Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (part 3/3)

The Sound of Refacement : The Hybrid Word in Glamvoid

Renegades of Noise : Mirror / Skin Alliance

Thus, the vacuity saturating hotel rooms is not very different from the vapidity of wide open spaces. Not entirely unlike them are the apartments, exuding exuberant affluence, resembling sites of glamworship. In particular, the Pleasure Dome, that can be perceived as an equivalent of reality TV shows in the culture we know, is where producers, managers, singers, viewers seem to dwell. That’s where their desires are being sustained, continuously animated, their longing fired, their projections galvanized. That’s where their skin starts acquiring features of slightly excessively permeable membranes. That’s where they most intensely reach the oblivion of the suspension of belief. Or, so somnambulist logic wants one to believe.

            In the novel where everyone is watched and perversely rejoices in such voyeuristic-exhibitionist conditions, surveillance is more rendered invisible than approved, accepted, embraced, or adopted. It is a society oblivious of and blind to the subtleties and nuances of being observed, overseen, and/or recognized. It is a culture deaf to the human face. Well, almost.

            Noon devises a symbol reminiscent of the nearly forgotten need and capacity for establishing an awareness about the role of skin : its sensitivity, its resilience, and its potential to maintain the boundaries. These characteristics are insisted upon via a symbolic plane that from another perspective concerns the difference between  individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity. By extension, Noon’s narrative technique provides a creative / critical vocabulary. It demonstrates the vitality of creation and reconfirms the vibrancy of a critical distance. As such, it, simultaneously, reinstates the significance of both critical thinking and reading-writing in the spirit of reverence.

In Channel SK1N, mirrors emerge as anchoring, steadying signposts. In response to a dorian gray thematic in the context of digitized fame, the symbolic of the mirror is subliminally soothing, since it distracts the look from deafening noise of glamacams and visionplex towards an image more resembling the touch of gentler, less abrasive, more appeasing light spilling a friendly shadow over the face, over the body, over the skin—the mirror image as friendly, reconstituting, ethereally rooted energy amidst alien pixilated sites: the image remindful of the human presence / solace.

Mirrors—between nights fuzzing with thickness of liquor, smudged in distastefully oversaturated flavors, noise of overcrowded bars. Mirrors—between solitary night driving through desertlike luxury, abandoned landscapes, urbanity camouflaged in disinterested facelessness. Mirrors—through the crevices in the bruise on Nola’s belly, through the crack in the bruise on her hand. Borne out of these humanoid reflections, squeezing out digitized sensuality, is the child’s voice. Borne out of the mirror is an invocation of childhood, reminiscence of the human presence. Borne out of the mirror is Nola’s etherized self, bringing to the eye of the reader reconstituted, spectral Melissa Gold—daughter of George Gold--the Pleasure Dome superstar, who was to disappear into alleged suicide.  Until the mirror (somewhere, sometime), after Nola Blue’s body has been found by the railroad, regenerates her.

George Gold, father to them both, albeit in different ways, is in awe faced with the sheer wonder of the site of the bruise. As the white dove from the inside is becoming prominent, as the world is opening, George is being sucked in. Until the mirror renders available fruits of  Nola’s disintegration that started during those long forgotten nights of bar crawling when she was released—not screenbound any more. As Evelyn Moore, the gossip/spectacle hunter, was taking over the bodily narrative, and Melissa Gold assuming the digitized one, Nola was disappearing. Learning how to balance being open to signals and being resistant to them. Parts of herself functioning independently from each other, yet her whole being not disconnected.

Until the mirror regains the presence of Joe Palmer, once brought to Nola’s world out of the bruise. A young man who once was in the bruise, a young man with a voice that talks, sings stories of semisecret pockets within polluted information flow, the voice that semireveals contrapuntal signals, anticorrosive message: amidst the hollowness of a hotel room, he vocalizes the message about that what spreads not being an illness. Or, perhaps, solace.

And yet, still slightly distant, aloof, detached feels the interaction. Enabling alienation. By virtue of the power of weakness, language generously keeps the characters at bay. Being kept at bay, they are protected by the inability to dominate. At the same time, language acknowledges its limits. It cannot provide the characters with linguistic means to convey the message in its entirety. There is no way to precisely verbalize the characters’ humble withdrawal before the realization that it is less relevant which one of them sends out redeeming signals. There is no way to utterly precisely articulate that it is the message whose centrality enables recuperation of the communication channel. Jeff Noon, Channel SK1N:

Nola’s body reacted to the human presence, the closeness. Her skin tingled. Strangely, she felt comforted. It was good to be giving pleasure in this way, to be sending out signals, and to have those signals received and understood. She became a giving object. A subject to be viewed. Here was solace, of a kind. (861)

It is, perhaps, the very incapacity of the characters and the limits of language that are also suggestive of the limits of robopoetics engines. Like humans, albeit in different ways.