Have Fun Pretending by Alex Hampshire

 

Have Fun Pretending is made up of 120 untitled poems, each very tightly justified to the left margin and vertically centered. Though they have line breaks, they read more like a nonstop droll of speech whose effect is accretive and reverberant, at times sounding a bit like Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation:

Do good things with bad money

do bad things without money.

Become a bad person for free

without money, as things become

free for everyone who acts now.

All free things become bad things.

All things become bad, too, because

whether a bad person or a good one.

No one is free while others

are obsessed. No one is without

the possibility of becoming capable.

Lines like these and “nothing ever happens where no one ever profits / except when authorities are aware of the circumstances” speak to Hampshire’s antipathy towards mass-produced political discourse, his sense that good deeds have always already been bought by bad money and repurposed as virtuous marketing schemes. Indeed, much of Have Fun Pretending includes moments where this discourse turns back upon itself, as in:

Become ungovernable by immediately building

a different kind of cage.

Calling attention to this dynamic risks incurring critiques of being reductive, cynical, or even apologetic for the powers-that-be, a gesture of bad faith. This tension is one Hampshire leans into to an almost cringe-inducing point, admitting in the book to being “uninvited” to something for making people so uncomfortable. At the same time, this tension shows a fundamental lack of meaning in language itself as it becomes increasingly instrumentalized to sell, sell, sell–everything from weird and potentially toxic gadgets like thermal retention pillows, to Brita filters, to an image of oneself as constituted on a personal vision board. 

While the earlier book Furniture Activism takes a more explicit stance against domination–arguing that we should burn our mattresses because pharmaceutical and furniture industries are in cahoots to make us sick, our “consumer choices” unwittingly complicit in this domination–Hampshire’s aim in Have Fun Pretending is not to campaign on behalf of the dominated. When everything is grounded in as absurd a situation as Hampshire argues that it is, taking sides can feel ridiculous–a kind of pretending that is more about oneself, than about whoever is getting the short end of the justice stick. However, rather than analyzing the dynamic, the poetry embraces the circuitous logic, projecting its guilt towards the reader. The resultant mode assumes a declarative, directive, or questioning syntax frequently addressed to “you,” meant to arouse a sense of anxious doom and guilt over your inability to “realize” the magnitude of “the lives you are held responsible for”:

What did you say last night? Remember how disrespectful

you were, and what you said about my family? I’m serious.

Do you remember what you said about your family? No?

Nothing? Good. That’s because you didn’t say anything

Whatsoever.

The speaker of Have Fun Pretending is an actor. This profession shields him from divulging much about his own life or political stance to instead “reveal something to us about ourselves,” specifically how much we are always posturing. (Acting is also a fitting profession as it is never easy to tell how serious he’s being at any moment, which speaks to a larger political ambiguity in Hampshire’s writing.) An expert in pretending himself, the speaker sees right through you:

Follow me for more unsettling content.

Nobody is clean. […] I can see

your wounds. They are too deliberate

to ignore. Incentivize what you think is

wrong before attempting to fix it yourself.

Other people might fall for it, but not the Actor. Indeed, the actor is full of knowledge of the deficiencies of your righteous act, able to see that you are a bad actor. Hampshire’s lines “The thing everybody says / yet never admits to saying” are axiomatic here, calling attention to the “true Self” underneath the would-be actor’s worldly mission:

No one starts over without

profound delusion. You will be wanted again

when the time is right.

Thus, for Hampshire, acting means something larger about being in the world and enables him to express cynicism about progress. The other side of mass produced political sentiment expressed in vapid discourse (“solution-based solutions”) is a rapacious appetite to be a Self seen a certain way. Seeking “truth to power” or “accountability,” phrases that repeat throughout Have Fun Pretending, is more likely a ruse for selfish gain—Self-help, as it were.

Anyone who doesn’t see this is deluded, and perhaps Hampshire’s thick irony expresses the sentiment that piercing that delusion isn’t possible. The response then is not to break through that delusion, but to carry it to ever more bizarre extremes:

ATTN: If I run into any of you today, tonight,

or tomorrow, try to remember my intentions.

The costume I have chosen is very authentic,

maybe a little TOO authentic for some. In years

past when I have attempted a traditional “zombie

attire,” I just went with the store-bought materials.

This year, I stepped up my game with gelatin & latex

to create a base that is painless and easy to remove

once the day is over.

Ultimately, Have Fun Pretending’s best moments are less “gotcha” than absurd. Indeed, while Hampshire is clear on calling out the double-standards of contemporary discourse, this risks being a double standard in its own right. On the other other hand, these absurd moments say something more profound, or ultimate, about Self-hood:

Ask the movers. This time tomorrow, they will

possess everything I own. My wallet was stolen.

My ID was inside it. I paid them a thousand dollars

to move me. I can’t help them. No tools. They said

I can’t leave until they figure out who I am.

They don’t believe I am the one they are moving.

The self is ultimately always an act, one that transforms one’s desperation into a more easily surveillable, controllable subject. What seems different now, though, is the increasing lack of contact with the true Reality beneath our Self-ish projections. Indeed, if in former days the language of the status quo was duplicitous, hiding a more insidious agenda of control, today’s language is different not because it “shows its domination” on its sleeve but because there really isn’t an ulterior meaning or motive anymore, just a constant stream of simulation after simulation. In other words, there isn’t anything left before pretending—things just are now by virtue of pretending in the first place, originate as vapid slogans.

And so, nowadays, we hear more from Two-Factor Authentication texts sent from six-digit mystery machines than people, constantly asked to prove that we are ourselves in an existence where no meaning is possible. Faced with these odds, do we have any other option than to have fun pretending?

Buy it here.