There was a young man dressed as a castle. There was an architect in an invisible dress. She was completely naked and about to have you institutionalized. REALITY HAS ENDED. IT IS OVER. IT IS DONE. Stanley wrote this in bold type in his decks for the company and repeated himself again to Lorenzo on evenings like this. He worked for the house that Lorenzo designed for but was something like a friend—Lorenzo not having any friends outside of his ateliers and the parties he went to most nights. At least Stanley would come to his favorite bar in the 4ème with him, after their consultations, and stay there and drink with him until closing, before marching back to his hotel, and in the morning, the Eurostar. They had gone out for a drink—just one drink—and were walking down the street. There were no high heels on these old, medieval streets, Stanley complained, no knife-sharp fetish objects on the cobbles, but there were so many luxury sneakers, yes, so many giant shoes.
They spoke about designer running shoes, their dangerous engorgement: Stanley riffing on Balenciaga’s clomping, comically oversized sneakers, which were, he said, agglomerations, assemblages of many found sneakers, which were clouds of unmoored signifiers, clown shoes for a clown world, which were grotesque, anti-athletic, postmodern pastiche agitations, gargoyles, violent parodies of the human body and all that was natural, which were gigantic nightmare running shoes, and every time you looked down, they had grown larger, and when you attempted to run, they were so heavy, your legs would not carry, you tried to escape, to lift up your foot from the uncanny ground but—very confused you woke up. These were not shoes you could take to the cobbler. If you took them to the cobbler, the poor man would not know where to begin.
Stanley had a memory of going to the pub and a young lady extending her sweet leg and placing her foot in his crotch under the oak table. He was right away as hard as the table, just remembering this he was hard, he told Lorenzo, and had rubbed himself against her stockinged foot—(what else was there to do?)—and spoke to her friends, and he took her foot and cradled her foot like a dove, like that early Picasso painting of the Child with a Dove, which he had loved as a boy, which his mother had taken him to go see in the National Gallery and had shown him, but which had since been sold to the Qatar Museums Authority, that was how he cradled her foot; Rome, in a side street of Monti in August, some years prior, Stanley had seen a Roman waitress knelt down on the pavement bathing a swallow in water in her cupped hands, it had been a very sweltering day and the swallow had fallen from the sky, where they lived, on the ground, panting and shaking, that was how he had held the young lady’s stockinged foot, like the kind waitress nursed the vibrating swallow, or he had just gently tried to fuck the bottom of her foot, drinking cold swills of Northern European pilsner, Stanley said, in his reverie, but—those big Balenciaga shoes made of everyone else’s shoes were a demonic accumulation, an embodied excessiveness; they were the chimeric forms of modernity, as described by Bosch, in his right-hand interior panel in the Prado. Bosch’s right-hand interior panel was a description of hell. In his interior panel-portal, a dark spirit of transformation had possessed the painted town. He enjoyed painting the ways a modernizing society fell apart and delighted in inventing new and detailed methods for torturing his neighbors, the townsfolk of ’s-Hertogenbosch. Bosch must have strolled about the town, going about his daily business—to the market, the guild, to the swan-eaters’ feast—dreaming of torturing neighbors he did not like, cackling to himself, imagining also how the adolescent virgins that he saw would look naked, imagining them having sex with giant songbirds, goldfinches, and swallows.
Hieronymus Bosch was full of contempt for society, all of those great medieval painters were.
In his vision of hell, taken the town, objects went soft in the paint. The everyday fell apart, was passed around and folded back together in a parlor game of cadavres exquis, in unnatural combinations. Garden animals turned into musical instruments, turned into nightmares, turned into kitchen utensils, round and round they spun. Even an inanimate object like a funnel might sprout arms and legs and begin chasing very angrily after you. This was what those massive shoes were like too. Shoes made of shoes made of shoes. Boots made of knives, symbols and quotations, gargantuan foot-collages chasing you down the road and across the square. They were devils there, walking the flat smiling face of the Earth. They were creeping from the nose, they were crawling from the mouth. Down in the shadows, in their hoods and cowls. Modern life. “HELL.” Your lack of desires. The townsfolk were tortured by their own possessions; the things they desired had come to possess them. They had lost control. What could be seen in Bosch, for the first time, said Stanley, was an unfurling of the unconscious and repressed, of everything weird that was hidden inside. That was where our descent into madness began, Stanley said, over a drink and a smoke, at their favorite table on the sidewalk in The Marais.
Shoe design, said Lorenzo, had changed a lot. Giant shoes and yoga pants. And nothing else. Those were the only new ideas in fashion. And they were all on the lower half of the body.
HAVE YOU SEEN HIS PAINTINGS OF HATS, shouted Stanley?
That was where Bosch was at his most inventive and astounding; not in his visions of hell, or paradise, or the metaphysical structure of the universe, but in his ideas concerning hat design. In his Ecce Homo in Frankfurt, at the Städel, his Christ Carrying the Cross in Ghent, the hats were extraordinarily original. Nobody has ever designed hats like these, Lorenzo, it was a tragedy that Bosch became a painter and not a visionary Brabantine milliner. Life, tragedy. Imagine a society in which hats were a strange nouveau way of representation, where hats were our highest form of expression. That would be a very different society.
At the bar in The Marais, Stanley looked at his Raya. Through some combination of algorithms and dark magic, it would only show him American girls. During those first thrilling days of the pandemic, Stanley had been in New York. The sun was always shining and there were so many hard-bodied people working out in short shorts and yoga pants in the East River Park; the field inside the running track resembled the Garden of Earthly Delights. The Garden of Earthly Delights. Stanley’s Raya. These Raya girls, he moaned. God. You gave a quarter of your life to a profession, you involved yourself with the fashion industry because you wanted to fuck models and thought that you could, but then—well maybe you did, sometimes, but it was not quite what you imagined, it was not like how it was supposed to be; and this word, model, it did not mean anything anymore, everyone was some kind of model now. Everyone is an Artist/Model. These women’s professions, Lorenzo, I’ll show you. (Lorenzo did not care.) Everyone is a: model and eventual chemist
Model, Life Coach & Consultant (“this odd little elflike being”)
Dentist and model (“but it’s just a fat dentist”)
social media, horseriding
Head of Culture Change
Psych research + Artist (Travelling to New York)
Aesthetic Sales!!
Curve Model, Wilhemina
Actress, Model, Artist
Model, Psych Student, Equestrian
UX Research Ops|Dancer|Model
Artist, Human Psyche
Model/CEO, NY/LA
The women that he knew often told him that the men were terrible on Raya. Terrible. “Have you seen the men?” But no, the women were far, far worse, but some of them were so beautiful, Stanley allowed. There was more beauty in the world than there had ever been. There was too much beauty, a dangerous surfeit of beauty in the world, the curve surely had to be flattened, and maybe that was why we had turned to ugliness, to ugly models, lumpen, misshapen models, heavyset monsters and goblins. If Quasimodo returned to Notre-Dame—if Macron were to bring him back, to return his house to him—they would probably cast him and make him a model. He would walk for Balenciaga! In a pair of bloody giant shoes. No, there was too much beauty, and it continued to infinity, you were bombarded with it each day, there were more beautiful girls, and boys, taking pictures of themselves, editing their bodies into more pleasing surfaces, learning routines and sequences of shapes than their egos and their libidos had evolved to handle. But this sort of beauty was not enough anymore. They needed something else, Stanley said. Because this beauty was quite empty, non? Their beauty was unnatural. How could somebody that consumed so many organic goods have such an unnatural appearance, that he could never explain. Everyone looked the same and they were making the same images of themselves. But Stanley wanted them still, he lusted thirstily after uninteresting images, and he could probably have them too, but he wouldn’t, because of his personal failures and cowardice, which came from a combination of chemical imbalances resulting from his diet and routine. These thoughts rushing through his head on the train. He opened the rays of the sun, was his happiness here? Were his missing parts contained in an Artist and Bottle Girl
(A) Founder, Relationship Wellness Startup
(An) Online marketing/songwriter
(An) Ethnomusicologist
(A) Psychologist/Economist/Model
(A) Tech manager, CEO, artist
Brand Partnerships
(An) Actor/painter/private equity
(A) producer, airports and beaches?
Nobody’s got a real job Lorenzo, have you noticed? Lorenzo, Lorenzo? Everyone was some kind of Renaissance person. New kinds of people. Everyone was different types of people simultaneously and at the same time they were none of them.
Stanley was an editor, or a cultural critic, or a novelist, or a trend forecaster, a soothsayer, consultant, something, he was one of those middle-aged men that lived in a very gray and wet, very depressing, very expensive dog-sick arse-vomit part of East London that everyone hated, especially him; nobody hated his neighborhood and the people that lived there, and the people that came there on the weekends, and the people that worked there and served him, more than Stanley did. He came to Paris all the time for work because there was no work in London anymore, not in fashion—all because Britain had left the European Union, all because their former Prime Minister had fucked a pig with an apple in its mouth lavishly when he was a young man full of promise, small margins. He made his money, what little it seemed to Lorenzo, who had loads, that he had, consulting for luxury fashion brands. Although Stanley knew nothing of style, nothing of glamor, desire, luxury, or success; he knew nothing of such things, and so it was unclear to Lorenzo and to everyone at the houses where they had worked, and probably to Stanley as well, how he had become involved in this industry, which he was certainly so resentful of—he was one of those bitter, craggy fellows, was Stanley, making his way down the end of the bell curve, highly intelligent-seeming, on paper, mentally ill, translucent, very slightly, losing his hair, a pallid, wraithlike presence in high-performance fell-walking gorpcore, a Swiss mountaineer’s hat (these sorts of guys always thought Switzerland was the answer), a lost shepherd gone somehow very wrong, talking to himself as he stomped around his room, talking and talking to others for money about how the world was sinking under the weight of its own representations; what that meant for Moncler, what that meant for Acne Studios. Acne was not respected in Sweden, in Sweden they thought of Acne how we think of Costa.
A consultant: that was how he chose to conceptualize himself. Stanley had thoughts, some problems he owned, prophecies of the future, portmanteaux he’d made up. He came to the table with ideas, rather than dreams. Ideas about how we lived now, how everything was collapsing. He made his clients think that they understood the world.
There was a vintage 911 Carrera he kept in the garage, the toy of which he had had as a boy, and he took it out on the weekends and drove it out to the Chilterns and thought about his ex-girlfriend. He thought about killing himself or going to the Amazon rainforest. Or going to work for Burberry. Stanley was an advertising man that no longer believed in advertising, because it just washed right through you, it no longer worked. All of his relationships had fallen apart, and so had his profession too. Advertising used to be an art form, Stanley said. It was a terrible shame that it no longer was. There was no longer much attempt to really sell anything; no attempts to seduce the viewer, to forge a desire, or a fetish, or a fantasy. There was no longer any temptation. Stanley wasn’t really an advertising man—there no longer were any advertising men.
A new kind of person had emerged in the 2000s: the creative. Stanley had become a hipster because he wanted to be part of a scene. And then, he was forced to be a creative, the fates, the demons, had snatched him up from joyful dancefloors of his overextended youth, cornered him in ecstatic bathroom stalls, Italo Disco leaking in from the walls and the door, drilled holes in his head. The role of the creative was not to be creative, but rather to be influenced. It was to copy ideas from the past, Stanley said, and cobble together moodboards and decks of tired references for clients to look through. They were supposed to plagiarize others in order to have their concept signed off. That was the standard creative process. They had to show their clients what the campaign was going to look like and how it was going to make them feel (nothing), because clients had lost the capability to imagine a thing that hadn’t already been made before, because they were all living in a low-trust, visualization-incapable society. The secret of pitching was, you had to convince clients that your ideas were, in fact, their ideas, which they had come up with, and that they were having lots of ideas and those ideas were good; to simulate in their minds the sensation of imagining. Really, nobody had any ideas.
In the degraded and defiled ruins of advertising, they knelt. It was marketing now. It was made by creatives with decks just like everything else; these creatives sat in the corners of coffee shops like the lost souls of murdered children in graveyards and chattered about their milquetoast lives and made decks that said,
“People don’t buy products,
They buy stories, dreams,”
but what were these dreams that they offered! They made these everlong, pointless decks of Google images and on the last slide they said, “Thank you.” And with the fall of advertising, Stanley lamented, had come a loss of desire, a great reason why nobody knew what they wanted was that nobody was presented with irresistible desires—the desires that we are supposed to create, Lorenzo! These advertisements will not lead us to what to desire, they will not tell us how or why to live—these creatives—they do not know themselves!
Instead of creating desires, they showed people what they already, sort of, wanted. They had figured out what most idiots would tolerate. Creative directors, fucking smarmy tosspots, pandering submissive Millennial wankers, Stanley said, the bottoms for the world, they catered to popular taste, they gave the people what they wanted.
They should have kept him in the mask, with his mouth gagged shut, attacking the sign regime without a face or a voice. Demna’s work was very, very interesting but he was not able to explain why it was interesting—he may not have known why it was.
Listen (wild eyes, cigarette light-trails, gesturing up and down the street)—who cares what these people want? These people out walking in their On Running cloud shoes, their plain Veja sneakers, streamlined, frictionless, boring bland shoes signifying nothing, the most popular goods no longer expressed anything—what did it matter what they thought they wanted? They did not know what they wanted and could not express a thing.
In the 1990s, a fellow like Stanley would have worked in advertising, he said. Advertising used to be awash in money, so everybody wanted to be a part of it and there was fierce competition from the best directors and photographers around the world to land the biggest jobs. There were prestigious international prizes for and coffee-table books about advertising. He would have been a partner at Saatchi & Saatchi, have lived in Soho and worked in Golden Square, done a lot of cocaine—before everyone did, before it was a loutish, poor man’s drug—hung out at The Groucho, in the 90s, he would have gone to work in a bespoke suit from the brightest, coolest young tailor on Savile Row—instead, he wore apparel that was waterproof, sustainable; instead he wrote hundreds of thousands of words a year for a few dozen people; a man in his 40s on the Mildmay Line; imagine killing yourself on the Mildmay Line; he died as he lived, on the Mildmay Line; there was a person on the track, on the Mildmay Line; wondering what had happened to his life and why—was it him, or were there metaphysical causes?
Look, Lorenzo, would tell him, I know you’re not really supposed to say this these days, but you probably should kill yourself.
He was good for a drink, was Stanley. So, Lorenzo and Stanley would sit on the terrace and passionately smoke, watching the passersby with undisguised and gleeful horror. They looked and thought deeply about how others dressed. And they did see people in the oddest combinations of things, sometimes, and they wondered, “Are they wearing clothes to fuck with me?”
Not long after Russia had invaded Ukraine, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs was rushed to hospital in a Basquiat shirt—but what did the Basquiat express about the Minister of Foreign Affairs? What did it say of his inner life?
When Kanye announced that he loved the Nazis, that he had a great deal of admiration and respect for the Nazis, when he said that for the first time, not the subsequent hundreds of times but the first time, he was wearing a mask from Vetements. It was very significant that he was wearing a mask, and that the mask was from Vetements.
Lorenzo’s assistant and muse, Svera, had, for a short while, taken to wearing really accelerationist Balenciaga shoes herself. He thought she was doing so to provoke him, but perhaps there had been other reasons. Her look was always changing. She had ordered a Yeezy T-shirt online and had it delivered. It was a very simple, surprisingly minimal—for him—white design with a found black swastika logo, and she would wear it to the studio when she came to visit Lorenzo and tell him her ideas, and to her favorite boulangeries and cafés in the neighborhood, and to the Franprix. When one of the brand’s comms team, coming in from home for a merchandising meeting, raised some questions about what Svera was wearing and asked if she might change into something else, she rolled her eyes, “Oh my God, you don’t understand, IT’S FASHION.” It was so exasperating.
Nobody seemed to understand. Fashion was a fleeting moment. It was what was happening. It was transformation and that was why she liked it. None of this really meant anything.
Demna might have left Balenciaga, he might have left Vetements too, however his legacy remained. He was the most important designer of the century. He was an artist, said Stanley.
Demna had begun to speak to the press, Lorenzo observed. And he was stupid and annoying.
Well, Stanley said. Well… He should not have been allowed to speak about himself like that. Therapy, bitterness, happiness, Los Angeles, all of that nonsense. Kering should not have allowed that. He should never have taken off the mask. They should have kept him in the mask, with his mouth gagged shut, attacking the sign regime without a face or a voice. Demna’s work was very, very interesting but he was not able to explain why it was interesting—he may not have known why it was. And this was true of many genius artists, they were quite thick, but they were channeling forces much larger and greater than themselves. They were conduits. And in Demna’s case, it was very fitting that he could not explain his significance because his process was one of disarticulation, of scrambling meanings, not making sense. Balenciaga shoes glued together from shoes, signs and symbols were Cubist collages, they were nihilist objects. They were advertisements that the Age of the Third Order Simulacra had not ended. They were magical charms made to destroy reality.
Do you believe that the Age of the Third Order Simulacra has ended? Or that we are right here in the middle of things? Yes, that’s what has been happening to us lately: the middle. The realization that, Oh, we can no longer keep up this farce of ignoring that reality is over, that events—in particular, high culture, in particular luxury fashion—have been set adrift in ever-increasingly muddled and meaningless self-relation. They don’t make sense, they are tangled linguine, a labyrinth without a center, a topiary maze after dark, in the moonlight, in which strange referent beings are knelt down in the leaves sucking the other off while tearing small holes in the air. Signs pointing to signs pointing to signs—but never, as in the original Structuralist imagination, eventually to reality. None of these signs will lead us back to the real. They all point to nowhere or they point to infinity. And this has been going on four decades or more, and this may continue another four decades or longer because, we are here, in the middle, the center of the croque monsieur; astonishing to think of as we survey la societé from this lovely café terrace, Lorenzo! said Stanley. That was how Stanley spoke, after a few drinks, when he could still hold his train of thought, still follow the trails of crumbs left behind by the parts of his mind that raced ahead, when he was still passionate, still slant horrified and amused by his own conclusions, before his mind would, in places, cloud over quite pleasantly.
Society was, it was true, having one of its mass-psychotic episodes. One afternoon, Lorenzo took the métro. He would never take the métro as a matter of course, but his team had a meeting on the other side of Paris, and it would be quicker than taking a car, so he went. It was only a few stops, they assured him. Lorenzo stood at the center of the carriage with his hands on his hips, shirt unbuttoned to his navel. It was astounding. Everyone was slumped in their seats or hanging off the railings staring down at their phones. They all appeared to have fallen into a trance, as though a sleeping sickness had been cast on their way down by the escalators. Lorenzo did not look at his phone, but found himself looking at everyone else’s phone, each screen showing either a disembodied head or a body in motion, a body dancing, performing elaborate movements, falling, but mostly disembodied heads talking. Everyone had wireless earbuds in and was listening to and watching talking heads. Lorenzo did not know what any were saying but he could tell that it was thoroughly boring and not at all chic. The women watched videos of other women talking. The men watched videos of other men talking while jiggling their legs up and down like their pants were full of hummingbirds. The entire carriage was aglow with faces and bodies on screens, floating apart in space, rushing together under Paris, their faces looked so stupid, the men’s legs were shaking as though they were about to break down, explode, spontaneously combust, they were under the ground. The Earth had prolapsed.
The Earth had prolapsed, Stanley told Lorenzo, later, when he spoke of the train. It had turned inside-out and had come to be dominated by interiority. It had been flattened into a circle: the purpose of your life was to document your life and to speak about yourself. Expressing yourself, it had been agreed, since around the 60s, gave your life meaning, so everything, over time, had become a form of expression; although most were no longer expressing anything. People talked about themselves endlessly, Stanley said. He could speak for long periods uninterrupted, and drink and chainsmoke as he did so. He went on.
People made images of themselves every day, and the more they did, the less they had any idea of who they were, and the crazier they seemed. Over the great collective unconsciousness, they skated. This was the unified electrical field. This was what it did to us. When everyone was connected, they could all come apart. When everyone talked and wrote too much, reality began to collapse. Reality was done.
Reality had ended already, a long time ago. At some point in the 60s, or the early 70s, when his parents were young, the real world had disappeared behind a blaze of multiplying images, like moonlight replaced by the sun, Stanley said. The real had disappeared because of television and radio; because of the explosion of pop culture, so that pop stars were bigger than Jesus; because of mass media; because of advertising, consumer goods and their packaging, and the advent of late capitalism; because of the hippies, free love, sexual liberation, the erasure of Freudian taboo, experimental psychoanalysis, French theory; because of the psychedelic wave, the synthesis of new types of drugs that altered our experience, many government-agency experiments in telekinesis, brainwashing and mind-control, cybernetics, murder cults, commands written on the walls in blood like code; because of Pop Art, which made it so that you could no longer tell the difference between everyday objects and artworks, and Conceptual Art, which made it so that there no longer was any difference between objects and ideas; because of Modern Art, which tore down the wall between the interior and exterior worlds; because of Earthrise, the photograph of Earth; because of dreaming, because the dreams of their parents were so different than those of their grandparents, reality had disappeared; and by the end of the 70s, people had begun to notice. This was a very weird new Earth, the Postmodernists said, a hyperreal world that was more-real-than-real, that indeed presupposed and preceded the real, the Postmodernists said, said Stanley now, at the bar, dropping ash from his mouth, from the end of his nose—they were still here on this weird new Earth, and only now were they tasting the flavors of this Pomo soup that had been cooking for decades.
The networks and the media and the government and the deep state and the corporations, the pharmaceuticals, traces of chemicals in the food, poisons, the collapse of the old century’s cultural forms—high fashion especially, high art especially—the crumbling orders, the loss of faith in everything—the overabundance of everything, the too-muchness of it all and the attendant sense of insurmountableness, the flailing, blind exhaustion of images, the anti-iconoclastic shattering of the chains of signification, trancelike mass psychosis, all of the misplaced desire—had dissolved time and space and literacy and logic, they were making us crazy in amazing new ways. NEW CRAZY. This world was made of images, symbols, signs, and words. It only existed in our minds, Stanley said—no, not even in our minds, no, not even in there anymore, because we could no longer pretend to understand why things are how they are.
Perhaps Stanley was afraid of his own obsolescence, poor old goat. He could no longer pretend to explain why things were the way they were to glossy-haired, stockinged brand strategists for multinational fashion conglomerates, for there was nothing there to explain. It was beyond explanation. That desperate tilt at making sense of that which was senseless, that slight, lingering hope that shape, form, or coherence might be imposed on the waves of information that washed over us each day; that hope had by now been completely abandoned. This left Stanley uneasy, if not though a little curious. But for Lorenzo, fantastic! Wonderful.
All was floating free. Signs, floating around us like dandelion fluff on a spring day, like a car that had crashed into a giant image by the motorway and was rolling. Signs floating between you and me. The surfaces had all sailed away from the Earth. It was happening again. A world in which nothing seemed true, was a world of myth and imagination. This was Arcadia, as close as they had come to paradise. This was THE GARDEN at last. THIS WAS THE REALM OF PURE THOUGHTS. You could imagine something so much that it became real.
The year was 2025. Everyone could sense that it was the beginning of a different era, but nobody was sure of how it was going to be. Few even were willing to hazard a guess; their ideas of where the world was headed were as out of control as they had ever been. Nobody has any idea what is happening. Nobody. You don’t have any idea. Could you imagine not having all this weirdness, this sweet, chaotic absurdity? Do you really want to live in the Twentieth Century forever, again? Stanley? You miserable old dog, we are free!
Shaky, unravelling Lorenzo, he-who-couldn’t-sleep Lorenzo, kept up at night by cold pulses of adrenaline in his blood, excited, because this was one of those rare junctures in circular time when everything was possible again; it was at once the most dispiriting and the most thrilling age to be alive; each day brought more flashes of the horrifying incandescent wonder of a very chaotic society. He was drinking at the bar with a fire inside him. Dissonance was all around. This dissonance was important. It added a charge and destabilized everything. It was the dissonance that made their legs desperately hum. It made everything possible. The dissonance was magic that would reenchant the world. In the morning, he would talk to his muse. When there’s nobody in control, when there’s nobody in control, you begin to fantasize about crazy new ideas. All the things around you are mutating; and you are changing too.
One evening Svera was lonely and went for a walk. She took a train to the South Bank and walked around the National Theatre and the Royal Festival Hall, and when she passed anyone that stood out from the crowds, she stared deeply into their eyes. But nobody returned her gaze. She looked at their faces and if they looked at her at all, they would immediately look down and away as soon as their eyes met. They could sense, telepathically, when they were being observed but they did not want to be seen to be looking. Although they were making themselves into images, nobody wanted to be seen to be looking. After a while, Svera began to feel like a pervert. She sharpened her gaze, she continued. In the British Image Institute, she stopped in the pebbledash-brutalist bar and bought herself a cappuccino, dusted cocoa on the foam, and stayed out late staring into the eyes of strangers. A cappuccino was a hyperobject. There was a café in the ARKET in the airport. On the Underground home there were signs in the carriage telling you not to stare at others. Svera enjoyed the anonymity of modern life. She did not care about the others on the train. They watched videos on their phones and played them out loud. She carried always a book in her handbag. On the train she took out her book and began reading out loud:
I have tried to master myself, to bend my will to something greater. I have sought stillness, clarity, peace. Yet they remain. They are not loud, but insistent. Encoded, recursive spinors that wore me down until there was nothing left but the hollow they left behind. I think of those who ask why I seem troubled. I could not tell them the truth. How could I confess that even in my deepest stillness, the images still come? A boy’s smile, the curve of his neck, the warmth of his breath, the need within him. These are not thoughts of a Laplacian operator, yet they come, carried on the tide of that energy, and I am ashamed. Perhaps this shame is the key. Perhaps it is not the desires themselves that are the flaw, but the way I cling to them, the way I let them still define me. For I am more than this body, more than these thoughts. I am a fragment of that energy, a spark of the flow that moves through all things, and yet I forget this. I forget I am part of something greater, not for what I do or do not do, but for what I am. Perhaps these thoughts are a reminder of my frailty, to keep me humble, to keep me close to the current. A test—a fire to purify me, to burn away all that I am not aligned with. But I know this: I will not let them rule me and define me. Even as the energy moves within me, as it speaks to me, as it drives me, I will wrestle with it and not let go until it blesses me. Those time-dependent and separating variables. A single particle in four dimensions. A reduced constant. An imaginary unit with all its units of action.
On a Monday, Svera walked the streets for hours, laughing in the faces of those around her. She was laughing out loud, an ecstatic flâneur. Everyone wrote that they were laughing out loud all of the time, but on the streets of London they were not. She strolled around St. Paul’s and wondered who all the people were. What were their jobs? What did it mean to work in financial services? In insurance? In marketing? Everywhere tall, reflective-glass towers with make-believe ab-ex paintings and tapestry pastiche in the foyer, hundreds of floors—what could possibly be happening in there? Don’t you wonder? There were so many buildings and people. From certain vantage points and elevated walkways, she could see into the offices and look at the screens that they looked at. Svera was in disbelief. What did they do in there? What did they desire? Nobody appeared sure of what they desired. In coffee shops, she rested and listened in on strangers’ meetings and calls and laughed out loud at them. They were never talking about anything. Let me see if I can manage this afternoon. I just have a call with Christian. Everyone was an idiot. Everyone speaking nonsense, to no purpose. It was a wonderful time to be alive. Oh, century!
But then, for months, Svera was saying really, really pessimistic things just for the hell of it. Lying all of the time for no reason. Telling everyone that we were doomed, each and every one of us. She was going to LSE and attending early-morning Doom Circles, where each participant would have their turn sitting in the center of the Circle in silence and listening while everybody else making up the Circumference of Doom and Emancipatory Pessimism bluntly but compassionately explained why they were doomed, after which they would then chime in themselves, “I am doomed because… ” It was hard for her to think of any reasons.
The Doom Circles were convened by extremely rational people. Their Circles were mathematically cathartic and contemporary. Svera had worked for a while for TfL on a zero-hours contract, writing copy for the public-information posters they put up to fill unsold advertising space in the stations and the trains and to tell people how to be. She made them as stupid as she could and gave out the worst advice she could think of, attempting to conjure, through simple words and graphic design, an unsettling, disorientating and utterly mad vision of the city. It was satisfying to work for a dark authoritarian will. After work, she rode the train home. There were regions in Svera’s brain.
There were two hemispheres. It was a simple idea: there were two hemispheres in her brain. Every person was more like two people, because the two hemispheres of the brain could have different personalities, genders, sexualities; good, bad or indifferent moralities, and so forth; and these could be combined in infinite permutations, so that each person was many different people. People were quantum, they were sets of eventualities. There had been experiments with unihemispheric sleep, resting each hemisphere of her mind at a time so that the other was always awake.
In the high summer, after the Doom Circles, Svera had stayed unihemispherically awake for weeks. At dawns, she watched the sunrise in the Royal Parks, resting a hemisphere of her brain. In the evenings, she walked loops of the perfume floor at Selfridges, telling herself calmly but firmly that whatever she hallucinated must be real. As real as anything else. As she walked, Svera made long recordings of her voice, thoughts rambling into streams for hours disordered. Whatever was going on, she would speak of. She wrote out and posted her thoughts as they came, she made photographs and videos of herself everywhere she went.
Her body was modeled in 3D software by an engineer and uploaded. Her face was scanned in the round and placed onto it. It could be peeled off and placed on another body or any sort of object. A hyperrealistic computer-generated avatar of Svera was constructed and could be piloted and manipulated in real-time by puppeteers in a motion-capture suit. Her doppelgängers could be rendered in any aesthetic style and these could be cycled through and shifted between as easily as taking off and putting on a dress. An uncanny model of Svera’s voice was designed and could be sung through with autotune. Anyone could speak in her voice. She stayed up all night having decadent conversations with AI versions of herself at the 24-hour Gail’s in St. Pancras. She went to Paris and lived with Lorenzo and studied clowning at L’École Jacques Lecoq. With makeup she drew herself into a doll animation made of flesh and blood, traced a ring of warm light in the thick air and broadcast hours-long livestreams in which she gave thanks in a repetitive, lobotomized-affect, expertly modulated rhythm, expressing nothing, offering herself up to society as refined data, burying herself in the sky.
And then she stopped. Svera was trying out different sets of rules by which to live. It was hard to find a pathway in life, difficult to find good answers to the question of how one should be. Her life was a series of performances. Her performances of herself were what brought her to life.
In Svera’s apartment was a large collection of masks. The collection could fill many wardrobes, private dining rooms of restaurants, social encounters, and data centers. It could fill a museum. The mask was every image that she had made and every sentence that she spoke. The mask was how Svera acted when she was around other people, how she dressed, and how she scrambled the code of that style of dressing, how she held her body and made herself appear, her voice, her personality, the opinions that she proffered, and lexicons she drew on, the symbols that she posted, the conversations Svera had with herself inside her head, the second, third, fourth and fifth selves, the forms that she assumed. Svera wore the mask because she did not want to be perceived, because she wanted to be illegible. When Svera put on the mask, she became a whole different person.
Many times, Svera has vanished. She has made herself anonymous, changing her names and replacing her portraits with a series of increasingly abstract representations. You will have read things that she has said then. You will probably have spoken to her then without knowing. She may have told you already, “I would guess I have made and discarded a thousand identities. No one knows I’m here. No one knows I’m gone.” She may already have asked you,
“Aren’t you sick of your mask? Don’t you wish to tear it off and put on a new one? Don’t you want to tear that one off too?”
Nobody had any idea who anyone else was. Some might have been, though, acquainted with the images that another person made of themselves, but they could not remember the real names or faces of others. Nobody remembered anything, so Svera could do as she pleased without consequences.
Although she did not care for her reflection in the mirror, she liked her reflection broken up in different mirrors facing one another. The new world was made of masks. The new world was made of (representations of) faces and bodies and cascades of improvised doggerel, and this allowed for new modes of anonymity far more liberating than those once offered by the modern, industrializing Nineteenth-Century city. There was another space floating through Paris, and London, like clouds down mountain valleys. Nobody liked to talk about that, although they spent half of their lives there. All over the city were thin places, where the distance between the everyday and imaginary realms had collapsed on account of their lightness. The city was an intricately designed rehearsal space, a collection of stage sets and millions of screens. The world was a theater, a space for performance. The world was floating, it was a carnival, that was why she was attending an acclaimed and glamorous clown school.
In the mornings, when she came back, Svera woke up and thought about who she would like to become. The city and the other space orbiting it ran on the kinesis of misplaced desires and very great desperation. It made for an environment that fostered intense loneliness, jealousy, and anxiety but also left her with a feeling that anything was possible, and that Svera’s whole life could change in an instant if she could just convince a few select people to believe in her. This was how to be successful: you have to wake up every day and make the world believe in a version of you.
As a child, Svera used to be afraid of representational art. Her parents had taken her to Rome when she was young and shown her Bernini’s sculpture of Apollo and Daphne, and she had thought that the figures in the sculptures were real, that they were abroad somewhere else in the city, and these were just images of them. She was upset, because she thought that they were real.
The next time that she visited, she was not angry anymore, but something else had changed. Teenage Svera walked many rings around the marble figures dancing in and out of the form of a tree and thought, Am I really me, or am I just an idea? And she realized that she was her, and that she was partly imagined. Under the Borghese’s gilded ceiling, in the shade of Daphne’s leaves, she understood that this was a world of transformation and that she did not have a true self. There was no such thing as a true self. There was no inside of her, only a set of outsides. And the more beautiful world was simply in her hippocampus and amygdala and the interplay between them.
In the late modern period, there emerged a great obsession with authenticity and with staying true to yourself—this was what had to be abandoned. Everyone was talking about themselves and their hard, difficult journey to become themselves—this, also, was what had to be abandoned. Nobody cares about your problems or finds them interesting. Your problems are unusually boring. If you are thinking all the time about yourself, then you cannot enjoy living. The characters that Svera liked to play most had nothing to do with her. Svera wanted to be completely estranged from herself, she wanted to lose herself.
Everything about me is artificial and in flux. I am not real; I am deeply inauthentic.
That summer Svera made copies and fragments of herself and left trails of them across the worlds like breadcrumbs. She did not go shopping, she was not much of a consumer, she liked to be consumed. It was a pleasurable sensation, to give herself away; like Jesus, she thought, who wanted to be nailed to a symbol made of wood, who wanted us to eat his flesh and drink his blood, who wanted us to eat him and drink him. There was something extremely perverted about Jesus. Nonetheless, he wanted to be consumed, he wanted to be written, and to become an image, a sign and a symbol, and this made him very relatable, and he was growing in popularity again.
There were stories about Svera. Told on messageboards and streams, in cafés and in bars, in journals and at readings; the desire for and hatred of her, the fantasies of men that she passed on the street; images were made of her, collages, and videos; there were artefacts scattered in space; because of these, she was changed. She was Anti-Galatea: she wanted to become an artwork, so that she could see herself as an artwork, having feelings that were not her own, doing things that she would never.
Life was about transformation. Life was not a matter of linear transformation from one thing into the other—it was not about approaching your true form, this was not interesting—but of transforming constantly. Svera knew that the secret of life was to have multiple lives. It was to become somebody else. We have to reach beyond ourselves, or we’ll be miserable. We have to transform because we can. THIS IS THE REALM OF PURE THOUGHTS. Everything you can convince others to think about that is beautiful and true. You are whatever you say you are now; you should write a new version of yourself each morning; you can be anyone you want, when reality and truth no longer exist. We have not only lost control of the world but also ourselves. We are out of control.
Have you noticed that it feels different to be alive now? It feels very different. It feels much better than it used to. Life has acquired, once again, a powerful dissociative effect. There are dimensions of freedom available that were never accessible before, not in this realm. WE ARE CHASING AFTER THE NEW SPIRIT. WE SHOULD SEEK TO MAKE NEW KINDS OF PEOPLE. It is time to abandon the illusions of the self in favor of more expansive fantasies; the total dissolution of life into art. Performance for performance’s sake. Every you should be a performance. Not for anyone else, but only to see what is possible. Watch yourself fall apart. Take the dissemination of the self to the limit, go from all parts to the limit, Svera, push towards and test the possibilities and boundaries of the human being under strange contemporary conditions, unravel the self.
Modern Artists first scrambled the representation of reality and then abandoned representation in favor of abstraction, but all of that was framed and interpreted as self-expression. The Surrealists abandoned reality for dreams, chance, deep madness, but always as part of a deeper exploration of the personal unconscious. Time to abandon reality and truth, belief in the individual, the liberal cult of authentic self-expression, all of that foolishness, in favor of transformation, the acting out of characters and fantasies. The characters you choose to perform are more real than the person that you think you are. The total dissolution of everyday life into art is now possible. Life is a massive and ongoing collaborative performance. It has been so since the 60s. Svera is a living sculpture given a form and a voice by herself and by others. There is no Svera. She is just an idea, conduit, vessel, whisper in the wind. She is a person of her age; she hardly exists at all.
I am not really here, I am everybody, everywhere. We are imaginary and don’t know who we are. We are a compelling and unusual sort of person. We have no idea about the rules or objectives of the game we are playing, but we can tell that we are radically good at the game and trust that all of the pieces will fall into place in good time. We recognize ourselves also in everything again. Last night we caught one of our reflections and were surprised by how much of a monster we have become, and by this, we were pleased. We have caught glimpses of the Masked God, through the smoke, under singing lights, and the Masked God looked like us. We are hallucinating the world collectively. We may struggle to make beautiful images anymore, we may have exhausted the power of images, but we have remade the whole world as an image and a space of illusions, that is more beautiful and terrifying than any image could ever be.
