The more I read, the less I know, and as I gaze at the little paper airplanes of knowledge fluttering down from the rooftop of my mind, I feel not concern, neither regret, but satisfaction. The more I mark meaning — giving names to my emotions, my hopes, and my fears — the more meaning eludes me. I envision myself climbing up onto one of those flimsy paper wings and gliding over an anonymous city and into a field of total blankness. There are no corners, no grooves with which to construct answers. There is no meaning. There is only meaninglessness.

“The acts of life have no beginning or end,” writes Tristan Tzara, vanguard of the early twentieth century’s Dada art movement. “Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada.”

To read or to shred and blend into a smoothie? Up to you.

WEEK 7

Literature Is Dead, But Reality Is Better Than Fiction

Reading Assignment: Don DeLillo’s Mao II

Turn on the news and watch it as if the anchors are actors, performing a highly choreographed stage play that requires inter-network participation and an audience desirous of increasingly dazzling dramatic forms. Desensitize yourself to violence and assess the theatrical faculty of terror. Change the channel. It doesn’t matter what you watch, just as long as it’s not another panel or live broadcast—preferably a scripted show. Make a basic mental map of the new presentation’s plot points, its climax and dénouement.

Switch back to the news and do the same. Assess the possibility that live-action “midair explosions and crumbling buildings” impress more potently upon the human psyche than what we used to call art. Transform reality into a performance: everyone is a character in your diegesis; when exterior influences inevitably alter the direction of your story, reshape your persona with new neuroses and sufferings that protect your position as leading man or woman. The world is a stage. Whatever happens, wherever it happens, there is always a way to connect the chain of events back to you.

WEEK 8

Keep Your Identity at Arm’s Length and Wear Someone Else’s

Viewing Assignment: Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore

Accept DeLillo’s eerie augury, “The future belongs to crowds.” Every crowd is a chorus, filled with characters independently acting out their own stories. The crowd is also a character, swelling and undulating with collective energy. Temporarily lose grasp of your plot and dance with the ensuing dissociative fugue. Drink the soma. Play toss with the vibes. Pleasantly slip under the spell of generational hypnosis.

WEEK 9

The Truth Is a Lie If You Want It to Be

Reading Assignment: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed

By this stage of the exercise, it should be unclear whether you are living or acting or unwittingly placating to the directions of an elusive cosmic force. You are experiencing the cusp of the crack up. All of the earthly archetypes are conferencing inside you. They are discussing the meaning of insanity. Consensus fails to emerge, but one idea remains fixed: when the story assumes ultimate eminence, it only makes sense that unplanned disruptions, minor disappointments, and competing narratives trigger total internal collapse.

WEEK 10

Puzzles Are Always Missing Pieces, Just See What Happens

Reading Assignment: Jean Jacques Schuhl’s Dusty Pink

Cut-ups of your fragmented mind are floating in the ether, coalescing and fissuring at random, like jelly fish in an aquarium. You reach out, thinking you might take hold of one strand, only to be stung by another. Sometimes their tentacles scar the supple surface of your gray and white matter. Recognize these scars as stories.

WEEK 11

In The End, Stories Are All That Exist

Viewing Assignment: William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm

Every story has multiple subplots. Every subplot has its own subplots and spinoffs. Every story is a story within a story within a story and, in fact, when you depart the only thing that will be left of you is your story. And yet the story never ends, never even begins and there is only one way out: extricate yourself from linearity.