sticks hanging sideways in the air as the striated atmosphere of Jupiter or another giant planet tuned to a scrambled channel. But even the static is digital now, to be more comprehensible. Everything takes place there in the rectangle. The space between those sharp borders and the ovoid retinal form is discarded, like newspaper with the headlining picture cut out. I had forgotten that the eye’s image is devoid of corners, that it ends at an indistinct fuzzy boundary always just out of reach. I struck my hand on one of those corners once, and it stung me like an animal, fearful for the pixels gestating inside it waiting to be born through the narrow canals of my optic nerves. I was already dilated 5 millimeters, having shut off all other sources of light in the house that loomed over me in gray obeisance to the flashing glare of the screen like the nebulous mane of a new sun crushing chance atoms into arrhythmic bursts of radiation irritating the surrounding blank space with unexpected being. Dilating further, my pupils bulge open and the painful contractions begin while the hypnotic epidural takes hold higher and higher up the spine, rendering the limbs and torso limp and useless while the forebrain remembers the taste of oblivion as it churns through the rest of the hemispheres silently and regularly. Images are born in quick succession, taking shape along narrative lines of force that emanate powerfully from deep structures in the brain, aligning chaotic light and sound into neat arcs of exchanged dialogue, allowing for discrete absences of space and time, and associating logos and behaviors with ancient cultural values and schemes to maximize reproductive activity. The screen never shuts off, though the limbs return to joyless motion. It suckles on the visual cortex as an afterimage, replacing perception itself with its broad rectangular haze, as the sun’s perfect light withers in the loose scraps of retina bordering its sharp angles, still brilliant, but tossed aside.