Bad Phantoms: An Exhibit of Pataphysical Heartforms

 

Body of Water

50% >3,000m depth, other dimensions immeasurable; see coastline paradox. Range from high disturbance (longitudinal and transversal waves) to stagnancy (stillwater).

Heart of Palm

6≥dig/can, >1 hand. Stem, core, central softness; swamp cabbage or millionaire's salad, a gamble.

Prickly Pear

≤ 6sp/areole, opuntia engelmannii. Flowering May-June, spined year-round, clefted sporadically. Pyriform, carmine fruit.

Firework

16+ only. Arterial lumina. Customizable shapes, colors, sizes (list of possible specs avail at request). Detonation warning, murmur, use at your own risk.

Monsoon

2.5 inches, H20, dust, dewpoint, light, flash, flood. Grandiose expressivity in response to minute climate shifts (rich network of reliance made visible). 

Spear

85 kJ/100g; a. officinalis, sparrowgrass, points d'amour (love tips) or kuşkonmaz (bird won’t land). Succulent (adjectival sense); adventitious, fasciculate root system.  

Clock

60s/m, 60 m/h; grandfather, face, 2-3 hands. Expert horologist; superior self-regulation; steady HR with minimal subjective deviation.

Two-Step

2/4 or 4/4, >130bpm; QQS, QQSS, QQSQQS. Whiskey Road, premier high energy country music nightclub midweek dance party every Wednesday (free lessons Thursday at 7). 

Heart on a Sleeve*

45 bpm, three-chambered heart; compact myocardium typical of most ectothermic vertebrates. Viperid, squamate.

Hummingbird*

1,260 bpm; extreme aerobic endurance, ideal model for tap dancers, pure spirits, anxious blurs.

Moth*

60-100 bpm; lepidoptera. Crepuscular, diurnal, paraphylectic. Feathered, varied, non-club antennae. Known fashion-devourer, lover of light.

Sunset

26m. to civil twilight, angle and atmosphere dependent. Bands of ROYGBIV fade to black, ecstatic ending.

Fleabag*

354bpm, resilin, chitin. Ideal model for states of chronic autonomic cardiovascular arousal in bodies of parasitic lifelong hunger.

Free-Tail*

40-200 bpm (not as quick on the rev as uroderma bilobatum, 20-1,000 bpm, hibernation/flight dependent). Ideal slow-rev compact aerial model. Nocturnal.

Abstract:

There are some manipulations science can’t or shouldn’t perform on an animal or human heart, or too many variables that arise in their testing, which we can eliminate through a more predictable model. So we create a phantom heart, a stand-in for what we want to study. Something that is reproducible. A heart allegory built from that slime children play with, for instance; gelatin with electrified sensors placed inside to stimulate, to simulate a beating heart. Or a fake cadaver manufactured from chemicals, salts, and dyed synthetics. This is what we mean by a phantom, something that looks or acts like what we’re hoping to study. 

Trying to think up a solution for missing you, I made a list of pataphysical phantom heartforms, mine and yours. Bodies of bugs, dead and living; tapestries of feathers, disembodied wings; collages of trash loose on the street. I made more and longer entries as the summer passed. Stones, cacti paddles, nonsimultaneous light. Pyrotechnic stars inside their shells; clocks cognizant of their finite lifespans; pomegranates split open on the ground. I wanted to study each alternate form to see where these alternates resonated, where they felt short or overcompensated; to glean what I could about heartforms in general. Some of those heartforms are collected here.

To know x = to know (everything - x), wrote René Daumal. This equation summarized his theory of pataphysics, "the science of imaginary solutions" (Jarry). Only in taking the most alien forms seriously could I hope to gain a serious understanding of the very familiar. Only in becoming a scientist of bad phantoms could I hope to learn something about anything real. 

Sometimes it is convenient to think that your heartform is the only one of its kind that can break in the specific way your heart has broken, but the pataphysical laboratory’s evidence proves otherwise: that every heartform holds such a fury and can love exactly as fervently as your heart has—that your heart’s loved and misses one such as itself (scared alien glitter-lipped pizza-eater).

Perish or Publish / All Hail the Tone Commander

 

Why do I love such unbeloved things? I speak here of the touch tone, push button office phones I rescued from my university’s heading-to-surplus pile. I saw them in a box labeled GOING TO SURPLUS and I was thrilled and sad. We still have office phones, of course, though I don’t think anyone ever uses theirs. Our office phone numbers are listed in the directory and you can call me on it if you look me up. If I am in my office I usually pick it up, albeit with suspicion. Over the past five years, 90% of the phone calls I received in my office were from a colleague who died early in April 2019, very early indeed in the pandemic. I don’t know if his death was caused by covid or was not, or how to fully disambiguate the two. His obituary did not list a cause of death and everyone was pretty isolated when he passed. It was sad. He was a pain in the ass, the kind of guy who refused to participate in many aspects of university life on principle. Publish? Who cares. Perish? He did. I think of him when I think of phones. 

The first three phones I rescued from the surplus pile are off-white. Two of them have brown backgrounds behind the keys. Two have phone numbers written on them: 621-6214 and 621-7406. The other has a torn orange sticker on the cradle saying EMERGENCY / Suspicious Activity / “report it” / 9-911 [from 621 prefix] or 911 and I can’t read the rest. 

Rescued may be overstating the case. Who cares about these outmoded phones with their stretched-out handset coils that once I imagine fingers tangled in while talking. Everyone has cell phones anyhow. My friend Manuel even gives his cell number to his students, which seems like a stretch to me, but it works for him. 

That we call the part you put the handset in the cradle, as in infant’s, suggests their former value. That the plastic buttons the handset depressed when you laid it in the cradle were nearly always translucent white or clear is a memory that may go away and that no one besides me and my dead friend Charles may mourn. 

The phone remains to me an object of erotic interest. They were once—and still are, I’m sure—a portal to sex or porn. That’s not what I’m talking about here, however. 

Because I took the phones from the surplus pile a sign popped up a couple days later from the administrative staff: “please email annes1 before going through or adding to this pile. Thnx” which I took as a rebuke. I’ve arrived at the point where saving something dying deserves rebuke for what I’m sure are sound administrative reasons. They would explain if I asked. I do not ask. I do not care. I know no one loves these phones. 

Also who abbreviates “thanks” “Thnx”?

I also saved—I don’t know why I’m telling you this—a Panasonic “Integrated Telephone System” with a “Data Port,” an AT&T digital answering machine that I had myself circa 1999, a crappy vtech cordless phone and, my favorite, if just based on the name, one that’s labeled TONE COMMANDER. I’ll let that sink in for a second. With this phone you command the fucking tones!

I found it online. It’s a TEO Tone Commander 8620U-01B 20-button ISDN phone, which it looks like you can find refurbished for…$325. I guess it could be the 8610 which is a hundred dollars cheaper. The user manual announces that its features include AutoSPID and Parameter Download, programmable SOFTKEYS, Direct Station Selection, and a bunch of other things that only mean something to a very specific sort of administrative staff person. I can imagine the power one must feel as Tone Commander with the Tone Commander at your fingertips, programmable and programmed, multiple lines lit up by lights, slinging calls to faculty offices, all things under control.

There was a time when you would not have been wrong to call me Tone Commander, phone phreak that I was for at least a few years in which I rewired Radio Shack instruments to take control of pay and other phones to use them for my purposes which were mostly to call long distance to friends for free. The magic of it, which is to say the hack, was the trick: I didn’t have much money so I couldn’t have afforded to talk too much long distance otherwise anyhow, but I’m not sure I cared that much about it that I would have paid to do so anyhow. I called girls, friends, girlfriends, and friends of girls. Hence, perhaps, the erotic attachment to the unbeloved phone. 

Now who talks on these phones, even on the Tone Commander? A cell, perhaps, collapses distances, but a wired phone? Until the cell service spots out in my dad’s rural town I don’t see any use for it, and only then I do. The Tone Commander gives me options: CALL, SETUP, DONE, MORE>, TRAN, CONF, DROP, MUTE, SPKR, and HOLD. It commands up to 10 lines of tones which is probably why you can still buy them online. Institutions may be the only remaining home for phones like these, but our institution has banished it to surplus.

I carved this little space out of my decaying institution and I hold it dear, a little bulwark against the loss of what often feels like everything that matters. I call it the Tiny Cabinet. You can find it here at the.tinycabi.net. It is a cabinet for tiny things. Also a tiny cabinet itself. It is where I installed the phones I took from the surplus pile without permission. It is this thing you're reading. It’s a small rebellion, this one, to have temporarily reserved these phones from the surplus where they go before they eventually get transferred to the trash or to recycling. It probably deserves no notice for its li'l (not even little) heroism. 

I don’t mean to gnash my teeth at progress. My department was and perhaps is still paying something like $90,000 a year to the university to keep phone service in every faculty office. (We may step back to note that the university’s latest budget model tallies up all the things it provides, for a fee of course, against the money the department brings in from students, less administrative fees, so while something like phones may seem like a basic thing a university ought to provide, it is no longer so: the department has to pay for its phones, to the tune of $90,000.)

When we were trying to cut costs a few years back to the point where the then-department-chair’s solution was for all the faculty to make after-tax donations to the department fund to avoid having to lay off staff and only the junior faculty did (unsurprisingly), I said why don’t we just give up our phones?

We had no voicemail anyway. I’d never had voicemail in my office here, which was half blessing and half inconvenience. It turned out it would cost more to get rid of the phones, which would entail (somehow) having to have the phone lines removed from the office walls (why, I asked, and don’t remember the answer: why not just give up the phones). Your only option, if you wanted voicemail, was to get an answering machine, like this one my friend Manuel had, which may be why he gives the students his number. He’d brought his from home, I think, though maybe they’d given it to him. Maybe this machine is from his office. I had no inkling you could requisition one from the university, though now you can, apparently, at least thanks to surplus, or you could if I were to release this answering machine from the Tiny Cabinet and put it back in the box. 

If I don’t let the phones go, maybe they can’t take the whole pile to surplus. Maybe the world will slow. After all I did not save the cords. So the cords in the boxes sit there in a box a dozen feet away, separated from the phones. That box is for surplus. This box is for art. This is a display and also a resistance, if a small one. A little museum I made of this cabinet opposite my dead colleague’s former office door. Now his office is empty and it’s labeled ITEM FOR SURPLUS, referring to, I presume, the stuff inside the office, which is locked. 

"Made in the USA, the Tone Commander’s flagship endpoint is the TSG-6 IP phone which meets the stringent requirements of the Committee on National Security Systems and is compliance tested and approved by the National Telecommunications Security Working Group. The Tone Commander TSG-6 IP Phone is a non-proprietary AS-SIP endpoint which interoperates with most relevant Session Border Controllers." [source]