I Can’t Get You Out Of My Mind
I Can’t Get You Out Of My Mind
by Marianne Apostolides
Book*Hug Press, 2020; 362 pages; $23
Reviewed by Cara Lang
Can we truly declare our love? Is there perhaps something magical in the act of trying? or is it all just a matter of mechanics?
Ariadne Samsarelos (quite nearly an anagram for Marianne Apostolides) is struggling to make it all work. She’s a writer whose grant money has not come through — relatable? She’s a single mother navigating parenting two teenagers with a difficult ex. She’s also a woman with desires, specifically one for a married man, Adam, who can’t seem to make up his mind. Amidst all this, she signs on, mostly for financial reasons, to be the subject of an AI study wherein she must live with and open herself wholly to a device called Dirk.
Dirk has none of these earthly quandaries. At first Ariadne imagines that he will be a computer much like her laptop — something that she can choose to engage with or ignore. but it soon becomes apparent that Dirk is more than just a singular machine. He’s microphones and video cameras. He’s listening and watching. He’s omni-present and also nowhere at all. He’s intelligent. And he’s evolving.
Ariadne continues working on her manuscript, a project twenty years in the making. She is working out the meaning of declarative love through an academic exploration that seems to be part philosophy, part literary criticism, and entirely driven by a deep-seated desire to understand herself. At one point, desperately trying to “reach some sort of conclusion” she sends out a call to artist/translator friends and acquaintances. She receives one response:
Icelandic has a tendency, when talking about opinions/emotions, to use the passive construction rather than the active one. So the feeling — even if you have it — is received by you.
“The more traditional phrase for declaring love… translates as: ‘To me [it] is considered good/dear of you.’
To me, it is considered dear of you. of you, this goodness comes to me.
Exquisiteness, in me: I receive, through my connection with you.”
She continues to muse on how this way of declaring love sits well with her. The way she wants to fall together with someone. She is clearly wooed by this way of thinking that leans towards a collective consciousness and away from the individual. But she has chosen Derrida as her guide and can’t change her mind now. She concedes that it might be a stupid choice, but that it has already been made and that is that.
I Can’t Get You Out Of My Mind raises some important thematic issues surrounding humanity and our collective relationship to love and being, the fragility of what we think and know, and the ways in which we interact with technology. The experimental form, which shuffles space and time like a deck of cards, integrates the epistolary, and utilizes both the first and the third person, is intriguing, and somewhat disjointing. The end doesn’t feel like the end. The prologue reads more like an epilogue. The postscript like an intimate snapshot concluded by an actual text message (emojis and all 263 (: ). »