The Skin of Anxiety

Kevin Barry

1 On a winters afternoon late in 1994, I sat with two friends in the attic bedroom of an old terraced house we were renting together on Frenchs Quay in Cork and we listened, ra t, to the gurgle and hiss of a dial!u Internet connection inside a gigantic deskto com uter" It sounded like a beast trying to take form in there, and we smiled e#citedly through the brownish fug of do e smoke $ we were using the attic room also to grow cannabis lants under lam s mounted in the ea%es" &emory erha s elaborates the icture but I seem to remember that it took miles of cables, doorsto ers of com uter manuals and weeks of hair! ulling com lication to bring us to this moment" 'he connection hissed more loudly and s uttered hard, and we held our breaths as the great network that we knew was out there tried to snag its digital hooks on the %irgin nodes of Cork city, but it failed, and the room went silent, and we turned off the com uter and got on with our li%es" (hich, in 1994, largely in%ol%ed slithering bug!eyed around the walls of )ir *enrys nightclub until the small hours, slee ing till mid afternoon, and then trying to lure assing college girls into the house with romises of free do e, laytime with a cute black rabbit called Flu sie we had bought in a et store on +orth &ain )treet, and ,we lied- access to .the (eb" I was twenty!fi%e years old and at this time o erating fitfully, and at a %ery stoned le%el, as a freelance re%iewer, writing u notices of gigs and lays for music maga/ines and news a ers" I would bash out my 0udgements on a )inger electric ty ewriter erched on a wardrobe laid on its side to function as a desk" )entences of

Faulknerian com le#ity would be em loyed to tear stri s off a Frank and (alters show at +ancy 1lakes, or the latest Corcadorca offering at the 'riskel" 'he )inger, 2uite sna//ily, had an eraser function" I would go to a stationery store off (ashington )treet to re lace the white!out ribbon3 'i !4# was history, and the eraser was essential for the obsessi%e redrafting of my killer intros" I recall a sub!editor at the Irish 'imes asking whether a notice on some Corkonian indie act at the 5hoeni# 1ar really merited an o ening sentence that came in at something like 167 words" I would carry the ty ed ages as though they were tablets of stone across the ri%er from Frenchs Quay, ast the ho y belching of the 1eamish lant, to what was then 8urys *otel, on (estern 9oad, where the rece tionist would fa# them through to :ublin for a ound the first age and fifty ence thereafter" )ometime towards the end of that winter, 0ust before we all mo%ed to ;ondon, we did finally get the Internet connected, at least to some rime%al degree" I do not remember e#actly what I saw when I ga/ed for the first time into that fateful ortal, or what I e# ected to see, but I do recall that the first thing we did on the Internet was look for a reci e for 4cstasy"

< In the early autumn of <=1<, I tend to wake a little before eight in the morning, and for a moment or two I listen to what the weather is doing outside our house in south county )ligo3 on almost three hundred days of the year it is raining, and I curse my fate" I then endure a moment of intense moral struggle" I know that I am going to get u soon and s end the morning attem ting to write fiction, as :estiny says I must, and I know the last thing I should do now, because it will shatter my concentration before I e%en begin, is go online" 1ut of course I reach to the bedside table and gras the i5hone" &y wife tends to be awake a little before me, and she will already be ta ety!ta ing at her i5hone, e%en as I listen to the counter oint of the rains snare!drum beat outside, and so my insinuation into the online world has begun e%en before Im truly awake" I check my >mail" I read bits of the a ers" I >oogle myself $ and yes, shame

reddens my cheek as I ty e that hrase" I would almost rather admit to lying in bed, mornings, and abusing myself, but my sus icion is that almost all writers, young and old, now erform >oogle and 'witter searches for references to themsel%es se%eral do/en times a day" I flutter about from site to site" I may well ,as in, I do- ha%e a look to see how Im getting on in terms of ?ma/on sales, so Ill %isit the @A, ?merican and Canadian %ersions" I ha%e been e%en known to %isit the 8a anese %ersion, because someone ,a worried &urakamiB- bought a book of my stories out there once" I go back to >mail and refresh my inbo# to see if anything has come through in the fi%e minutes since I last checked, though its not yet eight in morning, but maybe somebody I know is u late in )an Francisco and wants to make me fatally rich and world!renowned and has chosen 0ust now to tell me about it3 but I ha%e no new messages ,=- and another little knife is twisted in my ner%ous gut" I am not yet standing or e%en fully conscious but already I am in that im atient, flitty, online modeC I bound about like one of those neurotic etrol!sniffer hares youll see at the :ublin ?ir ort car ark" I stay nowhere longer than a minute or two, if that" Ill start to read a iece, but two aragra hs in Ill go yeah, right, blah!de!blah, and mo%e on" Dou could not by force of will design a state of mind more unsuitable for getting u and attem ting to make ;iterature, but that, hilariously, is what I get u and try to do" Or after a fashion, anyway" ;ately, I note, most of the essays and stories I write tend to be broken u into %ery short, numbered sections, because I can no longer re licate on the age the im ression or sensation of consecuti%e, concentrated thought, because I dont really do that anymore"

6 ?way with us to a medie%al scene $ the town of 1irr, County Offaly, as it was in the drear winter of 19EE $ and an initiation ritualC I stood in an anne#e to a news a er office that was in fact a shed, with a gal%ani/ed tin roof, the lace warmed only by a )u erser with a bowl of water in front of it to absorb the gas fumes, and a lady with a strong &idlands accent stood before me and

said, slowly and deliberately $ .'his F is F a mouse" )he dis layed the little attachment that trailed from a s2uat, s2uare, green!screened &acintosh com uter, and smiled encouragingly $ I was allowed to ha%e a go" I leaned down to the desk and took the mouse in my trembling hand" (orms of concentration wriggled across my brow as I tried to make the arrowed cursor on the screen mo%e in res onse to my mani ulation, but I was all elbows and knuckles, and the cursor skittered and s rang" .4asy now, she said" .Doull get the hang of it soon enough" ?nd within no more than a few hours, I really did ha%e the knack of it, and felt confidently immersed in the world of 'he +ew 'echnology, as it was then known in the offices of local news a ers" I was nineteen, and had 0ust dro ed out of college to take u a osition as a cub

re orter on a new weekly a er starting u in ;imerick city" ? 0ob in ;imerick in the late .E=s was news in itself, and my college ad%isors had bid me haste as they urged me to 2uit cam us and go for it" )oon my sensibilities would be forged ,i"e" scarred for life- in the furnace that was the ress it of ;imerick :istrict Court, but it was the era when hot ty e, scal els and gum were gi%ing way to deskto ublishing, and my first task was to s end a week in 1irr, on a sister a er, being schooled in the mysteries of the &acintosh" I was ut u in a sur risingly lush and nearly deserted hotel on the main street" I s ent the winter e%enings drinking to e#cess with members of the &idlands ress fraternity" 'hey were mostly of the generation e#cited into 0ournalism by the (atergate scandal3 but ha%ing found themsel%es writing about the othole situation in 'ullamore, they dulled the ain of anti!clima# with boo/e" I recall one night returning to the hotel, ha%ing crossed the main street on all fours, and falling to a des erate slee and its sour, scary dreams of green screens, 0ittering ty e, electric mice"

*ow many times a day do I check my emailB 'his is going to be %ery embarrassing" Fre2uently now, you will hear eo le 0oking about Obsessi%e Com ulsi%e :isorder" 'heyll say that they are .borderline OC:" (ell, I am not borderline OC:" I am dee in!country, u ri%er and entrenched, the Colonel Aurt/ of OC:!land" I once had a work room, in a flat in Clontarf, with a new beige car et on which little hairballs would mysteriously gather o%ernight" 1efore I could begin work each morning, it became .a thing that I had to crawl around the floor and ick u e%ery last one of the hairballs" ?nd count them" )o thats my kind of le%el" ;ast year, I s oke with two other Irish writers after a reading in 5aris and I asked them how many times a day, at an honest estimate, they checked their email" One of them, who is younger than me and much more connected, totted it u and blushed and said $ .&aybe F E=B 'he other, older than me and I would ha%e thought much less connected, shook her head, and scoffed, and said $ .Oh, at least F 1<=B Or okay, maybe F 16=B &eB I dont turn the Internet off while Im writing, and I dont ha%e that software that blocks it, so Ill check at least once e%ery fi%e minutes during the working morning" )o thats robably about G= checks by lunchtime" In the afternoons, I gad about the )ligo hills, often on my bike, but that doesnt sto me from fishing the i5hone out, though granted the checking will be at the more rela#ed ace of about a half!do/en times an hour" )o were heading towards 9= checks or so by teatime" In the e%enings, I tend to check my mail 2uite a lot, because the @) is about its working day, and you ne%er know what might come in from o%er there" )o were back u to maybe ten checks an hour" 1y bedtime, I%e checked my >mail I would think at least 1G= times, and this may be a conser%ati%e count" 'his section of the iece, for e#am le, has so far taken me about fifteen minutes to write and I ha%e so far checked my mail four times" Or ossibly fi%e" 1ut lets say its 1G= times a day" On at least 14= of these occasions, my inbo# will tell me that I ha%e no new messages ,=-" 'hats 14= tiny ego deaths I suffer a day" 'he effect of these is minuscule indi%idually, but significant cumulati%ely" Of the ten or so mails I get a day, two or three will be s am offering me new tits, or a reliable erection, or in%estment o ortunities in ;agos, and the rest will be dull and routine"

I might get one or two mails a month of the ty e that Im actually after $ these are the emails that tell me Im a wonderful writer of stories or scri ts or whate%er and theres money on the way" 4ach of these mails turns me into a more monstrous egomaniac $ each to a tiny degree, maybe, but the effect, again, is cumulati%e"

G ?utumn <==6 $ the era of the digital 2uickening, and I am li%ing in a basement flat in the +ew 'own of 4dinburgh" &y girlfriend is doing her 5h: at the uni%ersity and I am attem ting without landmark success to re%i%ify the short!story form" &ost e%enings, as dusk trails in from the Firth of Forth, carrying on its skirts a near!1altic chill, I go for a walk around the elegant +ew 'own streets" 4dinburgh has always had a great culture of a artment dwellingC its a city thats ro erly li%ed in, that doesnt clear out after dark, and as I walk along I can see down into the basement flats of the >eorgian manses" ?s it is the custom here for the high sash windows to be left uncurtained, all the domestic scenes are lit and resented to the obser%er in a se2uence of unfolding tableau#" I ha%e lately been flabbergasted by a re ort in a news a er that suggests that eo le are now s ending a ro#imately as much time online as they s end watching tele%ision" 1ut the e%idence of this is clearly resented in the basement flats in the autumn of <==6" 'he most ty ical scene dis lays a young cou le" )he is on the couch, watching 'H3 he is at a slight remo%e, erha s in an armchair, or at a dining table, and is staring into a biggish la to com uter, most likely a :ell" Im back in 4dinburgh fre2uently, maybe a cou le of times a year, and by habit I retrace of an e%ening my +ew 'own walks, and I look down into the basement a artments, and the 'Hs ha%e long since been switched off, or ha%e disa ,likely an ? le- or the smart hone ,ditto-" eared altogether, and both the he and the she ha%e erched on their thighs the la to

?lthough I am online all of my waking hours, I am considered among friends and ac2uaintances to be an amusingly 1"= kind of fellow, with throwback tendencies and ;uddite markings" I am not on Facebook" I am not on 'witter" I do not ha%e a website, or a blog" I steer clear of i'unes, ha%ing wound u there once a bit issed and buying about fifty 2uids worth of *uman ;eague songs" I do not maintain a 'umblr, or curate a Flickr account, and I am unsure what words to a ly to such things, because I do not know e#actly what they are, or what they do" I check email, I read the a ers, and I busy about looking at F stuff" I occasionally wee gladly in the small hours ha%ing fallen into a Dou'ube hole of the early E=s synthesi/er acts I grew u with, or the dee house tunes from Chicago and :etroit we used to slither around )ir *enrys to in the early 9=s" I ha%e had an i5hone for almost a year and ha%e downloaded no a s" ? little flush of trium h comes to my cheek if I manage to email someone a hoto, or aste a link into the body of a mail $ this, after eighteen years of Internet acti%ity, is the le%el of it" I ha%e ne%er looked at orn on the Internet, not ha%ing the need, as my mind already ro0ects terrifying se2uences of hantasmagorical se# images at all conscious hours of day and night" I ha%e ne%er layed games online, or arranged dates, or ,yet- sought to locate dogging %enues in the %icinity of the south county )ligo swam lands" I ha%e lately bought turf online, but I do %ery little of the stuff youre su osed to do" 4%en so, I become e#tremely twitchy if force of circumstance kee s me away from the Internet" &y thoughts will stream then through the classic addict ruts $ when can I ne#t get a connection, where can I find it, and how long will it take me to get thereB

I ;ets osit two e#treme and contrary arguments, both of which I belie%e to be entirely true $ 1" Our com lete immersion in the online world is largely bene%olent" ;oneliness has been %an2uished by social media" Intense connecti%ity breeds a freshness of thinking $ we o en oursel%es to new influences, we make brilliant new friends, we are e# osed to the %ast ools of human talent" (e ha%e immediate access to great film, music, and literature, and to the artists behind the works" 4ducation, healthcare, in

fact e%ery area of ci%ic go%ernance can otentially be streamlined and made better, and these things are already ha ening in measurable ways" 9ebellious olitical will can e# ress itself with a furious immediacy" 'he o a2ue screen that co%ered the workings of officialdom has been shattered" )e#ual emanci ation is com lete and all of our tastes and eccadillos are re%ealed to be broadly democratic and can be satisfied at a click" ;o%e is all around" <" Our com lete immersion in the online world is largely male%olent" 'he le rous s read of social media does not re resent a new connecti%ity or o enness but merely em hasi/es ,and reinforces- the e idemic le%els of social isolation in our ost!industrial world" Our constant online resence breeds a new timidity, a herd thinking, in which we are afraid to stand a art from the crowd" &eek consensus 2uickly comes to dominate e%ery con%ersation3 erha s the most common hrase on 'witter is .?greedJ" Filmmakers, writers and musicians are being economically ra ed by the e# ectation that if something is online, it must be free, with the conse2uence that, artistically, we ha%e entered the era of the amateur and the art!timer" Our concentrational abilities ha%e been shattered and they will ne%er reco%er $ the eo les smart hones can be taken only from their cold, dead hands" 'here is no longer any real learning" 'he Internet has made us all so %ery rickly and aranoid $ how long can someone take to res ond to an emailB ?nd why, co/ theyre too busy fucking tweetingB ?lso, er%erts are e%erywhere, and they want to masturbate all o%er us"

E I ne%er thought Id be nostalgic for Internet cafes, though always those laces had about them the tang of nostalgia anywayC they emerged 0ust as the great wa%es of westward and northern migration swe t o%er 4uro e in the mid to late .9=s, and always they were filled with the homesick %oices that whis ered urgently on cut!rate hone lines in booths around the edges of the cafe $ the %oices nostalgic for Chad, or @kraine $ and the rest of us ta Dahooed oursel%es, and si ety!ta ed at the metered screens as we checked our *otmail accounts, and our Friends 9eunited, our 1ebo, our ;i%e8ournal, as we ed coffee from a ercolator 0ug that tasted like it was

brewed from crotch sweat and 1isto cubes" I ha%e hauled myself to ) ain e%ery winter for the last twel%e years or soC by late 8anuary, I can sim ly take no more of Ireland, and I run screaming from it for as many weeks or months as I can afford" 1y the early ==s, my des eration to locate an Internet cafe as soon as I arri%ed in a ) anish city had become all the more intense and neuroticC I would throw my bags into the ension or rented flat, and immediately dash out to scour the backstreets of Cordoba, or &alaga, or Cadi/ until I found the K symbol on the frontage, and then I could breathe easier again" I would slink in and out of the cafes three or four times a day, and often late on $ those magic hours, with our faces lit by the glow of the screens, as the nights of the ) anish cities assed by outside, obli%iously, and when I think of my old tri s now I think not of the great cathedrals, or the bustling alley life of the barrios, or the sweet wines, or the fried fish, or the beautiful eo le3 I think of the Internet cafes"

9 Hisiting ;imerick again, in the summer of =4 or =G, it seemed that half of my old friends were working at the :ell lant in 9aheen" It was the high water mark of demand, they couldnt shi the things fast enough, and they sim ly couldnt get enough workers" ?mong the more idle ty es in ;imerick, there was dark talk of .the :ell bus $ it would come through the estates at the crack of dawn, and .the :ell eo le would 0um off the bus and knock on windows and doors and try to yank innocent citi/ens out of their beds and onto the factory line"

1= I mailed my old housemates, )eamus and >ene, from the days on Frenchs Quay in Cork" 'hey were far more tech!sa%%y than I, and both ended u working at digital stuff, and so I asked them for their memories of our first Internet connection, which would no doubt be more recise than mine"

arently, we used to look mainly at alt!dot newsgrou s, and most likely those that

focused on cannabis culti%ation in dam climates" 'he newsgrou s had a %ery basic interface $ dull greyish blocks of rolling te#tlines" 'he com uter was a >ateway <== 5C, s ecifically a 4E7ss66 with <&1 ram and a 1==&1 hard dri%e" 'he modem, bought in from *olland, ran at 14k er second, too fast for 'elecom Lireanns network, which ran at 9"7k er second $ this was the snag that fucked u our access for most of the winter" Our rimiti%e connection was e%entually made by hitching onto some local ladys network in Cork" (e did not ha%e a browser as it would be recogni/ed now but a green!screen a through which you could erform basic hy erte#t linking" )eamus went to the 'elecom Lireann office on the )outh &all and asked about setting u an I)5 and he was told the best thing he could do was emigrate, which he rom tly did" I allegedly threw the black rabbit, Flu this, and deny it" (e a sie, down the stairs one morning when I woke u with it sitting on my illow $ I do not recall arently did find the reci e for 4cstasy, but the ne#t roblem was locating the ingredients"

11 'he scene, late at night, in County )ligo $ 1y the side of the bed there are, ty ically, between twenty and thirty books" ?lso, there are co ies of maga/ines and literary 0ournals" I am reading none of these" I am lying in the bed ta ing at my i5hone" It is a rare occurrence for me now to finish a book" I search for reasons to sto reading rather than for reasons to go on" I flit and ho from book to book in recisely the way my brain has been trained to flit and ho from site to site $ I ha%e been neurologically rewired" ?lso, a dark disco%eryC if contem orary books ha%e some tiny ho e of being read all the way through, I belie%e that many of the classics ha%e none at all $ if you%e been online all day, their ace 0ust seems altogether glacial now3 they can seem kind of ridiculous" &ortified by one of those enormous blinds ots in my reading, I had a go last winter at Madame Bovary, and it took me three weeks to get through about si#ty ages of the horrible thing before I flung it across the room" It 0ust wouldnt mo%e in

the way I e# ect a narrati%e to mo%e now" I fear that I will ne%er be able to read such books again, and I fear I am not alone in this, that I am ty ical of the current multitude, and the coming multitudes will be worse again $ they wont e%en try to read such books $ and the classics will fade away, and disa ear"

1< 1ut weirdly $ 'owards the end of writing this iece, I %isited friends who li%e in the dusty, dry, li/ard!coloured hills south of ?thens" 'hey do not ha%e an Internet connection and I decided against the e# ense of allowing my i5hone to roam" )o I s ent 0ust o%er four days entirely offline, which I belie%e is as long as I%e been offline in more than a decade" ?nd, you know, it wasnt so bad" In fact, Internet addiction turns out to be %ery similar to cannabis addiction" For the first day or two without, you are a little bit irked, and %aguely im atient, and susce tible to a kind of why!bother!with!anything ennui, but there is no hysical withdrawal3 there are no sweats, and there is no shaking" ?nd after a while, you retty much forget about it, and you 0ust get on with your life" I now sus ect that Internet use might in fact ha%e 2uite a lot in common with cannabis use" 'he occasional blast is fine, and can e%en be re%elatory" 1ut too much of it makes you a bit touchy and stu id, and you really shouldnt be doing it all day e%ery day, and you really, really dont need to wake .n bake" Is it concei%able that a more casual a effects" It a roach might e%en become the normB ? few

months ago, I s oke to some art students, and we talked about the Internet and its ears that the cool thing now for arty kids in their early twenties is to go ily of closing their Facebook accounts and gi%ing u 'witter" offline" 'hey s oke ha

'he Internet, they suggested, has become a bit of a :ad thing" 'hey seemed to me to be much less e#cited about it than my own generation is" It was as boring to them as tele%ision was to me when I was in my twenties $ I 0ust wasnt arsed about it3 it was what middle!aged eo le did $ and I wonder now if the coming multitudes might not be so bad after all"

16 Or $ (hat if its a skin of an#iety thats ulled tautly across the entire surface of the world, o%er all the hills and undulations, and what if it has changed e%erything, fore%er, and for the worse, and what if we can ne%er, e%er esca e from itB

To read the rest of Dublin Review 49, you may purchase the issue here.

Proudly powered by WordPress. Created by Mark Ellison