Sophia and I talk about my latest story collection, ”Autocorrect”, and about art in general. Can we describe the world around us when it keeps changing so fast? And even if we can’t, do we have anything better to do than keep trying? That’s what happens when you throw two confused but very assertive people into one Zoom call.
Literary bonus - a link to me reading my very first story ,“Pipes”, and the story “Mesopotamian Hell” from “Autocorrect” which we mentioned in our talk:
Mesopotamian Hell
According to Mesopotamian faith, hell is identical to our world in every way except one: the dead are allowed to say anything they wish once they get there, but they can say each sentence, phrase, or word only once. Words glide out of their mouths like soap bubbles that take flight and then evaporate forever. Imagine a world in which you can say I love you or I’ve never felt this way about anyone only once in your lifetime. And not just the brief lifetime of a heavy smoker with bad genes who won’t make it past sixty anyway, but once in the truly eternal afterlife. Is it any surprise the Mesopotamians were so afraid of coming to a bad end? But forget compliments and loving murmurs. Just suppose that you could say please, sorry, stop, I don’t like that, or even no! one single time. Try to envision what a relationship might look like in such a world. No more than once a month, a pair of sinful, dead Mesopotamians living under this verbal austerity regime might allow themselves to waste a word—or, on birthdays and special occasions, a whole sentence—on each other. They’ll spend four whole weeks hugging, kissing, pinching, and spitting, only to close out the month with an “It’ll be fine,” knowing that’s the last “It’ll be fine” they’ll ever say.
After painstakingly meting out words over the course of several hellish millennia, each sinner is ultimately left with one final word, which they desperately cling to like a drowning person trying to grip the wreckage of a sinking boat. This last word is bound to be esoteric or redundant, because if it had been at all useful or relevant, it would have been uttered long ago. It might be pensioner, badminton, hybrid, or intermittently. And once it’s the only word left, it takes over the sinner’s world: it’s there to explain, to threaten, to flatter, to lament. To express the sinner’s every desire. But it’s no easy feat to give voice to one’s conflicted inner life by saying muffler, ostensibly, or rickets. Only a few are left at the end with the word that is most important, be it sorry, true, or maybe. The sinner might have needed the word countless times before, but opted to hurt loved ones and lose everything they believed in rather than squander this most precious of words: the word they would never dare say. It was some hell, those Mesopotamians had. It’s no wonder they came to a bitter end.
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