Academic and popular discussions of India’s internet landscape have largely focused on trolling, fake news, propaganda, and activism through spreading information and connecting individuals. These are familiar articulations of the oft-lampooned ‘power of social media,’ or admonishments of its insidious epiphenomena. When scholars engage with this binary of boon or bane, the broader arc presented emphasises how what is happening online in India can be likened to a global wave of participatory politics, post-truth mistrust, and specular mental health concerns.[2] Like the introduction of democracy or coffee or causal dating, imported social media is understood to replicate the trajectory seen in ‘the place it came from.’ Original histories can be used as a prognostic to see what these disruptions are capable of. But like the introduction of democracy, coffee, or casual dating, the interaction between Indian and non-Indian culture on social media presents its own eccentricities and requires theoretical excavation. The term ‘cultural humour,’ can be used to describe such an inside joke that involves and refers to comedic interactions between different cultures’ sensibilities and artefacts. Cultural humour in India has erected its own repertoire, tones, and tensions. I submit that looking closer at it can tell us, descriptively and metaphorically, about curiosities in the seepage of ideas and objects into India.

This essay seeks to probe two meanings. First, in the literal sense. Humour is a politically potent force. It serves a reflective role – revealing truths about the status quo and its discontents – and also a positive role – as a space for catharsis, observation, and agitation. It is relevant to understand prevailing Twitter humour in admittedly elite sections of the English-speaking internet because of what it can tell us about the pulse of (at least some) the people, and what their cultural sensibilities look like. In the second sense, I propose that cultural humour can be a metonym for processes of modernization like capitalism, democracy, and secularism. In his essay ‘An Outline of A Revisionist Theory of Modernity,’ Kaviraj theorises modernity’s tendency of ‘improvisation’ in India: “Improvisation…not simply copying from other successful democracies, but fitting them to a society’s peculiar circumstances, is of the essence of the unfolding of the modern.”[3] He deconstructs modernity’s plural character in its operation in India, suggesting that institutional design is dependent not merely on an imported idea (say, democracy or capitalism), but also on the topography of Indian history and politics. Something happens to these ideas when they travel, there is discernible modification in their ‘essence’ to make them comport with another society. They are not hand-me-downs of the same thing. They become, and are always becoming, their own.  

In an essay published in The Atlantic, a British writer carps: “America won the internet, and now makes us all speak its language.”[4] By ‘us all’ she is referring first and foremost to Britain, but abstractly we are to assume, everyone on the English-speaking internet. She goes on: “Sharing the internet with America is like sharing your living room with a rhinoceros. It’s huge, it’s right there, and whatever it’s doing now, you sure as hell know about it.” She discusses how Britain’s discussions of race are now taking place in an American vocabulary. While blind to the similar but perhaps less over-bearing barrage of British culture, she has pinned down a crucial reality of the internet. America’s culture is not a monolith, but it, along with the UK, exerts soft power on the currents of the online world. A rough survey of their digital discourses reveals that America’s internet, while intranationally diverse, practices comedic and mediatic endogamy.

Primarily interested only in endemic political dynamics, Anglo-american internet discourse has not seriously been influenced by cross-continental cultures, at least in the mainstream.[5] They enjoy the status of the solipsistic default – arguably in international imaginaries, but certainly on the internet. It is true that populous developing countries like India have now begun to dominate the number of daily users for many social media sites. These countries have seen an exciting explosion of democratic creative power, for nobody more than those who previously did not have access to say something and message-in-a-bottle it to the rest of the country.

At the same time, elites occupying spaces of the internet in several developing nations around the world have always had asymmetric access to the valorized Western cultural model and its commodities. Today, they can afford an iPhone, they watch Netflix, and they tweet about Trump. In the Indian case, it is easy to see what colonization had to do with this. During the British Raj, several privileged Indians identified more strongly as white than colonized, having the cultural repertoire required to perform whiteness and a clean English accent to boot.[6] This is not because of any ‘weakness’ in antecedent local cultural imaginaries, but because of the empire weaponsied culture to make domination stick. Now, with the diffusion of English, the relative affordability smartphones and internet connections, the segment of people exposed to and engaging with softer Western culture has sharply increased. I argue that rather than leaning towards being absorbed by Indian lore and politics, or suffering terminally from a colonial hangover, prevailing cultural humour on the internet indicates that something else is happening here.

Following the model of America or the UK would predict that Indian social media spaces would also be insular, rife with preoccupations of only the national – both in the realm of culture and in that of politics. However, for at least the privileged urban Indian, there is no analogous humour bounded only by the goings-on of territorial India and its cultural output. Put another way, India, or ‘Indian’ humour, is culturally plural, and the forged result of intervention, syncretism, and hybridity. Kaviraj notes that there is neither analogous democracy nor secularism. Consider two reasons why this may be true. First, we know better. Indian democracy guaranteed universal adult franchise from its inception, unlike its European prototypes. The constitution had a reserve of reference points to draw upon when drafting its statutes. But it is equally true that we do not know better, or at least that some problems spring eternal: right-wing extremism, democratic backsliding, and identarian polarization are cosmopolitan in their reach. This is true online and off.

There is second, more significant reason why these institutions are not analogous. The illusion that the internet is amorphous by design, is just that – an illusion. Its airs are not gases taking the shape of the container. Rather, the cultural imaginary of the internet is an infinite palimpsest, upon which every stray thought restructures its history, and establishes new trajectories of trends, shifting the needle of public discourse ever-so-slightly or all-at-once. This can be taken in two senses. First, that there is something specific about the legacy of the internet that was handed down to us. In its infrastructure (or, by institutional design), the internet privileges certain forms of communication; you will find conspiracies on QAnon, porn on Tumblr, cancellations on Twitter, and education on YouTube. The mechanisms of these media, like, share, comment versus retweet, quote tweet, and bookmark, enable and disable cognitive and cultural patterns of engagement from their users. The second sense in which the palimpsest can be read is that when the internet is encountered in a place that was not its origin, this travel is generative of new kinds of tension. To put it in Ramanujan’s words, “the ‘modern,’ the context-free, becomes one more context, though it is not easy to contain” (57)

            American internet culture rose on its own, without another reference point. By Ramanujan’s typology, it rose in ‘context-free’ terms, a historically blank slate open to be used and abused however things would turn out. This maps onto some western experiences of democracy and nationhood like France or Germany. The principles of critical thinking, individual choice, and rationality could exist unfettered by widespread contradictory – or at least, complicating – histories and habits. Chronologically, India’s internet culture did not rise up on its own. From the beginning, there were Western models of what engagement should look like, what media to cite, and what aesthetics to deploy to earn currency. One view could empahsise the lack of agency in India’s cultural contact with the West (colonization, to begin with), but equally significant to contact are also the differences in the social fabric of India and its media, and the peculiar design realities of the internet. As a framework for expression, the internet’s economy has a different ‘market logic’ and formula for virality and success in India.  The social fabric of India has a culture of receptivity, stemming from a familiarity with synthesizing the self and the other. The internet has created a modern online presence wherein cultural contact is unavoidable, seepages are inevitable, and syncretism is inbuilt.

India is inundated by texts and symbols – indeed the ubiquitous ‘melting pot’ imagery of the nation refers to language, food, religion, and political organization. The majority religion has too many Gods to count, our people have too many dialects for AI to compute. Colonizer modernity and globalisation’s modernity both attempted, in broad strokes, to universalize the particular, because India’s particulars were uncountable. What we now see, in the modern, even postmodern stage of the internet, is that these attempts at universality have not made India ‘context-free.’ It is the context that makes cultural humour possible, and indeed, funny.

Gautam Adani’s swift downfall coincided with the crest of success of the film Everything Everywhere All At Once. Several film accounts were sharing screencaps of the dialogue: “in another life, I would’ve really liked just doing taxes and laundry with you” – and going viral.  Twitter user @DrCheruvarun edited the quote “in another life, I would’ve really liked just doing money laundering and tax evasion with you” onto a photo of Narendra Modi and Gautam Adani embracing. The layering of culture from cinema to trends to the close relationship between Prime Minister and a businessman are all required context for the gag to work.

Sometimes, contrast is enough to make the joke. And this can be surprising in that the contrast is not funny because the joke is on India, on its creepy Facebook men or its rural population whose English is not perfect. The contrast works because the interface of the internet has made fusion and fissure necessary – you are speaking the language of modernity when you write on the internet, but by breaking open that language to express a radically different cultural perspective, the meaning of what you are saying disrupts fixed ideas of nation and identity. You are always polysemic. You are not laughing at India nor are you laughing at whichever new form of slang America has adopted today. There are new ontologies emerging from the infrastructure of America in the hands of India.

It is these imbrications we have seen in the recent student protests, where a quote from an American movie “Mean Girls” is mobilised towards governmental accountability; where Mbappé’s dictatorial tendencies are dwarfed only by Narendra Modi’s, and where memes and jokes are the vocabulary of a new contingent of global politics—online and off.

Like the internet, democracy too was a new way of engaging with the world, its ideas and culture. Quickly seeping into the soils of India, the practices of democracy and expression have become habit, but habit that always leaves room for novelty. Democracy and the internet – and indeed any forces of modernity – erect changes that seep into other fields of life.  These modern institutions, instead of creating predictive frameworks to understand where history is unfolding, have created the conditions for creative surprises. These are surprises in funny jokes, but also surprises in the ways we think of the self, the other, media from other cultures, and politics at large.  These are the surprises of improvisation.

            Bibliography

Rahman, Aziz, et al. “The British Art of Colonialism in India: Subjugation and Division.” Peace and Conflict Studies, 2018, https://doi.org/10.46743/1082-7307/2018.1439.

Lewis, Helen. “The World Is Trapped in America’s Culture War.” The Atlantic, 16 Nov. 2022, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/10/internet-world-trapped-americas-culture-war/616799/.

Kaviraj, Sudipta. “An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity.” European Journal of Sociology, vol. 46, no. 3, 2005, pp. 497–526, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003975605000196.

[1] @GordonRamashray on Twitter, 2023

[2] Baishya, The conquest of the world as meme

[3] Kaviraj, “An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity,” p. 522

[4] Lewis, “The World is Trapped in America’s Culture War.”

[5] Lewis, “The World is Trapped in America’s Culture War.”

[6] Rahman, “The British Art of Colonialism in India: Subjugation and Division.”

I’m turning 25 tomorrow. Time is running out for me to be the voice of a generation, or at least a voice…

I’ve been tearing through the Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante, aggressively watching its women suffer through the consequences of their morality, dreams, and abilities. I’m learning from these books all sorts of clichés, like that life is long and what goes up will come down. I’m learning that having all the wrong ambitions (literary fame, men, money) will rot you later on. I’m learning love can be hardening and awful. I’m seeing that goodness can be a way of life, more sustainably than pursuing riches and smarts. I have had to turn to these tempestuous books because in my sun-soaked room in Cambridge, everything is always exactly where I left it. In this room, the room of my own, I have watched the small become large, and the large become small.

The small becomes large

Definitional nits in my dissertation. What capsules go into my laundry. The loudness of the breathing in a library. Whether I walk home through the gardens, or by the river. Doors and light.

The large becomes small

My friends and I are all nice girls, who walk in the grass and eat well-rounded lunches and sleep by 11 pm and are in the library by 9 the next morning. Wiping dew off my rosy, clear face, I wonder if there’s somewhere messier I should be. I have begun to worry that I am known to myself as a petty routine. For instance, any malaise or dissatisfaction means incoming menstruation. Stomach problems come from overeating the bar of M&S white chocolate pistachio I keep by my bedside. And a post-formal hangover is terminal only when I smoke more than 5 cigarettes between courses. In a strange sort of grass being greener, I yearn for the old days of my madness, which are coming into focus more and more as a phase rather than a fate. During those years, there were parts of my brain that every day had to be redacted, that then peeked out, that had to be redacted again. I sloped diagonally on balconies, walls, and bathrooms, never quite catching my breath. Bad music raced through my earphones, unintelligible metaphors sat alone on the page, and hypochondria, I think, became me. Today, there is a ground beneath my feet, and Lady Macbeth and I have nothing in common.

Sorry Elena Ferrante

Is there something missing in a life so clean, in a life so preoccupied by the smallness of intellect? I consider the protagonists of the Neapolitan Quartet, Elena and Lila. Elena studies smart, works hard, marries well, and writes many books. And yet, despite having access to a new literary and academic culture where she is a prized contributor, she worries that everything she has done is just a matter of elevating her social class. That at the end of it all, no words will survive her, and no goodness has stayed in her. Her daughters will not read her. All that she accomplished was economic mobility and mass success—which is meaningless against her brilliant friend Lila’s intuitive genius. Lila’s genius comes from emotional grief, hardship, and a belly full of experiences told in violent dialect that do not sound polite at a dinner party.

While reading the books, I urged Elena on her quest for betterment: I whispered, leave the filthy neighbourhood, leave your illiterate friends, become a Person in the World. And Elena did just that; bylines, graduate school, feminist theory and all. But she remains deathly insecure of Lila, because Elena’s new life, soft and societal, doesn’t make for good writing. Lila cuts her down to size with Large Truths about morality and grit, which Elena could never arrive at herself. Elena was “an intelligence without loyalty,” which made her selfish, untrustworthy, and myopic. I was surprised when the book seemed to suggest that worshipping at the altar of creativity and academia was cowardly and delusional. You see, I wanted Elena to follow all the rules for success and fame because I myself want to follow all the rules and reap the same rewards: readership, wisdom, fame, and yes, happiness. Or least purpose. What could mean more?

Twenty-five forever

This past year, ideas have bled from me into clear, little phrases, spread on parchment screens. I am writing a dissertation in political theory. I’ve been sharpening away in all the libraries I can find, suddenly seeing the point.

Ferrante’s Quartet is no parable I can swallow. Insulated from the consequences of choices, I sit in my sun-soaked room in Cambridge, where everything is always exactly where I left it, and let the small become large. As if this is all that matters. I ignore the hot truth of Ferrante, I shun Lila’s penetrating goodness, I enclose myself in this rarefied air, relegating drama to the novels.

I wake up on the day before my birthday desperately, gorgeously excited. I have no idea what the next 6 months of my life are going to look like, and I don’t care. For now, myopia is the highest luxury, and I have grown wings on my feet. As Elena learns over her lifetime, will I learn too that intellect is a false god? That creation really leaves no legacy? Will my love turn also into a lesson about naïveté? Might intelligence and fame not be the answer to everything? I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like that right now. Sunlight twinkles on my blinking eyelashes. I will be twenty-five forever. Ensconced in the pastoral idyll of my long-term everything, I am smart but not wise.

The book is always where you need it

It was late November of last year when I had decided to go to the old University Library, wandering aimlessly up its tower to a massive room made dingy by rows of books extending from wall to window, with only three desks scattered in between. I sat down, feeling intimidated by the endless tomes around me. As I tried to disentangle the wide world of late 20^th-century feminist theory, I began searching online for a niche PhD dissertation about the politics of recognition. It was available nowhere on the internet. I realised that it must be somewhere in this big University Library, which legally must contain every book ever published in the UK. It could be anywhere, from the 10s of floors, wings, and rooms. But it turned out to be at arm’s distance from me. The Book Is Always Where You Need It. This minutiae is what I call magic, these days. This is what I pass off as experience. Sorry, Elena Ferrante, but I cannot yet learn to be big and brave and grounded in the real world. For now: I am abstracted.

As I write this, my hands stink with self-satisfaction. Twenty-five puts dense pressure on my skull and not my heart. Everything can be achieved in the space of a page. But will I achieve it? I am sat on a bench by the River Cam, returning to beauty and wisdom and the sublime, a born-again virgin. In front of me are the expanses of a lawn (on which walking is prohibited), St. John’s neo-Gothic single-stone buildings, and the cooling westerlies. I am gorging on the pink sunset, the cloudbusting breeze, the flashes of amber, and their chopped reflection in the river. It might be better to be Lila when Judgement Day comes, but without Elena, there is no creation kicking to be born. Without Elena, there is no book at all.

Inaugurating four months of unemployment was a weekend trip to the little hills of Lonavala. It was seventy-two hours of drinking coffee in a wine glass, projecting Gossip Girl onto whitewashed walls, reciting Audre Lorde’s poetry, and napping in a garden with green rain and perfect highs. We bookended the trip with Joan Larkin’s ‘Want,’ – “She’s in her city, meeting / her deadline; I’m in my mill village out late / with the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells, thinking / of the twelve years of wanting, apart and together. / we’ve kissed all weekend; we want / to drive the hundred miles and try it again.”

Week 2

My brother has decided to go to Vipaasana, a 10-day silent meditation retreat, before his 27^th birthday. We parse Reddit threads, watch YouTube videos, and lay predictions at each other’s feet. When he calls, the morning of ‘getting out,’ I immediately start jabbering about Elon and Trump’s divorce, his birthday party plans, and other nonsense. Finally allowed to speak, my brother said he could do it again, easily. He said he resolved most of his existential and emotional questions by day four. He has come back with a playlist and a personal note for everybody in his life on what he thinks they should change. His note for me? To be serious at Cambridge.

Week 3

A framed flower, a sheer shirt, a proffering from back in time. (An I love you in a fishbowl.)

Week 4

While reading J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, I think about knowledge and the epithet “campusey.” The book is centred around questions of reading, the aesthetic life, the burdens of intelligence, and the burdens of wanting. It was recommended to me by new friends who have provided weekends that are distinctly “campusey” – loaded up with conversation, clarity in a projected self, and a reignited optimism for the possibility of new friends at all.

Shuddering, I see my socialising with some old friends differently: “cleverness was my permanent affliction, my wooden leg, and it was in the worst possible taste to draw the group’s attention to it.” The characters are intolerably addicted to intelligence that is trying to become true wisdom, as if to say the goal is not knowing, but the goal of knowing is peace. Sitting in my life baked in 20 years of blankets, I underline: “I do like him. I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”

Week 5

There was a peacock on the pickleball court. Barely teal, barely royal blue, and barely chartreuse, the peacock recoiled into itself, limping on the ledge of the newly laid bright blue, teal, and chartreuse court in my building. Dozens lined up to watch the bird. It gingerly stepped around the artificial turf overlooking the main road, clearly injured and yet unwilling to give up its old nobility. Where had it come from? I live on a hill beside The Hill, where animal ambulances clog up the air for billionaires with bad taste. Festivities in this area are marked by choked police cars, black sedans, blinding light pollution hanging from trees like hot rope, and Masses of tourist buses and selfies, betraying trips taken solely to see what was once an orphanage and is now scab-scraping the sky. Together, they overwhelm the once-quiet neighbourhood, wedging old bungalows with old values. Now all sorts of shiny once-national-symbols frequent The Hill for the pretty price of whatever. The peacock must have come from there.

Or, the peacock could be from the Parsi Tower of Silence, Doongerwadi, down the road. In Doongerwadi, scavengers were entreated to decompose corpses as part of the circle of life. Then the vulture population dwindled for urbanisation demanded its own pounds of flesh. Then there were bodies lying there without enough vultures to strip decaying meat from bone fast enough. But the trees, quietness, and occasional corpses remain. They remain attracting feathery, murderous birds. The peacock must have come from there.

Week 6

One evening after hours in a museum, at an art and culture society’s member induction, I was told by a pearled philanthropist wearing couture and her last name: “sweetie, we don’t say unemployed, we say, creatively employed.”

Week 7

At night, when he and I finally spoke, I was mad with desperation. I had read A Simple Passion in the evening and knew that Ernaux’s level of obsession was not mine – mine was not so self-effacing – but by nightfall, I felt crazed. I watched my phone reach 8 pm and resisted the urge to play the violence of Lana Del Rey. When we finally spoke, I was back-down on the swing, saying all the right things. Although A Simple Passion does not get into the psychoanalysis of desire in an all-consuming affair, it does, however, get into the scheduling: “The only criteria to be taken into account, perhaps, should be of a material order: the time and freedom at my disposal throughout the affair.”

Week 8

My Creatively Employed days have eased into vibrant, felt, well-rested and reliably-reaping weeks. I am exercising, rehearsing for a play, taking notes and compliments, and spending time with friends. I am reading, but not enough. I have finished Dosteyovsky’s Notes from the Underground (realising too late that I should not Relate to the character living in Bad Faith), and the beautiful God of Small Things. I am not really writing (yet). Neither have I begun to think about my research, nor the material life I will soon be living. I have ‘stepped away’ from the glare of the internet, the endless hubbub of social climbing, and the constrained realities of jobs. Before, I could write about the politics of the contemporary moment because I was right there kicking in the moment’s womb. Now, warmth has made me distant from friction. The evil gods have cursed me with contentment.

Week 9

We spent two days dehydrating in Delhi at Khan Market, Humayun’s Tomb, and Claridges, the oldest hotel in Independent India.

Then, we spent a week in McLeod’s Ganj. It was the Dalai Llama’s birthday. We ate a hundred momos and stayed at a British expat’s block-printed cottage. We read Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Sunflower Sutra’ by the outdoor fireplace opening into the stern mountains. I wrote a poem called ‘The Lesser Himalayas’:

Birthstone clouds settle on skin,

Stripped doors open into mountains certainly

Younger than us.

We’ve been winding up

Winding up winding up – heck, you can’t

See the wisp-airs you’re in. And we have

Taken to elevation like flying fish.

On the inside, we’ve been touching rocks

From London, labs, and the Lesser Himalayas.

We’ve seen the way the light falls the way the

Light lives the way the hills give

Themselves to honest lovers not looking up.

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Week 10

I go to the last show of the Symphony of India’s season at the NCPA. I listen to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet with rapturous love. I watch a double feature of Phantom Thread and Babygirl while drinking wine with a friend. I go clubbing with the girls (to a new big club that I had never heard of) and a 19-year-old in our group asks me, “Who’s Akon?”

Week 11

Over dinners with family and old family friends, my mother pulled out albums from the 90s, and we looked at photographs of my father. My house was mostly the same, Willingdon Club looked mostly the same, and my father’s Jim Morrison posters, Marlboro cap, and American postgraduate stint were also well-worn images. But they were suddenly breathing; they were breathing in the same wooden walls. And they could only inhale now, so many years later, given the air for respiration after a childhood of holding our breath.

Week 12

The day was late, arriving after its time. I ached into a bed-crawl, sinking into skin and soft sheets. French class was never going to happen. Pink rolled cigarette, wet copy of Sense of Sensibility, blue mouldy float, and August impromptu Goa pool. Nothing existed for me except the moment. Marshall’s speakers playing What I Want (Weezer, Addison Rae, rap). I slipped into the float, bum-first. Bum first! Summer Bummer!

The late afternoon heralded a smoothening into smooth days, held up like a white tent by scaffoldings of linen tobacco, smoked Mezcal, and a body that finally curved right. I got out of the pool and began pacing on the patio until I was reminded that academia was coming soon enough; all I had to do in that moment was Ooze. So, I returned to the pool and splashed around like a child, danced with resistance against the water, let my hair get wet, and let my head get heady. No pages of the book were read. Sense? I didn’t need it. Sensibility? I had a summer sensibility, one whose stakes differed in their structure from society’s.

I am agreeable while the climate turns evil. We glitter like hard rocks in moonlight. It is twilight – his favourite time of day and my least. We know night is next.

Week 13

I keep stumbling onto my mother’s womanhood. She recommended Deborah Levy to me before I took off for my beach trip with my boyfriend. Sitting, splayed, unemployed in a bikini, Levy scolded me through feminist theory I had read deeply during my undergraduate degree. Wetting the pages with the chlorine from the pool I was floating in, my mother scorned me with underlines like: “motherhood is being chased around by the woman you were before you had kids.” Fine, I think. Whatever. Her underlines are messy and mine are artful. We watched Petite Maman, a French film about a 9-year-old girl who meets her mother as a 9-year-old herself. I thought it was warm, wonderful, and how all films should be. My mother thought it was fine, if a little saccharine.

Reading Levy offered insight also into what and how I should feel – about writing, womanhood, travel, and life – and inconsistencies between her life and mine became proof that I wouldn’t succeed in the literary world for not wanting it enough. She begs: “it was urgent that I got out of my life.” I felt no urgency to leave the beautiful bay.

Week 14

I take another Goa trip before hosting a party for a friend’s birthday. We get massages at the St. Regis to prepare. On the consultation form, they ask, ‘What is your purpose of choosing a spa service?’ I circle ‘Pampering.’

Week 15

It looks clean outside. Routinised like an abdominal. Inside, it itches. The glass is itchy like sequins on skin, grating like spice in eyes. The head wants to be sandpaper. I drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, take an edible, read a book, read a post, read a text, read a tweet. I don’t want to go to the gym. I don’t want to go to French class. I don’t want to talk to my family. I don’t want to talk to my boyfriend or my friends. I want to ache the air like an open sore, festering it with myself. I don’t want to shower, to stretch, to eat. I want to be psychotically blind and grounded in the core.

Week 16

My boyfriend turns to me on the promenade of the new Coastal Road, with the sky split by pink on one side, and the grey rocks of the Haji Ali mosque on the other. He asks me if I’m ready to start the Rest of My Life in Cambridge. I tell him that I’m reading Giovanni’s Room and want desperately to live in Paris again – fluttering and fucked up and fluorescently young. Vultures and black kites circle the half-constructed bridge as the sunset gives way to the gloaming.

Three years ago, when I littered the 6^th arrondissement with myself, I had questions of personhood, womanhood, academiahood, and creativehood. Their resolution seemed distant. Today, these hoods have taken clear form, and they are no longer chemtrails on a sunless horizon. I know how the day will age, and I don’t mind walking in the uncomfortable blare of footpathless streets. I am tired, clarified, and concentrated. I quote a woman in Baldwin’s book: “from now on, I can have a wonderful time complaining about being a woman. But I won’t be terrified that I’m not one.” Indeed, I can have a wonderful time complaining about being a writer, an academic, a person, and a lover. But I won’t be afraid that I’m not one.

Week 17

Love Letters, by A. R. Gurney. A beautiful (if sometimes misogynistic) play set in the 1960s-2010s of two people reading love letters to each other over the course of a lifetime. In the middle, divorced parents, money troubles, slutty parties, affairs, failing art ambitions, elections, and love happen. I performed it with an old college friend, Dev, in my living room to 70 people over 3 intimate shows. People laughed and cried, said I was like my character (which alarmed my mother and my boyfriend for independent reasons). Dev and I said we’d keep performing it every year, as we aged into new lives. The first time we’d read it, we were babies in our second year of college. It was the first time I’d acted in years. To prepare, I watched Birdman and Girl, Interrupted. The lights hit my eyes in bright yellow glitter. I had ease on stage, and loved to star. Friends who’ve known me for years said it was good to see me in action again. New friends said they didn’t even know I acted. Dev and I smiled, accepted the flowers and the wine and made promises of repeating this play – the play an ode to time, what it does to love, and what it does to always-forming selves.

Week 18

My mother and I watch Sholay. My brother and I forget to watch Entourage. My friends and I scrapbook our favourite days together, and they make a list of all things they want me to have better takes about (Paris, class hypocrisy, bisexuality).

“Meaning Beautiful Bay”

Now everything is really ending, and there are white linen pants terrified of being discarded in the mad dash out. No need for breathable pima cotton. No need for polyester cropped tops. No need for real diamonds, nor tiny black clutches. Soon I will become bungled, wool over my eyes, fingers un-manicured and pinked in the trembling cold.

Could everything really be ending? For now, I treat the city as an extended bed; performing, sleeping, and jumping across its coastline. In the air everywhere, they tell me that everything is really ending and I still do not believe it. I ignore my mother’s implorations to start packing, I don’t study for my French exam, I don’t make it to the lunch plan for a friend’s birthday – relax! I have time. I have time before I leave the potholes and the people I love, time to go shopping with my mother, and host games night for my friends. Time to read all the theories I have forgotten, and time to become the person I want to be for the rest of my life.

Cambridge sends my course list over. Newnham asks me to RSVP for the matriculation feast. There are three giant suitcases cluttering up the part of my room where I used to practice dance.

Week Zero

I’ve been talking a lot about what it means to live a creative life. I laugh through a serious intention of never wanting to work a 9-5, never wanting to be beholden by a bank account, and always wanting to be free. Free to what? Free to write? Free to confuse appreciating beauty with creating it? The last time I lived in the First World, I felt infinite possibilities with no expectations of literary output. Looking was the same as inhabiting, and art was the same thing as emotional intensity. Things will be different now. I want my brain to slice out clean cuts of meat; delicacies of not only language but also logic, politics, and philosophy. After having ‘stepped away’ from the current conversation of slop and AI and AI and AI and American fascism and Indian censorship, I want to start climbing up mountains I don’t know the view from. To test myself in the icy waters of undefined reading and broad-sweeping intellectualism. To work on my Brain. To work on working. To admire Cambridge not only for its magical balls, centuries-old legacies, and wine-bottle-chic libraries, but also for its networked potential towards alive academic greatness.

Virginia Woolf delivered the talk that became A Room of One’s Own at my college, Newnham, in Cambridge. She worries: “I should need claws of steel and beak of brass even to penetrate the husk. How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper?” I am about to try, claws and all.

It’s happening again, I worry, waking at 7.45 am to thunder, deciding half-asleep that I should open my blinds and switch off the A/C to better experience the blackening rain. For the next four hours, I sleep and stir to fragment-dreams about old buildings rebuilt into modernity, the gravity of the future, and the threat of children. By noon, looking out into watercolour grey, unable to shake it all off, my day has written itself already.

It is the early days of my unemployment (or pre-grad school sabbatical, or rehearsal for my aspirational life). My job was never terribly exacting, but working in the development space had suited me perfectly – it was meaningful, a party trick, did not impose on my time, had nearly no commute, gave me new friendships, and also a choate narrative for a choate life. Now severed from its linear sense, I have had to start thinking away from the 15-minute radius of my childhood home and its implied childhood complacency.

But in this city, complacency and contentment and community have become difficult to separate. I write to-do lists for my formless weekdays, including tasks such as, “brush up French,” “do crossword,” and “think about X’s birthday.” I crowd up the nights with dinners, collaborative gym sessions, and group hangouts of bubbly bro-ship. I haven’t watched a TV show in about 6 months. I haven’t written something other than careless poems for roughly the same amount of time. My relationship has arched into a languorous routine that defies the laws of diminishing marginal utility. Every weekend, we wrap into meals, films, parties, game nights, weekend trips, and alone time – all encountered with the same plush, loving hedonism. There is little time for nostalgia as we climb easily into the future, passing whole afternoons in hugs and exalting through evenings buoyed by Diet Cokes and guilty cigarettes. The months have matured in smooth-stemmed glasses of red momentum.

Now, in this breath before the Rest of My Life, I am determined to treat this unemployed time not as a no-rules extended summer vacation, but instead, as a trial of how what a Real, Future-Forward Life in this city would look like. Could it really be more than a socialite stimulation or baby-faced regression? To this end, I have an unfinished novella that will be resuscitated. I’m doing a play with a college friend. We meet to read the script, and to adapt character names for India. I have a list of magazines I want to write for, and an excel sheet of books I want to read. And I have a relationship waiting to be turned into provocative, creative nonfiction about tenderness and (non)genderedness. Can home be a real place? I’ll let you know in the next four months.

Today, however, monsoon has caught me off-guard. The sea is a black-and-white GIF, and in looking at it so intensely, I become a 20^th century sketch of a woman in a balcony, eating peanut chutney and chai. The day has written itself already. I sit down with a book that cannot keep me, for the intrusion of complacency and the past are doing some gentle choking. Nothing, the nothing of idleness and nostalgia, have their cool little palms elegantly around my neck, teasing me into suspension. They entreat me to ignore the tug of the future and its whole-wide-worldness. To ignore sublime art, with its need for contemplation and criticality. To forget about growth and dreams and anticipation. Enough anticipation. Kill possibility. The only writing is the writing I did many many years ago. The only real living is the life I lived as a child. I look outside at the black-and-white sea, feeling like I did three, four, ten years ago. I am twelve years old looking out of the window in Math class because it has started raining. I am sixteen years old, reciting lines for elocution, sodden paper wetting printer ink. I am eighteen years old, leaving a club, hair crazy and shoes heeled, humidly getting into somebody’s car. I am twenty-two, feeling like my life is over, and all I have is this looking out at the black-and-white sea. In bowing down to this beauty, I become only what I was.

It’s happening again, I think, the pull of limbo inexorable. Monsoon bears history. Monsoon is a Revivalist Nationalist. Monsoon wants me to remember, monsoon reduces me to the stupid, lazy act of looking out at window at black white sea. Must drink tea smoke cigarette eat noodles think about Parasite scroll twitter light candle and feel as though it is years ago. Monsoon can only ever be here, in this city that christened it. Limbo, bitch. Nothing will ever happen again. It is a beautiful day and despite the growth, healing, learning, and gleaming, I am still who I was.

Lately, I’ve been getting off not being seen (online). I have lost weeks of my life to Instagram. Not through sloppy reels, but obsessive counting, checking, verifying of who likes me and who does not, how social capital can be measured, what photos and words I want to represent me, and when I would like to be seen. I am going to graduate school to investigate this neurosis with the scaffolding of political theory. But for my birthday, I threw a sundowner soirée, and I wanted the humid glare of visibility.

The event was originally conceived as an unabashedly nothing-party; I wanted polite conversation with society, followed by well-timed goodbyes. But then my mother bought me a set of champagne flutes and a pearl-embroidered dress. My boyfriend suggested having a projector playing a film in the background. My brother offered to set up some mini-golf. The list of invitees grew. Cocktail menus were prepared by friends wittier than I, and cheese boards adorned by mango-jalapeño roses and edamame leavened the wood. I began imposing myself on other people’s time. I thought about nothing except a beautiful set of blue hand-painted tissues and whether my party would be fun. All conversations became speculative fiction, determining where the hordes would move, would they dance, would they need shot glasses, and would they want to stay for midnight pizza. I turned into a worldly woman, concerned not by lofty ideals of creation and utopia, but instead, enforcing fascist prohibitions against jeans and weed before nightfall. I annoyed even myself.

Today, I sit scattered in golden balloons and lit buntings. I think of my house full, crowded in corners with unexpected pairings of party-goers who entered saying they were anxious about my vague dress code (“soirée chic”) but ultimately enjoyed getting ready to be here. I think of long and loud conversations that I saw without needing to add to as some sort of negotiating hostess. My overworked bartender called me at the end of the night and proudly counted the many empty alcohol bottles he had worked his way through (we ran out of everything twice). I was high on thoughtless chatter and saying, you-look-so-chic-very-on-theme.

The morning after, I debriefed with different sets of people for hours. The family members discussed the finished food, surprise bills, and not getting a slice of the floral cake. The new people from my life discussed the old people from my life and vice versa, and we wrote air diaries of what time does to knowing. The socialites asked for pictures to put in internet collages. The cultural critics theorised collegiate banter versus adult engagement, bringing house parties back, and the human craving for an occasion to perform.

Before preparations for this gathering took flight, I had made it halfway through Mrs Dalloway, where a London lady recounts in self-indulgent, detailed social psychology the agonising events of a day preceding a party she is hosting. In on-the-nose irony, I was too absorbed in myself and guest lists and playlists for the past two weeks to read Virginia Woolf. I turn back to a highlighted-but-forgotten passage: “She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, sayings things she didn’t mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination.”

My Jungian dream claims a consciousness in disarray. But I liked my aliens and their intrusions and the buoyancy of celebration — in dream and in home. I liked the grounded glitter of this real world, with its social proofs and domestic blisses. Just for now. Just until the open unemployed summer undulates, and then I want to be nothing but strange words and disturbing ideas, on a private plane unfettered by Plans and Places.

I

Capricious and dainty sea!

I am integral with you … I too am of one phase and of all phases.

Last year, I wrote of a manic attempt to ‘correct’ everything that was wrong with me through moisturizers, therapy, and a routine that would offend an ascetic. As I moved back home and greyed into a 9-5, I worried about my brain, society, art, and morality. But this year, I’ve been governed by blazes of deep Work, aimless summer ennui (perhaps you read my SUMMERIA ZINE), intense emotional fissures (remember when I wrote about fighting with my girl friends? We made up!), and mostly, the delicious, gaseous, oozing joy of possibility. Bombay broke open in my palm. I didn’t have the time to theorise.

II

This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds

I applied for the Rhodes Scholarship between April and November. The process was torturous and elating. I spent hours poring over one statement that was supposed to be the Story of My Life. Who I am, where I’ve been, where I want to go. I thought, long and hard, drank Red Bull for the first time since 11^th grade, and turned away from the senseless chatter of socialising. It was freeing; I had missed being consumed by something big and golden and worthy.

As I pushed through successive interview rounds, an old disease of optimism began plaguing me again. I made notes about ‘current affairs’ and practiced pitches for my research proposal. The support of my friends and family and mentors and professors was a gift I didn’t deserve. They came prepared with tough questions, didn’t laugh during mock interviews, and generally let me run around with an air of self-importance. I am so grateful for all of it. The interviews themselves were terribly weighted with consequence, and the panelists seemed horrifically smug. Still, it was the first time in a long time (and maybe the last time) people would really, really care to find out if I was ‘smart.’ Bullshit, broadly speaking, wouldn’t quite cut it. Making it to round three validated my naïve desire to Change the World and Be a Person. But I want to. And I am.

III

I too am untranslatable.

I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.

Maybe – sorry – I’ve been really lowkey about it, but maybe you know I’m writing for dirty Magazine? I love my weekends pinking in our editor’s living room drinking iced coffee trying to – in a world that did not ask for it – make high art. Devastatingly well-dressed, we giggle in cultural chic and blush in shades of design. Something shifted in July as I learnt from creatives whose smarts did not come with academia’s paraphernalia, but rather, from fingers exactly on the pulse of the moment. Their instincts for craft-colour-commentary are sharp, and glamourously insightful. Finally, I feel I can call myself a ‘writer’ with some authority. This has been a door into a world I have longed for, engraved with a voice I’m still carving.

The jokes about South Bombay girls in Bandra are all true; I take a photo of a sunset on Carter Road while driving back home from brainstorming, inspired by a new model for what an Artistic Life could be.

IV

I sing the body electric

It would be wrong not to say how romantic everything is. In October, he dropped me home after one of our early 13-hour dates. He spilled himself in those last minutes of the drive, complaining about the dissonance and contradictions and abstractions of life. I quoted Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass on being large and containing multitudes. Now, months later, we are tying bows around each other’s conflicts, pillow-talking in a love language best described as half-meta half-hedonist. Gluttonous children, we inhaled December. Embodied it. Were artisanal, hands muddy with meaning-making.

But eating cold pizza by a sunrise last week, we talked with bites of open-mouthed trust. Softly, now. The glide has come. There are a million mornings left to drink medium roasts and forget our toothbrushes and do the crossword and fight about AI and change the music. We look forward to taking our time.

V

I celebrate myself

The air of unreality has been shaken off my life. There are mad sounds coming from the piano setting notes through the hall like fresh prints in snow. There’s no dread here, not in the now, where each day blooms multiple like a hydrangea. Evil eye emoji. Prayer hands emoji. Pink heart emoji.

I ended my last year in review post with an Annie Ernaux quote that said: “to exist is to drink oneself without thirst.” Fuck that. I’m wet with January’s air. I’m a glass half-full, foaming to brim.

“Dharshika would not have made such a cruel statement unless she’d actively wanted to wound Puhal in some way…unless she’d held some secret resentment against her friend that she wished to punish her for. It was the kind of deep, unspoken resentment that was only possible between people who loved each other intensely and yet sensed the possibility of being hurt by each other, between people who needed each other and were yet unable to fully acknowledge this need to each other for fear of becoming vulnerable.”

And suddenly, the calm of Sunday evaporates in a casual terror and I can no longer ignore it: the terror of girl fighting. Girls fight with a manual. They fight with a map of all the weakest points of a frontier; and all I can think about is my broached borders, the invasions in our no-man’s land. Over the past year, I have been fighting with my girl friends. These fights have been about various things, from boys, to lies, to broken patters of communication, and busyness. Whatever the overt subject, they have always become, after the first moment of explosion, about insecurity. They have become about different areas and levels of insecurity in how we act, socialize, and love; how we communicate and trust and lie and cheat. I am always saying sorry and waiting for others to say sorry and giving forgiveness and denying it. Is all of life a constant prayer for grace?

Sometimes when I’m fighting with my friends it feels like we’re speaking different languages, which is shocking, because – haven’t we become fluent in each other yet? In the summer of ‘brat,’ I had 3 songs on my rotation because I didn’t know how to feel about any of these rabid female scrapes. Each revealed one way of warfare. First, there was ‘Von Dutch,’ the easiest way to climb my stairmaster and the shallowest cope: I say that my life is leaps better than yours, everything you want I already had, everyone you will be, I already was. ‘Von Dutch’ represented an easy, bitter goodbye, closed with coke-laced-spit. It worked well for a collision with fame-fucking and boy-blindness. Then there was ‘Sympathy is a Knife,’ which builds to a tension in, “I couldn’t even be her if I tried,” which is to say, no, I’m not trying to be her, and no, I don’t want to, but even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. It admits the pain of never being anyone but yourself. It is a heavy pain. And then of course there was the hopeful solidarity of ‘Girl, so confusing,’ where Charli and Lorde worked it out on the remix. Their wildly different perspectives (“sometimes I think I may hate you, maybe you just want to be me”) were communicated with vulnerability and resolution. The confusing nature of girlhood made up the distance in emotional experiences of a situation. Hatred cooled down into an anthem of forgiveness, it was a recognition of shared 20-something messiness.

Where will my fights fall in these arcs? In June I handed out closure that was bitchy and bloody. The hotness of hate and jealously and insecurity didn’t cool down to an admission, and there was no neat ending in an avowal of female solidarity. Life Von Dutch, I moved on.

In September I realised that intimacy can be betrayed in the cruelest of ways, as if it is nothing at all. Who draws the lines of what is unforgivable? Who draws the lines of life? The difference between my friendships and boys or family is that I chose, I chose with years piled onto years like ringed barks, I chose to let them know me, fully. Legs draped over legs, sloping into an endless evening, doing the crossword, painting our nails, listening to albums and songs that raised us, talking everyday for hours, calling it codependent with a cheeky smile and a bad joke about our parents. I chose them. I chose to let them know me. I loved them. I loved them in a way that was like finding solid ground in a wasteland of plasma. I entrusted them with my most manic poems, my grimiest hangovers, and my worst body, rocking into itself, depraved with hopelessness. It is October now, and I am in mourning for the death of intimacy.

We mythologise female friendships and say they are the greatest predictor of happiness for women. What will that say about me, I wonder, scattered in a graveyard of casual hurt. What does that say about me, back broken with intimacy I never thought would turn into a weapon. I’ve been the archer, I’ve been the prey. But to have both of these movements – victimhood and villainy – turned into something stray, foreign, violent – felt like having the call come from inside my house of horrors heart. Those confessions turned into culpability; I worry about being Bad.

My friends have been shedding for years now. Who will I be without them? What will happen to all the selves we shared and sculpted together? And god, how much have we shared: clothes, makeup, joints, lies, beds, memes, songs, people, months, years, meals. We have shared ourselves into each other and now the separation must be surgical.

I get good news on the following Friday, while I’m out with new people. I want to call one of my friends and tell her immediately. I weigh history against hurt and…I don’t call. 

(I didn’t. I waited through the slop of summer. I waited through the blurriness of rain.)

I showed up to London a begging daughter asking for the big prizes. I knew it was an old city; during the Industrial Revolution, there had been sonnets about its chimney sweeps. I knew it was an important city; John Snow had mapped cholera to a water pump in Soho. I knew also that it was a strange city; even while its new empire of brown money turned racial history upside down, the economics still spoke in a straight line from slavery to steam to Sunak. Over three weeks in London, I waited to feel its age and importance and strangeness.

My first evening wandering around Chelsea and Kensington, I saw children in pinafores escorted by security guards, and pilates-bodies toting small dogs as furs. It was the end of April, and I was freezing. I’d hurt my knee a couple of days ago, and as the day aged endlessly, it stuttered at the fulcrum of my trousers and boots. I saw Blank Street iced matcha blueberry lattes and cars with cameras on them. Lining the hopelessly grey streets and manicured gardens, I saw white statues with gold encrusted to their threats. The Great Men of the statues stood stupidly, like a relative drunk when dinner’s been dead for hours. After three hours of walking, I sat down in a café of laptops to try to write with ink. Street names, towers, and spires. Their language so native on my tongue; I didn’t have much to say.

Over the next few weeks, I paced through central London, surveying palaces and classical architecture that looked neutralized, as if shot in the art by modernity. I couldn’t appreciate the monuments without thinking of how much more fertile these styles looked at home, decayed by sun and spat-out tobacco. Beside them, the office buildings gleamed lightlessly, named after tools and assets. Somehow, each one looked unoccupied. Of course, there were people, polite and clean, pale and upright, but they didn’t look alive. In history textbooks, we called them ‘Britishers,’ remembered between famine, jewels, and death. They seemed to expect my presence before I had even become.

(Somewhere, Homi Bhabha laughs.)

I knelt down in Daunt Books Marylebone, scraping its wood with the spoon of my hands, trying to find literature somewhere buried under all the totebags.

I stood atop Primrose Hill, watching a French family try to take the perfect photo. Their hair and their children kept flying away.

I eavesdropped on a first date in Chinatown, where a Rothschild scion condescended to a writer from Istanbul.

I drank beer at a pub and proved again that drink makes me sick; I can’t even blame the bitterness, because mead makes me sick too, and that is nothing but sweet.   

On Saturday, I went to a club in Mayfair with heels and straightened hair. My friends and I bobbed beside a table of men we were assigned at the entrance. Every couple of minutes there would be an explosion of dry ice and a procession of bottle girls would emerge with sparklers and incomprehensibly, American flags. When the emcee (?) said, ‘if you’re here on vacation let’s hear it,’ I almost forgot to cheer. The next morning, we stood in line for brunch at Granger & Co in Notting Hill, where we would pay 16 pounds for a glass of orange juice. As we waited, hungover and cold, we pointed out nose jobs, lip fillers, and face lifts in the line; we counted Launer, Delvaux, and Hermès bags.

One particularly ambitious day, knee still rickety, heart still stagnant, I was to do a long museum trail. I mapped out my route and wore sensible shoes. As I walked by the water, thin slices of rain sluiced down onto me. The river and the rain were far from my warm cobalt monsoon, and they lacked even the moody drama of Europe. Instead, they were stern white sheets paling to an unrecognizably dim blue. Instead, they struck my eyes and my bones and my lungs in a kind of permanent tear. Umbrella lost to the pewter, I shuffled into Tate Modern.

The building itself was all cut lines and half-planes. It was nearly closing, and I had already been to three other museums that day, so I stuck to my must-see list. I saw Jackson Pollock’s The Yellow Island, and a David Hockeny splash. I saw Duchamp and Warhol. And then I saw IKB 79, the painting I was most excited about – Yves Klein’s ultramarine blue painting. It is a tableau covered entirely in one shade of blue that Klein went on to patent as ‘International Klein Blue’ (for even colour must be made an asset). In Bluets, a book that I bought at Daunt about loving the colour blue, the author Maggie Nelson goes to the Tate to see this painting. When she inspects it, she says: “I wrote but one phrase in my notebook: too much. I had come all this way, and I could barely look.”

I kept waiting for it to start – something, anything, a loose smile, a fallen leaflet – somewhere I could hear the city after weeks with my ear to its ground. Pale even in April, the streets felt indifferent at best, and ignorant at worst. Perhaps that was my answer. Perhaps it could smell my faked confidence like a dog. The problem with London was that if I squinted, it maybe looked like Paris. It was too proximate to too much from its people, to its pasts, to its plays. It reminded me of a home I could never return to – Delhi before October, my childhood games, bunk beds at camp, poetry written in Haussmannian buildings. A half-city with a dead imaginary, London came to me calcified. It was already over before it even began. I wasn’t visiting it, I was haunting it, with a bad knee and a weak stomach, too cold to light my cigarette and too anonymous to care about my face.

A few months before my trip, I had read a long investigative piece in the New Yorker about Zac Brettler, a 19-year old white boy from West (Central) London who jumped into the Thames in 2019. There was a sleet of ambiguity over how exactly it had all happened. Still, ever since he reached high school at a posh private institution, he had been pretending to be the son of an oligarch. He was entwined with notorious Indian billionaires like Akbar Shamji, who had an office on Berkley Square and Dave Sharma, who was, simply, a gangster. The article alludes to connections with the Ambanis, who declined to comment and threatened legal action if their name appeared. Accusations circled that Zac was in debt, caught up in fraud, and using heroin. His parents found a search for ‘witness protection uk’ on his iPad the week before he ‘jumped.’ The journalist writes of the city where Zac drowned: “London is the capital of pristine façades, often painted in wedding-cake shades of cream or ivory; the city’s dominant aesthetic is literally whitewash. As a 2021 report by the British think tank Chatham House put it, the U.K. is a “comfortable home for dirty money.””

The article seemed to implicate London itself in the death. London, turning lies into assets. London, with its buildings named after tools. London, freezing in April, and yet not blue.

Where was the sun? I looked up to find it and saw the domed head of a church, the white statue of a prince, and the stern face of the Shard – who was I to pray to? Money, heavens, or monarchy? There was nothing for me there, I couldn’t help feeling, wracked by the dissipations of modernity and too-rich-for-my-blood bodies. There were brown faces everywhere, but I felt no trace of possibility for myself. Staring at a brocade sari in the British Museum, a few aisles away from the Magna Carta, I thought, maybe empire never really happened. Maybe it was always already history. With this balding truth, I wondered, bundled up and flaking into the fog, what my escape route from the island was. Would I flee Kensington Gardens with a diamond in my nail and a lipstick boat for the Thames?

William Wordsworth grew into himself as London smoked out the Industrial Revolution. Wordsworth, like Nelson, and like me, felt overwhelmed by London and what its skyline meant for the world. He wrote the aching poem, ‘The World is Too Much With Us’ to freak through the city’s heavy-handedness during its economic explosion.

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.”

At a café outside St. Pancras, wearing leather boots and my vintage Prada, I asked the waitress if she knew where I could find a cheap packet of cigarettes. “You’ll have to leave Zone 1 for that,” she said wisely, but after looking me up and down, “just take some of mine for now if you like.” I took them, just to be a part of something. She knew I wasn’t leaving Central London quickly enough for a smoke.

It is April in London and I feel ambiguous. For this, for everything, we are out of tune; / it moves us not. Nothing itched my eyes except cold bones and punishing water. I rubbed them anyway. I had come all this way, and I could barely look.

I think she is quite stupid. Her articulation reflects the stupider still method by which we engage with art: one where it is picked up only when all its contents are precluded by its positioning. There is no surprise left on the table. ‘Preferences’ of genre, form, and style reflect a wish to filter out the chunkiness of intellectual discovery, and consume a product that is programmed to stimulate senselessly. We pretend that we already know all the ways in which art works on minds. Bubbled into aerated nothingness by branding and formulaic composition, art is incarcerated in an à la carte prison. It was supposed to be that with the death of the author, the reader would come alive, front row in the carnival of interpretation. Instead, the reader has hollowed themselves into singular, flat, self-obsessed ‘consumers.’ There’s no need for exertion or self-imposed difficulty. We are the final masters of art, which we do not read or watch, but consume, like gluttonous carnivores. Art must never disobey us or our worldview; it must unravel on sight.

“I liked it” has become a moral force. It obviates statements like, “it was good,” or “it was silly.” It doesn’t matter. It could be bad. Who cares? I liked it. If someone said to me “I liked it,” and I responded with a review of some unsatisfying details, or judgements passed on the writing, or the music, or whatever it is, two things would happen. First, this response would bounce back like a weird, random interjection, because they weren’t talking about whether it was ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ They just said they liked it. And secondly, to point out shortcomings of the writing or the cinematography, I would also just seem like a pretentious asshole, because they just said they liked it! If they – as an individual who derived some amusement from consumption, said they liked it, who was I to cast doubt on whether it was good? Hadn’t the artistic object already served its primary – and indeed – only function, that of delivering amusement?

Everyone wants to have fun. Nobody is afraid or ashamed to say they watch terrible television, or that they get all their music from TikTok, or that they have not read a book in the last 5 years. They use ChatGPT to get by in the one Humanities class they were mandated to take (if that), and complain about the ‘elitism’ and ‘pretentiousness’ of others. By turning ‘pretentious’ into a catchall for any form of artistic taste or critique, we are doing ourselves a disservice. To be pretentious is to be a superficial dilettante, talking belletristically about that which we do not understand so we may appear intelligent or cultured. I think we overcorrected in our disdain of pseudo-intellectual ‘pretentious’ chatter on the interwebs. Reading, reviewing, or otherwise engaging with art in a sensitive, serious manner is not the same as being an insufferable drone who thinks they know everything. Unfortunately, it seems, we were so put off by a few posers that we have given up on the concept of taste entirely. The result of this abdication is a simplistic logical moment where multidimensional thought or contextualised perspectives come off as un-self-aware, not ironic enough, or self-importantly indulgent.

It used to be that discernment, deep knowledge, wit, and intellectual surprise were valued. Audiences were given much credit; the difficulty of interpretation yielded both discipline and taste. Auteurs and authors were told not to spell things out, but to leave room for the most tantalising experience of criticality – confusion. Stay with the confusion, my literature professors would tell me. Read contrapuntally, dialectically, with polysemy, like a rhizome. Read with the messiness of non-linearity, wearing ink on sleeve and heart on page. Refuse to fall into the ‘infinite narcissism of the present.’ Render a world of multiple possibilities by rejecting the domination of one Truth. Let it all air. Think about the unconventional workings of this or that logical strand, and the disruptions effected in your worldview, their worldview, or this text.

Now, a stupid person will say: let people enjoy things. Dear god. People would enjoy just about anything playing on a screen, so long as it was presented in a high enough resolution with direct enough representations of the world. People’s enjoyment cannot be the benchmark of the creative fields; people’s enjoyment is guaranteed by any and every kind of stimulation that does not ask them to exert independent critical thought. (See: ‘Barbie,’ ‘Saltburn,’ ‘Dune 2,’ or pretty much any Netflix/Marvel movie ever. Read also this fabulous critique of contemporary film culture, and the vacuity of Christopher Nolan).  

But it is difficult to fault people for this. Neoliberal individualism has so successfully presented alienation as freedom, and the tyranny of the masses as democracy, that we are ready to do just about anything to feel something, belong somewhere, or escape where we are. Who can be blamed for being creatively wrung dry by the infinite blandness of working life? Imagination is a muscle, as is intellectual exertion. Modern life is structured around securing their atrophy to maintain the status quo.

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Yet, it is quite frankly patronizing to say that we have no control over our consumption. And indeed, my ‘diatribe’ is directed firmly at the sophomoric philistines who hate, bore, and degrade culture. It is directed at those whose impulse to sanctify any-and-all amusement exceeds their capacity for critical thought. These anti-intellectual positions are reactionary, and plain lazy. To say that the maintenance of standards is ‘elitist’ is at once conformist, and self-flagellating. In fact, we live in a rare moment where we have access to the best theory, literature, film, and music that has ever been created through the circuits of the internet. This could have been a grand opportunity for critique because once, ‘high-brow’ art was out of reach for the average person. Instead, today, it rots for free on archive.org and in underfunded spaces of imaginative expression. Like the woman in the TikTok who wants to reduce books to tropes, all art suffers because of our discomfort with confusion, surprise, and rigour.

If the thoughtful critiques of others make a person feel inadequate, that’s a good thing. That insecurity is their curiosity bubbling up inside them, searching for articulation. That feeling that you should know more, that instinct that you would like to be deeper within the world of ideas - that feeling is the one which demands more of you. Yes, it is harder to do the work of being intentional with your artistic engagement than to consume superficially. But it is also infinitely more rewarding. The former allows us to connect with texts and artworks that have expanded the emotional, intellectual and creative firmaments of the human experience. This will not drain you, or make your head hurt from thinking too much. It will not ruin entertainment for you, nor deprive you of genuine fun. Instead, it will enrich fun, pleasure, and enjoyment. It will help you lead a life of much more emotional richness, dexterity, and beauty.

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I am not saying there is a ‘wrong’ opinion held by the uncultured masses, and a ‘right’ one reserved for the literary. No, I am saying there are many answers, confused and concatenated by other art and context, nourished by reading and cosmopolitanism. The mighty devil of discourse can sometimes produce lovely, disturbing, and awesome interjections to our encounters with the creative. The point is that we must at the very least entertain the conversation about quality, entertain the possibility of reading widely and finding something new in the world, and entertain the demands that all kinds of art make of us. It is only natural that in this process there will be fallacies, pretence, Latin phrases, and attacks on beloved art. It is only natural that sometimes, when you are scraping the canon in your free time, you will sound like The Worst.

Amusement is not nourishing your soul. Enjoyment is not the same as connection. So, go forth and be The Worst. Read the Russians and rip apart the rom-com. Talk theses, learn language, drizzle poetry. The beating heart of the zeitgeist will come to you from the palimpsest of past and contemporary art, resplendent in its tragedy, humour, and undeniable, abundant beauty. You will feel one with those who lived a thousand years before you and you will be laughing hysterically with foreigners from several seas away. Find through this process your taste, and your voice, and then change them up again. Do not deprive yourself of the limitless surprises and joys of discovery that exist in the thoughtful world of art. They are what make life honest, and indeed, bearable.

 Except, with a persona as strategically sanitised as hers, we are led to believe that the only arrows she’s slung are at famous ex-boyfriends or evil producers who started it. Certainly, this is the only archery we will hear about in her music and public statements. Dazzled by her shimmering yet opaque self-presentation, we feel honoured to access her vulnerability in romance and art. As far as the rest of it goes (politics, feminism, economy), we work with what we’re given: private jets bad, bonuses to her tour crew good. Taylor Swift has mastered the binarist form of right/wrong public discourse in the attention economy such that it either points in her favour or is drowned out by opalescent fresh music. Reincarnating herself with a new soundscape and matching outfits once a year or so, Swift has continued rotating like the sun, while we seek warmth under her irrefutable aphorisms and elegaic excavations. Over the past 15 years, her star has continued to grow while other celebrities rail against their dwindling shelf-lives. On “Karma,” Swift herself taunts you to “ask me why so many fade, but I’m still here?” Why indeed? Her fans may call it Tayvoodoo. They say she is the embodied moral compass, the last religion we can believe in, a truism of our cultural times, and the music industry itself. Even if she isn’t perfect, they say, to deny Taylor Swift is like denying gravity - you’ll just end up falling. But let me hazard another approach to this question of everlasting legacy and singular dominance. Let me reconstruct her legal mastery, mythology, and cultural totalitarianism.

Juridification - Taylor Swift, The System? 

In an essay called ‘The Twilight of Legality,’ John Gardner theorises the demise of legality in the modern age. He describes the increasing invasion of legislative regulations in every aspect of life – think, the complicated and mistake-prone process of filling out your taxes, requirements to link government IDs to your bank account, or intellectual property rights and their muddy disputes. Gardner sees this barrage of legal paraphernalia as antithetical to democratic justice and freedom. He calls the current state of affairs, in the twilight of legality, “juridification,” and explicates its two axes: 

1.  The sheer breadth of laws renders ‘the law’ in its entirety, unknowable.

2. This vastness means that the law cannot be enforced evenly. 

Selective judicial enforcement operates with biases, fears, and vested interests. Powerful groups can exploit the vastness of law to further their particular ends, while marginalised groups are disproportionately vulnerable to eccentric enforcement. In a juridified climate, citizens are turned into large moving targets acting within the omnipotent framework of ever-burgeoning laws. So, the law has become an unwieldy tool of the ruling class. Perhaps it has always been this way, but well, size matters – and in the case of the law, the bigger it gets, the less fair it becomes.

In Taylor Swift’s 72 Questions with Vogue, back in 2014, when asked “What advice would you give to anyone who wants to become a singer?” she replies, “um, get a good lawyer.” In what follows, I show that juridification is a weapon in Taylor Swift’s arsenal. And metaphorically speaking, juridification has done to legality what Taylor Swift has done to culture.

I must first clarify some points before we may talk of ‘singularity’ and ‘scale.’  It is difficult to, either quantitatively (through sales, net worth, or awards) or qualitatively (through an objective hierarchisation of cultural products) provide an indisputable metric for ‘fame.’ First, there are contextually contingent variables like streaming or internet relevance preventing me from drawing transhistorical comparisons with say, The Beatles or Michael Jackson. And then there is the reality that in our postmodern, globalised world, culture has expanded, mutated, and infected our lives without needing a specific mediatic vector to transmit itself. Living in the age of so-called ‘democratised’ content, we consume so much, and so frequently, that culture eludes concretisation; quite like the law in a juridified system, it pervades the everyday. There are indeed other megastars with tremendous influence and institutional legitimacy - say, Beyoncé, Drake, and Bad Bunny. When everyone is a consumer with at least some level of agency in choosing what they will listen to from millions of options, a ‘monoculture’ can hardly exist. This is why it is no use arguing over linear claims (‘Taylor Swift is the most famous person to ever exist’). These lead to the sorts of fights best reserved for Twitter replies. Instead, by creating a framework for Swiftian criticism, we can get to the bottom of an indisputably mammoth phenomenon, and then interrogate other celebrities whose modalities may hinge on different levers. Thus, our focus is on a periodising analysis of what a dominant cultural presence looks like, and its ideological consequences (‘Taylor Swift is prolific and neoliberal presence has led to cultural totalitarianism’). By thinking through a conscious silo, we can plumb at these big ideas of  ‘cultural dominance.’ 

The Polyester Podcast references a tweet qualifying Taylor Swift’s fame: “how many times a day do you think about taylor swift against your will.” Needless to say, I trust that you have seen the headlines and leotards; you’ve heard the rabid crowds and resplendent hits. Here is some personal context (as to why we can proceed on a first-name basis). I was introduced to Taylor at age 9 or 10 by a friend while we played basketball. I was wearing knee-length checked shorts and some football jersey or other. My friend said I had to listen to this song she heard on the radio – it was about a girl who wears T-shirts, not short skirts! Say less! A few years later, ‘RED’ became the first album I successfully ‘Torrented’ on the family computer. ‘1989’ brought me my first artist merch. I’ve had, at some point, swiftie accounts on Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter. I can do the ‘name the Taylor Swift song in 1-second challenge.’ Easily. I’ve been in the top 0.001% of her Spotify listeners (in a particularly emotionally unstable year for me, but nonetheless). A few months ago, I spent an amount of money I choose not to disclose on Era’s tour tickets, for which I will fly to Singapore. When I begrudgingly told people how much I spent on tickets, they said, ‘that’s insane, but it makes sense for you.’  I hope these credentials suffice. Let us move on then to the accusations. 

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Since the Grammys, there’s been a shift in the cultural temperature on Taylor. In part, this is but a standard inflexion of the cyclical relationship of love and hate the public has with Taylor. Yet, this time, the problem is not ex-boyfriends or leaked phone calls, it is more insidious. We learnt that she had an exclusivity deal with the Singaporean government, receiving millions of dollars in subsidies for playing nowhere else in South Asia – forcing fans with means to fly, and fans with none to suck it up. We also learnt that Taylor threatened to sue a 21- year-old college student who was publishing information about her private jet’s movements. How could sharing already-public information constitute the endangerment of life? It gets worse: Elon Musk kicked the student off Twitter last year for the same reason.

Evidently, these billionaires are being litigious as a form of censorship. Legal action was the chosen course only once there was scrutiny and backlash. When Taylor wasn’t losing favour because of the data, apparently the student’s actions were not illegal. Suddenly, after trends and takedowns for her 13-minute flights, they maybe could be. So what if an addendum to a legal text from somewhere or the other could construe these social media posts as the endangerment of life if she were to sue? Nothing about this is fair. It’s a symptom of a society in the grips of juridification.

The familiar argument goes: criticize systems, not individuals. But can we read Taylor Swift as a system unto herself? On the front of her carbon footprint, despite her being the highest polluting celebrity, she is still far from most corporations in the top 100 polluters. Yet, what makes her footprint newsworthy is that she threatened legal action - against not even a whistleblower - just a student with an Instagram account. She would never have had to sue, the threat was enough of a deterrent. It’s easy to point out why this is disconcerting – power asymmetry, environmental irresponsibility, and institutionalised censorship. Taylor weaponized the law to control the narrative, in a thoroughly undemocratic, unequal machination. But the problem is bigger. It doesn’t matter that this time she used her magic powers of institutional intimidation for wrong. The problem is that she - as an individual - has the capacity to do institutional intimidation at all. 

Only to a largesse like Taylor Swift would the juridified legal system be a tool and not a tyranny. This is a cold, winking, ‘bury them in paperwork.’ The average person cannot dream of seeking remedy through the behemoth of law because the cost of entry exceeds their capital. Meanwhile, Taylor has threatened to sue (deep breath): her ex-guitar teacher for buying the domain “itaughttaylorswift.com,” fans on Etsy for selling merchandise bearing her name, an Australian graffiti artist who made an objectively horrific mural, two podcasters, 24 unidentified trademark violators, Microsoft, and Kimye. And, all this research is from 2017, the last time tabloids hated her enough to find this out. Other artists have threatened to sue merchandisers for using their name - like Drake - but they have largely threatened major retailers like Macy’s and Walgreens, not fans barely turning a profit on a website. By 2015, Taylor had applied for 121 trademarks (almost 10 years ago). Yes, other major artists have caught wind of these practices and many have, literally, followed suit. But none with the frequency and fluency of Swift. 

A few months ago, disgusting, unconscionable, and sexually violent AI-generated photos of Taylor went viral. The promptest response came from the fans, who scraped the images off the internet to protect their star. They mobilised with their usual cultish deft and large-nation-sized population. Next, the general public reacted in outrage, and finally, in response to the outrage, lawmakers began reviewing the scope for legislation to prevent such tragedies.

This is an objectively worthy outcome of a twisted situation. But it does matter that this is what it took. A Guardian article notes that there are upwards of 9,500 sites dedicated to nonconsensual deepfake porn, and that this technology has exploited child sex abuse. Yet, the title of the article documenting historical terrors is: “If anyone can get the US government to take deepfake porn seriously, it’s Swifties.” The author sees the mobilization of fans as a “silver lining.” Indeed, we are transacting in an attention economy, and pressure is always needed to realise any large-scale legislative change. However, when activists have been fighting for years to make better laws for women’s protection, and girls have died by suicide over deepfake porn – it is bewildering that this is what it took. The system is broken. The celebrity is brighter than the sun. Only she can decide when it is day.

Under the regime of juridification, the notion of injustice has been concentrated onto individual right/wrong, and modified to accommodate said individual’s social and economic capital. This is both a cause and result of the realism with which we encounter broader systems of power. The superstructures of today’s world – capitalism, neo-imperialism, patriarchy – are interwoven into a bureaucratic and ideological hydra whose heads can never be cut off. Power is no longer wielded by a single sovereign against their subjects. Instead, it is diffused and upheld by a host of interacting identities and ideologies. In the brisk air of the internet, through the hot spillages of media, our compasses for morality must cast their gaze everywhere and nowhere, for that is where power thrives. We are beholden to the vagaries of algorithmic ritournelles and post-truth chatter because these are our sources of ideology, morality, and consumption. 

When a singular force such as Taylor Swift rises and grows tall, tall enough to touch the superstructural sky, it is not enough for us to applaud when she forces change in the music industry’s worst habits. These, and most of her moral-legal triumphs, guarantee the victor monetary spoils. Her ‘activism’ is consumer activism – starting and ending with protecting the dominant ideology’s faith in private property, commodified art, and individual ascendency. Her ecosystem sees private ownership as a virtue and critical rhetoric as unlawful. Yes, wrong is wrong. It is disheartening that in our lurid world of so much negative media coverage and so little attention, not all wrongs were created equal.

Taylor Swift has said nothing on Palestine. (I will not count attending a comedy show with proceeds donated to relief efforts and then saying nothing more on the matter as ‘registering dissent’). The actual colonial state of Israel tweeted: “we promise that we’ll never find another like you,” tagging her. Another person tweeted: “i genuinely  think taylor swift could change the trajectory of world politics by tweeting free palestine.” When her undying star has the proven power to shape public opinion on morality (no one in the general public seriously considered it unjust to not own your masters before her), then we have entered a brittle new world. One where Presidents beg Taylor to tour in their silly little nations, historical monuments are renamed to pay her respect, and a single Instagram story from her can increase voter turnout so drastically that it influences the outcome of an election. She’s a recession-proof price-inelastic commodity; she is the hopeful democratic party’s silver bullet. In her Time Magazine interview for being the Person of the Year in 2023, the journalist characterizes Taylor’s deserving of this award primarily on grounds of scale: “To discuss her movements felt like discussing politics or the weather—a language spoken so widely it needed no context. She became the main character of the world.” Well, if we grant her all this power, we must crucify her for its misuse. 

At the recent Super Bowl, while Rafah, a declared safe area for Palestinians was bombed, everybody was watching Taylor and her boyfriend. In order to be a functionary of ruling class hegemony, Taylor Swift does not need to be a liberal psy-op, as suggested by the erudite folks of the right wing. (The right-wing is correct to point out that ‘the system’ is working in a manner of unfreedom. Unfortunately, they get cause and consequence so wrong you cannot take them seriously). She simply needs to continue existing as an acquiescent friend to the neoliberal system. Her fans defend: she isn’t asking for the camera to be pointed at her! But her brand has gestated and come to life by dint of photographs, blurred lines of personal and public, and transfixing eyes – all of them – on her. She provides partially differentiated products (albums, outfits, easter eggs, boyfriends) that, under the guise of  ‘apoliticality,’ enable the continued injustices of the status quo. Her existence on this scale is sanctified and sanctioned by the superstructures of our times. If we live in a juridified system, she has made it her armour. If we live in an attention economy, she has monopolised the market. If we live in the culture industry, she is simultaneously its shiniest product, and deftest producer. 

Taylor Swift - The Culture Industry 

In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer theorise our engagement with media as the “culture industry.” The term describes the state of culture wherein freedom is lost both creatively and politically, because alienated people uncritically consume artefacts that reproduce dominant ideologies. The mode of production in the culture industry is that of the Enlightenment - rationality. All must be measured for target groups, scraped clean of the offensive, and rolled out with the inflexible rhythm of an assembly line. This rationality becomes a totalitarian cultural force, by subsuming all artistic endeavours, compelling them to be organized and driven by the market’s principles of efficiency. In mandating such precision and vacuity, totalitarianism sustains a society that is “alienated from itself.” 

In a lovely podcast about the Culture Industry, the hosts bring up Beethoven, Radiohead, and Taylor Swift as countermodels to the culture industry. They claim that each of these megastars successfully liberated themselves from the requirements set forth by the dominant artistic-economic production machines of their times. Beethoven refused to live with a patron, choosing instead to build relationships with more experimental supporters of his art. This retained his ingenuity and craft. Radiohead, tired of the creative limitations and steep prices wrought by a record label, released their album ‘In Rainbows’ for free, letting fans pay as much or as little as they’d like to hear it. In this way, both were able to supersede the culture industry’s restrictions of economic efficiency and creating a product bound by the market’s logic. They could then create with disregard for selling as much as possible, having already secured a loyal coalition that guaranteed their existence. This led to freedom to create outside the culture industry, untainted by appeasement tactics and performance metrics.

The hosts then extend their argument to Taylor Swift, suggesting that because of her scale, it is likely that she, too, can escape the machinery of the culture industry. I agree that her scale has allowed her to become an autonomous market with its own coalition, but do not believe this has been through rejecting the totalitarian rationality of the culture industry. Where Radiohead formed autonomous platforms to increase the availability of their music to fans, and Beethoven’s patrons granted him greater scope for countercultural composition, Swift’s autonomous economy bows down to neoliberal capitalism, delusions of Americana, and plain avarice. These principles have been Taylor’s buttresses, scaffolding her very own hypercapitalist culture industry. 

Taylor has made herself an essential truth of society, naturalizing herself through familiar ideological games. She has entreated each reigning system of power to swear fealty to her, because she has sworn fealty to them. She will protect their values and principles with all her heart (and lawyers and billions) as long as they give her the same privilege. 

 Taylor says, often, that she has had to stand up to systems that slut-shamed her for having too many boyfriends and being too surprised. In the Time Magazine article, Taylor calls ‘reputation’ – an album mostly full of love songs, “a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure.” She is so severed as an entity from the structures of oppression that public disapproval – while mean and misogynistic – has been turned into disenfranchisement. Neoliberal ideology demands this kind of posturing, which empties out and co-opts the vernacular of genuine resistance. Far from being some kind of contrarian catharsis, ‘repuation’ proved, as a VICE article notes, that “Taylor Swift is Too Big to Fail.” While critics largely panned the record, and ‘haters’ slithered in her comments section, it became the best-selling album of the year, selling more than double of the next albums on the list. It did not matter that the ‘mainstream’ market rejected her. She is a mainstream unto herself. But had she done some shady things to get there? In the VICE article, the author talks about how, in the run-up to album release, Taylor threatened to sue several publications, so many, in fact, that another article asked: “Has Taylor Swift’s Lawyer Threatened to Sue You? Let Us Know!” 

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After years of silence on America’s two parties, she claims that when she realised she ‘had to say something,’ she came out as Democrat. I don’t buy that. I believe her calculus shifted: it was becoming costlier to not disclose her politics, than to say she was a democrat. (Many publications, that she threatened to sue for libel had started to call her a Nazi). I don’t suggest she is secretly a Republican, rather that she is a chameleonic nothing, computing politics through an assessment of the zeitgeist’s mathematics. This is why she can be criticised for being too right wing, too left wing, and too centrist all at once.

When neoliberalism deems a concept ‘normalised,’ it has appropriated that movement into the rational moral consciousness. Hence, the marginal cost of making a song called ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ telling homophobes – in the vein of all great activism – to chill out, is far outweighed by the benefits of appeasing a moment’s norm. When it was the normal position to adopt, Taylor mobilized her army and did genuinely impactful things (donations, petitions, etc). The needle for morality had already been shifted through the hard work of activism, she coasted in once all the discomfort around queer rights had passed. Her glistening image is deliberately placed in the marketplace of media as an anodyne, unsexy, formless protean. It would be foolish to expect her to soil her best dress with radical empathy.

The culture industry requires that its products embody this tepid, mass-apeal-based moral rationality. It can never say, speak on Palestine or Indian farmer protests, but it could, reasonably, peddle an LGBTQ+ flag and talk Biden. It is the cowardly white liberal feminism that revels in its fetishisation of individual agency and ‘choice.’ Accordingly, Taylor has turned the personal pronoun, ‘I’ into the sharpest, most well-organised institution seen in modern culture. Even in the age of stan Twitter and internet insanity, she has the most rabid of the bunch, who have scared music critics by doxxing unflattering reviewers to protect her ‘I.’ 

In return, Taylor uses this large fanbase as a cash cow that will purchase 4 Vinyl records of the same album only because when you arrange them, they form a clock through their cover art. (Seriously.) Her fans stream remix after remix to climb the charts, and have moralised her re-recordings so well that purchasing a Taylor’s Version is recast as a display of love and loyalty and feminist consumption. (On stan twitter, the older versions are called “unethical versions.”) And all the while we are to believe that her predatory and rapacious marketing efforts, her (in my opinion) ugly, overpriced merchandise, and her single-minded gamification of streaming metrics, are supposedly irrelevant to her musical genius.

In that same Time Magazine interview, she explains Girlboss feminism 101 as if she invented it (is Sheryl Sandberg a joke to you?): “feminine ideas becoming lucrative means that more female art will get made. It’s extremely heartening.” Taylor has turned the logic of production and its efficiency into a virtue, proof of talent, feminism, and a mandate for a legacy. This is the work of ideology. It manipulates its subjects from realising superstructural oppression. It brazenly invokes identity politics. It piggybacks off of movements with teeth and blunts them into blubbering, white individualism. 

Taylor recognises that the culture industry was responsible for making artists play the capitalist game of profit-maximisation: this is why she fought Apple Music and Spotify for better compensation. In an interview with the Rolling Stones speaking against streaming, she said: “And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.” Her problem with these platforms was not the commodification of art itself, but that she was not profiting enough from this commodification. She was able to hold them hostage because the platforms needed her more than she needed them, and this is what it means to rule one’s own culture industry. Her output is – after all – songs she wrote about herself, by herself. In our late capitalist context, when economic avarice has been naturalised into ‘business savvy,’ we forget that consumption is a political act. Marketing and releasing partially products for the sole reason of more profit is a hostile, exploitative, totalitarian act.

Taylor Swift - The Myth 

We must now get to the music itself, so allow me to borrow from Barthes’ description of Myth to make the following claims: 

1.  Taylor Swift is a storyteller.

 Taylor’s stories have soundtracked much of my inner life. I say story, rather than song, because across Taylor’s discography, form and style are both only window dressing for the storytelling impulse. It’s all about angle. She’s said it herself– it doesn’t matter if it’s the icy synths on ‘1989,’ or fiddle twangs on her debut record, the heart of her work remains the same: images and actions weave themselves into conceits that are as repetitive in their structure as they are compelling in their world-building. She has never sold us sex, with its risks of post-nut clarity and inevitable somatic changes. She chose, instead, things that stay with us forever – I remember crushes through her titles, choose date spots through her hooks, and explain heartbreak by her bridges. Her folklore is water, seeping into every structure of feeling, buoyed eternally by its narrative arcs that are always about things. For most people’s romantic lives, you could reasonably say - hey! There’s a Taylor Swift song about that! 

  2. Her music is a Myth: Unlike polysemic art, which abounds in all directions and invites the reader to participate in meaning-making, this all refers back to its own mythology - that of Taylor Swift.  

In semiotics, linguists break down the process of signification: there is a complete sign which is made up of signifiers - the vehicles of representations chosen by a cultural system (like saying ‘cat’ to describe a cat)- and the signified, which is the thing itself (that animal with some milk and meows). Barthes explains myths as a second-order language system, wherein what was once a sign (concept of cat + image of cat) becomes just a signifier (for spinster, or bad luck, or cute, depending on the myth). 

My claim is that Taylor’s music makes itself a second-level signifier for her own Myth. She makes the act of listening to her music an act of trying to get to the bottom of the first-level of signification, in order to plumb at the second-level of signification, which is her Mythology.

Swift’s music presents a series of signs for emotions - love, heartbreak, and joy - woven into linear arcs. However, these arcs do not leave much room for the emotions themselves to explode beyond the narrative structure she has erected with hook-machines and chord-cement. Barthes tells us that the triumph of Myth is its ability to never reject things or mottle them. Instead, “its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification.” In other words, her reams on the rituals of relationships perform a purifying function, clarifying the messiness of emotions through the imposition of a language system whose framework is order, logic, and realism.

These narrative arcs, furthermore, are replete with meaning that can be uncovered and further purified through a cipher-style listening process. Unlike more interpretatively complex singer-songwriters, (say, Björk, or Fiona Apple) her lyricism, while powerful as a series of fatally-precise adjectives and remembrances, form a lexicon for emotions that creates distance from the emotion itself. Her songs are more interested in spinning a story around an emotion, than the emotion and its catharsis. In other words, they all tie back to story, to self, to myth.

3. The more time you spend with both Taylor the woman, and Taylor Swift’s fandom, the closer you get to Myth.

One of Taylor’s greatest songs, ‘Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,’ is a deep cut off ‘Midnights’ that documents a debilitating relationship with an older man. Her grief is naked and gutting, with lyrics like, “give me back my girlhood, it was mine first,” and “I miss who I used to be/ the tomb won’t close,” and “I regret you all the time.” Her voice – as always – is clear as a missile, inflecting at the proper moments and crooning at each loss, making sure you understand how each word felt in the story of the song. When the song was released, me and many other dedicated Swifties said the words our coven demands us to drop at least once an album cycle: this song was written specifically for me, about my life.

This is the brilliance of Myth: “it comes and seeks me out…as a confidence and a complicity… I feel this [song] has just been created on the spot, for me, like a magical object springing up in my present life without any trace of the history which has caused it.” There is much discourse around how, because Taylor’s vocal range is limited, her songs are easier for the average person to sing. It’s not about hitting the high notes, it’s about achieving the emotional intonation as prescribed. That’s what delivers the fulfilment of enjoying a Taylor Swift song. To properly appreciate the song, you have to listen to the lyrics and sing the story. You have to find the protagonist sympathetic or antagonistic as prescribed by her Myth. If you are faint of heart and a lover of stories, you cannot help but invest in the first-person character she embodies, and you cannot help but construct yourself in the first-person character she entreats you to learn-by-heart. That’s how you begin to speak the metalanguage of her Myth. 

Taylor’s prolific musical exeges have created not a discography, but a Myth. This is what makes her fans feel as though they are speaking a secret language, and living in a world of interiority where it is only them, their secret sessions, their reserve of references, and their own red-lipped Rosetta Stone. This is not polysemic literary interpretation, because there is a right answer as to what refers to what, which you can understand if you sink deep enough into her mythology.

Cultural production under late capitalism is characterized by its intertextuality: nothing is unique, everything is a referent of something else that has come before it; all is bastardised kitsch and layered with quotations, simulacra, and symbols of other cultural artefacts. What makes Swift feel like she means more is that from the singularity of her vision and her magnificent power to produce prolifically, all ties back to her own Myth. She does not have to debase herself with external borrowings and imagery; she has no reference point but herself. Roland Barthes describes: “Myth…establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.”

I, seasoned Swiftie, recognise not only the songwriting easter eggs within ‘Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,’ but also that it is the 19^th track on an album she released at age 32 – obviously, this is a metacomment on 32-year-old John Mayer dating 19 year-old Taylor Swift. Duh. The web never ends, there are no limits to her omnivorous mastication of language, her oeuvre is an exercise in scarfing down images and symbols and regurgitating them as her own Myth. Lest we forget, she also has juridification: In an insane, must-read essay ‘Taylor Swift Does Not Exist,’ Sam Kriss offers a screenshot of a diary of notes made while following the ‘1989’ tour, shortly after Taylor copyrighted ‘this sick beat,’ ‘nice to meet you, where you been,’ and ‘party like it’s 1989.’ They are the scribbles of a madperson, but they are right: “she is attempting to PRIVATISE ALL HUMAN LANGUAGE” in order to “make it so it’s IMPOSSIBLE TO SPEAK WITHOUT ONLY SPEAKING OF TAYLOR SWIFT.”  

By offering so many stories across so many genres, as Horkheimer and Adorno write, “[s]omething is provided for everyone so that no one can escape.” Her ocean of cultural output flows with the pull of language-learning. The more you listen, the more you connect, the more you understand the Myth of Taylor Swift. You can remember the necklace from the paparazzi photo and use it to decode an epithet in a hit. You can watch her music video a million times and find a new album title. It is not ‘high art’ that has multiple possibilities. It is the deadening out of artistic possibility, being so invested in an individual’s myth and truth. This is why Taylor Swift stands out: by gamifying her cultural output, she has added another layer of engagement with it that is ostensibly ‘depth’ of interpretation. The pleasure delays its own gratification for a second, invites a semi-automatic form of engagement, and eventually reveals itself as metalanguage. Determined not to give up the appearance of intellect while in fact eroding its cultural roots, we flitter through loose, laden, Swiftian songs and accomplish “not only…a depravation of culture, but inevitably…an intellectualization of amusement.” 

Because of this participative element of stanning Swift, new music is encountered with a kind of high: to recognise a variation or adaptation of an older album, ex-boyfriend, or album-drop tactic, a user is validated as part of the in-group, well-versed in the mimetic ontology of the group. Each new cultural output from her (song, outfit, outing, boyfriend) is satisfying irrespective of the quality of the creation, since the fear of missing out on a cultural moment is so stark, the threat of irrelevancy so debilitating, and hence, as Adorno and Horkheimer write, “enjoyment is giving way to being there and being in the know, connoisseurship by enhanced prestige.” Then, any additional differentiation made by the creation is championed as innovation, despite these differentiations’ subscription to the same format and ideological scope of the Taylor Swift Universe. It’s Marvel, with some SAT vocabulary and an enthralling bridge thrown in there. Dialectic again, “the machine is rotating on the spot.” 

This ritualistic engagement with music as a form of amusement is particularly rewarding under late capitalism, when our leisure time – thought to be a place of freedom – has turned into anything but. Under late capitalism, the time we do not spend working is time we must spend preparing to get back to it the following morning, and it is time we cannot spend critically questioning this fact. Of course, not all Swifties are 9-5ers breaking their backs over labour, but the sociological shift in our leisure necessarily affects every consumer of the culture industry, for we cannot help but think in the grooves of work. When Taylor offers us a treasure map and a legend, the faculties for work which ideology has been training us to take up since birth leap back at us as pleasure. This offers the appearance of singularity in our pop culture landscape which has been socialised into an alienating world, where we do not ‘engage’ with culture, we consume it as entertainment. By and large, culture is entertainment, and everything else is pretentious. Our leisure time is spent re-watching old shows, scrolling until our fingers ossify, and adaptations of adaptations are all that’s left on the air. Most of what we consume in our postmodern world is both boring and pleasurable, demanding little effort and content with the slopes of the familiar inundations of media. Thus, Taylor speciously demands more of us, the brains we’ve wired to work, and we oblige, glazed over and content. 

These conditions have a degrading effect on culture at large; there is no choice but to amuse and puzzle, and thus, what was supposed to be the great democratisation of content has actually been a juridification of culture. There is too much of it, it serves to reproduce the ideologies of the status quo and its hegemony, and the more of it there is, the less meaningful our engagement with it gets. Art is degraded into schlock that serves to unify the masses through output that by design must never question the systems structuring life under late capitalism. The culture industry facilitates the collective numbing of our weirdest, most dangerous, and revolutionary impulses, by feeding us a never-ending supply of base entertainment. It reduces art to the distractions of fun, and with our diseased alienation, “fun is a medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe.” 

Taylor Swift, My Close Personal Friend 

The word ‘parasociality’ gets thrown around a lot. The New Yorker podcast covering Taylor’s potential creation of a monoculture discusses her Mona-Lisa-esque ability to create intimacy with her legions of fans through a “hey guys” linguistic effect. She walks onto the stage and offers a simple introduction – “hey guys, my name is Taylor” – and hundreds of thousands of people almost faint. We know your name, Taylor. We have spent hours days months of our lives listening to your music: in our bedrooms, curled up over handwritten poems to boys who didn’t make us feel cool; driving around during the pandemic where there was nothing to do but sing ‘folklore’ and talk shit with our friends; at our sleepovers, where we hated those girls better known for the things that they did on the mattress; at the club, when ‘Love Story’ came on and we didn’t like how everybody else (the ‘locals’) sang your song as if they knew you like we did;  in our Instagram captions, where we dressed daydream-nightmare-core; on tumblr, wondering if you were ‘Taylurking,’; over a joint, talking about your capitalistic offences; in a playlist we made for a potential boyfriend to test whether he was worthy; with our mothers, trying to explain why we had the best day; getting wine-drunk and crying over champagne problems; missing him even though he kept us like a secret but we kept him like an oath; at the pregame before our 22^nd birthday because how could a person know everything at 18, but nothing at 22?; necks sloped into our knees as we got wasted like all our potential. So much of my imaginative and sentimental universe has been handed to me by your songs. I have a playlist called ‘taylor swift songs that made me want to be a writer.’ And another called ‘taylor swift songs where i have been the villain.’ When I graduated middle school, high school, and college, I had an indescribable need to play ‘Long Live’ and cry: I had the time of my life, with you.

These rich histories, where your mind turned my life into folklore, are unshakeable, and visceral. I will never not feel ownership of you when a song plays at a café, or a person offers poorly-informed trash-talk of your massive cultural impact. I will not deny your role in my emotional life, for to do so, would be like gravity: I’d end up losing a part of the world that kept me grounded. When I watch you perform live in a few days, I will watch also pages turn as bridges burn between us, my longest musical relationship, and my most wonderful anxious-avoidant confidante. But there is a point beyond which we must all grow out of our lowest impulses, and I’m afraid, you are mine. There is no doubt that you will continue to be the light of the cultural firmament, glowing in adoration and impossible increases in fame. Nobody can take anything from you now. It is time we take stock of what you have taken from us, instead. It is time I write this essay, documenting your systemic transformation into an uncontrollable machine, running riot beyond our formulas for success, quite like the free market. It is time we take stock of your role in replicating the worst parts of feminism, neoliberalism, and shallow cultural output in our degraded climate of consumption. There is a danger to your blinding star. For years, you made it impossible to look clearly at all that you are, and all that you have done. Happy in my heart-shaped sunglasses, humming along to my gospel, I was a believer. Now, I wonder, if I can step into the daylight, and let you go. 

Schiaparelli’s SS24 show on Monday was sound-tracked to ‘Top Gun.’ Its designs were stitched together with screens and intertextual references to movies (Oppenheimer, Alien, and Jupiter). The looks themselves are gorgeous. Out-of-this-world. Schiaparelli’s colour palette is what you may find at an electronic wasteland: latex black; metallic grey; battery green. It is also what you may find at a fantasy convention: cream puff sleeves; medieval-style collars; shoulder-padded suits. The silhouettes are not just dramatic, they are sentient beings themselves, extending models’ bodies into metaphors of more.

Special shoutout to the looks, ‘Mother,’ and the model carrying ‘Baby.’ These are made of what Creative Director David Roseberry calls “pre-historic technology” (which he defines as “pre-2007”). David uses Swarovski crystals and electronic chips to pay homage to a past before Steve Jobs and a present that misses flip phones. Clunky technology becomes obsolete because of minimalism, and then its clunkiness becomes an aesthetic as tender as a memory. Yeah. Mother is mothering.

David is good. He is bringing Schiaparelli back, by going back to Sciaparelli’s roots: the avant-garde, the surreal, the outlandish, the outrageous.

Elsa Schiaparelli, founder of the Maison, was an Italian misfit from high society who wrote scandalous poetry while studying philosophy in Rome. As a result of said poetry, her family sent her to a convent. In protest of said convent, she went on a hunger strike. And then, as all the best stories go, she found herself in 1920s Paris.

After a surprise patronage from the man behind Galaries Lafayette, her double-stitched sweaters first gained attention. They were, decidedly, weird. (Please note the bow.)

Over the next 20 years, she worked and hung out with the best of the bunch - Man Ray, Duchamp, Picasso, Warhol, Dali, and Cocteau. She considered clothing art. Elsa invented my personal favourite article of attire – the skort. She also (and this is something we should really be trying to bring back) made gloves on which you could actually light a match. That’s just plain cunty. Yves Saint Laurent, years later, said about her impact: “She slapped Paris. She smacked it. She tortured it. She bewitched it. And it fell madly in love with her.”

I like haute couture because it does not ask what fashion can do for your body, but what your body can do for fashion. It is not interested in being flattering, or form-fitting. It is most disinterested in whether you are a spring or an autumn, a silver girl or a gold girl. Thank god for that. Aren’t we tired of suiting ourselves? Aren’t we sick of treating our bodies like finished paintings looking for a frame, instead of blank canvases and unmolded clay?

I stopped buying fast fashion about 6 years ago. I had done my research. Sweat-shops/factories were collapsing – that is, when they weren’t burning women workers on fire. Zara’s ‘employees’ stitched SOS-calls into their clothes. Overconsumption was creating plastic islands in the ocean. I hated haul culture, and I hated Shein. For any of my feminism and socialism to stick, I knew I couldn’t patronize these stores.

(To be clear, luxury brands also suck in this regard. Despite their ridiculous prices, houses like Dior, LV, St. Laurent, Burberry etc. enlist labourers under devastating conditions. Underpaid embroiders from India make Dior’s skirts and 950$ t-shirts that say ‘We Should All Be Feminists,’ and ‘” Femininity, the trap”- Simone de Beauvoir.’ But since I want to talk today about style, and not about how there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, I’ll keep it moving – rest assured, I didn’t give up fast fashion for luxury fashion.)

It wasn’t that hard to cut fast fashion out of my life. I’d always loved shopping, but nothing in H&M or Zara could be considered ‘style.’ All was boring trends made more boring by their short life-span, and the inevitable fact that everybody else would be wearing the same thing. There was no struggle, no search, no gift of discovering what spoke to your inner eye in these massive corporations. And this was before TikTok trends ruled over us all with a bow-wrapped iron fist.

Indeed, ever since I watched that fateful TikTok – “use 3 words to define your personal style,” the horizon of outfits I wore shrunk. (To those who know me, so did my general self-confidence and spunk). My sartorial pickings had to be classy, neutral, sophisticated, and elegant. I became a poster-girl for mock necks, sweater vests, and white linen pants with white linen shirts tucked into them. I began to dress like I was afraid of my body. A series of rules racked my closet: no cleavage; no shorts that made my thighs look bad; no t-shirts with stupid words on them. Sure, this desire for timelessness protected me from dressing like the hype-girls of sneakerhead-land and the cut-up queens of y2k gone 2 far. But the only joys I was getting from clothes were coming from the richness of the fabric, their fall on my frame, and the way they’d look in pixel. Where was trashy, weird, and downright deranged? Well-matched outfits rarely make history.

Couture – especially when done with as much aplomb as Schiaparelli – is about this beautiful weirdness. Yes, its price tags are inaccessible. Yet, unlike the beige prison of ‘quiet luxury,’ couture reminds me that fashion is about art and expression and scandal and fun. It is not about monochromes and pastels that are supposed to help you class-signal better. Forget coastal-grandmother-loro-piana-ralph-lauren-core. Ditch the pearls and clutch the campy. Be ugly. Thrift to the bottom of the earth and convince yourself that the 3-euro pile holds all the secrets to slay.

When Elsa Schiaparelli was coming up in the world, she was placed against the other titan of the time, Madame Coco Chanel. Chanel’s sweaters were so well-stitched they looked factory-made in their perfection. Her suits were clean, and her women were ladies. Schiaparelli, on the other hand, was more interested in ideas, and in invention. Because her stitching wasn’t perfect, she clipped fabric together with strange broaches and random buttons. Then, she turned those broaches and buttons into insects and animals. She painted gold fingernails on black evening gloves. She took René Magritte’s ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ and turned the pipe into a bottle for men’s cologne. Salvador Dali’s clock was turned into a woman’s powder compact. Needless to say, the two women did not get along.

I love Chanel as much as the next god-fearing-Blair Waldorf-loving girl. At the same time, I am tired of dressing to code cool and classy and effortless. I am, in fact, none of those things. I want colour and cloth to leap off my body with audacity and artfulness and personality. I might, at first, feel more anxious and perceived when my clothes make me stand out in a room. But with time, these outfits will make me feel bigger and weirder - and more comfortable with being both.

“In difficult times, fashion is always outrageous.” -Elsa Schiaparelli

This has been a quiet year. I moved back home with the slowness of a full-body stretch in bed on a Sunday.

For the first time in years, I stopped filling nights with green lights. Instead, I began to moisturize maniacally. Hand cream, eye cream, foot cream, nail cream. After the gym, after the sauna, after the club. My hands became so soft I couldn’t help but wonder if something was slipping through them. I put on a homemade lip mask of coconut oil and honey and I tried not to think about being kissed. Journalling into the night, I wrote down all the circuits that were shorting in my brain, then tried on end to re-wire them. It was a year of working to be Right. Seven pillows, satin headgear, decaf cups.

In the past, I’ve lived rawly, clutching onto the present with my teeth and letting bleeding on my lips be a sign of doing something right. So, usually, my life is measured by its highs. And I’ve had them this year too, in foreign lands of crimson adventures (A French sailing aficionado I met in Istanbul has taken advantage of New Years’ to ask if I have plans to be on a boat in Marseille anytime soon). My job has flung me into the folds of India in a way that is both instructional and thoroughly unmooring. These varied trips reminded me of who I used to be, who I could be, and who I want to be, the way some ghosts are friendly in their chill.

But the best parts of this year came with yawning sustenance. As the liquid gold of the last year drained away, and the drunken disarray of college flaked off, I was left with white tablecloths and a desperate need for purity. Clean living. Avocado eggs and stir-clear driving. Perched on my desk of glass, kaftan sweeping the floor, I did the crossword. Its black squares and knowing wittiness became my matutinal co-conspirators. 5-letter word, ‘They work in meters:’ POETS. Ten-letter word, ‘Bookie?’: AVID READER. Fitting, for after years of PDFs and drought, I finally got back into reading. Underlining in ink on paginations of past lives brought me the great privileges of connection, understanding, and perspective.  

The first book I read this year was Annie Ernaux’s The Years (Les Années). Its poetry of part-memoir-part-collective-history stuck to my teeth like caramel now hardening. Somewhere, Ernaux writes: She has gone to the other side but she cannot say of what. The life behind her is made up of disjointed images. Elsewhere, she reveals: She dreams of writing in a language no one knows. She writes in her diary that she longs to return to an original purity: “I am a will and a desire.” She does not say for what.

Like Ernaux, my diary is a tome of disjointed images. She seems overwhelmed by the need to take everything on board, as if assailed by a whole that she alone perceives. Here are some flyaways from it.

In the midst of a home renovation where I fought to keep the weird ornaments and Gothic wooden furniture, on 20^thMay I say, “I’m not sure when aesthetics became attachments – time has been flattened into desiccated decoration.”

After an intimate evening in lawn grass, I sadly note on 12^th September, “I’ve made delicacy a religion and I will go to its hell – for never living up to the gracefulness of its asks.”

In a year of feeling unenthused and relentlessly disappointed by men and mirages, I force out by December 2^nd, “But who is really cool? Can I actually name a single cool person?”

And yet, the respite from chaos in my day-to-day created windows for creative (and crazy) storms in my mind. Away from my ritual hazes of smog, these days, I can remember each hour of the clock. My dreams have never felt this true and this far. I am seeing myself come into focus under an eye-mask, fantasies unspooled through psychoanalysis. On 11^th December after a dizzying set of REM reveries, I write, “This day peeled over my eyes, closing at every ray. My dreams have grown in their architecture. They are now a madhouse I inhabit with knowingness and precision. When I realise at moments of ecstasy that they are false, I love them all the more for it.”

I’ve grown up in a city with no seasons (save for wet and dry). It has taught me to feel change without the world spelling it all out. This year was filled with chemtrails spurring over country clubs, old friends returning to me with silken casualness, and watching television with my mother on the sofa. It was a year of burying into my own interiority and seeing, not a finished film, but each still frame. But slowness does not inhere stagnancy. I am thinking, I am writing, I am wanting. To exist is to drink oneself without thirst.

From a May covered in dust to a December glittering with festivity and too much champagne, tonight, I celebrate the quietness of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet, “I am a little world made cunningly.”

Did you find this too referential? Too many quotes, too much media? Too bad! Here are my favourite cultural artefacts of the year.

Best Podcast – the Paris Review Podcast (particularly the reading of the short story ‘Fairytale’ by Alexandra Kleeman) and ArtHoles (the Jackson Pollock series was fantastic!)

Best TV Show I watched – Mad Men, twice

Best TV Show (that released this year) - Succession (he’s the eldest boy!!)

Best Film I watched – La Haine

Best Film (that released this year) – Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon with Coppola’s Priscilla a little further behind

Best Albums (that released this year) – Caroline Polachek’s Desire, I Want to Turn into You, Lana’s Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard

Best Book – Madame Bovary by Flaubert, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera

Happy new year, postmodern princesses and handsome heretics.

Each night, we watched the moon wax bigger and bigger, bright like I’d never seen it before, soaking Istanbul’s waterways in deep purple and white gold. How could the moon be so different here, beaming like a metaphor? We googled it. Islam was born in Arabia by moonlight, through the desert, where its guidance in the night sky led people to their destinations – like God in dark lives. Now, crescents flew on flags, cradling their civilizations. Against ‘Eurocentric’ tellings of history, which manufactured and repurposed the so-called ‘East’ for its own thrill, here was an empire, a slit between continents and crusades, a capital that was once the centre of the silken world. There was, of course, no Rome without Constantinople, no sumac without these straits. My 3-week trip revelled in splendid, grimed moments that neither compacted into clear days nor stayed separate from navy, laser nights.  Bursting its binaries, welcome to my travelogue, my fieldwork, my diary of Türkiye.

Tourism versus Localism

The first half of my trip was spent budget travelling with an old friend. We knew that the true tourist experience meant avoiding tourist traps. And yet we also knew that there was something politically voyeuristic and frankly, annoying, to spend a week in a city trying to be locals. Like many ethnographic tests, this conflict played itself out over the 3 nights I spent in bars or clubs in the country. There was first a night in local Istanbul, then one in hyperlocal Çesme, and finally, a flagrantly touristic one in Istanbul again.

On our first Friday night in the city, after 60 lira Efes beers at a rock n’ roll bar, we asked our server-turned-friend if she would direct us to some clubs. What kind of music, she asked? Whatever you recommend, we said. At midnight, we entered the first club. The bouncers asked for Student IDs and not passports, and we thankfully supplied ours (I’m still young, I thought, I was an undergraduate just a few months ago). The large venue was filled with big groups of friends, talking as they danced, drinking cheap shots and enjoying the Turkish pop and rap that played manageably loudly. About an hour in, after a couple of 100 lira shots, I realised I was listening to Pitbull’s ‘Hotel Room Service’ - dubbed entirely in Turkish. I found this unspeakably funny. The club was comforting because it was filled with students who barely spoke English and anyway seemed more interested in their circles than in us. There was an ease to the green smoke and dubbed throwback bangers, a veritably authentic yet familiar feeling of late-night abandon that came from seeing circles of friends, doing their weekend rituals. (The situation could be best described as sweet: when I told a boy who’d been holding up Google translate and half a finger heart for the past hour that we were leaving, he fell to his knees and immediately confessed his love for me. I think they were the only three English words he knew.)

Buoyed by this early success, we made it to the next club, which opened only at 2 am, and took a hefty entry fee. There were, once again, only locals – but of diverse ages and races, some presenting as queer, all of whom were semi-lit by the purple shadows of the pelt-like techno music. Heads swayed crooked at the neck, hands cut dry ice machines with juts. Almost immediately, we were offered drinks and dates. More English was spoken here, but somehow, less was being said. I met civil engineers, wives, businesspeople, and other professions that melted away in the din. As my friend and I tried to reach the base of the DJ booth and dance, we were stopped, approached, and talked at. The small area of the bar felt even smaller when we tried to dance, as the space and city overpowered us. The sound of an unfamiliar language twisted my ears with anxious malaise. From the upper deck, people (mainly men) looked down at us and waved, and I wondered how young we must’ve looked, 5’nothing and disoriented by attention.

That’s the thing about travelling ‘local’ - you dive into immersion, and then panic at being underwater. This panic reached its peak in Çesme, a sparsely populated beach town at the Westernmost tip of Turkey, separated from Greece by just a few nautical miles. Perhaps during tourist season it came alive, but there, in shoulder season, we felt like the only tourists in a many kilometer radius. We’d taken the bus there from Istanbul, and after a sleepless night spent watching people filter out of the bus steadily, only three people were getting off at this town. But initial worry soon gave way to beauty, as we made it to our hotel at sunrise with the world bathed in nubile pink skies and yawns of clouds. The town was flush with settlements in white and blue, its little lanes forming veins canopied in fuchsia bougainvillaea. The souvenirs, like the people and the raki, bore much resemblance to Greece. We spent the day at the beach burying into sand, making friends through strangeness, and showing off a swimsuit that screamed My Name Is Red. At night, after downing spinach leaves with yogurt, cheese kumrahs and sheesha, we left the coastal restaurant partially in search of music, partially to get away from a man sat at a table next to us, who’d been pouring raki into our water glasses and asking for a dance. He had been interrupting our psychoanalytically laced conversations about our mothers, and while we wanted to meet residents, we decided they had better not be men. We’d had just about enough of being placed in the center of a cultural panopticon.

With our ears to the ground searching for a good bassline, we found a bar with live music and made friends with some girls, twirling and giggling in secret complicity. After it shut, we walked around, watching the town fold into itself, hyperlocal and endogamous like a bygone era. Everybody seemed to know everybody else, and unlike Istanbul, people here looked and dressed similarly. We ended the night with our new friends and some guys they knew, sipping beers and emboldened to ask burning political questions: what of class, what of the refugee crisis, what of Erdogan, and what of Palestine. When we woke up the next morning, our hotelier said he’d been waiting up to make sure we got home safely, but after 2 am he had given up and hoped for the best. Çesme had been so intact in itself that it was hard not to feel alienated and frightened, but it was also ~ethnographically~ a dream site. It was there that I heard from local lips of the fractious dynamics of refugees, secular disillusionment, and the drain of the young from the country.

Finally, my last experience was made possible by Turkish Airlines, who kindly cancelled my flight and didn’t tell me when the next one would be. I left that airport with a bag full of dirty clothes, no liras left, and a brain that reeked of too much living. Two nights later, I went on a bar crawl at a friend’s hostel in Istanbul. Immediately, it felt different from my whole trip up until that point. The hostel itself was hardly a hostel, with sleek neon lights, sanitized white walls, and digital nomad décor. At the bar, about 20 traveller-types got to know each other before we took off. These travelers didn’t just take loads of vacations, they settled in places for weeks or months and treated an atlas like a bucket list. When you told them you’re from India, instead of getting a vague, joyous, “Sharukh Khan!” you got things like, “oh, I’m coming to Goa for Sunburn in December.” That night, there was no language barrier, and no pressure to creep up inside of culture’s skin. Instead, we could discuss the city – treating it like a construct – over banter and exchanged Instagrams. You could complain about the over-friendly men or the poorly-designed system of public transport. I was no longer playing ethnographer, swabbing surfaces for insight. Istanbul was only one city in one country; we could stack it against others, weigh its pros and cons, and look at it – wide-eyed and safe – from the outside.

Between the grimey bars and the luxury resorts, deciding who to kiss and where to eat, this dichotomy of tourism versus localism reduced itself to redundance. You just have to do both. I sang Oasis with the tourists coming home from the bar crawl, talked football with Galatasaray heads in Taksim, and used the backdrop of unfamiliarity to break new ground in relationships with people I’ve known all my life. I told my mother about my emotional unavailability, and heard from a stranger about their lost love in Viet Nam. Sometimes the 300 lira Stan Sebastian cheesecake is worth the line, sometimes the 1000 lira breakfast is neither worth the seagulls nor the selfie sticks. Should you try to plumb at an underbelly or take only what is made available to the outside? Bad question. As a field worker, Instagram fiend, and an experience junkie, there is euphoria in treating a city like a dream, and there is honesty in trying to taste its truths.

Past versus Present

To travel is to visit in the moving present, a country’s pasts. In Türkiye, however, as Gaza burned, when people spoke of “with everything that’s going on right now,” there was neither geographical distance nor secondhand empathy – Israel’s war crimes seemed to breathe and bellow here, in mainstream media and graffiti. Rather than represent a countercultural narrative as in the US, UK or India, next to the many distinctive, red Turkish flags strung on skies, Palestinian flags flew high. Cafés, trams, and shops featured people listening to the news of Israel’s latest offences out loud. I held up Google Translate to words on walls, and read lines like ‘our fight is one, solidarity with Gaza’ and cruder, blunter, ‘Israel Baby Killer.’ Protests coagulated in lanes like open, crimson wounds. Hundreds of police stood at junctions like buff black ants. I even saw shop owners with signs that said Israeli citizens were not welcome so long as the violence endured.

Meanwhile, the West pushed wildly irresponsible and morally repugnant ‘news’ in The Atlantic and The Times and in general on the internet. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was, because not only was their position untenable, their strategies of media manipulation and propaganda were so cold and clear. (Twitter was a hellscape of death tolls, a postmodern badland where misinformation and information fought battles in Community Notes). Türkiye is one of the few countries in the world whose humanitarian aid to and recognition of Palestine has been consistent and supplemented by state rhetoric. Yet, things are more complicated than ‘their government chose the right side.’ Head of state Erdogan was accused of attempting to pander to his Islamic vote bank. People also called the timing of his attendance at a pro-Palestinian protest suspect, because it was just before the country celebrated its centenary – the anniversary of its 100 years as a secular republic, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The founding vision of a secular Türkiye, devised by Mustafa Ataturk, crashed into the conservative platform of its current President, Erdogan. Discussing politics in a small town late into the night over beers, my friend and I had asked a group of twenty-somethings what they thought of Ataturk: “he is like our God,” they said, adding that many of their friends had his signature tattooed on their arms. (I promptly bought a 100-lira baby tee of Ataturk for good measure).

Famously, Erdogan barely mentioned Ataturk’s name and had overturned most of his secular policies – which were once the lifeblood of the newly-minted state. In his time in power, Ataturk had banned headscarves in school, replaced the Arabic alphabet with the Latin script, and dreamed up a secular, modern Turkey. These are big, valent words. And yes, they are ‘Western’ words. But as my friend and I stood at the entrance of the Hagia Sofia, a church turned into a mosque, then turned into a museum by Ataturk, then turned back into a mosque by Erdogan, we murmured about what it meant to honour complicated histories. The new post-Erdogan inscriptions skirted over the structure’s proselytizing past, and veered quite close to propaganda. 

To visit a historical site is to visit an active site of political editing. Each new government retelling of the past is part of a project to create a certain kind of political imaginary. Türkiye’s poetry of bringing together Europe and Asia, East and West, had translated in fact to a population that seemed rawly discontent with their lack of formal Europeanness. They simmered as they were asked to accept crippling inflation, increasing authoritarianism, and internal polarization. Their mythologies had failed them, and now young people were leaking into other waters, born into a citenzry of disillusionment. 

This was a government, like my own, that was buckling over its past, and sacrificing its present to force itself a future. People, however, cannot be bent as easily as a story. They feel the past more clearly than the future, and will not accept by default the present. There we were, watching binaries inflated into balloons for the ballot, pierced by the grit of real life. Standing on a bridge, I could see continental waters below and flags of watermelon and crescent above. I heard, between chants I didn’t understand, one that I did: from the river to the sea.

When You Leave, Who Do You Take Home?

Once at a sleepover with a friend, splayed on the floor with legs dangling in the air, I remarked, “I think my favourite thing to do is set up a concept in a binary, and then burst it.” The false binary. It was a common trick of academia, a beloved rebuttal of debaters, and an age-old Whitmanian truism. Yes, of course, things are large, they contain multitudes. But the trouble is that we cannot help but think in our little dichotomies. An expectation, crystal and cerebral, versus a reality, fleshy and opaque. We encounter the world through the interplay of binaries - against the past, we measure the present. Against the local aesthetic, we scurry to build a touristic one. Against the self we make in our homes with our routines, out comes the traveller, cigarette in lips and diet gone to shit. Türkiye drove me wild in its twilight modernity, hushed me in its mosques by moonlight, and left my head spinning like I was at sea for days after. It made me nostalgic for past selves, and conscious - conscious like a conqueror - of infinite new selves that could become in this big world, across a border and a binary or two. 

Shop like a tourist, eat like a local, see like a child, and write like an alien. Somewhere between these edicts, friendships form, senses tingle, and through estrangement, culture becomes as clear as it will ever be.

There is – as there always is – a trend clogging the internet as its oldest natives battle their 20s: recommendations for books or films about feeling lost and confused and hollow and wrong as we navigate adulthood. The lists are well-intentioned, if predictable, and point you towards novels like The Idiot and Everything I Know About Love. One July last year at an old bookstore in Nice, I couldn’t find any of these booktok options. Really, it was for the best. Wanting to preserve the romantic intrigue of reading an invitingly-titled book in public, I walked out with Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned. At the time, I knew it only as Ms Serena Van der Woodsen’s favourite book, which was reason enough to try it.

I see now, that it is a timeless aesthetic account of waste, ennui, and early adulthood. Why do we continue to read Fitzgerald? Why is he – irrevocably whitemale – a part of canon? Because of sparkling, painstaking prose from a man who knows he’s smart and won’t let you forget it.

Messier and more indulgent than Gatsby, this novel meandered through ideas with luxury and yawning humour. There is champagne without socialism, decay sets in slowly, and sheen turns to rust unnoticeably. Its discussion of the lost generation rings true, and will perhaps never not ring true as each age is christened by its own set of freakish technologies and social effluvia. This is a book for the ADHD procrastinators, the TikTok philosophers, and the self-proclaimed writers who will die before putting ink on a page. It is for us, the stylized generation, whose conflation of beauty and truth has become a social fact, a principle structuring all interactions in ever-cruder and hackneyed terms.

I was laughing almost immediately, underlining almost maniacally. Early on:

“Well what he means by brains in a woman in is—”

“I know,” interrupted Anthony eagerly, “he means a smattering of literary misinformation.”

“That’s it. The kind who believes that the annual moral let-down of the country is a very good thing or the kind of who believes it’s a very ominous thing.”

Documenting the post-collegiate life, everything golden turns to disappointment as the titular maladjusted hedonists (Anthony and Gloria) make mythically poor decisions. Holy shit, is this play about us? Like Anthony, I see myself as: “a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism.” Like Gloria, I feel girls are no longer beautiful in a shining, endless sense, instead, we are “as pretty as she would ever be again.” One of my friends picked up my copy of the book and read some of my annotations and, asked, deservedly, if I’d considered being less insufferable.

But in earnest, as essays are no longer curricular requirements, ideas and anti-capitalism develop patinas from disuse. It was all fun and existentially-destabilising to get a job in the first place, but now, old friends are scattered across continents and lives unlived are closing doors with silent slams. Now is the time when we actually stop calling as frequently, settle into routine, miss and yearn and long but remain unable to do anything about it. When we come home from work we find ourselves physically unable to open a book, much less write one, because staring at moving light is all that can be achieved. I wrote in my journal in the comedown of summer, “it is August in my twenty second year and I am covered in dust.” There is a subtlety to these deaths in which artists never become, and in which gregarious banter dims into polite conversation by the coffee machine Monday morning.

 Towards the close of the book, Fitzgerald writes:

“What becomes of everybody you used to know and have so much in common with?”

“You drift apart,” suggested Muriel with the appropriate dreamy look.

“They change,” said Gloria. “All the qualities that they don’t use in their daily lives get cobwebbed up.”

“The last thing he said to me,” recollected Anthony, “was that he was going to work so as to forget that there was nothing worth working for.”

So, this novel is also a warning. For the would-bes and the should’ve-beens. I left a note on a page: check back at 40? In the first half of the book, Fitzgerald details the day-to-day wherein dreaming starts to feel like too much work, and mundane inertia settles into the corners of bright eyes. In the beginning, as with early adulthood, his characters have undefined hope and shapeless ambition, but they remain shackled by stupidity and circumstance. And then, towards the end, hope itself is polluted, it becomes “more sordid than despair” for it is ‘too late now.’

The point, I think, is twofold. The novel is an excoriation of how idealism wanes, and it is also a plea to resist the numbing. Fitzgerald holds my hand in moments of lethargy and immobility and finds the aesthetic glint of rotting away in a bedroom. And he also takes my hand slides it against the dust that will form over my lips and eyes and furniture if I keep sacralizing suspension instead of activity, energy, creativity - life. Perhaps there is something fated about aging, that the beautiful are to be damned. But in its description of this fatedness, this determinism, I left wanting to rail against irrelevance, to ascend the trappings of style, and really, with the confusion and wrongness and mess of it all, to do something.  

Our sugary professor invites us to do a round of introductions – everybody here is a seasoned Literature-type looking to experiment with genres outside their comfort zone. They are minoring in Creative Writing and they want MFAs while I think writing can neither be taught nor seriously done. The blue-haired socialists, the snowy offsprings of the internet age, they say they are all tired of writing about themselves. They are sick of insertion, surfeited with the ‘I.’ And I’m like, oh. Have you figured yourselves out? Is there no memoir agitating your horizons?

Must be nice.

Personally, I am still caught up in an obsessive, hackneyed search for meaning. Your friendly-neighbourhood confessional poet, journal truther, inner life deluder. Every word I write is an act of becoming, every epithet carves inlets and outlets into me. I can’t forge fiction, nor abstract distance – I can’t write all the time.

At home in Bombay, a sky is blue is blue is blue. Friends have been pickled into truths over time. Family is a wave on the Arabian Ocean that crests and always comes back. There is no need to write, there is no need for memory. We drive past our 200-year-old school past midnight, playing songs we heart-by-know. ‘For The First Time’ by The Script, ‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA, ‘Good Riddance’ by Greenday. We live, by grace, in ‘we’s. We tell the same stories, bricked person-by-person, comedic timing chiselled into our clayminds. We know what the real is. It is open, and wombic, and honest. We do not fear forgetting, and we do not fear ourselves.

At university in Delhi, I am a swinging wind vane, in airs made capricious by climate change. I pace through the day: wake up sweating when the AC is switched off; my roommate rummaging for class; there is nothing to eat; I think about whether my professor thinks I’m smart through my 10.10; 11.50; 3, is my outfit weird?; 6.30; gym, my eardrums are shredded by a brown boy’s Brit-rap playlist; there are mosquitoes in the shower; bong rips and friends, iced coffee and there is nothing to eat; sleep and dream of fuller times. Intentionality collapses into the interstices of routine. There is no space for the meta. I’m too imbricated to imagine.

If home is real enough to be taken for granted, and university renders me unthinking in its regiments, then, well, when (and what) do I write?

I write in danger. I write blind. When the ‘real’ is compromised or transient or tenuous, then I must commit truth to paper, create truth in paper. When the real darts mercurial – somewhere in between life and inner life – I catch whiffs of reality, embroider dreams around it, and forge my fiction. I write in love. I write when I’m afraid I’ll forget, when I’m afraid I’ll never know who or what we are. It is an act of desperation. A jam preserve. A looting of life.

In the past two years I have written a poem about a Woody Allen Protagonist Type; a love letter claiming to be Salman Rushdie’s last midnight child; a feverish 10,000-word diary of my time in Paris; ad nauseam about how my fingers feel on these photosynthesizing screens. I’ve written elegies as I break through the girls I could’ve been, won’t be, and am; and odes and odes to happiness, eyes eating sun and fingers finding gold.

This makes me a fake writer (if I may borrow the identifier for a moment). Real Writers don’t wait for threats or disquietude in the realm of the real. They know very well what the real is, they detail it – in characters who do plot and speak with authority in conversations. Real Writers are obsessed with observations and specifics – how cold the draft felt swarming through the metro line 4 that one Thursday, the dirty guilt on his face before he got up from the table for the last time, the smudged ink on the margins of the legal paper. These are the tiny acts that amount to behaviour, character, plot. Writers see these things and know what they mean. If writers’ plots or people are complicated, their imposition of perception, their belief in the senses, is not.

Writers urge me that this is the world we are living in, these are characters who have flesh, here is a plot which has teeth, you must believe, you must believe. Fiction is assertion. Even if this is just in the context of one novel or essay, readers suspend disbelief, and make a leap of faith. Writers, on the other hand, have to be godmen who can inspire that leap. Thus, the adages of good writing are framed around confidence and how to hack it. Write what you know! (Seriously, I don’t know all that much.) Show don’t tell! (Me, I love to tell, repetitiously, maniacally.) Worldbuild! (Long ago French philosophers taught me the world is but ideology and hyperreality.)

And yet, I’ll say it straight: I believe, in my heart of darkness, that there is a book inside of me. Pulitzer-certified, upper echelons of the literary pantheon, generation-defining book. (Novel? Memoir? Cultural criticism? TBD.) If I am to retain this belief, I must ask whether being a Real Writer means I have to step out of the self – or at least, the unending anxiety of its search. Instead of getting caught up in existentialist nitpicks or complacent in the everyday, I have to snatch reality, grab it by the garters, and mercilessly write it down.

Maybe my uncertainty in knowing the ‘real’ is some kind of woman problem. It’s like I’m stuck in 11th grade, furiously asking a man ‘what are we.’ Sadly, Simone de Beauvoir would call my writing a woman’s “babble.” At the close of The Second Sex she writes that “[w]e women are still too preoccupied with seeing clearly to try to penetrate other shadows beyond that clarity.” (For her, this is because women have been denied transcendence and subjectivity because of the feminine myth that fixes, objectifies, disempowers). Our writing is spontaneous, and diaristic to a fault; it represents a constant impulse to ‘find yourself,’ to ‘become’ through writing. It does nothing more than tan on the beaches of selfhood, never daring to wade in waters of the sublime.

But I was raised in the wet warmth of women babbling about their worlds. My mother wrote blogs and then a book, Taylor Swift turned my schoolyard crushes into self-mythology, Sylvia Plath held my hand in a mental institution and offered to preheat the oven. Their style could not be universal, but teenage-me found them sublime, luxuriating in their hot confusion, manic declarations, and hysterical fits. They didn’t lay claim to what was big and real for the world, they were happy to talk about the brags of their hearts, and dancing in refrigerator lights. These are specifics, to be sure, but from a very peculiar, particular vantage point in the world. So, I borrowed their ways of seeing, draped them over my eyes, and stitched my selves into a story.

For a while, that was alright. I did not have to be outside myself or a universalist to write about the state of women’s safety, skinny love, and teenage malaise – I could see these things with truth-force and basically no irony. They gave me access, they gave me a mandate, and so there was an ‘I’ who could comfortably write the damn thing. South Bombay comment on coloniality. High-schooler on hookup culture. Marxist analysis of Art and Gentrification. But the seams were always going to be visible. Not only have I lost my sense of what ‘real’ things to write about are (I couldn’t write a serious essay on feminist politics without giggling into gas), but I have also lost faith in the ‘I’ who is out there, having an opinion, preparing plot, and asking people to believe.

Riven by reality, call me a postmodern princess. I have lost my religion, lost faith in hooks to hang from – Marxist, feminist, Reductress-Headline-ist, Swiftie Who Loves Kanye West-ist – these old identities fall from the stars, slithering dead in a post-truth no man’s land. Creeping into adulthood, identification through check-box dispositions is not enough. There is no essential shoe that fits, no Tumblr-niche big enough for Whitman and me. I’m in my no-era Era. The 1975 told teenage-me, “I know you’re looking for salvation in a secular age, but girl, I’m not your saviour.” I am still coming to terms with the truth that nothing ever could be.

Rita Dove wrote of bad confessional writing: “It goes skewering in deep, exclaiming, Ooh, look at all this blood! But I’m like, No one’s interested in your blood. Make me bleed as I’m reading.” My difficulty is that the specific position I occupy – carved out by literary idols and exes, Twitter threads and strange nightmares – feels inseparable from the world. Everything is confessional, even when not explicitly so. When I write about Freud or Benjamin or Gandhi, I am only ever writing about myself.  Mine is an old problem, that my personal is (in the broadest, most charitable sense) political, and having no clarity in either sphere means all I do when I write is work through who I am, and where we are. I am spent, creatively and emotionally, describing how a smile teases my skin, rolling a rock up a hill.

There is a powerful argument about how, shockingly, class relations and gender politics are central to these creative dynamics. But this isn’t a political theory essay, and I maintain that there is more to my disease than womanhood or looking at that damn phone all the time. Not knowing what is real has become an aesthetic principle, my aesthetic principle. So, I broker my writing bashfully. I mull over ecstasy, I mull over regret, look at me now - mulling over mulling. Yes, this is tedious and indulgent. It is common and base. But where else can honesty come from?

As I sit down to start my first fiction piece in years, with an outline of a narrative horrifically and avariciously about myself, I realise that this is my principle simply because I have no other choice. I must lose sight of the burning forests, I can only cover the swaying trees.

I am content, depraved, resplendent, and exultant, in a little corner of culture, dying as a casualty of the 21st century, and shimmering as its finest export. I have found joy in babbling, in feminine phrases light as a droplet, about our state of cultural decline, irrelevant intimacies, and flights of fancy. Who will read me? Perhaps nobody. But to write as I do – in danger, blind, desperate – is the only way I want to. Sure, creation is centripetal. Most writers start from themselves, writing what they know. I write because I will stay forever in the limbo of ‘knowing.’ And even if I can never move on, if I never leave the beaches of selfhood, I will not give up my claim to the sublime.

Call it delusion, or narcissism, or the tell-tale signs of inexperience. You wouldn’t be the first to do so. As I listen to the feedback the fiction class has for my story, I hear things like, “the writing is good but, the writing is good but.” The characters and the plot are wrecked by abstraction. Why don’t I write a normal story? Not to try to be theory, memoir, and short story all at once. Write clean. That’s good advice. Wise, and practical. But I dwell in possibility, a rarer house than prose.

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As I sit there for hours, watching the sky’s cells coagulate into grey creams and slit-sun showers of blessings (having, as my mother witheringly puts it, nothing better to do), the air begins to ache with History - marshy and mischievous, mixed with the chutnied butter of JB sandwiches and manic rehearsals. Because June, at the Cathedral and John Connon School, is ruled by Inter-House Dramatics. Less importantly, swimming, second-term exams, and throwball also take up afterschool hours, but it is through Dramatics that I, with my postmodern-unpatriotic-secular-individualism, learnt the art of uncomplicated being. Like Mr Rushdie’s protagonist, a prick-ish Cathedral boy whose fate pulses and pounds with that of the nascent nation’s, Dramatics, or the House play, directed the blithering egotism of adolescents towards the greater good of the collective. Pardon my histrionics. Find the truths in their theatre.

My first Dramatics was in 2014: wooden archways walked me into a tiled classroom where budding thespians and truants pickled on desks carved with profanities and promises, chairs with gaits of their own, and floors stamped with polished shoes shiny enough to avoid the indignity of costing a House a Minus Point in the annual cup (the winner of whom was charmingly called the ‘cock house,’ but I had not yet developed feminist sensibilities enough to fault this). On the day of auditions for the house play, it was, as it always was in those days, an ecstatic, roaring Wednesday afternoon - clouds belched into the searing sky, warm dreams tumbled out of teenage teeth, and damp shale courts scraped teaming knees. The playful threat of monsoon felted the air with hair-frizzing humidity, but I had not yet developed feminine sensibilities enough to fault this. This would be the day when I, eternal star of my own show, was superbly cast as a reporter with one line in the opening scene. The excitement was all too much to bear.

An undyingly loyal companion in all inter-house pursuits (cultural or romantic), sat beside me atop a desk palimpsest, as a looming, invincible Prefect sermonized on many things, although nothing in particular, just your everyday wisdom-of-the-elders, and our acquiescent heads nodded like soldiers. Of the 4 houses, mine was Wilson, the only group identity I’ve ever believed in. As I listened to the script our seniors hurriedly explained – we were always running out of time for everything and nothing – I could see why we’d earned a reputation as a house determined to try to make a Great Play, never mind if it was a good play. This 20-minute script featured, impossibly, a dirty politician responsible for the massacre of innocents, an unsuitable marriage, a boy orphaned by the massacre seeking revenge through seduction, an undercover maid, and a high-stakes pre-election shootout. And it was a musical. Clearly, Wilson house had caught the History bug, and my head leaked trickled-down ditties. 

During those superhuman school days, 6:30 am to 2:30 pm flashed by with little ceremony, and at precisely 2:45 pm, the work began. Blazered bodies whose only initiation to the arts was their big age and boundless confidence, would deliver impassioned speeches about work ethics, make demands of integrity, and harbour expectations of excellence. Discipline, dreams, and duty were all the same to us, and it is with unquestioning allegiance (to what, I never deeply introspected about) that we fiercely performed what was asked of us. Of course, we were like, 14 years old. So, the meaning of hard work and excellence was welded by old Latin phrases we did not understand, handed to us by teachers who did not understand us. But easily, within the predictable, heritage-sited structure of Cathedral, my friends and I, never an easy bunch to control, learnt the motions of discipline. Of dreams. Of Duty. With some shame and much chagrin, I recall now the changed lyrics to the school song: house first, school next, self last. The level of dedication - what we called ‘house spirit’ - that I felt then, seems plainly ridiculous and embarrassing today, in the icy age of nonchalance and effortlessness. If I see people ‘hustling,’ I immediately want to bury myself in a deep hole. Were we sheep back then? Chatterboxes who just didn’t know how to be cool? Perhaps. But how fertile time felt. How grave and giggly were our worlds.

It was in those early June Dramatics days that the disease of optimism first plagued my mind with hopes about Meaning and Deserving and Greatness. Mr Rushdie’s protagonist, Saleem (house unknown) came of age in the verve of Bombay talkies and melodrama served at every Muchhad paanwala. In Midnight’s Children, the babies born at the hour of Nehruvian independence bore the lush burden of birthing, with them, independent India. Mr Rushdie wrote magic to reveal a reality where yes, the personal is political. But even juicier, the present-personal-political is yoked to the past-universal-historical. And the frailly-fated-future tears through Saleem’s quest for Purpose. When Mr Rushdie invokes Cathedral’s school song, he claims it is the city’s song as much as it is our sheltered private school’s:

“This vision – a dream of a British Bombay – was a notion of such force that it set time in motion. History churned ahead, with their Fort and land-reclamation, and before you could blink there was a city here, Bombay, of which the old tune sang:

Prima in Indus,

Gateway of India,

Door to the East,

With its face to the West.”

Saleem repeats through the novel, “to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” Eight years later, watching the monsoon gurgle in the gloaming, there are jet streams of old worlds seeping into the tenuous present. I remember of then more than I know of now: hours were folded by card games, days devoted to drama, and weeks wet with the happy idleness of skipping tuitions and classes for, like I said, the greater good. I remember: being instructed to pick up the McDonald’s our seniors had gotten delivered, but having, wonderfully, lost my shoes somewhere in school. My friend (loyal as ever) and I had then trekked barefooted through Fort in cement softened by freshly sodden leaves, not even trying to dodge the falling rain and honking cars, letting the moment be all that we were. And with tunic-over-PE-uniform, Bata-less-feet-muddied-toes-wrinkly, hairband-hanging-around-neck, there was a french fry feast. Look. Before I understood depth, I knew ease. The art of uncomplicated being.

Our immortal principal would taunt us at assemblies: do you children recognise the legacy that has been passed on to you? No, I would think, not really. Illustrious alumni plucked from paginated modern history were not really the concern of a 14-year-old who routinely failed Chemistry scheduled tests. Now, with the help of Mr Rushdie’s warm romanticism and gifted gab, I am beginning to see, to feel, to wade in the trenches of tradition. Buried in buildings breaking with anachronistic beauty, I feel footsteps of past lives when I walk through these heady spiral staircases. Then, there was breezy Meaning. Handed to me with a stapled script. Measured by able elders. Weighted with achievable expectations.

I’ll likely never stop loving how much I lived at that time, recklessly, embarrassingly, and without a second thought. I painted over the lines, I slipped on stairs in front of Important People, and I didn’t blend my makeup the first time I tried wearing it to a party. I didn’t get the lead roles but there was hot glory in everything anyway. I didn’t think about myself, I just found it, with my hair tucked into a starched cap, March Past in biting grass, laughing through torrid training. I leapt on wooden stages, and cheered with my whole chest, I was silly in my seductions, and bad at my equations, I was. I was. I had every dream alive on every surface of my skin, there was nothing in the light but more. I wasn’t scared of past present future, the angst of Meaning didn’t hang over my body, there was nowhere I couldn’t go in my mind, and no one who didn’t know me in my heart.

And now it is clear that I suffer from the same hamartia Saleem did - that narcissism typical of students of political science and readers-of-books, where I have rendered Purpose a fate powered by proximity. To say nothing, I know, of privilege. Wilson house’s musical, whose title eludes me, ended up coming last. It was pouring defeat as we moored onto the quadrangle afterwards for a post-loss pep talk. Teary-eyed or simply wet, my seniors forgave us and themselves, chalking it up to bad luck and too-steep ambition. We’ll definitely win Athletics, they assured us, and, muggy and mystified, we believed them. Per ardua ad astra.

June in Bombay. Changing governments suffocate the streets. I saw children getting onto a school bus and I cried a little. Fatwas have been issued, and fates have been fractured. Bombay is more, and has always been more, than a floating city produced by filmfare and powdered postcolonialism. I look outside and Saleem’s catchphrase has proven difficult to stomach. To understand just one life, how could I possibly swallow the whole world?

The retrospective is rich and renewable and refractive. I will forever have these shared universal histories with the season and the sunset and Saleem and Mr Rushdie; they fill up my heart enough to keep it beating as allegorical and ambitious as the high seas. But there are police falling from the sky and when rainwater touches my feet I screech. I have lost the art of uncomplicated being. As much as I yearn for it, there are other arts clawing and biting at the skyline of the times. The monsoon was late this year, and serenity was designed for memory and mythology. Saleem, child of midnight and South Bombay socialism, realises in the end, “I was taught, harshly, once-and-for-all, the lesson of No Escape; now, seated harshly in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am.”

Childhood thrives in Cathedrals and Bombays, where success within the finite walls feels a lot like infinity. But Mr Rushdie is right: “another sound is swelling now, deafening, insistent; the sound of seconds passing, of an approaching, inevitable midnight.” So it is time to separate the breathing past from the breathless present. To treat life like a project, where dreams and duty and discipline do not come with cartographers. The wild gods of existentialism urge me to Make Meaning instead of trying to find it. Per ardua ad astra. Twain said history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Someday perhaps I will learn its cadence and make its poetry. But for now, as the sun sinks into the Arabian Sea, and my mother joins me in the balcony, the words of old worlds stream from me like a monsoon, and I will not stir. I will drink my tea, read my book, and let the strange tenderness of the moment be all that I am.

         In the process of getting to know somebody, we ask questions like: what music did you grow up listening to? Which is the last film you watched? What’s a book that would keep you going if you were marooned on an island? If, for instance, a man on a first date responded to these questions with Radiohead, The Batman, and The Infinite Jest, I might telephone him a therapist. But I could also reasonably assess our interpersonal compatibility (high, if you must know). Because anytime someone picks up a cultural artefact, to read, watch, or listen to, we are abstracting ourselves from the so-called ‘real world.’ We are entering a plane of private contemplation, even if this is subconscious or distracted contemplation. In our postmodern world, for most of the liberal (Euromerican) elite, previous identities of nationality, or religion don’t mean as much to ‘who we are’ as they once did. But knowing whether you would label yourself as, say, a Metalhead, a Whitmanian, a Classicist, or a (god forbid) fanfiction enthusiast, does matter to how we encounter and construct our subjectivity. The stories we read and the ways we read them reflect the stories we tell (about) ourselves. Which is to say that what one chooses to enjoy speaks to the dynamics of their inner life and conception of self. In the absence of conventional markers of identity, artworks - and their cultural afterlives - have increasingly become the basis upon which we enter social relationships, build our aesthetics of self, and accordingly, embody those aesthetic positions within society.

But I believe that intentionally abstracting yourself from your surroundings requires abdicating the tethers of reality in pursuit of the tethers of something else: art demands submission. Our choices betray what we are willing to submit to. Let me explain through Lolita, and the ways of loving it.  “Imagine me,” its paedophilic protagonist implores, “I shall not exist if you do not imagine me.”

            Excluding people who hated the book on the grounds of morals and such, there are two broad ways for girls to read and to love Lolita. First, maybe it was an experience of profound identification, emotional catharsis, and relatability (the kind that inspired Ms Lana Del Rey to get ‘Nabokov’ tattooed on her arm). This type of girl obsesses over it, not because she dreams of being raped or kidnapped, just because she and Lolita share an air of “celestial vapidity,” an affinity for old magazines, and have terrible relationships with their father-figures. Like Lo, she wears cocaine white bikinis and licks Botticellian pink lollipops. She sees her subjectivity in Lolita and so she loves the book, she loves the book so she assembles her subjectivity as Lolita. She skips around Americana’s towns and trailer parks, charmed by her capacity to charm, falling in love as men cause her vast and various harm. This stereotype is prolific. If its aesthetic sounds tired, done, 2012 – that’s because it is, and for that (and so much more) we thank tumblr.com. Yes, this reading is overexposed, commodified to a point of cleanliness, and a saturated cultural imaginary. But if anything, Lolita’s appropriation into the mediatic mainstream over the past two decades has only pressured and/or empowered more young women to confess that – yes! –  they would like to be the light of another’s life, fire of their loins.

            Or, perhaps for some literary-theory type, it was an experience of distanced deconstruction. With an eye for the spell-binding language and crafty form, this type of reader catches its allusions and apercus, she obsesses over Nabokov’s ability to let us in on the huge joke the book is always playing on Humbert Humbert. She giggles at the book’s clever digs at psychoanalysis, and she vociferously nods at its critiques of capitalism. Perhaps she even writes commentary on the politics of popular culture, at the crowded intersection of art and the internet. (“Is this ‘second type of girl’ in the room with us right now?” you might want to ask.) About the actual book, she has lots to say, invariably invoking Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and YouTube video essays she watches about some or the other the deleterious ‘Romanticisation’ that the illiterate masses are engaged in right now. She scoffs at the prudish, decidedly un-rhizomatic readers who found Lolita pornographic. She cherishes the book for its acerbic wit that makes sleek satire of sexual violence without trivializing it.

The second type of reader tends to be annoyed with the former, and at first glance this is understandable; there is something intellectually (psychologically?) lazy about reading texts like a coloniser in search of relatability and a personality which you can steal for yourself. The second type of reader seems to preserve her subjectivity despite her love, whereas the first seems to submit her subjectivity in her love. To be clear, when I say subjectivity I am referring to a dimension of a person’s consciousness that locates their prejudices, preferences, and emotional registers in the insular architecture of the mind. What sets Lolita apart, thereby allowing us to use it as spelunking into the way we read, is that under closer examination, the distinction between the first and the second reading are neither irreconcilable nor mutually exclusive. In fact, they are both imbricated in the other. For Lolita is not an allegory, a symbol, a specular surface. It is seduction.

          The premise of Lolita is that a middle-aged man has a burning desire to be with a 12-year-old girl. This is not something that unfolds gradually, nor is it something a reader is likely to be caught unawares about. Humbert Humbert kidnaps his stepdaughter, rapes her for months, and eventually kills for her. Art, like love, demands submission. If, as readers, we find ourselves sympathising with Humbert, laughing at/with him, and are mesmerised by his miasmas, what does that say about us? What have we been willing to submit to? Every line of the book is a deliberate act of lowering our defences with exquisite prose until Nabokov chooses to remind us how far we’ve fallen. Reading Lolita is not being in a constant state of ‘oh my god, how horrible that this happens to young girls.’ It is being in a constant state of, ‘oh my god, that’s so beautiful – or sad – or funny,’ and then, ‘wait, what in the world.’ It is immersion into Humbert’s mind, and we will stay there – until our phone buzzes, the chapter ends, or Nabokov elects to give us a blink into Lolita’s pain.

            Lolita woos you. On three fronts, Nabokov works his reader. First, through the language, Lolita performs a moral and literary sleight of hand. The book is adorned with ornate epithets and nacreous images. Humbert talks of “aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art” – because of course, the murderer-rapist moonlights as a poet. Second, through the familiar cultural references that Nabokov has him evoke, we can easily imagine having a reasonable (albeit pretentious) conversation with him. Third, and relatedly, because the premise of the novel itself is so depraved, the choice to pick it up at all – worse if you read and enjoyed it – is incriminating enough to create a sense of complicity and guilt. There is nothing in this book outside Humbert’s rapture, and there’s not much of a comeuppance either. Humbert lays his crimes at our feet. With the arrogance and self-effacement that only a certain calibre of manipulative men can muster, he dares us to not give in. As Caitlin Flanagan writes for The Atlantic, “Lolita never pardons us for the sin of participating in it.”

            Because of these three reasons, you cannot read it without submission. You are mesmerised by Lo’s movements and musings, and entranced by the intricacies of Humbert’s rich, fertile imagination – why else would you read about sexual abuse? Surely not for the subject matter. This is Stockholm Syndrome. It makes compromising your subjectivity a precondition to reading.

Needless to say, the two types of loving Lolita I laid out initially are merely caricatures, and do not even necessarily need to be populated by women. But the broad typology  – reading to relate, versus reading to regard – are exploded by the seductive allure of Lolita. The distanced reader would never make it through the first chapter without sounding the siren. The reader lets Lolita into their heads and their hearts whether they like it or not.

Now, on the first, identifying reader - if we have been spending our time being deceived by Humbert, where is the space to identify with Lo?

The thing is, Lolita herself barely speaks in the novel. There’s a few indirect quotes here and there of her reaction to Humbert’s sexual abuse, and even fewer instances of actual speech. Mostly, we are told that Lolita is frowning, pouting, being bored, being sarcastic, or throwing a tantrum (the divine feminine if I’ve ever seen it). This makes sense. The book is Humbert’s case against his hanging, so naturally, the point of view of one of his victims is limited. But even beyond self-preservation through selective storytelling, what’s striking is that Humbert can’t tell us about Lolita’s inner world because he never knew she had one. Towards the end of the novel, when he finally sinks into febrile remorse over his behaviour, he realises: “I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate.” So, Lo emerges from the negative spaces, in the shimmer of a girl who has sacrificed her subjectivity at the pyre of a brute. In reality, she had not lost her head. Only through Humbert’s undying obsession did she become a phosphene without subjectivity. But then how could he - or we - claim to love her?

Lo eludes paginated personality – her interests and ideals (besides, presumably, escape)  are nowhere expressed. This is information we usually need in order to identify with a character. In its absence, somehow, Lo has inspired such mass cultural identification where girls both see themselves in and assemble their subjectivity according to her portrayal. Then is the subjectivity-identification love for the character ingenuine – and even impossible to call ‘love?’ Is it revealed to be some kind of manic pixie dream girl situation, where Lolita is a foil, a disappearing vision on which girls project whatever they want?

I don’t think so. Through Nabokov’s moments of permeability, we glimpse who Lolita was. She is never fully demystified, and that’s her ultimate victory. He thought he had everything she was, but she was performatively “mail[ing] her vulnerability in brashness and boredom,” or elsewhere, “glad as an ad,” taking acting classes to learn how to leave Humbert. He took her youth, but she didn’t lose her subjectivity because it was never on the table – Lo grew into herself in such a traumatic firmament that she had to adapt into someone capable of control and restraint and resilience. Female pain and retreat are not charades for public consumption. But when these are rendered so tenderly, ­as we see here - like lifting a cobweb in the wind  – it is a stunning feat.

            When girls read and identify, that cannot be disparaged as ‘lesser’ than reading critically. Lolita’s subjectivity is buried deep in Humbert’s vertiginous filth. To wring that out of the narrative, it takes serious work, and critical reading. But to see yourself in it, as so many confess they do, one requires a different kind of emotional and philosophical dexterity, naivete, and yes, submission. It is to read with sense rather than sight, letting the spaces between the lines spill the secrets of subjectivity. In both readings – the identification, and the deconstruction – Lolita imposes on its readers by never telling them a shred of reliable information. Humbert is an unreliable narrator, but Nabokov has also written an ambiguous book. In the opening pages, he welcomes us into his “tangle of thorns.” In the end, only the heart-shaped cuts we unnoticeably incurred will remind us of what we submitted to. 

But this belief of ‘feeling the sisters’ imprisonment’ is immediately followed by a confession: “we knew that they knew everything about us, and that we couldn’t fathom them at all.”[2] This ‘women, huh’ admission is the sentiment the film ends on; the boys are still obsessed with the dead sisters, who, even 25 years later, are preserved in the boys’ memories in the no-man’s land between definite closure and eternal incomprehensibility. The Lisbon sisters’ sibylline feminine mythology is still wrought with sufferance, triviality, and…a keen aesthetic sense. And then the credits roll: Written and Directed by Sofia Coppola. At this point, the woman spectator is likely to offer a slight smile – beacuse in this film, secrets are well kept, and deaths are well died.

I hate to be so topical, but I believe that The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola, my favourite nepotism-princess-tortured-artiste-muse, is a feminist film. I argue that a film which engages with both the gendered power and spatiality in the dynamic between the woman spectator and the woman on screen can be considered a ‘feminist’ film.[3] I use the phrase ‘feminist’ with caution, but also with a clear political valence – Coppola’s film is feminist, and not postfeminist as it is often termed.[4] My use of the word, then, signifies not only a lack of pandering to the patriarchal cinema which Ms Mulvey had chalked out (I’ll explain this in a second), but also a distinct preoccupation with dismantling patriarchal cinema’s assumptions and afflictions, thereby catering to the (very real) woman spectator – in a way that is completely dissimilar to male gaze-y identification.[5] In other words, a ‘feminist’ film doesn’t reproduce patriarchial thought, it actively ruptures it, and this permits women to identify with its world.

psychoanalysis and the screen: laura mulvey

As is the case with most great women (see also: Sylvia Plath, Ayesha Erotica) people grow tired of Laura Mulvey as a substitute for reading her. Forget what you think you know about the male gaze, welcome to the back seat of a candied van with conspirational girls. Ms Mulvey’s discipline-altering essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ argues that cinema is a medium of pleasure and anxiety – visual and narrative. This pleasure is inalienably coded on the gendered lines of male/female, active/passive, and subject/object. No mediatic gratification can exist outside this matrix. Basically, it’s impossible for cinema to work without the basic building blocks of form and narrative that cast women as passive objects, and men as active subjects.

Her essay makes three broad claims:

First, that film is infrastructurally bound to the patriarchal unconscious. Ms Mulvey’s premise is that cinema’s “formal preoccupations reflect the psychical obsessions of the society which produced it,” therefore, within a patriarchal society, the languages of phallocentric discourse articulate themselves on film, just as they do anywhere else. [6] Psychoanalysis is a method of interpretation that can work on unspooling the unconscious, and so in this context, Ms Mulvey wields psychoanalysis as “a political weapon” which can spelunk the unconscious operations, structures, and manifestations of the patriarchy as they are recorded on film.[7]

Next, she describes a typology of the pleasure of looking in two psychoanalytical forms: first, that of scopophilia; second, that of Lacanian ego-formation. Both pleasures are accessible only to the male spectator. Scopophilia refers to the voyeuristic, sexualised pleasure derived from the act of looking. This gaze – or method of viewing – is potent with an objectifying power that delights in dominating the person displayed on screen, and rendering them an object for erotic apperception. AKA getting off to images you turn into objects. Ms Mulvey believes only a ‘male’s gaze’ could structurally contain this objectifying impulse; women cannot cathect agency into their gaze, women’s gazes are receptive and submissive, not agential and imposing. To derive the sexual satisfaction of scopophilia, there is a scission between the male spectator and the eroticism of the male actor on screen – it is the actor’s woman who is subjected to the spectator’s objectification, but the male actor himself is removed from the perceptual equation.

The second way of looking for the male spectator replicates the Lacanian mirror stage on screen, allowing him an avenue of ego-formation and identification with the active protagonist in the narrative. Lacan’s three psychic realms – the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real – imbricate to produce subjectivity at the knot of the mirror stage. This stage is a moment of identification where the child sees their image in the mirror for the first time, and the represented wholeness can achieve more than the fragmented, non-specular ego. The image in the mirror shows the child their ideal I – indeed, this image is “the first articulation of the I, of subjectivity.”[8] Therefore, reality, with its irreducible contradictions, and a site of alienation and discreteness, is transcended for a moment by the sight and simultaneous identification with the ideal-I in the mirror/screen.

Think of it this way: real life is full of inexplicable and shitbag situations, even for a baby, and at some point during your infancy, you looked into a mirror and realised that you existed as a whole Thing that looked cool as hell and didn’t seem weighed down by diaper or existential angst. So, you identified, and felt like an ‘I’ when you saw the cute ass mirror image of yourself. However, Lacan is careful to note that at the point of identification and recognition in the mirror – there is misrecognition – the coherent, aggrandising perfection is reflected and internalised in the psychic space of the Imaginary, but impossible to embody in the Real, where inadequacy and contradictions run rampant, and no myth can survive.[9]

The film screen, like the mirror, situates a person in their environment. The darkened cinema hall, with its velveteen seats and cryogenic air conditioners, fabricates womblike impunity for its venal male spectators, where the filmic atmosphere is able to effect “temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego.”[10] The narrative itself seemingly “unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience,” which only encourages voyeurism and identification to abound as they please.[11] In Classical Hollywood cinema, populated by the heroism of John Waynes and Humphrey Bogarts, Ms Mulvey posits that only male protagonists are empowered and active – as a consequence, male spectators can see various forms of dazzling egos with which they can identify, and various forms of naturalised domination they can enact on women. Think of all the harm that seeing Jordan Belfort/Quentin Tarantino protagonists saving and destroying society has done to male spectators looking for something to believe in.

The third dimension of Ms Mulvey’s critique builds on the paradox already identified above, where what is viscerally satisfying (filmic images) is substantively deleterious (leads to the objectification of women and male-ego-aggrandisement). Women are the highest point of this paradox: they must be conduits for meaning, but they can never make meaning themselves – neither as sexed goddesses, nor as visual manifestations of male castration anxiety, which is triggered at the sight of women’s phallic lack. On the first front, as sexed goddesses, the ‘male gaze’ imposes a “to-be-looked-at-ness,” as their defining trait.[12] On the second front, that of castration anxiety, men either resort to the demystification of women, or fetishistic scopophilia. The former is an exercise of sadistic voyeurism, where men investigate, reduce, punish, save, or in short, deny women their humanity by turning them into receptacles of male action both on the abstract and material plane. The latter, that is, fetishistic scopophilia, “builds up the physical beauty of the object, turning it into something satisfying in itself.”[13] Thus, “the man controls the film fantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense as the bearer of the look of the spectator,” this is the sealed fate of the ‘male gaze.’[14]

The three vantage points involved in cinema which coagulate into the ‘male gaze’ are:

(1) the camera or the director (almost certainly a male at the time of Ms Mulvey’s writing);

(2) the male characters;

(3) the audience members.

Ms Mulvey’s theory argues that because society is patriarchal, these impulses get coded into the artform of cinema through ‘the male gaze,’ which is always already acting on the form, style, content, and spectatorship of films. A lot of people read this essay and noted that both the forms of ‘visual pleasure’ she outlines are accessible only to men. So, the follow-up inquiry is natural: what of the woman spectator? How does a woman’s gaze interact with cinema? Is there even such a thing as a woman spectator of film, or are we just kidding ourselves in dark rooms and artificially flavoured butter hits?

mary ann doane and the woman spectator

Mary Ann Doane poses an explanation for why a woman spectator is a theoretically irreconcilable position: “the woman can never ask her own ontological question.”[15] Where Ms Mulvey’s work used the active/passive ascription of gendered relations between spectator and image to argue for the exclusively ‘male gaze,’ Ms Doane submits spatiality (distance/proximity) in that same dynamic is primary to the formation of a gaze. Where Ms Mulvey theorised male proximity to their on-screen representation by way of identification, Ms Doane contends there is “measured” distance between the film and the (male) spectator, and that this distance is what sustains the ‘male gaze’s’ capacity for scopophilia and identification.[16]

For voyeurism – which she regards a “meta-desire” – to sustain itself, Ms Doane believes there must be carefully preserved space, because desire “depends on the infinite pursuit of its absent object,” thereby mandating symbolic and spatial distance, where the illusions and obsessions can subsist.[17] As a form, Ms Doane accpets film’s heavily endowed, sensory nature, and yet, she argues that most of its meaning emerges from its lacunae. Films’ negative spaces where lack and liminality lie are “haunted” by the “absolute and irrecoverable distance” of absence itself.[18]

The woman, however, on the one hand, suffers from her imagery’s overexposure, and on the other hand, from the spectre of the basic phallic absence. Since the woman on screen is, as Ms Mulvey points out, bursting with a “to-be-looked-at-ness,” either in terms of sexual pleasure, or as an object to be demystified or fetishized, the woman spectator cannot view a woman on screen without a narcissistic gaze – “the female look demands a becoming.”[19]

Her proximity to the inescapable image of her castrated body cannot be overcome through reactionary fetishism or scopophilia. She cannot accomplish distance between her ways of seeing and her ways of understanding, and Ms Doane calls this a feminine “overidentification” with the image arising out of the “non-identity” of femininity:

The association of tears and ‘wet wasted afternoons’ (in Molly Haskell's words) with genres specified as feminine (the soap opera, the 'woman's picture') points very precisely to this type of over-identification, this abolition of a distance, in short, this inability to fetishise.[20]

           Femininity, for Ms Doane, is a vacuous bubble of excesses, like a drunk girl at a party, spilling all over the floor while collapsing in on herself, she has nothing to herself but her drunkenness, or femininity itself. This reading of the problem of the woman spectator suggests that the excesses of femininity cannot compensate for fundamental compaction between woman and image; there is no ‘outside’ the meretricious aesthetic of femininity, no arm’s length at which it can be read as anything more than a narcissistic self. This switches the logic for women’s representative “to-be-looked-at-ness” from one arising from the ‘male gaze,’ to one emerging from women’s narcissism, that is, their inability to do anything but drown in aesthetics of self because, again, of a narcissistic and castration-anxiety-driven sense of lack. Which of course is the logic of Ms Mulvey’s ‘male gaze,’ as well, simply argued from the other, pinked side. However, what is more curious about Ms Doane’s reversal is that it implicates women directors and spectators in either adopting male practices of Otherisation, or, through the aforementioned feminine sensibility, engaging in hollow “masquerade.”[21]

            Ms Mulvey’s conceptualisation of the ‘male gaze’ uses the fixed inscriptions of active/passive to inhere invisibility to the woman spectator, Ms Doane’s theory talks of an empty femininity, and implies that certain types of emotional and aesthetic sensibilities preclude the possibility for women (who, like any bimbo worth her glitter will tell you, are ready to invest in all their images) to exist distant from their representations. Thus, they cannot have a gaze, and there is no ‘female spectator’ to speak of. And look, Ms Mulvey, Ms Doane, I get it. I’ve watched women flatten into furniture in movies that are fast and furious and fetishistic to the core. I’ve also experienced blinding, narcissistic overindentification with literally every single female protagonist in a romantic comedy/chick flick/coming-of-age film, even if they are nothing like me (In the wise words of Salvia Palth: i don’t know anyone i am). So yes, perhaps women have trouble articulating in clear terms the stakes of femininity or the substantive content of girlhood beyond its appearances. And perhaps it is difficult to ‘represent’ women’s inner lives on film because it is really quite impossible to get out of these inner lives from an ontological position. Yet neither of these frameworks seem to account for the radical shift seen in recent films made by women directors on precisely these two points of passivity and overidentification: directorial self-awareness.

the virgin suicides and metacommentary on the male gaze

            In the opening sequence of The Virgin Suicides, we see: a 13-year-old girl try to kill herself; the same girl telling her doctor that he has no clue what it feels like to be a teenage girl; a group of men admit that 25 years after a pact of sisters killed themselves they continue to be more concerned with the girls than their wives; and then, radically, a 14-year old girl winks into the camera. Sofia Coppola knows what the ‘male gaze’ is, and she frames her story as a woman gazing at the ‘male gaze’ gazing at girlhood. The neighbourhood boys who peer at the restrained girls through telescopes and secret tunnels become literal stand-ins for the gaze, opening up space for the woman spectator to do the watching for once – we see the young boys perform Mulvey’s processes of demystification, saving, punishment, objectification, fetishization – all of it. The spectator is aware that everything in the film is a male fantasy – this, in itself, is a feminist act. It is through such a premise that the politics of the ‘male gaze’ are allowed to escape both the essay and the art house, and enter the multiplex. The Virgin Suicides is a feminist film for not only is it able to reject the ‘male gaze’ from behind the camera, but it is also able to theorise the gaze for the woman spectator, and it is able to do so without appropriating the violent logic of patriarchal films. Ms Mulvey fixed women as passive on screen and off, Ms Doane fixed them as collapsing into their own images. Ms Coppola does not deny these claims. She weaponises them.

When the film is lush with feminine aesthetics, it is not the girls who are faulted for their superficiality, it is the gaze. It is not that there is nothing more to them than their femininity, it is only that visualised representations of young girls, told in snatches of secrets and sunbeams cannot proclaim access to anything outside boilerplate, bewitching, images of likely rich inner life. Instead of resisting ‘the feminine’ in fear that it is, as Ms Mulvey argued, a source of objectification and voyeurism, Ms Coppola makes voyeurism the subject of her film.

Further, where Ms Doane saw the same feminine aesthetics as depthless, and a slippery pool into which women spectators would sink, Ms Coppola guards against this by crafting her film through two degrees of separation (one: it is told from the half-truths of the neighbourhood boys, two: the act of filmic representation itself). In doing so, she ensures that the identification women spectators have is not exactly with the emotional or intellectual particularities of the sisters, because we do not really know who they are with much certainty. I don’t relate to them the way I do, for instance, Cinderella or Cady Heron or Kat Stratford. Identification takes place on what can only be called the plane of the feminist, if that doesn’t sound like too much of a reach: there is a collectivist urge in the boys’ voyeurism apparent through the film, and there is also a softer, subtler, but no less salient collectivist urge in the girls’ resistance to being known. In this resistance, the Lisbon sisters and I enact a revolution against a certain kind of reductive portrayal in minds, memories, and movies.

            The final feminist victory – and the final feminist sadness – are the same, which is that there is much about womanhood that eludes representation. In the Lacanian sense, Ms Coppola leaves actual girlish suffering untouched in the realm of the Real, by only gesturing toward it through such obviously stylised imaginaries: unicorns, close-ups, licked popsicles, ennui, legs interlocked on beds, flipped magazine pages, commercial-friendly frolicking, hair in wind, and so on. These images become politically charged because they are conventionally used to connote women’s emptiness, and how easy it is to access and represent them. Ms Mulvey’s instantiation of objectification, it seems, has been picked up word-for-word by Ms Coppola, whose handheld camera, grainy film, and invasive cinematography is replete with close-ups, long legs, nubile smiles, and everything Ms Mulvey warned against. In The Virgin Suicides, they become symbols of the sisters’ unknowability. This is because the stylisation of such a morbidly jaunty narrative forces questions such as: yes, the sisters participated in the familiar rituals of feminine childhood, but given that all of them inexplicably killed themselves, could it be possible that these rituals do not represent what we think they do? Or, could it be possible that women’s relationship with the world of style and aesthetics is not meaningless, but a conditioned response, and as such, one with its own political stakes?

            The broader takeaway from The Virgin Suicides is that while theories of the ‘male gaze’ continue to be relevant, and perhaps will always be relevant, there is always possibility embedded in art forms to appropriate, reclaim, subvert, and confess. Suggesting that a medium as vast and ductile as film structurally bends toward a political position of female oppression discounts the tremendous potentialities of craft. More specifically, visual and aesthetic representations always bear risks of being criticised for bringing style over substance, objectification as opposed to subjectivity, and romanticisation instead of representation. However, the trick is to, as Ms Coppola so skilfully demonstrates, pay attention to the blind spots of a medium and learn its techniques alongside its politics. And then the medium may be exploited, exploded, and emancipated from itself. Or, if all else fails, get Kirsten Dunst to wink into a camera.

Bibliography

Coppola, Sofia, director. The Virgin Suicides. Studio Canal, 1999.

Doane, M. A. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator.” Screen, vol. 23, no. 3-4, 1982, pp. 74–88., https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/23.3-4.74.

Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975, Pages 6–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6

Kennedy , Todd. “Sofia Coppola: Postfeminist [d]Au[Gh]Te[u]r?” Sofia Coppola, 2017, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350988071.ch-001.

[1] Coppola, The Virgin Suicides.

[2] Coppola, The Virgin Suicides.

[3] The intent behind this claim is to allude to one kind of a positive theory for what a commercial feminist film might look like, while conceding at the outset that The Virgin Suicides is by no means perfect, and by no means the only kind of substantive and formal template for a ‘woman-gaze-based’ film.

[4] In Todd Kennedy’s ‘Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,’ he offhandedly comments, “I would by no means call Coppola’s films ideologically feminist.” (p. 41); see also Tasker and Negra’s Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture for a description of the phenomenon.

[5] This claim requires three points of clarification. First, to unpack women’s representation in cinema, I use Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ as this essay’s primary theoretical framework, reconstructed as if in response to the question ‘why is there no female gaze.’[5] Second, read alongside Mulvey, Doane’s ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,’ similarly discusses the difficulties of imaging a woman spectator, while providing an evolution of Mulvey’s original formulation of the ‘male gaze’ by emphasising spatiality in the relationship between spectator and image. Third, and finally, I critically examine Mulvey and Doane’s theories and point towards their possibly limited approach to what kind of film it takes to inspire woman spectatorship. I submit Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides as one such ‘feminist’ text.

[6] Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ 3.

[7] Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ 1.

[8] Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ 8.

[9] Another critique of Mulvey, which I do not dissect here, accuses her of confusing the realm of the Symbolic with that of the Imaginary. Whereas the former is composed of objective symbols that exist in a cultural language (Saussure’s signs), the latter represents a person’s fantasy world. It is at their intersection that meaning is produced.

[10] Ibid, 8.

[11] Ibid, 7.

[12] Ibid, 10.

[13] Ibid, 11.

[14] Ibid, 13.

[15] Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,’ 76.

[16] Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,’ 77.

[17] Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,’ 78.

[18] Ibid, 78.

[19] Ibid, 78.  

[20] Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,’ 80.

[21] I have not here detailed Doane’s approach of “trans-sexing” as a form of escape from the male gaze because it largely operates on the logic of the male gaze, rather than providing a true liberation – Doane herself is dismissive of this option.