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Yesterday, I stepped into a psychic’s reading room, hoping to address my difficulties with love. I dressed nicely, all in black, to emphasize my sorrows and silver hairs.

I sat on a throne across from a young woman who was perched, catlike, on an identical throne. She had long hair and wore a university fleece. I wished she was older. Where was her turban? The lozenge-sized jewels on her gnarled fingers? The crystal ball?

“The in-depth love reading?” she asked in a thick Bronx accent.

“Yes,” I sheepishly confirmed. I was surprised to be going through with this. I’d only lightly committed to it over email, and hadn’t received a follow-up. Then I thought it would be a poor psychic indeed who needed to send follow-ups, and was heartened. She must be good.

She stared hard into me.

“You have psychic abilities of your own,” she said flatly.

“Thank you,” I said.

Her eyes continued their work. For a moment I thought something extraordinary was about to happen. Namely, an impromptu telepathic battle with a psychic Latina from the Bronx. Then, she blinked. She asked me to take a deep breath. I inhaled.

I’m chronically single. I haven’t had an official relationship since high school, and I was closeted then. I’m 35 now. Hinge is losing faith in me. It’s starting to show me women. A 31-year-old Ukrainian refugee named Zlata. A 55-year-old Filipina named Memory. I have nothing against women, but I’m a homosexual man with certain preferences. “Have you considered opening your mind?” asks Hinge, showing me Gitte, 52, her profile entirely in Danish.

To be fair, I’m not doing so great with men. I told my most recent date that I was working on a novella. “Because you’re Mexican?” he asked. I asked what he meant. “Isn’t a novella a Mexican novel?” Before him was the guy who confessed over drinks that he didn’t “believe in Helen Keller,” because there was “no way she actually flew that plane.” I asked if he meant Amelia Earhart. “Who?” I slept with both of them. I’ve been on a lot of dates. Sweet. Yeah, same here. Any siblings? Your parents are cool with it? Very nice. You too. Yeah, I’m on Instagram. My friends sometimes set me up. This has only ever gone poorly. We sit across from each other, read through the script at a polite 75% effort, wondering if our friends know us at all. I get frustrated with myself. Picky. Shallow. Greedy.

Like many chronically single people, I spend a decent amount of time speculating on what’s wrong with me. I’ve entertained many theories. These are divided into three basic categories: My Looks, My Personality, and Miscellaneous. Years of research have yielded nothing concrete. It could be that I’m simply ugly, an ugly man, one of many. But there are ugly people in committed relationships. It’s not my personality. I’m an unambiguous delight.

The problem is all but certainly hiding out in Miscellaneous, the fat manila folder holding everything from a personality disorder that hasn’t been named yet to a repressed experience in my youth that makes romantic love impossible.

The worst part about being chronically single isn’t the solitude, which I enjoy. I even enjoy loneliness; that melancholic note, issued from a single, plucked string pulled taut over an emptiness. The worst part is the ambiguity, which makes me susceptible to folk remedies, trite platitudes, and magical thinking. It will come when you least expect it. You’re looking too hard. What’s your sign? You’ll know it when you feel it. You’ll just know.

Thank you. I’ll stop looking until I find it. I’ll stop thinking about it so it can take me by surprise. This isn’t how anything else works, but I’ll give it a go. I wake up most mornings with a vague hope, smothered by the hour, and cruelly rekindled in sleep. I’ll have to stop doing that.

Love today feels like a luxury and a game. I don’t need a boyfriend. The world isn’t pressuring me to have one. In the not too distant past, I’d have a wife, children, and a doomed clandestine romance with a guy from church. Or I’d be an eccentric bachelor with rumors swirling about me, content with mere survival and the occasional tryst. I wouldn’t want to go back, but I feel I’d know the score better. Without a Have to or a Must, love becomes leisure; a pastime and a pleasure. I look when I’m bored. When I want to give my thumbs something to do. When I want to feel something. I can pay extra to increase my odds and remove the ads.

Theory: I’ve spent too much time playing. The game itself has taken the shape of a relationship. The protean boyfriend of the mind. I swear I see him everywhere. He wears a chunky silver watch. He works in accounting. He’s a site supervisor in construction. He has big hands. I had a brief romance with a man who was a salt harvester. I used to send him pictures of salt at grocery stores and farmers’ markets with “thoughts?” and he’d immediately start typing. The rancher in Lubbock who was fluent in Chinese for some undisclosed reason. The Dutch guy with the ambiguously inky job at sea. Tristan. Cooper. Diego. Matthew. He’s been too many people to be one person.

I decided to see a psychic.

I don’t believe in psychics, but I believe in metaphor, which is the essence of understanding. Being a Pisces, for example. What are the ways in which I am like twin fish? Or tarot. How am I like a chariot? The world is text and living is reading. Metaphors firm things up. Heraclitus said the universe is like fire. Thales said it was like water.

I have no metaphor for romantic love. Is love like fire? Fire-love is bright and wild and brief. Is love like an oasis? Oasis-love is salvific and precious and rare. The psychic would give me something. The day before I saw her, I took out my journal and wrote down a list of concerns.

• Anticipated problems with love psychic:

  • I’m a customer. She won’t tell me that I’ll never find love.

  • Psychic abilities likely not real.

  • Ambiguity.

  • My cynicism.

  • Over-eagerness on my part.

  • A lack of talent on her part.

These were manageable qualms.

But walking up to the door, I felt like I was about to have some medical operation. Something was about to be removed from me. I reminded myself this was fake and fun, like most things I do. But something unnerved me. I was afraid of learning anything concrete about that “him” who was out there. I’d spent much life on the looking. Checking for him in the folds of chance. On some level, I never thought he might actually be real. Oh. I was breaking up with a ghost.

I exhaled.

“I’m ready to begin,” she said. “Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Have you had a psychic reading before?”

“No,” I said. This wasn’t true. A couple years ago, a friend, plagued by a persistent foul mood, had recommended one to me. She’d not made a demonstrable improvement in his demeanor, but I’d been jealous that he’d seen a psychic. I booked a session. She told me I was Winston Churchill in a past life. True, I thought, contemplating my eloquence and resolve. Then she said my father’s father was watching over me, and I knew she was making things up. Grandpappy wouldn’t do that.

“I don’t see any major illnesses or surgeries,” this psychic, the one from the Bronx, said. “Only one minor procedure. Your folks are good people. Not rich, not poor. Yous guys are close.”

“Yes.”

“Your aura is lavender and gold.”

“Yes,” I said, believing this was her acknowledging my homosexuality.

“It’s bright. But it’s spilling everywhere.” She cocked her head to one side. “It’s like you’re a glass with no bottom.”

I almost said a bottom was exactly what I was looking for, but was too struck by the image of myself spilling all over the place. A good metaphor. Of course no one loves me. How can they, when I won’t let them hold me? When I can’t be held? I feel like someone new all the time. I slip right through people’s fingers. Sometimes it feels like I’ve never actually let anyone meet me. Yes, I’m like water. I’m like bright, lavender-gold water. That’s a great point.

“Have you had someone enter your life very suddenly, with a lot of energy, and then go away?”

“Yes.”

“When was this?”

The true answer, “every other week or so,” felt inappropriate, so I said it’s happened once or twice.

“Have you been in love before?”

I don’t believe in psychics, but I believe in curses. A curse is misfortune, with a storyline. Inside, a curse, tragedy, is a natural force. Like the wind, or the sea. It makes certain activities on certain days impossible.

Sorry, I can’t. I won’t. I will never...

His dad found out about us and made him choose. He told me not to worry, that he’d meet me there. I waited all night. He never came. I was wearing nice clothes. My best. Because I really thought… Well, I was a fool, of course. But then I stayed one. It happened again. Different guy. Only, that time, he did come. But it wasn’t him. He was ruined. He barely recognized me. Heartbreak sounds exactly like what it is. I’ve been careless with myself ever since. What you said earlier, Madame Psychic, about me spilling everywhere, it’s true. I share too much too soon, only to slip away down the drain in the middle of the night. I don’t mean to do it. I really don’t. He starts to like me, and I change shape. I don’t think I can be loved. I don’t have an “I.”

But then, sometimes, sometimes, I have a conversation, and neglected but wonderful things in me start glowing, How did I ever forget?, and my heart thumps maybe-maybe-maybe, and it feels like I’m close, like I’m so close. What happens to these guys? They become friends, or something bad happens, or, “Hey. You’re an amazing guy, but…” It’s like that, Madame Psychic. It just hasn’t worked out yet. Because of the curse.

I said none of that, because they aren’t words.

Tragedy, when spoken, is a list. It’s explaining what the weather is like back home to a stranger on the other side of the world. I opened my mouth. “I’ve been in love, yes. But I’ve had trouble. I have trouble in love. Bad luck.”

She looked at me. “He’s already in your network,” she said. “He’s absorbed with his career. Yous guys haven’t crossed paths yet. He has dark hair and light eyes. I see a wedding.”

I’m significantly more likely to have psychic abilities than I am to ever have a wedding. I relaxed. I smiled. I am gay Mexican-American Winston Churchill. I will have a wedding. Grandpappy will attend. Right. Thank goodness. None of this is real. “Thank you,” I said.

“Do you have any questions?”

“Not that I can think of.”

I made my way to this cafe in Manhattan that I like. En route, I sent a brief recap of my appointment to some friends. I included something else the psychic had told me, that I’d only met one of the three friends I was meant to have forever. In retrospect, this is an insane thing to share with multiple friends. They all ignored my future wedding and fixated on this detail. “Who do I have to kill?” asked one. “Maybe you should be texting your one real friend about this instead,” said another.

Arriving, I planned to spend a few minutes informing some of the many potential boyfriends in my life that I would soon be spoken for, and asking if they had anything to get off their chests. I sat down at a table and noticed that a handsome man was sitting at the one beside me. He was drinking a cappuccino and reading Hamlet. I looked at his eyes and noticed they were light. What a story it would make. The only problem was that he was blond.

Dirty blond, I thought, reminding myself that there were many interpretations of “dark.”

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No one has been right so far. About the end of the world, I mean. But it has to end somehow. Imagine the correct guess here: [ , and then . Ultimately, ].

Harrowing.

Human life is a fine lace made of spun sugar. One wrong touch, it collapses. This would be true even if we weren’t insane. But we are. We have a sweet tooth.

The world could end in any number of ways. The moon, known for its placidity, suddenly becomes hostile, for example. Or the moon does nothing, and we decide to blow it up anyway because we’ve been moved by some compelling narrative about its treachery. Our last act as a species: launching a hateful projectile at our innocent moon. Our best scientists are forced at gunpoint to devise the best, most scientific way to shoot the moon dead. But something goes wrong. The calculations are slightly off. We die.

This scenario is one of billions.

One of the worst things you can be is credulous. But that’s what I am. What I’ve always been. Credulous. Tell me the world is ending, and part of me believes you. At age seven, standing in the checkout line at the grocery store, I saw a National Enquirer headline: a statue of the Virgin Mary had begun weeping tears of blood. Because the world was ending soon. Like, tomorrow. I made my sister cry by passing on what I thought was totally legitimate and, needless to say, pressing information. When my mom told me that, no, the world wasn’t ending, I was confused. So someone had gone through the bother, the considerable bother, of printing a lie, and distributing that lie all the way to a grocery store in Lawton, Oklahoma? I couldn’t imagine going through the trouble. Who would do that?

I’m in Portugal at the moment. I love Portugal. It’s a lush garden at the edge of blue oblivion. I’m in the Algarve now, but was in Lisbon long enough to have the beginning, middle, and end of a fabulous romance (it only needed a single afternoon). I met a gorgeous actor. He plays an abusive husband in a Portuguese TV show. We smoked several cigarettes on his balcony and drank Super Bock out of wine glasses. He sent me down to buy more cigarettes and more Super Bock and when I got back to his building and looked up he was there, smiling down at me. There’s nothing like romance in a foreign country, because it’s doomed. The doom lends something wonderful and fragile to the whole thing. We spoke freely. Confessed. We were uglier and more passionate with each other than we would have been otherwise. Then I left. I was fat and satisfied from this encounter, like a snake whose body holds the shape of the last meal it will need for a good long time. Nicotine makes me nauseous, and I still feel sick, here in the Algarve, which makes me happy.

The Algarve is home to the former end of the world. It’s in Sagres. Today, it’s called Cabo de São Vicente, but the Romans called it the Promontorium Sacrum. They thought the gods had slumber parties there. No one else was allowed to sleep in the vicinity. I don’t know who would want to sleep there. It’s mostly sharp rocks. I think people in the past made a lot of shit up to entertain themselves because they didn’t have phones, and we kept whatever sounded pretty or interesting.

The other reason Sagres is famous, aside from the eponymous beer (though I’m officially a Super Bock loyalist), is that it was home to Prince Henry the Navigator’s legendary school of navigation. It was here, at this rocky terminus, at the end of all things, that the Age of Discovery was born, the crucible that birthed the modern world as we know it, the one with Brazilian-run fan accounts for American popstars and Mexican diaspora poetry about flan and poverty.

Except, there are no ruins of an observatory or a lecture hall. The shore is obviously too jagged for ships to provision. So, maybe none of what I was told about Cabo de São Vicente is true. It’s not even the former end of the world. There are two of them in Portugal. The other one up north, Cabo da Roca, is probably more scenic, or better in some way. Maybe nothing is true at all. I’m getting tired of looking into things and being ambushed by the same old Not Quite! I’m a very gullible man. Please just tell me the truth.

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If it’s true no one reads anymore, you’d think there’d be fewer writers. But there are a lot of them. Hundreds of articles about what it means to be a writer are published every day. How to do it. How not to do it. Meanwhile, I’m told, our society is slouching toward illiteracy. Every week a new study reports that a room of Harvard students was shown “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow” and couldn’t interpret it, believing it to be Olde English and speculating that it’s about depression.

Soon, writers will outnumber readers 1,000 to 1. You may call this absurd. You may despair. But it’s progress. Since the dawn of technology, we’ve been picking at the locks, trying to free Being from the shackles of Doing. We’re on the cusp of a major breakthrough. Today, you don’t have to read to be a writer. Soon, you won’t have to write to be a writer either. Our utopia will have no readers at all. Terms like writer and artist will be freely elected opt-in demographics. Not something you do, but something you are.

The belief that you shouldn’t have to do anything to be something isn’t exclusive to one political ideology. Outside of a dwindling population of cranks who were probably already struggling with the basics of email, the idea enjoys broad consensus. The progressive set thinks work is a capitalist conspiracy. You don’t have to look hard to find arguments like “expecting writers to read is ableist.” Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley types are using SeedDance to conjure forth scenes of breasty anime girls with pink hair wielding samurai swords and boobily mowing down hordes of robo-soldiers. This visual appears to be the one idea they have, and they are passionate about it. You might think such enterprising individuals would call themselves “prompt engineers,” something cold and technical, but they don’t. They demand to be called artists. Uniting the camps is an entitlement to validation. They want moral approval for what they were going to do anyway, and they want dignity, in the form of the mantle.

Intuiting that we are about to become defunct, we, the remaining few who take the craft seriously, have closed ranks and grimly concluded that we have no choice. We have to use it. The secret weapon artists have always wielded in dire situations. We pound the alarm, shatter the glass labeled EMERGENCY, and remove it from its case: Impotent Critique. Your video is shit. Your article is shit. You are shit you are poop you are feces you are excrement and you should be embarrassed and it should be legal to flush you and banish you from our sight.

And so on. And so forth. We retreat into superiority, cling to the cold comfort of “better.” I am better, better, better. This doesn’t seem to be accomplishing much. Nothing we say is more effective than letting these people share their own work. It’s the equivalent of someone showing you ejaculate in their hand and proudly telling you it’s their baby, and that they’ve named it Timothy. But how long will our balms be effective? Of course it’s great that the output is terrible and easily identifiable, and it remains wonderful news that it’s “bad for the environment.” Imagine if it was somehow good for the environment! Count your lucky stars while you can still see them. Through the smog. Or whatever the fuck.

This might not always be the case. The machines are getting better all the time. Only yesterday, the height of technological achievement was a blurry image that, if you squinted, looked like something. The digital version of seeing the Virgin Mary in your toast. Today’s AI can put The Last Supper on toast, legibly. I’m just saying there’s an evolution there. And by sharing our work on the internet, we feed the borg. Virtuosic anti-AI prose gets incorporated into the AI. We can’t hurt its feelings. We can only give it presents. As parents know, this is a recipe for spoiled, ungrateful children. We do have one thing we can’t give it: discomfort.

Our problem, our big problem, is our relationship to comfort. It predates LLMs. We are powerless before anything that promises to reduce effort. We hate effort. We think effort is a barrier between us and being able to be: a writer, an artist, a creative. Effort is uncomfortable, and discomfort is the devil. “I’m uncomfortable” ends the conversation.

But effort is creation. There’s no creation without it. I think writing should hurt. If it doesn’t hurt, you probably aren’t writing.

Let’s define terms. What is pain? Evidence of aliveness. Information. Pain is the most urgent form information can take. I am, says the ache, the burn, the bleeding cut. Pain verifies connection. What doesn’t hurt, we are disconnected from. If you pressed the bruise on my leg, I would grit my teeth. If you hurt my mother, I would hurt. My arm, cut off from circulation, becomes rubber. Stab it, and I’d feel nothing. Pain tells us something is happening.

What is discomfort? A thwarted will. An unmet I want. It often leads to pain. Response to discomfort is everything. If you do something with it, you’re probably a creator. If you demand to have it removed, you’re probably a customer. Discomfort is anathema to the customer. A customer seeking discomfort is a pervert seeking pleasure. The line between creator and customer has blurred as artists let social media further encroach into their lives. They’re becoming indistinguishable.

The strongest argument against generative AI is also the least coherent: it has no soul. It’s the woo-woo argument. But what’s the thing we can do that AI can’t? Hurt. AI can send writing into the world and feel nothing about how it’s received. My writing is mine. I’m connected to it. My nerve endings are here. I labored over choices. I wondered. I guessed. I changed. I felt bad, then good, then bad again.

Hurt.

You might be thinking that I’m advocating for suffering. To be fair, I am a lapsed Catholic. Suspicion is warranted. But suffering isn’t the same thing as pain, which isn’t the same thing as discomfort. Suffering is persistent, inescapable pain. When comfort is prized over everything else, suffering becomes a totem. We all know on some level that pain affirms being. When someone wants to be perceived as authentic, they reach for their suffering. My pro-discomfort argument is anti-suffering. The valorization of suffering is a byproduct of our misaligned relationship to pain.

I’m not telling you to flagellate yourself. I’m not saying writing should always feel bad. Writing sometimes feels wonderful. Sometimes it feels like a mistake. It feels scary and like a waste of time and like the best part of my day. Writing is the biggest thing in my life, and life is a process. Life is doing. Process involves change. Metabolism. The transmutation of this to that. A fire below the beaker. Pain is the inevitable accomplice to change. We shouldn’t seek out unnecessary pain, but we should cooperate with it. We should work beside and through it, like we do with pleasure.

Pain and pleasure beget each other. The ascetic’s dilemma: he can inflict all the punishment he likes, but over time he begins to feel proud simply for enduring. His wisdom becomes hoarded treasure. He finds pleasure in his piety. That’s the risk of too much. The risk of too little is that we want the ascetic’s benefits, the self-actualization, the mastery, the untetheredness from suffering, without his sacrifice.

How do we do that? One option is to outsource the sacrifice to a machine or a machine-like laborer, preferably one whose face is obscured by a motorcycle helmet or, better yet, altogether invisible. Just leave it at the door, thank you. We like to think technology reduces suffering. Just as often, it displaces and obscures it. It’s a fancy screen. Upgrade to premium and you can obscure suffering without ads. Freedom from suffering, we assume, will liberate the soul, which we suspect is an artist.

Consumerism has always relied on willful self-deception. Individuality, for us, expresses itself through a collage of purchases. In high school I could leave for summer break and come back a different person, because I bought new clothes. That’s what a brand promises. A borrowed essence we can mistake for our own. This self-deception is itself a move to comfort. Comfort is an anesthetic. It is not pleasure. Pain and pleasure both rely on friction. A culture that pursues frictionlessness will find itself pursuing non-humanness.

On tech platforms, we’re all customers. The platform has a responsibility for our comfort. Ironic, considering how unpleasant these platforms feel, but the dynamic remains. There’s a help desk. We’re engaging with a service. No wonder people feel comfortable (ha) engaging with art as if it’s a product, dressing up a desire for customization as critique. To be fair, the art is becoming more product-like. People feel entitled to an experience. If they want to experience “being a writer,” well, who can stop them? These dynamics predate generative AI.

In my book, though, these people will never be writers. You may accuse me of gatekeeping. Of snobbery. But I disagree. Anyone who agonizes over a word choice is a writer, even if they never share the sentence, because authentic identity, and authentic creation, lives inside that agony. Inside that agony, “voice” lies buried. It’s the dark jagged cave that every great writer has had to enter in blind pursuit of themselves.

Those same greats, the ones who brought back something unique and valuable, are the ones generative AI is trained on. You can ask a machine to sound like them, to bring your idea to life in someone else’s voice. Sure. But don’t fool yourself. You aren’t writing. You’re shopping.

Writing, like life, is in the doing. In the hurting. As for being, I have theories. I’m starting to question whether the soul is a deep interior element of authenticity waiting to be freed, or something more collaborative. What if the soul isn’t a thing? What if it’s an act, seeking expression in our thoughts, our decisions, in how we move through the world?

I don’t know. Not knowing is uncomfortable.

What I do know is that AI can’t bruise or ache and that it has no mother. It can’t send an anxious “hey?” text to a man it suspects has ghosted him and it can’t break down in tears in a CVS while listening to “Landslide” and it can’t embarrass itself by sharing too much and it can’t pick up stray lines of dialogue from strangers nearby. It can’t say “take care” knowing it’s the last time it will ever see someone. It can’t hurt. You can.

Pinch yourself, and rejoice.

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Narcissus didn’t fall in love with himself, but with his reflection. There’s a difference. “Inopem me copia fecit,” he laments. “Abundance has made me poor.” He wastes away with everything he wants right in front of him.

I have a primal fear of being photographed. Someone angles a phone camera at me, and I duck like they’ve pulled a gun. I’ve told people I don’t like having my picture taken, that it makes me anxious, that it’s painful, even. And still, they take photos. Even more violently, they show them to me. Navigating modern life while avoiding my reflection makes me feel insane. It’s easier to opt out of wheat than it is to opt out of seeing pictures of yourself. I’ve been called unreasonable. Totally neurotic. Maybe so. But I think I’m onto something.

Pull a medieval serf out of his thatched mud hut and plant him in our world; he’d be bewildered by how shiny and smooth it is. Flat. Liquid. Obsidian. A wilderness of mirrors. He’d not fail to notice, as he put one leather turnshoe ahead of another, that something was following him. Something in the form of a smear of color, slipping like quicksilver across the side of a building, warping across windows and screens before firming up in front of him, its eyes never leaving him. His reflection.

To be alive today is to keep the constant company of this trembling image-self. Alone in your bed, scrolling on your phone, the screen goes black between distractions and briefly reveals a ghastly face in the murky depths; your face, seen from an angle once reserved for long-suffering spouses. We see more of ourselves than any people before us. This ubiquity hasn’t brought us into a deeper understanding of ourselves. The opposite is true. It has alienated us from ourselves. It’s making us miserable.

Some locate the source of this misery in morality. In “people these days.” Shallowness. Self-obsession. Insecurity. Love yourself! Our scientists hem-hem. Our therapists coo… coo… But no one is totally sure how to articulate the situation we find ourselves in. No one, that is, except me, who is confident in saying: It’s black magic. It’s sorcery. We are under spells.

I’ll prove it.

We don’t think of our reflections as tricks of the light. We think of them, simply, as ourselves. This error is costing us dearly. We’re like the betta fish looking at itself in the mirror, driving itself to exhaustion by a mistaken understanding. At least the fish recognizes an enemy. We, on the other hand, enter into a one-sided romance. I submit a disturbing possibility: The fish is right. The images in the mirror are not us. They are Something Else.

We were once suspicious of reflective surfaces. We intuited them as portals, bewitched objects, and bringers of misfortune. These figures, though they resembled us, had an agenda. Scrying, the art of divining truths from mirrors, was for professionals—mages, oracles, shamans who wore spectacular hats and traded their sanity for supernatural knowledge. The average Joe was no more qualified to handle mirrors than the zoogoer is to enter the tiger enclosure with a bleeding hunk of meat.

Somewhere along the way, we dismissed all this as superstition. But stare long enough at your reflection, and it will eventually reveal itself to be a monster. Maybe I’m the crazy one. But when I look around, I see my neurosis everywhere. I see physical bodies piloted by their reflection. Toiling for it. Worrying over it. Feeding it. Obsessed.

Logically, we know we’re not literally our reflections. Turn the lights off. Your reflection goes away. You’re still here. But for the sake of argument, assume these beings in the mirror are even less us than we think. Assume they’re totally distinct entities. Give them a name. Call them Reflections.

Reflections aren’t confined to mirrors. A Reflection is anything outside ourselves that we perceive to represent us. Long before the proliferation of mirrors, which is a recent phenomenon, Reflections were mostly confined to bodies of water, and to the eyes of other people. Mirrors occur naturally, yes. So does fire. But the mirror of today beside the mirror of antiquity is a flamethrower beside an ember.

We “saw” ourselves in how people interacted with us, in how their treatment of us compared to their treatment of others. This is still true. I go to the club with my tall, conventionally attractive friend. He is offered a free drink, and I am not. I see myself without looking at myself. Comparison is the kingdom of the Reflections. Where they live.

In Medieval Europe, a person encountered their moral reflection by comparing themselves to exemplars; to Christ, to the saints. A man got the true measure of himself by identifying where he fell short. This basic dynamic also remains unchanged. When we look in the mirror, we compare the image to an ideal. This ideal can look like someone else entirely, or like an aspirational version of ourselves. In the past, however, a man stepped into this comparison expecting to fall short of Jesus and Augustine, and there was hardly shame in doing so. His baser jealousies, meanwhile, were confined to his immediate community.

Today, the exemplars are far more numerous, and more attainable. They’re just out of reach. Every day, we place ourselves in relation to countless strangers, most of whom we’ll never meet. Even still, no relationship is costless. Consciously or not, when we see an image of another person, we measure ourselves up to them. We establish a relationship, and give something of ourselves to it. Comparison.

The Reflections’ realm is expanding.

Mathematician, astronomer, and close advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, John Dee was an antiquarian with one of the largest libraries in all of England who abandoned academic wisdom in pursuit of supernatural knowledge. He came upon a looted Aztec relic, an obsidian mirror of the sort priests used to commune with Tezcatlipoca, “Smoky Mirror,” the harbinger of discord and Lord of Contradictions.

Together with his scryer, Edward Kelley, Dee used this mirror and other reflective objects to receive messages from what he believed to be angels. Kelley had a different opinion. He saw demons. He begged Dee to stop consulting the reflections.

Whatever Kelley saw, it touches on an intuition that presents itself across disparate cultures in time. Traditions from all over the world direct mourners to cover mirrors after a death. In Book IV of his Disquisitionum Magicarum Libri Sex, "Six Books of Investigations into Magic," the most sweeping survey of the occult in early modern times, Martín del Rio filed mirrors under magia daemoniaca. Demon magic. Mirrors, he noted, relied on a pact with malevolent beings.

Mirror entities are never friends. They come to replace you. They're jealous of your depth, your aliveness, your blood. The vampire has no reflection, because it's bloodless. The mirror is uninterested in it. But Reflections' relationship with magic goes far beyond folk wisdom and literature. It goes all the way back to the beginning.

What is magic? The attempt to manipulate reality through signs. Today, because we have science, we scoff at the idea. But in fact, science comes from magic. La Cueva de las Manos, the Cave of the Hands, in Patagonia: Prehistoric man created a handprint on the wall, and saw himself in it. “Me.” Hand stencils are among the first manmade images, and some go back even further than those found in Patagonia. El Castillo. Sulawesi. Premature forays into abstract thought, and an abstracted self.

Sympathetic magic: the belief that an action, object, or ritual can influence a separate target through an invisible connection or shared resemblance. It’s unclear what the individuals who painted the animals in the caves at Lascaux believed, but the images look like sympathetic magic. We painted animals. Deer. Bison. These were depicted with remarkable observational fidelity, down to their seasonal coats. As for direct self-representation, we refused. But in Lascaux, hidden away in a narrow shaft, past hundreds of animals, you’ll find a single image of a man, with the head of a beast.

One of the first recorded depictions of ourselves wears a disguise.

When we separated sign and signified, we opened a portal. Through that aperture came algebra, ritual, geometry, liturgy, prose, science, and language itself. Symbols. The world was reflected back to us in a form we could freely manipulate. We were able to represent reality without reality being present. Signs eliminate chance and reveal necessity. This granted us insights into the secrets of the universe. The planet Neptune: discovered on a piece of paper before it was ever seen through a telescope. The gap between x in an equation, and what x stands in for. That is the realm of God.

Harnessing this power, we terraformed our environment, flattened it, removed it of friction, and, crucially, optimized it for the further proliferation of language. Language, like all technology, wants to spread. It behaves like a virus.

This came at a cost. When we opened the portal, it allowed for all manner of entities to slip into our world. Our brightest minds, invariably obsessed with science or religion or math, often went mad in the twilit gap between sign and signified. The essence of madness: I say that something is here, but it can’t be seen. Spend too long in this tenebrous Between, and you might end up like Blaise Pascal, the mathematical genius who had a vision of holy fire so overwhelming he sewed a written account of it into his jacket and spent the rest of his life championing Jansenism, an offshoot of Catholicism that held Catholicism wasn’t self-abasing enough. “FIRE,” he wrote on the parchment in a manic scrawl.

Following this joyful revelation, and after reaching the subsequent conclusions that he had no free will and mankind was lower than worms, Pascal started committing all his thoughts to paper in a sort of analogue Twitter feed. This ultimately took the form of his Pensées, where his famous wager can be found. There’s something about language, God, and symbols that invites self-effacement and, paradoxically, self-contemplation. Reflection. Speculation. These words belong to the mirror. All words do. Language is a mirror. Glamour, the old word for a spell, is a corruption of grammar.

It’s no coincidence that when mirrors became widely available, new forms of art and literature flowered that focused on the deep, interior self. We call these forms “modern.” The form of the modern essay, championed by Michel de Montaigne, who wrote so colorfully of his own mustache. Mirrors were key collaborators on modernity itself. Perhaps if vikings had access to pocket mirrors, we’d have a wealth of personal essays with titles like “On Performative Raiding.”

Mirrors invite a fascination with the self. To hate yourself or to love yourself is nonetheless to be fascinated. To be gripped. This was Ovid’s basic intuition in the tale of Narcissus. Why would Reflections want us to be fascinated with ourselves? Because they only exist while we’re looking at ourselves.

A Reflection is a contingent being. A symbol. A sign. It represents us. It is not us. The gap between us teems with demons. Daimones. Sentiments, emotions, ideas that seek to possess us. Every encounter with a Reflection opens a gap. Contemporary life isn’t just reflective because it’s shiny. We consider it entirely normal to endlessly contemplate ourselves. To be obsessed with ourselves.

Obsession. Its roots denote a siege by demons. Have you ever been obsessed? It does feel like fighting an invisible war. Obsession is the battering ram at the gate, threatening total possession. Once the demons break in, we cease to fully inhabit ourselves. We are disrupted. Distorted. Warped.

Two mirrors facing each other reveal an infinite regress.

Alienation is the particular misery attending modernity.

What is an alienated person? A person whose true self is outside himself. Estranged. Alienated labor: our toil enriches someone we’ve never seen, in a system we poorly understand. We intuit this arrangement as undignified. The indignity arrives to us as felt humiliation, as the suspicion that there’s something inauthentic about our lives. Disconnected, we reach in blind pursuit of ourselves, groping at unity. This anxiety is exploitable. We become susceptible, in this state, to the delirious notion that a pair of baggy jeans or a jar of goo will reconnect us to an authentic self.

The image-self, the Reflection, thrives in this environment. It is, in a sense, the avatar of alienation. Most of the products marketed to us have the Reflections in mind. They are image-first. Advertisements invite us to project the image of ourselves into the world they present. This isn’t exclusive to corporate advertising. An image of a stranger whose body we envy, positioned in a lush, faraway corner of the world: what does this image have to do with us? Nothing, without Comparison. In Comparison, we see something we don’t have, and that we want. The image becomes relevant to us. A Reflection.

We seek ourselves desperately in every available surface. Why does alienation generate such misery? Because we naturally seek harmony. We like evenness. I recognize this in my own compulsions, ones I’ve nursed since I was a child: always taking an even number of steps toward an arbitrary endpoint, always applying an equivalent sensation to my right side if one occurred on my left. We prize harmony in other people’s faces, and in our own. We find it pleasing to look at. Harmony says something comforting about the universe. It tells us there’s a benevolent design.

When we perform a labor, it pleases us to see the results of that labor. When we need something, it satisfies us to have that need met. Anything else is injustice. Unevenness.

Unevenness creates discord. Discord creates obsession. Obsession is the persistent and often irrational behavior toward an imagined harmony. As with religion, we seek unity through subtraction of the self. Pascal. Obsession is self-destructive. It whittles a person down to a nub. The child cutting a piece of paper into the shape of a heart, obsessively trying to make it perfectly even, will reduce the heart to a misshapen nothing.

We don’t like when one image competes with another. One either has to usurp and banish the other, or the two must agree.1 Thus, a hierarchy, an organized system, is established and reified. Unfortunately for us, we are confronted with hundreds of competing images of ourselves, thousands, each one telling us something slightly different. Chaos. Conflict. Tezcatlipoca.

Visual drift. Perhaps you’ve encountered someone under the thrall of their Reflection. Convinced of their inadequacy, they strive to meet the impossible demands issued by the mirror. They may even become a grotesque to everyone but themselves. Some will commit themselves to the relative safety of an aesthetic extreme, in a radical bid for agency. But the goalposts always move, because a Reflection is the moving of the goalposts. We can no more unite with it than we can unite with the letter A. It is a symbol. A discordant entity can’t achieve harmony.

This is the hell of obsession. The desired harmony doesn’t exist, no matter how painfully one strives for it. Carl Jung, speaking on alcoholism, called the compulsion to drink a low-level spiritual thirst for wholeness, for union with God. Spiritus contra spiritum, he wrote in a letter. Spirit against spirit. Liquor against soul. Addiction, like obsession: compulsive reaching toward union. Hence the sex addict who obsessively seeks out beautiful men is really seeking himself in their mouths; hoping to find a flattering image of himself to incorporate into his being. He seeks harmony with a more ideal representation of himself. But there’s always an even more ideal representation to be found.

What we call body dysmorphia: the involuntary fixation on a perceived flaw, accompanied by obsessive rituals, in a desperate attempt to find the good image that will overcome the bad one, ending the latter’s oppressive regime once and for all, and finally bringing peace. This isn’t mere vanity. The condition has high suicide rates. One study has them twice as high as that of severe major depression.

Harmony. When I was anorexic in high school, I found comfort in simple cause and effect, in the symmetry between skipping meals and my body’s response. It was validating when it provoked a reaction from the world around me. Are you okay? Are you sick? Confirmation that my rituals were producing an effect. I relished being seen as sick, because the sickness was my invention. My will. I ran so much around my parents’ house that I burnt a dirt track in the grass. Hunger pierced the insides of my bones to suck nutrients from the marrow. I was wasting away. I thought these were positive developments.

Obsession isn’t always obviously miserable. There are people who present as the very image of self-confidence, who make their living off their exceptional looks, who may even be fully convinced of their own beauty, and who are nonetheless caught in the snare, in the flat, shallow romance of glass, toiling for a being other than themselves. Authenticity becomes impossible. We are surrounded by images of ourselves. We’ve never been less satisfied with ourselves.

Abundance has made us poor.

“Iste ego sum,” Narcissus says to his beloved reflection. “That person is me.”

The most fortunate reaction to a mirror, in both man and beast, it seems, is indifference. Knowledge doesn’t do much. Narcissus was aware he was looking at an image of himself. Knowledge did nothing to save him. Those who’ve suffered from obsessive behavior understand this. One can easily identify one’s behavior as totally irrational, and remain powerless to stop it.

We’ve all seen the elaborate scaffolding required to produce a pleasant image. Lighting, tripods, makeup. Today, such images don’t even need a relationship with physical reality at all. Language. Mirrors. Technology. As they continue to develop, representations of ourselves become more abstract. We’re regularly given new tools to manipulate them. We can send them out into the world, fully knowing they are distorted. We still declare them to be ourselves, believing we authored them, and not the other way around. LLMs represent a new advancement: the first mirror for the interior. Soon, people will be able to speak to, and fall in love with, themselves, without having to recognize themselves.

Clever grammar! What are you turning us into?

In Ovid’s tale, it’s no god that transforms Narcissus into a flower. In some tellings, he takes his own life in anguish. But in Ovid’s, his physical body simply vanishes. The flower remains, bent permanently over the water’s surface. The flower. Beautiful, and unthinking. It almost sounds like a happy ending. Except that the Styx, as Ovid tells us, is still enough to gaze upon.

No photographs, please.

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Hello from Dublin. The longer I keep a journal, the less I want to write about myself, and the more I want to write about strangers. Not because I think I’m uninteresting, but because it’s interesting for a person to find other people interesting, and the worst thing you can be in your own journal is boring. It was keeping a journal that revealed this unintuitive fact; that it’s the things that seem totally unremarkable at the moment that are the gems. The inner turmoils, the baroque meditations… These read like filler between descriptions of other people’s outfits, their eccentricities, and descriptions of furniture. The only parts I like reading about myself are when I’m doing things a stranger might be seen doing. I’m sitting in a restaurant. I’m eating chowder. I’m restlessly drumming my fingers on a marble table.

The journal I have now, a red Leuchtturm, is filling up nicely. There’s a smug satisfaction in watching the ribbon bookmark migrate further rightward by the day, the written record of my life getting fatter. It feels like I’m accomplishing something, but I’m not, really. Keeping a journal isn’t about accomplishment. My journal is my daily companion. I can’t imagine life without it. There’s nothing important in it.

I saw a man on the train to Dalkey this morning. He was watching videos on his phone at full volume, laughing and literally slapping his knee. I hated him. I glared in his direction. We got off at the same stop. Minutes later, I saw him on the sidewalk beneath a blanket, the anguish of a Catholic martyr plastered on his face, eyes cast dramatically heavenward, asking for euros. I love him now.

My argument for keeping a journal is primarily a sensualist one. Keeping a journal provides pleasure, like looking at art, or kissing, or pressing your forehead against a cold window on a train on a drizzly day. It’s indulgent. My hand moves to write in my notebook with the same thoughtless greed that moves it toward chocolate or to another sip of wine. Luxury. Will it make me a better writer, improve my mental health, reveal otherwise obscured truths by plumbing the depths of my subconscious? I don’t care. “Your notebook will never help me, nor mine you,” wrote Joan Didion. A journal isn’t about self-improvement. Strange as it sounds, my journal is a means of moving beyond myself.

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It speaks to a deep spiritual inadequacy in me that I’m not a sports fan. What the average beer-bellied football enthusiast is capable of doing from his recliner on a Sunday afternoon is nothing short of astral projection in my book.

When I look at what’s keeping me from enjoying sports, it looks an awful lot like what’s keeping me from escaping samsara. I’m a smarmy materialist. How dearly I cling to my sad, sorry self! I will not experience God. I will be reincarnated. Oh, I’ll be back for sure. I know it. I’m weighted with “me.”

On my next go-around, I humbly request to be a sports fan. I want to place my fragile happiness in the bodies of perfect strangers on my Samsung TV. I want to yell, and curse, and pray, and believe. How beautiful. Submission.

Last winter, I attended an Oklahoma City Thunder game. I had a decent seat in the Paycom Center. “We” were playing the Lakers. I enjoyed the huge arena. Huge arenas feel like antiquity. Like nothing’s changed. I even enjoyed watching the players. The fierce, open-mouthed focus on their faces. They’d fan out in a flurry of squeaks and clump back together in one fluid, mitotic motion.

I found myself fixating on Luka Dončić, the forward and point guard for the Lakers who hailed from Slovenia. We were booing him.

When a teenager pokes up over 6’5” anywhere in the world, it initiates an international bidding war. One of my high school classmates in Oklahoma, for example, stood at six-foot-ten, and was swept away to Romania.

I was trying to put myself in Luka Dončić’s Jordans. One day, you’re an exceptionally tall kid. The next, you’re being booed in the wheaty heartland of a very different country from your own. I asked why we hated him, and was given some perfunctory narrative. I dutifully cupped my hands around my mouth. “BOOO!”

But I couldn’t shake the absurdity. This man was not from Los Angeles. He was not from this country. For that matter, not a single Thunder player was from Oklahoma.

A basketball team isn’t a stable entity. Players are traded all the time. This strikes me as outrageous. You mean some rich guy can remove a human being from Lawton, Oklahoma, and plop his whole life down in Bucharest? Sounds like trafficking.

The act of booing a Slovenian out of obligation to a thin storyline overwhelmed my suspension of disbelief. It felt rude and unwelcoming. I wanted to show Luka Dončić my hometown by the Texas border. Perhaps go fishing together. “We aren’t all like that,” I’d tell him, during a placid lull by the water. We would trade secrets. Become friends. Fall in love…

This fantasy was no more outlandish than the one I was being asked to participate in.

My inability to enjoy sports is almost certainly related to my general suspicion of group activities. Political movements. Identity-based communities. National and regional pride. Yogis. I’ve been burned by them all.

I was part of a scholarship group in college that forced us to attend weekly meetings. I discovered a way to game the system by stealing my name tag from the table and slipping away. The one activity I couldn’t escape was the annual scavenger hunt. I told my team I’d search the dorm tower where I lived. I was never heard from again.

This is basically how I approach all groups today. You may think I’m with you, but… look around.

There are pros and cons to this solitary mode of being. I’m less irritated this way, but it precludes me from the ecstasy that can only be experienced in collective triumph.

Last year, I was walking through Manhattan after a first date when it was announced Zohran Mamdani had won the Democratic mayoral primary. I just so happened to be passing a bar hosting a major DSA watch party. Bodies spilled out into the humid night, each wearing a shirt with the red DSA rose, hooting and slapping each other on the back.

I’d voted for the man, but I could never be part of his watch party. As for DSA, I simply don’t have it in me to sit in a room and debate my “comrades” on the subject of problematic fonts or whatever is going on over there. Sorry.

Still, I envied this orgasmic expression of emotion following a team victory. There are certain torments involved with group participation, yes. But there are certain joys reserved for joiners.

That’s never been me. Even when we used to go to church, my family and I would sit in the very back pew by the exit so we could “beat the church people” to lunch. We’d sneak out after communion, the body of Christ still in my teeth. It’s in my blood.

I’d basically accepted my condition, but then something gorgeous happened this summer. My tenth summer in New York City. The summer I became a real New Yorker, by some metrics. The gorgeous thing that happened was that someone set fire to a school bus. We set fire to a school bus.

You’d think it would be a terrible summer to be a sports atheist in this city. The Knicks. The World Cup. Actually, it was wonderful. The most manic summer I’ve ever experienced in New York. The stage was set before anything sports-related happened. It doesn’t feel good to be an American right now, but it feels good to be a New Yorker.

Our recently elected mayor, for example, is young and supple. Even after being dipped fully clothed in a swimming pool, he remained attractive. Photos of our wet, fuckable mayor stoked an ember of patriotism in me. His high-watt smile could probably power the grid for a few days.

Young socialist victories have lent our metropolis a certain vitality, especially when compared to the gerontocracy running the rest of the country. Mamdani’s opponents take no less part in the rush. The headlines at the New York Post have never been giddier.

People who don’t live here think we’re lawless. “It’s dangerous up there, isn’t it?” an Uber driver in Texas recently asked me, sizing me up in the rearview mirror as if to assess my hardiness. Stabbings. Muggings. People pushing each other onto the subway tracks for fun. A daily free-for-all.

This narrative touches on something true. So many people in so small an area. It provokes some dizziness. One imagines the whole project teetering: The most ethnically diverse urban area on the planet. The most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world. The densest population in the country.

This city shouldn’t work. It’s a miracle that it does; that, every single day, its hull groans through the morass of millions of anxieties toward an ambiguous tomorrow.

This isn’t to say we live in perfect harmony. Tension roils and seethes just below the surface. There’s a distinct feeling that the city would much prefer it if you gave up. Go back to where you came from. You can probably drive a car there. You’d have in-unit laundry. Wouldn’t you like that? Hmm?

Relatedly, Jennifer Lopez recently declared on “Subway Takes” that no one is a true New Yorker unless they were born in New York. I find most subway takes nauseating, and yet I, like anyone, have a subway take of my own (we need to let ugly people be in movies again).

I can’t deny the shrewdness of the format. An intimate talk show, hosted in the artery of the city. On the subway, I often find myself studying the faces of the strangers around me. Who are these people? What do they think? What am I doing here? Do I belong?

“Subway Takes” feeds on the neuroses of very online transplants. Many of the takes attend to ethnic or nativist themes. Which races should be seen in certain neighborhoods, and which should know to hide themselves in shame? Is interracial dating an okay thing to do? Is it really? What makes someone a true New Yorker?

Who do we cheer?

Who do we boo?

I can’t pretend like I don’t understand the desire to locate the city’s essence in something more fixed. The faces change. People move away, then move back. Restaurants shutter, reopen, then close for good. I left the city for a few months, and when I came back, it was a different city. The kineticism is destabilizing. It inspires unease.

From Ur to Akron, a city is a monument to work, to the human capacity for cooperation; a test of our ability to banish violence. Under the concrete sleeps something ancient and dangerous. Some people pick up on the thinness of the membrane.

“I could never live there. It’s too much.”

Energy. Restless. Primal. Something is owed to it. Sacrifices must be made.

The night the Knicks won, a bricolage religion, complete with rituals, figureheads, and festivals emerged. Music. Dance. Chants. Spike Lee was carried through the streets on a palanquin like a makeshift pope. I was warned to stay inside. A school bus was put to the torch.

Before it was burned, it was beaten. Videos show a man in a crossing guard vest repeatedly tossing a stop sign into its grill like Captain America’s shield. The owner of the bus begged for the crowd to stop. They didn’t. We couldn’t. There were mixed sounds of anguished disapproval and excited whoops.

A victory riot. “Nika!” shouted sports fans, the Blues and Greens alike, in Constantinople before tens of thousands of them were killed in the Hippodrome, their blood seeping into the ground of the arena. “Victory!”

Why a school bus? What could be more innocent than a yellow school bus? We entrust it with our children. With our future. The world.

I think about that school bus burning in the night. The ur-stuff of ritual. Take into yourself, yellow school bus, what we cannot hold. Absorb the excess, so that we might destroy you, and then shame ourselves for doing so.

After the rush, we will return to ourselves. Better than before. We will arrest and punish the man. Show us the photos.

Burn.

I had a mystical experience last month. It was related to sports.

Every bar and coffee shop had set up a TV to play the World Cup. I tend to have at least one manic episode every summer. It’s to do with the sun. I was thinking about the sun that day. Another heat wave. I hadn’t slept. I was “on.” Delirious.

I was walking down the street to get a haircut. Something in the air was wrong.

I was thinking, with concern, about the sun. The relentlessness of its giving. It was too much. A gushing fire hydrant that had been spewing for eternity into a ground that was well beyond its saturation point. Excess.

I feared that the world would overflow with heat.

After my haircut, the sky went dark. Strange weather sometimes follows a heat wave, when the heat wave “breaks.” Fever. The sky was at the absolute threshold of something. Like it might rend itself open at any moment. The road was wet, dark, and slick. I’d never noticed before that it had no painted white lines on it. The world was like that. Borderless. The sky and the ground; less distinguishing between them than usual.

In the bars and shops, people gathered, some spilling out into the street, to watch England vs. Argentina. Everyone was rooting for England. Argentina had been made the vessel of various irrational hatreds. One justification was that England had the more diverse team.

I joined a crowd. Watching the faces canted up toward the screen, I thought of the sun.

There’s something beautiful about sports. There really is. Physical strength and cooperation. Brute force and strict rules. Chaos and order. Between: Bodies, seeking something. I was standing in the street. I turned myself toward the match.

Until relatively recently, priests performed the Mass with their backs to the congregation, ad orientem, facing East. The rising sun. The Source of radiance, emanating through the bodies all facing the same direction. Body. Mass. One.

England went away.

Argentina went away.

Energy radiating from above. Energy radiating from the game. Energy radiating from the Source. One non-dual character. The sun. The sport. The summer. The storm. The strangers.

I evaporated.

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Last night, I had the privilege of viewing The Odyssey the way it was meant to be viewed: on the largest IMAX screen in the country, with merlot, a cup of Dippin’ Dots, and three friends. Very traditional. I discovered today that I could have sold these $30 tickets for something like $4,000. It’s all getting to such a point, and I wonder how much longer I can endure.

Pouring my canned wine into a cup, expectations were high. I’d managed to avoid the particulars of “the discourse,” but total abstinence was basically impossible. Questions abounded. Is The Odyssey woke? Based? Unfaithful to the source material? Does it need to be faithful to the source material? Will Odysseus have a Bisexual Moment™? Will Penelope look into the camera and say, “and women too, of course”? Does Ithaca run on Dunkin’?

I was looking forward to receiving the answers to these questions and more from the huge screen before me. Yes. An epic must be huge. I’m deeply informed on this subject by the late Michael Sugrue’s excellent lecture on Gilgamesh, where he argues that an epic is like a culture’s RAM, encoding its values and norms into something that can be passed down.

The epic is a conservative medium. Epics justify the morals and attitudes of the elites to hoi polloi. “There are no revolutionary epics,” Sugrue says. The most interesting thing a modern take on an ancient epic can do is update it. Affirm our contemporary culture. In a way, it’s also the most faithful thing it can do. Beyond costuming, beyond fidelity to dialogue, constructing and reinforcing a collective identity honors the form.

It can’t accomplish this by lecturing, by sitting us down and hectoring us (sorry, that’s The Iliad) into having “good values.” Culture. Water to fish. We’re liable to forget we hold certain values in the first place. What we do know is that it feels good when those values are affirmed. The pleasure of a harmonious order. The pleasure in music. Poetry.

The prestige of antiquity tends to obscure The Odyssey’s capacity as vulgar entertainment. Heroic narratives have very often been just that. Homer gives us a Bronze-Age hero. I know where to find him. What I wanted from Nolan’s adaptation was a crowd-pleasing blockbuster that positively articulated what a hero looks like in the WFH age. Show us a great man who embodies the best in us. Test him against nature, against his fellow man, against the gods, against emails!

This is what I hoped for as I shoveled another spoonful of cryogenically-frozen “ice cream” pellets down my gullet.

Did Nolan deliver?

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“Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”

The most impressive thing Jesus did. The fish and loaves thing looks like catering in comparison. I’d find a way to walk on water before I forgave. I don’t think I’ve ever genuinely, earnestly forgiven anyone. Not of my own will. I’ve forgotten. I’ve pretended until time did it for me. Deciding to forgive someone? Choosing to? I wonder if it can be done. Probably some people can do it, the way some people can fit their whole fists in their mouths.

Like most people, I expect grace that I wouldn’t afford others. Have you imagined what you would do in a situation where you had to grovel for grace? What would you do? Would you be so callously shrewd as to involve strategy, or would your innocence, or your genuine remorse, shine through? Do you know the sin that, if it were to be made public, would result in your being branded with the stigma?

I know my answers. I might tell you at the end.

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I regularly read on the subway. Physical books. Increasingly, these books are leatherbound tomes. I’m at high risk of someone sneaking a photo of me and posting it online with a caption like “Look at bro seeking occultic wisdom in the grimoire… you are not a vibe my guy.” Plus, my fit will probably be trash.

“Performative reading” is an allegation of inauthenticity. “You’re only reading to be seen reading.” It’s of a kind with “performative outrage” and “performative allyship.” The word “performative” can be appended to any public expression of morality. In the constant jockeying for social capital online, it’s a useful tool to address a phenomenon we all know takes place, but is uncomfortable to state plainly. People are lying. They are not who they say they are. They are pretending to be good people for personal profit.

It should go without saying that no one should let themselves be bullied out of reading Infinite Jest because of rude posts on the internet. Ignore. But it does seem to me that reading books, and professing to reading books, invites a certain resentment these days. Resentment usually has something interesting to say. There are things in every culture that typically go unsaid, but find expression in resentment.

Resentment is the mind seeking revenge for the experience of jealousy. “You think you’re better than me.” It’s the inevitable outcome of classed society. Any time it presents itself, it’s an occasion to consider how our particular civic project is chugging along.

When we talk about our literacy crisis or “performative reading,” it feels obvious that we’re not, or shouldn’t be, talking about book sales, but about virtues and ethics. About the kind of society we want to live in. It was a mistake, and itself a byproduct of internet polarization, to cede the very concept of morality to fundamentalists. To speak of principles and standards of behavior makes me feel like some kind of neopagan pervert. This is a problem. “Morality” shouldn’t be the sole province of the worst examples of online moralists.

The world I want: Ideally, engaging seriously with literature would be a mundane activity, not an exotic hobby that warrants creep shots. I would like to move toward that world. To that end, we have to create a culture in which reading is not a moral statement at all.

Reading wasn’t always thought of as a moral act. Plato warned that the written word could degrade the soul, because books are passive and can’t argue back. Historically, there have been moral panics around the addictiveness of novels that don’t look so dissimilar from contemporary concerns about TV and streaming. Both cases, however, speak to the enduring power of the written word, and to the relationship between literacy and the character of a specific society in time. This is true for us as well.

Our present emergency is decidedly language-based. Social media. LLMs. These are language-based enterprises. What lends books their modern moral valence is that literature stands in opposition to the Goliath of our age. As low-effort distractions monopolize our attention, literature challenges us in the right way. Where social media makes us incurious, reactionary, and cynical, literature requires nuance, patience, and critical thinking.

This is why I’m not a pessimist. I think this is an incredibly exciting time to be a reader or a writer. We who work with language are being asked to contemplate, and to take seriously, the power of language. We can make genuine contributions. Despite its attendant perils, technology has undeniably opened many doors for writers to discover each other. With the advent of generative AI, you can today be valorized simply for writing your own words. As a lazy megalomaniac, this all comes as spectacular news. Luck of the draw!

But as with any age, we have problems to address. Ours are nothing to sneeze at. I would call the culture we live in “techno-consumerist.” Increasingly, tech platforms mediate our desires, values, and habits. There is a small, ultra-wealthy class of tech CEOs, and then there are the rest of us, whose morals are downstream of theirs; negotiated on their platforms, defined by our relationship to their products. A person’s attitude on AI, for example, tells me a great deal about their values in general.

“Performative reading,” whatever your thoughts, is another example of an occasion for online outrage. Online outrage: We resent, suspect, and fight each other. What’s particularly pernicious about social media is that, in a very literal sense, our outrage enriches the tech CEOs. Our moral crusades that take place daily on their platforms line their pockets. What we have is a pseudo-morality; viscerally felt, but illusory.

These CEOs, meanwhile, abide by a completely different set of morals than we do. There’s a reason they don’t let their own children engage with the products that make them rich. Nor do they suffer from the same short-sightedness their products inspire in us. While we are glued to the present, wealth affords them something precious indeed—a vision for the future. As consumers of their products, we enact, with our very bodies, their soteriological narrative of technology.

The world’s first trillionaire is candid in his ambition to install chips into our brains. It was altogether sensible, and in keeping with that aim, for him to purchase Twitter, a product that, per memes he’s posted, he sees as similar to a brain-chip. Correctly so, in my opinion. The concept of “The Woke Mind Virus,” however pejorative, identifies the contagion power of language, as mediated through tech, to produce patterns of thought.

The anti-intellectualism that social media tends to inspire in its users, its corrosive impact on the quality of our discourse, takes on a more sinister character in this light. We are losing the ability to mount a substantial counterargument. In the words of the mystic Simone Weil, who I will quote again later, “the oppressor’s strongest support comes from the impotent revolt of the oppressed.”

The wealthy have always kept culture on a tight leash. The elite have always valued cultural mediums for that reason. Nor is it anything new for cultural output to take on the shape of the popular medium. Dickens and the weekly serial come to mind. But what feels new is that the daily churn that takes place on tech platforms is, for many, indistinguishable from culture itself. Production, consumption, critique, all happening simultaneously, referencing each other, creating each other.

Well before Elon Musk purchased it, Twitter consumed writers, academics, journalists, artists, and creatives of all stripes and trapped them in its particular logics. They were encouraged to build an audience, and to tailor their output to the medium of the tech platform where they borrowed real estate. This placed them firmly in a techno-consumerist, highly surveilled arena where baser instincts prevailed. This has been deleterious to culture.

From Plato’s warning about the written word to today’s AI-induced psychosis, it’s clear we enter a vulnerable state when we engage with language. We become porous. We induct, often without being aware of it, the character of the language we steep ourselves in. Language. The manipulation of signs. Magic. These things aren’t so distinguishable. One could look at it this way. A decent number of the best and brightest among us who should be pushing culture forward, who have the capacity to engage seriously with literature and original thought, are under spells, unable to produce thoughts that aren’t first mediated by tech.

This lends culture an oppressive, unpleasant aspect. There’s a feeling that we’re choiceless in the matter. An illusion of freedom rises to meet this. “Children in play can bear with laughter physical pains that would overwhelm them if inflicted as punishment,” wrote Weil. This is obviously true. Irony. Detachment. Humor that becomes ever darker and more self-referential. Seeking catharsis and imitations of justice in moral crusades. These seem to me to be mere coping mechanisms for addiction, and for crude obedience.

There is resentment for anyone who thinks themselves above obedience.

To this end, it’s foolish, I believe, to think we can ameliorate the ills of our specific culture by making literature a trend. Trendy literature would certainly fatten some pockets and produce bad literature and fold easily into the general techno-consumerist project. Nor can we shame, mock, or bully people into Ulysses. I tried this on myself once.

What can be done? I’m not yet delusional enough to believe I have an answer. But I do think we have the same technology available to us that the tech CEOs do. We are, as I said, already moving toward the world they want to see. In a world in motion, this is the purpose of ethics. Show us True North. We will face that way, and we will move. We should stop using the compass we were given and find another one.

In the past, religious obligation drove literacy rates. The relationship between how a society is organized and that society’s literacy is inextricable. Literacy is only one measure, but an important one. To increase literacy, we need a community that expects it of us. In a culture defined by the pursuit of individual pleasure, this will be difficult. But a community is nothing more or less than a group of people living toward something. The exciting task before us is to determine our values, and then to live them. In living them, we’re sure to find like-minded people. In finding like-minded people, we find a common language. Common language invents culture.

A world.

Get your jokes off. When I finally find the spell I’m looking for, you won’t want to be on my bad side.

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I’m around the age that features in marriage pacts between teenaged besties. “Okay, if both of us are still single by 35…” I made some of these pacts myself, which says something about being young. I thought 35 was impossible. No one was 35. I didn’t know anything. I’m supposed to want to go back to that brain? My body doesn’t ache nearly enough to trade wisdom for youth! I imagine this will change.

“Still.” A nauseating word. Mosquitoes lay their eggs in it. Still single. Still going on bad first dates. Still figuring it out. Still finding my voice. Still learning how to write. Still working on that novel. Other people, meanwhile, move past me in one swift, ebullient motion. Getting married. Giving book talks. Writing things that people “like.” Whatever. I’m sure it’s secretly bad.

Some days I wake up and the first thing I see is my 35 years, the most years I’ve ever had, loafing on me like fat, lazy cats. They stop licking themselves to stare at me. “So, is today the day you finally get around to it, or…?” Sometimes I get embarrassed. Like I let a situation get out of control. Sometimes I feel cooked. Like it’s over for me. This goes away. I distract myself.

There are people older and younger than me. I’m grateful to anyone older than me. Especially the failures. Thank you. On the internet, I see my anxieties, reflected back. People ask aloud if it’s too late for them. Everyone younger than me asking this question is a crying baby on a plane. Everyone older asking it is pitiable. There’s no winning with me. This famous author didn’t publish their first novel until they were in their forties! Yay. A poultice, repeatedly applied: I have time. I have time. I have time.

Do I? Time feels like something I have and don’t.

Shortly after my first book came out in 2021, I started seeing a man who didn’t like me. I was roughly the age my parents were when they had me. 31. This guy had bought a house on the outskirts of Austin. Home ownership was one of his three personality traits. I spent a lot of time in his house. I’d put my head in his oven and announce an intent to Sylvia Plath myself. He didn’t know who that was. He did know his oven wasn’t gas-powered. He’d say so, and we’d laugh like it was a new joke. For well over a year, I didn’t write anything.

He got mad at me for having fans. We’d been going along fine, had discussed a future, a future that excited me for how banal and attainable it was; us, and a kitchen island. Then I took him to one of my book events in Houston, where he saw a long line of people waiting for me to sign their copy of my bright blue debut. He started putting me down. I thought this was a tolerable situation because he played rugby and I thought he was very attractive and not very clever. As someone who felt ugly, I had no natural defenses against a hot person wanting to kiss me, and I thought anyway I knew what he was up to. I could handle it.

The problem with playing chess with a dog is you can only lose. You’re playing a game. The dog is not. One-and-a-half years went down the drain. One-and-a-half years I could have spent writing, reading classics, becoming an eccentric bodybuilder, doing anything other than what I had done. The money I could have saved on airfare alone! Some spectacular outfits were in that sum. Lost. The ghost-life running parallel to the one I chose haunted my daily activities. I could have been different.

Months sailed by. I received a lengthy email from a guy who told me that Mr. Texas had been seeing both of us at the same time. I wouldn’t recognize him if I saw his face, he said, but he’d seen me. He’d once passed himself off as Mr. T’s “Uber driver” while dropping him off to a brunch date with my family.

I was 33 with no romantic entanglements to speak of, uninspired to write, and the victim of some kind of true-crime-esque scheme drawn up by a guy who’d once pointed at a Holiday Inn and asked in all earnestness if it was the Alamo.

Cooked! Over!

I recall picturing the emotional trajectory ahead of me in my mind’s eye. It was like the flight map on the little screen on the back of the seat in front of me on a long international voyage. I began partitioning time into chunks. I will probably feel angry for this many months, then sadness, then lunch will be served, which will eat some time. Then I’ll read some books. More anger. Play on my computer. Bathroom break! Numbness. I’ll laugh about it. All told, I should be good to date again within a year or so. A year or so. 34. Do I have that kind of time?

Do I have time? Time to read Proust? Time to catch myself mid-conversation on a first date in a sun-streaked bar and think, Wait, this is going well? Time to get closer to the truth of things, to make a contribution, to write something good, to agree that a courthouse wedding is more our style, to share the baby names I once wrote down, to wake up in a strange country with strange ideas in my head, to make mistakes?

No! And I will explain:

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Inspiration strikes non-consensually. It’s possible to make the case that, by courting it, we offer it pre-consent. Coffee. Reading. Visiting museums. Heady conversations. But inspiration has no obligation to obey us. If it did, if a contract could be drawn up, we’d work with it more often than we do. Inspiration is more bully than business partner. It wants to use us like a pack of crayons.

Inspired art requires submission.

I’m bored on a flight. Peeks at other people’s screens only do so much. I need to pass the time. I think I’ll make the case that the greatest piece of American art ever produced is made of garbage. It’s currently on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

I was in DC recently. From the Uber, I could see the spidery UFC arena peeking up over the White House. Yeesh, I thought. Caligula. My prevailing sentiment was disappointment. Not in my country, but in the way things happen in general. In the cause and effect of “history.” In my part as bourgeois witness, watching the narrative of history convulse into place from the back seat of an Uber.

Even when I lived there, the Neoclassical buildings of DC, their white columns rhythmically chanting HISTORY, HISTORY, HISTORY, made me feel slightly embarrassed for both the building and myself. I thought they were sheepishly asking something from me. It’s silly to be so big and to request anything from such a tiny creature. But that’s what buildings do. A city’s architecture is its argument against oblivion, made to a captive audience.

The Neoclassical style is accompanied by a Didyaknow? As in: Didyaknow the Greek and Roman buildings weren’t actually white? They were a riot of color! The word “riot” often appears here for its subversive flavor. But the buildings in DC clearly borrow from the severe, indifferent authority of ruins. This architecture asserts that Greece and Rome never died. It denies the death of empires. It objects to time.

In 1931, James Hampton started receiving visions from God. While working the night shift as a janitor in a federal building in the capital of the most powerful nation on earth, he was commanded to build a throne, the seat of God’s terrestrial authority, ahead of Christ’s imminent return. Hampton rented a carriage house in 1950 and, over fourteen years, dutifully set himself to this task. He collected material while at work and scavenged broadly elsewhere; foil, plastic, cardboard, jelly jars.

Hampton’s resulting masterpiece, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, has an alien aspect that distinguishes it from typical religious art. Covered in silver and gold foil, the shapes allude to familiar designs (baptismal fonts, altars, tabernacles) without fully conforming to them. I get the impression, looking at it, that it references a truer, protean version of these things, that it gets closer to the essence of them than anything in the Vatican, as if here were the crude materials of worship itself. Matter from another world. The rough shape of ideas. The Third Heaven: God’s realm.

Beneath the foil is old furniture, burnt-out lightbulbs, and general refuse. I imagine Hampton seeing an object in a waste bin, and immediately recognizing its place in the grand design. There are 180 pieces in The Throne of the Third Heaven. Its layout is symmetrical. On one side is the New Testament. On the other, Moses. The grand forms are annotated with an invented, undeciphered script. Hampton, like Hildegard of Bingen, received the language from above. The latter said she didn’t invent a language, but unearthed it. I imagine Hampton would have felt similarly.

Floating above the throne itself are two words, written in English. Hampton was unwilling here to risk illegibility: “FEAR NOT.”

A Black man laboring in the heart of empire, whose thankless toils contributed to its maintenance—the word “Inside” feels more accurate of Hampton than the “Outside” frequently applied to him. The term “Outsider Art” makes some people uncomfortable. This is because, I think, it calls consent into question.

Classical art involves mastery. Control. Education. Execution. We’re assured of the artist’s agency. What makes people slightly nauseous about Outsider Art is that the works are often products of pure compulsion. Madness. Obsession. Delusion. Outsider artists are defined by their lack of classical training. They are self-taught. They rely on intuition and an urgent feeling of necessity that’s indistinguishable from a manic episode. This makes us voyeurs. Perverts.

Yet inspired art incorporates many of the same elements that distress us about Outsider Art. The enduring fascination with Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings; the prospect of a naughty peek into madness. The forensic fascination with Van Gogh’s later works; a window into the asylum. The gospel of Frida Kahlo’s pain that’s become the necessary lens for her body of work. Illness compels us. The narrative of genius is often accompanied by details of affliction. The unspoken argument beneath is that affliction, pain, and madness work through these artists to achieve their superhuman results. It’s the Christ story, in a way. Mere matter, anointed with suffering, made divine.

The relationship between suffering and genius predates Catholicism. Plato’s Phaedrus argues that there’s a dispossession, a drunkenness in art. In it, Socrates argues that theia mania, divine madness, the sublime unsettling, is the essence of genius. To work strictly within sober conventions is to preclude genius. Plato, whose utopia would have exiled poets, writes that the poet who approaches poetry relying on technē (competence, skill) alone will find themselves eclipsed by those willing to surrender their sanity to the Muse.

Unwellness gives Outsider Art its authority, as well as its air of blasphemy. Affliction, and therefore death, infiltrate and overpower intent. Today, we like to imagine the human heritage of art as life-affirming, preferring to believe that art transcends mere necessity. Artistic agency is crucial to that end. We come to the art museum hoping for temporary amnesia of our mereness; an escape from the banal fact of ourselves as small beings, a freezing of history as its vicissitudes crash against the stone walls outside. We’re, in other words, afraid.

Inspiration has always been a frightening prospect to me. The word literally means to be breathed into, to be filled with a foreign breath. The breath of what? God. The Muse. Something else entirely, lurking in the abysses of the unconscious. Regardless of the What, inspiration instills an intolerable sense of distance between the glorious form in our heads and its absence in the material world. Toil is the only remedy.

Hampton’s work was kept a secret. This is another common hallmark of Outsider Art. What marks them as “outsiders” is the refusal to cooperate with the pride and greed of “the art world.” Hampton didn’t live to see how his project would be received. I wonder if he would have cared either way. His purpose was pure. This isn’t to say it was innocent. Pure purpose is madness. Purity of any kind is intolerant to us. Either we besmirch it with our meddling, or it dissolves us.

Human beings have been toiling in the hulking shadow of empire since the dawn of empire itself. We all participate in the general economy of energy as it moves across the surface of the earth. Wealth, as Georges Bataille argues, is a surplus of that energy. Surplus guarantees waste. Art is, strictly speaking, wasteful. It shares this with trash. Hampton wasn’t wealthy as we would define wealth, but his Millennium Throne is a byproduct of wealth, only possible in an empire with surplus. His work, then, is a product of Empire.

Wasn’t Christ a product of Empire? I prefer the interpretation of Jesus that translates tekton not as carpenter, but as builder. I like the idea that Jesus got his hands dirty with Empire, that his sweat was mixed into the wet concrete of Empire, that Empire bore the tender fruit of its own destruction on one of its many neglected boughs, that the messiah who would set Rome on fire with his message had his fingerprints somewhere on an aqueduct, or a road, or a federal building, along with those of countless other laborers.

Seatbelts, please. We will be landing shortly.

Hampton’s materials were the detritus of a colossal entity that would have manifested to him, as it does to me, as a system of pressures and aesthetics; its true nature, something of a mystery, but felt. Empire is not unlike God in this way. Those who live in Empire, those who live in History, live in non-consent. We’re subject to material circumstances. Inspiration, divine breath, presents the opportunity to answer to a different authority, one not of this earth. Sacred submission.

My belief is that Hampton achieved his goal in The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. I believe Christ sits on it. Insofar as I accept the notion of Christ, this is the one I prefer: the Redeemer. The Savior. The son of a God that rescued a broken and discarded object from the bottom of a waste bin and gave it a divine purpose, who chose as his messenger not a king, but a worker.

In Hampton’s materials, I come very close to seeing the shape of Empire, the way an entire ecosystem is implied in an owl pellet. In its ambition, I come very close to seeing God. The shape of inspiration; the otherwise invisible breath. Mereness and matter. Madness and the miracle. They conference here. They reach a univocal decision. They have good news to share.

FEAR NOT.

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Forgive my use of “stuff.” The word “stuff” called to me, and I answered. I don’t consider these books to be reducible to such a frivolous word. But the way their contents sit in my brain is undeniably stuff-like.

While reading a book and being shepherded word-to-word by what is usually a master of the craft, sentences are sharp and voice is distinct. A good writer will hold you in their vision and keep you there. A good writer makes you forget about other good writers while reading them. It’s like listening to a song and trying to think of another song. Impossible. There’s only the imposing Now, as conducted by Me! It’s really great and I enjoy this aspect of reading.

However, once that great book is closed and another great book begins, and then another, and then another, the mind turns those crisp, individual pages to a soggy pulp. What survives of that original and specific experience is the juice, squeezed by a closed fist like water from a balled-up rag. I lovingly call this great wad of lit-pulp in my brain “stuff.”

What I write to you now isn’t about whether the specific works below are “good” or “bad” or even “enjoyable” but about… the stuff-juice. I read all of these over the past several months, with the exception of Donald Barthelme’s work, which felt necessary to include. I’d be honored if you took these as recommendations, or simply enjoyed my commentary.

The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar

A touchstone of Sufi and Persian literature. Birds are amazing. They’re on page one of the Bible, and thus, all Abrahamic traditions introduce birds immediately. Say what you will about the rest, but this move feels correct. Even in scientism birds are recognized as our noble forerunners; living dinosaurs, direct descendants of the previous stewards of the planet. I like the idea of my serious reading journey also beginning with birds, even though that would be a myth. I elect to believe it.

The Conference of the Birds is an allegorical tale in which the birds of the world come together to elect a leader. There are chapter titles like “The Birds of the World Gather” followed by “The Birds Confer and Make Excuses.” Pigeons, peacocks, eagles, and the rest all have unique virtues and specific character flaws. Just like in real life!

There are certain books you visit because they’re wellsprings, because other writers have visited them over the centuries, and you wonder what could be in the water that’s so special. Reading this felt like handling an artifact at times, but you can tell Attar’s poetry was the lovely birdbath Rumi himself drank from with cupped hands.

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I used to read a few books a year. Now I read about one a week. If you’d have seen my habits only a year ago, you’d understand how unlikely this is. It’s a little embarrassing. I look back and feel as though I spent several years of my life without showering. How was I getting by at all? Why didn’t anyone say something?

I don’t need to go on about the benefits of reading, but here’s a brief paean: it has dramatically improved my quality of life. I’m less anxious. My thoughts feel cleaner. Thinking itself is more pleasurable. Pain is less mysterious. My brain is just better. Books are a privileged medium. We’re grammatical beings. We talk to ourselves in sentences.

Having experienced these and other benefits, I consider myself an evangelist. I want you to join me. I can’t guarantee my method, if it can even be called a method, will work for you, only that it worked for my addled mind, and mine was such a severe case that I can’t help but believe my map, however crude, might hold something for you.

It comes down to a shift in how I think about attention. The atrophied muscle. The diminished faculty. Growing weaker by the day, besieged on all sides by distraction. The relevant science isn’t something I’m qualified to parse. But while attention is near the heart of the situation, a subtle distinction makes a world of difference.

There are many kinds of attention. Here are two: the muscular attention you remember from high school, and pure attention, where the self dissolves and time passes differently. When it comes to reading, we’d appreciate it if the former would kindly beget the latter. Think back to when reading was easiest, most enjoyable. You’re thinking of pure attention, of being in the deep thrall of words. Here, information is at its most accessible. The coconut splits open and discloses the sweetness.

But the hard, hairy shell is too daunting for many people. You’ve probably heard this, or said it yourself: “I’d love to read more, but I can’t.” I can’t focus. I can’t sit still. My mind wanders. “I can’t crack it.” People who want to read more are aware of the tender goodness inside literature, but the barrier is too stubborn. They’ve become too weak to pierce the skin. Or so they think.

If you’re hoping for an easy trick to bypass this obstacle entirely, I’m sorry to disappoint. There is, or at least there was for me, a mandatory effort on this front. But as with breaking into anything, it’s useful to find the weak points. It was while probing that I found my way in. The sweet spot wasn’t attention, really, but something closely related to it.

It’s difficult to pursue anything you don’t have a genuine appetite for. Absent appetite, some other incentive (a salary, necessity) has to compensate. The benefits of literature are abstract enough that reading is almost exclusively a leisure activity. “Make reading fun” sounds too simple, because it is an oversimplification. Some of the most worthwhile books are not, strictly speaking, fun, and those are exactly the books we have in mind when we imagine a more serious reading life. But fun is a wonderful starting point because fun and play lend themselves to curiosity. Curiosity is an attention multiplier.

Curiosity is a child. It’s greedy and unpredictable and has two modes. It’s either in frantic activity, or it’s dead asleep. When it wants something, when it truly wants something, it’s nearly impossible to keep its hands away. A child curious about the taste of dirt will find their way to dirt. The whole of the child’s spirit will narrow toward dirt. The child will slip through any gap in the pen. The strictest parents know there’s always a gap. “No” means nothing.

When I consider the attention crisis as a curiosity crisis, some things become clearer. For argument’s sake, embrace some hypothetical good news: our faculty of attention isn’t shrinking after all. We’re as capable of sustained attention as any of our forerunners, including the French ones in voluminous powdered wigs who attended the grand salons and kept vast personal libraries. The problem, in that case, would be misapplication.

Pure attention isn’t rare. I see faces in pure attention all the time. Glassy eyes. Knitted brows. Slackened jaws. Immersed. Enthralled. This state is pleasurable because it removes us from the world. There’s no suffering in pure attention. Some call it prayer. I’m inclined to as well. Not because I’m religious, but because prayer goes somewhere. It’s addressed to something. It faces a direction. Prayer faces upward. In pure attention, we are malleable. We absorb and we melt into and we pass through, like mercury. It matters a great deal what we take in while in this vulnerable state. It matters what direction we’re facing.

It’s no coincidence the internet is holding our attention with ever more colorful, infantilizing distractions. Take those AI-generated videos of anthropomorphic fruit. Sugary. Bright. The strawberry cheats on the banana with the pineapple. And then what? The strawberry gets pregnant and gives birth to a pineapple. The banana is present. And then what? The only thing that distinguishes this from entertainment for babies is its lewdness and lack of a perfunctory moral lesson. If prayer makes the Catholic more like a saint, then pure attention, spent like this, makes us more like crass, immoral babies. Attention here is only the price. The thing that’s spent. The child is the one that stole the credit card.

Curiosity stays childlike, always; childlike, even as everything else matures and grays and turns cynical. Curiosity is easy to distract and, because it’s indiscriminate, easy to exploit. It pursues zealously, tuckers out quickly. Its desires are pure; good and evil don’t figure in. It’s up to the parent to guide the child here. My return to reading was a collaboration between play and discipline, child and parent. Curiosity supplies the energy. Curiosity is attention’s white-hot spearpoint. I am its guide. I take aim.

I was already working on this essay when I came across these words from Simone Weil, from one of her letters:

A funny thing about reading is that often, when you read daily, the thing you need to read most will emerge. A strange providence.

What struck me was the submission of Weil’s intellect to appetite. Anyone familiar with Weil knows it’s a significant event for her to cooperate with hunger. Obedience is the right word. It’s not true, or at least it shouldn’t be, that the parent dominates the child. The parent protects and guides the child. The child, the sheer force of the child’s youthful energy, steers the parent.

You’ve experienced curiosity at full bore. You’ve lost hours to true crime on YouTube, surfaced from a show at three in the morning, tracked a fight between strangers on the internet down to the last granular detail. There’s something juvenile about this, isn’t there? Helplessness in the face of an urge. It’s like eating ice cream with your hands. Eat. Eat. Eat. This is pure attention, and we spend a great deal of time in it. It’s dissociative and pleasurable. It can be abused.

The parent’s power is discipline and discernment. Nothing, I’m sorry to say, will make vegetables taste like ice cream. But you can live in such a way that the tongue’s relationship to sugar changes. People trying to get back into reading sometimes reach for the densest, most impressive novel, then bow out believing they’re too stupid to access it. Intelligence isn’t the culprit, but palate.

Where to start? By living the life you live, you already have books and authors in your periphery, names that recur. Answer them. There’s almost always a why there. For me it was David Foster Wallace’s nonfiction essays. Literature on today’s internet favors the nonfiction essay, and that’s what I knew; reading him was the Rolls Royce of what I was already consuming. He made me feel smart. As Patricia Lockwood wrote in her very funny takedown:

I was curious that something I felt so personally was, in fact, a nameable and even banal effect of reading him. It spoke to an almost supernatural element of literature. Ignorance is only what we don’t know. I love mysteries. What was it about this man’s writing that worked on me? What was the quality in it that made it feel so impressive? I went digging.

I learned about his influences. DFW led me to Donald Barthelme. Barthelme led me to Pynchon. Pynchon led me to wanting to read more in general. While talking to a friend about this, he recommended Clarice Lispector. Lispector led me to the mystics. Weil, Rumi, Eckhart. The mystics led me to philosophy. Then came Dostoevsky, who bridged philosophy and the novel. I began to read all sorts of novels. Old and new. Classics and deep cuts. I became grabby. It was like how I used to be in elementary school, when I would pick up a book, any book, because it was a book, and read it front to back. Childhood.

I’m led by my curiosity. I buy new books constantly. I shelve them in different slots to keep every shelf alive. I read without expecting this to be the book that changes my life or becomes my favorite. I read out of strict obedience to curiosity, the desire to know what these words in this sequence might hold. I had to make it fun at first. This was messy. I sipped from this book, then that one. It wasn’t formal or rigorous. I read whenever I felt like it.

If a book or an author kindled my curiosity even slightly, I acquiesced. I would buy a copy on Thriftbooks, open it right when it arrived, and not so much read the book as play with it. I was a hummingbird zipping flower to flower. I had to cooperate with the zigzag, the frantic little heartbeat. It felt manic and diffuse. Now, like a hiker pausing to look down behind him, it looks like a very obvious path. I want to stress how crucial it was for me to work with appetite. A little human curiosity can move mountains.

Eventually literature itself began to open up, to impose itself. This was an overwhelming spiritual experience. Individual authors dissipated, replaced by a vast, living heritage. It seemed to me that, across traditions and cultures and time, writers had all been borrowing from this singular source, and everything that had ever intimidated me about reading, the particular genius of singular talents, the thickness of leatherbound tomes, the rigorous demands of dense prose, all evaporated and went away.

Some writers would judge me for arriving so late to figures I’ve met only recently. That’s okay. I’m only grateful, eternally grateful, to have arrived at all. Who cares about judgment while holding such a gift? I get emotional about it. I’m spoiled to love reading and to have so much to read. The world is sweeter than it was.

Today, words are sprouting through cracks in my daily life in unexpected places. I journal constantly. I write letters to friends. The fact that there’s a pen in my pocket right now makes me happy. My writing, back when I read little, was bumbling in the dark hoping I’d touch something valuable by accident; a writer who doesn’t read now strikes me as absurd. How does a bee make honey without visiting the flowers?

My internet usage is lower, but I’m by no means an ascetic. It’s not that I don’t see what’s online. It’s that it feels farther away now, even as I’m looking right at it. It’s taken on a different quality. A truer one, I think. I’ve developed what I think of as ephemeraphobia: a natural aversion to cheap, fleeting thoughts. They make me slightly nauseous.

I was never sure what was important, and what wasn’t. I experienced reality as a series of disconnected images. Each one was loud, urgent, and temporary. The feed refreshed, and there was an entirely new constellation. My thoughts resembled the medium I engaged with. To be too attached to the right now is to miss the bigger picture. The powerlessness that chronic social media use inspires comes from the medium’s pact with the absolute present. New. New. New. Show it to me. I recall scrolling to the very top of the feed and desperately trying to pull the absolute present toward me with my thumb, needing to know: And then what?

But the present is a riptide. You’re only human; the spirit of the age will ragdoll you. You will suffer. Become tired. The absolute present exhausts your curiosity first, then the rest of you. No wonder you can’t open a book. Your curiosity is out like a light before noon.

I framed it as good news that our problem might not be attention, but exploited curiosity. Part of me agrees. Another part finds it the more macabre picture. Attention is only a resource. A precious one, but a resource. Curiosity is your very spirit. Its corruption for profit might be the worse sin. Reading, the nurturing of curiosity, is the opposite of that abuse.

I’ll be transparent. Even here, with books scattered across the table, pure attention only comes sometimes. I still need muscular attention. Reading takes effort; there’s no way around it. But pure attention does visit me. More and more, these days. I keep a clean house for it. I attract it with special occasions. Every morning, before anything else, I read. Every night, I close everything down, turn on a lamp, and I read. I have rituals. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don’t.

But a minute in pure attention, while facing the right way, is worth more than years facing the wrong one.

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I listened to myself on a podcast today. The episode was recorded over a year ago. Culture, politics, the usual. I don’t typically listen to my podcast appearances. I avoid myself when possible. But there comes a time when it stops making sense to ignore certain things, when you dare to lock eyes with yourself and ask, “What do you want?” I sat, listened, and found what I was afraid to find. Mmhmm. Haha. Yes! Hehe. Gooey pleasantness. An eagerness to fill silences. Soft-bellied diffidence. Hehe. I wanted to leap into the episode and ask this giggling idiot what exactly was so funny.

It’s not uncommon to hate hearing your own voice. I don’t think any of us are meant to see or hear ourselves this much. This was something other than that: a formal diagnosis.

For most of my life, I’ve been a people-pleaser. I eschew conflict. I struggle to be difficult. Gratitude gathers like mucus in my throat, and I have to clear it. Thank you. Thank you so much! I appreciate it. Thank you. Wet coughs. I don’t know anyone more vocally grateful than me. Like a person who coughs all the time, I’m sick. People-pleasing is an illness. At root, it’s an infected relationship to gratitude. To grace. Gratia. An abscess on its walls.

Grace is indispensable. Infected grace is like an infected lung. It should be taken seriously, as a matter of life and death. Chronic people-pleasers don’t need to be convinced of this. They know the condition makes the ordinaries of life painful. Speaking. Seeing. Being seen. Grace is the good faith to move naturally through the world. Corrupted grace, bad faith, touches on every aspect of being. It strains every step and breath; produces sounds of discomfort.

Hehe.

You see why my little podcast giggle alarmed me, why it sounded to me like a gay character in a melodrama who coughs into his sleeve and is marked for a slow, agonizing death. People-pleasing is a kind of death. An inability to demand. A denial of the possibility to do harm. A refusal of the will. What’s a human without these things? A corpse. Or a new category of life form altogether, one that rejects the guiding valence of life itself, which is to live: to ask, to push, to resist if need be. Its opposite is Not-Life. Super-Natural. A saint, in a twisted way. The way an ingrown hair is a hair.

But, no. This view elides that people-pleasers, like anyone, are self-motivated. It’s only that their goal is counterintuitive. They want to be invisible. More accurately, they want to remain unseen. What you have to understand is that the people-pleaser has a fragile image of themselves. This self-image is their petty tyrant. They confuse this image for themselves because it’s on the inside, where we intuit the true self to be. But it’s not. It’s the abscess. Sensitive to the touch. Swollen. Growing larger by the day. Unsightly.

Human eyes are dangerous. They pierce. The abscess fears the scalpel. It’s impolite to see another person’s ugliness. It’s unmooring when your own ugliness is seen. The people-pleaser’s worst nightmare is to have their ugly, uncharitable view of themselves confirmed. That’s why silences, pauses, lulls in conversation are intolerable to them. Attention gathers in those clearings. Given enough time, enough quiet, attention might land on me. I scare it off with noise. Haha. Yes. Right. Mmm!

Grace, good faith, trusts that we can see and be seen without incurring permanent damage. Bad faith tells us that in every conflict, no matter how small, is the potential to be seen. The potential for Ragnarök. This is the philosophy a bubble would develop in a pointy world.

People-pleasers are generally thought of as weak. Cowardly. But consider the feats people-pleasers are capable of to remain occluded. Maybe you recognize such feats in your life, or have suffered on the baffling other side of them. There are times when a minor confrontation would make life easier for every party involved, and still the people-pleaser refuses, electing instead to make things many times more difficult. Most of all, they make things more difficult for themselves.

Caught between opposing wills, the people-pleaser knows he has to mollify them both. Mollification is the dire priority. To disappoint either side would be to allow the birth of an ugly image in another person’s mind. This image, like their own self-image, would be true and hideous. The infection spreads. Quarantine is the only answer. All sorts of complications and unpleasantness can happen under this logic. The benefit of conflict could be obvious and overwhelming, and even so, the people-pleaser would reject it. When you consider how thoroughly one must abdicate their best interests in pursuit of such a small theoretical gain, it beggars a sort of admiration.

All people have a reserve of aggression. All people have the capacity for cruelty. This is what makes the people-pleaser disingenuous, and not a saint. He can’t truly be harmless, so he denies nature. He ignores it. Avoids it. Intentionally mistakes not looking at it for it not being there. But the capacity for cruelty demands expression. The people-pleaser, thoroughly convinced of his badness, of his unique harmfulness, tries to abstain. To withhold. In withholding, he chooses guilt. Guilt is cruelty turned inward. If he calls this kindness, he’s lying to himself. This isn’t altruism, but retreat. In withholding himself, he obscures himself. Commits himself to a fog. Safe.

Can I confess some things to you? I build elaborate mazes with trick walls. Behind them are false treasures. I’ve impressed myself with my own strategies. In pseudo-vulnerability I’ve disclosed minor things and played them as major things so that I could scamper away, like a gecko surrendering its tail to preserve its head. Anything to trouble the march of conflict to my center, toward my beleaguered tenderness. I smother with honey anything that makes it too far. Even here, thank God, I have metaphor, analogy, language. I love writing. Writing’s tricks. I’m not here.

There are people who take the opposite tack. They pride themselves on being difficult, on being arrogant, on terrorizing others. They’re as weak and as small as you’d expect. They suffer the same fragile self-image. The abscess. Too much self. Self, withheld and gathered and swollen. Misery finds both kinds of person. They live with infected grace. Who can enjoy life while clinging so dearly to an abusive lump?

“People-pleasing” has nothing to do with pleasure at all. It makes the question of pleasure (friction) impossible. What I want isn’t to succeed in being seen as a kind, polite person, but to induce a failure to be seen. I obscure myself with gratitude like a fig leaf because I consider myself indecent. Sickly. Infected. My shame protects us both from my misanthropy, my cruelty, my ugly. You should thank me.

This arrangement only intensifies misanthropy. The people-pleaser thinks if he shows his belly, performs the trick, some bargain will be upheld. I preempt my agency. I play dead. The predator is obliged to politely look elsewhere. The people-pleaser will be permitted, with gratitude, to keep his self-image unmolested. It’s bad enough when this doesn’t work, when the people-pleaser feels stiffed, and he wonders why he bothered to diminish himself only to be found out anyway. It’s worse when this method succeeds. He enters the relationship between a master and his dog.

No human can tolerate being another human’s plaything. Even the masochist who salivates at the prospect is really working toward personal gratification. So the people-pleaser is prone to resentment, to bitterness, to angst. The people-pleaser can become the thing he fears being exposed as: nasty, small, spiteful. He might lash out. Attack. Become violent. The desperate last resort of the oppressed. He’s either unaware of, or frustrated by, the fact that he’s his own oppressor.

The question of where this behavior comes from is owed attention. Many answers. Wounds in childhood; open doors for bacteria. A strategy learned in the face of danger. People-pleasing only needs to work once as a deterrent from harm for the mind to settle into its logic. There are cultural influences. Congenital factors. Gender. Sex. So on. My money’s on a mix of these things meeting a surplus of awareness. Awareness complicates the animal motion of living. My people-pleasing, it seems to me, bears a relationship to my obsessiveness, my fixations, my overthinking; anxiety.

There’s a popular prejudice toward determining the cause. I want to deemphasize the romantic search for the source. It becomes narrative, and narrative becomes yet another alibi for the people-pleaser, who anyway feels most at home, most comfortable, in the interior. The people-pleaser would be all too happy to hear that spending even more time in self-contemplation might constitute progress of some kind. He suffers already from too much narrative; the yellow pus to be drained.

My answer is violence. A person who can’t violate his conditions, who politely refuses to disturb the universe, is inert. Impotent. Usable. So he’ll be used, either by others, or by the lesion. Himself. His false self. I say vandalize the self-image. Take the blade to the abscess. Empty it. Look into the raw, popped hollow. You might be unsurprised to discover: You are not there.

Hehe.

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From Judge Khan: Brammer’s short story, Regionally-Specific Award-Winning Short Story, throbs with a quiet power and secretes a cultural authenticity we are reluctant to question. He casts a much needed light on a region of our country no one thinks about, the diaspora of which, we were shocked to discover, could read and write. It is our great pleasure to award it the Brammer Prize for Excellence in Landlocked Literature.

Her name was Mallory Dowdy, and she had the kind of ass that made the menfolk go wowie. The menfolk around These Parts are hostile and crude and they spit a lot, which adds some texture I’m sure. The name of our town is These Parts. It’s probably in Oklahoma or maybe Kansas. Here in These Parts every rock remembers and every tree whispers stories in the sighing dialect of leaves, spoken overhead on breezy afternoons. Between the rocks remembering and the trees whispering, gossip is more or less impossible to keep occluded. It spreads quickly, like some fast-spreading thing. That’s how news of Mallory’s affair reached my ears. The rocks told the trees, and once the trees have a tale it’s game over for your secrets ‘round here. In These Parts.

Now a description of Pap is necessary, for it’s with Pap that Mallory’s clandestine activities took place, per the trees’ account. Pap is one of those men who keeps to himself. He wears Coke-bottle glasses and he’s got a bear-like frame, so he looks a bit like a bear wearing Coke-bottle glasses. When he agrees with something he says “um-hum” and when he disagrees he says “nossir,” and you’d be hard-pressed to get much more out of the man than them two statements. Pap’s world is divided clean into things he agrees with and things he don’t. Maybe if you punched him real hard he’d make some other sound, but it’s mostly the two available responses provided above. One afternoon he saw Mallory’s fabled ass in her acid-washed jeans sauntering down the potholed street where he lives, her tattoo of Woodstock from Charlie Brown poking up over the waistband. Pap took one look and said “um-hum,” and the trouble officially began.

Mallory was a bit young for Pap and Pap was a bit old for Mallory, but that wasn’t the heart of the matter. Plenty of folk ‘round here are in age-gap relationships, which I don’t condone of course, but you’ve got to understand that in our impoverished rustic tableau all sorts of things transpire that would offend your sensibilities. We ain’t got no proper education nor electricity nor plumbing. All we got is God and guns and our sentient rocks and our loose-lipped flora. This is to say nothing of race relations, which are guessable. Now anywho, back to the heart of the matter, which was that Mallory wasn’t no woman at all but rather she was us. All of us, in composite. The town itself. These Parts.

She was the hissing swell of cicadas in July. She was Mama May’s sweet iced tea in a perspiring glass at sunset. She was the sound of the dogs barking at the moon, the wiry clang of a screen door, the pitter-patter of rain on the roof. She was the white-feathered underbelly of a hawk circling overhead, as well as the way the boys point at it, starved for scraps of beauty as they are, and she was the way they’d ruin anything so fine if they ever got their grubby mitts on it. She was every young girl’s dream of leaving as well as the fact that those dreams hardly ever pan out, which is to say she was a one-way bus ticket home. She was the din of a lawnmower on Sunday and the attendant green perfume, the hot kiss of the sun on the bottom of your feet on summer pavement. She was the potholes and the boarded-up arcade and the meth and the steepled church and the notion that things used to be better but aren’t so good anymore. She was the fact that good girls last but only for a moment around here. This is all to say she wasn’t no woman at all.

Naturally, a town hall meeting was called to address the fact that Pap was going steady with a literary device, which is strictly prohibited in These Parts and falls under an antiquated sodomy law we apply on a case-by-case basis. The malefolk, myself included, donned our best ten-gallon hats and bolo ties and boots for the occasion. It’s rare that we fellas get to dress to the nines, and we weren’t about to let such a golden opportunity slip through our craggy fingers. A menu was hastily assembled for the interrogation, which included a watercress salad, braised tofu, themed cocktails such as the Mallory Mule and Pap’s Pimm’s, and venison steaks.

The night was tense. The night was a drum skin pulled taut. Every move you made released an awful sound. The sound of a drum, probably. Like bum-BUM. After we were all assembled we commenced interrogating Pap. We trained our slingshots on him which were loaded with our intelligent rocks, and you best believe a point-blank shot to the dome from one of them suckers would prove fatal. “It brings me no pleasure to do so, Pap, but we got to get to the bottom of this. Answer our questions honest ‘n true, and nobody need be permanently altered tonight by a contemplative stone.”

“Um-hum.”

“Now is it true that Mallory ain’t no woman, but is instead you and me and everybody else here assembled in this kangaroo court, as well as a host of other intangible elements?”

“Um-hum.”

“And is it also true you knew this before you decided to get romantically involved with an abstraction who is by the way many years your junior?”

“Um-hum.”

“Are you aware of the problematic power dynamic that might make such a relationship toxic?”

“Yessir.”

“And have you scruples on that front?”

“Nossir.”

“Has feminism gone too far?”

“Nossir.”

“Would you agree a man’s strength is measured by the amount of truth he can tolerate?”

“Um-hum.”

“Do you believe in the validity of a vanguard, specifically a professional group of revolutionaries who will lead the rest of the people in creating and enforcing change?”

“Nossir.”

“Good lord, he’s a Maoist!” said Tate Ulrich, who was a dedicated Marxist-Leninist. “I’ll kill you, you sick son of a bitch!”

“Enough!”

Mama May’s voice cut clean through the evening like Excalibur through vegetable shortening. She had heavy bags under her tired eyes. Bags so heavy that if you managed to rend them from her and unpack them you’d find all the stuff you’d ever lost in there. Just a really exhausted lady. A tired broad. She was wide in the way that made men afraid. Every ear in the assembly turned toward this wise, wide woman.

“Mallory Dowdy is my daughter,” she said. “Same as she’s your daughter and same as she’s your mother and your girlfriend as well, uncomfortable as the notion might be. She is your brother and uncle, as well as all manner of other figures, such as the nameless youth working the gas station in the wee hours of the morning and the patron dining alone at night, glanced briefly from your passing vehicle going well above the speed limit. She is the thumb covering the mouth of the garden hose to angle a fan of water toward the daisies. She is the distance between where a thing is kept and where a thing is used. She is all the forgotten places, the girls who quietly dissolve in this land’s gut and the boys torn like jerky by its teeth. We are her, and she is us.”

“So you’re sayin’ not only is Pap guilty of sodomy, but incest as well?”

“That is the grim case,” she nodded. “May Allah absolve him.”

And so in our provincial ignorance we killed Pap. Tate Ulrich (Mallory) and Jeffery Buckles (Mallory) and myself (Mallory) and the other menfolk (Male-ory) loosed our rocks (Mallory) upon him while Mama May (Mallory) swung her great sword (Mallory) and it goes without saying the torrent was unsurvivable. We (Mallory) buried him under the town hall. We boot-scooted the night away. We invited Mallory herself to dance with us, her ass more beautiful than ever. Needless to say, we fucked ourselves.

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For decades I have been receiving encrypted messages from Anne Hathaway instructing me on how to live my life. It’s not a perfect system but it’s brought wonderful things. I’ve met amazing people I now consider lifelong friends. I’ve become quite beautiful. I’ve worked at Condé Nast, where I wore nice shoes. I’ve traveled the world, delivered keynote speeches, and appeared on the occasional list of influential individuals. All thanks to Anne Hathaway, and her guidance, transmitted through occultic symbols and references scattered throughout her body of work, and noticed by me.

Mother Mary, directed by David Lowery for A24, is a film about obsession, the creative process, and fandom. It will be quite incomprehensible to those who are not me. If you personally got something out of it, that’s fine, but I can’t say that I care, or that it matters. It is first and foremost a message to me from Anne Hathaway, a Marian apparition instructing me on what I must do next, instructions I have received loud and clear. If, however, you watched or plan to watch it, or are simply curious about what its events mean for our collective future, a future that, if I succeed, will bear my mark, then I encourage you to keep reading.

SPOILERS BELOW…

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Some people want to be right and some people want to tell the truth. Rightness is social. It emerges from a matrix of relationships to people and to institutions. Truth’s only relationship is to itself. Truth is dangerous precisely because it’s uninterested in rightness; indifferent to law and order. Truth will destroy the person who holds it, will have them thrown in jail or burnt at the stake or exiled. It will gnaw through its vessel in pursuit of its aim, which is, simply, to reveal itself.

The most interesting line in M.I.7 is “God thanked it.” These words appear as a refrain throughout M.I.A.’s seventh album. Lyrically, there’s not a high bar to clear. “God does have a cape / that’s not a cap” offers thin competition. “God thanked it” is delivered with the confidence of quoted scripture. Really, it’s Biblical vandalism. The Christian God doesn’t thank anything. The mystics, the ones worth reading, all dealt in this sort of transgression. To depict God in an original way is to commit blasphemy, to violate dogma, to risk something.

Disappointingly, “God thanked it” is the closest M.I.7 gets to danger. The rest of the album, for all its hellfire and war-zone angels and visions of apocalypse, plays by the book. A heavily earmarked book with highlighted passages on every page, but the book all the same, the one you’ve probably read before, or been beaten with, and M.I.A. wields it not unlike a youth pastor or a high-school zealot in the cafeteria; self-righteously. Not every artist’s “Jesus album” needs to be dangerous, original, or risky. M.I.A.’s does.

The project opens with “TRUMPET 1,” heralding the Rapture. The short skit asks if we’ve ever low-key noticed the importance of the number seven in the gospels: “Seven days of creation in sevenfold Spirit of God / Seven candlesticks, seven golden bowls / Seven lamps through seven pipes in seven churches in Asia.” What purpose does this numerology serve? Stay tuned for more on that. The following track, “PRAYER 777,” is an anthemic battle cry urging us to don the armor of God and brace for war.

It’s immediately clear this isn’t God the Ineffable Absolute, the One that saints, sufis, and philosophers have tried in vain to capture in language across the centuries. It’s God the bearded old man sitting on a throne and meting out divine retribution. The God of American megachurches. The God of highway billboards. REPENT!

That doesn’t mean the album can’t bang. While it’s true that something about this God tends to inspire less than compelling artistic works—Hillsong instead of Gregorian chants, jokey graphic tees instead of brocaded robes, conference centers instead of ornate mosques—perhaps no one is better suited to offer an original take on him than M.I.A., who’s always had a fruitful relationship with the aesthetic detritus of our dull present. Early in her career, she embodied the chaotic visuals of a burgeoning social media, made liberal use of s/ashes and @s, uploaded her music directly to YouTube for free.

“The artist behind ViCKi LEEKX makes a Christian album,” in other words, would have drawn me in. And it did. Which is why I’m so disappointed. There’s not much here. The thirty minutes of silence padding out the end is richer than the songs. There are, quelle surprise, SEVEN TRUMPETS, all of which interrupt the flow of the album. The songs between them are musically slight, repetitive, and only call upon God whenever M.I.A. needs an ultimate authority to say “Yeah, what she said!” in a booming voice. Atheists, haters, and doubters get shellacked. It’s depressing to see a woman who once proudly declared herself a problem for the system throw her hands up and say, “I found a good system, and it’s inarguably true, and it agrees with me.”

“This must be the Rapture,” she says in “TRUMPET 1.” If it is, then M.I.A. doesn’t situate herself in the smoke and wreckage in an interesting way. Here, she can’t resist her favorite role: the unheeded prophet saying “I told you so.” The problem is, that’s who she was before she became a Christian, and the music was better back then.

It’s easy to forget, with all her recent antics, that M.I.A. was once ahead of her time. She was woke before woke. Before she announced a clothing line including actual tin foil hats on Infowars, before she appeared on Candace Owens’ podcast, M.I.A. was rapping about immigration, visas, and the exploitation of the Global South. “It’s not me and you / it’s the fucking banks.” When I was a teenager, she was my first pop idol. I was angsty, and she was my “tear it all down” icon. “Galang,” “Bucky Done Gun,” “World Town,” “Sunshowers,” “Bamboo Banga,” all in constant rotation. She was FE@RLE$$! She’ll flip your baby off at the Super Bowl! Srdgaf! Was it all kind of Banksyish in retrospect? Maybe, but it sounded great. Still does.

As Kanye, her compatriot in Canceledonia, famously said in 2010, “M.I.A’s from the future. Our present is her past.” Even beyond her eclectic sound, her “just asking questions” posture prefigured what is now a Very Common Kind of Guy on the internet. She’d always been into conspiracy theories. It’s all corrupt, man. Fuck the system. The government is tracking you. Watching your every move. A Black president doesn’t change shit. Can you really say she was wrong? Not about all of it.

But culture caught up to her, then outstripped her. Her tin foil hats once promised protection from 5G. Not enough. Today, she’s all about 10G. Unable to compete with the conspiracism of the average suburban mom on Facebook, M.I.A., who’s always found it intolerable to be where “normal people” are, is clearly struggling to ratchet up the stakes in a world where normal people are all but extinct, their cool melted by the very internet that was once her muse. I don’t know about you, but my brain today looks like the cover of ΛΛ Λ Y Λ (2010).

M.I.7 feels less like an evolution and more like an elevation of her conspiratorial register into cosmic territory. She sounds less like a prophet and more like a campus preacher holding a cardboard sign, yelling at people. This is something to do with the generative potential of conspiracy. A conspiracy theory is unearthed. Discovered. Shed light upon. It lives and dies by what it reveals. What does M.I.7 reveal? That you should have listened to M.I.A. And what is the Rapture, if not the ultimate “I told you so?” In this, her take on God is all but indistinguishable from the average megachurch-goer with a Hobby Lobby cross hung on the kitchen wall. It’s not interesting, which is the worst possible thing an M.I.A. album can be.

A visionary with a truth is dangerous. Most of all, to themselves. The medieval Christian mystic Marguerite Porete was burnt at the stake for refusing to stop distributing her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls, which argued that a direct connection with God was possible. The sufi mystic Mansour al-Hallaj was executed for, among other things, declaring “I am the Truth!” Some interpreted this as a personal claim of divinity, but, for al-Hallaj, it was the opposite: an annihilation of self to achieve oneness with God. In both cases, these visionaries were killed by fellow believers.

Everyone is a conspiracy theorist these days. Partly because we don’t have the truth. A conspiracy theory is an aesthetic substitute for truth where truth is absent. It’s truth-shaped. Its design belies human thinking: It’s all connected. It’s labyrinthine and complicated and esoteric. Runes scattered across the world. Scrolls in jars buried in caves in the desert. A math formula big enough to fill six chalkboards. Lines drawn between all the sevens in the Bible. It’s like that’s what we want truth to be. Funnily enough, though, the most dangerous truths are simple.

God thanked it. Imagine a thankful God. I like the thought. What does it mean to thank? What does it mean for an omnipotent God, a God that created Everything and is Everything, to express gratitude? Imagine a God thanking his creation for music, God giving the gift of music, and being regifted it, and being thankful for it. It feels wrong and beautiful. Truth doesn’t always need a chart. Sometimes, all it needs is a bad album, and an intuition.

M.I.7 did give me that much. So, thanks, I guess.

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Hell charges a cover, and we pay it.

I was standing in line for the gay club. It was my birthday. Thirty minutes passed in the February cold until my friends and I caught sight of the front door around the corner. A woman asked if she could cut in behind us. In an attempt at rapport, she noted my silver hairs and said we both probably remembered when this club was a restaurant. “I changed my mind,” I said. “No cutting.”

My friends are handsome. I’m shy, but horny. I make a lot of friends by accident of appetite. Some of them were meeting for the first time that night. I knew it would be my fate to watch them discover each other. Contrapasso. My punishment for horndoggery. We got in. I was handed a drink. The light was blue and purple. Sweaty backs and hard elbows bumped and rocked against me. Vodka soda spilled up and on my shirt. I was a kid at the school dance. Everyone knows how to live. I don’t.

I thought about hell. Hell as the gay club. Hell as a mechanical cuckoo clock: me in the center, both feet screwed to the floor, beautiful men pirouetting around me in pre-ordained circles, exchanging glances, kissing. I turned and saw two of my friends making out. I saw me seeing them; my mind’s eye drawing up my own inadequate face, catching the sight in the dim dark of two men I once hoped would kiss me, kissing each other. “Just dance!”

Unbeautiful, unchosen, I trudged back toward my apartment. My friend caught up to me. He asked what was wrong. “Nothing,” I said behind crossed arms. I was embarrassed for being upset and for resenting him. I felt like punishing us. He followed me home where I sank into my couch. My unhappiness, like most, is selfish. Illogical. Bald as a newborn. This isn’t the anguish of geopolitics or poverty, but the petty wound that explains a person.

“Tell me,” he said. “Please.”

I collect hells like ships in bottles. Italian hells. Pagan hells. Hot hells. Cold hells. There are highly organized hells with kings and administrative buildings where paperwork is filed. There are hells that are thick, wild forests, home to fabulous beasts and obsidian rain. Some hells are utterly alien. Some would be indistinguishable from the life you know.

The most recent addition to my collection is Emanuel Swedenborg’s hell. Despite his contributions to multiple fields of science, the Swedish polymath is an obscure figure today, likely because, in his mid-fifties, he began experiencing mystic visions, which tend to preclude people from the veneration of the scientific community. I don’t consider this an unreasonable policy.

Swedenborg claimed unlimited access to the spiritual realm. He articulated heaven and hell’s schematics in Heaven & Hell, a tome with chapter titles like “After Death, We Enjoy Every Sense, Memory, Thought, and Affection We Had in the World: We Leave Nothing Behind Except Our Earthly Body.”

I hate to essentialize the Swedes, but this is the hell IKEA would design. Everything fits together, and you assemble it yourself. Heaven is mappable. There are three of them. They flow downward from God. Heaven has geography. Terrain. Cities. Communities. So does hell. In the afterlife, as in this life, people seek out people similar to themselves, distilling each other down to a common essence. That essence is either heaven, or it’s hell.

Swedenborg’s hell, his critics said, was too nice. His God never gets angry, never condemns, never so much as frowns at us. God doesn’t send us to hell. Hell is where you go because it’s where you’re comfortable, where you want to be. You take an Uber there with your friends. Heaven is open and available at any time. All that’s required is that you choose to go there. Being there, however, would be intolerable to those who align themselves with misery.

Is it really so implausible that we’re in hell? A human is after all what hurts him. Each person has a bruise at their center. The soul might be a bruise, might be the spot where God’s fingers pushed us into being. No mark left by his fingertips is the same. The shape. The color. The feeling. Yours. Is you. It would explain why hurting feels nostalgic. To make me was an injury. And so I hurt, and to live is to hurt, and the hurting is hell.

Sometimes, bored, I press softly against my bruise in gentle harm to remind myself of something fundamental. I guard and keep its sallow borders, maintain it as preciously as if it were my entire self. Who am I without the hurting? I wouldn’t know. I can’t know. There’s a design there. In hurting, I see a purple map of me. The sight of myself frightens and fascinates me. My habits, the places I choose to go, the things I choose to do. Daily rituals. Serving what? An echo of God’s inaugural push, the ache that says me, me, me, I am.

Suffering is the floor. Why, when the will goes slack, do we list toward unhappiness? Because that’s what’s down there. It pulls invisibly at us. Gravity. Gravity killed Christ; the weight of his flesh on the cross. Not even God gets in free to this club. Here, at this very moment, animals are sinking their teeth into each other, ensnaring each other in intricate biological traps, pumping venom into veins, laying eggs in carcasses. This is the crucible that slashed a mouth across my face and delved a hole through my center. Suffering is my mother and my father and my boyfriend and myself. I was brought into the world screaming, and causing screams.

I look for affection where I know it isn’t. When I’m invited closer, I start to push. I welcome the bad faith of strangers and distrust the praise of friends. I crave the approval of people I don’t like and the love of people who don’t love me. I’m sitting now at a long table in a coffee shop. To my left, an Australian man is having a loud Zoom call, demanding Meta Glasses from his boss. To my right, a man in a black hoodie is rolling a cigarette on top of a copy of Sartre’s On Being and Nothingness. On my phone, which of course is in my hand, a faceless Grindr profile named “INTO CHUBBY” says, “hi.” It’s not giving heaven.

“What’s wrong?” my friend said. “Tell me.”

Why does it hurt so much to tell the truth? It doesn’t. What hurts is the option. I’m afraid of the truth. Heaven charges a cover too, and this is it. When approaching the truth, the tongue-muscle moves to a reflexive cleverness. The will moves sideways and counter to its own interests. Choosing is hard. Cowardice and unhappiness have a strong relationship, I suspect.

My throat gummed up. My muscles tightened. Just Say It Just Dance Just Be Happy. To say happiness is a choice is terribly unfashionable. I uncrossed my arms and opened my mouth. In opening, I peered into a design, into the nuts and bolts of myself, of all selves. I was a tenderness tabernacled in flesh and bone, a bruise peering through a flimsy lattice. I chose. I unscrewed myself. My feet left the floor.

In Swedenborg’s heaven, communication is perfect. Angels transfer images, memories, and meaning between one another as freely as original thought moves through one’s own mind. There’s no gap between what’s felt and what’s received. Heaven and hell are constantly tugging at us. We can experience them. Make them. Live them. Ape the angels. Every thought I have is a heaven or a hell, because for a moment that’s where I live.

Humans have to speak to each other across a great distance. With smoke signals in the desert. What I said to my friend would make little sense written out; a crude pile of splintery words doused in sputtering coughs and lit at last with the striking of rock against rock, truth against truth. The fire said little more than “It hurts.” But my friend received it. He made a little pyre of his own. It said, “I know.” Something passed between us, and in the weak warm light I saw for a moment. We were the same. Goodnight. I love you. I love you too.

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Feargal and I walked into an Irish-Mexican cantina. There was sawdust on the floor. Feargal, who is from Dublin, told me this was an Irish thing. I had no choice but to believe him. Seeking ethnic credibility of my own, I searched for some visibly Mexican element of the place to demystify. I was on the verge of fabricating a backstory about the indoor tree when Feargal, menu in hand, declared, “They have poitín!”

I asked what that was. He said it was Irish moonshine. “It makes you blind,” he smiled, as if fondly recalling a recipe from his childhood. I’d assumed poitín was a Mexican drink I’d never heard of, given the accent over the “i.” A great American question: “To which culture belongs this ‘I?’” Feargal and I agreed to honor our ancestors by getting drunk.

When I saw a clip on Instagram about San Patricios, a recently opened Mexican-Irish fusion restaurant in Jersey City, it was obvious to me that A) I would eat there and B) I would bring Feargal, the most Irish person I know (apologies to my many O’Cquaintances, but, yes, there is a ranking). The video advertised corned beef tacos, Irish cheddar queso dip, and chicken tinga pot pie. The comments were predictable. “Everyone involved needs to be arrested,” read a popular response with 400+ likes.

I saw myself in this controversial restaurant. According to my Ancestry.com test results, which I got before learning that doing so granted the government permission to clone me, my two main ancestral regions are “Indigenous Americas” (Mexico) and “Celtic & Gaelic” (Ireland). I intermittently receive emails reporting that my results have been updated, but this hasn’t once revealed anything interesting. I’d like to wake up one day, check my email, and discover that I’m Czech. Czech-Mex.

There are few things more American than a corporation assigning you an ethnicity over email. But I am an American. It feels good to say that. Not because I’m proud to say it, but because saying it feels like a confession. My peers are all dissociating from the national narrative, sourcing identity in some form of otherness, or pretending New York City is a country. I don’t blame them.

San Patricios occupies the bones of a former Irish pub. This gives it the vibe of a Boston establishment in a delirious fugue state. It was packed the night Feargal and I went. I, embracing my Americanness (an identity that, when embraced, is indistinct from mania), had decided I was a restaurant critic and emailed the place announcing my intent to swing by. This ended up paying off. We were given the works: a mezcal tasting, cocktails, and several courses.

Our Scotch egg arrived; gooey yellow eyes staring up from a bed of frijoles negros with chives sprinkled on top. I don’t know what the quintessential Scotch egg experience is supposed to be, but this one was delicious: jammy yolk hugged by juicy chorizo, nestled in a crunchy crumb coat with a little kick. This is what I don’t get about the feigned offense over San Patricios’ menu. What cuisine wouldn’t benefit from getting a little Mexican with it? Mexicans are already making the food anyway, which people would know if they’d ever worked in a kitchen.

Feargal ordered the Guinness I’d assigned him for homework. I selected a fruity cocktail called The Countess that had Guinness in it. We were seated beside an alcove with a Frida Kahlo candle, she being the patron saint of Mexican restaurants in the U.S. that serve $20 cocktails, and a coffee table book about The Troubles. The Countess entered my all-time top three. The Guinness lent it a silky little something.

“Look at that!” Feargal said, tilting his glass so the foam teetered over the lip without spilling. “That’s good Guinness right there.” Between the mezcal and the poitín margaritas and The Countesses, we got blindingly drunk. We became polemicists.

Americans, not exactly famous for our couth, tend to become wooden on the subject of ethnic identity. It’s a sacred concept here, which is why fusion cuisine is so often maligned as a chimeric abomination. A person will drive their Japanese car to drop their kids off at Chuck E. Cheese to gorge on recently invented syrups while staring into dubiously sourced phones watching AI-generated reels on Facebook of baby lawyers arguing with each other in baby court without thinking much about it, but bring up ethnicity and food and that same person will take on a priestly air and speak, with great authority and barely concealed enthusiasm, on what constitutes genuine articles of their grandmother’s country’s cuisine, music, or traditions. Authenticity matters a great deal to us, in niche instances.

How did ethnic identity come to be such a sacred cow? Guilt can’t be discounted. Claiming descent from a different country is a move toward absolution from our country’s sins: Native American removal, racialized chattel slavery, segregation, forced regime changes, unjustified invasions, and Christian rap, to name but a few of the evil handkerchiefs flowing from the sleeve.

But white Americans, while famous for this kind of behavior, aren’t the only ones. Mexican-Americans are doubtlessly familiar with a distinctly Chicano form of visual art that commonly features, among other favored subjects, an Aztec warrior bearing a damsel in his arms (she is usually unconscious for some reason) with a pyramid looming in the backdrop. This is, I’m sorry to say, altogether goofy, but nonetheless beautifully expresses a desperate romanticism that seems endemic to the United States: a desire for roots in some place other than this, our graceless national project.

Many of us in this multi-ethnic empire partake of this custom: cosmetic association with the aesthetics of dead empires in symbolic repudiation of the one we presently inhabit. Dead empires have all the best stuff. A living empire, meanwhile, is less appealing, because it looks like the United States.

I voiced some of these thoughts to Feargal.

The problem as I see it, Feargal, is that American culture is a style of consumerism. No one wants to identify with it because it is itself a mode of wanting. Customerly impatience. Customerly ingratitude. So people dissociate. So people buy DNA kits hoping to be assigned a real identity. You’ve got this influencer class policing authenticity all day, spouting off about what cultures can be mixed, who can cook what, while talking the same way and thinking the same way, because they’re on the same tech platforms. Because they’re consumers. “Phone” is more of a coherent identity for these people than anything else. Their language is Phone and their culture is Phone. And what I’m trying to say, Feargal, is that building a brand on dissatisfaction with everything is itself American, a profit-motivated pageant divorced from the sweaty, sputtering guts of the thing.

Our chicken tinga pot pie arrived. Pollo tinga, corn, peas, and potatoes under a crisp pastry shell. The team behind San Patricios is the same one behind the Dead Rabbit, one of my favorite bars in New York. I doubted the Dead Rabbit would risk its reputation on a gimmick. It was unsurprising that the menu was an unequivocal triumph in the admittedly niche genre of Irish-Mexican fusion.

The real history behind the name is fascinating. It’s not every day they name a restaurant after U.S. Army deserters, after actual traitors. The San Patricios were Irish immigrants serving in the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American War. They looked around, remembered they were Catholic, said “fuck this,” and swam across the Rio Grande to fight for the other side.

I certainly lack the courage to do that sort of thing. But, in their honor, I’m happy to eat at a restaurant. I recommend the churros for dessert.

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ON BEING CLAVICULAR

My recent essay in Playboy about Clavicular is popping off. If you don’t know who that is, the essay explains. He’s the shiny new toy internet anthropologists are playing with at the moment. Chronically online writers love an e-phenomenon that makes them feel old. As for me, it was the “assignment from Playboy” of it all that drew me in. I thought it would be chic to have an essay published in Playboy, and I was right.

When you write about someone like Clavicular, you open yourself up to a specific flavor of feedback, the substance of which is: UGHHHH… As in: Why are you writing about this person? Why are you making me think about him? Just… why? Then there’s the standard: Everything I’ve learned about [Whomever], I learned against my will.

This isn’t so much a criticism as it is an expression of a preference. Fair enough! But there’s less distance IMO between the average social media user and Clavicular than said user is likely to be comfortable with. The “against my will” meme tells us something on that front. There is an element of coercion in social media, isn’t there? It really does impose itself on our psyche. It inserts its proboscis into our frontal lobe and pipes in ideas and faces that were not invited.

So we fight back. We tell ourselves our choices on social media matter. We customize the experience in such a way that it’s “healthy,” or at least less damaging. I wouldn’t call myself a total doomer on the subject, but I do think we very regularly kid ourselves re: how much control we can exert over our social media experience. Mute. Block. Go “private.” What I’m talking about goes beyond such measures.

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