“I wouldn’t feel upset if humanity came to an end.”

I read The Self-Esteem Holocaust Comes Home and felt extreme anxiety for three days. The anxiety was very bad. I kept watching that Johnny Cash video for the song Hurt. I sat for hours staring at the screen like a zombie watching the sad Johnny Cash get older and die. Sam Pink is making a statement on the last man. According to Wikipedia the last man is, “a weak-willed individual, one who is tired of life, takes no risks, seeks only comfort and security.”

With The Self-Esteem Holocaust Comes Home and Person, Sam Pink is showing what it is like to be the last man, to be futile, to have no power, to be adrift in the ocean of self-serving humans. Because that is what it is like now, with so many humans alive and ever-increasing, an ocean, we are all drowning each other, holding each other under the water, no man, woman or child escapes. We seek comfort not happiness. When an American says, “I want to be happy,” the definition of the word “happiness” is “comfort.” There is no risk, no struggle anymore in the American spirit. It has all died. The characters in Self-Esteem are cheap; they have been cheapened by the world and have no desire to become expensive and rare. Supply and demand works with humans just as with shoes and apples, the more humans there are, the cheaper each one becomes. Tocqueville and Nietzsche thought it was democracy that cheapened and leveled the human spirit, but it is just population size, the more humans there are, the cheaper everything gets, people are cheap in America and people are even cheaper in China. Self-Esteem doesn’t contain any names, no first or last names, only the positions of the people in the story. The group of plays sets up a world where everyone is not a name, not even a number, but a temporary title.

The plays could be defined as tragicomedy but it doesn’t resemble any past works by Beckett or Ionesco. It is a completely different creature. I believe tragicomedy is a manifestation of a culture suffering from mendacity. Sam Pink is not afraid of mendacity, he knows it well, and it shows in his writing.

Noah Cicero: I don’t know if I love humanity. I don’t think I do. Sometimes I think, “I feel bad for humanity,” but then I think, “How can I feel bad for humanity, I have no money and I’m not very good myself.” Then I think, “I’m surrounded by humans, some of them I like being around.” A lot of humans I do not like being around though. There are some people I would beat with a baseball bat if I could. I do not know if I could shoot them dead. But I could beat them. I don’t know if I have “compassion” for my characters, I like to think about people. It is what I’ve done since I was little. Instead of thinking about sports or music I would think about people. I remember playing football when I was little and trying to understand the relationship of the football team, and oftentimes dads would coach their sons. And I enjoyed watching their interpersonal relationships and going home and thinking about them. I don’t know if I want to save humanity. I don’t even know what I’d be saving them from. One time I was talking to a political science professor and I said, “The majority always wins, not people like me. If the majority wants to destroy themselves, let ‘em.”

Sam Pink: yeah i don’t want to save humanity or anything. i wouldn’t feel upset if humanity came to an end.

NC: Self-Esteem seems spiritual in a way. There is this line in The Human Body as a Fireplace, where you say, “The thing called the world will put out the fire on the couch.” I think what you are referencing here is eternal recurrence. The janitor basically says, “The fire will be put out. The fire is already out. No need to worry.” That will organically take place. Everything will resolve itself in time. To me eternal recurrence is this: I am at work on a Saturday night and it is busy as hell. The window is full of plates that need to be dressed. There is chaos in the kitchen, people are yelling, people are dashing around like maniacs, plates are crashing on the floor, my knees hurt. I scan the computer screen and then scan the plates and realize what must be done and start moving. I’m moving in a direction, as a force, a force that will dress the food and get it to the customers. Someone walks over and says, “Noah you are backed up.” I respond, “No, it is already done.” I don’t know if that is a good description of eternal recurrence, but that is the feeling of eternal recurrence to me. The feeling I have when I take on a mode of Being that is pure and driven.

SP: i like the janitor. the janitor cleans. and everything’s already clean, because the janitor knows he’ll clean it. in one of the scenes of that play, the janitor makes a man dressed like superman drink his blood. the janitor is better than superman. i don’t aspire to be a “super man” i want to be a janitor.

NC: Are these actually plays? Because they lack set or acting direction. You supply no descriptions of what people look like, their race, what they should be dressed like, the characters don’t even have names which implies the genders could go either way, etc. I get the feeling from these pieces of language that you wanted to create a different world, a world out of place and that seems to float in the allegory. The thing about fiction is that you have to set the scene which places the character in reality. For example in Beckett, he seems to get that escape from reality he always wanted when he finally wrote plays. His fiction attempts but doesn’t completely escape the confines of reality. Theater is strange because you can stick people standing next to a tree or in a car, and it strangely isolates them. It takes them out of reality and places them somewhere else. My question is, do you want the audience to imagine these pieces of literature as plays or to take them as they are, disembodied voices and that the audience should be free to make the characters and scenes become what they want, allowing the audience to have the freedom to write some of the story?

SP: the pieces in the book use methods of both short story and plays. i tried to refer to characters in as many ways as i could. so in some parts of the book, they are referred to by where they are located, sometimes as blank figures like “girlfriend” or “male” or in many other different ways. so i wanted people to “take them as they are” but also be able to be performed. if you saw the plays performed, you wouldn’t need to know the names or be told what they look like. the book took years to write because it changed forms a lot. at the end, i just wanted to write things as they are to be imagined. like, one of my goals, was to make something that is entertaining to read, while being as bare as possible. so to me, it’s both really bare, but also very full when you read it. to me it’s all very concrete. i don’t think about “setting things in reality” or anything. but self-esteem holocaust is not going to be a popular book. it has nothing appealing about it, except to a small audience of people. i told cameron (the publisher) that when we started working on it. it’s just a weird fucking book that maybe ten people will love, and many others won’t care about. i’ll probably never write a book like it again. it was fun to do and that’s it.

NC: In an email you said you wanted things to be “organic” when it comes to government and society. I recently had to do my senior thesis and it was high debt and its consequences on government. In doing research I noticed several pieces of data that are very troubling. The pieces of data go like this: if you have kids and make $60,000 or less you basically can’t afford to live in America, in reference to this blog post. There are 45 million Americans using food stamps right now, 47% of Americans don’t pay taxes, a good portion making between $30,000 and $75,000 don’t pay any because they get tax credits and many who do pay some in that category don’t pay all of it because of tax credits. 79% of American households make less than $75,000 a year, we can assume from the data that 79% of America aren’t doing very well. They can’t save money, they are in terrible debt trying to have cars, health insurance, raise kids, have the Internet, cable, pay the mortgage, etc. Now this is my assumption from the data: if the food stamps, the welfare checks, and the tax credits were taken away, America would be instantly thrown into chaos and revolt. It would be organic. Currently the government is just printing fake money to hand out to buy food. It seems obvious that the country is at some stalemate, like nothing is happening. The world isn’t turning in America, history has temporarily stopped. Now, to your word “organic.” If things were to become organic then things would get very bad very quick. How do you feel about that as a person, that the nation, our nation, would be sent into such chaos? Do you feel fine with it? Is it something we should do? Would you rebel? Would you say, “Man this is awesome, let’s kick some ass!” There is a part of me that “feels” like it might be worth it, but there is also a part of me that “feels” like it wants things to stay normal.

SP: i typed a really long answer and erased it. i don’t remember the context of “organic” in the email you are referencing. basically, the assumption of the post you linked, is that people need to have those things, and that people would become chaotic without them. which i don’t know either way. plus there is already chaos now. chicago police sexually abuse people, and coerce confessions that send people to prison for decades. there have been many many cases where someone is released from jail after doing ten, fifteen, twenty years. and the news reporter is right there to ask him questions about it, like what it feels like to be free. and when the released prisoner responds in a thankful and ecstatic way, the news reports the story as if everyone should just be relieved to have such a good example of positivity and triumph through adversity. that’s chaos. you reference societal things in your question, and society formed from chaos. people will always try to have society. i don’t care if “chaos” happens. there is nothing good about my life that would change in a state like that. if anything, i don’t think the kind of chaos you are talking about could ever happen because people are pussies now. if chaos happened, our generation would lose fast. the older generations are way more sturdy. our peers are just a bunch of passive losers who argue about dumb shit on the internet and complain if they have to walk a mile. i have extreme mood swings so sometimes i care about people and sometimes i don’t. right now i’m feeling angry. it feels thrilling to me, to think about america losing. i’m not trying to do anything to help it lose, but it would be so great to watch everyone panic. living in a controlled society makes me panic, so it’d be nice to see others panic. the first thing i’d do if “chaos” happened, would be either beat the shit out of my landlord, or throw a brick at a cop car. or maybe just do backstroke through lake michigan, looking up at the sun.