Social Isolate Club

Sure, that was where they all hung out, the lot of them, real and imaginary alike and failures all, like the Club itself. Both a place and the idea of a place. The mandate being something like: to fail continuously and generously in the pursuit of of understanding and re-imagining everything. And they succeeded in that failure with comical vim, like a toddler unable to walk or talk, trying to do both with wide eyes in a series of loud guttural grunts and acrobatic stumbles.

It was unnerving, in all of its incarnations, the Club. Social isolates indeed. Like when it was the dungeon space, inside the Sculpture Center, all crumbly walls with moist air and nooks. It was bookended by two doors, one wood and painted white, the other white and painted wood, both without handles and set open by being mis-hinged and wrongly sized for their jambs, announcing the Social Isolate Club backwards and the acronym straight up, [sic], which also offered some lame excuse for their fumblings. Open door policy, by their own ineptitude. And in between the doors were all of the attempts and mistakes, lined up in a hallway that lead to an office.• It was sad and cold and comfortable down there, quiet and echoey.

Insofar as a corporation is a body, that was the flesh. The breath and brainwaves lent by the individuals who passed through the doors and the select individuals coming often [sico] animated the space, giving it an atmosphere of engagement in things both frivolous and necessary, of an ongoing search, not only for comprehension and possiblities of reinvention, but for the joy inherent in the objects of interest and the tasks at hand. There were artists and literary types, a few physicists and janitors, mathematicians and doctors, whathaveyou. And then some were figments or people who died and live in the minds and habits of other members. There was no schizophrenia or multiple-personalities, at least no more than is common, but the Club made allowance in its atmosphere for those dead and unlived souls to have their own voice as members in a way that all recognized as being eccentric and quirky, but cherished both for the strange ability it afforded in communicating otherwise difficult information, and for the very awkwardness that the rule exemplified. And though all of the members, real and otherwise, were odd and had their differences, they were all suicidal in the best sense, and sincere in purpose.

What happened in that space, mostly is that there were long silences that seemed as awkward to those unaccustomed to it as it was comfortable to those who were. That society and isolation that is both title and defining atmosphere allows for the strange and singular flavor of failure that the Club is known to produce, as well as the strong and lasting friendships. Days and evenings spent there, reading and writing, talking and sitting. Visiting. Visiting like that, like it was a verb, the way people on the porches of Virginia visit, where two rocking chairs and nothing to do is something to do. Or visiting like this: like people visit in marble halls where they scream over the meaning of words and invent structures of power. Or visiting alone, as people do on porcelain thrones or park benches, calculating possibilities or watching the bounces of leaves at the margins of solid trees.

Late at night and in the unused hours the mood changed slightly outward - social isolation became more isolated social; members would gather for long and studious games of Calvinball or Nomic or Mornington Crescent, games that would start with ridiculous rules and end with starkly beautiful and utterly nuances systems of government. Groups would set out to change the world with innovative energy policies and end up dissecting the semantics of humor, or start telling jokes and end up with exacting plans for solar satellites. That kind of idiocy.

Sure, I mean that was it, the Social Isolate Club, more or less.

•The hallway was sprinkled with books and curiosities, placed symmetrically in the alcoves and crannies of a crumbly and grimey space. The books, an array of art, science, philosophy, math and literature texts, had been re-bound in identical black hardcovers, and retitled in pairs, with one title reading backwards and the other not - titles like Quixologia, Tallyho: Signaling Games, Turing Test: Teachers Edition, and Syntax (abridged). In six of the niches, there were awkward seats installed, where you could sit and read the books. The seats were made of Dibond, an aluminized material that was stark white and strangely clean in contrast to the space, and this material was screwed onto plywood, again with a bilateral symmetry to it’s pair down the hall. The seats had cushions that corresponded to the order of the screws and went from black, to white static, to black-and-white static in the middle, in some strange echo of Maxwell’s Demon’s idiot cousin’s sad fate. In the first nook, Alan Turing’s death mask sat on a Classic Macintosh humming a Grey Screen of Death; in the last nook a bust of Turing spun slowly in the body of another Mac. The next two nooks were empty except for the natural debris of the space; following that were 11 hendecahedral frames supporting one face each of wood veneer, all playfully arranged like maladroit children's blocks. It’s corresponding space down the hall held 11 more of the polygons, this time made of olive wood, with drawings on one face of each arranged in a mirror of the others. Above both of those sets of polygons were shelves of books, and across the hall (which is to say, if you had room to turn around in that narrow space, just behind you) were more books shelved below two model Ships of Theseus, each with half of their planks newly painted white, the other half bare wood. And in the middle of the hallway sat the last fax machine, cut in half and filled with black cement, plugged in and trying to communicate.

In the office there was a desk made of Dibond that was folded around a filing cabinet on one side and resting on two stacks of books on the other side: one stack of encyclopedias, and one stack of Anarchist Cookbooks. The surface of the desk was worn and marked around a clean, 8-1/2 x 11 inch rectangle, in the middle and carried a few stacks of composition notebooks and a jewelry-framed, color photograph of static. Behind the desk was a Comfortable Chair which was actually a couch that was painted black and white with the words Comfortable Chair across the back, and that had a short stack of primary-colored books replacing one of it’s missing legs. Above the Chair was a mirror image painting of the Chair in it’s place, next to a small wall text that fell well short of explaining anything there. Across from the Chair was another piece of Dibond screwed flat against the wall, with some scheme of a thought map that evolved across it. All of which is lead out by that final door made of Dibond and painted flat, a dark woodgrain, with a baby-blue door-glass painted in the middle and that Social Isolate Club text showing through the back of the glass, the [sic] painted on the front.