Ten Tips for Autostereogrammatic Epiphany

Anumber of commenters have inquired regarding the high volume of mistresses referenced on this grief blog, e.g. “How does an apparent deadbeat like yourself appeal to so many mistresses?????” Or “Unless you’re a French aristocrat, the word ' mistress' is a low point for even this dubious blog read solely by your dozen former classmates who maintain morbid interest in how low you might plummet, ” or, “Your headshot sneers epicene. Your teeth are too small for your mouth, offering a feral impression. Please elucidate your unlikely process for procuring mistresses and spare no detail. ” Having (fingers crossed) recently added a new ' tertiary love interest' into the fold, here is the process.

One: Find yourself in the Liberty Village apartment of a pretty young woman from your hometown of Sault Sainte Marie, the crucial preliminary maneuvers lost in the nebulosity of a blackout. Based on the tears on some faces, most notably your own, and the voices hoarse from shouting, many cruel words must have been exchanged during the unencoded hours, yet still you find yourself cross-legged before her, looking into her eyes and holding her hand. If the Sault is notorious for its shallow gene pool, and the lighting low enough, let her vaguest resemblance to Catherine hold you in thrall.

Two: If your small press Amazon listings can’t convince her that the “great man in history” theory applies to you, do not denigrate her chosen profession of “marketing” by suggesting that marketers referring to themselves as creatives is the cruellest oxymoron ever to manifest. These tactics can only set you back.

Three: If Mariana is explaining what brought her to Toronto, i.e. “I was in love with an actual great man, Pete… ” and her sad saga of an ill-advised menage-a-trois incorporating both Pete and his brother Paul is poorly told with hundreds of diversions, none of which even remotely relevant to mistress procurement, albeit slightly more relevant to the subject of grief, then even after editing it down to the fewest possible clauses while maintaining her speech’s integrity of dialect, place it in a supplementary PDF so overburdened readers can skip it if they so choose.

Four: If she sobs “And now it’s come to this, 5:30 am and here with this doofus rather than Pete or even latent Paul, ” yet a mixture of stimulants and GABAergic drugs has you feeling like no doofus but rather the “original vagabond, ”5 then dust off your high school Latin to speak the words of blessed Augustine, “Quid est enum tempus?” “(What, then, is time?)”6

Five: If it gets to dark to see the Catherine in her anymore, try to make your home in the darkness. Lie beside her. Touch 5 (Baez, 1975) 6 (Augustine, The Confessions, 1998) her purple pyjamas. Attach a leash of longing. Here is the crux of all bonding. Here is where and when you will acquire that tertiary love interest, reader. The euphoria of post-coital repose is often attributed to the magic of the coital act itself; however, lying down beside a woman is itself a magic rite. The hair vitamins’ yield. Static electricity off pyjama bottoms.

Six: Align your knees with hers. Align your regrets. Touch her neck. Tell her she’s adorable, which she is. You are no longer lying. You are being yourself. Tell her that you’ve always been aware of her sexual appeal, i.e. ‘the tan and the $400 haircut and the boyish charm, ’ but now you are aware of a certain humanity as evinced by the Pete-Paul fiasco, a tenderness that calls to mind no specific girl from your Sault Sainte Marie youth but all of them.

Seven: Ask her if she has read the essay The Autostereogrammatical in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. If she has not, or if more likely she doesn’t respond, emits a fake snoring sound for example, then remind her that an autostereogram is better known as a “magic eye” poster and then quote the following from Julia Jordan: These two methods of seeing an autostereogram correctly are thus either known as wall-eyed and cross-eyed, or convergent and divergent. To achieve either view, the brain has to overcome its desire to focus, or to converge at the point of the image. This moment of revelation, where images become multilayered and munificent, is known as parallax. The autostereogram thus offers a model of vision where the image itself seems to be an agent: we can provoke it, we can coax it, but nothing is guaranteed; the autostereogram asks us to consider whether two perspectives, if converged on correctly, can give way to a previously hidden third element—by dint of its revelatory structure, the autostereogram is naturally epiphanic.7

“We’re having an epiphany, ” tell her. Explain how the moment of revelation occurred when her humane side evinced by Pete’s big mistake, e.g., ‘appeasing Paul as best he could, ’ parallaxed with her Instagram appeal, and the complete human being was born in time. Ask her, “Isn’t this munificent?” Confess that all fully-coaxed human imagery cannot but invoke Catherine’s humanity for you. Say, “We’ve found the third element!” Say that several times for effect, with increasing enthusiasm. Say, “We’ve coaxed it. ” Say, “I love y o u.”

Eight: If she isn’t laughing, chuckle a bit, i.e. ‘Hey, above all, life is a gag. These magic eye visions may be mirror refractive folly, but you must know how possible it is to love a stranger or even an in-law in any given moment, for love exists outside of time and only flits back into existence when credentialed by desire converging at the point of the image.’ Say, “I love you, Cathy,” while kissing her neck, Cathy being a nickname of your dead sister that also conceivably rhymes with Mari, which maybe Mariana is sometimes called. If she says, “I love you, Paul,” then you are in business! 7 (Jordan, 2015)

Nine: If later Mariana awakens provoked by the deceased sister coaxed in her living room and well nay in her, she’ll retreat to her own room that contains another heterosexual man, i.e. ‘Any heterosexual man would be less unsettling than you right now after all that dead sister talk, Dave, ’ then why not lie on the floor, on a big pile of soiled garments for example, until you are asked to leave.

Ten: If after a strategic interlude of exactly three days you text her the following from Julia Jordan: On one hand, the autostereogram disturbs our assumption that meaning resides in depth—in what is buried and latent—by creating a hyperdetermined surface; the depth that it promises to disclose literally exists on the surface. We know as a viewer of the autostereogram, and as a reader of fiction, that depth is an illusion, and that both interpretative acts are therefore a mode of play, where the delight and vitality of the depthless, glittering surface is allowed to be all. But simultaneously, the autostereogram lives up to its promise, sharing its secrets and showing what was previously hidden. The surface is less meaningful than the image it obscures.8 then do not compulsively check your phone for return texts while re-reading this essay, for even if Mariana has consciously forgotten you, overtly denigrated you to her housemates 8 (Jordan, 2015) once you’d been Ubered away, you have made the excellent mistake of exposing something real of yourselves in the place between profane and mythic time.

5 COMMENTS ON “TEN TIPS FOR AUTOSTEREOGRAMATIC EPIPHANY” Anonymous: Doesn’t even sound like she’s your mistress bro. Mariana Sicoli: Okay first I am not your mistress and second there’s a reason all these posts get 1 like on social and it’s that YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO MARKET YOURSELF PROP - ERLY. Third I don’t even miss Paul and I’m glad we broke up. Fourth I don’t even remember you saying any of that crazy stuff and quite frankly I think you made a lot of it up. Did we play footsie or something? Maybe, I forget. Take this down or I’m contacting a lawyer. William Pitts: So I was thinking, “Yeah, she’s not going to be his tertiary love interest. But since ^ obviously got pretty worked up maybe David has an outside shot. I hate to think this guy actually knows what he’s doing and this is how I should be carrying on if I want more tertiary love interests. LigottiLigotti: How’s it going with the borderline personality one? David_Astaire: Not well.;(