Screen

 

Unsure what to do with my line ‘I screen, you screen, we all screen for I-screen’, I ask Text Generation (TG). Here’s my first return: ‘I'm screen-screen-screen. You screen, my screen. Let's screen! (Gimme that screen! I need screens! Screen, I need for screens. Screen?) We take the screen. I need for screens. You screen, move for screen, you watch screen, or you screen, which, as before, we should watch. Screen? screen? screen? screen?)’ Repetitive, you would have to agree. A little hysterical, a touch unhinged? It’s unusable. Entering the line again TG had this to say: ‘I screen, you screen, we all screen for I-screen. I'm a great filmmaker. I look at these images and see the great people in those films. The other movie came out last year and, just like that, gave us a glimpse into a world where the movie world never was, or was not. What caught my attention is how one person even put it this way.’ Our great filmmaker goes on in this fashion for some hours, before clearing the room. TG has trouble constructing a logical argument. Whatever you ask, it replies in the voice of a California dropout who’s tripped once too often. ‘I screen, you screen, we all screen for I-screen, and for the phone of my friend, and it's the only screen I get, and I'm like, I don't get it, it's bad. I do get it, and my friend does, and now I get it in my head, but I'm not in the frame of mind, I'm not in the head of reality. Which, I mean, it's very frustrating, because I'm trying to take full control of the timeline while being really on the phone, and that gets me very frustrated because I always want to have that real life.’ This is not Hemingway, or Beckett even. I’m out of sympathy with TG. Its grammar is a disgrace, ditto its work schedule: ‘I screen, you screen, we all screen for I-screen, I just work, all over the place, with great things happening with my time, with my life. The only way to live your life the way you want to is to live it up, and that's just because you're not the only person who does that. I'll go home today like 15 hours after I hit sleep, I'm really good at sleeping. The only other time I've slept is because I had to get my clothes cleaned up before I hit sleep.’ Really? Time to read a good book and trust my own instincts. Diagnosis: TG lacks humour, indeed is relentlessly serious, has no emotional sense whatsoever. TG is a limited source for poetic activity; it’s word-wallpaper. TG uses the first personal singular but has no self. I prefer imagination, a good conversation, anything rather this: ‘I screen, you screen, we all screen for I-screen. With those words we started to see the real world, from the human eye like the sky. On top of that, the two worlds were just as close, because each one had a world of its own. The two worlds were identical in size and shape, except for a tiny feature. We saw very little else. They each had their own unique names.’ TG needs to go on a long holiday, preferably to a world other than this one. It talks too much about nothing. It does my head in. I’m over it.