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| imagine this forever |
Hey!
Before you dig in, did you know that subscribers to my Patreon can now
read Galaxy of Zeroes every week-ish (cough) in the virtual pages of The Hurting Gazette?
OH, AND THIS WEEK'S ISSUE IS FREE TO TRY HERE??? IT IS TRUE!!!
I am also happy to announce the release of the first issue of The Hurting Gazette Omnibus, collecting the first five issues in their entirety in original reading order. That's almost 70K words - about as big as Brave New World, if you're keeping track at home.
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CW: Suicide,
self-harm, politics.
So let’s talk.
There’s a quote commonly attributed to Karl Rove, from an
October 2004 feature on the Bush Administration written for Rolling Stone by Ron Suskind. Everyone
who could have said it has subsequently disavowed it.
You may know the quote. It’s pretty famous:
People like you are still living in
what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge
from your judicious study of discernable reality. That’s not the way the world
really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
reality. And while you are studying that reality – judiciously, as you will –
we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and
that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you,
will be left to just study what we do.
You knew when you saw it that it was going to end up in the
history books. Such a naked display of arbitrary power – reality itself is just
another constituent to be heard from in its turn and then, perhaps, heard from
less as time goes on.
It was also nakedly delusional. It’s almost like something
they might say in a comic book. Not a particularly good one.
Anyway. Those guys
failed spectacularly at everything they tried. Only it was a funny kind of failure, one that came
with very little in the way of personal, professional, or political
consequences. That’s really weird, I mean, when you think about it.
I think about it a lot. I sincerely hope you do too.
So the National, of all people, used this famous quote on a track
on their 2017 album Sleep Well Beast.
That was my favorite album of 2017, but 2017 was a weird year for me where I
didn’t listen to a lot of new music. 2017 was also an emotional charnel house
from January through to December. It’s that kind of album. If the idea of doing
a rock album about the heat death of a tired grown-up relationship seems
unpleasant, well, it’s probably everything you think it is. But like I say, my
2017 was pretty rough. I think there’s a chance yours may have been too. It was
that kind of year.
It’s a very inward facing album, filled with observations
that could perhaps be described as “musings.” It’s . . . well, I’m beating
around the bush here, but it’s a rock album about being middle aged. And not
the Springsteen “Glory Days” middle aged – no, this is a contemporary middle
age, all quiet despair and disassociated bonhomie. It’s not an album about
longing for youth. Being older is just taken for granted, and there’s something
really reassuring about that. It’s
not an album I think I could recommend to a twenty-year old and expect them to
love – I mean, it’s just kind of sad. The kind of thing you listen to when you
want to think about old memories, not make new ones.
If you know anyone who’s really into this album, maybe ask after
them?
For a good while in the late Summer and Fall of 2017 I was really into this album. I bought
it the week it came out at Target, because that’s the only place that sells CDs
next to the dog food. That still sells CDs. This would be right before my mom
went into the hospital for a couple months, so I would have a lot of time in
the car driving back and forth by myself, listening obsessively to this and a
few other things, the most recent Ariel Pink (which dropped the week after Sleep Well Beast), a newer band called
Alwways.
So think about that quote from above, from the Rolling Stone piece, and imagine a
recitation of that played over a low-key instrumental section of a song about
being emotionally disassociated in the last days of a doomed relationship –
“I’m always thinking about useless things / I’m always checking out,” he goes,
before cooing “I only take up a little
of the collapsing space.” Only. Matt Berninger has been reduced almost to a
tiny pinprick of wounded beffudlement against the horizon. I hadn’t encountered
that quote in a while. I heard it a lot over
those few months, by now I can probably recite it from memory, to give you an
idea of just how maudlin things were (well, maybe, get a couple drinks in me
and I’ll show you my Karl Rove if you know what I mean). I puzzled over that
quote in the song, on the album, an album without any other kind of political
content whatsoever. It was perhaps an unexpected bit of “wisdom” to be chewing
over in the first year of the Trump Administration, but maybe not by quite so
much as you’d think.
The National put that quote in a different context and made
it a lot easier, once I had thought about it for a while, to see the emotional
tenor of those words. The reason why it seems so cartoonishly evil is that, to
me at least, it sounds like something you
imagine someone saying, in terms of the fact that it lays clear the malice
at the heart of the sentiment in a way that would usually only be a dog
whistle. Imagine sitting in traffic and drifting off in boredom, putting these
fateful words in the mouth of the impossibly beautiful woman who no longer
gives you the time of day. Like the woman in these songs – only described by
her absence, a chiaroscuro person.
Those words are
arrogance. It doesn’t seem plausible that a real, live human being would
actually say those words out loud because the philosophy described in them is
so obviously, patently absurd and
self-defeating that you’d need to be extraordinarily
high to have it make even a passing kind of resemblance
to sense. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore” – famous last
words for conquerors since time immemorial. The
underlying premises behind reality do not change simply because the ruler deems
them inconvenient.
So why is this woman absent? Why are there no songs about
her on Sleep Well Beast? I puzzled
over that a bit but I think the answer is fairly straight-forward. He’s not blaming her. This isn’t “Idiot Wind”
with its suffocating bilious rage. The fact is that the relationship died, and
sometimes when that happens it’s no one’s fault. The album knows this. It
doesn’t really want to drag the other party into it on anything other than the
level of allusion, because it knows that it would just be petty, vindictive,
possibly just repellent. Two people who once loved each other are now on
completely different planes of reality. He doesn’t try to blame her for his
behavior, or use the album as an opportunity to air a one-sided grievance. There’s
a power differential between the semi-famous rock star and the person who
isn’t, and Berninger never oversteps, in my judgment. The person who isn’t a famous songwriter doesn’t
usually get many chances to settle the score.
I mean, sure. There’s lots of pleading, appeals. The core of
the album, found a little over halfway through, is a song called “Empire Line,”
whose chorus is the simple question:
Can’t you find a way?
Can’t you find a way?
You are in this too,
Can’t you find a way?
It’s the worst sound in the world. It sticks in your throat
because you know what the answer is. He knows
what the answer is, too.
But crucially he doesn’t try to represent the conversation
as equal when he knows it isn’t. It’s not actually about her at all. It’s about
him. She’s not in this too. She left
a long time ago. That’s kind of the problem. She’s not there, and neither is
anyone else:
I’ve been talking about you to
myself
‘Cause there’s nobody else
And I want what I want
And I want everything
I want everything.
Maybe that’s the problem.
One of the best pieces of advice I got in my entire college
career came in the form of an observation about the Great American Novel Moby Dick.
I am certain the person who made this observation had made
it a hundred times before to hundreds of undergrads. I didn’t even like this
person, truth be told – but this one very simple thing has stuck with me long
past almost everything else. I’m paraphrasing, but this is the gist:
The most important parts of Moby Dick are the parts with the whale minutiae.
If you’ve read Moby
Dick you know the feeling of huffing along somewhere in the deep thicket of
the novel and coming across those first chapters of factual recitation of whale
lore. It’s not a fun feeling because
it’s an acknowledgement that this wonderful book which had begun as such a
rousing pulse-pounding adventure story and buddy comedy in jolly old Nantucket
was actually maybe going to get a tiny
bit dry and tedious before all was said and done.
Now, I’ve read Moby
Dick twice and I can assure you that the tedium is intentional. It’s a very
contemporary impulse, actually, the construction of an archive of interpretive
material beyond merely the symbolic or metaphorical or psychological level.
When you read Moby Dick you have to
grapple with the fact that the significance of whales to human myth and
imagination – no small significance,
either, as whales remain the only animal whose sheer size naturally conjures
associations with divinity – is no greater than the significance of whales to
human science and economy. It is at the intersection of these that we see the
process of dismantling the living creature into pieces precisely measured for
separate sale by capital, the process which consumes so much gory (and
homoerotic) real estate in the middle of the book.
What’s the whale a metaphor for? Maybe there is no metaphor. Maybe the point is that the whale is
bigger than we understand. To make any creature or person or phenomena into a
metaphor is to rob them of the most basic right of standing for themselves. The
whale is its own reality. When the
whale asserts himself the book promptly ends. He alone survived, etc.
Star Wars isn’t a metaphor. This book is about a lot of
things but this book is still always consistently about Star Wars even when it’s about everything else, and the
reason why isn’t because Star Wars represents
anything at all. Star Wars doesn’t stand for anything but itself. Culture
writing in this late capitalist hellscape of 2018 resembles nothing so much as
the crew of the Pequod setting out to
hunt, capture, and vivisect the mighty leviathan. It’s gruesome business. We
filet every square centimeter of meat for piping hot takes, served daily all
year round.
I mean, come on. This book could have been about anything,
really, but the reason why it’s actually about Star Wars is that by being about
Star Wars there’s a chance more people might read it. I don’t think I’m giving
away any trade secrets there, hoss.
But Star Wars – well. Star Wars is big enough to accommodate
even the most capacious intellect because it’s a beast designed around the idea
of scale. From the very first moments
of the very first movie you are seeing things that are designed to impress upon
the audience, and convincingly, the illusion of size. People like seeing really
impressively large things on the movie screen. Give people a window into a
universe where really impressively large things happen on a regular enough
basis and they’ll make you a billionaire.
Star Wars isn’t a metaphor. When I lost my shit in the
grocery store parking lot because I left my keys in my car, I really was going back and forth between having
an active breakdown and figuring out how best to use Starck and the Phoenix
Squad. I’ve been on this farm for a year and I still have not missed a day of
farming my game, even in the midst of the most grinding depression and poverty
and despair and apocalyptic current events, it’s still a reason to get up in
the morning even after two and a half years.
I used to think I should feel ashamed about that but I guess
writing a book about the process has, at least so far, helped me appreciate the
significance of wringing whatever meaning from life that you possibly can while
you can. And honestly, after doing this for two and a half years and counting
the scale of the endeavor has sort of become the point. It’s a part of my life.
And now it’s been a year.
Didn’t plan it that way, certainly, but I write these words
on the July 4th, 2018 – one year to the day after I last saw my ex
outside the terminal of the Cleveland airport.
How has it been a year? It doesn’t seem long ago now, just a
little bit. A year on the almond farm with my parents and their dog and cats.
How has it been a year?
I bought a chain a while back to wear around my wrist –
beautiful piece, stainless steel. Fits my general motif. I wore it for a few
months and it was quite comfortable – fit perfectly on my wrist, not too heavy.
You see . . . it was a hard thing, a very hard thing, to
realize that I have within me a streak of slavish dependency. That makes me
ashamed of myself. I avoided being alone for decades because I was afraid of
what I might find out about myself, and sure enough, I only had my final
revelation about being trans after I’d been living semi-independently from my
ex, then at art school. I was afraid of being alone – so afraid, terrified of something I knew was
hiding in the back of my head, getting ready to leap the moment I let my guard
down.
Peoples’ emotions are very loud for me . . . and I think
just that fact made me desperate to stick to as many other people I could. If I
was around someone else I didn’t have to listen to my own problems. I could
just ignore them, which I did for over twenty years – we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. But
you can’t outrun a faulty premise. I found it exceedingly difficult to make
good decisions while acting under an incomplete understanding of myself.
So what happened? Lying to myself did nothing but compound
every problem in my life. It led me to a place where my only options were
simple: change or die. I’ve hurt people . . . more than a few. Not
intentionally, certainly, but that’s cold comfort. I didn’t know anything about
myself, in so many ways . . .
Suddenly I nod off. I’m trying your patience. More than
usual. I’m having trouble getting through the fog, this last section has been
hanging pregnant over my head for the better part of the week.
I jerk awake. The
room is dark and my computer is on the floor next to me. I don’t remember
turning the light off or putting the laptop up . . . I’m still listening to
Stars (“Sunrise / oh sunrise / when will the night be gone? / It won’t let me
go”) on my headphones. I turn the music off. I hear a scream . . .
. . . AND IF YOU WANT TO SEE HOW IT ENDS, CHECK OUT
THE HURTING GAZETTE 7,
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