Yannick Giovanni Marshall

A 5,000-word philosophical monologue in narrative form — about love, exile, and a seafarer and his adult doll.

This is my strangest and most unguarded writing — but also one that I stand by.

Written years before the normalization of AI, it’s a meditation on post-humanness, place, taboo and intimacy.

I’m polishing it now and releasing it August 5th. Pre-order below.

excerpt from the oceanist

1.

I have a cold. I’ve gone the entire winter without one. I have no idea if this will be the final straw and be the reason that she leaves. She will most definitely notice but maybe she will find it endearing. It’ll be considerate of me to try not to talk often. To let her speak, or spend most of our time in glances.

Most likely though she will notice. She will ask me whether we can light a small fire on the beach, near the rocks and on the sand so that she can politely remove herself from confinement with my germs and give herself the room of the night. She doesn’t know that fireflies can injure her and mosquitoes will land on latex skin like any other.

I will have to break it to her that even though she can’t see them, this is a soldier’s beach. They have been watching us all along. They only humor me and my vessel because I seem to them an old, salt and pepper mad man that only has his ocean and his doll. In me they find their poetry. Even if they never speak of it, or write it down, they’ve convinced themselves that only looking at me, only noticing me makes them authors. And by being authors they are not soldiers but better. They’ve heard of Hemingway’s life but they don’t know that all Oceanists hate Hemingway. All of his lines ring false. The ocean is not a partner to fisherman. It is not a man of any kind, though it is a body, wide and open. It does lend itself to the use of compasses, the digital mapping of sea-floors, nets and sails, green bottles. It does let our refuse lubricate and lotion its skin. But it is not a person, it has no personality, and it would be a terrible thing if it did. 

Eventually she will leave. I’m not sure if she knows that I plan to free her. She is scared but in the way that seaweed is scared. It is vulnerable, able to be pried though but is almost always pushed aside. I’ll unharness her. I’ll finish memorizing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and lay it inside of her. This too is a kind of memory. 

You, out there, you must understand that even us Oceanists need an audience. We were not created to pose against the storm clouds for your photos and epic poems. I have had a mother and a father; I went to school and bought sweets at a shop. I am more than a shadowy figure to warn your children about. She will run to the land police, immediately after I free her, of course. I’m well-prepared for that. Prepared at least in terms of being able to draw in an anchor. Prepared in terms of setting a bull loose upon the waves while being set upon by swimming, out of breath, German Shepherds. You cannot catch a man of the ocean. Not even with speedboats.

I sound like them. One day I’ll look in the mirror and find a silhouette. 

The sea and the land are very different, even non-writers know this. There are different laws. The jurisdiction of the stunted imagination ends somewhere on the surf. This vessel recognizes no law, no maritime law, no international anything. Sailors have always been the only anarchists. Once there is law there is no longer sailing, only the movement of cargo. This must be what they think of her. A single unit. A pile of trembling rubber, stood up in the moonlight dressed in a red evening gown by a madman. But if this is madness we might as well be mad.

“Hey, do you want to be released?” 

Of course there is no response. This is why if I bring her out to the town people will say that she is dead or that she is not alive. You see what they did to Lars and the Real Girl, they made Lars run around like Forest Gump. There is no love land people will not pathologize. They say Sex dolls are not people. There are no sex dolls. There are dolls — and the oversexed town. Or undersexed, or just a world where an attractive, motionless woman cannot be associated with anything other than sex and possession. Their motionless women are on billboards by highways and their men find a way to climb them and vandalize them. 

We have not expanded our horizons, we humans. There is no such thing as inorganic matter. Between consciousness and the unconsciousness there is a fluidity. They should watch the old Twilight Zone episode where the man is locked up on a prison planet galaxies away and is given a lady robot for comfort. And even though she…or it…was an invention his tears were real and human. And so were hers. And so would mine be if they shot her in the head like they did that robot. Savages. Still, I’d cry too if she left me and ran off to the hills. But that is the thing about those whom we call dolls. They cannot run off. They are physically incapable of heart-breaking. So tell me, don’t we who love dolls say something new about the evolution of the human spirit? Aren’t we testament to lives post-human, post-Siri, towards a post-organic humanity, the only humanity possible in the society we’ve decided must careen towards the dust? 

My red dress love is better than the volleyball who left the guy in Castaway. Wilson ran. It’s funny how so many of these lonely love stories are set in or near the ocean. That’s because they are written by land writers, the only people that see a world teeming with animal life, physical adventure, and multiple skies as dull, lonely and boring. I know many Oceanists who have families and daughters they bring gifts too, mistresses and misters abroad. The ocean is not a lonely place. It is not an apartment building with a single glass, a single plate, a cold stove, and the infesting hum of refrigeration. The ocean is where real men go that have courage enough to snap out of that world. Women too. People who are brave enough to love differently. To see the glossy, admittedly inexpertly done makeup of an adult doll and know that love does not require sentience. That its best moments are still, or in a falling beyond language. The best of all loves is the love that requires no reply. 

Wait, I think she’s waking up. 

2.

“You want a blanket?”

Human beings have made an entire world of plastic. Everything they love, everything they go to war with, the lynchpin of their economy, all things have plastic in them. They love plastic, they love it literally to death. And when one sits down and reflects upon this one is confronted with the realization that maybe what repels us from sex doll loving is not its artifice but what is human in it. It is wrong to love a sex doll not because it is plastic but because it is human. It is the thing we made for us. The thing we live with and in. It is our most monstrous creation and the thing that reflects us best and we are in many ways both proud and ashamed of this.  There is now no human, whether body, space or culture, that is not in part, plastic. The Anthropocene would be more honestly described as the synthetic-oscene. Finally we have followed God to the ends of the earth, ha, and made a world of our own making and of our own doing. But, of course, this is just like us, hating and loving what we make. God fashioned Adam out of clay and he loved him the first day. He loved him even before he breathed life into him and even more when he did. We, as disgusting as it may seem, have always been God’s playthings. But now Adam has fashioned plastic and polymer and latex and has brought his own love from it — dug his own love out of his own loins and stood her up. He has brought her from his own loins rather than have it stolen from his body and be told that it is woman, a mate and a helper. Indeed, I blew life into her myself, from my own lungs. She is real because of my own breath. And she is mine in a way that no woman can be. She is propertied, not property. She is mine own master. This love may be many things but it certainly cannot be said to be ungodly. In any case, when did it begin to matter what humans thought of as ungodly. Man follows God. Man is made in His image, in the image of the image-maker. But she is no image-maker. Still, these are early days, when the ex-machina’s are only just stirring in their cradles. Indeed, there has never been sci-fi that was not at the same time some mode of doll-making. She is no image-maker but neither was man for centuries. At least not like this.
“From dust we came and from dust we shall return.”

She won’t. She is not biodegradable. Is that not holy? My body is moth-bitten, it is a normalized decay. The sight of grey hair should send the same panic through the bones as noticing a lion staring at you from the plain’s grass. Death, the plague that all we mortal things hold on to, romanticize, and don’t — as would be logical —  spend every waken moment to rid ourselves of, is welcomed in our most moving songs and art. We learn that all people catch death and throw our hands up as if no one ever could stop this most terrible of messes. Death, our only mortal enemy, does not call us to arms. No one has rolled a rock over the cave to block that clawing dragon that has been carrying us off one by one since the beginning of time. If anything was worthwhile at all, any human endeavor worth the money spent on it, it would be stopping death. Death thou shalt die! Not in heaven though, here, where there is sex, kippers and dawn on the water. I will roll the rock. As for me and my house we shall not suffer fools. 

Look at my baby.  All the dead and dying parts have been scrapped from her body.  She was built without a plan for our destruction, or hers — yea, in some ways we are more than God. Or at least an expansion of the his works. We are his logic. Look at her. I’d suffer for her. I would draw a sword on the first man that called her my “synthetic partner.” No, my love is like a red, red rose. Pink in her body and velvet to the touch. Thank you but I don’t need her to be included into the realm of human sexualities. It is the conceit of man to not believe that the human has its limits. That one can, if one wishes, step over onto the edge of people and peer down. The waves are not always crashing. They are often still and the sunlight is often upon them. Life and death is not everything. Sometimes the impala stretches and walks over to lay beside the lion at the watering-hole.  We are still too fascinated with absolutes. Moving towards her means moving away from them, and their heavily corrosive and plastic sociality. She is not synthetic. She is not, not sentient. The land, towns and trade are. And they peddle it.

They will ask me what her name is. If I don’t tell them they will wave it as evidence of the truth in their accusations that she is an object. I must brand her to bring her into the realm of the subject for these people. I won’t. Love is not named. It is unnameable,. To name it is to cheapen it. One thrusts it into well-worn artificial categories that do nothing but lead humans by the bit into appropriate calendars and behaviors. Naming destroys the very inventiveness that is or could have been humanity and replaces it with animalistic routine. It is an arrest. It is an imposition of place. What they do not know is that they exist in the same world as my red, red rose. They are with her as well. All the world is plastic, and nothing really ends. Loving her is simply being honest about the will to escape bio-degradation. To shoot my best shot at permanence. It’s not an avoidance of age or fetishized youth but something more akin to an enduring. All of our poets speak of enduring, forevers and loves eternal but not one of them had the courage to really seek it out. 

She is not my doll. I am hers. I am her plaything. I am the one that offers her touches, intimacies, language, meaning, all of the silly, transient things humans have manufactured and kept for themselves. I am her doll. And she, with or without consciousness, has me as a temporary thing. To throw away as we imagine we do to them. A thing that will disintegrate at a speed that she must recognize as but an instant. Because she will outlive me, the birds, the trees. This is what ought to have been meant by angel.

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