“Welcome to the world” our five-year old daughter would say, when our kitty cat puked on the living-room floor, or when a freight train stopped our sedan from coursing down the highway. She knew, early on, what it meant to hold the tension of opposites. When her little sister was born, she chose a Whoopee Cushion as her welcome present, saying (you guessed it) “Welcome to the world.” 

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Zoë Hitzig’s Not Us Now welcomes us to a similar world of benevolent, if ominous, portent. Suffused with a Kindergartener’s wide-eyed wonder, although perched on the vertiginous path of the math of possibilities, Not Us Now proposes that life’s littlest pieces—from the mitochondria in our own bodies, to the microscopic insides of a computer’s diodes and solderings—these are the very things that add up to “Us.” That which is not us, however, is the heft of Hitzig’s disarming and formidable art, helping us descend into an algorithm of who we might yet become.

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In the book’s foreword, Srikanth Reddy imagines Dante’s Divine Comedy as an epic algorithm, “a finite sequence of steps which, if followed correctly, might lead to the infinite.” Hitzig’s proposed sequences are indeed terrifyingly simple, like the guileless conjurings of a Miró painting, or the profound naïveté of a Gertrude Stein novel. But like a kaleidoscope’s swirling shards, the stained glass of Not Us Now will cut to pieces that which you may have regarded as believable. Section 1’s first poem, “Bounded Regret Algorithm,” states in its opening lines:

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Mine is a life dedicated

to the calculation of loss.

I know with certainty

almost nothing. Yet here I am

executing legions

of decisions each moment.

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This is the stuff of confessions, a commencement where the quality of mercy is not strained, although what follows is indeed gentle, albeit frighteningly so. Words, and symbols, drop from a heaven to which we’ll later succumb (in Section 3 of the book). But first, we must endure what it means:

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To replace each arrival with

the nearest destination.

To keep you in what may

still be called breath.

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as well as crossing that very modern desert, when our devices cannot connect to the internet, let alone to one another:

 

Then our coin machines

began to translate earth.

As if all our neighbors

unplugged at once.

A gangrene tonality. 

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Hitzig forges on in this fiery place of all that we are not, its poems leading us to the City of Dys: “Technodysphoria,” (with “bodies soon / -to-be-blush / -ing embers of gestures,”) and “Technodysmorphia,” where “your index of memories obsolesced / heraldry shrunk to a point / classification codes dropped–.” She does not omit the phonic cousin of our Virgilian, algorithmic guide, “Dysrhythmia.” The lines Hitzig spray-paints on the walls of this new Dis (cf. the sixth circle of the Inferno) help us find the locus of our beliefs:

 

beyond the beyond-state

tremors the now swept

choreographed paths

 

and:

 

on the throat rendered

each gone heart

each pump slump hammer

 

finishing with:

 

the tangled vocals or

whatever murder chorus

sang that year

 

This is not the language of leisure or desire. Rather, in this parched place, we realize ourselves as unbelieving seers, “toxic molecules according / to principles invisible” welcomed to a world that is disintegrating. “Simplex Algorithm,” Section 1’s final poem, collects the language of this learning into a painful series of singular, monosyllabic line-sounds:

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           am

             I

             the

             snake

             am

             I

             the

             bone

             neck

             lace

             can

             I

             air

             lift

             drop

             fruit

             from

             planes

             to

             save

             those

             rear

             of

             wall

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Like Dante, we are welcomed into a new world. Section 2, its space “rear of wall,” qualifies as a place of purgatory. In this section’s eponymous poem, “Not Us Now,” we hear that:

 

             The family never thought

             it would be the last Christmas

             Eve dinner. By the gas

             fireplace. Drinking the after-

             dinner drinks. The sisters

             and the usual argument.

             The sweater and the talk

             of burning the sweater.

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Stories of family-holiday purgatories are legion, and laughably relatable. Hitzig reminds us that “The shadows on the long- / dead willow have time” due to the collision of opposites found in such spectacularly quotidian places: conversational battles at the dinner table between Grandma and Dad; or that hush of the crowd before a pitcher’s ball, and its connection with the opposing bat. “So many seconds came up close / then far then close again” she continues, words for the way time folds in on itself during a car crash, when seconds masquerade as years. And now, bleary-eyed from the whack of things coming together in such strangely consensual violence, Section 2’s subsequent poem “// tablets of unknown origin / 응 now us not are we,” churns out the computational arrangements that exist in its five words:

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we are not us now

we are not now us

we are us not now

we are us now not

we are now not us

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continuing until all the possibilities are exhausted, and finishing with:

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not us now +++ ++

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Have I unwittingly made this review into my own algorithmic reality? Maybe. And perhaps that’s part of this book’s magic. By allowing something to happen, by inviting an algorithm to follow its inherent path, we play craps with reality. But Hitzig, ever the seer, offers us a pair of pink, fuzzy dice to hang from our rearview mirror. She places them there on purpose:

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z* pounding at the ground

as if the ground couldn’t

be found. Like past. So many

miles of past. Now behind

z*. z* sees a shadow

jump-cut across an empty

swimming pool. Come in says

a voice come in into my shadow.

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There is little profit to be had, pounding at the ground of the past. Except, perhaps, in attempting to understand from whence we’ve come. Not Us Now revels in the brilliant, if fearsome, possibilities of a world rife with chance and change. In the foreword to his book on the I Ching, Carl Jung wrote:

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The psychophysical event includes the observer just as much as the reality underlying the I Ching comprises subjective, i.e., psychic conditions, in the totality of the momentary situation.

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This, too, is the world of Not Us Now, fomenting what’s already feared in the modern mind; that hard-to-believe sense of being seen in our scrollings, our online purchases, and in our relational preferences, algorithms invading most of the minutes of our lives. But Hitzig offers a paradise for all these pieces, the book’s final section storming through fieldnotes and questions and scans of fragments, until we reach “Exit Museum,” a place of honorable outlet: 

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wake – up – too – ea - rly

too   –  ea - rly  –  feel  –  sick

mom – and – dad – gone

took – the – dogs –

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Finally, we are placed solidly in the body, its progenitor’s nowhere in sight (we have learned our own way in this new world), and the dogs have been taken somewhere out there because, at long last, an arrival has happened. In section 3’s final poem, “Fieldnotes,” we are re-minded (and I hyphenate that intentionally) that something no less that our entire consciousness has shifted, a veritable metanoia if you will:

 

…we are

the brief soak of silence

when the power lines

in a storm went down

the music stopped

and what of the sun

if the quiver-sharp

valley like a church

could hold its music

then would we still

unravel the fractal

wardens of will

then would we still

then would we still

then would we still

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Immediately following, three, extra-large, emboldened hyphens fill the center of the page. Consider the Merriam-Webster definition of what it has meant to “be” one of those: 

 

In the early 20th century, the noun "hyphenate" referred to a resident or citizen of the U.S. whose recent foreign national origin caused others to question his or her patriotic loyalties - with or without there being just cause for that questioning.

 

Thus, my proposal, far reaching as it may sound: might the language of Not Us Now be our aforementioned ‘sequence of steps…leading to the infinite,’ an elegant algorithm of poems leading us to the timeless and emergent reality that no citizen of the world we’re in (no-bo-dy) is separate, or questionable, or hyphenate? That exclusion of any kind, anywhere, is not us now?

 

What a large way to see. What an unbelievable possibility to live toward. Perhaps Zoë Hitzig is welcoming us to a world that we have never seen before, inviting us to believe that everyone, everywhere, belongs—and is welcomed.