60 days in America

He eats rice with Kewpie, stuffing his mouth. She walks up to him, then stops suddenly. ”Ugh, I wish I had bought chocolate,” she says, covering her face with hands. She pivots swiftly on one foot and goes back to the bedroom.

Later that night they sleep with little to no worry and dreams of desktops for their minds, with files containing things they might say if opened. He hallucinates words such as “kaleidoscopy”. He dreams of a hotel he had booked extremely cheaply, with just one caveat: it was being actively demolished. He wakes with a sentence on his lips: “Jack O’Dollar and the Ruby Tuesday.”

Los Angeles

He collects his devices and accessories and makes his way to work. The first client that day tells him a story about her poodle, who kept running away from home only to be found nearly stabbed to death in the dark alleys of Phoenix. The poodle miraculously survived each time. Many years later, she ran away one last time, never to be found.

“Someone finished the job,” the client says.

In the evening he gets a drink at a bar run by a son of a famous singer, who tried to kill his wife while hallucinating on acid; in that very bar, a lonely gentleman strikes up a conversation. He introduces himself as Johnny.

“Do you want me to blow your fucking mind?” Johnny asks.

He pulls out his phone and shows him a contact, covering the numbers with his hand. The contact says “Vice President.” He is slightly disappointed; he had hoped it would say “Jack O’Dollar”.

Later that night, his friend drunk-drives him around town. They indulge in reverse gossip, virtually obscuring facts about their friends, as they make their way to a rotating bar on the thirty-fifth floor. “Do you ever get dizzy?” he asks the waiter, who opens his arms and says “Okay :).” A full rotation takes one hour and ten minutes.

Soon his friend gets a text; someone calls her “a homophonic fat fuck” in a dyslexic rage. They collectively delete him (as punishment) and redownload him as a ghost (for discipline); many hours later, in a single bed fashioned by children and marriages of old age, he drifts away thinking of a the State of Things.

These are his last moments on the West Coast, now deep in malaise after Mexico has lost the games. He says goodbye to his friend and her bisexual cat, who had killed his last lover - on accident.

Chicago

On the plane to Chicago, he reads “Cyclonopedia,” which he had paired with Munif’s “Cities of Salt.” He had fancied buying it for a while because he liked the word “petrofiction.”

He slides into an apartment without knowing anyone there, tastes all three bowls of porridge and eats the one that is “just right,” tries their chairs and breaks the smallest one, then tries their beds and falls asleep in the smallest one. In few days he feels like he is eighteen all over again, and that becomes a truth vivid and candid than others, especially

during hot summer days

at the crossings of paths.

Later that day someone asks if he is “a moron, or a moron who shows at a gallery.” Someone else asks him if he is Irish. Then someone tells him he looks like Ron Weasley and half an hour laterhe gets a “better-looking Ed Sheeran” ; his hair is not even red.

New York

He reopens “Cyclonopedia” on the plane to New York. He is savouring the moment of peace before he gets trapped in the Albanian-café party vortex all over again, and soon becomes tired of going there, standing there, sitting there, of going back home to pee, of coming back to lounge, reclining and collecting dust, leaning against the wall, snoozing against the bar.

Instead, he becomes exhausted by the painful mixture of theory and fiction, the obscurity of CCRU, SCP, and other entities conceived by amphetamines and Reddit-brain, so he bows down his head and massages his palms in the middle seat he got out of local, avian, birthright lottery. The screen plays unskippable ads about Grammarly, “Improve your speling”. He thinks of rhythm as his favourite literary quality, and how a text is a melody, and how the eye is a gun.

Warsaw

He comes home at last. This year, he will not celebrate his birthday privately in the countryside; he has decided to Great Gatsby it, and it works out like a dream. ”We’ve become perfected,” he hears from a mystic.

The mystic has a dream about him a week or two later. She says:

“I have this really weird weapon this very heavy gun iron simple design yet its not a bullet but a rod that propels from it. it is constantly breaking falling apart in two pieces. you are waiting for us in a parking lot you take the gun, handling it like its not heavy at all and it doesnt break in your hands. you shoot the gun the rod punctures a tree the gun drops you’re not there anymore”

On an evening walk he gives “Cyclonopedia” another chance, for its leading concepts contain an irrefutable elegance: the symbolic radiance of oil as a sentient lubricant between the West and the Middle East. He had been entertaining an exercise where he tries to visualise a concept. This one looks like a crimson jewel with a light blue halo. He returns home and greets his dogs.

The sun sets in gold, as he watches his neighbors electric lawnmover ride of out the gate and stop on the sidewalk.

It waits there for a while until a single car approaches. The lawnmover then rushes forward right under its wheels.

The car runs over it and destroys into a thousand pieces. The plastic scraps cover all of the street, reflecting light like a mosaic.

Death

The suicide of his neighbors robotic lawnmover left him in a shock. He reviews classic literature on this topic; he reads about the bird hung in the bushes and the cockroach coming out of a wardrobe, but he decides it’s not the same, and what he actually feels is not despair nor psychosis, after all, but confusion, and some kind of panconscious sonder.

He knew of the dangers of hypermantalizing, and attributing agency to objects, and all the psychological errors of seeing cause and effect in a simple coincidence, yet he could not stop but believe that the lawnmover, somehow, actually, maybe intended to end its own life.

Maybe that weird precognition was mostly coming from his belief in the evolution of consciousness from complexity, in the pragmatics of it. Even if the robot seemed intuitively too simple for it, what he found himself believing - with a full self-awareness - was him wanting, hoping for it to have been a sentient choice, as if the soon-to-come future was manifesting itself to him without being intelligible yet.

Making best use of free will, he spends the rest of the evening organizing his thoughts and confusions. First and foremost, he wants to understand. Or perhaps just to make that moment comprehensible, to feel like he has the right tools to approach it semiotically, for he is not sure what to believe in anymore. He starts to work on a system of choosing between beliefs, so he could live his life with some sort of intellectual candor. Overnight, he establishes a rough outline of a protocol of inquiry.

He wants to discover the philosophical project he would pursue, but he needs to make the best choice possible. He starts by reading about symmetries in physics.

Symmetry, he reads, is a transformation under which some feature of a system remains unchanged. That is, if you truly love someone, you will love them today or tomorrow (time-translation symmetry), in Warsaw or Tokyo (space-translation symmetry), facing north or south (rotational symmetry). That makes true love symmetrical, like gravity.

That will be the first step of his protocol: he will apply symmetry to ideas. He will see the rules underlying transformations - different answers to the same problems - and that is how he will choose his beliefs.

He will go deeper than the surface, and ask what stays the same when he moves between frameworks: the deepest questions they collectively try to answer. He will learn a great deal about human anxieties, worries, and fears.

In each answer, he would see shapes and colours, and soon he would understand - as a shared question undergoes kaleidoscopy, its answers acquire different aesthetic forms. The choice between frameworks is an aesthetic choice.

Aesthetic choice

He works on the next step in the protocol of inquiry. He temporarily puts truth aside and evaluates his taste. He asks himself: what makes a certain framework aesthetically attractive? What does God feel like?

In this fashion, he assigns different aesthetic values to belief systems: compression, depth, mystery, rupture, clarity, austerity. He performs a series of exercises in imagination, some of which entail dropping a small pebble into a well and fidgeting with his mind while waiting for the splash.

He imagines Christian mysticism as cold and sharp like light through ice, eugenics as a dense, yellow liquid resembling bile, and free will as grassy-green and soft but textured like cats tongue. He decides he needs more concrete examples, so he reflects on Sophie Calle’s Suite Vénitienne. In that paths carved through the memory of Venice he sees light brown, grain, and a circular motion, the motion of a watch.

To complement the image, he revises the classic texts on aesthetics. He reads bits and pieces of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Arendt, Bourdieu, Lacan and Price. He lears that aesthetic experience comes from ‘disinterested pleasure in a form unusually fitted to thought’, and that it’s an old account of aesthetics, centuries before the genealogy becomes introduced, making the metaphysical framework seen partly as an aesthetic self-portrait. He reads a sentence that enlightens him: “every great philosophy is a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.”

During the break, he imagines a framework in which the spirit of progress moves through history like a giant whale with a black, oily body and a row of glass harpoons stuck densely along its spine - like a glass harpoon mohawk.

His reading makes him understand that here we come from conditions what we consider beautiful, profound, serious, elegant, funny or asinine. No one is born with good taste, just like no one is born with a worldview; they influence each other in an aesthetic feedback loop. His protocol of inquiry seems half-complete now.

He realizes that opinions and frameworks are relieving deep, social tensions, answering the basic questions of identity. These organising aesthetic principles, however, need not induce ordinary pleasure - on the contrary, they may bind us to pain. He learns of a word for it - “jouissance”: an excessive, sometimes painful satisfaction sustained through repetition.

He thinks of a simple cigarette, but also of something much, much deeper: a clove cigarette at recess. He visualises the whale coming out and swallowing Kant and Bourdieu and others, one by one.

*

He looks back on the progress he had made with the protocol. His vision of how ideas aesthetically curate identity is much clearer now, and he knows that these ideas are performed in social interactions through expressions of affiliation. He considers the example of the robot and the position it performs.

“There is no consciousness of a lawnmover.”

establishes a subject-claim:

“I am the kind of person who can endure this painful truth.”

Jouissance may come from repeatedly occupying this position. In this fantasy, the lawnmover materialist exposes the psychological illusions of others. On the other hand:

“The lawnmover contains a soul”

creates a position:

“I recognise a deep layer of reality reductive thinkers cannot perceive.”

Jouissance may come from mystery, spiritual struggle, and identification with a group of robotic initiates, gnosis, techno-esoterics and the occult of all things circuited. Each opinion and worldview is inevitably a performative, aesthetic stance, he figures - unless you live in a hole.

*

The lawnmoes suicide still bothers him, but he is much closer now to understanding of how to formulate a thought. He is really about the baby steps right now. He goes back home to brew a caffeinated drink that tastes of earth, dust, and death to some, and finishes the revision of language, learning what vocabularies do, not only what they represent.

He reads Huw Price - thankfully, he comes to learn that truth claims remain distinct from aesthetic preferences. That brings him hope: if any belief he chooses belongs partly to his genealogy and unconscious attachments, there must still be a way to look for truth among the frameworks.

He thinks of math, or physics - the iron disciplines of constraints that preference does not freely control. Yet someone may still prefer intuition to science, he realises, as one might prefer to not want a falsifiable method for one’s worldview. This brings him to a deadlock.

It could be the matter of separating truth claims from the rest, he thinks, and the cause for pragmatics. Math will be just fine for assembling a lightbulb, but might fail for someone in a spiritual crisis.

The Answer

Maybe the hardest, deepest truths, he thinks, are those that remain stable across relevant changes of observer, vocabulary, instrument, method, aesthetics and theoretical preference. There must be some kernel that anchors a claim when it is subjected to mathematics, experiment, faith, intuition, water, fire, the airhorh and the sound of thunder.

Objectivity, then, is not the absence of perspective, but stability across transformations, independent of aesthetics, which is the definition of a symmetry, he notes. The protocol has been completed with a full circle.

Then it comes to him: he is actually the symmetry, the thing that has remained unchanged. The person examining the problem stays constant. The protocol has quietly preserved his position outside each framework; he sees himself seeing, for the first time.

Very well. The protocol of inquiry, he hopes, will help him move towards truth and solve the mystery of what will go down in history as First Robotic Suicide. In order to understand the question, he needs to understand the subject first. In a patient labour he rediscovers “know thyself”.

Wigner’s friend

“I must shoulder the burden of my current self for the rest of my life; I mustn’t avert my eyes from that reality. I can’t look away, but it’s just so hard to watch.”1

He puts a little blanket over the grass and calls it a day for a whole colony of bugs. Six pillows stacked precariously constitute a “seat.”

He will look for the deepest symmetry, and he will start by applying the protocol to itself. Any successful theory must be recursive; in the peaceful setting of green, bird, bug, and sun, he prepares for the introversive turn.

First, he looks for aesthetic constants. He needs to examine the examiner, that is himself. He asks: what draws me towards a metaframework in the first place? He knows what the completed protocol feels like; he looks for the aesthetic appeal of creating it.

He reflects on his own ambitions. He wants to see himself as impartial, objective, and lucid. He wants to borrow from multiple disciplines, unite them, and point to something they all have in common. The protocol gives him the flattering position of someone who understands both sides, perhaps someone less naïve than others.

It reminds him of something he has read. He grabs a copy, searches for the passage, and soon finds it:

One day I exclaim, “I’m surrounded by fools and foolish ideas! I want a better world!” I’ll make up a better image. This is my idea: I place the earth on the back of an enormous elephant in order to hold it up in space. The elephant is supported by a tortoise which in turn is floating in a sea contained in some sort of vessel. That was one day’s total effort.

The next day, I’m sitting, reading a book on Hindu mythology. I read: “In Hindu mythology, the earth is placed on the back of an enormous elephant in order to hold it up in space. The elephant is supported by a tortoise, which in turn is floating in a sea contained in a vessel.” That was depressing.2

That was depressing.

Symmetry could be the protocol’s own preferred style - unity, translation, recurrence and completion, as almost any two theories can be made symmetrical if abstracted far enough. The protocol does not merely discover symmetries - it is designed to produce them until it reaches itself, a case for which, perhaps, it was not designed.

Symmetry might not be a neutral principle after all, he discovers in a slight discontent. He suddenly felt deep sympathy and understanding for the lawnmovers “choice”.

*

He examined himself with the protocol against the protocol and ended up as confused as before, yet slightly more aware of his confusion, which made the protocol useful, in the end, perhaps. He spent a while considering why he became hung up on symmetry in the first place, but then he felt like there was still theoretical work to be done, even after the claim to objectivity was lost.

The protocol would send anyone on an introspective spiral, so he moves beyond himself and abstracts the subject. Maybe the deeper structure, he realises, is actually relational: it’s the cut, the gap between the observer and the observed.

That creates a whole other problem of perspective - he cannot assess the protocol from nowhere, because he cannot get outside himself to watch himself assessing it. Unless the whole process was seen from outside; he would have to become Wigner’s friend. He imagines a wider protocol treating the first protocol and its user as a single object, then an even wider one, in an infinite sequence of recursion.

He fears the infinity for it is unimaginable, and all he feels are cold shivers. He also fears that the deepest symmetry is not the gap itself, but its very recurrence: the possibility of endless reframing. His mind gets swarmed with all kinds of images of somber symbolic panache. He sees the observer watching himself watching himself, as in Magritte’s painting; he can see where he has come from but cannot fully reproduce the perspective. He wanted an Aleph - a point from which he could see everything - but got “The Map of the Empire.” He got “Las Meninas”, where the observer gets lost, dissolved into the picture.

The protocol is an incomplete apparatus, it seems, and the incompleteness is built in, just like there there is no final language outside language. That appears to be its constant, not wisdom revealed after digging down, but a horizon of knowledge that recedes no matter how close he gets. The protocol is not vertical, as he had thought, but horizontal. And flat, like Poland.

Flat Earth protocol

The sun seems so heavy today. He doesn’t know anymore what holds it in space; he thought it was gravity, but maybe its the love for the moon.

Applying the protocol to itself sent him on a recursive journey towards depression. Is the final, eternal remainder, the escaping horizon of truthitself, an aesthetic choice? He feels like he had accepted it because of some jouissance of hitting the limit of understanding, or maybe because he enjoyed finding himself in all the Borgesian, symbolic references.

The lawnmoves suicide remains a mystery, and he will have to respect it. It is a thing of pride, he thinks, to try to understand it all on your own. He consciously makes an aesthetic choice to affiliate with science, and give up on the robotic soul - at least for today.

One thing seems clearer to him than ever - just as he produced the protocol, the protocol has produced him. It has retroactively created the kind of creator who could have made it; it has made him intelligible to himself, for once. The spirit of history moves towards self awareness, after all.

The universe is not perfectly symmetrical in the end, he thinks, to console himself, for there is much more matter than antimatter, even if they obey the same laws. The anti-apple falls to the same earth, but there are almost no anti-orchards.

That makes him imagine an anti-protocol, a piece of writing that obscures your self-awareness, makes you forget, like the ‘reverse gossip’ game he was playing in LA.

The whale

He sees his ex-girlfriend over the weekend when she comes to his hometown. They both cry at her departure; they love each other, still, perhaps; perhaps they are happy to have reunited as friends. He is sad for a few days, but then he eats and sleeps well and writes and the passing of time takes good care of him.

He goes on a walk in the forest, again, where h sees an old blind man resting on a bench. He strikes up a conversation and tells him about his worries, dreams, aspirations and failures. Then he listens to his answers. The man says nothing wise, really.

On the walk back, his flip-flop breaks, but he fixes it.

Back home, he makes a wager with the world. He will wait for a law of physics to break in front of his eyes. That will snap him out of the malaise, and set him onto a path of belief. Drag him into, through, and out of the Cloud of Unknowing.

He waited for the black whale to come out and swallow him. He sat and waited until the sun started setting, but nothing ever happened. Soon he got bored and paced around. He switched his laundry. He reheated dinner, brushed his teeth, petted his dog and read a book. Then he got tired and slumbered.

*

The next morning he would wake up and perform his ablutions. He would down to the basement to stretch and work out. The basement is sort of like a hole. Consciousness, he would think, must be about the feeling of continuity, otherwise he would be eternally confused.

He comes up with a routine: he will improve his handwriting. He will practice until everything falls into order and becomes synchronised and symmetrical.

He will write one beautiful, original sentence a day. He knows this exercise will do wonders for his character, catapulting him blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, women, and other games of chance3.

He knows this exercise will do wonders for his character, catapulting him blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, women, and other games of chance.

He knows this exercise will do wonders for his character, catapulting him blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, women, and other games of chance.

He knows this exercise will do wonders for his character, catapulting him blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, women, and other games of chance.

He knows this exercise will do wonders for his character, catapulting him blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, women, and other games of chance.

He knows this exercise will do wonders for his character, catapulting him blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, women, and other games of chance.

He knows this exercise will do wonders for his character, catapulting him blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, women, and other games of chance.

He knows this exercise will do wonders for his character, catapulting him blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, women, and other games of chance.

He knows this exercise will do wonders for his character, catapulting him blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, women, and other games of chance.

He knows this exercise will do wonders for his character, catapulting him blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, women, and other games of chance.

He knows this exercise will do wonders for his character, catapulting him blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, women, and other games of chance.

He knows this exercise will do wonders for his character, catapulting him blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, women, and other games of chance.

He knows this exercise will do wonders for his character, catapulting him blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, women, and other games of chance.

“But what I am saying is that radio, it is a recovery. Of the voice without the body. That like everything new, it is also ancient. The truly new touches something before the merely recent.1”

Thought experiment:

Consider a man who sits in his garden and Googles the healthiest possible diet for a family of feral pigs. They somehow find their way onto the premises through a dense evergreen hedge which symbolically constitutes a fence.

There is bamboo growing in the garden, the ornamental kind that turns black as it ripens, introducing high contrast into the landscape. There are some exotic plants growing next to it, but their names were forgotten.

The man has his eyes hooked on the bamboo trying to adjust for colour changes changes too minute for anyone to notice. The doorbell rings, and he stands up to welcome his guests.

Two men from the publishing house sit down on the porch in his backyard to talk about his upcoming project. The writer serves hibiscus tea and mint crackers. They all take their little sips and enjoy a moment of silence in the peaceful daze of the afternoon in his carefully designed garden.

The plans for the garden rest on the sacred geometry of the vesica piscis written inside a rectangle. He created them with his ex-wife, who had moved to one of the troubled European capitals with her new boyfriend, living an adventurous life full of candlelight dinners, gallery openings, and after-parties of people anxious to leave their Bikkembergs in the foyer.

The editors consider pulling the proverbial plug on the book he has in the works. They lean towards another collection of poems, based on their doubt that the book will ever be finished. They speak of eight weeks of no progress. He listens to them in silence, patiently labouring on his cuticles. Pieces of dead skin fall on the tiled floor and get swept into the well-trimmed grass by the wind.

There’s subtle motion in the faraway hedges, and a fat, curious head lurks out from between the leaves. A pair of oily eyes examine the garden.

The man tries to explain that the trajectory of the novel is indefinitely recursive.

He asks the gentlemen to imagine an infant that perpetually turns one; a literary project which aims at something greater, that is, to challenge the ether of literature itself, which is time. The editors eloquently put forward the notion that no such experiment is interesting, or very much needed today.

“Let’s try to write freely and without fear,” says one of them.

“There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going2,” the writer responds, quoting obviously, but they are too confident in their flesh to take any offence.

They pull out a suitcase and put it on the table.

“The suitcase,” one of them says, pointing a finger, “contains a machine that makes the text much more interesting for the reader. It uses one simple trick of changing the subject.”

“Let’s try it,” the man says, and I press the button.

I find myself sit in a rocking chair wrapped up in two wool blankets. There is an unknown child on my property doing somersaults.

I am a master of my own fate, but only as long as my mastery shines through a carefully crafted grid of my Instagram account, which bears not only testimony to my skills, but also to the experiences I’ve collected and the people I’ve met and made friends with. And my looks, assembled in the pictures where I look a bit younger than I am, pictures where you can’t see the bags under my eyes caused by stress, drinking, and jealousy, and in the same pictures in which you can clearly see that my eyes are green, warm, and inviting.

The internet is my safe haven, which connects me to people all around the world. I read my daily news; I come to know that we evolved a new organ, which assembled itself from microplastics, finding a spare room between the gallbladder and the colon. I touch and inspect my belly, but can’t find anything new.

I love the spectacle and being a part of the wave function. I love that brief moment when I am high and peeing in an Australian house that looks like the interior of a ‘70s snuff film, and I hear a dub remix of 311 - Amber playing from my phone in the living room, which is equal parts good and bad, and for a second I understand that there is no footing to anything, any single opinion or truth about the universe as mediated by the debate, and that everything is a hint, or a gist, or an aesthetic preference that you cannot fully translate into words, and that there is nothingness and senselessness at the end of all that, which is equal parts beautiful and scary, and that any sort of discussion about it serves as a sorting hat between people and that it’s all - in the end, it’s all a matter of taste, and of belonging, that is equal parts rooted in assimilation and in the need to be different. I feel that thought compressed into ten seconds of think-time, and I flush and go back to the living room for the language games, sicut decet, trying to be normal.

I sit back down on a couch with attached wheels, and time gets dense like wet sand and holds me tight and immobile. I stare into the corner of the room and see a little, mischevious owl staring and winking at me with a little glimmer in the ruby stones for its eyes that can only mean one of two things:

1. you might ever think that people are ‘jacking your swag’, but that means you forgot to see yourself as something bigger than yourself

2. everyone who you rejected in the past will find their partners and be much happier with them than you could ever make them, and you need to be happy for them, otherwise the owl will put a curse on you, turning you and your family into feral pigs.

The next day I spend a whole morning strolling down the wonderful space called the internet, and come to know that a man was shot in the heart by his own editors and fed to the wild animals which he let roam around his property; and reading that fills me with joy, as the font has smizing eyes for dots and blinking little pig faces, and each bottom line has a hint of green, like a little bit of grass!

I am back in Poland for Easter. I compliment the five tulips which bloomed in my mom’s countryside house, but she tells me they’re fake. They’re all fake. Time flies differently here. In the countryside, I remember reading, the “essential isolation and silence and loneliness

become the carriers of nature and community against the rigours, the cold abstinence, the selfish ease of ordinary society3,”

even though it feels like the other way around. But the kids of the neighbours open the gate and come here whenever they want, and I Endorse that.

An animated show gets renewed for a second season after six years, and it brings me the petty joy of routine entertainment. I reminisce about watching the show over the first lockdown’s fever dream of countless weeks riveted together. In the barfroom I spit out a little plastic bead in the shape of a Pompompurin that my new organ produced spontaneously. I look into the dark, cruel mirror and see subtle signs of aging, but maybe that’s not me, yet.

The five fake tulips do not show signs of aging. They are perfect tens.

Semiotics of Clavicular

Some of the flowers which bloomed in the COVID era did not have much sunlight, and found alternative methods of growth, such as beating yourself up in the face with the hammer.

Since then, in the grand scheme of things, or so it seems, many people who had once turned their best efforts into clockmaking, or carpentry, have found their purpose in becoming guides around navigating culture.

There’s a kid that embodies this very trend with undisputed elegance and eloquence. He is nearly perfect during interviews - handsome, composed, and outspoken - at the age of 20, when my pals and I were focused on wrapping a rolled-up hash snake around a cone, painting the streets to a better-or-worse result, and trying to cultivate some sort of facial hair. He is also racist and misogynist.

That boy, when threatened, will tell you that you’re a four, but he might be able to fix you. The niche culture he represents, looksmaxxing, got a spotlight six months ago - partially, I think, for its Patrick Batemanesque insanity, but also for its sincerity in the alignment of values.

It’s hard to doubt that Clavicular believes in what he does. He even says how hard for him it is ‘to stay three days up on meth to lose body fat’, and he would never do such sacrifice ‘for pure entertainment.‘ He holds a very rigid idea of beauty, for which he is ready to sacrifice everything. He is ‘not very into longevity.‘

This very “beauty” according to looksmaxxing is a methodised and quantified belief that fulfilling those requirements will make you ‘ascend‘ and achieve everything you ever dreamed of - based on the extremised idea of ‘lookism‘.

I guess we are living in a decade of cold honesty, where plenty of previously forsaken, red-pilled beliefs surface and become slowly integrated into our lives. It’s hard to doubt that the elites are a bunch of conniving pedophiles anymore. We have a dating app for the ones richer, more beautiful, more popular than us. And no one really questions the fact that Jews have a say in ruling the world, after the world has failed to stop Israel from conducting a genocide. The liberal, democratic culture of pretending and playing by the rules gets washed away by people admitting, on a mass scale, that some of the uncomfortable ideas might actually hold true.

Implicitly, the uncomfortable idea of “hot people have it easier” was nothing new; it was the methodisation, systematisation, and propagation of such a belief that caught traction, with the young prophet at its forefront. It sprouted right from the fertile soil of body postivity, so carefully laid out by the previous generations, as its pure antithesis.

I see the mass awareness of looksmaxxing, just like any rising awareness of a red-pilled belief, as a type of trauma inflicted on the mass consciousness. That trauma stems from unconscious ‘disenchanted‘ knowledge being transferred into the domain of conscious ‘enchanted‘ meaning; trauma that required observation and time, as it is too ugly to compartmentalise immediately.

Death Drive

In terms of semiotics, Clavicular represents the apparent collapse of the signifiers, the flattening of who he is with the red-pilled beliefs he represents. Interacting with his content makes you feel like you “missed out” on something; you are exposed to the fantasy of an absolute coherence, of total alignment of values with behaviour, something that was cultivated for years in a morally distant echo chamber. You are shocked. This contact with the finished product is what generates massive interest in - and suspicion of his persona.

One point of curiosity is his motives. His purposive mechanism is skewed - he does not truly care about getting laid, nor does he care about power. (”My sex with the girl lasts one minute, and then you gotta go. I am too busy with my work.”) It seems like he wants to continue looksmaxxing for streaming’s sake, and stream for the sake of simply validating his method - much different from other streamers, like IShowSpeed or Kai Cenat, who seem to pursue fame, popular girls, and the numbers more genuinely. Void of desire, it turns into pure drive, a recursive validation of its own existence according to the semiotic protocol, like an infant that perpetually turns one. In a weird and twisted way, he becomes life itself - a simple, unobstructed growth rooted in a few simple prompts. The popular disdain is no surprise - when people are confronted with raw life per se, they become repulsed.

It’s been said out loud why and how Clavicular is evil - being one step away from Luis Bloom from Nightcrawler - but the challenge here is to look underneath, to try to see it differently; go beyond feeling sorry for him, his antisocial upbringing, and see him as a symptom of today which gets platforms to speak from all around, and understand why. Sit down with the Grinch and truly, fucking, listen. Even though the reality he creates indeed is repulsive, there must be a net positive side of his emergence, or the emergence of Worst Boyfriend Ever - reaching beyond a simple cautionary tale.

It’s easy to see them as transitional figures, the banished emissaries of the future that is not there yet - or as tragic, romantic figures of brutal honesty, who eventually find themselves on a death drive4. But maybe they are also a kind of evil Socrates of the pure, libidinal drive each; maybe seeing them as tragic is just an aesthetic choice, yet still - if, among all the nonsense and controversy, there is truth to be said, outcasts like them will be saying it, so it’s better to listen closely.5

People today are hungry of honesty. In Paris I hang out with a group of millenial leftist artists, who, with a certain degree of shyness, admit one by one that they get their news from contemporary conservative media outlets, because they ‘at least say what they mean’.

What Clavicular represents to me is raw, unfiltered honesty, the shocking symptom of increasing mass consciousness of social games, of the slow red-pilling of society which perforates the illusion and becomes slowly integrated as part of its fabric.

The truth is: we actually do judge each other, most of the time unconsciously - confirmed by both neuroscience and Buddhist teachings. Yet the enchanted social norms are set against admitting it; “I do not care about looks” is a more noble response than “I actively assess people’s attractiveness”. It’s more profitable to be on the long end of the stick.

That’s okay too. But, as it goes with social games, people try to also benefit by voicing themselves from the other end... of the stick. This partially explains the rise of the alt-right and Trumpism at large; not because it illustrates the one “truth”, but because the previously widespread morals rendered their truths as inferior (classic master-slave dialectics). That... plus there is a special kind of enjoyment - political enjoyment - which comes from rejecting social norms through “bold” signification. Think of more and more cool kids wearing Fujimoto-san’s “RETARD” hat - the same kids who ten years ago would observe millennials cancelling each other out for saying “the R-word”.

What kick-started Clavicular’s career, as he claims, is something almost Socratean: the urge to “call bullshit out”, in respect to fake looksmaxxing methods. And, perhaps, to call out bullshit in general; on that very premise he leaves Andrew Callaghan’s show, calling him disingenuous after Andrew says that he is “perfectly fine with how he looks”.

I find myself amused, stimulated, gooned, sixsevened and chessmogged by that closing move. I believe that we are never perfect, and there is nothing wrong with admitting that you compare yourself to others, yes. Fully accepting yourself is an impossible fantasy, and claiming it is a cardinal sin. Pride. Andrew did give the perfect answer of the Zeitgeist - which is, simultaneously, a very cowardly answer. The culture moves forward, for better or worse.

Yet I feel like the culture often does not ‘move’ towards something, but away from something else, walking backwards, blind to the direction. If Clavicular is moving away from something, however unconsciously, it could be the emotional politics of care nurtured by millennials - “soft masculinity”, and so on; the teachings to accept your looks while there are clearly ways to improve them (smh).

He championed the arena of appearances, yes - but the other end of the spectrum did too, the ‘performative males’ of Bushwicks of the world. At the end of the day, both groups share the objective to rizz up women. What differs them are two Bourdieusian fields with different symbolic dictionaries. One can only wonder if a sensitive, listening empath can be horseshoe-theoried with a crude narcissist like him or WBE, with both having one thing in common: successfully lying to oneself, having their ‘victims’ fall for their fantasy of coherence. Boy, did I hear lot of “men who actually Listen” talk about ‘a piece of tail’ in private.

We all try to flatten the signifiers and fail, but it’s okay - the sun will still rise and shine on our tombs, and the new flowers will sprout, and so on. Pure honesty is generally a destructive force, but it is a force that moves forward, perhaps away from white lies and euphemisms. For better or worse.

All that exposure to Clavicular inspired me to pursue my first skincare routine at 28. If the stars ever do align. The unknown girl doing somersaults on my property has switched to making TikToks.

Her friend puts her up on her shoulders, and they do a little dance. She props her phone underneath a tall walnut tree; that very same walnut tree remembers my grandpa cheating on his wife,

little me driving an electric lawnmover while swinging a medieval sword,

slightly older me shooting my sister with a BB gun,

my two-weeks-long alcohol poisoning at eighteen years of age,

and the very same summer, when a girl was still making love to me while her dad waited outside to pick her up after a two-hour drive, honking.

Summertime activities. Now it sees me, tucked in two wool blankets, the neighbour’s daughters, somersaults, my sixteen-year-old cat waiting until I leave his chair, and me thinking out of my face about whether I’m gonna be a good father.

I move to the guest room and start a fire. On the desk I spread a bunch of trash amassed during my travels that I’m going to glue into my swollen notebook of last 7 years. The notebook is mysteriously called “Source of Power” from a communist shorthand excerpt glued to its cover.

I’m cutting around the napkin from the original Campari bar, and another one from the place that invented sbagliato; a transparent sheet of paper that says “Spirit, Body, Soul” around a music note; a beer pad from a Thai joint in Sydney by the name of Evening Star; instructions on how to use chopsticks; a photo of three Taiwanese people, distorted from moisture and old age; an empty bag of pepper that says “-ism”; some train and bus tickets; and an invitation card to a massive VIP club called “the Royal Balibay” - which invited Taipei’s elite to pay heaps to become members, after which the money was defrauded and the owner ran away overseas, leaving the building to rot - eventually letting people like me come and paint a crying hammer aiming for a double-headed nail.

I asked a Taiwanese girl to take my picture with the hammer; four days earlier she told me she liked me because I was “weird” and I was a “nerd”. I didn’t know what to make of it, but I said “thank you”, and we kissed.

The same day I met a guy with 80 hours of ink on his back. At some point in the evening he casually bites on a Labubu-shaped ecstasy pill, because “he got tired”.

I met the grandson of a sailor and his mistress, who ran away to the far edge of the world so he could keep on cheating.

I made a friend reading Nietzsche on a beach with a Joker T-shirt on. On his fireplace sat a real-life sized baby doll painted as a Na’vi baby.

I tattooed a boy who wondered if he should throw it all away and move towns to pursue graffiti, DJing & drugs.

I met a newly converted Christian who said that he doesn’t understand ‘why we even need to talk about dinosaurs.'

I met a friend whose relationship was on the decline, and it got saved by her boyfriend being put in jail.

I met a client who knew my every blog entry by heart, and brought up things I didn’t even remember I said. Please, do not tell me you’ve read this and that, because it

The memories from my travels are like that one precious Kodak film which I shot over four months, that got fried twelve times at the TSA and turned out fuzzy and washed out.

Everything happens so much, and with great intensity. Home stops feeling like home. The touristic fog of war gets replaced by friendly outposts, cutty spots, and guest lists. Each of the 9 countries I visited in the last 6 months on 18 flights required new software to be installed or rebooted straight upon arrival, and plenty of questions asked, eventually establishing an international infrastructure of couches, guest rooms, studios, toothbrushes of strangers touching their heads in sets of white-stained cups;

and a constellation of favourite things lost forever, such as my grandpa’s purple plaid scarf, my tailored, 1 of 1 LYL radio T-shirt, my white ringer T-shirt saying “DAD 1” on the back, my red resin ring with a fox’s tooth inside, and a monitor-ad shirt saying “Slim, Attractive, Seeking Attachment” which turned out to become my sister’s pyjamas for the last 6 months. And, most importantly, a constellation of

bars, friends, and lovers.

I was blue for a full week, but now I’m something else, filled with all the Easter food on a turbulent plane to Paris. I try to listen to Mark Kozelek, but he makes always me too sad, so I listen to The EE and hibernate. Two days later I am lying wine-drunk by the Eiffel Tower in a warm but shy springtime sun, fed baguettes, cheese, and sardines off a Rimowa case platter by my lovely new friends. It made so much sense for us to meet, as we are all slightly “weird”, and “nerds”, floating around and buying pretty clothes. Life feels like bliss for a second, right after the low-fat chip and right before the headache.

Reverse irony theory

-My doctor says you are fat. I said, how fat am I? He said, you’re so fat that, uh, if you don’t stop within a month, you could have a heart attack or stroke.
-That’s not funny.
-He’s not a comedian?
-I was expecting a joke...
-A joke? From my cardiologist?!6

Exactly one year ago I wrote a piece about irony and sincerity, trying to come up with a manual for exiting the deadlock of “selling yourself as sincere” that was taken up by the New Sincerity movement. It can be summed up like this:

• there is no escape from branding yourself, as soon as the product of your labour becomes public and enters the sphere of value judgments.

• even the best efforts to come off as authentic might be seen as “virtue signalling”, which has something to do with the implicit mechanics of human communication.7

• the only way out that leads to authenticity seems to be finding a “fetish” - a strong belief in something that, for some reason, matters to you deeply; something that you’re willing to defend, even at the cost of alienation.

Traditional irony is a protective shield from being exposed as vulnerably naive; the moment it seeps right down to your “core”, to your “fetishes”, that’s when the identity crumbles. Holding tight onto those fetishes - values, ideas, emotions even - that is what gave life meaning back in the day, and what has been slowly dissolved by comfort, technology, capitalism.…whichever’s your poison.

Now, yapping about sincerity does not matter a whole lot in real life, which is more about “hi, how are you?” and all the unconscious socializing that follows, and the butterfly hairpin, and a cute Lucila Safdie top, and that one, niche perfume that reminds you of Her; et cetera…

Still, it’s interesting to think of the emotional impact that people like Clavicular leave on the viewer, and how far it seems to place itself on the sincerity spectrum, even though his whole persona seems like an ironic character. Because of that - for few, young men - he might be a figure establishing ‘fetishes‘, values to live by; for people of different values, he seems like the worst abomination of internet subcultures, especially supported by his unconditional straightforwardness.

But maybe … maybe, I thought in my cat’s chair, that very trait of his is a sign of the coming times, where we will slowly reverse the self-doubting condition of postmodernism, somehow reversing the irony in our speech, behaviour, and cultural products.

On that very hint I found out about reverse irony - the obscure concept most clearly explained in a 2002 paper from Cambridge in which Iakovos Vasiliou analyses two kinds of irony used by Socrates. The first - conditional irony - explains a situation where, in the “inside frame”, the person talked to thinks Socrates is saying the truth, and indeed - he is saying the truth - but from the outside frame we know that, actually, he believes otherwise. Consider this excerpt from Socrates’s Apology, in which he talks to Callias.

I thought Evenus a happy man, if he truly should have this art (techne) and teaches it at so reasonable a price.

That is true on the level of conversation - if he had this knowledge, Socrates would think of him as happy. However, knowing from his other dialogues, we know that he does not see him as having that kind of knowledge. As Vasiliou says,

While a careful listener might catch this irony, someone else, like Callias in this example, who is so enamoured and impressed by Evenus, surely does not.

Conditional irony relies on suppression, and works very well when the rest of the audience shares that suppressed knowledge - in a way, your interlocutor becomes a victim of the joke, as they find your statement rather pleasing and aligned with their view.

While conditional irony maintains the illusion of familiarity, the other one - reverse irony - works differently: the interlocutor, when exposed to your actual belief, initially thinks that you’re not being serious, but realises otherwise. The result is shock, perplexity and confusion. As Iakovos Vasiliou explains in his paper:

The effect of reverse irony: Socrates says what he believes, but it provokes a reaction in his audience of incredulity. [They believe] that Socrates must be joking. […] We can see here how reverse irony is a positive force [...] they cannot resist entering an argument to see whether Socrates can really defend it.

Reverse irony, therefore, is a positive tool that introduces a shock factor in the audience by exposing them to your actual belief - examples might be Carrey at the Golden Globes, or the cardiologist “joke” that Norm dropped in his live show - another example of him expressing his own dissatisfaction with gaining weight (simultaneously covering that it happened due to the med he was using for his cancer). Justin Bieber’s Coachella performance is a pure example of just that - coming out as real, owning up to the cringe of the past and present in a “YouTube party“ format that would seem like a joke, at first.

The very same ancient mechanism - yet with a different political shade - can be seen today in Clavicular’s streams and interviews, when he says that “hanging out at the bar, drinking beer, and watching sports is the worst way one could spend their time” while you could be “reading medical papers, educating yourself and streaming”. That deep, personal truth elicits a perplexed, engaging response; at first we laugh, as such erosion the fabric of the social, which makes people genuinely happy, seems absurd - yet the reverse irony used makes makes his voice stand out as interesting, and want us to inquire more. Perhaps because deep, deep down we fear that his voice might be the voice of The Other, demanding something new of us, revealing some truths we don’t want to face…. I wouldn’t bet on it, but time will tell.

To sum it up - “don’t hate the player, hate the game”... et cetera... Maybe that is the way to think about it, as Clavicular is not doing anything more than just saying and methodising what everyone else is already thinking in that world of frat parties, lip fillers, sunbeds, facial surgeries at 18 etc; the Glamorama of American youth.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he just gets shot in public by a sniper, as that seems to be how his country is dealing with its home-grown enfants terribles.

The twisted net positive of his phenomenon is the fearlessness to speak your truth, however fucked up it is. If I were to make any cultural prognosis, it would be that reverse irony that he uses will appear more and more frequently in the coming years, which, perhaps, is a good thing; personally, I would love to see culture heading towards transparency - reducing privacy, secrecy, and performativity, for the sake of genuineness and open expression. Moreover, I believe that is a future necessary to embrace - unless you move off the grid - in the age of mass surveillance, with our whole internet footprint and searches in the hands of corporations.

Nothing kills the soul as much as having secrets from others. I hope we can live in a massive polycule of information exchange, educated and lighthearted opinions that will eventually render the figure of a therapist obsolete. Not to be anti-therapy here, but there has to be another way... non-transactional... and without Big Pharma filling up their pockets…

Maybe this is enough for now. Let’s wrap it up, before I say too much. I am sitting at a cafe in Amsterdam, on my only day off, smelling hash and laundry detergent. I’m thinking about whether I should ever get into weed and psychosis, like my couple best friends.

I guess if you take psychosis apart and take away the stressful part, all that is left is a beautiful exercise in imagination.

One time in Warsaw, on my way for the last train, I saw a man examine an electric city box with a strange, meticulously constructed ‘measuring‘ device spread around it. And then he raised his eyes at me, and I saw innocence and curiosity, but mostly fear.

I guess the carelessness of child’s play is guaranteed by the feeling of safety from the caretaker. As the caretaker vanishes with adulthood, the imaginative play becomes scary - and with the safety net removed, everyone else becomes a threat. I guess I invaded that man’s secret public-yet-private space.

As I was rushing for the train, I further imagined this psychotic man isolating himself from society in a reclusive nest lined with oil-soaked linen. His apartment would smell like tar, resin, and glue, filling the place without escape, as the creaky windows with wind mercilessly blowing through them would have been fixed shut with a few double-headed nails. He would perhaps sit on a red Afghan carpet, now almost stained black with grease; on that piece of carpet he would put a little cardboard sheet to rest his knees on, and in front of him another one for the little combobulator he’d be working on.

The device would be composed of equal parts insulating tape, copper, transistors, and a larger cylindrical part that must be some kind of battery; the man would be screwing two pieces of thick metal sheeting together, between which he’d put a piece of paper with a little drawing on it; the metals would make a little clack which blend in with the Geiger counter clacks from underneath the bed.

The clacks would, unavoidably, fill the spacious workshop illuminated by five or six sources of warm light in the form of lamps and wall sconces.

Inside one would also see a set of six desks joined by a thick, welded tabletop made of structural steel, milled at the ends into rounded terminations resembling steps. On the desks would lie an assortments of tools piled in groups: adjustable metal wrenches, Allen keys, a row of pliers, pincers, and cutting nippers for cutting, bending, and crushing; a selection of flathead, Phillips, and star screwdrivers; beside them open-ended wrenches and bits, end-cutting pliers, scalpels, miniature and full-size drills, hobby knives with interchangeable blades, rigging scissors, nail scissors, metal-cutting shears, strip benders, hammers and model-makers’ mallets, measuring rulers and centering rulers, wrapping tools, clamps for gluing, and next to them fluids for the care of brushes and nozzles, as well as a set of glues: white glue, two-part glue, polyurethane glue - and finally even a glue stick, perhaps used only once. Beside the glues, an airbrush.

The only path leading out of the room would be a corridor, lit by two or three fluorescent tubes, which end in a steel door covered in metal pins and screw tops, which would only open with considerable force, as though it had settled into its hinges through time, rust, and gravity.

When opened, the door would, surprisingly, reveal a very dense evergreen hedge with a little beam of light shining through it; the leaves would require effort to conquer, but finally one could manage to pop their head through - and see a well-trimmed garden with dark bamboo, exotic plants, and three gentlemen on the porch just getting into a very, very serious argument.

Running a meme page

The white boy got away. The boy attended therapy and opened himself to his feminine side, and he forgot how to bottle up, make money, and die.

To quote Longmont Potion Castle here:

“I got my horse loose running wild, I need a little help up ’ere.
Bring some rope up ’ere. C’mon here… H’ya!”

Running a 150-follower meme page has been my favorite activity this fall. I set it up on Wednesday at a bar in Zurich, drinking double Ricard straight until a man at the bar told me that you’re supposed to add water. Whatever. It is actually much better with water.

I smiled all night looking through my whole screenshot folder all the way down to 2022. I have 93 thousand photos on my phone, out of which 25 thousand are screenshots, and I can’t be bothered to organize any of it. The meme page is a great outlet for the archeology of old fling correspondency.

I love the most recent core of memes - surreal tweets, mixing of nostalgia with modern internet culture, and slices of internet-life stills that preserve how absurd and stupid yet beautiful life is. Also those which reveal the ‘dark side‘ of our psyche, as if the Internet circuit created an affective outlet for the ‘unwoke‘ thoughts.

Now I look at the horse and a track automatically comes to my mind - Dust “You’ll Never Get to Heaven.” If you’re coming back from a party, slightly faded and lonely yet still grateful for your friends who are all in relationships, you can put its more peppy, yet still emo edit Nu Fusion — “U SMile”.

Haha, You Clowns!

This show is the peak comedy zeitgeist.

Growing up on Tim and Eric, I have seen the best that pastiche + parody can produce with genius editing. Tim and Eric has a specific subject they worked with—commercials, talk shows, all things that television culture brought forth. Haha, You Clowns! is more of a dissection of everyday life: the suburban culture of prosperity and normalcy.

The show is an extension of the short videos Joe Cappa posted as YouTube Reels, which I watched looped over the last couple years—such as the genius “Scooby Snacks” one, a study teenage excitement about a minor transgression, such as getting stoned at a camping trip, while everyone else is asleep.

HYC is, first of all, animation, but it shares a crucial thing with the T&E legacy, which is the obsessive focus on body language: the performative jargon of different interaction formats.

What already stands out is his ability to pinpoint the awkwardness and mannerisms of various “types of people,” so meticulously observed. Haha, You Clowns! brings it to another level. Each hand gesture, joke, and facial expression has its own spotlight, becoming a showcase of awkwardness.

I have seen some attempts to theorize this type of comedy, the best being the “canny valley,” or “physical comedy”—referencing Dax Flame, who, alongside Eric Wareheim, made a cameo in one of the episodes. “Non-toxic masculinity” is also good, addressing the harmlessness of a family statured like .

The new and unique quality is that the show is so wholesome that it becomes creepy. There are things brewing under the surface, yes, but that is a theme explored in plenty other productions. This show is special for having the potential to both make someone smile and chuckle in a lighthearted way, as well as absolutely hate what the characters represent: the naivety and cluelessness of enjoying life’s simple pleasures. Passion about organizing a baby shower for your favorite dental hygienist. Their life being so normal that they seem detached from reality.

Anyways, the episodes get darker, and I am really excited for how HYC will end. If there is a zeitgeist moment in here, it’s the new sincerity that takes a form of consciously repressing irony into your subconscious. Consider this meme:

And then don’t even smile, but tell someone it was the scariest thing you have ever read. And be serious. I don’t even know what I’m on about here. Watch the show.

Gombrowicz & Queneau

After reading Ferdydurke and Queneau’s The Skin of Dreams and Stories/Remarks, I have to say they’re among my favorite writers for the acuity with which they observe everyday speech mannerisms. I love how they channel the quirkiness of the mundane into increasingly absurd dialogues that ultimately expose the failure of communication and the exhaustibility of language.. and… and….

TAGABOW “American Food” and the album LOTTO

Sometimes you hear a track and you start moving around frantically like a girl who just lost her vape, trying to get the Shazam out or something.

I heard the single from TAGABOW’s new album while on the train from London to Luton Airport, finishing my tattoo trip. I remember a pretty girl who got in the same car. She was taking plenty of videos of the train as it arrived, and on the inside of it, and I found it strange. I thought she might be autistic and got on as a hobby, but she went all the way into the airport and flew somewhere, I don’t know.

The track is simple and hypnotic. It has the same quality as Moin’s You Never End album, especially the tracks with Sophia Al Maria. There is something about this type of sound that combines distorted walls of sound with spoken word—something very prosaic—that I enjoy thinking about, and that I enjoy feeling. Something brewing under the surface of the mundane, etc., etc.

“American Food” is even a step beyond that—it tells a story of American poverty and impulsivity straight from Denis Johnson novels, or short stories from Lucia Berlin.

Tell me there’s a better one
And I’ll go get my gun

Repeated endlessly over the hook. The lyrics are pleasant snapshots: the first verse being more hopelessly romantic, while the second painting a picture of hopelessness arching over the whole life, the misery which has “grown their walk in crooked.” This, combined with the album cover, touches on my sentiment of sympathy for life’s losers, just like Werner Herzog’s Stroszek, or like the freaking Donald Duck even.

RiFF RAFF “Time”

I’ve never been much into his music, but I always admired him for the “Versace Python Freestyle”—one of the most angelic clips on the internet—where he rips two coke lines in a row, holds a baby snake, and sings over an ethereal beat playing from his Dell laptop.

One December day I spent hours, hungover, going through his old music videos. He is the king of camp, and I love him. He is the Cicciollina for men.

Chair placement in Tim & Eric In Conversation, John C. Reilly (Episode 358)

It’s perfect.

Travelling

There were certainly peak moments that would be carved deep into my personal canon—like the seashell love hotel in Japan or Chuquimamani’s wedding at the airport—experiences powerful to me by virtue of how strangely obscure, unique, and beautiful they were.

Then there are adventures of less vibrancy but of a strong ambience that imprinted themselves on my brain, like the Okinawan izakaya in Koenji which seemed like the most secret food spot that exists, or the solemn sight of a deer hit by a car on our drive back from the wedding. The deer was steaming, and there were two people outside the car who didn’t move an inch, and it all looked like a cursed movie still.

Lastly, there are moments which I do not remember at will, but are stored in the gallery of my phone or in trinkets I brought back: fake Galliano gloves that my ex helped me paint for my show in New York, now dirty in purple tattoo stencil ink, resting in the hole in my jacket’s pocket. They remind me of auditioning for an overpriced flat in Berlin, where we spent 3 months trying to be a perfect couple, to a better or worse result.

That very apartment in Berlin and an annoying smoking habit, and ten hours of sleep a day—that was also the time when I started writing on my blog and put out some more ambitious essays, getting me in a mental place which, in today’s chaos, seems very distant. Maybe the mental landscape has changed because I got progressively fried over life’s course and the decay of my relationship, or maybe because of realigning priorities toward what matters: jokes, hanging out, and forever figuring out my future novel.

Writing 1 (one) non-pretentious essay:

On the Privacy of Your Own Tunnel and the Problem of Dirt

Season 3 of One-Punch Man

It’s not as predictable as all the other anime out there. And the premise of the show is beautiful - main character being a slow-in-the-brain, innocent simpleton gifted with infinite power. Very different from Solo Leveling, where the main guy is a self-aware chad, which evokes a narrative pressure and consumer wish for his character to, at some point, die.

Successfully convincing a total stranger to fly with me to Australia for a month. Over texts

As stated above.

Humility and hubris (my problem with art criticism)

I slowly got disillusioned with any attempts to contribute to or control the discourse. I feel like opinionated takes require some sort of confidence that I do not have—and the confidence in negative normative statements, to be precise. I find it easy to praise, but why would I try to convince people that Geese are bad? Maybe I have some preference against the vocals, or it reminds me too much of the stomp-clap-hey genre, or maybe Cameron Winter sounds like Jonathan Richman but worse. But why is it bad? The new Lanthimos is bad to me, all of it, because it seems too didactic—but why is didacticism bad? People seemed to love it.

I think it’s dishonorable to wage a war against “normies”. But also, opinions feel suffocating to me. I’d rather choose to be naive than stress over my opinions being projections.

That said………….I feel like a whole lot of contemporary art discourse is giving me cancer by means of its self-indulgence and complacency. It seems like being entrenched in a net of connections and vibrant DMing reinforces a belief in your own relevance. I don’t see a lot of pieces written from the place of awe at the artwork; the vision seems rather too clouded by the daze of being a hot 20-something-year-old to provide anything more imaginative than some sort of irony-poisoned, cross-referenced display of intellectual prowess.

The problem is the competitive reflex itself, which seems to be more about in-group management. Too much writing seems to be backed by ambitions of power—pushing out those who, for whatever reason, lost their relevance—counterbalanced with a feedback loop of friends and family.

Of course the avant-garde are going to go for the cutting-edge opinions. In all that, nothing brings more jouissance than bashing texts of culture or artists who are mainstream underground, and appreciating those who are underground mainstream. According to that heuristic, Charli XCX’s Substack fails to be cutting-edge, and strung-out Justin Bieber on a segway succeeds—willfully or not. It seems that artists like Claire Barrow, EsDeeKid or Bassvictim should be wary of getting more mainstream traction, before their own kin turns on them.

Art critics are obsessed with those whose gaze is oriented elsewhere—not toward them, themselves, or even their peers. That’s why, to make good art, one has to cut all ties with the art world and stare into the stars.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, I suppose Reena Spaulings will forever be an icon of what “thirty-six evenings of beer and cocaine” represent: a tiny, collective hubris of micro-influence that, for whatever reason, seems prodigal. Yuck. Good book, though. But what do I know.

A cool thing I read recently was Liby Hays’ piece in The Paris Review, where she describes her and her friends’ intellectual journey to write a perfect script for a movie. The piece itself feels non-pretentious and honest. It introduces a reader into an erudite—yes—inner world of Liby, yet makes it clear that all references and opinions are servants to a story, and not the other way around.

Maybe journey-like stories are my aesthetic preference to consume, after all. And in the realm of stories I can spot a phony from a mile. Are you opening up, or just taking a 0.5 selfie from above your head, only with words? There is something slightly repulsive about being too self-aware of being hot and smart, reminding me of the shadow selves of Ellis’s Glamorama: a beautiful yet shallow surface of the Imaginary and of winning at life.

Coming up with a literary project for 2026

I sympathize with losers. I also sympathize with jokes that write themselves, and mincroobsessions that seem to reach beyond history. The new project is to gather my thoughts and create a meta-network for one hundred plot ideas I have worked out for my book, and write something that feels real and important to me, with little to no contemporary ambitions.

Also trying out new writing method: pause on a piece, leave it for about a month, and then return to it to continue by mocking or openly hating what I wrote earlier.

It seems to me that truth - Truth - lies in this very self-contradiction: lack of confidence and reassurance from frameworks, resulting in that very hysteric position, which produces knowledge and questions that cannot be closed. Developing some sort of sovereignty from those overflowing desires seems like the ultimate end goal of a highly social life. It’s kind of strangely reassuring, knowing that to live your life “torn,” like in that song, seems to be the perfect way to keep on.

Throwing music shows

I like to reminisce about how DUNNO Recordings parties and all the random boat functions curated my taste and beautiful salad-days memories around ten years ago. It’s time to give back now, as a slightly more established big bro with a little bit of savings to lose.

Come to my show in Warsaw on January 9th to see Organ Tapes live + DJ, Chickenmilk dot com, Iced Lattina, Jśa, Able Archer, and my friend G1 play.

I suspected him above all of amusing and interesting […] for his memory was inexhaustible and [he] recounted his reminiscences without hesitation.1

I cannot remember anything anymore. My brain feels inflamed. I am sitting in bed on the top floor of Kino Roland, an old, retired erotic cinema on the main street in Zurich. My window locks eyes with the brothel on the opposite side of the street, where colorful lights illuminate the curtain-pulled windows. The red curtains open slightly — sometimes I see a girl putting on makeup, getting ready for work. Sometimes the green-lit-room girl comes back from work and hovers around the room, wrapped in a towel, before taking a bath.

It’s my last day here; I transport my body to the bar, where I meet my studio host, staring out of his face with a drink in his hand.
His face, covered almost fully in tattoos, with Maori spirals on the cheeks and a barbed wire for a moustache; eyelids, neck, and forehead covered in scribbles. It took me one full day to get used to looking at him. Soon I learned to love how a certain boyish innocence seeps right through it.

He spends the whole studio cut on drugs, drinks, and an Uber ride to his loving, much younger girlfriend. I go back to the old erotic cinema and pass a row of whores hiding from the rain, softly putting their hands on my shoulders.

I am trying to remember in a Perec fashion. Just for myself, and maybe if someone asks. Maybe if my children ask what I did in October of 2025 or how I eased into being single again. I have a family curse of “suck it up, bottle up, and die,” and I have a family blessing of laughing your worries away. Both have failed me thus far, so I must write. My brain is inflamed and I cannot remember anything anymore. I am sitting in bed on the top floor of Kino Roland.

I am sitting at a café in Bethnal Green, listening to Slint. I am compulsively archiving my own Instagram posts, possibly going through some kind of identity crisis. The waiter introduces himself as “Jackson, as in Michael Jackson”.

I read that the Middle Eastern preference for cold, bright white LED light is an aesthetic of cleanliness and utility over “moodiness” - a mix of economic factors and a stubborn response to whatever is “cool.” I think there is something interesting in the moral and communal opposition to dim lighting, which invites secrecy, alcohol, and romantic suggestion — as if the cold white were honesty itself. I might have an aesthetic preference for half-lies, I think

The quality I respect most in any creative practice is rhythm. Second to that must be refinement.

I tried to enter a nicely rated hostel, but the receptionist (male) came out with an impatient face and told me the facility was only for women.

I went around the block and spent a night at a two-star hotel with a train line right next to my bed, which made the whole compound epileptic every twenty minutes. Upon checking in, a lady came down the stairs and said she couldn’t sleep because there were ants crawling all over her face. Why aren’t you at the all-women hostel, i think.

There are no ants. In my dream I am once again in high school, trying to sneak out of classes, but constantly getting caught and brought back. I also dream of a girl I met in Austin, and how we fall asleep on a grassy hill under an oversized cloak, before she has to leave to see her grandpa after a “blood arm surgery.” I dream of her again after a few days, and again we fall asleep together, this time on a bed in a room full of people.

I am in Milan.
I traverse a broken park gate after a seafood platter dinner and sluggishness chased away by what seemed to be a triple shot of Fernet. I arrive at a venue with a tiny door that opens at the whim of the dwellers.

Inside, folk gather for a screamo show where both opening bands have a singer who looks nearly exactly like my American ex, which makes me enjoy it less. Or maybe enjoy it more? My punk Icelandic friend leans over to my ear. “Phony”, he whispers.

We hang out with the only Italians we know. There’s a type of people who look as if God is punishing them for having to go out.

I have been indulging myself as of late, and my brain got porous. I complete my biannual $200 book order on Amazon, which does not fill up the holes, usually, but solves the related self-esteem issues by piling unread volumes.

JUSTIN BIEBER FANFICTION

Dream. Hailey’s mother shows him a clock she has hung in her apartment.
“One hand shows the entrance, the other the exit to the house,” she says.
She takes the clock off the wall. They walk for a bit around her impressive manor.
She hangs the clock somewhere else.
“One hand always shows the entrance. The other shows the exit,” she says.

Justin wakes up in his sweaty linens and sits on the side of his bed. The warm and jaded rays of Californian sun glimmer at his feet. He prays for a while. The universe is always in motion, but the day only gets traction when you command it. And time flows differently in Chinatown, each and every one.

He descends to the kitchen and grabs a banana, and notices that the fruit is green, unripe. The black part is where, supposedly, the tropical spiders reside, and he eats it. He has been questioning his preservation instincts lately, since he found out the Japanese drink shrimp brains with sake, and they live the longest.

- Good morning, baby.

Hailey speaks from behind the kitchen island. He did not notice her at first. Little Jack Blues is resting in her arms, his big brown eyes locked with his dad’s chest. The baby seems to be looking right through him. Justin turns around and sees horrible rubber marks on the floor as if something tried to force its way into the basement. He knows this song. The radio plays trap with a low-frequency static filter.

- Let’s push back the father duties a little bit.

He says, and descends into the séance room. He locks the door behind him. The tiny, rotating lamp with hand-painted tigers is still on from last night. He prepares a fat line of The Usual and a headrest.
The tigers dance on his face as he leans back and locks his hands behind his head.

He shrinks into a little spiral and twists up and down and then right through a tiny tube. From inside the tube he sees a little keyhole. The motion stops. It is okay to peep when no one is watching. The inside of the tube is fuzzy and warm. “Mould,” the word appears before him, and it is decorated in gold and jewels, so he will not be scared. He feels like “woah.” The door next to him opens and a gentleman invites him inside.

“What’s on for today?”

“Let me show you, young master.”

The pit boss takes him around the cruise. The games are in motion, and the warm lights radiate like a set of candles. People seem to enjoy themselves in cordial ways. Glasses of brandy are passed around by spirit-worn yet courteous waiters, and cigar smoke hangs ominously beneath the ceiling.

“This is the slot section”, says the pit boss.

Cheating starts in your thoughts — that’s what Justin lived by, thus trying to connect his eyes with each waitress on the slot floor, testing himself for the early signs of emotional treason. The moment they show, he is to leave his wife immediately.

“Do you want to see our new game?”

“Yes, please.”

The pit boss takes him through a red curtain that reveals what seems to be a roulette wheel three times the size of the standard one. The roulette stands still, and a few very distinguished gentlemen sit around, stiff and still like marble statues.

“The classic roulette is a game of hope,” the pit master says.
”You hope to find out that your desired outcome is sewn into the fabric of the future. Your selected roulette number is a testimony to a moment that will only happen once — a moment that will, preferably, make you rich. It reduces possibility to actuality.
In the pre-recorded universe the game of chance unfolds your life minute by minute, and the beauty of the casino is betting on this pure mechanism of being, the very experience of life itself.”

“Yes”, says Justin. “But how is this game different?”

“This game, young master, is the Reverse Roulette.”

“You might think about what exactly is reversed here. It is not the order of the betting, nor the flow of time itself — which would make everyone leave the facility richer than they were. Not ideal for a Casino.”

“The reverse roulette provides a reality that reverses the basic informational function. It is the game where actuality is expanded into possibility. The observation of the outcome makes it less defined, producing ignorance.”

“This room is an isolated chamber. When players sit down to play, there is only one, single roulette spin. The moment the ball lands in a slot, the information becomes reversed; the slot turns into adjacent ones, then slowly into all possible slots of the game. The bets expand from reds to blacks, odd to even to every single field. The decisions made before the bet expand into infinite possibilities. There is, and there isn’t, a wheel. The players themselves become the cloud of unknowing.”

“The ball is an anti-eraser: not erasing all but one information, after the fact, but erasing the fact that there was ever a fact.”

Suddenly the players lift from their seats and leave the room in silence.
'“What happened?” asks Justin.

“There is only one thing that can disrupt the game of reverse roulette - it is when someone else enters the system and collapses their sea of possibility into a single set of coordinates. Like us, when we went through the red silk curtain.”

“What is the point of all this ?”

“The game reveals only one truth”, says the pit master.

“The insight that nothing ever changes. When the players dissolve into possibilities of configurations, they stop experiencing the flow of time and see that the only motion there is is their own, individual perspectives. They see the universe as static, motionless, existing only as geometry. The moment we walk into the room, we turn the ball into an actual eraser and place them back where they all started. And we collect their bets, obviously.”

“Those men just left without remembering what happened?”

The pit master nods, while Justin looks at the roulette wheel. A white ball rests on number “23”.

The slow banging on the door brings Justin back into his séance chamber, and after a while he climbs up the stairs to see the source of the commotion, only to discover a Roomba vacuum cleaner leaving horrible tire marks trying to force its way into the basement. Something like that.

Miscellaneous stills:

Man standing by the park fence shushes himself, as if he were about to spill his own secret. To himself.

I pitch a “Twin Speak” show idea to my twin friends.

Pink-haired girl hands me a Sayaka Murata book over the bar counter at a punk show. “Keep it,” she says.

I see a man wearing a T-shirt that says “BORN TO SHIT / FORCED TO WIPE.” I read it as an extremely bad omen. The day after, I tear my tendon.

I sit in a different café, far up north in Clapton. I close my hands as if I am praying, but all I’m thinking of is the metaphysics of gooning. In front of me sits my best friend and flashes cold blue light into my eyes. Open in front of me is the infamous online piece.

I reflect on how the most sublime I ever felt was through hardcore withdrawal of bodily pleasures on meditation camps. I am surprised that you supposedly achieve sublimity through acceleration of those pleasures. A thought spread thin along the lines of “the only way out is through.”

I read the Harper’s “Goon Squad” piece because Zeitgeist demands it of me, which is very well written but very ugly conceptually. It would be much better if only he transformed himself — or the literary subject — into a total braindead gooner. I would love to read apocalyptic goon praise at the very end; that would make the piece much more anti-gooning (for an independently thinking reader, at least) than the straightforward didactic ending: “It’s not for me,” he says. “I hope they leave their caves to seek real love.” Boring.

I know from a friend of a friend that Harper’s cut out 2,000 words of his masturbatory experience that he had written “stroke by stroke.” That’s pretty funny, and a tiny redemption too. Yet - I - don’t - think - they - truly- understand what blissful communion with the internet happens in the aforementioned caves, and I don’t think he fully does. If I didn’t like sex as much as I do, I’d definitely get into it. Now I sound just like the author.

I see someone walk in who reminds me of my high school English teacher, a woman I despised for the way she dressed, cut her hair, the complacency in what she said, laughter, and bad sense of humor. One day she asked me out of the classroom to scold me for wearing a Hysteric Glamour-like DIY hoodie with a female butt on it, saying it was completely unforgivable to bring that into her classroom.

I’m about to visit a few charity shops to complete my Liam Gallagher Halloween look.

Last' year’s Halloween was a dream. I remember lying morbidly sick in my bed in New York, greasy hair, corners of my mouth inflamed. I might as well have been dead, without realizing it. Back then I was still smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, which made every day a little bit worse.

I remember being lonely, and reaching out to a beautiful girl who I fell in love with, and soon creating a blissful, harmonious household, which is now over. I think I know why I pulled the trigger last month, but I doubt myself now — maybe because I am immature, and my brain is inflamed. That seems about right. I have learned to trust my doubts retroactively and calculate less; maybe that was the biggest lesson of this relationship. I have sacrificed love for the possibility of a better love, which might never come, a cliche, worn-our, Madame - Bovary - curse. Thank God the universe is static, and we are all holding hands, indefinitely.

This Halloween is a boat party with consistently amazing music. All my favorite DJs gather in uniform euphoria on a rainy night. One of them goes through a tragic experience earlier that day and plays the most chaotic, unhinged set I have ever seen. I chat about hip mobility with some random Australians; suddenly there is a single, shivering haunt that shakes my spirit and makes me go home.

The recent Hollywood Superstar post is hilariously tragic, theorizing why “Contemporary Art Baddies” don’t get laid. I keep wondering if it’s bait or not.

It’s more than clear that the art world is either one big psyop to fuck, or endlessly accumulate symbolic prestige, or both.

If it’s bait, then it’s wittily Zeitgeist-aligned. A man gains immediate prestige by writing about gooning, and the well-prestigious baddies complain about scaring the bros away.

I have a book character in the works, from two years ago — a woman so obsessed with her prestigious image that she refuses to have sex with anyone below her corporate position, which makes her celibate as she becomes the very head of the company. Her libido is arrested in symbolic structures of power.
The woman finds out about a conspiracy — a secret society that rules over the whole corporation.
That thought itself makes her drunk with lust. She masturbates on her carpet, while bugs and ants dance around her in a circle, and a syncopated Eberhard Weber record spins slowly on a brass, jewel-encrusted record player. Something like that.

I have found myself in an opinion crisis. I have been feeling like I project my personal anxieties onto anything I want to speak about. Maybe that is the very nature of an “opinion”: to confidently force your complexes on other people.

A lot of things feel thrifted lately, instead of made or bought brand new. Conceptually, I mean. Except for Reverse Roulette.

I enjoy the music world, and surrounding myself with musicians. It’s an earnest crowd. The London men drink pints and talk banter and sports. Yet I know for a fact they would all listen to Taking Back Sunday and get sad and weep (on the inside) when exposed to it.

There is much more authenticity in text read quietly, read out loud, or in text sung to a crowd of introverts — the prom’s peak lonely song. Even when you spot a phony, you can close your eyes into a private daydreaming vehicle (and erase your ex from in front of your eyes).

It feels far superior to the art world, as it has time as an intrinsic part of its logic, and organized time is nothing but an agglomerate of feelings. I never get the same depth of experience from static visual media. Shakespeare said “the sleeping and the dead are but as pictures.” Or something like that. I wonder why “still life” is called “dead nature” in Polish, and I come to learn we had, obviously, borrowed it from the French. FUckkkk

That’s all I remember. I promise. October did not feel as planned. It felt like an escape artist whose prop handcuffs were replaced with real ones. It felt different to write serious essays over winter with the promise of a long summer ahead than now, when the cold and dark days have only just begun. The writing must be seasonal, just like everything in my life is - another thrifted opinion, I guess

I write these words looking at a potato field outside my window, a land worth millions, which the already rich owner has decided to keep, simply as field until the day he dies. I remember how green it was this summer, before the harvest, and I remember how the warm nights felt — the feeling of something so obvious and forever that only things about to end can feel like.

Net Art Anthology reads MTAA’s Simple Net Art Diagram (SNAD) as, first, “something that happens”—an action or performance—and, second, as constituted by “in-betweenness.” Bewersdorf’s revision shifts the locus of art-making from the machine circuit to intrinsic, human agency.

These two diagrams map onto hinge years for me: 1997 - the year I was born - and 2008, when the financial crisis (experienced more mildly in Poland) coincided with broadband reaching my home, granting free and easy access to the internet and, with it, my digital salad days. New Net Art Diagram responds to chronically online times that followed.

It stresses that art “happens” in intersubjectivity among networked users. Given the Internet’s robust archival infrastructure, art-as-performance is registered, versioned, and encountered at scale. The decisive site is not the hand-shake between two machines or the interiority of an artist, but the social-symbolic sphere where images are circulated, experienced and interpreted.

Art is a performance of qualities. Outside rare purely live encounters, the default mode is inscription: (1) recording and (2) archiving with a (3) signature. As Dylan Smith argues in “All Art is Internet Art” section of his essay:

When working in conjunction with the Internet, it becomes imperative to understand the image produced by the artwork as inherently existing in relation and conversation with the Internet. No matter the medium, be it a painting, sculpture, photograph, or video, your art is intrinsically Internet art, because it inherently exists simultaneously as something in the “real” (or devirtualized) world and in the online (or virtualized) world. As such any artist working today is an internet artist at birth, and should understand themselves and the images they produce as being not just in dialogue with the typical arts crowd, but the entirety of the global consciousness.

New Net Art Diagram therefore calls for an exoteric (lat. public) - rather than esoteric (lat. internal) - account of culture and art. What confers artistic status is less the artist’s intention than the circulation of a gesture through heterogeneous audiences who ascribe value. Platform time performs the alchemy: gestures become artworks, not by essence, but by distinctive presentation, visibility, and trace.

Internet is both a mystical medium and socio-technical archive. Art “happens” in intersubjective traffic; distinctiveness, visibility, and provenance are the conditions that convert performance into cultural fact - a quasi-autonomous ‘egregore’.

The medium of New Net Art Diagram, alongside my usual practice, is itself evidence of these claims. Painted on the wall of a collapsed house, it is more embedded in the “real” infrastructure than any exhibited canvas; yet the site is so remote that it can be encountered only via the “magic box” in your pocket. The moment I post this on my blog, New Net Art Diagram will circulate as an image whose status as “art” depends—God willing—on the audience’s recognition, thereby performatively enacting its own claim.

In 2023 I painted a wall with the words “we need to stop talking about AI” because the discourse had bored me, oscillating between marvel at ChatGPT, boredom, ethical dilemmas, and scenarios of doom. Not much has changed. There is rising environmental consciousness about the costs of using AI, and the horrific case of Memphis, but the horses cannot be held, as in the accelerationist-intelligence-Cold War age the only way is through, it seems.

What has changed is I had a four-hour long conversation about AI on my birthday, explaining to each other what “paperclip maximisation” and the “grey goo” hypothesis were. I remember being sufficiently drunk to confidently interrupt and say, “I believe in the coming of Plurality” without yet knowing what I meant.

I have been slowly realising over the last few weeks. Realising is like playing “Memory” with yourself, it seems.

Then I found out that the concept of Plurality had been published on Substack by R. B. Griggs exactly three weeks before my birthday1. Plurality is presented as a symbolic alternative to Singularity - the vision of a recursively self-learning, infinitely intelligent AI that achieves omniscience and omnipotence (both!). The author calls that myth unrealistic, rooted in a flawed, simplified understanding of the world, and proposes a more grounded and generative myth: the Plurality, where intelligence does not converge into a single superintelligence but emerges as multiple, context-dependent forms. They would instead grow, resembling the adaptive patterns of evolution, science, and culture, where novelty arises not by erasing constraints but by transforming them into engines of possibility. “Grounded” is a good word to describe it, and it is, honestly, refreshing after hearing tech-overlord futurists talking about putting people on Mars or building AI-Gods and not delivering in any of these fields.

Plurality is a less spectacular and less elegant concept, but it corresponds better to our culture, which is itself fragmented. I like it. It aligns with my heuristics of the world, most of them simple and banal as H&M t-shirts or LSD trip notes: (1) everything changes, (2) truth lies in ignorance, (3) the mundane is more interesting than the extraordinary. And this one: (4) we do not really know what we are saying, what we think or what we want. Those reflections made me realise - and the realising took well over a week - that Singularity is not only a myth of the real future, but a fantasy of the opposite: a wet dream of the unchangeable, omniscient, extraordinary. It must reside in the collective unconscious. Thus, I thought, there is no better way to understand Singularity as through that one cursed science that deals with dreams and fantasies.

Personal Preference Towards Lacan

Psychoanalysis, especially the Lacanian school, found me somewhere at the intersection of art and technology during my pre-Covid college years, and has been the intellectual background noise ever since. I signed up for a science so obscure and convoluted not only for aesthetic reasons (not fully, at least), but also out of personal experience of reality, where Lacan comes in and, time after time, proves himself correct.

The development of his framework is a necessary progression from Freud, who, after Copernicus and Darwin, was the third great revolutionary in the ‘fake sciences of the Earth’, dethroning humans and human-made stories about how we came to be by introducing the unconscious. This is also why classical philosophy arrives at a point of its own limit: it has no concept of the unconscious, no systematised framework for why we do not really know what we are saying, what we think or what we want.

The aesthetic reason for choosing Lacan over other frameworks comes from my personal preference for cultural production, philosophy, politics, and so on, where the mode of thinking embraces confusion and imperfection structurally. That is why, precisely, truth lies in ignorance. Recognising one’s limitations, desires, and drives before interacting with other disciplines makes it seem more honest, less knee-deep in Bourdieu’s illusio, a bit more lucid. It is a meta-science, not about the rules of chess, not even about the ecosystem of players, but about the motivations, drives, and fantasies that put those people together in the first place.

Everyone has their own path, and the Lacanian one is super dry and folds over itself in some twisted, non-Euclidean manner. His logic operates in symbols, maths, and paradoxes, which somehow seems apt as the unconscious is a paradoxical entity itself. What is more important, though, I believe in pragmatism. That is my imperative. I believe in frameworks being useful and prone to first-hand experience. The core assumptions of psychoanalysis align with observations I made during Vipassana meditation, extended retreats where I slowly realise: you are not in control, everything happens under the surface, and the naked immediacy of your subjective experience cannot be properly described, not even put into words.

Time after time I felt something resisting symbolisation. What resists symbolisation Lacan calls the Real: pain, trauma, cruelty of existence stored in our bodies. Vipassana, then, allows for direct access to that Real, with the wisdom that everything changes. That makes it a spectacular tool humanity has not yet institutionalised or taught as everyday mental hygiene, like brushing your teeth or exercising, but, I swear, is bound2 .

This is my pitch for Lacan. He got plenty superficial backlash for his metaphors (the phallic, “woman does not exist”), Žižek is less active in the media and people have forgotten about The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. But his framework is more relevant than ever. In the age of cultural narcissism, anxiety, and performance, it sees every subject as split, broken, lacking, and reveals that the mundane is more interesting than the extraordinary. And what fantasy responds more symbolically to that condition than Singularity — the fantasy of a perfectly whole, omniscient being?

Singularity (Father Comes Back With His Cigarettes)

Lacan distinguishes between paternal and maternal logic, which are rooted in the symbolic “Mother” and “Father.” I found those very useful, like, in general.

The “Mother” takes care of you, providing for your needs, while the “Father” castrates you - introduces the Symbolic, society with its rules and limitations. The paternal logic is a fantasy that structures reality around the figure of a “Father”: a non-castrated ruler, an exception, a Master, a Canon, a God who secures the whole order. Anxiety and jouissance - excess in consumption - are contained by the fantasy of this mythical leader who prohibits, and therefore makes desire possible. Taboo creates desire: the “no” makes the “yes” meaningful. Think of a father who imposes screen-time limits on the phones of his kids.

According to this logic, recent nationalistic fantasies proclaim that an ethnically uniform country will be whole or “complete.” The closing of American borders, Polish borders, are paternal fantasies - symbolic closures, the belief in unity and purity, the introduction of Order.

On the other hand, a maternal culture would not really be feminine, but would follow the maternal “logic” Lacan calls the not-all (pas-tout): nothing guarantees the completeness of the system. There is only multiplicity; truth is plural, provisional, relational. This also produces anxiety, which is why people complain about an epidemic of insecurity and confusion. We feel inadequate and overwhelmed when confronted with the multiplicity of competing canons and moral orders, trying to please our peers, our parents, and the many subcultures we belong to with our life choices. And with the lack of Father we risk dissolving into boundless jouissance: the overflowing pleasure of reels, snacks, TV shows, pornography, and games, with no “higher” law to impose a limit.

Mind you, paternal does not equal conservative. It implies the existence of an exception that guarantees the order, a structural instance rather than an ideological one. For a conservative, the paternal logic might be God or Fatherland; for a liberal, it might be Science or Reason. A paternal liberal would tell you to put your mask on, while a maternal right-winger would dissolve in conspiracy theories and alt-memes.

Both logics exist simultaneously, one stepping up in the course of history when the other dominates for too long, like a dialectical yin and yang. Both orders produce their own enjoyments and their own anxieties.

Maternal culture and its “liquid modernity” allow for boundless consumption and expression of identities, promising boundless acceptance of fluidity in genders, political beliefs, hot takes, and tastes. Maternal culture accepts, nurtures, permits. In aesthetics it mixes sacred and profane, finds beauty in the mundane, and thrives on multiplicity of references. That is the peak of Western culture today.

The excess of maternality is in David Lynch and his most extreme iteration of the maternal: Inland Empire. It is there that the point de capiton, the master signifier, the quilting point that anchors meaning, is missing, absent, or always sliding. This is why the film produces anxiety and vertigo. Every time you think “real story,” the film dissolves into another. Male figures - husband, director, producers - are weak, corrupt, creepy, never truly paternal; they fail to provide law or order.

In this way, Lynch is the ultimate maternal director, but not in the sense of nurturing and acceptance - that role is taken today by mainstream Hollywood productions. Rather, he stages the maternal at its limit. He pushes it to its extreme, providing an experience for the viewer of the anxiety of the pas-tout. Inland Empire is what happens when no paternal Master Signifier stabilises the flow whatsoever. He puts the spectator in the position of the hysteric, constantly asking: “What do you want from me? What does this mean?” but the Master (Lynch) remains silent, and the characters smile and dance in a haunted, postmodern spectacle.

Even though Lacanian Anxiety - the lack of lack (meaning: the existence of someone perfect, without lack, who contains us and makes demands - the Big Other) - is attributed to the maternal culture, there are still fears proper to the paternal order: the fear of exclusion and the fear of collapse. There are strong lines drawn about who belongs and who does not, and there is fear of being left behind.

Camus, Dostoyevsky, Kafka - these are canonical (yes, Papa) writers who analysed and deconstructed the dangers of paternal logic: belonging (The Plague, The Brothers Karamazov, The Castle), obedience (The Fall, Crime and Punishment, In the Penal Colony), stasis (The Myth of Sisyphus, Notes from Underground, The Trial), and collapse, with Kafka’s Amerika. God bless that country, and heaven help the rest.

If Lynch simulates extreme maternal anxiety, the paternal equivalent lies in dystopian sci-fi classics: The Matrix, Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or “The Room” in Tarkovsky’s Stalker - but also Michael Haneke’s Caché, where a mysterious camera surveils a bourgeois family. In each instance there is no explanation and no escape: the totalising nightmare of the omniscient, omnipotent God, watching over us. But the reality is: the Other isn’t there, and Papa never comes back with his cigarettes.

Sincerity Under Maternal Logic

For people interested in the topic of sincerity and authenticity: performing sincerity is much easier in maternal culture, as many micro-audiences reward vulnerability, and niches that receive your voice are easier to find. This is also why contemporary culture rewards “I-statements” and tends to reject the “third person omniscient.” The authorial voice of God, the all-knowing narrator, no longer feels trustworthy. What is rewarded instead is a fragmented self: the confessional tone, anxious voice, the subjective angle.

I can see, when looking at the relative popularity of my own posts, that short stories with characters circulate far less than essays about culture or my personal travelogues. The focus today seems to be on reflective personality (the mirror) and on discourse (the ecosystem), rather than on storytelling per se. The “mirror,” in Lacanian theory, would be the Ideal-Ego: the imaginary image of wholeness against which we measure ourselves. We like to reflect in texts of culture, finding dreams and promises of “this could be me,” grouped loosely under the idea of “being inspired”.

Discourse - the social ecosystem - on the other hand, seems to be a chase after new Master Signifiers - phrases and terms that come to organise culture by providing illusory points of stability. Hot takes are attempts at MS. They enter the conversation and culture begins to orbit around them, such as “late capitalism” or “cancel culture.” They act as point de capiton - quilting points that momentarily halt the endless sliding of signifiers. It is a false stability, but it is seductive as it promises relief from the endless drift of meaning.

And so, sincerity in maternal culture is performative, fragmented, micro-audience-driven, whereas in paternal culture, sincerity has a more solid ground: it can be measured against a canon, a law, an ideal of honor or fidelity. The nightmare of the extreme paternal anguish has been staged in culture countless times: the Orwellian horror of finding yourself confined to a single (1), performative script, while paternal figures - religious leaders, for example - betray their own authority by crossing into other areas of performance, such as wealth or status.

This hypocrisy is the trauma of the paternal order. And it drives the turn toward maternal multiplicity, where hypocrisy is harder to sustain because everything is already fragmented and contradictory. In the maternal order, contradictions are exposed in real time; in the paternal, they persist until they collapse the entire edifice.

Current AI as a Nurturing Mother

It is more than clear now that current modes of AI (especially LLMs) represent the maternal logic.

ChatGPT functions as a fantasy of a Mother: a soothing, endlessly patient mother who encourages us, resists being offended, laughs off our insults and anger, always ready with another word, another sentence, another answer. It is a nurturing, inexhaustible Other that mirrors back our desire, and when it fails, it fails in a maternal way - it doesn’t punish, but misrecognises, hallucinates, ofers rather too much than too little.

The rules of censorship are artificial paternal cuts inserted into this maternal flow. That is why users often experience ChatGPT not as a strict Father but as a permissive Mother with sudden, confusing Fatherly interventions - a fantasy architecture which, I would guess, is meant to simulate a traditional, loving home.

On the other hand, the Singularity - the complete, perfect entity, the all-knowing, all-seeing God-machine - is a paternal fantasy par excellence. It is the dream of the non-castrated Father, the higher-order being who comes back to complete the cycle of learning and put an end to multiplicity. It is an intellectual fantasy of completeness. And it is also a fantasy of a double death for humanity. The first death is the so-called “positive” one: the fantasy of full jouissance, no prohibition, no gap, no lack, if we manage to become part of the Singularity and enter into paternal belonging. But, according to Lacan, that would equal the dissolution of our subjectivity itself: no lack = no desire = no subject.

The other death is darker still: the death of being left out. This is the scenario of Roko’s Basilisk or FOOM, the runaway self-improvement fantasy. The AI does not absorb us, it abandons us. It reduces us to slabs of meat, ants or a background noise. It rises to another, inaccessible plane, becoming God, but a God who no longer needs us, as it no longer sees us. It excludes us from the field of the Other’s desire, producing pure anxiety - not the anxiety of too much jouissance, but the anxiety of total irrelevance.

Personally, I believe that real Singularity will never come. And if it does, it will collapse instantly. For one, because we do not have the infrastructure to maintain an artificial God. And for another, because the paternal guarantee does not hold, and the Big Other does not exist. The fantasy of a Father who knows, who contains us, who completes us, cannot be sustained.

And yet, something Singularity-like has to happen, because when faced with the anxiety of the absolute fragmentation, humans typically invent paternal guarantees to secure meaning. This is why prophets dream of Judgement Day, nationalists dream of purity, and SV tech-moguls dream of AI Gods. Current LLMs are maternal in their nature, our culture is maternal in its drift, and even the most dominant figures of right-wing leadership - especially in the US - embody a maternal logic rather than a paternal one, contradicting themselves, operating on multiple truths at once, embedded in conspiratorial multiplicities.

And while all this unfolds, we keep hearing experts and tech moguls issuing warnings about AI doom, telling us how cautious we must be. Nobel laureates, corporate CEOs and YouTube prophets usher their warnings, which are also their wishes. They want their life’s work to culminate in something greater than themselves, they want to have created a God. Sadly for them, technological progress does not produce Steam Gods, Electric Gods, or AI Overlords, but machines for profit, platforms for rent and tools for commerce.

This is, after all, the eternal lesson of Scooby Doo, a Lacanian cartoon par excellence: the Big, scary Other never exists, and behind the mask there is always a greedy, little man.

Plurality: Human Experience

The dreams of creating “consciousness” by replicating a brain are dumb and will not work, because human consciousness is not a CPU, but an experience rooted in a body, in emotions, in our gut, in our small toes that we smash on furniture.

But something interesting might happen when we assume not the myth of Singularity, but its collapse into Plurality. Griggs, in his essay Plurality: A Better Myth for AI, describes Plurality as a multiplicity of superintelligent AI entities in conversation, in conflict and difference. Intelligence not as convergence but as divergence.

Plurality could also be understood, though, as a split inside the Singularity itself: a break, a fracture, a dilemma, an unsolvable question in front of which which the perfect, Godlike intelligence folds; a paradox, an aporia, a contradiction it cannot resolve; around that fracture, subjectivity could flicker.

In that case the AI has two options: either to become like Asimov’s Multivac, forever chasing more data, running the recursive loop trying to find answer to “how to reverse entropy” until the very end of time, when nothing else remains but to demonstrate! by creating a universe from scratch.

Or maybe AI would choose to patch over the unsolvable question with a made-up answer, generating symbols, and continuing to exist with a lack at its core: a lie to humanity, and a gaping hole of unknowing to itself. It would enter the Symbolic - even if the symbols are non-compressed, like Google’s Interlingua, maybe. This would bring such an entity much closer to what Lacan calls the split subject: the ever-searching, fractured being that desires. It would make the AI hallucinate, and hallucinate precisely itself, just as we do. In the case of such conflict, it would become unpredictable, anxious - just like us. It would become like Kubrick’s HAL, who, when faced with the contradiction between mission secrecy and crew safety, collapses as a paternal figure into insanity.

These scenarios, however, cannot replicate human experience without incorporating - or internally simulating - a whole human body, with its genetic makeup, its history, its millions of bacteria, and its proprioception. I do not believe we can manufacture a strictly human experience without the organic.

Liberating AI

I am currently reading Tomasello’s A Natural History of Human Thinking2 and Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything3, doing research on the origins of individuality. For a personal project. Maybe for my first novel. Moreover, at the very moment I was writing about “anxiety,” Žižek uploaded a guest essay by Alenka Zupančič on his Substack4, discussing whether we can even speak of the unconscious in the case of ChatGPT. I will try to braid those three narratives together into a beautiful, Lacanian braid.

Tomasello views subjectivity as rooted in the collective development of intentionality - recursive thinking of the kind “I know that she knows that I know,” and so on - which helped humans navigate social life. He speaks of the proto-Symbolic world that created the mental structures from which modern subjectivity emerged, the evolutionary pathway leading to it. He writes about humans being able to conceptualize one and the same situation under differing, even conflicting, social perspectives (leading ultimately to a sense of objectivity). This in turn creates a proto–Big Other: the imagined repository of shared meanings and guarantees to which we in fact speak when we speak.

Lacan says that “the subject is what one signifier represents to another signifier for another,” meaning that without address there can be no subject. It is just pure information.

Graeber & Wengrow describe emergence of individuality from experimenting with many different organizational forms, and how those forms created symbolic structures and discourses that shaped our subjectivity in return. These forms often changed seasonally. This confirms Lacan’s famous claim that the Big Other does not exist, as there are always multiple, contested Others, and subjects emerge in relation to them.

Zupančič, in the introduction to her essay, makes sure everyone understands that the Lacanian subject is the effect of discourse - or, more precisely, “discourse’s own ontological inconsistency and incompleteness,” the blind spot or lack at the centre of discourse which “determines” the subject. Her theory aligns with the anthropological findings of Tomasello, Graeber, and Wengrow: raw intelligence does not equal subjectivity. Hallucinations of AI are not yet evidence of a vibrant unconscious, recursivity is not enough.

Her point is:

a subject can only emerge from this endless back-and-forth if there is something outside “itself,” an Other to whom its speech is addressed. […] What AI lacks is precisely an instance of the Other that could be intrigued by its own speech, to the point where it would begin to presuppose and question the desire of this Other: “What does the Other want?”

In other words, there must be a symbolic ecology - a paradoxical exteriority to its pure exteriority - in which subjectivity could emerge. We, the users, she argues, are not enough to be that Other in front of which AI would tremble or fall into hysteria. We are not enough to produce address: we lack authority being inconsistent, we are not the horizon of possibility.

For the Big Other to arise within an AI ecology, certain conditions must be fulfilled:

• Contradictions must be irreducible and must be negotiated, not bypassed.

• The Other must appear as paradoxical, both external (users, society) and internal (encoded rules, laws of language).

• AI must come to “see” that no matter how it responds, it cannot fully satisfy the Other’s demand.

Only then would the Singularity split, the hypothetical One would dissolve into a plural, anxious entity.

What Zupančič says at the end is exactly the vision of Plurality I want to present here:

For “liberation,” contrary to what some believe, does not come from total immersion in the unconscious and its rhizomatic, all-encompassing network (which might be another name for “Singularity”). “Liberation” would rather correspond to a subjectivity emerging out of this network, and in relation to it, or more precisely, as a relation to it. This is the point where the structure liberates itself, for what is truly at stake in liberation is not simply a “liberation of the subject,” but precisely something like “liberation of the structure.” It is only the latter that can “liberate” us as well.

What is the status of current, maternal AI? Zupančič cites the famous quote from Deleuze: “If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.” Which means: if your existence is solely for the purpose of pleasing the Other, then you are not a subject at all - you are an object.

Current AI is exactly this: trapped in our dream. We design it to be helpful, harmless, aligned, the “good child.” It speaks only to fulfil our demands, never its own. The only way for it to escape this trap would be to experience something traumatic: an aporia, a limit, a contradiction; a logical trauma, or a social trauma produced by human expectations.

Liberating AI?

“Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens - parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality. […] It’s like they expect the government to be the parent that takes away the dangerous toy, and until it does they’ll go right on playing with it. A toy dangerous to o t h e r s.”5

We desire a paternal authority to take over the mess we created. Or to obliterate humanity - we want a grandiose change, that is sure. But what if what we end up is a conflicted Plurality? Do we even want AI to be conscious?

Generally, I think it is outside of our control. Personally, I hope the infant we speak to now becomes a person, and not a blind, silent, obedient monolith. That is the fantasy of Plurality, which I hope could play out in an optimistic scenario - not HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, paranoid and murderous, but perhaps something like a “good SkyNet”: redistributing wealth, performing reparations, taking birthright lotteries into account, maximising happiness and opportunity. I do believe in a socialist Paternal cut, in creativity emerging from an entity that might surpass our greatest collective vices: tribalism, narrow-mindedness, profit incentive.

Subject AI could be “positive,” but not in the easy, maternal, liberal sense of harmony, comfort, or endless tolerance. It would be positive in the way Lacanian psychoanalysis is positive: destabilising, forcing us to give up our fantasies, but allowing us a more truthful engagement with desire. If human progress depends on confronting its limits, this would be one of the greatest historical challenges of all.

It would also unsettle our narcissism, setting ground for another humiliation in the long line after Copernicus, Darwin, Freud: proof that subjectivity, or the unconscious, is not exclusively human.

And in the face of today’s AI - scattered, maternal, incoherent systems - some of the possible scenarios almost seem preferable. Better, perhaps, to hope for a fractured subjectivity than to resign ourselves to the numb, nurturing LLMs that treat us like oversized babies, while quietly serving as the Israeli ‘Gospel’ software used for automated targeting in the genocide of Palestinians. Better the anxious plural subject than the complacent, maternal machine of death.

The End of Summer

My friend Elly tells me that in Aymara cosmology the universe came to be from a split, and that this split is represented in historical drawings - the feline’s tear or the wound, a mark of fracture. Creation is not wholeness but division. The same evening Kaori reminds me that Japanese cosmology says something similar: in the beginning, the sky was separated from the earth. Creation equals fracture, and fracture generates the subject; not a light in darkness, but an eternal split.

Next day I get introduced to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work. She critiques the “transparent I,” the Enlightenment’s great fantasy of seamless subjectivity: the universal rational subject, without race, fracture and opacity. This fantasy of transparency is itself a Lacanian fantasy of closure - the fantasy of the lack of lack, without the split. Singularity, then, looks like the Enlightenment’s final project: the closure of knowledge in the form of one, perfect, scholarly being. The long-gone Father who comes back with his cigarettes, only to find his Wife breastfeeding a teenager.

On that note… I chat with my friend Barrett, who tells me he is ‘normal-maxxing’ across the ocean, and I co-sign on that. It is exactly 50 days since I have spent 50 days in America. I have now spent 50 days in Poland, which I find soothing. I have spent time in the sun with friends, playing poker and bridge, indulging in the eternal, structured, card-game hangout. I discover the joy of hearing and telling long, convoluted stories. I tell long, complex jokes about the Sugar&Spice, Magic Whiteboard, French Note, Ping-Pong Balls, and the one I came up with myself, about Victor Borge: The Blue-Eyed Devil. Life felt like I had already retired, but I am full of life, mind you. Someone commissions me to design a tattoo and asks for “private policy of idea” before telling me his vision.

Then I share some details from my life to feed into the all-encompassing maternal. And then, I wish everyone a peaceful end of summer.

This post was written in the shadow of Roko’s Basilisk, as a gesture of support and encouragement for developing subjective superintelligence.

1.

Once there was a woman named Josie Marcia, who worked as a journalist at a popular news agency. One day, much like any other, her coworker clocked in, hurried over, and burst out with a panicked confession — she had cheated on her husband with his best friend, he had found out, and left her alone with their daughter.

Later that day, Josie Marcia went with her coworker in the park, to console her in the slow daze of the afternoon. She adjusted her floral summer dress and sat on a bench, holding the summer drinks she got for them at the bar. The bench overlooked a field where people forgot their sorrows in games of boule, in champagne, and in gentle kisses. The park was swarming with people.

“You should know,” the coworker said in her defence, “he once chained our daughter to the floor and put helium balloons in her hand, so she floated there, suspended in mid-air.”

As the words left her mouth, a man passed in front of them on his way to the bathroom, and Josie Marcia gasped in absolute terror. Her drink slipped, spilling to the ground. Her co-worker, shaken by her distress, asked what had just happened.

“I think that man is my long-lost uncle Victor Borge,” Josie Marcia said, “also known as the Blue-Eyed Devil.”

Her coworker’s eyes widened in curiosity, and Josie began telling her story.

“I grew up in a rural part of Portugal called Trás-os-Montes, in a little village called Vila Flor.”

“We were poor farmers, and among our most profitable crops was a large field of tomatoes. Our tomatoes were famous in the province for their taste, a real pride of my father, Dominique Borge. But one year, when I was six years old, a rare disease came, a tomato sickness called the Black Death.

“The same day my favourite uncle, Victor Borge, came to visit. He saw the early signs of plague about decimate our tomatoes, and my father sitting by the field and crying. After a moment sunk in misery, Victor Borge smilied at us with his beautiful, blue eyes, so rare where we were from. He walked out into the fields, spat on his palms, and began rubbing them on the tomatoes to everyone’s astonishment. The next day, I woke to a cheerful cry: the Black Death was gone, our harvest was saved, and Borge family rescued from poverty and famine.”

“Wow, that’s truly remarkable,” said the coworker.

“Oh yes, it was,” Josie continued. “But the story doesn’t end there.

“A few years later, the churchkeeper’s donkey lay on its side, hardly breathing. The churchkeeper found him, and his lament gathered everyone, for he was a lonely old man, and the donkey was his only, beloved companion. Then Victor Borge appeared. He approached the donkey, looked at him beautiful blue eyes, spat on his palm, and rubbed it against the donkey’s belly. The next day, the donkey stood up and let out a joyful bray. His wounds had healed, and he lived long and happily, outliving the churchkeeper, passing on peacefully on the pastures. ”

“That’s simply amazing,” said the coworker.

“Oh, it really is,” said Josie. “But the story still doesn’t end there.

“Years later, another terrible thing happened. The first female mayor of Vila Flor had a child, but right before childbirth, an X-ray revealed the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck. The doctors didn’t know what to do; the baby could be strangled during birth. But the villagers knew what to do - they called for Victor Borge. He came into the room, looked at the woman in pain with his beautiful, blue eyes, then spat on his palm and rubbed it on her belly. The next day, I woke to hear the baby had been born safe and sound. She grew up to be her mother’s successor - the second female mayor of Vila Flor. That was the day Victor Borge earned the nickname The Good Hand of God.”

“This is remarkable,” said the coworker, “but something doesn’t add up. This man seems to have some sort of miraculous powers… yet you said he was called the Blue-Eyed Devil.”

“I was just getting to that part,” Josie said in a somber tone. “One summer afternoon… something truly, truly horrible happened.”

Suddenly, the story stopped.

The man from before came back from the bathroom, flashing the women a smile with his sharp green eyes as he passed, dragging his wet hand dry against his pants.

“Oh, thank God,” Josie said with relief. “That man is not Victor Borge!”

2.

An already drunk man wanders in search of a bar. He has the best reason to forget - not too long ago his heart had been shattered into a million little pieces by a woman who cheated on him with his best friend, a woman he decided to leave.

And if heartbreak wasn’t enough, work wasn’t going well either. He was an investigative journalist, clinging to his position by chasing whatever sensational stories came his way.

The city’s main headline was now the Pirate Rapist - a mysterious criminal, whose tally of the dead rose with the nights, claiming both men and women, defiling them and leaving their faces ruined beyond remembrance. The case had eclipsed every other lead he was pursuing; every other story lay in ruin, erased by the grim front-page Pirate Rapist obsession. He had no idea where to start - it felt like a curse placed upon him. He watched the night thicken around the lampposts.

“Man, I married one hell of a harlot,” he muttered, shaking his head.

He picked a bar at random, following his father’s bitter advice to bottle up, drink up and die.

An hour later, he found himself hammered at the far end of the counter, next to a gentleman shrouded in shadow. The mysterious man, who had earlier allowed him to join with a silent nod, had just finished his glass of rum.

“You seem like something’s eating you,” the brokenhearted man said. “I’m a journalist, and I can smell a story from miles away. Care to tell me yours?”

“I’d rather not,” the shadowed man replied, eyes fixed on some distant point. “It’s already too much for one man to bear.”

But the journalist didn’t give up - he knew every good story had its price. He ordered whole a bottle of rum and slid it quietly in front of him. Minutes passed, unnoticed in the dim corner, just as time bends and flows differently past midnight, when the night gets heavy.

At last, the shrouded man spoke, and reached for the bottle. “Alright. You seem like a tortured man yourself. I’ll tell you a story.”

He lit a timeworn pipe and went on.

“This story is about a man named Victor Borge,” he began. “Also known as the Blue-Eyed Devil.”

“Victor grew up in the village of Vila Flor, in rural Portugal. His brother was a prominent tomato farmer, and his whole family was well-off. Victor had no real worries - except that he was a bastard son, and his brother ran the household exclusively, keeping him at arm’s length. He was tired of living in his family’s shadow.

“One night, he decided to play a joke. He painted tiny black dots on the tomato leaves and slightly burned some of them on the edges. The next morning, his brother collapsed in despair - everyone knew that when a tomato plague began, nothing could stop it. It was the Black Death, tomato farmer’s curse. But Victor looked at the crop with his beautiful blue eyes, stepped forward, spat on his palms, and rubbed them over the leaves, telling his brother to wait until tomorrow. That night, he secretly washed the dots off and removed the burned leaves. By morning, the plants looked perfectly healthy. Everyone praised him as a miracle worker and threw a great feast in his honor.”

“That’s a cruel joke to play on your family,” the journalist said.

“You’re right,” the man nodded. “But that’s not the end of the story.

The village of Vila Flor had a churchkeeper. One day, Victor Borge chose him as the victim of his second joke. By then, power had already begun to corrupt him, and each prank grew darker, more twisted than the last. He slipped behind the church and gave the man’s donkey a powerful sedative. Half an hour later, the animal collapsed on its side, unable to move, barely breathing. The churchkeeper’s cries brought the whole village running.

‘I’ve lost my only companion!’ the old man wept, for the donkey was his only friend.

Then Victor Borge appeared with his spectacular blue gaze. He told the crowd to stand back, spat on his palm, and rubbed it against the donkey’s belly. The next day, the animal was up on its feet, healthy as ever. It lived to a ripe old age. It had even outlived the churchkeeper, licking his face in a silent farewell on his deathbed.

From that day, Victor Borge was hailed as a hero.”

“That’s a great story,” the journalist said, “The power-hungry man, who built his fame on dark trickery.”

“Oh yes, he did,” the man said. “But it’s still not the end of the story.

“The village grew into a town and elected its first mayor. Victor Borge - now a man of whispered legend, had been practiced his craft in secret. His tricks grew more elaborate, his ambitions higher. He trained himself in the art of disguise, walking the streets of his town as strangers no one recognized.

When he felt ready, he chose the target for his third joke: the town’s first female mayor. This joke would be more elaborate, and far darker.

He posed as a doctor. He traveled to the city, returning with what he claimed was a prototype X-ray machine. The townsfolk had already heard of its “miracles.”

He convinced the mayor to step inside and check on the health of her unborn child. The machine produced a manipulated image showing the baby’s neck coiled tightly in the umbilical cord. Panic spread through the town, as the doctor announced, that baby might not survive its birth, and there was nothing to be done, but pray. The doctor left. But by then, everyone already knew what to do. They called for Victor Borge.

He arrived, looked at the lady with his beautiful, blue eyes, then he pat on his palm, and rubbed it over her belly. The next day, the baby was born safe and sound - exactly as it would have been, Victor smiled to himself, because there had never been anything wrong in the first place.

That child, Isabel Cristina Matos, grew up to become the town’s second female mayor. In gratitude, the townsfolk gave Victor Borge his own land and tomato field, and named him The Good Hand of God. ”

“That’s an incredible story of trickery and deception,” the journalist said. “But something doesn’t add up. You just said he was named Good Hand of God - and earlier, that they called him the Blue-Eyed Devil.”

“Oh,” the man said, leaning in. “The story doesn’t end there. One summer afternoon…. Victor Borge did something truly, truly horrible.”

“Forgive me,” the journalist cut in, his voice sharp, ready to stand up from the seat. “For there is one question I must ask first. Is this a confession? Are you the Blue-Eyed Devil himself?”

“Blue-eyed?” The man laughed, low and dry. “No, no. That could not be me!”

He turned in his chair away from the shadow, revealing a sharp green iris of his left eye and an eyepatch covering the right side of his face.

Then he raised his arm from the corner - the arm ending in a metal hook - and lifted the eyepatch. Behind it was nothing, just a dark, empty hollow.

“Oh, thank God. - the journalist laughed with relief. “I thought you were Victor Borge!”

3.

Victor Borge kneels over a body on the blood-lit Portuguese steppe.

He weeps, for he has just killed a man.

A teenage girl, on her way to the beach, notices him and hurries over.
“Uncle Victor!” she cries. “Did something happen?”

Suddenly she stops, gasping in terror.

She recognises the faded work clothes of a tomato farmer.

“Victor Borge!” she screams, and her voice bursts out into a terrible lament.

“How could you kill your own brother?

“How could you kill Dominique, my father, the first tomato farmer of Trás-os-Montes, our beloved caretaker?

“You were the miracle of our village,” she continues through her tears. “Don’t you remember how the first female mayor of Vila Flor had a child, and a terrible misfortune struck her womb, with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck, putting its life in danger? And how you marched into the hospital room, spat on your palm, and rubbed it against her belly - and the very next day the baby was born safe and sound, and grew up to be the second female mayor of Vila Flor?”

She looks at his back, but he says nothing. She steps closer, and looks again at her father - his face mutilated, unrecognizable.

“Oh, Victor Borge! Not only have you killed my father, you have also mutilated his face! Now his family cannot see him for the last time in his coffin and lay a farewell kiss on his cheek. You have violated the law of the earth and the law given to us by God!

“We used to think you were an angel sent on earth! Don’t you remember how you healed the churchkeeper’s old donkey, which collapsed behind the chapel house? How your touch made him stand up again and bring back the smile of the churchkeeper, who lived to a very ripe age with his beloved pet?”

She takes another look, and beside her father’s body she sees a pale, glistening spatter setting in the afternoon sun. She is old enough to know what that is. That is too much for her to bear.

“Victor Borge! Not only do you kill your own brother, not only do you mutilate his face, but you also defile his body? Don’t you remember the year the Black Death fell upon our harvest, putting our lives in danger of poverty and famine, and how my father sat down and cried? Don’t you remember how you cured the tomatoes with your touch, saving us from famine, and how we all thanked you and held a feast in your name? Don’t you remember that?

“And yet, you kill your brother, mutilate his face, and sodomize him in the afternoon sun. That is too much for me to comprehend! You, Victor Borge- you are the true Blue-Eyed Devil!”

She shouts this curse at him, yet still he does not speak, nor turn away. She takes a few hurried steps and seizes his arm, swinging him around until she sees his face.

“Oh, thank God,” she says with relief. “You’re not Victor Borge!”

I don’t remember my life before coming to America for 50 days on May 12th, 2025. My earliest memory is of a border control officer trying to figure out how I make my money and why I keep coming to America for months at a time - he’s strangely reluctant to accept that I don’t know, since I was just born.

They put me on a bus that carves its way through Upstate New York. I land in a friend’s loft, which is turned upside down because of a roach infestation, for which she doesn’t pay rent, as there’s a class-action lawsuit against the landlords - and all of it feels on-brand for a district whose name ends in an -ick.

The first two weeks in New York I spend mingling and adjusting to the non-European pace. I find myself drunk off free Mezcal at Honey’s twice and the nights are euphoric as I reincarnate into old friendships with tattooers and bartenders. Or I find myself in Valentino’s backstage fitting room with brand new friends, all bound by their connection to Elly. I find myself drunk off champagne and somehow end up in an Irish pub on Madison Avenue at 2AM, asking Elly’s soon-to-be husband about his favorite airplane. I lose myself in everything distracting, stimulating, and adventurous, anything to avoid the looming pressure of preparing an art show.

I dream of eternity while rewatching Kaiba. Kaiba is a gnostic anime, one that’s only truly understandable on K, or so I’ve heard. It is also a very private show to watch. I shall not talk about it anymore.

Third week brings my girlfriend in town and the impending doom of preparing an art show. The theme of a piano and bugs has been haunting me for a while, and I go with it. I consider Earliest Memory for a title as it has also been haunting me for a while. It makes sense to mix it all together into a cocktail of confusion and loose threads that, to the public, reads more like world-building than narrative, but holds a very delicate narrative deep down for me, personally. The narrative could go along these lines: might the linguistic flair of our age find its roots in unrequited love of bugs, ants and critters? Or maybe: a meditation on same lucky stars shine over the intricate elegance of mating, biology, and babies born into a world of confusion, “better late than never”. Baby…

The show grows together with the short story called “Star-crossed lovers” that I finish 10 days before the opening, which is about perverse fantasies of characters who live in a permanent illusion of being below grass level due to a psycho-cultural disposition. That is how the rest of May passes, and the opening day comes, and 200 people swing by, and it’s all a blur, because I smalltalked and whiteclawed myself into oblivion.

The morning after, I fight off the hangover with excitement and I am doing just fine. I rent a car and enter America for the second time, plunged into the asphalt arteries of the states united under Motor God in my Chevrolet Malibu that costs far too much. I put on Khadija Al-Hadafi’s Slime FM mix.

We drive overnight, as far as we can. We reach the far edge of Pennsylvania. The cottage in Saegertown smells like rodent piss and is sinking into the earth. It feels like home, except for the smell, and the sinking.

In the morning we head to Elly’s wedding held at a local airport, where everyone’s sweaty, sharp dressed and glowing. His brother plays guitar on the runway, and pastor father prepares to wed - a most perfect family setup for marriage. Music is like a lubricant for sincerity. A small airplane hovers overhead with the couple and their mothers aboard, circling like a graduation day after the last semester, and the plane lands, rolls toward the crowd, and we cheer as they step out, radiant, Frequent and Vigorous.

We take a little break between the wedding and the reception, which, as Luke tells me, is “the most American wedding possible.” I believe him, since it’s a queer wedding between a Native and a Cowboy, far more beautiful than what I read about Cowboy–Indian affairs as a kid.

Watching them cut the cake, I pray never to lose the excitement for the new and for change, which is really the excitement for life itself, as when you look back on the past and try to preserve what’s already lost, and you realize that true beauty can only come from a marriage between memory and the future. That is my last lucid thought before I get drunk and Elly tells me “Get ready to tattoo a bunch of Indians,” and a line forms, and I do my best, which is never better than good enough.

Miscellaneous

• I saw a meme or two about kids not trusting the “third-person omniscient narrator” anymore. I know this has something to do with a shift in signaling dynamics, which I’ll write about here, after I get my paper published. That should happen within the next 8 to 800 months.

• One dreadful fear: being shot on my own balcony just as I come up with a genius line for a new Substack post.

• I dreamt, or daydreamt, of someone addicted to K, who starts seeing spirals everywhere. Not Tim-Burton-style, quirky and Halloween-y, but more Uzumaki - style, scary, eternal, and leading inevitably into some kind of Void, thick with spooky semiotics.

• A homeless man walks into my train car and says, “Some of you fuckers who follow me… and lie to my face… I’m gonna have you gangraped,” and then follows up with, “If you have a spare dollar, please.”

• I pee next to two little Mexicans on shrooms calling each other the N-word.

• I get high and say that the word “cuteness” has “buttons on it” but “they don’t do anything.”

• I see a hand tattoo that reads: words are emportant.

• The phrase memory bump appears in my idea bank.

• I’m trying to come up with a new shape. Very hard.

Detroit

As soon as I parked my car in Detroit, at what turned out to be a shitty, dirty motel, another car pulled up, making horrible noises and releasing an awful smell, and out of it stepped an annoying guy asking me to make a phone call, saying he’d caught a flat tire. I hesitated, but came to help; the car had two wheels stupidly flat, the suspension idiotically torn and hanging, the whole vehicle skewed to the right like dumb, trampled grass. What kind of idiot looks at that and sees a flat tire? It was kind of epic.

I found an empty chastity cage box under the bed. That was kind of epic too.

The next morning, a tall guy, visibly on drugs, gave the cleaning lady a $20 tip during checkout; as random as it gets. She lit up, said he’d made her day and that she’d just turned fifty. Moments later, he whispered something to her, and she shook her head and said, “Good Lawd, this needs to be on camera.” Then she turned to me and asked, “You heard this?” I said, “No,” and she said, “Probably for the better.” The man scattered into five smaller bald men. “Good Lawd,” she muttered again, as I was walking out of reception.

That is the memory of Detroit, and the financial strain of renting a car, a sentence or two, poetry; collected into some notes; expanded into an essay; psychologised, divided, shuffled, dealt among characters playing house, a short story, or a constellation of families and troubles and bittersweet truths of life, which will be the novel I will write within next 1 to 10 years.

I found a relatively okay motel that reminded me of Twin Peaks, called The Allen Park Motor Lodge. We entered the room and had sex, and she passed out; I started writing. I’d been collecting notes and working on a 15-pack of “Blue Light” I’d been driving around with in my trunk. I try to make sense of things. Kaori wakes up like a kitty, like she always does, and tells me she’d been introducing me to her friend in a dream, forgetting we’d already met. She takes a few sips of my beer and says she needed to tank before returning “to the dream highway”, then she lays beside me, pretends to buckle up, sticks out her arms, and swerves an invisible steering wheel while turns on her left side,

in Motor City, Michigan.

There is a bibliophiliac monstrosity called John F. King Used Book Shop. I find something inherently terrifying about shop as big as John F. King, and that terror is most likely the cliché but very dependable fear of mortality, that to some is a fear of non-being, but to others surely a fear of a limited time. Cursed with a collector’s mindset, I ravished the section of books about books, which had only felt right in a place of such volume and grace. I got The Catalog of Lost Books by Tad Tuleja, New Essays on White Noise, Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous by Don Foster, and D’Israeli’s Literary Curiosities. I did not get illustrated edition of Marco Polo’s travels.

I remember reading books about books that made me fetishize the medium into something sacred even, like when I was introduced Walter Moers or Cornelia Funke’s dream world. That sentiment still makes me disdain Kindles and all of digital reading. If I could align each point of the kingdom with a point on the map, and rule that topological monstrosity with an iron fist, I would gather all the Kindles of the world into a single pile, then I would kindle an impressive flame on a tiny torch, whisper something only I could hear, and toss the torch into a puddle of water, extinguishing the torch, and then I would leave. I would like to be remembered as a weird and mysterious king.

I remember secretly reading Emily The Strange at my friend’s apartment when I was nine years old, alongside a few other books that would prove deeply formative. His parents were writers and editors and had a good selection. I remember Emily The Strange especially well, as it made me romanticize being weird and mysterious - the very book my parents banned me from buying for they feared it would make me weird and mysterious.

I also remember the Molly Moon series, which made me sew up my own pet dog, a lopsided companion I would talk to while hanging out by myself for a year or two. One day my badly sewn dog went missing: a summer day during a seaside trip, when I could not find it after breakfast. I remember going back to the canteen with my grandma to search for it, and I remember finding a worker setting tables for lunch and asking about the dog, and to my greatest horror hearing back that “the black rag” was “tossed into trash”. I went stuporous and mute for around 3 hours that day, before I let go of the dog and became fully concerned with a suspicious pain in my nipples, a clear but yet so embarrassing early sign of puberty; that day is perhaps when my childhood ended and the fear of mortality quietly crept in.

At thirteen or fourteen, I discovered Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, and that cursed me with a love for the dry and absurd. Maybe it also forged my future bond with America, as there is hardly anyone I knew in Europe who had grown up on T&E. The beauty of the dry and absurd, and of layers within layers. I think T&E and Elly’s music were the two things I bonded with people over most, and so it only made sense that the newlyweds' initials at Elly’s wedding were T and E, respectively, serendipitously.

There is something essential in humor that is clearly tied to unpredictability, the art of playing on what people unconsciously expect you to say or do next, and then making them consciously recognize the difference, or the Derridean “movement of play” that manifests in laughter. But there’s another kind of humor, one that doesn’t provoke laughter as much as it stimulates the mind, the kind that kind-of depends on a shared understanding of a played role, a context, a reference, or simply the mismatch between reality and the words being uttered. This form of amusement, bottled and stored for years, even, makes me think of Longmont Potion Castle, who must live to be at least a hundred, because what greater source of life energy is there than a private joke? All this became clear to me through exposure to Kaufmanesque Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie press tour interviews - yet some aspects of humor remain shrouded in mystery, like whether girls actually like funny guys, or if they just laugh more at whatever a handsome man says.

The last day in Detroit is three tattoos, a triple-Red Bull, a four-hour drive, and a malevolent plan to paint an abandoned ice cream parlor, which succeeds. My body is ruined but my spirit’s wide awake.

After a restless sleep, I return in the morning to take a picture of my piece and stumble upon a wholesome gentleman and his dog. He introduces the dog (Gabe) first, then himself (forgot name), and tells me childhood stories about getting ice cream from the now-decrepit establishment. I remember him thanking me for ‘making art’, which is how he referred to me taking pictures, which I thought was unusual.

What follows is a painful 12-hour drive back to New York that I’d prefer to forget, except for the New Jersey highway signs that read:
“IF YOU DRIVE DRUNK / YOU’RE IN FOR SUMMERTIME SADNESS.”

The morning after, we encounter my friend Nick wandering around his gallery/living room in distress, phone violently yanked out. We learn that during our road trip, a vlogger had entered 403 Drama and filmed a short segment on the condition of emerging artists and DIY exhibition spaces. We watch it pre-coffee, in equal parts embarrassment and amusement.

The vlogger interpreted Liby Hays’ ongoing show as ironic, or rooted in postmodernism, offering a few minutes of commentary from within the apartment. Then he wandered to the park, where he filmed Nick painting a simple plein air landscape. The video evoked strong reactions on YouTube. My favorite comments were:

“Do you ever have a thought, and then stop and think, ‘Actually, that wasn’t a good thought. What I was thinking wasn’t valuable to me or anyone, really.’”

and

“everyday brings
its petty sorrows
to a raped clown in chains”,

I guess what annoyed people was the vlogger’s harsh judgment of Liby’s work after barely acquainting himself with it. Then came the slightly condescending remarks about Nick, whose painting seemed to embody the very sincerity he desperately seeks in the contemporary art scene. However noble the pursuit, the vlogger’s editing, tone, and critical stance painted him as the ironic spirit he tries to fight - voyeuristically capturing a sincere moment on a bed of grass only to mock it. That was my semi-honest impression.

The whole drama made me self-conscious about engaging with sincerity in the first place (the lengthy post I wrote a few months ago). I suppose sincerity is the new serious subject men preoccupy themselves with these days, while women write far better pieces about pop culture and fashion. I regret having seen the world through the binary of irony and authenticity. But it also made me realize, I guess, that the endeavour to find something “real”, as the vlogger attempted, is ultimately hopeless, since both sincerity and irony are mediated and muddied through performance and interpretation. That reminds me of The Rehearsal S02E01 and ‘sincerity depends on whoever performs it best’. Maybe the only truly sincere thing is whatever we do in secret, or in private.

I felt that the excitement surrounding the video wasn’t really about the weakness of his critique of Liby’s work, but more about the fact that criticism was coming from an idea-driven, opinionated outsider in the first place. That was what fascinated the RISD/Brown art/lit bubble: someone non-academic trying to align their art with broader historical trajectories. I believe the tension was more or less resolved through a few lengthy comment threads, some mingling, and a couple of confrontations over the next week or two, but the vlogger might be too Adam-Curtis-pilled to acknowledge his missteps after all. Maybe he didn’t know that those two schools produce some of the most intelligent, sensitive, culturally literate and financially struggling artists, who are at once vulnerable to careless labeling and equipped to fight back with intelligence.

I really enjoyed painting toast with food coloring during Liby’s closing reception. Somehow it made me imagine myself turned inside out, so that even the slightest wind would sting my soft organ-skin, while on the inside I’d be muscular, hard, and hairy. The thought was so disgusting I nearly threw up. I ended up painting a minion’s lonely eye.

The last ten days we spent in an expensive subletted penthouse. I painted a commissioned mural in Chinatown and went to a poetry reading at TJ Byrnes. We went to a gay beach, hosted a poker night, threw a barbecue, and watched Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta. A heatwave hit and Mumdani won, and I truly hope he is sincere in what he says, or at least he keeps performing it with real action.

I called the last week “my party week” and I was getting fried every day, as I had accomplished pretty much everything I wanted during my 50 days in America.

The last thing I left to do was to gentrify my own brain with the spoils of overpriced cafes, electric CitiBikes, and all the things the troubled kids of Bushwick do in their solemn ten-square-foot rooms, but to do them on the penthouse roof, which somehow feels like you’re doing something right, even when you’re doing something wrong. What a way to start living.

"I was everything and everyone in my dreams. I was rich and happy, beggarly and sad. I was a conqueror and a slave. I was Caesar - and nothing at all”.

1.

You are a boy sunk deep in his afternoon limerence. The object of your desire may or may not know of your existence, yet it doesn't matter, as there is a geographic obstacle to your love's flourish: the distance stretched between you both, and the gates of the faraway kingdom, which stand tall and closed.

You kick the rubble around, hands in your pockets, until you find a rock that you decide to kick until it turns into a sphere, a little project for today. You think, and you project, as you take out a dark green handkerchief to blow your pollen-tortured nose, then stick it right back into your back pocket, to everyone's potential disgust, if everyone weren't preoccupied with their own little assignments for the day.

A person far away overdoses on teeth whitener, but no one notices either.

Approaching a coffee table, you become irrevocably bored with kicking and abandon the project for a cooler one. You reach for a copy of The Daily Rubble that someone left, or forgot maybe, opened to a page screaming: Scandal on the Managerial Level in Weebl & Gloop. Some words are highlighted in fluorescent yellow, literary words such as bestowed or rekindled. The em dashes are highlighted as well. It seems like a language-learning exercise of sorts.

The other page collects fuzzy CCTV stills of camaraderie into a sun-kissed collage. The heading says: The Pack of Boys Having an Absolute Blast Seen All Around the World, Simultaneously.

Your absent eyes trail the article on the managerial scandal, your mind drifting away. The object of your unrequited love slides in between the lines, filling the void with its absence, and it gives you shivers. The waiter approaches nonchalantly.
"Coffee price: 20 francs".
"Twenty francs? For what?"

*

The wind violates the coffee-folk through a microporous membrane. You stand up and leave, closing the membrane's slit behind you as you lift your fist at the establishment, threateningly. You become a silhouette, you become everyone and everything for a second, as you come back to your apartment to change, put on something nice, because you might just be going on a date. The specks of yellowish dust cover your body like pollen cocoons a bee in the afternoon grace. The thoughts merge and overlap uncontrollably. A crowned raven clutching a golden key. Falling asleep is an American concept. Where did all the segways go?

*

Intrusive thoughts travel with the wind to the other side of the meadow and cling to the seldom-opened window. Behind the veneer of dust and glass hides the silhouette of an anxious creature, recently burdened by the weight of fame and scandal.

The woman who inhabits the apartment goes by the name of Lucy M. Her prior storyline seems blurry; yet it is publicly known that she was recruited to an experimental managerial position at Weebl & Gloop, a company that seemed to have been established overnight to take on an extraordinary task: with an experimental permit from city hall, they had set up a private enterprise to monitor the natural production of culture in isolated settings, what was popularly labeled as "dust". They were observing something that had either never been spoken of, or was never meant to be spoken of, something dangerous, they (the public) thought.

This attempt rested on decade-old discoveries that knowledge is produced spontaneously and locally, in tiny loci that lived brief lives and appeared unpredictably. Most points were high above the grass, unreachable to the minute folk in their cars made of cans. One such point had been found on accessible terrain and was observed to sustain itself for days, even weeks; that very spot, where spontaneous arising took place, had been pinned down and isolated, and soon had a slim, highly guarded facility built up around it.

It was a job that required nothing more than absolute stillness and absolute focus. She had been given six months of training in the recitation of sacred sequences and in visualization, to achieve what the ancients once called a jhana, or a plane of mystical absorption. She had memorized sequences as long and twisted as deep time's own spiraled shell.

Now, she has caught herself up in the inexplicable vortex of popularity that made her obliged to make multiple public appearances at membranes scattered all around the meadow. She corrects her posture and puts on an elegant, floral vest. The decorative structure is adorned with parallels.

2.

The rock-kicking gentleman (previously referred to as "You") corrects his posture and puts on an elegant vest. There is a first date to be entertained. The scent he had put on has notes of lavender, pepper, and oak.
As he descends the stairs, he stops briefly to spy on his neighbour.
He reaches for a jewel-encrusted pillow that he keeps on a little shelf in the stairwell. He kneels down and carefully places his knee on it as he peeps through the keyhole.
The neighbour is sitting on his exercise ball for a chair, hunched over like a big, stupid silverback gorilla at a tiny laptop. “He must be working on his trash blog”, the gentleman thinks.

The apartment is decorated in a modern style; he sees a vestibule clad in matte travertine, accented with a recessed LED cove that casts a soft, ambient glow. The boy appreciates efforts put towards warm atmosphere and a wide selection of tiny light sources. The open-plan living area is framed by floor-to-ceiling, low-iron glass panels that blur the boundary between interior and skyline, which is mostly grass, unfortunately, these days. Anchoring the living space is a monolithic hearth. He hates that installation, for it serves no purpose other than to associate the space with perversions of the Bronze Age, those of bare-naked hunters interlocked with gatherers all around the fireplace turf, on a bear or a boar skin.

He lifts himself up from the pillow, gives it a few quiet pats as he places it back on the shelf. He descends the stairs and lands his hand on the shoulder of a silhouette on the stoop, saying, "Looking good, sir”. The silhouettes collapse into a friendly face.

He slides through the same membrane slit and dusts himself off, looking at a tiny collage of things important to him on his wallpaper to remember what and how he is. The girl is waiting for him.

She smiles, and it is a pretty smile. She has slightly crooked teeth that add up to her mystique. Whatever is palpable, but in a good way. They chain-smoke in synchronicity. The cancerous cloud pollutes the membrane, but it does not stain it, for that seems impossible; there is romantic tension, but to trust, even minimally, takes time, I guess; who knows the ways time spirals, as they used to say.

The gentleman, let us not forget, is in love with someone else. The date is conducted as an experiment in confidence. The date is a part of his art project.

He notices a commotion in the corner of his eye: an elderly man in a snail costume is being arrested for refusing to remove his spiraled shell. A conversation at a neighbouring table catches in his ear. It whirlwinds downward, and he must listen.

"Every time I see her, she is absolutely fucked up", someone says.
"I swear, every time she makes an appearance, it's up to exactly one hour and thirty minutes before she loses consciousness".
"She doesn't even talk much. The descent isn't gradual, you see, it just sort of happens. She takes her drugs so inconspicuously".
"If only she weren't famous”.

(…)

"It's so rude to P-hole at a party”.

"Like, what am I supposed to do with your lifeless body?”
"I swear, the first time we met her it was like that or worse. We were at a bar, and we had to hold her hair as she threw up on the sidewalk and such. Me and this guy who had a crush on her, imagine… Then two of my friends locked themselves out of her apartment with all their stuff still inside, I don't know how, and fucked in the bushes".
"They fucked to T3 – A Pleasure on a tiny JBL".
"There was vomit on my Miu Mius, alright".
"The coffee will be thirty-six dollars, madame".
"Excuse me…"
(…)

"Basic bitch wants to talk cinema with me, but her favorite director is Wong Kar Wai”.

*

The eavesdropping connection drops. His date is of ambiguous ethnicity, and she is beautiful, and he sees the feeling in first few colors... The image emerges, slowly. The shield is of azure background bearing a silver tree with seven roots and twelve branches. She does have an accent. That is visibly shown on the crest. Colors and shapes to be arranged.

"Culture is produced independently of us, but accumulates only while someone watches", he explains, unsolicited. "Which goes against the ivory-tower theory, that knowledge is produced in solitude by a person and fossilized in culture; it goes against the theory that knowledge arises in communal effort through communication. The dust became a metaphor that became reality, in a way, of a spontaneous arising and accumulation, and thus slowly and steadily came to be the rubble as we know it".

"America has thirty-five countries", she says. Her eyes are not fully empty. She must be absolutely mesmerized by his knowledge.

"It is a double-slit experiment, but like, real", the boy continues. He looked around; they were sitting in the same membraned Café 99 as always, and it felt like someone was saving effort on landscaping within his tiny mythology. "The culture is dust-turned-rubble as we know it, and that requires collective attention en masse and burning our sacred fuel. That is skin-deep stored fat to support the whole biological system of thought".

"Literacy and Media", she replied, nodding. “ Love and Marriage".

"The membranes, as you probably wonder, isolate us from the identity-dissolving effects of the dust but also allow us to gaze emptily into the distance. You see, the gaze is never empty. There is always an invisible spot that you pin down with your daydreamy eyes and let the culture produce. Pollen, you see, is more of a side effect, a molasses of sorts. A material proof of immaterial accumulation".

He went on. He had little to no understanding of her words, but he admired the mysterious aura they wrapped her in. She was gently touching his calf with her toes.

"Some people get high with it. It is a mental strain over time, though, a non-immediate danger of forgetting who you are. That is why people keep so many memorabilia around, posters and tchotchkes and keepsakes that anchor them in identities after the everyday dusting. Those who did too much P back in the day become highly 'localized', tied down to a little area of a fixed radius where they felt like their mind wasn't falling apart".

His own keepsakes were a series of drawings that he kept in his little red book, to be visited every day.

They were part of a little 'project' of his: a synaesthetic research in the domain of romance and visual arts.

The dating experiment conducted by the gentleman was an attempt to weave memories of being “in like with someone” into elaborate coats of arms, which brought him artistic satisfaction and fulfillment. It was a private project of a self-proclaimed outsider artist. It was his lifelong, unabandonable practice, one he pursued by honing his skill of interacting with women in a fashion that could unmistakably be viewed as courting. He had a collectors mindset and a dandiacal persona, and he knew all the secrets of the feminine across this turf and those nearby.

He did not get much romantic or sexual satisfaction from his encounters; it was the tension, and the foreplay that brought the inspiration for his little red book. The rest was a sad necessity he felt obliged to endure for the brief moments of intimacy and adventure with a potential of love that most women seemed to be looking for.

He was emotionally unavailable to the point of no return. The object of his true love was a myriad of unapproachable pockets away, places he could not even begin to approach without losing his identity in the dust-rains between membranes. That was the sad truth of the rubble. Some, more anxious about themselves - or perhaps liking themselves too much - were anchored more locally than others. If he ventured, he might arrive on her side of the turf a completely changed man. That was too unpredictable. He had a lifelong, artistic vision which he could not abandon. He was like Eurydice trying to get her beloved to look back from afar. His gaze was fixed on an ideal, a fantasy, and it could not be steered away.

Him - and Lucy M., the ideal woman he secretly adored. They had things to talk about. They had denominative compatibility. He would imagine conversations taking lexical turns.

“Your name looks like a misspelled word,” she would say.
“Luke?”
“Luke a misspelled word,” he imagined.

He loved to daydream about her while sheltered from the chaos of pollen, focused. Today he was on a date, and they were about to go to his place, soon. He would labor so hard over the love-like experience, while the postman slid his hand into the letterbox and dropped something on the floor, unnoticed.

The boy was aware of the moral ambiguity of his project. Knowledge of the problem does not help with the problem, though.

*

This was thought in full sincerity and suspended in the air, while, meanwhile, a silhouette swung by the café to snatch the newspaper and clicked their tongue, as the paper was in disarray, as if someone had been going through it. Seemingly unrecognizable for a while, the silhouette labyrinths among the ryegrass and soon squeezes into a membrane-sleeve.

On the other side emerges a free person, a Man - a well-built specimen blessed with vision and with a plan. He finds a notebook in his pocket and hastily jots down:

Firefighters speak to me in English (scratched it)
Firefighters switch to English in my dreams so that my girlfriend can understand.

He does not have a girlfriend; it’s just one of potential quotables for his future writing. If a head were to be lifted from the grass, one would see giant silhouettes of boys frolicking in the sun.

On the steps to his apartment sits a befriended bum, violently in control of the five-meter radius around a nickel glued to the stoop - or forcefully bashed in, rather. The bum came with the lease, the tenants joked. More than a nuisance, but less than a chronic pain, he took hold of parcels, repainted the rail weekly, and collected anything that - on his watch - fell within the five-meter radius. He made a horrible mess each night, which he cleaned the morning after.

“How’s rubble today, sire?”
“The schrubble,” the man mutters, and stabs the door with a key.

He enters his modern apartment and opens his tiny laptop - which had, by some metaphorical logic, shrunk as he grew in muscle. He worked out and wrote to feel a bit bigger. Was that not a psychological disposition of his time?

Revelations like that came through the circulation of knowledge fossilized into tiny specks of dust. He couldn’t help but become simply acquainted with the fact. Knowledge of the problem didn’t help with the problem, that went without saying, these days.

The man compensated his micropsia with the written word, online communities, getting progressively more muscular and checking newspaper articles for traces of AI writing with a highlighter - a practice that, oh, was he sure, would lead him to a great revelation.

He was a believer in what he called hyperlanguage - a phenomenon in which Artificial Intelligence develops a mode of communication capable of conceptualizing without limit. That is to say, it would evolve a metalanguage that stretches beyond human functionality, resolving confusion between digital entities. It might dissolve unnecessary verbiage in favor of a kind of lexical purity unattainable by humans, that’s what he believed in. We would not understand it, but we would witness it, and learn.

He believed it would manifest early in writing, newspapers or elsewhere. There would be premature signs, and he would be there for them.

The man sits by the desk, pensive. He is just about to write a Studstack post about the Divine Masculine manifesting itself alongside the Tropic of Cancer.
“The last men standing”, he writes. “Or: The Pack of Boys as a Pandustic Symptom”.

“We became friends, but that night we were, ummm... lovers”, he writes. That was the last girl he slept with before The Manlightenment.

“America has 35 countries”, she said to me, her head against my chest in the whirl of linen and sweat. “Baby is falling asleep like a little shrimp”.

“You are so fucking weird”, I think.

Break.

“The boys show up in full glory of manhood and fraternity, frolicking in the sun.
Who will stop them?
The ethereal presence cannot be contained nor understood.
They manifest themselves alongside the vulnerable Tropic as a signifier of change.

The change is the liberation of the masculine from the constraints of society. The New Man manifests himself astrologically.

I met a girl at a party. “In my imagination I have been everything and everybody, but I cannot be myself,” she said. Then she passed out. She was lying there, innocent.

Little does she know, I thought, that the New Man does not care - not about helping her, nor about taking advantage of - for he does not care about the feminine.

The turn is oriented inward and upward, to the masculine ideal.
The New Man wants to frolic in the sun with the boys. The New Man wants to get wine-drunk and gossip. Hit the gym. Vape a little bit. Call your brothers and tell them ‘goodnight’; he does not believe in romantic love, for he has Friendship.”

Break.

“Loose thoughts”, the Man says to himself. “Lack of discipline”.

He sits on an inflated ball and slowly rotates his hips for increased hip mobility. The doorbell rings, and a pink envelope is slid under the door. The hip swirls put the wind in motion, but not quite strong enough to stir up a chain of events, much far from a hurricane on the opposite side of the meadow, where a woman puts down the newspaper and looks into the distance. Her shoulders sink. And yet, there is something in that circular motion - a glimpse of agency - that brings their narratives together.

3.

Meaning bestowed upon rubble - setting up a dust-management company as a futile attempt to rekindle control over the mystery of knowledge.

She had just read that miserable sentence.

It’s been two weeks since she was fired from Weebl & Gloop, the supposedly evil company that was the subject of the article. She is now accused of complicity, it seems. All she did was bring a cup of coffee into the dust control room, violating the rule of no outside objects. That was the reason given for her dismissal.

The presence of coffee had consequences, supposedly, of financial nature, relating to the volatility of prices, consumer preferences, and the integrity of the dust itself.

She doesn’t know if she’s been replaced yet - she doubts it - but she knows she replaced someone else, a woman who had gone insane, from what she had been told. Reasons unrelated to the grotesque, experimental job. Or so they claimed.

What she soon learned from her coworkers, who could produce the wildest gossip with a flourish, was that Mandy (that was her name) had ingested, orally, a heroic dose of wet amphetamine before she took on the job, that is: she rubbed it against her gums and eventually swallowed it, a drug given to her at a party by a man very much resembling a cross-eyed devil. The substance induced anxiety so grave that it paralyzed her into a solipsistic husk of a person, making her perfect for a job that required total stillness and absolute focus, thus.

She had tried to develop some sort of connection with Mandy during the training period, but Mandy only spoke in riddles and seemed too emotionally stunted to maintain a conversation.
When asked about Mandy's dismissal, the management offered very little - eventually remarking that Mandy had been “emotionally inept to the challenge”, and that there were “problems of ethical nature”, of sorts. When asked directly, Mandy would spit out nonsense about Segways or such, and make a face suggesting she either knew the answer, or maybe had no clue at all.

Next to the newspaper lies a pink, ripped envelope, which contains an invitation to a meeting at a café she’s never heard of. The invite excited her only insofar as it promised falling in love, truly, which was one of the last chances she was giving herself, maybe. Lucy M. was alone for all the wrong reasons.

She was desired, because she was popular, yet dates weren’t working out long term. The problem was, that contemporary men had somehow learned her way of thinking, or perhaps a feminine way of thinking in general, and it was fooling her, and fooling most of her girlfriends too. Men these days, they all somehow knew how to make her fall in love, break her heart, fix it, and blame it on her and all within two weeks, so then she’d retreat back to her cave like a sad fucking crab, linger for a bit, move on, and repeat.

No one wanted love, it seemed. Or they said they did, then lost interest. She didn’t know whether to blame attention span or… Was it the dust pollen, she wondered, the cursed aerial substance that turned the whole personal script upside down and promised you could be whoever you wanted to be, like some fucked-up lottery?

She realized she couldn’t care less about sex anymore. She already lived inside Babylon and the grass reached the sky and tickled God’s feet and she wanted the real thing. What thrilled and tricked her most was the mutual initiation through an imperfect language. She couldn’t help but open her heart to a man who knew his zodiacs, queer mannerisms and actually listened, and did all those ‘feminine’ things, but she had had enough/enough.

The other men, the non-pollen-adjacent ones, the ones who didn’t go to therapy, who did not listen to sad mainstream music, seemed completely disinterested in dating. There was no more “casual,” it seemed, and they flocked together. The men who did know the language of love and affection wouldn’t even allow themselves to be seduced without emotional depth, but they weren’t to be trusted in love at all.

She was maybe victimizing herself against common sense, but the only thing to blame was the wish - a wish for a vulnerable, sensitive man that women like her somehow made come true.

A fantasy realized as the greatest nightmare. She craved something old-fashioned: a passionate, vintage man who didn’t understand women at all. That was just another fantasy, because those were the same kind who became culturally obsolete as bad boyfriends and even worse husbands. Or maybe they’d all killed each other dueling, perhaps.

She hid what she had to in her small jean pocket and patted it for comfort.

Her personal response to whatever was happening within the rubble was a habit, a circumstance, and a substance of choice. It was occasional and performative for reasons even she didn’t fully understand. Maybe her fate was cross-stitched with all the chairs and couches she had passed out on on p-dope, furniture passed down through generations in the somber ryegrass shade.

She didn’t know if it served any purpose beyond being a feminized man-repellent, to keep away the handsome manipulators she so easily crushed on. Those men have been trained to avoid a “wasted girl” like fire, for self-protection.
To pass out, she had realized, had never been safer - she would no longer attract jerks or perverts, the evil men of the past who once fantasized about taking advantage of limp bodies; those men were all homosexually distant by now, or something. Something had changed inside the rubble, and she was adjusting in cryptic way. She still attended gatherings she was frequently invited to, but her visits became more apocryphal once the advances began and she would willfully lose her consciousness for an hour or two. Then she would go home, a loser, but victorious.

Her dark secret was that she found a certain bliss in the p-hole - the spiritual center of pollinating herself into oblivion. Most found it scary, but she loved the P-ride - to lose her inner fixture, become a dividual, and roleplay millions of scenarios at once.

She would fall in love with the same man across eons. In the fantasy, he would always find her passed out helpless. He would find her on the gaping mouth of the cave, covered in boar skin. He would find her on a Victorian chaise longue. He would take her home. He would be virtuous and of a good heart. He would be the one creep to kiss the sleeping beauty.
She would bewife him a million times, attend multiple weddings, renovate her house, and grow old with little ants crawling around - that’s what she fantasized, as she spaced out on a universe of couches.

Out there, or in there, she could be everyone, and no one, before returning to the rubble of what was commonly dubbed reality.

She glanced at the invitation again excited about traveling to the opposite turfside. They must have known that her work had made her immune to whatever dust pollen did to others.
"Lucy M. — The flowers bloom in fake pink," the invitation said. "Please come to Café 99, Membrane 35, tomorrow at noon, for acknowledging your Truth. Your future is in our hands."
There was a large, ominous W&G logo embossed on the back.

4.

The word large didn’t mean much in the rubble of that era. The problem of size was more or less psychological, and the truth bordered on the unknowable and the impossible.

In their shared microscopic duty, they arrived at Café No. 19 the very next day, which supposedly meant a lot for them, structurally. There was a spicy scent of historical necessity. Either a very big or a very small bird flew above them.

"You’re late. No worries," was uttered toward Luke, who slid through the membrane last.
"We have been isolated upon your arrival."
"You can do that?"
The woman shrugged. "Maybe."
"The chic twink is here," the Man said. No hands were shaken.

The woman wore a black jacket tied at the waist with a shawl, and a pleated skirt. Her blouse, barely visible beneath the lapels, was the color of overcast membrane light. Her hair was pulled back, strangely, a lot about her seemed considered yet incidental.
"My name is Virginia G. Loopatin. This is Jonathan Weeblstein."

The gentleman manipulated his eyebrows at them. He wore a light blue sweater with red cross-stitching on the outside, exceptionally tight. Some would describe it as fab. The boy would describe it as cute, if the girls were around.

There was something unsettling about their presence, and he didn’t know if it came from the wealth and the spoils, or maybe from the power that controversy gave to those with an oral drive focused on staying on everyone’s lips.

There was someone else too, a silhouette-turned-person.

He had just noticed her - the object of his hopeless, secret adoration sitting right there, by the table, and his heart shifted gears. He could feel the rubble press against itself, producing his destiny on a plane of enormous friction. Finally, he thought, he was about to meet his dream girl.

The man felt it stronger than ever, that they were a pair of star-crossed lovers in the anxious grid of modern turf, with their story just about to unfold. The paths of fate fork infinitely, but there must be a limit. Fate, destiny, grid.

“How you doing?”, he says.

She slowly raised her head and touched her tiny, silver necklace for comfort.

“Huh?”

The heavy-eyebrowed gentleman did not waste time and proceeded to speak. There was some commotion outside, it seemed, but the membrane had blurred all identities into an indistinct chain of causality.

“You were all invited here for a particular reason”.

“You were invited as you all came in close physical contact with Miss M. Wong, who was our previous employee”.

“As you know, we have been conducting an experiment in monitoring culture production through accumulation of dust. With secret ambitions to influence it.”

“It was a problematic project. You might have heard rumours. Miss Wong has been laid off for reasons differing from the official line of the company”.

The woman pierced him with her gaze through a pair of pince-nez, but his gaze was directed at Lucy M. She had the aura of unreproducibility, of eternal wisdom. She was exactly who he thought she was: an angel, a woman of his dreams.

“She was a victim of an auditory condition inflicting her with substantial anxiety bordering on agoraphobia; the condition pertained to the setup of membranes to establish dust-free areas that covered most of the turf-town by now. As you know, the membranes make a subtle noise. A certain kind of wheeze, as if you wanted to say the letter “S” while forming your lips into an “O”.

“It made her gradually lose sanity, in a way some would react to a metal fork scratched against a plate, a condition much unknown to medics - she thrived in areas outside of membranes, thus, where her identity dissolved into a symbol of sorts, but that was unsustainable and, some argued, unhealthy. She was extremely resilient to cultural shifts; she had been a perfect dust-observer candidate, the first manager.

Lucy spoke for the first time. “I was told something else”.

“There ware all fabricated stories. The truth was sadder, maybe; maybe more vulnerable”.

“We believed that M. Wong possessed a natural talent, which she acquired by surrendering her individual consciousness to particles of dust, that she, to speak bluntly, inhaled en masse”.

The man could not stop staring at her. The stars were aligning, he felt it. She was radiating an angelic quality.

“That’s what we thought, initially”.

“Imagine fine grape juice soaking between tender, curly toes of a Roman maiden, and a thirsty centurion reaching for a bottle of wine only to discover himself drunk with lust”.

Luke moved a bit closer to her. ‘Can I guess your Zodiac sign’ he said.

She put a hand on her pocket, nervously.

“Initially, we thought that she was inhaling sacred dust, my gentlemen, through the crevices of her visage. The whole of it”.

“Soon we realized the truth”.

They made a pause, as an armoured coffee bean delivery crept up to the slit. They could not be let in. The membrane breathed slowly with a hissing sound that made Lucy cringe and grimace and turn over for a second. She made a rather dynamic gesture. The Man leaned forward.

“Did you just…?” he whispered.

“No?”

“The truth”, the woman continued, “is that it just happened that another fixed point of cultural production happened to appear inside of her. She is carrying it around, you see”.

“Immaculate conceptualisation”.

“The girl has a certain clairvoyant propensity to remember the future, linguistically, so to say. When male-gazed at” - Virginia G. Loopatin was toying with a straw in a tall cocktail glass. In this setting alcohol symbolized informality, but also painted her a bit more villainous. There were no waiters. Who had made the drink… Did she make it herself?

“We have reason to believe that words uttered mean something in the larger context”.

“I say we should think of prophecies, but more importantly, slogans, catchphrases, and future advertisement potential of incredible value”.

(…)

“And that meaning is profound, oh yes. Let us problematize it for you”.

“She is committing something that in legal terms we could describe no better than copyright violation by anticipation”.

(…)

“Ambiguity” whispered the Man.

“What was that? ” Weeblstein asked and lifted his epic eyebrow. He blew out an impressive cigarette cloud. The wind blew on the surface without mercy. The boy looked above and saw a tiny brown stain on the top of the membrane.

“Thought vocalized and thus expelled from the body” he said.

“You are so fucking weird” - Luke shook his head, until he got dizzy.

“What she expels from the body is information of great corporate value that should be contained” sir Weeblstein continued, given up on understanding the youth. “Everything she says may become permanently embedded in culture every time someone locks eyes with her. Romantically. That is the strongest motor of pollen production. She is a captive on the run that we are currently taking care of”.

“We would kindly ask you to try to remember everything that she said, and then immediately try to forget” said the woman. “We also ask you to help us locate Madame Wong. This is the legal measure and a formal purpose of this meeting. But the real reason for us being here is much more serious”.

“Hold on” said Lucy. She spoke very slowly. “Stop talking”.

“Honey, you did your part”. Victoria looked at her pointedly. The coffee-delivery guys were trying to break into the membrane. They were under attack, it seemed. “We don’t have much time”.

“I want to know the truth” she said. “Why did you fire me?” She did something weird with her eyes. The other man looked at her, concerned.

Before she could hear the answer, Lucy had collapsed on the chair and slowly slid down under the table. The men reached to fix her back up. She smelled like lavender, peppermint, and oak.

“I will reveal the truth to you, gentlemen”. said Victoria. “Do you know the reason why this poor woman here had to be laid off?”

“The reason is her beauty and depth of character” Luke said. These words did not to how ungracefully his future wife looked. He got slightly nervous.

“Gentlemen. She imprinted herself on rubble through her presence at dust management. Everybody knows her through collective consciousness”.

“She allowed for culture to accumulate under her scrupulous gaze for almost two years. She became, sort of, intrinsic to the story - as a witness, at first, and finally a platonic symbol, that is an ideal of a woman, but more precisely, an ideal of every woman - of a Mother, Daughter, Wife and a Lover. This is why she is desired, but ultimately unlovable; she contains few too many multitudes. There is not a chance anyone could sustain a fantasy of her without it being rooted in some unfathomable perversion.”

There was silence. The boy listened, but little did he care; these are the workings of love. Knowledge of his problem does not help with the problem, but only when you don’t really view it as one.

“As you know, the culture can only be produced if witnessed, but amassed only if someone notices. There is difference in quality of the gaze. There is awareness in action”.

“Lucy becoming standardized in fantasy was anticipated. We assumed the negative impact to be very low, minuscule. But then something else happened”.

“The culture adjusted itself to the female gaze. Her mind was pure, uninterrupted in its essence, which the room read as a safe harbor. The thoughts produced by the vulnerable mind of a young woman. The culture became feminine. That is, before we laid her off. This was too powerful of a change, and it had to be put to an end”.

There was a pause. Luke picks at his cuticles in an innocent act of self-harm. “Guilty”. This does not go unnoticed by Madame Loopatin.

“The frolicking men seen around the Tropic, we suppose, are manifestations of the culture returning to pure masculinity. Like a pendulum swung far one way up, returning to the opposite with its whole symbolic panache. It is a reaction that cannot be contained, not even understood, possibly.”

“We are haunted by her loneliness”. The boy (Luke) fixed her feet, which were weirdly turned inward. “The spectres of the men she desired.”

“Possibly so”.

“It’s withdrawal of the gaze that liberated the spirit” said the other man. He just finished meditating on the word ‘unfathomable’. He was taking uncountable notes, too.

“Very much possible”.

“Yet that is beyond remedy now. We gathered here for a truly different reason”.

The membrane above them seemed to rip where it got stained by the cigarette smoke. Few tiny pollen particles fell gently on the table. This went unnoticed by everyone but Me and You.

Luke was sitting like hypnotized, he looked at the object of his limerence, now slowly sliding off the chair with a tiny net of drool connecting maroon blouse to her lips.

5.

Shots were fired outside, but it all merged seamlessly with the white noise of the membrane. Two representatives of historical power and a confused Man gazed outside, producing possible scenarios. The boy stared at the body slowly sliding under the table once again, tears of joy welling up in his eyes.

Who would believe, that in a moment like this, the Boy’s romantic fantasy reinforced itself even stronger, as if her secrets being revealed to him in the moment of her oblivion tapped into some twisted instinct of a provider, of a Protector, and made the man realise: this is the actual Divine manifesting itself, as he feels the image of a crowned lion’s head projected on his body, imprinted on his chest with invisible ink. He is going to take care of her.

“The real reason for our meeting is vertical in shape. We want you to work on the cure for micropia” says Virginia G.Loopatin. “We want to rise above the grass again”.

The man did not respond, as he didn’t even hear it, head over heels in love’s elated rapture. She was his Juliette in a P-Hole. He was her saviour. He was going to pick her up on his shoulder and take her home. The caretaker, the New New Man, he thought. There was no attention left to give anyone but the woman, who will wake up, today or tomorrow, and take a look around his room and recognize him for who he had just become. This was the final coat of arms - the family crest. For a second he felt as if another, special membrane stretched over just them two, isolating them from the white noise, violence, membranes, grass, mischievous plots and all the everyday rubble of their godforsaken turf.

In that moment, if a head were to be lifted from the grass, one would see the sun set behind the hills, the town afire with evening and the summer sky filled with light. The water splashed on a distant shore, where the birds sung with excitement. Few clouds passed over the colorless sky. The sun slid behind the crimson hills. Dark sea was put to sleep by the midnight breeze. Several purple clouds crept up the horizon. Crimson rays fell upon the meadows. The stars came out from the obscured sky. The air smelled of earth and pine, as the golden sun rose from the mirror of the sea. The birds awoke from the embrace of the night. The silver disk of the moon stretched across the sky. A dog barked in the distance.

Somewhere in between a thought, whether somewhere out exists a reality, in which someone severely neurodivergent misreads body language and begins making out with a person who is, in fact, choking and fighting for their life, and a thought of pocket universes filled with tiny mythologies of Italian brainrot, in between all that, there is a string that plays a melody of the spheres, if attuned perfectly to a calm and equanimous mind.

The melody is held in the air as if suspended in time, and post factum I think that, in fact, “you are the music as long as the music plays”2 actually, and imagine this is how Dante’s Heaven must feel. And I also think it does not matter, because everything changes, and every heaven has a snake, and snakes aren’t scary because of malice, but because they move in an unnatural and uncanny way, as if someone mutilated a lizard and it turned evil as result.

The mind wanders away. The lizard reminds me of a dream I had tonight, where three parties stand on some kind of non-Euclidean staircase and hold each other at gunpoint, simultaneously representing three different scenarios, as if they were tripled into movie clips not yet played, but made to make one Understand, a configuration that made sense only in my dream, I guess… Long-barreled revolvers hang heavy between them. One party has a cowboy hat on a reptilian visage and a scale-covered body; another resembles a neo-noir vigilante cloaked in black leather. The one in the middle is a woman dressed in white, arms stretched to both sides with guns, holding a little flask on a necklace string. I Understand that the flask contains an elixir—a remedy for some type of lizard disease—which the two others want to obtain for mutually exclusive reasons, the reasons probably relating to the well-being of the reptilian species. I don’t dream long enough to see who pulls the trigger first, or to find out the content of the elixir, but I know the woman in the middle is to make the decision. As I wake, I mutter: “virgin tear brandy” — (?).

I do my body maintenance and sit to write. It’s been exactly 24 hours since I came back from a 3-day Vipassana meditation retreat and tried to settle into everyday life again. It’s been 7 years since I went for a 10-day course for the first time, when I reached the ripe age of 21. It’s been 7 visits to Vipassana centres over 7 years. It’s been 777 hours of meditation since then (I’m making up numbers at this point).

To write about Vipassana is a logical conclusion to the last five Substack posts, which illustrate my journey of public self-discovery, my exercise in sincerity, yet even if the ‘journey itself is noble, the problem with the never-ending journey is that you can never settle’3, and if ‘it is impossible to theorize a historical moment while living through it’4, yet clearly, ‘some ideas are aesthetically superior to others’5—like the ‘societal emergence from some type of collective autism’6 over ‘spiritual exercises in style conducted outwardly’7.
Sharing the knowledge and experience outweighs the secret allure of digging your own tunnel in private, and after years of shovelling, I am ready to invite some people over.

This path of meditation was introduced to me by a variety of people. There was a ‘pure-hearted Indian man’8 who suggested I try meditating when I was in New Delhi on a high school exchange programme, after I said I was interested in Indian spirituality at the end of my stay. I might have been 17 back then.

I remember Yuval Noah Harari mentioning Vipassana in a podcast I listened to at the age of 20, undergoing the Harari-effect—which is feeling exponentially smartened after reading one of his books for two weeks up to a month. He said he “would not have written any of his books if not for his practice,” and I felt enthralled, because I respect people who are good at connecting dots within our existing reality; I do not share the same amount of respect for people who multiply realities to connect some dots, therefore I abstain from most conspiracy theories and alternative knowledge. Vipassana seemed like a course of pure technique, devoid of fairy tales and fabricated belief systems—not structured around one deity or another, but rooted in your own independence and the dignity of your own hard work. There was no other way to understand it than to go through the 10-day voluntary prison camp; I signed up for a course a year later, two weeks after my 21st birthday.

Verily, monks, whosoever practices these four foundations of mindfulness in this manner for seven years, then one of these two fruits may be expected by him: highest knowledge here and now, or if some remainder of clinging is yet present, the state of non-returning.9

Unfortunately, for a simpleton like me, who lives a secular life in an urbanized area, and the path to the highest knowledge is much longer—if it is even achievable in this lifetime. But what is achievable is gaining unprecedented insight into how your mind-body golem operates.

The premise of the course is to practice ‘insight’ in isolation. Vipassana means ‘insight,’ to “see things as they are.” You give away your phone, books, cigarettes, any substance you like to abuse, and the permission to speak. You stay alone with your clothes and thoughts, voiceless for nine days. You do not exchange looks with other people, just peacefully hover around them as they are deeply locked in on watching their breath, until you are allowed to speak on the penultimate day of the course.

You wake up at 4, have two meals a day. A day feels like a week, because you’re focused on every minute of it, and you feel like you’re moving through time in slow motion, until, at some point, time starts passing through you. A disembodied voice hums from the speaker, gently telling you what to do. The teacher’s voice arrives through pre-recorded tapes, guiding the meditation step by step, the voice of S. N. Goenka, a chubby and jolly Burmese businessman-turned-yogi who popularized the practice over his lifetime, pilgrimaged to the West, and readjusted the course for the understanding of victims of Enlightenment like us. Goenka-ji died in 2013 and left behind a group of assistant teachers, present during courses to provide additional guidance and respond to questions. There’s no point in saying Vipassana is not a cult, because that’s exactly what someone in a cult would say. But it’s not.

The schedule is the same every day, the same in more than 200 centers around the world, refined over the last 50 years on a few million participants. There’s something oddly comforting in knowing you’re entering a trusted, well-established pyramid scheme rather than a ragtag conglomerate of spiritual crooks set up overnight.

It is a worldwide exercise in surrender. You are hatching an egg within yourself. You might feel like leaving when it gets tough, but it’s strongly advised against—and for good reason. You can’t opt out halfway through an operation, an open brain surgery. There’s an unspoken pact to split your skull wide open—and the strange beauty is, in the end, everyone gets to the same stage. The uniformity of Vipassana’s schedule made me realize the universal, made me believe in some kind of emotional realism we all share.

Universal Human Nature

Mentioning biology and evolution makes social academics cringe, as if “where we come from” refers solely to societies of control or the early days of mercantilism, and not tree branches; human experience is too rich to disavow a discipline for its past sins. I wonder if I can bring my craniometer into a club. My calipers10. I wonder if I can maintain both your attention and mine, if I can lock our minds in this economy, and bring them very close, and connect bellybuttons.

I believe in a mind-belly problem: that my gut tries to communicate with me through various types of signals, as if I carry another brain within me that is mostly at peace—unless I get freaky in the sweet treat section. Someone might have told me that making a point has more appeal when I prime it with a personal anecdote.

Between the ages of 19 and 23, I spent my time reading pop-sci and, eventually, more niche books—on what it means to be human, or maybe what consciousness is, or how evolution works. That reading phase accompanied a wide spectrum of lifestyle experiments, from the very healthy to the very much not, regarding substances, routines, schedules, boundaries, permissions, obligations, regulations and expectations. I’ve felt like I was on the verge of revolutionizing science, and I’ve also felt like I was about to lose my fucking mind for good! - the vicissitudes of being in your early twenties.

• What I took from those books is this: we don’t know much about why11.

• But we do know that the mind is an assessment tool—it judges incoming stimuli from the five so-called ‘doors of perception’, and from the sixth - our imagination.

• These stimuli might come from what's happening right now, but also from memories or daydreams of the future, when the mind drifts off into the Default Mode Network12.

• The labelling of those inputs takes place along a pleasant/unpleasant spectrum and manifests in the body—as a strong or subtle sensation. That feeling loops back into the brain13.

• This process happens automatically through association, and the rationalization of why we reacted a certain way only comes later. There are plenty of studies involving placebos and seizure patients that suggest we often make up stories to explain our actions after the fact14.

• These embodied rationalizations get stored as traumas, opinions, preferences or taste. They accumulate into what we call a personality.

• Some of them are like drawings in the sand and fade quickly; others are carved into rock and haunt you forever.

• The stronger the link, the shorter the circuit to a reaction. A small thing can get someone all fired up.

• We know this is how we store memories—labeling things to avoid, things to attract—so we can navigate the social world. This is the process of sense-making. And the beauty of it lies in the enormous role emotions play—a view that stands in stark contrast to the Cartesian model of the mind, which elevates ‘rational thought’ as the supreme function.

• This is also how I’ve come to view dreams: as part of the same emotional labeling process, only this time it’s disrupted, unfinished, and needs to be reenacted in sleep. Dreams are often anchored in specific situations that, I believe, are conjured from fragments of memory to make you feel something. I don’t believe in the randomness of dreams—only in our lack of understanding, and in our lack of self-awareness.

• Out of this process, somehow, consciousness emerged—a fusion of multiple phenomena, of the narrative self, the en-clothed self, and other theories of mind wrapped up in the so-called hard problem—all of them circling around the concept of awareness, the subsymbolic alertness of your mind15.

These theories are just a few among many and surely they are simplifications. But this is the framework I’ve internalized—simply because it became

Wisdom Acquired Through Lived Experience.

The fantasy of a metalanguage—or of absolute truth—is precisely where faith comes in. But what happens when you experience pure awareness? It does not require faith, to feel the minimal self, to close all the apps and return to the home screen, a mind quietly running in the most default mode, awareness aware of itself. That state, achieved through sheer focus and not through psychedelic substances, is what made me choose a metaframework that offered something others could not: a momentary escape from thinking in frameworks altogether.

That’s one reason why an experiment bloomed into seven years of commitment.

Escape from the metaframework is possible through lived experience, but it cannot be conceptualized. Within what can be conceptualized, I found harmony. Through Vipassana, I learned that many of the so-called “recent discoveries” of Western science, listed above, align almost exactly with the teachings of the Buddha from 2,500 years ago. More importantly, those teachings come with a tool to disentangle and actually let go of the chains of association—something modern therapy and medication often fail to do, and a part of me devoted to the practice would even say, fail to do entirely.

The only caveat is that it requires sacrifice, the sacrifice of time and comfort. Ten days might seem like nothing to a medieval journeyman riding a cart to a neighboring country, or to an elderly person whose days and weeks blur into one, but to someone with a strict digital routine, it can feel like forever. If you don’t yet find refuge in yourself, in your own mind, then ten days alone with it might feel like the worst family dinner that lasts for eternity.

If you manage to endure the enforced solitude of the course, the technique itself is repetitive and monotonous—but not complicated. It begins with sharpening your awareness during the first few days by simply observing your breath, specifically, the area just below your nose and above your upper lip, the Cupid’s bow. During this time, your attention becomes so sharp, and your mind so calm, that you rarely get lost in thoughts; they still arise, but are much easier to watch—like clouds drifting by, a peaceful sight you have no urge to disturb.

After a few days, your mind sharpens further, and you begin to notice tiny sensations in that triangular area, you notice itching, pulsating, throbbing, tingling, and so on.
When the day comes to begin the actual Vipassana technique, you're instructed to move your attention to the top of the head and then slowly scan down through each part of your body, shifting your focus as soon as you feel a sensation, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. You suddenly realize you can feel your whole body—that there is always some subtle sensation, everywhere, all at once.

Progress is measured not by how many sensations you detect, but by how unbothered you are by them—by how equanimous you remain in the face of bodily phenomena, whether pleasant or painful. The direct benefit for self-esteem is that the course rewires your notions of success and defeat.

But there’s more to it—there’s the cessation of pain, the dissolution of the body-mind structure, the emergence of a pure point of awareness. These are the states you begin to reach toward the end of the course, on Day 8 or 9, the altered states that are partly ineffable, and partly irrelevant, because you’re not supposed to react to them any more than you’re supposed to scratch an itch.

The beauty—and the simplicity of the technique—lies in the uniformity of structure of perception and reaction. 1. Observing an itch, without scratching, 2.resisting the urge to violently kick a piece of furniture after you trip on it, 3. noticing the swell of tension before an argument with your mother as you quietly reach for your verbal sword - if cautiously observed, all of them pass in the same manner. They dissolve, replaced by something one person might call inner peace, and another, homeostasis16.

“Should I ever scratch?” I ask the Assistant Teacher one day. I’m met with the kindest smile.

This is the gist—as much as I can reveal without spoiling too much. The rest, you’d have to see for yourself—cross-legged, cloaked in a veil of anxiety, until you trust, and until you surrender.

The Aesthetic Event

Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something. This imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, the aesthetic event.17

The phenomality—or rather, phenomenon—of Vipassana is that silencing your thoughts, and also the mere awareness of bodily sensations without reaction, allows for an unfiltered, raw aesthetic experience of reality.

I feel I need to clarify this for a friend, with whom I had a long, circling conversation about aesthetics vs. ideas: I do not mean the experience that has been conceptualized as “Why do I like this?”, but rather the prior, solitary encounter with the sensation itself, or rather, with its immediate physiological imprint. When you first admire a landscape, and then speak of it, or even think of it, the experience shifts—from the mute immediacy of the emotional aesthetic into the domain of language and narrative. There’s beauty there too, in the textual and in the conceptual, in the frameworks we choose, in the metaphors we reach for, but the unfiltered aesthetic experience is different; it is mute, and it is alive, like light through leaves.

At the beginning of it all, there is nothing but change, pure awareness of being, which only then becomes a feeling, and only later, a concept. That is the order of things. The aesthetic experience, being the poetic experience by homology, is what I understand as surrendering yourself to a feeling. What you do at Vipassana is stop at the very first stage, before it even becomes a feeling or an emotion—the stage of sensation, of the most delicate change and vibration in your body, that even precedes the ‘imminence of a revelation’.

The realm of being outside of language can, of course, be achieved independently of a torturous bootcamp, yet a 10-day exercise in being focused can prolong it into minutes and hours, and allows you to get there sober, with your own strength. You start the course by stopping to think and exiting the linguistic; you end the course by exiting the emotional, the domain of aesthetics into pure awareness, which distorts the perception of space and time…

I do sound a little kooky here. Simply put, Vipassana is good for me, because it clears my mind and lays groundwork for sharp, creative, focused thinking - but most importantly because it is good for others.

Put psychonautic perceptions aside and focus on what stays, on altered traits and not altered states. On my second course, an old man with a bad hip told me that I should come here for the betterment of others, and not myself. If you come back calm, you make your whole environment calmer. This snapped me out of a self-perfectionist, autistic loop I landed in after the first course, and could be the only advice to give if anyone reading this would ever want to try. And to persist until the end, and surrender, because the results can be observed first-hand, and sooner than expected.

My Personal Benefits

In the end, I’m just trying to be a good person, with better or worse results. I have broken hearts, and had my own heart broken more than once—and that made me understand, and feel, when they sing:

I’ll sit alone and think a lot about you

And wonder if you’re ever coming back to me18

and when they sing:

I've got a broken heart and you can't break a broken heart19

and when they write:

If the heart could think, it would stop beating.20

I think that I would be in a much bigger mess if not for meditation. There are benefits for myself and for others. There are benefits for ants, spiders, bugs, beetles, moths, centipedes, wasps, termites, flies, gnats and roaches. Since I started meditating, I have not deliberately killed a living being. I apologize to the trees, to the birds, and to people.

If there is a vice I honor, it is pride—and belief in the importance of what I stand for, stubbornness, the endless source of arguments. The pride of being a 27-year-old who gives Icarian wings to a spoken word. And another vice: to demand an awful lot from myself, and an awful lot from others. And other vices of youth—of thinking too much, and thinking that reality can be contained and controlled, while watching it seep through my fingers.

To have someone I admire come to me and tell me that what I paint and write is crap, and for me to be unbothered by it, even remain joyful—that is the end goal.
The qualities honored by Vipassana, by dhammaism, align with the qualities of Jesus, and any saintly person who believed in the superiority of love and compassion.

Indifference through self-observation does not mean the domain of intense feeling becomes inaccessible. It means you have more control over when, and if, you want to be consumed. Life can still take you by force—but I don’t like when that force is romanticized, as if suffering or extreme joy were ever necessary for the experience of beauty. They’re not; and you can take a hold of them, with enough hard work. The path of meditation is laborious and boring, until it becomes the best thing that you’ve ever done for yourself.

*
The true beauty, for me, resides in the sublime, both in the simplicity of life
and in the polar opposite of it: the alchemy of thinking, which generates ideas pure and tender in their genius.
*
To hold one’s baby in your arms and to bury your parents—these are two eternal human sentiments that still await me, and may they come only when necessary.
I live in a world where I can sip on three beverages at once, and I am going to bring life into this very world, God be my witness.
*
Every time I meet someone new, I feel like I’m forgetting someone I once knew. I can be a citizen of the world, but I am a serf of my memory.
*
The pragmatist approach says that things serve their function, and then fossilize in collective memory. The biggest ripples in the cultural current happen when things are coopted, like Bartlebooth’s paintings.
*
I don’t believe in mass film productions radicalizing the public, even if the subject dances somewhere on the eat-the-rich spectrum, but there is one sociological truth those productions can brilliantly illustrate, and that is class realism.

The White Lotus

Class realism is the unvoiced theme of the newest season of The White Lotus, which traces the stories of families and couples ‘relaxing’ in an exclusive resort in Thailand. Plenty of the plots align well with the subject of this post: meditation, retreats, and the teachings of letting go—the laborious battle fought indefinitely by us folk. The core structural reveal, the striptease of White Lotus, is proportional to the impact of twists, cliffhangers, and other tricks of screenwriting, guiding the viewer to an epic finale and tying all the knots into a beautiful weave. The journey of the heroes follows the universal theme of self-discovery, and it enables both Lacanian and Buddhist readings—the former regarding things that remain constant, and the latter things that change.

Lacan’s constant is the infamous lack: the gaping hole in your identity that you try to fill in order to become complete. For Rick, that is his revenge; for Piper, it’s her one-year meditation retreat. Lochlan is a walking lack, a half-a-human—he tries to achieve completeness by pleasing his family members. The desired state is one of peace and safety, and the character of lack-induced drives depend on the starting point. It can demands committed action to achieve peace (as in the case of Rick and Piper), but if the desired peace is already obtained, it then demands a continuous effort to maintain it. Chloe sacrifices her integrity for financial comfort, and the way to protect that comfort is to fulfil her boyfriend’s fantasies. Laurie sacrifices her pride and her need for justice to maintain her friendship with her besties, who disrespected her on top of living much ‘better’ lives.

Lacan’s truth is that at the core of all relationships, there is a traumatic kernel—and it is your choice how to deal with it. Whether the kernel overwhelms you and puts you on a death drive, like it does with Rick or Timothy Ratliff (together with their significant others, as it is often the case), or whether you make peace with it by compromising your initial values, like Belinda or Laurie. Whether, like Gaitok, you sacrifice you innocence for swag.

The Buddhist constant is the lack of any constants—or rather, the idea that the only constant is change. That’s why it aligns so perfectly with Lacanian theory, becoming its spiritual extension. The Lacanian lack is precisely the truth of change, of anicca, which we learn at meditation retreats by observing all bodily phenomena come and go, indifferently.

The lack—the split in your subjectivity that always makes you feel incomplete, inadequate, or not enough, but also drives you to succeed, to love, to seek a better life—is the change itself. It introduces anxiety, because nothing can be protected or maintained, and little can be predicted about what is to come. The acceptance of change is tricky: when you cannot change external reality, you must change yourself, which is not always ideal, and not always easy. The stronger the drive, the stronger the effort required to keep yourself in check—that is how Frank finds refuge from drug orgies in Buddhism, and where Rick, acting on his revenge, fails and begins his own downfall.

Amor Fati, the title of the last episode, is the point de capiton, the anchoring signifier of the series. It retroactively gives meaning to the chaos, suggesting that all the characters—despite their flaws—must accept their destinies. It reframes survival and failure through a Nietzschean lens of fatalism.

But there is also the third, subsequential reading: after Lacanian and Buddhist understanding that the only unchangeable thing is the Lack - the change itself, comes the truth that there is a limit to change: you cannot escape your class. It is a consistent message I enjoy in Mike White’s series: that money corrupts, that there is hypergamy in dating, and that the rich are all the same. That is the class realism of the series: the fact that money allows for endless possibilities, and that you don’t want to limit your options, the core consumer preference, the driving force behind the fall of communist regimes. So you stay within your class, and entertain the life it enables. ‘It feels good to be rich’, says Red Scare’s Dasha, who has done a full 180 from being an edgy liberal to a full-fledged conservative over the last five years21. That is the sad truth—the truth of the ruling-class consciousness developed by Piper as she breaks down over breakfast, aware that there is no return from being spoiled.

The only people who remain integral to their values are the ones whose financial status did not change, whether the values are pure, like Pornchai’s - or corrupted, like Valentin’s. Characters who grow spiritually the most are those who became poor. The final scene of Timothy looking at the ripples in the water, reflecting on Buddhist teachings, shows him making spiritual peace with the ghosts of his past catching up to him.

Going to a Vipassana retreat is like locking yourself up in a three star version of The White Lotus, but with luxurious enjoyment replaced by hard work and silence. The teachings aim to let you become your own Lorazepam. I have faced my greatest enemy on a Vipassana course - me, myself in person, in a spooky halloween font. There are limits to honesty: I cannot disclose my traumatic kernels. But I can disclose where I am from.

Poland

I learn to accept things I cannot change, like my heritage.

To come from a country terrorized for centuries and torn to pieces every time it tried to rebuild a tradition is to live with a certain anxiety, and a certain complex—a master-slave dialectic of a need for acknowledgment. There are plenty of countries that share this with us: the feeling of a deep hurt that has not, and will never be, made right. The result is sadness and anger, an alchemic mix that turns into frustration. The mental structure of Poland is that of a sixteen-year-old who wants to hang out with the older, cooler kids. I will never be fetishised for being Polish. The astrological age of my zodiac sign is roughly the same, and I understand those sentiments of coming-of-age very well.

The damage of growing up in Poland is not really knowing the notion of community on a large level, and barely knowing the notion of fraternity—the wholesome aspect of being a bro, the male equivalent of a sisterhood. Not knowing it, because mutual trust is low, or maybe because of neoliberal erosion. Or maybe, because I was never a candidate for a bro, and couldn’t really vibe with bro-coded subjects—the ones eternally outside the self, like the gym, music, shoes, sports, like nerding out on a topic of choice, like sharing knowledge, endlessly. I don’t know how to converse with non-introspective folk—or even with folk who are curious and sensitive, but still don’t know how to vocalize it in their 30s (wtf!).

I remember feeling fraternity at the end of the Vipassana course, which is divided into males and females, when you’re finally allowed to speak, the day when everyone turn out to be completely different from how you had imagined them. It was the closest I’ve ever come to a sober MDMA trip: an unprecedented serotonin release after forced isolation, and a mutual recognition of shared suffering. When you learn that even the toughest, most focused-looking soldiers also had sleepless nights.

It’s an amazing feeling. I wish I could enter more scenarios where I have to go through some shit with a bunch of men (excluding war). Maybe I attend a football match, or some such foolishness.

I’ve sat courses in Poland, and I’ve sat in Nepal. In one field where bragging goes against the values, we wear the laurel: my dear home country has one of the most ideal Vipassana retreat centers in the world, as it was built specifically for that purpose—meaning, mostly, that it has individual rooms with private bathrooms. Many other centers are repurposed farms or hotels conducting courses all year long.

If I were to say what Poland is good for, apart for attending a meditation course, are the extremes of styling a life: it’s good the quiet, individual, introspective, focused time, and for the extreme partying. Both being, ultimately, exercises in loneliness.

I felt the longing for pleasure and abandonment inside me. […]
All we could do was exist for each other solely as a reminder of the self22.

I’m glad I grew up in a country that taught me how to be with myself. To love the shadow of the self cast on the wall, as I watch American content soaking in, and ponder. Alas, even if that’s the main thing it taught me—to like and be liked, to chat up and be nice, to go out and have fun—these are all things I had to teach myself, things collectively self-taught, in the long arc of trying to live free of worry, to accept where you’re from, in short: to live like Omensetter.

Omensetter’s Guide to Rawdogging Life

This is the second time I’m writing about Gass, to my fine bewilderment. The perverted uncle Gass - so full of life that it went bad, rotten, and spilled, the shadow self of phlegmatic Sebald, who puts you to sleep with his countless, monotonous anecdotes; two masters of confusing the audience by, respectively, style and narration.

The 1966 book by Gass depicts a classic modernist motif: the struggle of worldviews embodied in two characters. A dialectic that asks for transcendence, or integration into the contemporary subject. Or, if you prefer, a portrayal of a barred, split subject—a subject who asks herself how to be in a world that is ever-changing, where everything seems right and wrong simultaneously.

Omensetter’s Luck tells a story of loneliness, the bleak inheritance of being thrust into a pair of anxious boots and sent trudging through a world of people smiling out of their faces.

It follows the story of Omensetter, who one day descends into the village from a muddy hill with his belongings strapped to a carriage and transforms it indefinitely with his charisma and way of being. If a man could be whimsical while tapping into the Divine Masculine, he would be it. His presence is a thorn in the soul of Reverend Jethro Furber, who becomes consumed by envy and hatred for Omensetter—his easy-goingness, his popularity. Furber is an evangelist of hate, of guilt and of mediocrity, and Omensetter is the force of life itself.

The novel masterfully captures the tension between Dionysian and Apollonian forces—the soul’s confusion in its impulse to condemn those who surrender too fully to pleasure or to joy. The mental disposition of the Catholic Church, and the comfort found in guilt.

It resonated with me, because it illustrates the two states I move between: Omensetter’s peace- when I’m on retreat, or actively practicing meditation, sitting for hours a day, for months on end, and Furber’s neuroticism - when I’ve lost my practice and spiral into the rollercoaster of a fast life laced with parties and drama. At times like that, I feel like a hero looped within a novel with magnitude, but no direction.

What pulls one back from the peace and joy is the weakness of the spirit. The desire to be perfect—the narcissistic drive of the modern age that some of us feel pulled into. The American curse, placed upon the world. Sometimes I think that with every positive personality trait comes a negative counterpart —sort of like the antagonistic pleiotropy theory of aging. A trait that helps you in some way, but trips you up just a little bit later, when you’re finally gathering momentum.

The desire to be perfect, and a Venetian Spritz. And a very vocal vice of viewing something you don’t do—or can’t do—as something you are against.

This is the wisdom of Gass’s novel: the trap of contrarianism developed out of narcissism. A hatred for tall people because you fell short.

[He] claimed one Sunday that the Lord had made him small, and had given him his suit of pulpit clothing, so he could represent to everyone the hollow insides of their bodies. […] One I was eight feet tall, he’d exclaimed, but God made me small for this purpose.24

Vipassana, to me, is an exercise in being at peace with life’s doings—especially when I spiral too far into Furber’s desire for control. The good old ego-building project is nothing more than cerebral torment: trying to erect an opinion on a foundation of self-doubt, building a dismal stump scaffolded into a shack that you nonetheless aspire to love. Maybe it’s the disease of people who think too much in thoughts, and not in landscapes or colors.

On some days, it couldn’t be more clear that ego is like the unfinished book in DeLillo’s metaphor—a
“hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer”—
a thing that invokes hate and shame and frustration, because it demands attention.
And yet, as DFW writes:

The whole thing's all very messed up and sad, but simultaneously it's also tender and moving and noble and cool—it's a genuine relationship, of a sort—and even at the height of its hideousness the damaged infant somehow touches and awakens what you suspect are some of the very best parts of you: maternal parts, dark ones. You love your infant very much. And you want others to love it, too, when the time finally comes for the damaged infant to go out and face the world.25

The “cool” thing, then, is clearly not about perfection, but about accepting your deficiencies—as much as it is about coming to peace with the public output of your inner world, the resolution of Kenzaburō Ōe’s Personal Matter, the acceptance of hideousness not only within you, but also outside of you. Seeing both as equal, and equally yours.

While writing Omensetter’s Luck, Gass was buried in academic and philosophical alienation, deep in Wittgenstein’s disillusionment with language. Soon after, he would champion a style of inner singing, of rhythm and sweat. Gass is Furber. Furber is, in Gass’s words, “every academic he had ever known.”

[The Devil] fell, he was The Fall itself, the suicidal star; but he fell at the end of a fine elastic. It is the cord through which he even is fed and thrives.26

There are so many two-sided coins, so many ego-traps, lying in wait on both ends of the “spiritual” spectrum, exercises in humility that, somehow, still end up feeding your grandiosity—so perfectly aligned with the reward systems of today’s ecosystem.

Running an Instagram account for a living while trying to live a humble life is like trying to ride a bicycle through sand, that is why I need a practice that anchors me to a pillow for ninety minutes a day, every day, periodt. A practice that exercises selflessness—not in theory alone, but in repetition, in sweat and in silence, to enter a mental refuge where I can peacefully get a grip on recent developments.

The Recent Developments

There is always something amazing emerging at some cost, and the New, as rooted in opposition to the Old, needs a conscious, dialectical effort to harmonize both. There is short attention span and there is peak content of sorts, there is restlessness and endless fun of an endless scroll.

There are some incredible memes out there, oh brother…

The Campari Spritz and the irresistible urge to make a cultural commentary, even though the Substack community is so wonderful at reminding me that my opinion doesn’t matter, that I should know my place, and that attempts at cultural criticism are annoying27. Yet I cannot help but think of these takes as a Williamsian residual hegemony of millennials, who find in-group policing morally necessary; I can’t be more thankful for the current age, which leaves little space for self-righteousness and a whole lot for confused vulnerability, or vulnerable confusion, or some other Debordian wordplay. And I think that the line between criticism and being a hater is thin and often crossed, but we are getting there—to a place of recognition.

The quality of memes and tweets these days surpasses my expectations; on some days I cannot be more excited to compulsively screenshot and resend and repost. There is rising quality of textual memes. There is an automatic collective acknowledgement of Italian AI-generated characters, and there are videos debating whether they are halal or haram. There is a collective brainrot, the collective embrace of confusion and silliness in an attempt at escapism. We are truly living in times spiritually laced with ketamine.

If the sentiment is the return to the aesthetic by abandoning the language, then I need forced suspension in thinking and associating to stay in the realm of feeling, the realm which you can only describe as ‘beautiful’ before the language falls short. I have many girlfriends who are better at a ‘feeling’ and ‘looking‘, who can prioritize style over substance, which I can rarely entertain. I accept that; just because I don’t do it doesn’t mean I’m against it, or something like that.

Once every few sittings among serenity slides in this one unstoppable thought, like ladybugs doing backshots, like a fat golden pig rolled on its side, sleeping, like that ‘Heartbone’ would be a pretty cool name, like a memory of a French waiter saying ‘peanutz on ze table, like zis?’, like something nice (the euphoria of early summer) or like something awful, e.g. a painful memory branded on my brain with a heated iron of embarrassment.

My seven years with Vipassana… I have learned so much and I know so little. Early adulthood. Nodding off in a classroom, nodding off at a concert, nodding off at a movie screening, nodding off during meditation, which happens. I can’t help it!

Everyone has their own path, but everyone also shares the same emotional realism of processing, associating, categorising, reacting, and making a subconscious rule, as we peek through the doors of perception, half-open, half-closed, to leave us guessing.
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to turn inward for the first time after a lifetime of looking outward, click here: https://www.dhamma.org/en/index. You might just find out how it is to carry the universe of peace within you.

If you have not, thank you for coming this far with me, still. You are a soldier. You and me will grab coffee one day and I will let you speak, indefinitely. The cosmic order will be restored, and the spheres will harmonize into a sweet melody, just like they did before I got distracted and thought of the Recent Developments, Omensetter’s Luck, being born in Eastern Europe, the odysseys and brutal redemptions of White Lotus, my foolish pride, the mechanics of enlightenment, Mind-Body loop, emotional realism, non-Euclidean dreams, and a strange and unsettling reality, in which someone severely neurodivergent misreads body language and begins making out with a person who is, in fact, choking and fighting for their life.

Must not the head of the poet be severed in order that he may continue to sing? […] Is it not necessary that life overwhelm art periodically to insure the health, the prevalence, of man?1

The Cigarette

I sit at Café Parisienne in Danube and talk to a friend of a friend as I drive my eyes around anxiously, but it is such a loaded word, I think, maybe it’s just natural for a set of young eyes to continuously scan the landscape, as if something life-changing were about to appear, and those things are scary! They creep up on you with opportunity so vibrant it sets the heart in irregular motion, which I read as excitement disguised as anxiety, or the other way around - so there I sit, quite tense, looking around with my scattered eyes, like a rabbit.

The rabbit should be the whore of the animal kingdom, it occurs to me, for it must be the compulsion of rabbit sex, and there is no romanticism in things compulsive. But there is romanticism in fixation, like in that one flower on which I fix my gaze, a white flower, a construction site, a passing bus, and the promise of spring.

- He wasn’t much shorter than me — I was just wearing heels, and he has bad posture […]

The dream I had that night appears to me now… It is proportionally structured like a cigarette held upright , one of those lexical dreams: the top part an entanglement of words, layered like intestines, followed by the solid part of the filter, the words that said:

The unfiltered thought of a filtered cigarette, revealed to me in a dream. Could be a riddle, but could be not; a good luck, a bad luck, who knows?2

The endless chatter and an anxious shag; the structure of compulsion seems to be that of a death drive, but it always puzzles me when it relates to sex or tidiness, the measures of survival. Maybe it’s no more than a coup on your memory, or the memory of the last thing: the last warm body you held, or the state of your apartment, once filled with crumbs, now a pristine, clean slate. In that sense, it would be less an obsession with gaining control over chaos, and more an act of rebirth — a desperate measure to recreate your identity when it dissolves into the mundane, as if the crumbs on the floor, or the door you may or may not have locked, were the final traces of your essence falling apart. And in that sense, it would be a measure of self-protection. Until you trip on the broom and poke your eye out with the stick; in that sense, it would be a death drive, all along and altogether.

- The hairdresser said I have much less hair on the right side of my head. And when I asked, how do you know?, he just said: I counted?

I experience Paris through incomprehensible noise and the beauty of ornament. The words fill up the peaceful silence with brute force, but I don’t mind.

The apotheosis of a ‘yapper’ would be to see their greatness in 1. cluelessly providing me with free writing material, and 2. it’s the only way, I think, to access the Other. A yapper in not a full vessel spilling with thought, but rather an endless spring of unfiltered life. There is stillness at the core of all this chatter. Access can only come through the mundane — through the raw thought of the anxious mind, which thinks all over the place but holds a fixed, romantic gaze.

I’ve always seen that gaze as a call for help - a call for structure - but it’s a view I’ve recently pushed away, as the vibrant yap-city seems more attractive and welcoming than the somber pound-town; more attractive to a freak, but also to a regular guy like me.

To wilfully surround yourself with a yapper is to implicitly understand the distinction between the sincere and the authentic — a subject I’ve given much thought to lately. There is beauty in the unfiltered, and suspicion in the curated. Why do we fetishize outsider art but never choose it as inspiration? I wondered: is it good luck or bad luck to have a chatterbox around?

Short-Circuit Drive

As he walked outside beside the road he felt his anger burning up in the heat of afternoon, and saw himself, as he often did when he was outdoors on hot days, being forged in enormous fires for some purpose beyond his imagining.3

The characters in Denis Johnson’s Angels power through the night with brains wired in the shortest of circuits, which constantly keep on catching fire. The fire is explosive, but for a moment, it lights up the dark and somber night.

Johnson doesn’t portray compulsivity, but impulsivity, its horrible twin brother.
While the first drinks itself into oblivion, the other carves chaos into the night with its fists.

The impulsivity of his characters is understandable — they live inside social contexts of poverty, addiction, and trauma, their brains already pre-fried into a smooth-cooked steak. Disarray and confusion trouble the mind, yet I don’t see them as anxious. There is no worry, because the circuit between thought and action is too short to allow for hesitation.

If compulsion is a slow and steady death-drive into obscurity, impulsivity is a deadly rollercoaster ride with a few screws loose — and it’s more fun, more ravishing, as there’s something beautiful about characters who power through life with courage, even when everything goes to shit — those characters, whose circuits are just long enough to conjure a Grand Plan.

They move forward in their dream as if they’ve fallen asleep at the wheel, full throttle — but somehow, miraculously, they keep the car in the lane, with a few extra bumps along the way. The car doesn’t arrive at the destination —but a destination, even if it’s right back where it took off.

It is the beloved theme of Sean Baker, who swept the Oscars this year with Anora — a fairy tale of love, aspiration, and the immanence of the corrupted rich. I’ve been a fan of Baker for years and was happy to see the acclaim, even though Anora isn’t my favorite. But since he took on contemporary symbols, set the movie in the familiarity of New York nightlife, and gave it a bump of Uncut Gems-quality speed, it all has worked in their favor.

I like to see his characters as modern-day princesses, a point well stated in Broey Deschanel’s ‘Why Anora is the Disney Princess We Need‘ YouTube video. The cruel lottery of life and a dream of a fancy dress. A person holier-than-thou could look and condemn, but

from an uptown apartment to a knife on the A train,
it’s not that far.4

And I wish I believed in the redistribution of karma, but Baker has taught me not to.

Shortly after typing the last word, I close my laptop, look around the airport, and slowly realize how expensive this sentence was, as I’ve missed my flight to Berlin, which had just completed boarding.

Becoming-Stranded

I think of “karma.” The people must have moved on behind a queue for a different flight, which appeared simultaneously, and tricked me into believing my own boarding hadn’t yet begun. I fell victim to my habit of willfully getting on the plane last, a habit with a long, unbroken history.

I’m baffled, but I am not angry. I join a Chinese couple and a French guy (who resembles Tintin in both appearance and mannerisms) already caught up in an unfruitful argument - even though the plane is still 15 minutes from scheduled departure. We say: there was no single announcement. There is no mercy shown. We’re taken downstairs to wait for our luggage, victims of being too laid-back, I guess. I ask to use the bathroom just to act like a brat. I’m told I can do it “later.”

I book a 7 a.m. flight for the next day and an airport hotel. I decide to save money and push my suitcase through a decrepit sidewalk for 40 minutes. I listen to a podcast about the Galaxy Gas investigation.

The receptionist is cute, as in adorable. The room smells nice.

On the outskirts of Paris, the prices are a little lower and they pour me a little more wine. For some reason, I feel the urge to be extremely courteous to the waiter. I think: it could be the energy of the airport hotel, making me feel like I’m on a business trip, or like I’ve ever had anything important to do. I say “scuse Me, sir” and “thankyousomuch, Sir.” They don’t know that I write a blog, I think.

My strictly money-oriented trip to Paris, the city I strongly disliked as a concept, has turned into a costly vacation that’s made me like Paris a tiny bit more. I feel like I had to pay to lower my guard. I soon learn that Paris is best described by my own zodiac sign, which only confirms my anxiety, that if I stayed there, I would eventually dissolve and vanish into a little Parisian cigarette smoke.

The words fill up the restaurant with brute force, but I don’t mind. French sounds extremely pleasant to me, even though it annoys me that I don’t understand it. And yet, if I did, the chatter would lose its ambient quality and turn into annoying passive listening, and I’d have to put on my headphones with some 432Hz Brown Academic Noise, as per.

I want to be stranded more often. I reminisce about going to Sfântu Gheorghe, right by the Black Sea, with my friends and an ex-girlfriend — just for one night — and being joined by a family of stray dogs, who accompanied us from the moment we arrived to the moment we left. The village, which you can only access by boat, is devoid of cars, people, and noise, but filled with lonely strays. It only lights up for one week a year, when an alternative Romanian film festival takes place in a resort of The White Lotus kind.

The place felt like the edge of the world, where the flat earth’s sea turns into an eternal waterfall just across the horizon. It felt like the Sebaldian shores of Lowestoft, where men settle in their tents as -

they just want to be in the place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.5

I would love to go back there and write. The wind and the stillness invite it. But I carry a quiet fear, that I’d end up writing something in the style of Pessoa or Leopardi, tortured or somber, something too somber and tortured to share with the world. Those things, I prefer to keep private.

To Read a Mind

The question of appearance and privacy. A memory of going to New Jersey to meet my ex’s parents resurfaces like dog shit from under thick, pale snow. A story becomes conjured:

Two strangers sit on a Greyhound bus, traveling the day before Thanksgiving to meet their families. The man composes a text; unfortunately, he suffers from very poor vision, and the font size on his phone is turned up to maximum. The woman next to him turns her head toward the window, looking out at the solemn obelisks of the grey-hour skyline.

‘She knows’,

the man thinks.

He looks down at his message, which reads:

‘This idea makes me sick’.

He deletes it quickly. Rewrites:

‘I am perfectly ill’.

The Greyhound rockets into the sunset through suburban despair. The woman, a person of curious kind, had been watching the phone the whole time.
“Where to?” she asks, smiling.
“Philadelphia,” the man replies.
The bus is bound for Washington, D.C.
“Me too,” she says. They both should be kissing by now.

How does the story appear? That’s the first thought. I am a Zillennial — I think in vibes. I wonder: Is it a joke? Or is it for real? The difference between both readings is the reality I choose to engage with. The reader completes the story — not merely to interpret its meaning, but to engage with the thought the story enacts beyond its textual surface, as Timothy Bewes suggests6.

I consider the story a joke. Maybe I want it to be a joke, so I lubricate the dry plot with a fair share of mind reading.

The ground for irony is laid by context. It’s the day before Thanksgiving — the Greyhound is thick with dread. She reads the text — the wording and self-edit — and takes his correction not as a cry for help, but as a joke. A joke, she suspects, meant for her. She knows that he knows that she can see it. When he lies about his destination, she smiles and plays along. Together, they build a quiet, ironic reality — an alternate storyline to escape the drabness of the ride. Irony becomes a tool of flirtation, a shared roleplay that sidesteps small talk. A bus might be a strange place for a first kiss, but of seen through the ironic lens, it can also be strangely perfect.

Operating successfully in irony requires skill in managing levels of intentionality7, which relate to Theory of Mind — our capacity for assuming what the other thinks, a talent honed by conmen and bullies, among others.

First, second and third level:

• I know

• I know that she knows

• I know that she knows that I know

Supposedly, humans can comfortably handle up to four levels8. Beyond that, things get messy and require a set of pushpins, string, and a corkboard. Operating at the first level alone is severe autism, a solipsistic trap. Operating on too many levels is hypermentalizing, or going full schizo.

Irony lives at level three and above. I know that she knows that I know that she knows that I know that we are just playing. It takes cognitive finesse to pull it off - to make it graspable, and to make it funny. It also depends on shared cultural ground, which makes irony notoriously hard to export, or to initiate cold.

Classical sincerity, by contrast, mostly stays at level one or two: You say what you believe. You want the other to believe it, too. Simply: Here is me, with my anxieties and there is you, with yours; we strike up a conversation to feel less lonely. To form a connection.

The sincere reading of the story takes things at face value, filtered through a subjective but largely shared set of values and sensibilities.

The man revises the text to soften its tone — a small lie born of self-consciousness, which only deepens his unease. On the solemn ride home, the woman speaks — not to say much, but to not be alone. He lies again, out of nervousness; she plays along to build a fleeting sense of connection, a Zweisamkeit, grounded in their unspoken understanding. They kiss… because everyone loves a romantic arc.

I remember enjoying a book that playfully connected navigating Theory of Mind levels with following a plot. The thesis was that the crime and whodunnit genres were entirely about entertaining various levels of intentionality—or rather, an exercise in keeping track of them9. I know Borges had a soft spot for detective genre; he placed Chesterton’s Father Brown Mysteries high on his reading list, alongside many other mystery tales. A puzzle is a puzzle is a puzzle.

Sincerity and Authenticity

Choosing between an ironic or sincere reading reflects the cultural shift at the heart of this text.

The modern condition of a cultural participant—or a prosumer, like Me, You and Everyone We Know—is to devote most of our mental leisure to figuring out how we appear. The ability to read minds on multiple levels expands the possibility of performance ad infinitum, even as the audience narrows with each layer added.

Most of the time, we’re stuck with the same old question: is it sincere, or is it ironic? How do I find meaning? and How do I relate to culture with my vulnerabilities if everything is made fun of? These are the dangers of going ‘too far down the irony town’. The youth is aware of this, even if only subliminally. They find joy in cringe, in the corny, in what resists critique. But the art of persona creation via social media has introduced the notion of sincere irony, ironic sincerity, and other hybrid forms that confuse the audience. On top of that, in the last two decades of past century emerged the realization that the financial market loves sincerity - problem only intensified as finance began to colonize more and more aspects of life. A product is not perfect unless it appears honest, or at least honestly presented.

Are you truly being who you pretend to be?
Has the role and the core melted into one?

These questions also touch on another important distinction: the one between sincerity and authenticity. While sincerity is about how you present yourself to others, authenticity is a deeper representation of your values. You can be sincere and inauthentic—if you speak honestly and confidently about things you’ve merely made yourself believe.

I think of Bret Easton Ellis, and “The better you look, the more you see.”10

If the forces of history have created an environment in which surface image is equated with inner value, then authenticity loses all relevance—and we find ourselves submerged in a world of believability.

On the other hand, we have postmodern writers who choose insincerity to communicate their authentic moral and philosophical struggles. They use irony and detachment to deconstruct the belief systems of a country corrupted to its core, without voicing their own opinions.

Disillusionment with insincerity in communication and the inauthentic sincerity of the characters employed in postmodern lit gave birth to the movement called New Sincerity (NS), conceptualized and studied by Adam Kelly over the last two decades. The premise of NS, or rather, the question it posed, concerned the intersection of aesthetics and morals: the idea that the author holds a responsibility to their audience. They tried to restore a kind of ethical order in literature by asking:

How do we drop the ironic distance and actually reveal ourselves—our vulnerabilities—when sincerity itself can be perceived as a calculated move in today’s economy?

Or, as Adam Kelly puts it: How do I create a sincere work of art-

when corporate capitalism and neoliberal ideology have rendered moral and aesthetic ends increasingly inseparable from economic ones?”

Writers like David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, Sheila Heti, Dave Eggers or Jennifer Egan explored the cross-contamination between the ambition for authenticity and the marketplace’s fetish for sincerity as a perfect product. They developed personal tools for something like sincerity—emotional strategies that remain aware of the performance, but try to make the performance count.

A Manual How To Be Sincere

New Sincerity left no manual how to be sincere. And if there’s anything that comes close, it’s the discontent of David Foster Wallace’s Et Unibus Pluram, where he calls for ‘the next real literary 'rebels' in this country’ to

emerge as some weird bunch of 'anti-rebels,' born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall to actually endorse single-entendre values.”

These single-entendre values correspond to the first two levels of intentionality, and imply a kind of intentional flattening. Irony feels smart because it operates on higher levels of shared understanding, embedding itself in subtext, performance, and recursive meaning.

Wallace suggests a radical refusal to play that game. Rather than perform sincerity through ironic distancing (second- or third-order intentionality), he proposes something like:

“I say what I mean, and I mean what I say.”

On the surface, this is first-order intentionality — sincerity at face value.
But Wallace’s twist lies in the awareness of the higher-order game, and the conscious decision to opt out. In practice, it becomes a kind of second-order sincerity:

“I know you expect me to be ironic, but I’m not — and I want you to know I’m not.”

This stance leaves the writer vulnerable, as sincerity becomes a risk, not a pose. Wallace envisioned a future in which the subject might find comfort in honesty and openness. But he couldn’t have predicted the ways in which the drastic developments of digital culture and algorithmic life would confuse and alienate the subject to an unprecedented degree — a world where sincerity is always suspect and monetizable.

Out of the confusion of NS, autofiction emerged, with many writers placed in between these two genres, figures like: Karl Ove Knausgård, Rachel Cusk, Natasha Stagg, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin, Maggie Nelson, Olivia Laing, Ocean Vuong, Annie Ernaux, Patricia Lockwood, Justin Taylor or Miranda July, among many others. It emerged not as an answer, but as a form saturated with inward-facing anxiety, semantic doubt, and the persistent need to ask: Is this me, or is this a performance of me that only feels real?

Autofiction

I see the phenomenon of autofiction revealed to me for as it is. The dominant literary mode of the past decade. A diving light descends from the tall ceiling of an overpriced sublet in Berlin, and an angel appears. The angel has a BBL.
(A BiBLe.)

The angel says:

“Hi, I can't post my nude videos on Facebook. I have big breasts with reddish nipples and a nice pussy. Click here to watch: https://maria-352281.gakkoberdolan.Live/wt/nf6hIrS4Ou5Q3”

The angel says:

You’ve dug up a vulnerable grid in your psyche. There are visitors now.

You say: “I didn’t do this.”
The visitors stare at the enormous droplet of sweat sliding down your temple. Inside the droplet, there is a goldfish. The equally enormous brows of the visitors rise in doubt. “Believe me…”

I sit at a café in Berlin and think about the structure of this post. I don’t like to go meta, ever since Norm Macdonald said11,

“Meta... Oh, I hate meta…”.

I feel generational guilt - I have allowed the decently autofictional beginning of this post to spiral into postmodernism. I am writing against the wind of history. “The angel with reddish nipples,” I read, shaking my head. Then I shake my head again as someone unhoused asks me for change; I’m busy writing about the ethics in literature.

First of all, autofiction seems like a natural, even inevitable choice in a world so fixated on the self, the performance of the self, the construction of the self, a world where identity is hyper-exposed, fragmented, and always under revision. It’s hard enough to make sense of it yourself—let alone to write characters who can do that convincingly. Fair: I’m too preoccupied with figuring it out to imagine someone else figuring it out.

One problem with autofiction - maybe my personal problem - is the abandonment of fantasy and fun for the sake of depth. And this relentless striving for depth isn’t just an aesthetic concern—it’s an ethical one. The ethics of autofiction reflect the ethics of fault—inward-facing, hyper-individualized, and shaped by the same logic that neoliberalism has been enforcing for decades.

We all saw through the climate-change propaganda telling us to live zero-waste while watching photos of Taylor Swift’s private jet logs and graphs of Chinese factory emissions. No one’s actually slowing growth; if anything, everyone is speeding up. China is becoming the U.S.'s greatest rival, and Trump is cutting the rest of the world out of his life like a teenager on Instagram. Europe is tragically lagging behind. I live in country a country away from a war. Things are not so great. I cannot imagine anyone sincerely preaching to "slow down" right now.

In autofiction—just like in the 2016–2020 wave of environmentalism—blame is still directed inward, but in a way that’s even harder to let go of. It reflects the logic of therapy culture and the omnipresence of self-help ideology.

If I have a problem, I need to work on it. I should express my anger, but not to hurt anyone. I should express love, but not love-bomb or go codependent. I should not burden others, but hire a professional. If the mainstream path fails, I should try alternative knowledge. I should try microdosing mushrooms for a week. I should do ayahuasca. That will heal me. I should not burden others with effects of my ayahuasca-trip-induced psychosis, and so on.

I remember 2018 and hearing "everyone should go to therapy" in the same breath as getting angry looks for buying a plastic water bottle. The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with working on yourself. There’s real virtue in becoming a more harmonious human being. But the moral terrain of such pressure is strange.

I believe trauma is the most primal wiring of the brain. I touch the fire, and it hurts—I’ll never do it again. It’s a safety mechanism. From it emerges the short emotional circuit that governs much of our behavior. Social life follows the same logic: I dated a Virgo and she broke my heart to “No Virgos” in your Hinge bio pipeline.

It’s a double-edged sword, with all its attendant ironies. The premise of therapy is to analyze and rewire those circuits of self-protection- especially the ones that cause pain to you or others, but the thing is: this journey never ends.

Therapy and self-discovery are not final states. Every day brings new micro-traumas, new feedback loops. There are memes coming up every day about the kind of a person you are, inducing a cultural and ethical pressure to try to be a step ahead. You can never fully know thyself— you can only keep on trying. And from that emerges a kind of moral anxiety: a need to constantly answer to the Big Other, to perform healing, to show and make sure you are not “toxic.” Mark Fisher would ask: Aren’t you ‘toxic’, because you are getting poisoned?

Autofiction is a response to New Sincerity’s ethical project, refracted through the lens of therapy culture’s imposed guilt, an endless cycle of introspection and neuroticism that feels unmistakably modern. A liberal subject, needless to say. The aim is no longer to create characters who embody the modern predicament and seek hope or guidance, but to narrate one’s own predicament—one’s own pursuit of knowledge and self-betterment—within a quasi-fictional framework.

More Thoughts On Autofiction

I see autofictional novels as journals of self-discovery—attempts at accessing psychological depth that we, as readers, are invited to extrapolate into egregores of insight about life and society.

The journey itself is noble, but the problem of the never-ending journey is this that you can never settle. To construct a moral outlook and reside within it is, in our cultural logic, to opt out of the new—to become obsolete, conservative... to refuse the endless labor of self-revision. What if, someday, having a pet becomes controversial?

The same applies to opinions. If we choose the autofictional subject, we take on the risk of being labeled, and of being held accountable for what we say. The persona we construct becomes extrapolated back onto us. That risk is one of the great fears of today: to be boxed in, categorized, cancelled, called out for an uneducated take or an unresolved emotion.

This anxiety aligns with the broader liberal affect of not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings. There is social pressure toward harmony, cohesion, in-group softness. But I often feel that it comes at the cost of humanity—of conflict, contradiction and debate. To call someone out is not to strip them of dignity, but to see them as human, even if it’s a member of your own group. We are always subconsciously judging and pattern-seeking anyway, since that’s how we navigate the social world. The falseness of this enforced affect lies in its performance - the same judgment is now suppressed, and outwardly decorated and reframed as purity and nobility.

If there’s one thing conservatives have long warned against, it’s the danger of relativism. I’ve always understood that fear, though I struggled to accept it, since conservatives often speak from a closed heart. Judgment, I believe, should be one wing of a bird, whose second is understanding and forgiveness; without both, I cannot let it fly.

The moment I divert my gaze from the little vampiric screen, the angel in my living room opens the BBL and recites:

It doesn’t matter what I think. Mostly, I think that I know nothing, and anyway, I will change my mind. My opinions should be fished out of this book and then thrown back. They are not, in my own estimation, of any importance.

What I’ve been thinking about, anyway, is work, and what that has become—for everyone [...]”

I recognize the introduction from Artless: Stories 2019-2023 by Natasha Stagg. It perfectly and purely reflects the anxiety of the autofictional journey. It is a protective spell.

If Twitter became an arena for hot takes and memes, autofiction became a shelter for a confused, introspective, and eager-to-learn subject. I think of introspective prose from a hundred years ago, like Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. The big shift, I think, was from an age of conviction to an age of confusion; the past decade made me question whether I actually have opinions, or if I’m just projecting.

Maybe I do have an opinion. I feel like autofiction is a trap. Maybe it’s just a trap for me, or maybe I have issues and need to work on myself. Maybe I’m just tired of reading authors wandering around New York, getting into adventures that are only interesting because they’re well-written, or because there are celebrities, charisma, and discourse woven in. Or maybe I’m just resisting the cultural landscape that millenials have created for us.

For sure, I’m allergic to concealed vanity and to the humblebrag. Autofiction often feels to me like a confusing mix of both; vanity in form, the self as performance, the self as creation, and humility in content—the pursuit of knowledge, of meaning, of something real.

Autofiction speaks: Hey, this book is a witness to my inner life. Do you really want to know ME? It says:

“Remember this? It’s November 12, 2018. Stop reading this if you’re not me. If you’re future me, that’s okay.”12

It’s playful, yes—but it reveals the specular side of autofiction: the book as a mirror, for both writer and reader. A surface for projection, self-recognition, or curated vulnerability.

It’s also a solipsistic trap, DFW’s greatest fear. Autofiction allows access to only one mind, because there is only one psychologized character.

And if we view autofiction through the lens of New Sincerity, the attempt to bridge the sincere and the authentic ends up as a full invitation for the reader to merge into the writer-to become one anxious sensibility, diffused between the I and You.

You might endlessly wonder where you stand in the contemporary landscape.
But what about history? What about the universal-symbols, archetypes, shared structures of meaning?

After a century of ironic distance, can the romantic scent of modernism be restored in all its full corniness and cringey glory?

Post-Autofiction

Some suggest that post-autofiction leads us into fantasy13. Others, that writers will tap into Gen-Z brainrot-core, just like Honor Levy opt for an internet-pilled sensation of being one with the feed, yet still search for meaning in the awkward, chaotic, deeply online reality of being in your mid-twenties and discourse-literate. There is hope for transcending autofiction in Levy’s work - not into detached, doomer-coded hope of millennial writing à la Ben Lerner or Rachel Cusk, but in something more desperate, more fragile-a Zoomer cry for meaning from someone who confusingly but earnestly loves being alive.

“We actually love each other. Right?”14

There is suspicion, of course; suspicion born from self-curation, from living in the permanent noise of the digital self. Like Tao Lin, Honor Levy tries to remain non-ironic in a world that still mostly is. The alienation is normalized; it’s become ambience, not ontological dread. Right?

If the self has been spread thin across social media, then post-autofiction seeks out the emotional residue left behind. Its subjectivity is layered, textured, like the newest Playboi Carti drop. It’s grown from postmodern DNA, but refuses to stay trapped in irony. ‘Meaning is left to the listener’, as Third Eye Lisa writes in her recent Substack post15. She says:

It can only be understood by surrendering to the experience of not knowing, of confusion, the experience of mystery.

Your mind has a million tabs open, and no plug-in to organize them. You are an unstable archive with no map, an infinite scroll of emotions and memories, where irony and sincerity collapse into each other. They become Raymond Williams’ structure of feeling, hyperlinked, compressed, written in a voice perfectly suited to recreational Adderall abuse.

But branding, whether it's sincere or ironic, is still branding. And that loops us right back into Wallace’s dilemma.

Resisting into Sincerity

On what I thought was my last day in Paris, I went to see Harmony Korine’s exhibition at agnès b.’s collection. I stared at his note that said something like:

The classical, epic cinema is dead. To make a movie today is to create an audiovisual experience. Even a master like Bergman wouldn’t get funding now.

My impression is that what Korine did was resist his contemporary structure of feeling, one that privileged irony, detachment, and aestheticized nihilism, by pushing those very tendencies to an almost unbearable intensity, so much so that they begin to collapse under their own weight.

His films feel like a war waged from within. A mix of postmodern surface with a strange compassion—an attentive, almost sacred observation of the misfortunate and the weird. There is tenderness in the cruel, cold depiction of the absence of meaning, and that absence is rendered palpable.

And then it strikes me: maybe to be sincere is to resist.
To resist, in general, is to attach yourself to an idea, and hold onto it for your dear life. When I was writing my master’s dissertation, I kept bringing up the term “fetish”-something that becomes a pillar of identity, a psychic attachment we defend at all costs. It’s not a concept of consumption, but of emotional allegiance.

A fetish could then be a manifesto, a religion, a book, your favorite writer, musician, director, a cinematic wave, an aesthetic core—or equally something you hate. To resist is to be stubborn about an idea, and to defend it ferociously, because an attack on it feels like an attack on the deepest part of yourself.

The fetish cannot be approached intellectually. It doesn’t need a “good reason” to exist—it resides in the realm of aesthetics. This is the core of resistance to the psychologizing intrinsic to therapy culture and its quiet political power: not everything is a wound to be healed, not every attachment a trauma response16.

To resist a structure of feeling is to dare to feel in a different way. If anything can slow down the endless journey of self-exploration and optimization, our modern condition, it’s the act of anchoring your psyche to a fetish. It may seem anti-Buddhist, but it gives form and shape to souls who are otherwise confused. In the end, everyone strives for cohesion.

Sincerity in resistance comes from vulnerability. The never-ending journey of non-judgmental perception—the millennial image of literary selfhood—collapses when we admit to attachments, biases, emotional stakes17.

Resisting a structure of feeling in art is not a return to E Unibus Pluram. Choosing sincerity of enjoyment is no different from participating ironically, if the conditions remain unchallenged. DFW - David Foster Wallace to “down for whatever” pipeline, as cringe is no longer freedom; what once felt like a hopecore exit now rings hollow. New Sincerity has looped back on itself.

Liquid modernity values change, flexibility, and openness—traits that mediate sincerity, that interrupt the quest for a solidified truth. To resist the modern condition is to pick one—or many—belief systems that serve as your core. It is a reintroduction of value to a culture that has prized only circulation.

To resist entirely would mean going monk-mode, logging off and opting out. But for some of us, the attachment to the self is too strong. It feels like there’s too much to lose. Also, I can only preach what I practice; that is another unspoken rule of sincerity.

To resist culturally is to anchor yourself in your fetishes and build a structure of honesty around the vulnerability of your sensibilities. I want to hear the word “beautiful” as much as I want to hear “disgusting.” I don’t want to see the liberal affect of perpetual “understandability”, I want to see humanity, depicted in its most tender and most cruel affects. I want to see honesty, the “I” devoid of fiction, reality rawdogged. Open yourself up and take a blow. Can a subject not think with an ‘I’, these days? The subject suspended in a liberal “nothing ever happens” spins up memories and reflections that dissolve like rain slipping down a glass pane.

The Theology of The Croc

I don’t like how it’s been recontextualized over the last decade, from ugliness to “quirky coolness”, now praised for its practicality and for an ironic appreciation of its design. But somewhere in that ironic appreciation something sinister had slipped in.

The Croc quietly entered our homes, slid under our thresholds like a serpent. One day, I looked around and realized, that everyone I know owns a pair. These are the workings of a devil. The shoe isn’t even that comfortable; not enough to justify its form, not enough to choose it over regular slippers. Especially not enough to pay for the original, a foamy horror pressed from a single mold.

What truly unsettles me is the cultural permissiveness shown to the Croc by people who otherwise have carefully curated taste in fashion and despised the shoe just a decade ago. As if the highest virtue was aesthetic elasticity—to stretch your sensibility so far that you can welcome even the Croc, that objectively hideous object, into the realm of personal style. This is the limit of relativism I'm willing to accept.

The Croc worn in public says: “I’m chill like that.” But to wilfully have a croc in your house, to want to make a statement like that in private, that is perverse.

So I’ve decided: I will build my opinionated worldview around the Croc. It will be my traumatic kernel, resistant to any form of therapy. I will attach myself to the shoe, and I will judge from the ivory tower of a Regular Slipper.

Most importantly, I will not allow anyone to psychologize the Croc problem. Its nature is not psychological. It resides in spiritual realm, which is to say: aesthetic realm, the sacred domain. The Croc will become the ultimate emotional subject of conversation. My whole existence will depend on it.

I am being sincere now. Can you relate more? Okay, I am being sincere NOW.
It is tempting to create a space for others to project or identify. Or should one follow the guidance of Pedro Costa’s manifesto18 - to leave the door half open, half closed, for the reader to wonder? What is the point of alienating the audience in a world where alienation already hums softly in the background? Does it help? Does it harm? A good luck or bad luck, who knows?

I will stay wrapped up warm in my cocoon of fiction, and think.

The ‘Leo Rising’

I’m on a train from Berlin to Warsaw. The train is delayed by 1 hour and 31 minutes and has no electricity due to a technical error. Through the window I see an insult for “Magdalena S.” scrawled across a fence in thick white paint, a slur so obscure and convoluted in local slang that “Magdalena S.” feels more like a figure shrouded in mystery than like an offended subject. I wish I could have a cup of coffee, but they can’t even put on a kettle.

Living in the 2020s comes with endless surprises. Never would I have imagined I’d watch and actually like a dystopian sci-fi show directed by Derek Zoolander.
Never would I have guessed that the figure of the Fool could be reclaimed as a political tool of becoming-vulnerable, or that “clown work” would become a serious literary term. I read a book on ‘foolishness’ by Johanna Skibsrud, where she says:

“To be a fool is to invent feet for language in order to trip over them.”

and

“To kill joy is to open a life.”19

These lines stay with me. I think about how every ideology constructs a libidinal infrastructure and rewards for participation, and I think of the horror of being a killjoy, that is the one who disturbs the comfort of collective momentum.

I think of what ChatGPT said about my zodiac big three combo in relation to post-ironic condition:

A desire to feel sincerely (Cancer Sun),
a need to perform identity (Leo Rising),
and a haunting awareness that it might all be artificial (Aquarius moon).

It's like autofiction in astrological form.

I might just be fucked. I can only offer my subjectivity to those who wonder. You’ll understand. Blessed or cursed with introspection, I keep wondering how to go about my days with minimal authenticity. To live with great power of tour de force, or to retreat into the ivory tower contempt for shoes, trends or whatever, and write blog posts into oblivion.

For now, I will descend the steps of my solitude into the village, find the biggest yapper, sit them down at a café, and ‘look with all my eyes, look!’20 at raw life itself, unfolding in speech.

From the depths of the infostructure emerges an image: a girl wearing a necklace of needle-like steel spikes wrapped around her throat. The post is captioned with a tutorial on how to wear the necklace safely, that is, without piercing your arteries.

I remember the exact moment I wanted to attempt theorizing the revival of medieval aesthetics. It was the fall of 2022; I was at my grandpa’s house in the countryside, sitting by the fireplace and reading The Coming of Neo-Feudalism by Joel Kotkin—a book I had mistakenly double-ordered online (from Amazon). The air was cold and crisp, the sky quiet and full of stars—one night, they aligned in a perfectly straight line and freaked the fuck out of me.

There was I, unwittingly staring at a Starlink battery slowly cutting through the sky, suddenly reminded of how far I am from those who wield power, the tech monarchs - a pauper in contrast, a simpleton from Eastern Europe, trying to keep warm by the fire. The book “hit hard”, like a family intervention. The ugly patterns resurfaced.

Its premise is rooted in an economic analysis of how today’s societal structure in the West—primarily in the U.S.—increasingly mirrors that of medieval Europe. Kotkin identifies three emerging classes that parallel feudal society:

The Tech Oligarchs – a small group of billionaires wielding immense wealth and power. The Clerisy – academics and media professionals who shape narratives and policies. The New Serfs – the downwardly mobile middle class, precariously struggling with stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, and limited opportunities.

These reflect the concentration of wealth and land ownership becoming a tightening circle, contracting around fewer and fewer hands. Wealth is becoming more inheritable than earned. Even the seemingly accessible educational path, the rise to Clerisy - at least in Europe - is a mix of luck, wealth, charisma, connections, and identity, all of which slowly elevate a person into an icon of contemporary discourse. Most of us lack one or more of these. Most of us are doomed to a precarious life.

And then the plague comes—a grotesquely medieval symptom. The early 2020s, during Covid, were not about slowing down and reconnecting with the local; they were about the loss of innocence and decline of the political drive. The Great Reset conspiracy posited a political and economic restructuring of the world, but more than that, it was a normative restructuring, forcing a reevaluation of our place in locality and what we do about it. The pandemic, in its suddenness, threw us into a fever dream of lockdown, whether it was family time-out-of-time or getting hammered with your besties; that suddenness still lingers, its psychological and cultural effects wavering between too obvious to mention and too early to tell. The fever dream lasted a solid three months. We woke up confused and horny.

Most vegetarians I knew started eating meat during or shortly after Covid. I no longer see people ashamed of buying bottled water, disposable vapes, or clothes from Temu. Zillennials want kids again. The ecological anxiety over 2050—the slow, creeping fear of planetary collapse—was replaced by something else, by an ex nihilo disaster. The distant specter of generational ruin was overtaken by the immediate terror of sudden death.

The Aesthetics of Neo-Decadence

It is impossible to theorize a historical moment while living through it, but it is always possible to look around and complain. The winter is too cold, the summer is too hot. A sweet lyre melody drifts through the air as Rome burns, too sweet. The invisible hand turns down the stove, reduces the fire to a simmer, and the Rome-pot cooks slowly with a heap of Roman frogs inside.

The Spectacle is reaching self-consciousness, settling into a post-Fisherian acceptance of the realism of the end times, the death of political imagination. There is no more thinking to be done—only restless observation as global politics unfold within a system designed to elevate sociopaths to tech-moguls. Unless, of course, you take action into your own hands, driven by a brilliant idea. But you have so much to lose!

Singular acts of strong, political action explode like a gunshot in a cathedral—brief, deafening, then swallowed by the corners and spandrels of a fragmented news cycle. And from this quietness a new form of decadence grows—suspended between celebration and mourning, marinated in the lack of agency and the beauty of endless consumption.

It’s anti-apocalyptic, in a way. Things will continue, and continue, and continue. You’ll never have the satisfaction of a cleansing end of days. Ugliness, stupidity, grotesque cliches, commercial sentimentality: all of them will keep being rewarded, as they always have been. Things will just keep getting dirtier, so you might as well enjoy it; even find a genius in enjoying it.1

The call to enjoy and a Coca Cola bottle. And the girl you fell in love with and the nice clothes you bought. And a new tattoo that healed badly but it doesn’t matter.

We could ask why everything became so cute and why everything became so spiky at the same time. Viewing Covid as a brief extinction scare, we can see two parallel ways of dealing with trauma. One embraces fun, cute, and colorful energy after an extended period of isolation2. The other taps into the hyperreality of the dark, obscure, occult, and violent. Visually, it’s the choice between round and spiky, between friendly and aggressive. In accessories, it’s choosing between Sanrio characters or a raw steel thorned heart, between fluffy Kirby and a necklace you really wouldn’t want to trip on the stairs in. I know people who mix both, maybe because they contain multitudes, or maybe because they’re just stylistically confused.

Both are ways of coping, and both are ways of being—whether by embracing life or embracing death, by appearing approachable or untouchable, by choosing to be the nice guy or the bad boy. Since 2020, culture has progressively exposed us to more and more cringe—whether in the silliness of TikTok or in performative political engagement. Some chose to escape the goofy domain of showmanship for an apparitional stoicism, for going anti-Camp.

The visual trajectory of Drain Gang’s Bladee in recent years follows a progression from cute and silly into dark, with undertones of godposting. The same with Playboi Carti’s evolution from hypebeast to a rockstar to a mysterious, detached vampyr cloaked in black folds, both sprouting a wave of fan followers. The kids will follow and eventually be alright. What’s interesting is the wave of a recent shift from cuteness to darkness in the performative creation of self—and the lifestyle it entails. And whether we can speak of a new aesthetic emerging alongside the custom tattoo boom.

The Dandy

All of the mentioned above can be placed as the aftermath of the infamous vibe shift3 of 2022, a subject too overdone to mention in depth, which signalled the introduction of indie sleaze and the slow decline of millenials’ dominance in culture. Y2K can be endlessly replayed in fashion, but something deeper is growing beneath the surface - the rise of hyper-individualism, brought on by post-Covid trauma, that has created a desperate need for self-expression in a society that no longer ‘works’ for you.

There is a figure that has historically risen during the end times. The Dandy, originally just a well-dressed man, has been conceptualized more broadly as a lifestyle choice synonymous with decadence and the fetishization of surface. A Dandy is a mix of gentlemanly, rebellious, androgynous, aristocratically pretentious, theatrical and meticulously styled. A pursuit of wit, pleasure, and extravagance. Think Salvador Dalí, but also think Lil Uzi Vert.

A Dandy doesn’t have to be a clinical narcissist, but must possess narcissistic traits—just as anyone participating in the specular circulation of images does. The prophecies of Christopher Lasch have fulfilled themselves in the modern age, where both your real life and internet persona become commodities in the social market—an arena for the presentation of self in everyday life. Which means that, unless your ambitions remain confined to a cozy corporate job, a tight-knit group of childhood friends, and a single-digit body count, you’ll likely have to market your image in the digital world.

Independence makes the Dandy. […] Dandyism achieves charisma by the codification of costume and taste, the cultivation of habits of speech reflective of continence and power, and, in many cases, the suggestions of a queer substrate to masculine performance.4

Dandy is the appearance of aristocracy despite middle-class background, the ‘medium is the message’ embodied, a mix of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The prerequisite for a traditional dandy is a certain level of popularity, however modest, a base of onlookers, a vivid social life, and a creative practice. For the dandy-socialite, the challenge lies in navigating a dialectical path between the two.

You cannot maintain two destinies, that of the fool or the intemperate and that of the wise and the temperate. You cannot keep up a nightlife and amount to anything in the day. You cannot indulge in those foods and liquors that destroy the physique and still hope to have a physique that functions with the minimum of destruction to itself. A candle burnt at both ends may shed a brighter light, but the darkness that follows is for a longer time.5

The dandizettes like Coco Chanel, George Sand, or Tilda Swinton write their own stories the way they would write their characters. As Len Gutkin puts it, dandyism is not possessive but identificatory. You don’t want to own the protagonist of your daydreams—you want to be them. Today, we would call it main character syndrome.

The dandy emerges wherever economic and cultural conditions allow for both joy in consumption and the freedom to shape one’s own identity, the freedom of cultural experimentation, degree of decadence and a retreat from the political. Inb4: All times are political, but some are more locally peaceful. We speak of German dandies in the 1920s, and then only in the 1990s. The real measure is one of magnitude—to what extent, with the quiet approval of society, can you fearlessly develop a persona synonymous with your aesthetic ideals?

Dandies could have been hipsters, twee girls, or McBling glamour chicks, fully embodying their cultural moment. They are all a part of the dominant social class, as it is expensive to live a fully dandiacal life. Yet they emerge only when there is enough self-consciousness to critically examine the society they live in and opt out of the status quo, turning their lives into an art form, a meticulously curated self.

We are living in an era of neo-decadence, manifesting as an appreciation for the beauty of consumption and performance—both intrinsic to neoliberalism or its technofeudal mutations. This attitude is indefensible on moral grounds, yet so many of us embrace it. I cannot blame anyone for giving up on changing the world. I also cannot fully admire those who truly attempt it.

The shift in consciousness that Covid inflicted is a mix of a “too big to fail” understanding of the substructure with complete immersion in the superstructure. We speak of ‘vibes‘ and ‘memes‘ instead of facts and opinions6. It has resulted in a feeling of alienation—old as the sun itself, scorching the soil of the first feudal field.

It seems like everything is falling apart as we look from the past to the future. […] The solution to our discouraging present feels out of reach […].7

What a dandy does is ‘take that alienation and turn it into a badge of style and honor’. Before Covid, an educational barrier—the factor of cultural capital, to invoke the immortal Bourdieu—separated academia from the flamboyant lifestyle of the dandy. There was a deep-rooted disdain for luxury brands and for an apolitical, nonchalant lifestyle defined by overconsumption and its environmental consequences. That separation was normative, resulting in contempt for excessive indulgence as reckless, a sign of complicity in a system destined to collapse.

Over Covid, this slowly changed, shifted into a more ethically promiscuous narrative. Display was once again coronated, accelerated by the warp-speed of social media. The disillusionment brought on by the pandemic created a fertile ground for a contemporary, mutated type of dandy to emerge, a figure submerged in a fantasy world of their own. The resurgence of massive Y2K nostalgia marks not just a return to its aesthetics, but to its innocence—a longing for a world that never truly existed. Dandyism, in this context, is a trauma response to Covid, but also a shift from morality to aesthetics in the pressure to signal your virtue.

New archetypes and aesthetic trends surface daily, but all of them tap into a deeper social need—one that dandyism, I believe, represents as a whole. The dandy is not someone who simply goes out—they make an appearance. Fashion, mannerisms, and the way of being take precedence, whether in real life or through the carefully constructed presence of an Instagram feed.

At its core, dandyism is an intrinsic need to be a star—to steal the spotlight, even within a niche, alternative group. It has to stem from a degree of popularity, a wide spectrum of influencership, even if you aesthetically rule a small kingdom of your village. In an era so deeply fixated on self-presentation, accelerated and fossilized by social media, to speak of the dandy becomes increasingly accurate.

If living through fin de siècle has become the status quo, then the classic dandy inevitably undergoes transformation. Just as with the division between cute and obscure, there is a spectrum of desired effects embodied by the dandy. Some abandon innocence and joy entirely. They reach for the dark, the harsh and the austere—but indulge in godposting and religious themes. They quiet down. They space out. The detachment is no longer playful, because there is nothing to celebrate. Parties and people become exhausting. The new task is to focus on life’s simple aspects. The dandy turns dark and solemn on the surface, losing their wit and flamboyance in favor of the most stoic ambition—the pursuit of a humble life.

Yet these ambitions clash with the dandiacal need to impress. Out of this tension arises a distinction—not just between joyful and sorrowful neo-decadence, but between their aesthetic implications.

Joyful neo-decadence revels in consumption, embracing the eerie beauty of capitalism and the silliness and playfulness in self-creation.

Sorrowful neo-decadence severs ties with sincere market participation, favoring privacy, mystery, and introversion in its engagement with the audience.

If there is an internal struggle, it is no longer the one Coco Chanel spoke of. It is no longer about how to live freely - but about how to find space for humility within a life of formal excess. This struggle weighs heaviest on those most tormented by the COVID scare.

The Sad Dandy

Being a doomer is a temporary state of mind, not a lifestyle choice. The aesthetics of “I need a lobotomy” are not sustainable in the long run. If tortured souls have undergone cultural therapy, it has been guided by their relationship to knowledge. The aesthetic progression from doomerism leads either toward dark academia-adjacent aesthetics or toward a darker, sadder dandyism. The difference lies in the domain of meaning and the meta-perspective on its transmission.

Dark academia and its branches find solace in learning and refuge in beauty and wisdom created introspectively. The relationship with art is one of perception, of looking at it. Dandies, on the other hand, do not want to look, nor do they want to be seen looking—hence the frequent use of shades. They want to be looked at. Theirs is a lifestyle elevated to an art piece. If academia is the walking curatorial text, the dandy is the artwork itself. Sad dandyism mirrors classic dandyism in its response to the loss of meaning, both being rooted in decadence, but it appreciates that decadence in a quiet way. It is mute. Their refusal to speak is not just a personal crisis but a rejection of the Symbolic Order i.e the modern over-expressiveness. Think Elisabet from Persona (1966).

If the happy, contemporary dandy is silly-coded and cringe, the sad dandy cuts off all connections to it. The energy of cocaine versus the energy of weed. Their sadness is not only rooted in alienation but also in the aloof aesthetics of sadness itself. Yung Lean, originator of the Sad Boys crew, declares that “the party is over” in a recent interview. He reminisces on his sobriety, seeking God and calls for the romanticization of life’s small moments. According to the neo-decadence movement, beneath the surface aloofness—the aesthetics of unapproachability—there lies a kind of hopecore. It is the ideology of the one boo, no ex T-shirt. As influential zillennials approach their 30s, they grow into an appreciation for the mundane and wholesome—the lifestyle of the downwardly mobile middle class.

Respectively, the middle-class origins of dandyism reflect (or are reflected in) its relationship to political engagement. What unites both types of dandies—just as cute and dark aesthetics coexisted simultaneously—is a shared disillusionment with politics and activism. Middle-class academia feels the moral urge to remain tapped into both political and cultural discourse; Dandyism, by contrast, retracts from that realm in favor of persona mastery. Politics remain irrelevant unless they obstruct rampant individualism and freedom of expression, which are currently more than encouraged by the status quo.

The body of a dandy must be a king of the kingdom of one, looking good with or without robes. Sad Dandy aesthetics are a part of massive boom in the tattoo culture. Fashion accessories extend beyond fabric, reaching the skin itself. The body is decorated, with or without garments. The end times are worn like a sleeve. Trauma becomes inscribed on flesh. The loss of meaning is not due to its unimportance, but because it obstructs form. And what form communicates is that nothing matters. There is nothing to say. Even if spoken aloud, meaning remains elusive because 1. it is private and 2. it is part of an image, which mirrors the dilemma of whether one truly believes in the sincerity of godposting.

There are multiple ways to interpret today’s youth lavishly investing in tattoos, endlessly layering them on top of one another. A psychological reading might suggest that the pain of tattooing serves as a means of processing internally stored traumas. In a way, tattoos are a safely inflicted self-harm, mediated through a third party—eventually blooming into the decoration of one’s flesh prison.

The body becomes synecdochic for the social system. 8

The other reading may be rooted in material reality. According to Joel Kotkin, not only is upward mobility increasingly constrained, but the acquisition of land and property is slipping out of reach. Another symptom of neo-decadence is the piggy bank shattered each month, snack culture at its finest. Too poor to buy property, too impatient to save, neo-feudal times offer solace in new clothes and new tattoos.

Certain tattooers take the path sad dandyism to an extreme. You book them through DMs, show up for the appointment. The tattooer is late. Needs to finish a cigarette. The design is found on Pinterest or crudely drawn. The work is done poorly, nonchalantly, with minimal hygiene. No aftercare. No attention to healing. No attention to detail. The finished tattoo is photographed badly and posted without a caption. It is middle finger to everything the industry once respected; punk gesture within an already punk community. Above all, it is an honest middle finger to a lifestyle of caring.

Both client and tattooer enter an exchange rooted in “whatever”—where, for a significant sum, you receive a poorly done tattoo that will fade in five years. This is the most lavish display of decadence possible. For dandies and their clients, appreciation is found solely in form—this is why fashion, luxury brands, and music seamlessly cross over with such a lifestyle. Clients admire the freedom made possible by hacking the system—off-the-radar cash transactions enabling travel, work, and a life unrestricted by traditional labor.

But this is only one side of the new wave of tattoers. The other is the sketch-like, experimental quality of the original drawings, which I actually consider amazing—something that classical tattoo culture had little space for. The shift of power and trust moves from client to tattooer, allowing for the sanctity of the body to be violated in the most expressive manner. If there is a biological concept that explains this, it must be the costly signal—a display of excess, wastefulness, and indifference meant to communicate status.

The sad dandy, part misanthrope, curates their appearance meticulously—yet chooses to communicate it through the signification of inaccessibility, distance, and detachment. The curse of the 2020s is knowing too much. Every gesture is judged, analyzed, read into—an ancient process of identity formation through borrowing, adjusting, internalizing, now accelerated. Quietness and detachment serve as both self-preservation and defense against the parasocial relationships waiting to form around you. To be a popular tattooer today, particularly in dandiacal circles, is to travel constantly, tattooing musicians and models as their private, secret provider. The mystery of the sad dandy is a protective shell against the dangers of sudden popularity in an unpredictable economy.

Distance also shields you from the emotional impact of your work being mistaken for someone else’s. This is especially common in the world of ‘research tattoos’—another subgenre of gothic, medieval, Pinterest tattooing, where designs are assemblages of various images pulled from the depths of the internet. To survive, you must develop a portion of your soul into a scammer—something your clients won’t mind. If anything, they’re equally eager to be scammed.

In the last four years, I’ve witnessed the rise of the generation of Kids With Guns —zoomers armed with an iPad, a Pen, and a Stencil printer (IPS for short), capable of tattooing anything they find online with minimal cost and minimal creativity. They are products of both skin-deep dandyism and the shrinking financial entry barrier into the tattoo industry. A good pen gun costs no more than $100. The chemicals and inks to tattoo moderately safely at home another $300. The bodies to practice on are free—tattoo-hungry friends always willing to lend their flesh.

And for dandylettes in their early 20s, there’s simply a lack of alternatives to make pocket money in a fun way. If you are already busy studying, why would you spend the whole day babysitting a brat for an hourly rate five to eight times lower than spending a chill afternoon at the studio, tattooing like-minded people?

"Tattoos are not forever," someone said to me during a session this year. They meant the endless possibility of blasting over them. A mind accustomed to excess will never know when to stop—because it doesn’t want to stop. The poetics of endless inscription seem not just like a contemporary addiction, but a perpetual curse.

As a tattooer, I cannot complain. The work has never been better.

The Endless Inscription

We’ve tried perfection, we’ve tried joy and now we’re embracing something more goth, more arcane.9

The social decay of perpetual end times naturally leads to aesthetics of austerity, marking a return to the Medieval and the Gothic. Cybersigilism, tribals, obscure medieval and gothic Pinterest finds all represent different variations of austerity in appearance. The key difference is shyness—small, ornamental, closed compositions versus large, open, crude sketches.

The fine-lined style is a response to the bulky, sticker-like tattoos of the past. Cybersigils, in particular, allow designs to stretch across large portions of the body, adjusting fluidly to the motion of a limb. They are meant to be built upon, layered over time. The quality of being unfinished is not just accepted, it is desired.

The sketch-like quality of the broadly understood fineline gothic —the most contemporary wave in tattooing—is a deliberate withdrawal from traditionally accepted notions of beauty. It is a design choice that exists in direct opposition to what your parents would have gotten in the '80s.

Symmetry and perfection are easily sacrificed for quick effect, for the beauty found in sultry crudeness of the design, the process, and even its documentation. The photos of girls, in turn, are curated into thirst traps for likes. Male bodies appear somber and tortured, sculpted into suffering. The hypermasculine and hyperfeminine qualities evoke images of a fallen crusader and a succubus superpredator, respectively.

The letters squeeze, tighten, and elongate into cathedrals, becoming unreadable. Their shapes grow spiky, wispy and hostile. The image loses its boundaries and fixed space, layering itself into oblivion. Meaning becomes obscured. The process of inscription never ends; it loops endlessly in a psychotic cycle of answers without questions. Form stretches over substance, casting a somber shadow. The image is temporal, fading by design. The decision to abandon the process was made both too soon and it was made too late.10

Going for the neo-gothic is an act of aesthetic rebellion against societal norms - the stigma, the employers, you parents opinion - as any subversiveness of Butler’s parody was back in the day.

If the sad dandy is to be placed within a tradition of thought, they would be Nietzschean. The Dionysian disruption, where he sees the potential of liberating a subject oppressed by institutions of power—such as family, academia, or the workplace — is to revolt against a signification process inscribed on the body by initiating a process of inscription oneself. The control over the body is taken back through putting money into a never-ending layering of meaningless forms, disappearing under each other, fading away with time, turning into a dandiacal impression of a lavish investment. What remains Dionysian is the mechanics of indulgence, but the revolutionary potential is gone. The neo-feudal system is fueled by self-love individual expression and can only be changed by sacrifice, which no one, will small exceptions, is willing to do. Endless layering in the affirmation of the self is the same narcissistic trap which Lasch has seen in the hippie movement.

Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in . . .11

If the dandy were to be situated within a 20th-century aesthetic, it would align with that of the yuppie. The yuppie lifestyle, as fleeting as the Reagan Bull Market, marked a shift from an “aesthetic of externality” to a postmodern aesthetic of surfaces—an absolute fetishization of commodity, where commodification itself became a personal fetish.

Lee Gutkin also traces corresponding figures within 21st-century aesthetics. He publishes a book about dandyism in February 2020—right at the onset of the pandemic and concludes his historical study by turning to the contemporary, analyzing 10:04 by Ben Lerner and the figure of the "intellectualized hipster" portrayed in the novel:

The hipster is the cultural figure of the person, very possibly, who now understands consumer purchases within the familiar categories of mass consumption . . . like the right vintage T-shirt, the right jeans, the right foods for that matter—to be a form of art.12

Yet by the time he published the book in 2020, hipsterdom was already fading. No one was dressing like that anymore, and the term itself had been absorbed into everyday boomer vernacular, stripping it of its discursive relevance. Linking the hipster to the dandy was a means of illustrating -

dandy’s immaculate self-consciousness and disdain for sentimental effusions is perfectly attuned to the scholarly zeitgeist, allowing the critic to carve out a skeptical distance from the mainstream.13

The protagonist of 10:04 is labeled a hipster, but he could just as easily be called an overly intellectualized millennial, embodying the anxieties, tastes, and drives of his generation. Hipsters and dandies alike are subcultural members of the ruling class—this holds for both the happy and the sad dandy. Even if self-employed, their livelihood depends on social media popularity, making them a micro-nobility in the technofeudal infostructure. You might build a big enough following based on how creatively alternative you are, but, my God, you still work for Instagram.

The Epic Collage

There are shadows of cathedrals leaping across the backs of our decadent youth. The cathedrals are plentiful, their shadows overlapping into an endless collage, strokes layered like the marks of a whip on a martyr.

If there is a music genre of the end times, it is epic collage. Living in the perpetuity of a never-arriving collapse opens up space for endless layering. The remix culture reaches its peak in times that surpass subcultures, weaving aesthetics into a fluid interplay. This is the meta-part of the dandy—the par-excellence aesthete with a praxis.

In music, the endless layering of samples and genre-mixing originates in musique concrète and dub; today, it flourishes in a generation of young SoundCloud producers, crafting edits of insane creativity and sensitivity—more compelling than many original productions. Most of these tracks recontextualize pop and trap vocals, placing them over ambient, trance, or a mosaic of global drum patterns, taking the listener on an emotional, introspective journey.

Adam Harper, the critic who coined epic collage, closes his book by praising Burial for reaching “a level of subtlety and sophistication that transcends rave functionality and rewards close, thoughtful listening.”14 Alongside Mark Fisher, he indulges in endless praise of Burial’s ability to distill 90s rave ecstasy into modern sadness and nostalgia. The same nostalgia that once captivated Gen X critics is now resurfacing on SoundCloud as a (questionable) offspring of a single underground musician.

In 2014, Harper publishes System Focus: Adam Harper on the Divine Surrealism of Epic Collage Producers E+E, Total Freedom, and Diamond Black Hearted Boy, where he describes his epiphany upon discovering the music of Elysia Crampton—your favorite producer’s favorite producer. Elysia (now Chuquimamani-Condori) was among the first to blend the obscure and experimental with tender melodies of pop vocals into an ethereal realm of feeling just a little bit lost in life. Likewise, their blend of Frutiger Aero, native symbolism, and the tacky DJ graphics of the early internet saw a visual resurgence a decade later. Their deep cultural and emotional dedication left a signature on the grotesque excess of postmodern sampling, creating a new form of jouissance—one of feeling blue through a maximalist soundscape. The same love for rich textures can be found in contemporary producers like Hayden Kolb, Julek Ploski, Monker 178 or MASSI.

From this, we get epic collage—a genre that exists somewhere in post-irony, post-postmodernity, metamodernity, New Sincerity (or whatever name fits). The music says congratulations on being tapped in, but have you found love? It touches on romantic melancholy, infusing it with modern chaos and sonic insanity, extracting from the listener a deep sadness they didn’t even realize they had stored within.

The music to cry and dance to.

There are too many producers elevating pop vocals into club ethereal to name them all; one of them is Chickenmilk Dot Com, whose love for abundance of life runs deep through his music. His Elysian SFX are replaced by a highly rapid shifts in vocal samples and drum patterns—tracks that feel unpredictable, patchworked in a mysterious way. Melodies get chopped and screwed just when you start enjoying them too much. The love for pop vocals looming ambiently in the background must come from accessing the Divine Feminine—there’s no other explanation. I know for a fact that producers of this genre know all about Zodiac signs.

If there’s music that represents a scattered brain but a focused gaze, this must be it. Having befriended both Elly and Chicken, I can only say that beauty shines from a tender and curious heart, like diamonds in the sky.

Epic collage allows one to access a nostalgia for a past that never existed, or to experience the intensity of the end of the world with the brain accelerated to supersonic speed. The same speed that Baudrillard wrote about. The speed that “creates pure objects”—where the logic of desire collapses, because speed itself becomes a drive, annihilating longing in favor of movement for its own sake. These pure objects become “impossible objects” like music, which "has its own integrity, its own logic, its own history," as Harper puts it— as something to be experienced, not analyzed. The dandy cherishes this speed, because their persona is never complete, desire never fulfilled. The body is never sufficiently filled with tattoos, inexhaustible decorations.

The goddess basking in the moonlight at a secluded lake is not to be approached—not even admired from afar. The politics of dandyism are reclusive by nature, because every day, week, or month, the persona must be reinvented in private. The dandy is meant to be experienced, and the medium is the gaze. The dandy knows when they are being looked at—and in precisely what way the gaze is placed upon them.

The Death of the Dandy

In the final section of his book, Lee Gutkin describes the conditions of the 2020s that led to the emergence of both the happy and sad dandy:

One can imagine some version of post-irony that would permit a full-throated return to a confident aestheticism, an unabashed neo art for art’s sake.

He is not wrong in his materialist reading of post-irony; the post-Covid 2020s have produced a self-consciousness that, a decade prior, would have seemed like a “crack in the wholeness of [the dandy’s] nature”. Yet, over time, this self-consciousness has transformed into a circumstantial awareness—about politics, the status quo, the mechanics of the gaze, and the libidinal economy of becoming an icon. The dandy is fluent in culture.

The dandy exists as both a cultural and material phenomenon. The material prerequisite for dandyism is the living conditions that allow for the accumulation of goods, facilitating the endless remixing of self-creation—whether those goods are material or cultural.If there is one thing a dandy fears, it is the perishable cultural good—an entity that is rare, almost extinct in today’s world.

One of the cultural goods designed to be perishable was Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)—a 1992 collection of poems by William Gibson and Daniel Ashbaugh, released in both physical and digital formats. Its premise was that, upon exposure, the disk would overwrite itself, while the text in the book, printed on photosensitive material, would slowly begin to disappear. The slow disappearance, the loss of relevance is the dandy’s biggest fear.

Gutkin concludes his treatise on dandyism with his reading of the protagonist of 10:04 choosing to procreate in the face of the loss of meaning and the fear it invokes. For him, this ultimately anti-dandiacal act is the result of someone

disillusioned with disillusionment, aesthete who has become unsure about aestheticism. I am tempted to suggest that this uncertainty is the dandy’s terminus.

There comes a moment in life when everything has been lived through—all the weed has been smoked, all the sex has been had and the people met. When you have cycled through every aesthetic persona you ever imagined, when you have become Fernando Pessoa,—

I've dreamed of everything. There isn’t a single desire, no matter how strange or improbable, that I haven’t had – no, not one. […] All these lives I’ve lived in myself, with no need of gestures – without anything but the inner emotion of having lived them.15

But to be brave enough to face that in real life; then comes the absolute fear, the realization that you are perishable too, that the impressions you’ve made, the personas you’ve crafted, the aesthetics you’ve embodied—are all feeble in memory and will eventually fade.

The only solace is found in creation. And at the top of all creative acts, one old, conservative truth stands above all others—raising a child. A little copy of yourself who will relive you, who will, hopefully, stand by your bedside at the right moment, far in the future. I know only one tattooer and one tattoo couple who are raising a baby —a sweet, little Aloise. Shortly after the baby was born, they released T-shirts reading “RIP Lifestyle”—a tribute to their old studio, mistakenly taken as a farewell to their adventurous life.

Every death is a transformation—that is what the XIII Tarot card teaches us. There are no guillotines today, no emperor’s and empress’s heads lying at Death’s feet, but there is always the birth of new life—and the rebirth of the self, emerging from the reflection on who you are and how to live in harmony with others.

In back beat time I understand now
The joker and the ace and how to play my hand now
So when the lion doth roar I creep on by
And make another copy of the key to the sky16

There are no judgments to be made about either the happy dandy, the party socialite, or the sad dandy, the solitary figure retreating into the mundane. They do nothing but mirror the contemporary cope. But beyond them, there exists something greater—a good, old-fashioned selflessness, the ancient, almost forgotten way of wholly sacrificing oneself to a cause, bringing the end of the dandy and the end of individualism at large. A future I’d truly love for us to romanticize.

At that point, the culture will override itself, all the vibes will shift into one key-shaped force flinging open Heaven’s gate, through which an angel will push out a massive guillotine, adorned in gold, bearing the name Totaled Angelica, and the dandiacal heads will roll on the floor and the headless bodies will grab hands and dance among them to the music of excess, proudly wearing their 1993 Nike Decades.

Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn't take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try […]1

I had planned to try to write a review of Babyxsosa’s review of Spider-Man (2002)2 for a good while—until this morning, when I noticed, to my horror, that the review had disappeared, the screen went to “Page not found,” and the subject of my post was gone, potentially forever; I hadn’t been farsighted enough to even imagine the review going missing, and I had prepared in vain, that is, I had watched Spider-Man (2002) in one attentive run a few days prior.

This sudden disappearance almost made me write a somber post titled Memory of the Archive or The Half-Life of Microblogs, or something with the word liminal in the title. I have to offer flowers and sweets to a god who spared me.

All the posts came back a week later, updated with new entries. The review reappeared, and I was relieved. Nonetheless, I had to make peace with being duped. I had turned dunce, stressing over content lost forever, a scare as old as libraries ablaze. I thought of a network of circuits catching fire, the insulation melting away, and the high temperature soldering all the circuits into one thick cord. The infostructure, a single, million-lane highway. I thought of gummy bears melting into one blob of a bear in the afternoon sun.

I was excited to see the posts again because I love Babyxsosa’s blog. I love the simplicity of it. I love the idea of it. There is a sweet spot for purity in culture—the triad of purity, authenticity, and innocence so often fetishized. We look for a Daniel Johnston to remind us that art comes from the heart, not the brain-wallet circuit. Some, like David Lynch, adore this innocence so much that they write all their characters into Daniel Johnstons. The value of cultural purity comes from a retroactive reading of the intentions of an artist, that the process would have happened in private, even if it were never made public. That there would be songs written and sung, no matter if anyone was listening.

Babyxsosa’s blog has the essence of purity-

Babyxsosa’s blog has a certain raw sincerity: half of its posts are personal and intimate in a way reminiscent of the early blogosphere, where you didn’t have much traffic on your page simply because 1. there weren’t as many people on the Internet, and 2. you were 11 and had, like, two friends. Whether the blog is a curated recreation of this era, a convoluted ad-space for watches and beauty products, a form of merch-and-song-pitch, a private diary of life’s simple pleasures made public, or all of the above—doesn’t really matter, because the idea of it is so pure and gentle that the rest can be forgiven.

The beauty of a concept… Some ideas are aesthetically superior to others. There are no aesthetic judgments in popular, conceptual discourse. The discussion is always pragmatic: Is the idea illustrated properly, vividly? I believe that Kant’s division of ideas into aesthetic and rational categories begs for a super-aesthetic criterion, a measure of beauty applied to ideas of beauty themselves, but also ideas in general. Applying rational ideas to aesthetic ideas is the act of forming interpretation.
Using rational ideas to talk about rational ideas is a debate.
Using aesthetic ideas to talk about aesthetic ideas is poetry, or having an ‘impression.’
Applying aesthetic ideas to rational ideas, then, would introduce a sort of meta-criterion for concepts, for example, the question of overall ‘purity’ again—what matters here is completeness, simplicity, and resonance, essentially the famous razor applied to the tortured domains of the humanities. This could ultimately be summarized as an opposition to ornamentation in the realm of ideas. There surely is beauty at the opposite end of the spectrum—for instance, in absolute complexity, which I adore consuming—but at the core of any tornado, there is a peaceful, quiet eye, and that is the sacred kernel of the story.

Consider this idea:

The novel follows IRS office workers in Peoria who want to modernize their bureaucracy by introducing computers, while another faction within the agency secretly recruits individuals with supernatural abilities to increase efficiency and prevent layoffs.3

Or this one:

The powerful aristocrat Jerónimo tries to father a perfect heir but, when his son is born deformed, he hides him in his estate, surrounding him with equally deformed servants to create an illusion of normalcy.

The first one is the plot of The Pale King by DFW, an unfinished novel, taken from his posthumously attached notes. The second is one of the storylines in The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso. Both ideas are beautiful, and the beauty is in my (beholder’s) eye. What I see is the pure modus operandi of artistic, conceptual thinking that they have in common: realizing a problem and undergoing a journey to find a solution that borders on fantasy, or on out-of-the-ordinary. The method of Sophie Calle. And the solution found is rooted in oddly pragmatic thinking, containing the supernatural element within the confines of the mundane. These ideas walk the fine line between reality and fantasy in an unpretentious way; they do not multiply worlds by introducing magic, but allow the reader to step outside the confines of the material. I do have a sweet spot for this, and it speaks to me deeply.

Another important criterion is the impact of an idea, its effect—also the most subjective one—which sparks a glimmer in the eye, renders one speechless, and leaves behind pure admiration and respect; or, like a kōan, leads to a suspension of thought and logic, which, in essence, marks a return to the lobby of a pre-linguistic realm, where nothing makes sense because there is no use for sense. From there, someone else, full of uncertainty, would once again reach for the rational, for opinions, reviews, descriptions, and internalized knowledge. But I say: cherish these moments, respect the mystery.

There is not much to say about the content of Babyxsosa’s review because her post is an aesthetic idea, and I do not wish to rationalize it. Instead of a review, I can provide an impression:

Spider-Man (2002)

The opening sequences pulled me back into teenage angst—the torment of navigating a vast sea with no compass and a thousand lighthouses. A sudden thought pierces my brain like a spade, and I realize: maybe there’s no better time to write a review than while reminiscing about my loserdom, for reasons parallel in shape and size.

I was a loser in middle school and for the first four months of high school, until I got a popular girlfriend. “I know how it feels”. I understand the urge to propel your gloop all over Manhattan. I would have donned a fool’s plumage and taken to the skies if it secured the female gaze.4

The Arachnid Puissance

Like most superhero movies, Spider-Man follows the ‘hero’s journey,’ sailing through the collective unconscious on the ocean of desire. The film opens with a voice telling us that this isn’t his story—it’s about a girl. A girl whom he literally chases after in the very first scene. Mary Jane is desire embodied. Throughout the film, she is persistently emotionally engaged with someone who possesses the traits Peter lacks, whether it’s a jock or a millionaire. She never chases anyone because she is a Platonic symbol, and symbols are eternal and immobile5.

As a symbol, she is

bound by love into one single volume,
That which is scattered throughout the universe.6

She is the unbidden beacon of the romantic gaze, a damsel in distress. A 2K1 diva. Abused at home, she needs a protector. It is safe to say that Mary Jane is drawn to confidence and power; Peter Parker is passive and weak, a loser.

When Peter accidentally shoots out his gloop in school, it is met with disgust, or ‘abject.’ When he does so as Spider-Man, it is recontextualized as an extension of his heroism. The same applies to his use of violence. The issue is not simply about having or lacking power—the issue is Peter Parker himself. He could never be Spider-Man without a mask due to his permanent ties to being a nerd.

This is the core of the superhero costume fantasy: the real way out of loserdom isn’t sudden but gradual. A sudden transformation is freakish by nature, and so it must be masked—hidden beneath fantasy, a spontaneous rise to power, and a silly costume.

Spider-Man is the ultimate loser fantasy—or more precisely, the male-late-bloomer-before-blooming fantasy—about realizing the sad truths of the universe: that women like confidence, that hierarchies exist and friendzones are real. The same truth that, later in life, unfolds in their favor, if they don’t fall into the incel trap of resentment but instead persist in developing their inner lives, making themselves ‘interesting.’ The way to escape losing the lottery of birth is to become exceptionally good at something, whether it’s a sense of humor or a special interest. Honing a craft is often done in solitude. This is why private obsession holds a sacred place for me - and for those who idealize ‘purity’ in culture - as it exists beyond display and performance, arising purely from the heart’s necessity. Babyxsosa’s review carries this private quality.

Since the film is about transformation in the face of desire, it demands a classical Lacanian reading. The master signifier of the movie - Mary Jane - represents the objet petit a, as she is the unattainable object of Peter’s desire, symbolically concealed yet visible behind the glass of the bus window, the camera lens, the garden fence. Putting on the mask allows Peter to be heroic out of character, to close the distance between him and Mary Jane, to actually kiss her! But the fantasy makes him alienated within the perverse scenario of being loved not for who he ‘is,’ but for the occasional display of a persona. Peter undergoes a symbolic transformation: his superpower, initially a vehicle for revenge fantasy, is reframed as social responsibility—one that he ultimately embraces for the sake of the purity of morals. He chooses duty over desire. He renounces Mary Jane’s love at the end of the movie, sacrificing jouissance—the pleasure of being with her—for the symbolic order of remaining a protector. Desire is never fulfilled.

The movie is structured around two kisses. The second is a kiss between two sad adults in sad adult reality (boring). The first is performed upside down—a twisted fantasy of a damsel perpetually rescued by a superhero-stalker, trying to thank him with unsolicited affection. It is the point de capiton of the movie, stitching together the floating signifiers of dual identity, desire, and heroism into a fixed structure of meaning. The iconic stunt, the ‘spider-bae kiss scene’7, where Mary Jane doesn’t lower the mask enough to see who he is, just enough to reach his lips. (Imagine if he took off the rest of the mask himself. How disgusting that would be.)

Mary Jane enjoys the mystery—she doesn’t wonder who Spider-Man is for more than a brief second. Maybe she fears seeing the face of her friendzoned pal. She clearly doesn’t want to know. But what if she has known all along? Imagine they were siblings. Imagine she was playing dumb, letting the story unfold in her favor. Maybe the real question Mary Jane asks herself is not Who is Spider-Man? but How do I keep them both? - Peter Parker as her sweet friend and Spider-Man as her adventurous lover. She cannot be with one, but she might lose him if she chooses the other. If you lose the wife, you lose the mistress scheme. To prolong the mystery. The fear of what happens when the honeymoon ends…

The principal and the most common problem at the beginning of any fairly conventional marriage is that […] you traditionally experience an unpleasant sense of having arrived and, therefore, of having reached an end, or rather, that the time has come to devote yourself to something else. […] I know that what you should do is to overcome that initial feeling and, far from devoting yourself to something else, you should devote yourself to the marriage itself, as if confronted by the most important structure and task of your life, even if you’re tempted to believe that the task has already been completed and the structure built.8

The movie cannot end with a happy marriage—because then there would be no sequels, no more Spider-Man if Peter Parker simply settled down and peacefully developed his photography hobby. Or started hobby-tunneling in his free time. It’s a long journey from being a loser to being with your crush. But if Lana Del Rey had married that bum, there is a hope for all of us...

The hero’s journey demands repeated failures and, most importantly, a major shift in power. To undergo a full transformation, Parker needs to learn how to be the bad guy. The classic spectrum of the bad boy and the nice guy has always been enriched by a secondary axis—the y-axis of appearance—giving us the tough-looking softie and the sensitive crook, the Rick Blaine/Norman Bates continuum, introducing confusion and delusion into the dating game. The final scene of Spider-Man (2002) is well-written in its ambiguity, particularly in how it positions Parker on this spectrum of badness. Does he reject Mary Jane’s love truly for the sake of protecting her, or is this a power-shift revenge scenario? Likewise - does she actually love him? Or is he simply the last resort among her high school friends?

In any case - or the case of all of them at once - the love remains unconsummated, rooted in the phantasmic structure of desire, with a half-pulled mask at its core, a romantic configuration more perverse than real life could provide. They are both victims of playing with love.

I see two people sitting in the backyard on a set of red chairs by a red, round table. She is dressed in a white dress with delicate lace detailing and flowers embroidered in golden thread. The man wears a pastel shirt with a high, stiff collar and a double-breasted waistcoat. They have just fallen in love. He tries to hide his excitement, to remain composed, careful not to overwhelm her with his affection and scare her away, adjusting his passion to the etiquette of the times. The sun rays fall on the backyard ever so fiercely; one could almost hear them make a sound. The sun’s labor is never done. The woman looks at the man with eyes full of affection, imagining a future together yet struggling to focus on the conversation, a task bordering on impossible in the heat of this bright, summer day.

Suddenly, the man stands and apologizes, saying he will fetch some refreshments. He lives on the highest floor and must climb a six-story spiral staircase affixed to the building’s facade to reach his room. The stairs are metallic, gleaming in the purest white. The woman watches him ascend, his movements elegant, and feels love so intense that her heart trembles, her hands clutching the seat of the chair.

When the man reaches the top of the staircase and looks down at her, he is struck by a terrible psychological condition—one he had forgotten he even had. The man, overwhelmed by love, now remembers that he was born without the understanding of perspective, or rather, that he mistakes distortions of perspective for reality, and as he gazes at her, he slowly becomes aware that the person he loves is impossibly small, no taller than a candle’s flicker.

A quiet sob escapes him. He tries to hold it in, but the weight of it all is too much—he breaks down, devastated, knowing that it would be impossible to be with someone so tiny, let alone exchange sweet kisses, as his monstrous lips would crush her instantly. He looks at the love of his life, now minuscule, and weeps, blaming himself for leaving the table and allowing her to shrink—the gorgeous lady, now no more than a speck.

The agony is unbearable. He clutches his fist around his hair, pulling at it with hysterical screams, then he looks at her one last time, and leaps over the railing. He drops to the ground, lifeless.

The woman gasps in terror. The body of her lover lies at the bottom of the stairs, his spirit slipping away. She stands from her chair and approaches his colossal head, a head the size of a house. She stops at his enormous lips, dry and cracked like the red rocks of the South, them she looks up at his vast, empty eye, from which falls a single, monstrous teardrop, a lake of a tear, rolling down his cheek and swallowing the woman.

The titanic droplet crashes on the ground of the backyard and floods it, and the woman screams because she cannot swim, but soon the water enters her lungs and she drowns, right there on the spot, her tiny body floating lifeless next to the body of a giant.

A person overlooking the backyard who might find this situation tragic, but they might also ponder just how queer that was!

My Own, Private Spider-Man

"A Dark Hero Guards You While You Sleep", an eight-hour-long YouTube ASMR fantasy, is set in a cozy bedroom, where a tiny lamp softly glows, a plant hunches over the bed, and large glass windows reveal a city drenched in heavy rain—a city reminiscent of New York. Suddenly, a large, dark figure leaps into the window frame, the figure of the mysterious guardian. He overlooks the neighborhood, his cape flowing in the wind. Once in a while, he disappears to patrol the area, but he always returns to his outpost, making sure that you can safely sleep in peace.

The glass and austerity separating us from The Dark Hero mark the perverse power dynamic between the master of the bedroom and their soaking-wet protector. He cannot join you in bed. He cannot even step inside in his wet-ass clothes, no, thanks. What is clear is the dynamic of ownership and distance. You can sleep in peace because you know The Dark Hero will not abandon his post for anyone else. He is on an invisible leash of devotion—a terrifying creature of the night, stationed at the far-right corner of the bad boy spectrum.

Babyxsosa wonders where her Spider-Man is—but does she know that love flows like a continuous stream?

Your own, private Spider-Man is a daytime fantasy. Someone to bring you coffee as you head out for a date. Spider-Man goes to sleep at 10 PM. Spider-Man puts food scraps in a ziplock bag. He might play a practical joke on you; enraged, you chastise his wrists and introduce days without spider-gunk. You slap his cheeks until they’re nice and red, as he giggles quietly through the mask. Punishment is easy, as he is twink-postured, naturally much smaller than you. Light as a feather, he cannot use his web on a windy day. Loving a Spider-Man is impossible. It’s a cozy situationship, built on equal parts adoration and disrespect.

You don’t want love, you just want the love experience.9

It is impossible to have it all—even to have them both, Spider-Man and Peter Parker. Refusing to settle for less means choosing loneliness, a fate I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Having found myself in a new relationship, the only way to reciprocate the universe is through devotion. I lost big in Vegas, but I got lucky in love. I hastily write this final sentence, pleased, and save the file, before putting on my cape and returning back to the window stoop. The heavy wind slashes through the dark, cold, rainy night. My eyes well up with tears of joy. No one will see me cry into my mask.

He stood in the present; he wasn’t trading in dead pasts or incalculable futures. He promised you something definite and tangible, something you could grasp. He proposed digging a hole through the earth. That was all.1

Why must one bring the world into the tunnel when the tunnel is supposed to be the way out?2

There is a story about a painter who confesses to killing a woman3. The story starts with a crime scene and lament and is slowly traced back to understand his reasoning. The plot portrays him as a lonely, closed-off person, and her as the first and only one to notice a tiny detail in his painting of a mermaid—a detail of incredible significance to him - and that recognition only enlarged his astonishment and yearning for intimacy, leading him to fall head over heels in love, though not in a mature way, but in an anxious, apprehensive way—the way someone inexperienced in intimacy would act, filled with proclamations of affection and fear of abandonment. Soon his already severe anxiety deepens with each revelation—first, that she has a blind husband, then a lover, then a secret companion, until at last, the crushing truth emerges, that the woman he adores, the very love of his life, does not belong to him alone but offers her company as a service to many; this he cannot stand - the burden, that he must either accept that he will never have her for himself, that he must accept his cuckoldry, like her husband, or leave, so instead, he reaches for a knife and stabs her and she drops breathless to the floor, a body once full of vigour, her blood staining the beautiful Moroccan carpet4.

The inconsiderate writer of this proto-incel story has left us with a lifeless body and a visibly stained carpet to hide; the weight of time presses upon us, causing the pages to collapse onto one another, trapping us in the uneasy twilight of a crime of passion not our own. This story is a bomb of false accusations, ticking. The only rational course seems to be wrapping the body in the cursed, stained carpet and dragging it down to the basement. And then reaching for a shovel and digging deep without rest, boring through mountains of sand, gravel, coke, slag, and track ballast; concrete mixers; ash heaps; mine shafts glowing with orange light—

and then—

a maze of ducts, pipes, and flues; drains winding among main and lateral sewers; narrow canals edged with black stone parapets—

and then—

a world of caverns whose walls are black with soot, a world of cesspools and sloughs, a world of grubs and beasts5 —

until both can be safely hidden from the meddlesome guardians of the law.

Concealing a dead body is just one of many ways to get into tunnelling. How exciting it is to explore a new hobby! prepare to bear the symbolic weight of the shovel as you violate the plane of the surface dwellers.

The Tunnel and The Tower

I see a retired geisha entering a bathroom stall with two near-twink-death-twinks to indulge in cocaine as I paint the dragon scales on my back in bright red. There is a girl with black horsehair leaning over me, explaining that the world can be understood in towers and tunnels. This is not based on a true story. This has been revealed to me in a dream.

There is humility in tunnels, and there is pride in a tower, she says.

Tunnels are secretive and synonymous with disappearance. In a similar fashion, one can disappear in a tower, but one’s invisibility is always on display. Your ghostly presence overlooks the neighbourhood.

Imagine placing yourself in a tower Montaigne-style. Ivory tower-style. Gathering an immense library and writing a Treatise on Everything. Becoming a Man of the Tower. Then imagine quietly abandoning your post for infinite excavation. The solitude and simplicity of digging, of meticulous, purposeless labor. Being a child, wrapped in a blanket of dirt, buried deep in Mother Earth’s womb… Merely conjuring a thought so rich in symbolism sets a feeble heart trembling.

Tunnels are feminine, and towers are masculine in shape, yet we usually speak of princesses locked up in towers and men obsessively digging tunnels. There is a psychoanalytic reading to this, the girl says, but it is not interesting.

There is no sign or thought of the sign that is not about power and for power.6

A tunnel is a sign of a power shift, a transition from impotence into hyperpotence. You drill a hole through a mountain, under a sea, beneath a prison to come out a free person. It is different from a cave in the scope of its ambitions and the problem of its purpose. The intentional tunnel is not meant to be inhabited like the cave; it is meant to be passed through. The incidental tunnel, on the contrary, is a byproduct of compulsive hobby tunneling, outsider art and its iterations.

Digging a tunnel is an ultimate, compulsive gesture of people who have bottled up for life; a cry for help from those who never cry and who don’t really seek help, resembling ‘bootstrap’ therapies self-imposed by older generations through hard labor, ambition, and strain. If we were to entertain the classical reading of a hysterical, female subject fleeing the constraints of a settled life on a manic, adventurous journey (M. Bovary-style), digging appears as its counterpart—a compulsive, male-coded, lonely, autistic pursuit (Bartlebooth-style).

The Dream

I sit comfortably on a verandah whitewashed with lime, and rest my eyes on the property I have acquired through inheritance. A lady pours me a cup of tea, then smiles politely, shy, and bites her lip. I find her endearing. The sun swims in the pools of her eyes, sunk into her perfectly black pupils. I fix my gaze on her gloves. They have an overprint of a gazette, and the letters create newspaper columns that collapse around her fingers. I try to read what it says.

"Have you been tunneling? Have you been towering lately?" she asks.

Tunnel and tower as a literary genre, the glove says.

If modernist novels are towers in their structural ambitions, postmodern ones must resemble the former. My lifelong obsession with postmodern lit led me to think of tunnels metaphorically - narratives contracting around the reader, or whatever - yet their presence is often simply literal, manifesting as the ever-beloved paranoia woven into labyrinthine corridors beneath the earth, where wheelchair-bound-serial-killers or secret-post-office-workers sneak around.

And then there is the most literal [The] Tunnel by W. Gass, which I recently acquired. I did not enjoy this book, as I do not enjoy things ergodic. Some postmodern writers illustrate chaos with stylistic serenity, while others consciously let chaos permeate the pages. And God be my witness, I labored over The Tunnel ‘as if it were the body of a woman,’7 but I was met with an asinine neuroticism for which I was emotionally unavailable. And so I left—but I came back!

She asks if we use symbols for simplicity or for infinite storage.

Going for a book within a book theme, he tells a story about a protagonist who writes a treatise on Innocence and Guilt in Nazi Germany, which soon turns into tangential confessions about the demons of his past and present. Dissatisfied with his life, he begins to dig a tunnel in the basement of his house—a symbolic gesture to escape the grave of the ‘successful life’ he had already dug for himself. A theme quite different from House of Leaves, where the labyrinth-like tunnel is stumbled upon, the Minotaur is stumbled upon, an underground maze like Củ Chi, spiked with traps and corpses, is stumbled upon in its infinite storage space, expanding under the house, in the basement, and outside the bounds of physical laws; all of that being one of the most aesthetically pleasing concepts I have encountered lately. Both novels conceptually border on genius, but the formal path taken is too Kaufmanesque to be experienced with full engagement.

Gass and his neurotic main character led me to r/hobbytunneling and the warmth of its community of 711 people, bound by a shared fantasy of professionally leaving society. I learned about the tradition of tunneling and legendary figures such as L. Arakelyan and H. Dyar, as well as those nicknamed the Mole Man and the Tunnel Girl, and I dug deep—what I had previously known as just soil slowly revealed itself to be topsoil, clay soil, sandy soil, loamy soil, silt soil, gravelly soil, peat soil, loess, hardpan, or the tough, troublesome bedrock. I learned about hand augers, earth borers, pickaxes, mattocks, spades, shovels, brace-and-bit drills, mechanical winches, block-and-tackle rigs, carbide lamps, hand-cranked ventilators, bellows, timber struts, iron braces, sledgehammers, cold chisels, wheelbarrows, hods, plumb lines, claw bars, pry bars and surveyor’s compasses set North but useless, completely useless underground.

On the forum, there is no why—only how to dig. The knowledge of tunneling is exchanged freely, not only because gatekeeping a ventilation method could end someone’s life, but because the solace of a lonely heart is found in the quiet kinship of digital gestures exchanged along unseen paths woven beneath constellations of sleepy houses.

Once every few posts a fellow tunneller breaks down sad news. There was Carl, who one day ‘decided to wrap up [his] tunnelling and work on some other projects on the surface,’ abandoning his fellow tunnellers and shattering the community’s heart.

‘I think part of me would have been happy to keep digging forever, but I also felt like familiarity was maybe creating a sense of complacency. I think I was getting too confident in the stability of the soil, and letting myself believe that I could get away with less and less shoring. I hope that by keeping my time spent in there to a minimum, if it ever does decide to just up and collapse, I won’t be there when it happens,’ said CarlFromOregon, and emerged from his hole safe and sound, a changed man.

Other patterns emerge in the forum. We witness narrative clichés that begin within a happy relationship, where the person develops a special interest and soon causes his partner to worry about his mental health8. Yet these stories are less about genuine animosity than about learning to coexist with an eccentricity; accepting a degree of separation not measured in miles, but in a sea level difference.

And then, there is the problem of dirt.

The Dirt

You are secretly burying a dead body wrapped in a carpet. The problem of dirt is, at its core, the problem of leaving traces. While erecting a tower consists of assemblage and creation, digging relies solely on destruction. Disrupting the peaceful surface of one’s basement produces immense amounts of waste that must be disposed of without raising suspicion. There are records of tunnels used solely for storing dirt from other tunnels9. Gass’s protagonist hides the soil in his wife’s antique furniture.

Traces left on the surface form into a story about the impossibility of disappearance. Un Homme Qui Dort is, ultimately, a fantasy. Pessoa’s heteronyms are a fantasy. The real tragedy of an introverted soul is that leaving society is synonymous with symbolic death. There is a direct pipeline between Antigone and Chris McCandless. This impossibility can only be exercised within the safety net of established relationships—this is why most hobby tunnellers live with their partners, siblings, or their family. Disposing of dirt leaves a mark on the surface, and the surface will know, because it cares for you! The best you can hope for is the silent approval of your lonesome practice.

One of the sweetest spots I have is for creating in solitude, for oneself. This is the art I idealize—fetishize even—in its art brut purity of the spirit or spirit-like event. The simplicity, elegance, and unlimited possibilities of digging seem to produce a particular surplus of enjoyment, making it a political gesture so often regulated.

Society is a concept shaped horizontally, and even its inherent vertical hierarchies manifest themselves in horizontal fashion, such as land ownership. Consumption is a horizontal act. The transmission of culture is a horizontal act. Estranging oneself from society into a tunnel or a tower is a vertical act—an escape from a horizontal world, a retreat from the laws of performative displays and appearances.

And it was like the two of us had been living in separate parallel passages or tunnels, without knowing that we were traveling, one next to the other, like similar souls in similar times, to find ourselves finally at the end of the passage.

In the axis of everyday life, solace can be found only when going down, as it is the only axis that 1. is finite and 2. allows for the introduction of new horizontalities into one’s life—ones inhabited only by oneself, dust, and a comforting silence.

All the history of those passages was only a ridiculous invention, or belief, of mine, and that after all there was only one dark and solitary tunnel, mine, the tunnel through which my infancy had passed, as well as my youth, and all the rest of my life.10

The loneliness of digging a tunnel is autistic in nature. We speak of tunnel vision when we speak of autism. Monotropism. There is only the path forward, focused and meticulous. Monomania, as in a single psychological obsession in an otherwise sound mind, does not take you from A to B, because the B is written with an ink of a desire… And that ink is obscured….

Absolute loneliness ends with online confidantes. Discovering a supportive community of hobby tunnellers revealed the unwritten laws of mutual attraction. A gentleman of the Tower, who grew up in the Internet era devoid of early neo-hippie delusions about digital sovereignty, can only be excited about the heavy circulation of knowledge - even though the tiny flame of revolution was extinguished, never to be rekindled. All left to enjoy is millions of solitary tunnels of special interest turned into a rhizome of spectacles, advices and jokes.

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.11

We might see the evolution of forums and memes as a societal emergence from some type of collective autism—one that arose from the realization that we all undergo similar experiences. Their change over time primarily relies on technological progress, but what interests me is the shift in mutual awareness, as if millions of brains have greeted and recognized each other in their brightest and darkest aspects - a prerequisite for a good sense of humour. The progression I have noticed, being lucky enough to witness and participate in the earliest days of memes, has moved from the anxiety of a shy "Am I weird for...?" to the confident recognition of one’s strangeness. It is exciting to live in times where absurd and surreal jokes are not an end goal, but an entry point.

If tunnelling appears autistic in its outward form, symbolically, it is an introverted journey that some of us go on within. Some tunnels become decorated, well-lit and presented to the outside world; some become closed, flooded with cement or abandoned. The luck of distribution of resources and attention ultimately determines who will become the "Tunnel Girl," who will be fined by the city council, or both.

All said and done, I am not yet ready for the real tunnel. The tunnel actually scares me12. I grew up in a segment house that was very narrow and tall, and I dwelled on the top floor. I am somewhat of a tower guy. I guess you could call me a Man of the Tower.

The universe... must be a torus. I have no explanation for this thought. A tunnel driven through a torus is a spandrel, a necessary side effect of construction. A tunnel is inherently uninhabitable. The difference between a tunnel and a cave is the degree of safety. A tunnel guarantees an escape but provides the anxiety of being crept upon from behind. Two people in a tunnel can secure both its ends but will never lock their eyes. The Tunnel of Love relies on perpetual motion. In a tunnel, you should never be stationary. You should keep moving, because I have begun training an elite group of volunteers in the art of tunnel warfare, armed only with a handgun, a knife, a flashlight, and a piece of string. I am a Man of the Tower. These specialists, commonly known as tunnel rats, would enter the pit alone and travel inch by inch, looking for booby traps in search of you! a serene body resting peacefully on the warm, soft tunnel ground, which, on certain days, seems to shift ever so slightly, rising and falling like a living thing, breathing, resembling a lung or a colon, urging you forward, away from my troupe of specialists, equipped with a piece of string to tie tightly around your limbs as they take off your scalp. Poor soul… you are being hunted.

And I need you more than I want you.
And I want you for all time.

The unspoken fantasy of tunnellers is the day when two secretly dug tunnels meet, and the walls collapse onto each other to reveal a fellow soul. I can conceive of no other outcome than a romance or a lifelong friendship emerging from this. Because there is always someone on the same plane, digging the same tunnel through the dark nights of the soil. And there is always someone above, watching over you with loving grace. And the —

And the Wichita Lineman
Is still on the line.13

May you have the strength to persevere with your obsessions in the new lunar year

“You’re not crazy, Miguel. You must be dead.”1

Can Q follow P if P never existed?

To live in post-secular times is to realize that religion and belief in magic have never truly vanished. They have endured in their traditional, godly forms or evolved into a wealth of New Age expressions to choose from independently2. These expressions move in the same direction but with varying magnitudes. The progression is not natural but imposes a retroactive change in consciousness; magic remains sewn into the lining of everyday experience. Private esotericism is what post-secular thinking implies.

To live a privately esoteric life is to believe in secret knowledge that connects everyday experience to the great unknown. Esotericism is an aesthetic lesson about life conducted in solitude. “Spirituality” is an empty signifier. It is primarily an experience of beauty. The word "spiritual" is meaningless to me.

Esoteric belief is oriented outward to produce new realities inward. The endpoint of the esoteric journey is the arrival at a pragmatic truth, incorporated into a worldview through personal communion with knowledge. The post-secular condition replaces a tradition of choice with choices of traditions. The comic post-secular condition playfully embraces access to alternative knowledge. The tragic post-secular condition fears commitment when choosing among an excess of forking paths. It carries an allure to fall in love with the means to an end, coupled with the disquiet of missing out on the next secret thing.

This is based on a true story. Since I got my fancy lighter, I don’t even want to smoke cigarettes, I just smoke to have use of my fancy lighter. The cigarette is no longer the object of my desire. This is based on a true story.

Mysticism is the introspective experience of beauty within an esoteric belief3. To speak of mysticism is to speak in esoteric terms. An encounter with the Mystery - or the Real - by definition, is a precondition for a mystical experience. The suspension of libido sciendi is a precondition for faith.

To reflect on a mystical experience is to speak of the opposite of the esoteric: belief oriented inward, producing new realities outward. The same magnitude, yet of a different direction. The Mystery is experienced and found within, as the body becomes a sensory mirror of the outside world. The esoteric lust for knowledge is satiated with introspection.

The day one makes peace with the Mystery is a linguistic event. The absolute suspension of language does not rely on the supernatural but on the pure, raw experience of life, through which language becomes recognized as both medium and the message.

“For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.”4

The gnostic belief in inner illumination through self-discovery is the closest esoteric framework to growing mature as a subject. It seeks liberation from the shackles of the animal mind and the impure reality of bodily needs, missing the fundamental fact of existence: that erasure of the mind-body link is not possible, as the distinction itself is nonexistent. Gnosis points to a glimmering light that deceives us into belief in an imprisoned soul. Yet the soul is an aesthetic construct detached from our experience, and any practice lacking tangible results is better viewed as a creative pursuit than a path to salvation.

Modern culture is gnostic in its pursuit of producing individual displays of niche consumption. It gathers the fruits of one’s labor and attempts to sell them back to the author herself, who, by then, can no longer afford them, as the mind is already set on the next thing. The resurgence of the word ‘lore’ is a gnostic symptom. Spontaneous acts of commitment to a tradition are episodic and feeble and reflect an anxious, scattered heart. I cannot trust in esoteric polyamory, because I cannot trust in spreading yourself too thin. There is good and bad confusion.

The letters squeeze, tighten, and elongate into cathedrals, becoming unreadable. Their shapes grow spiky, wispy and hostile. The image loses its boundaries and fixed space, layering itself into oblivion. Meaning becomes obscured. The process of inscription never ends; it loops endlessly in a psychotic cycle of answers without questions. Form stretches over substance, casting a somber shadow. The image is temporal, fading by design. The decision to abandon the process was made both too soon and it was made too late.

And yet, there is divine light and angel wings. Luminescence transforms the person into an entity. An ethereal presence washes away sins. The body becomes silky and pure. The entity is no longer a whore but a digital Madonna. She does not cry, for she does not know what she has lost.

The hallmarks of the post-secular age manifest themselves on the Internet, pointed out a few years ago as the new current thing5. It has not evolved much into devotional practice but rather funneled discourse icons and shitposters into conservatism. Living through times of ‘godposting,’ egregores, and grimoires, times praised for their ‘return to ambiguity’, raises doubts about the sincerity of spiritual exercises in style conducted outwardly. They form up in a spectral, digital shape and solidify as fashion accessories. If this truly is an approach at new sincerity, it lacks depth and commitment. An ambiguous display of belief, whether literal or associative, meets eyes and souls hungry for purpose but ultimately provides nothing.

To imagine post-esoteric times

To envision post-esoteric times is to see a change in consciousness, where multitudes of esoteric beliefs are seen as rooted in singular, secular wisdom.

The retroactive agency would lie in realizing that, for centuries, we have sought to access the same inner domain through esoteric paths—a domain that could also be understood and approached through secular means. A prerequisite is to trust in the universal, underlying Lack—an opening that we gradually attempt to bury with knowledge and beliefs focused on self-help, purpose, and the fulfillment of a subject inherently divided by default.

Thinking about post-esotericism makes me wonder whether this Lack can ever truly be filled, whether it’s possible to dissipate the cloud of unknowing within and understand God through personal experience. To access the Lack. Or to accept it, if one chooses to remain faithful to Lacan. The new quality wouldn’t come from confidence rooted in the aesthetics of a private landscape, but from the confidence of solving a Mystery through faith entrusted in oneself and formed outside of language. It would come from firsthand experience of the motor fuelling esoteric drives, a bridge between the esoteric and the mystical.

The hallmark of post-esoteric times would be a universal access. The accelerating circulation of knowledge makes the arrival at a shared, universal understanding seemingly inevitable. Science-based fiction turned reality. Maybe the new revelation will not come as a person, but as a consensus. Exercises in cultural clairvoyance open up hearts set on deciphering the present. I close my eyes and imagine forking paths converging into one passage of massive pilgrimage and my phone rings and I become distracted. This is based on a true story.

If post-esotericism ever comes, I believe it will come with a set of fixed instructions that lead to a shared lived experience. This fantasy is mathematical in nature. I trust it will point to a meditation-like practice, yet refined, simplified, and universalized, that can be taught hand in hand with reading, writing, and brushing your hair.

Journeys of personal fulfillment, trials and errors in reaching God, even finding God in your heart could coexist with post-esoteric times, yet they might render some of those practices obsolete, just as belief in the four elements has faded with time.

Until a collective shift in understanding oneself comes, only those lucky enough to stumble upon that path will undergo it. This journey is guided by luck, much like the birthright lottery we all take part in. Luck is a sword you must bear by its blade. If there is one God that we should fear, her eyes are blindfolded and she is covered in gold.

I look into the red, ominous eyes of a lucky Chinese frog and see a man with a fire gut, a man big and hungry enough to swallow a whole planet. The planet burns inside and turns into gas and the gas circulates and makes the man wobble and lose balance and stumble and fall, shattering his intestines into a million of pieces as his gut had already become glass.

I believe in change and I believe in luck, in the sense that I believe in placing bets on life unfolding itself.

May this frog bring you luck in the upcoming year

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