Players [1] – Watching Television
23 février 2008, 14:46, par Tlön
–Alfredo Jarr, Lament of the Image, 2002
Lyle passed time watching television. Sitting in near darkness about eighteen inches from the screen, he turned the channel selector every half minute or so, sometime much more frequently. He wasn’t looking for something that might sustain his interest. Hardly that. He simply enjoy jerking the dial into fresh image-burns. He explored content to a point. The tactile-visual delight of switching channels took precedence, however, transforming even random moments of content into pleasing territorial abstraction. Watching television was for Lyle a discipline like mathematics or Zen. Commercial, station breaks, Spanish-language dramas had more to offer as a rule than standard programming. The repetitive aspect of commercials interested him. Seeing identical footage many times was a test for the resourcefulness of the eye, its ability to re-select, to subdivide an instant of time. He rarely used sound. Sound was best serve by those UHF stations using faulty equipment or languages other than English. Occasionally he watched one of the public-access channels. There was an hour or so set aside every week for locally crafted pornography, the work of native artisans. He found on the screen a blunter truth certainly than in all that twinkling flesh in the slick magazines. He sat in his bowl of curved space, his dusty light. There was a child’s conspicuous immodesty in all this genital aggression. People off the streets looking for something to suck. Hand-held cameras searching out the odd crotch. Lyle was immobile through this sequence of small grey bodies. What he saw retained his attention completely even as it continued to dull his senses. The hour seemed like four. Weary as he was, blanked out, bored by all these posturing desperadoes, he could easily have watched through the night, held by the mesh effect of television, the electrostatic glow that seemed a privileged state between wave and visual image, a secret of celestial energy. He wondered if he’d become too complex to look at naked bodies, as such, and be stirred. “Here, look. We’re here folks. The future has collapsed right on us. And what does it look like?” “You made me almost jump.” “It look like this. It looks like waves and waves of static. It’s being beamed in ahead of schedule, which accounts for the buzzing effect. It looks like seedy people from Mercer Street.” “Let me sleep, hey.” “See, look, I’m saying. Just as I speak. I mean it’s this. We’re sitting watching in the intimacy and comfort of our bedroom and they’ve got their loft and their cameras and it gets shown because that’s the law. As soon as they see a camera they take off their clothes. It use to be people waved.” “Good.” “Right here. Ri’chere, ladies and genneman. See the pandas play with their shit. Triffic, triffic.”
– DeLILLO, Don (1977). Players, New York : Vintage Books, pp. 16-17.
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