Guts
What is the point of any of committing something to a text? To remember without memory is one, to transmit an idea without being present to speak an idea another, to exist a little beyond our own physical bodies — a possible third.
Gut Text by Mike Corrao (which can be downloaded and read for free over here) is an experiment in submitting an identity to a text with a nihilist twist.
The text is an evolution of a way of thinking across a handful of cryptically-named identities — nn, ff, vv, yy, each of which has their own #existencegoals.
Or, non-existence goals for the most part. Through these characters the ideas of the cowardice of wanting to be nothing and to be entirely passive and also daydreaming-wish-thinking is explored, all of which has a Freudian death drive ring to it. The escape from the body is a theme — which is where obvious comparisons to the likes of Blake Butler become obvious too (although, here, the body being the architecture is inverted as the exact opposite of what is wanted to be achieved).
We’re presented with a linear growth in this attitude, that there is a sense of evolution, adaptive strategies of how to be a text and not be at all, all at once. Nn, the first persona in the piece, has a fear of any bodily existence. Having imagined themselves an idea of legroom to go beyond being a machine that dreams of nothing, the idea become “unbearably noticeable” — and so is cancelled, resulting in a reduced state. Later characters like yy suffer forms of the same desire for unbodliness by not wanting a body containing anything non abstract:
“I do not want rivers to form inside of my bone and my teeth to weather into fangs”
This rejection is actually something I found I stumbled on while reading. There is the idea of giving the self away to a text makes sense, creating an idol of the self in the text that will live forever and present the same things consistently (if interpreted differently, out of the authors control regardless). But then, in Gut Text why is there a rejection of the body — if the text is a place to express the perfect thousand-faced self, then why here is there such an argument about it?
I concluded that this is the formal conceit of the piece. It isn’t the text that any of these almost-entities want to exist as, this is, instead, more like the release notes of a piece of software. We’re not reading this in the hope of receiving something whole that can last, but instead the thrashings of a development team.
Once this is accepted, sense can be made. Pages exist within the text of overlapping names (i.e. yy, smudging across itself), “text” floating like fog across a page, dots and ellipses which turn into celestial objects. These pages are part of the stresses of that development and should be read as concrete-art-on-a-page but also linearly, like the rest of the text, as part of a process.
There is a line, early on, which struck me as the crux of the thing — there is “The desire to recognize a second desire” — that within all of the attempt to exist in the text here, the purpose is the exploration and finding that secondary desire.
Buy Gut Text Here.
Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own, it was written by @CJEggett — a man for whom a second desire can be defined as when you offer him the gherkin that came on the side with your burger, but you don’t really want. The further away someone is, the more that can be missed, that is science. Legit river invention article that might bring you joy, feat. good diagrams. I would like to try and do this on my website, which you can find here. ❤
