The Future is Only Dark from Outside

Keywords: Feminism, Modernism, Dadaism, Love, Psychosis, Reincarnation, Time, Chance

In May 2010, I met Bertrand Coube, a 36 year old Parisian bodybuilder and poet, on a chat site online. I had been using this site to solicit men for a virtual performance project I was working on that examined desire in media and digital culture. I was 27 years old, living in Chicago.  I was supposed to be a painter, examining the nature of nature, the fleeting and the Dionysian, in colorful little semi-abstract paintings. But painting had become heavy and riddled me with anxiety. I had never wanted an “audience” and I felt that I was being watched and waited on, so the next painting would never come. I could never get past the feeling of submersion that the expectations of the “others” would cause me. And so I had moved out of my studio, had stopped painting entirely, and thought I would just live my life without it. 

I can’t remember exactly why I did it, or what exactly prompted it, but I decided to post a personal ad on Craigslist on 01-02-2010. (Location: 1755 W 17th Street). It was tongue-in-cheek but true nonetheless: 

I am a tiny brunette chick with a serious abnormality that extends itself into many realms not excluding food, sex, drugs, interpersonal relationships etcetera. Seriously. However, I am tired tonight and I am goddamn lonely so I will do whatever I can to calm my nerves, maybe even relax. I am into many things. I have many interests. I consider myself intelligent, maybe fun, potentially exciting. I can hear the clicking of my upstairs neighbor's shoes as she walks around up there and it is loud and the click is clicking through my brain and distracting me from composing this personal ad on Saturday night, Jan 2, 2010. I will send you loads of pictures upon request, possibly even one with me in a bathing suit or something. I would totally dress up for you and if you are into it, I will tie you up a little too.

I got some replies: 

I gotta get me a girl like you! I am 5'10" 175 pounds, athletic build. Live downtown. I would love to spank your ass and call u a slut while u are riding me.

about your abnormality....you sound refreshingly wacky. I'm a little lonely tonight too... I am pretty normal. I own my own business, drink as much as I have time for, do a little blow now and again. I love to meet new ppl and love to hang with old friends. You will like me, I'm pretty cool. Let me know if you want to learn more about me and share more with me. Send me a pic?

hey hun i was just wondering whether you would be interested in any cam, cyber, rp, phone, dirty questions or anything else...i'm just feeling reallyyy horny :P

I started using Chatroulette just after. A friend introduced me to it by sending me a link in G-chat. With no explanation of what it was, I clicked and found myself looking at a screen with two video boxes. One showed my face and the other was black. I clicked the button that said something like “Let’s Play” and the black screen showed a boy’s face looking back at me. I thought “What is this? Where am I?”...

Then, after a few spins, I realized that the site is a random pairing of two people who are logged into the site. So I began talking regularly to people all over the world. And at that time I really felt like the internet was something wild, and I had embarked on the frontier. It was before Facebook ads and algorithms and analytics. It was when you used screennames. You could still be anonymous and anonymity was always a great priority of mine. It was a kind of freedom. Shy and reclusive, the screenname offered me protection and possibility without being identified as any single, discrete or named entity.

It was January 2010 and Chatroulette had just been released in November of 2009. Founded by a 17 year old in Russia, the site was a brand new digital space for communication founded on the principles of randomness, chance and impermanence. You could chat for as long as you liked but the connection would often freeze spontaneously after 20-30 minutes and you would lose the ramdom “stranger” forever.

On 5-10-2010 I logged back onto Chatroulette, bored in my bedroom. I thought, “Lets see who’s here tonight”. I scrolled through a few strangers and then the screen stopped on the face of a man, just the lower part of his face, with long hair, propped up on his elbow laying in his bed. I stopped short for a second, I mean- I don’t know, I guess there was some kind of deja vu type feeling. I had always imagined I’d bump into the love of my life haphazardly, at Starbucks or something. I would envision this person, this kind of moment, but never really what he would look like. We began to chat, using the text box. I didn’t record our conversation, I mean, I didn’t copy and paste our text into the word document I was using to archive my exchanges, because I didn’t think it would be part of my project. (I was pretty sure it was all a delusion nonetheless). It was just this one-off encounter, a rogue chat. It was, in hindsight, the beginning of what would become the next 10 years of my life. 

After our initial meeting on Chatroulette, Bertrand and I began to exchange emails and love letters, talking on Skype nightly. We engaged in a BDSM contract/play that stipulated essential reading material (Bataille, Sacher-Masoch, etc.) and rules for erotic games. We did this exclusively through video chat. My wifi was weak, so I would sit in my bathroom. The most common activity we engaged in was Bertrand commanding me to spank myself over the toilet with a hairbrush until I was black and blue. I found this entirely new and exciting. After each video session, I would fall asleep and Bertrand would write a love letter that I would read upon waking the next morning. After three months of virtual contact, we decided to meet in person in Eugene, Oregon, at the home of Bertrand’s aunt. 

At this time, Bertrand was preparing research for a biography on Arthur Cravan, little-known boxer-poet and nephew of Oscar Wilde. I had never heard of Arthur Cravan. While researching his life and work, I discovered his lover and wife, Mina Loy, poet and painter whose work was fragmented and often unfinished. Considered an elusive figure of Modernism, Loy is associated with several movements including Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, Imagism and Feminism. While she aligned herself more closely with the visual arts, her reputation was primarily built on her writing. 

Loy was known for her extreme reclusiveness. After a rumor circulated in Paris in the early 1920’s that she was “an invented persona”, Mina declared: “I assure you that I am indeed a living being. But it is necessary to stay very unknown” (Conover, 1966, xii). Her work was strongly feminist and portrayed the intimate aspects of female sexuality and emotional life declaring “there is nothing impure in sex—except in the mental attitude to it”. 

Other themes her poetry examined were childbirth, motherhood and disillusionment in marriage. Loy challenged women to free themselves of emotional and physical dependence on men. In her Feminist Manifesto she declared: 

Woman must destroy in herself, the desire to be loved. The feeling that it is a personal insult when a man transfers his attention from her to another woman. The desire for comfortable protection instead of an intelligent curiosity & courage in meeting & resisting the pressure of life, sex or so called love must be reduced to its initial element, honour, grief, sentimentality, pride and & consequently jealousy must be detached from it. (SOURCE)

Cravan was known for his antics and forgery, owning multiple fake passports and writing under many pseudonyms. He promoted himself as an eccentric poet and art critic, but his interest in art and literature was that of the provocateur, typified by his claim that art is "situated more in the guts than in the brain" and that he wanted to 'break the face' of the modern art movement. He staged public spectacles with himself at the centre. His proclivity for shock and his rough vibrant poetry and provocative, anarchistic lectures and public appearances was what endeared him to the New York Dadaist movement. Cravan believed that "every great artist has the sense of provocation" (Maintenant). 

Mina met Arthur in 1917 at an art benefit in New York. At the time, Mina was being courted by Marcel Duchamp. Cravan hated Marcel Duchamp. Some say it was Duchamp’s interest in Loy that led Cravan to pursue her so strongly. 

That night, Cravan was to deliver an address on 'The Independent Artists of France and America' but he was pranked by Picabia and Duchamp who got him so drunk that he ended up swaying and slurring his speech on the platform, shouting obscenities and removing his coat, vest, collar and suspenders. He cussed out the audience who later called the cops.

In 1917, Cravan moved to Mexico in order to dodge being drafted into the war. Cravan lured Mina to Mexico through love letters: “Mina, If you come, I swear to you on my eternal soul that I will never cause you pain and that your life will be sweeter than that of any other woman. Forget the past. I was full of lies, but now I only want to live for the truth. I can take care of you. Listen to my plea.” (Mexico, December 10, 1917).

She moved to Mexico in 1918 and they were married later that year. She became pregnant and they decided to move to Argentina. Having little money, Mina would take a passenger ship and Cravan would sail the small boat he had made himself. Mina waved goodbye from the shore and watched the boat disappear. Cravan was never seen again, having most likely died at sea. However, there is some myth that he reappeared in Paris, years later, under the name B. Travan. 

Mina was devastated after Cravan’s disappearance. She spent the rest of her years mourning his loss, searching for him in hospitals and jails. She declared often that he was the love of her life. The entirety of their relationship was 20 months. 

Bertrand and I would often discuss art and literature. Our first fight was about Marcel Duchamp. Bertrand hated Duchamp. He believed that Duchamp's ready-mades were the end of art. Throughout the years, I would send him postcards of Duchamp’s toilet-fountain and post the image to his Facebook page as a joke. Bertrand’s poetry was obscene, trashy, filled with slang and swear words. The main themes in his poetry being sex and fascism. After asking him to write to me about how he describes his poetry, he chose the terms post-classical and radical: 

Radical because it unabashedly expresses the total violence into which this era has thrown me. Radical because my own violence, excessive and joyous, has found itself in absolute harmony with the atmosphere in which we are abandoned: violence and submission, harsh and hardcore drugs, the Parisian bourgeoisie and bad encounters, the “big nothing”, hard rock music and the fascism of forms. 

In my work, I attempt in scraps to conserve the Alexandrine and octosyllabic forms or at least their imprint while absolutely freeing myself from [the traditional poetic] subjects to which I oppose [instead using] insult, pornography, and unrefined spoken language. [Translated from French by Kris Casey, Feb 2020]

Bertrand cared little about publishing his work. He considered himself a “failed genius”.

Like Cravan, who said, “I am perhaps the king of failures, since I must surely be the king of something.” However, he was unflinching in his convictions about philosophy, politics and art. I had never met someone so cultivated, generous and provocative. But his provocations were never meant to hurt. They were meant to expose, as violently as he experienced them, what he found to be a meaningless society, abandoned by the integrity that a life of philosophy, poetry, and literature offers. The society he found himself entrapped in was not his and he had no loyalty to its tenets.