I awaken this morning to a heavy darkness only partially explained by the early hour. I think: I believe perhaps it began for me with Oracle Girl’s predictions—all of which, of course, came true; the harsh edge of an iron blade story softly, slowly whispered to a child with a loving parent’s compassion.
Pay Attention…
But then I remember Piglia’s The Absent City, and I realize my world had simply been a theme park before 2020, constructed for me, for everyone here. We lived in a dream we couldn’t wake up from, and didn’t want to. Those who warned us are too often dead.
We keep trying, trying, still, to go back to sleep.
The ugly reality of a nightclub at closing time: who switched the lights on? Turn them off!
I remember and reread my post on L.A. (originally published on my website, here, in November of 2021) as it disappeared for me, fading into just another one of those gorgeous, palm-tree-silhouetted-Los Angeles-industrial-American sunsets; I couldn’t quite grasp it, but something was happening, something was dying. I could smell the acrid burning air pervading my previous home in, of all places, Burbank. Now I know what it was—the Disney dream going up in flames, blackened ash floating down, down, down, beginning to cover (as it eventually would) everything. At the time, I stared in confusion (how could this be happening?) as a great shaking of the machinery loosened the bolts. I listened to that awful yawning cry of huge beams of metal on metal falling, falling, falling…gravity taking it all down, down, down. Costumed characters fleeing crazily, wearing only their false heads while perfectly groomed floral paths (replanted nightly!) were left to brown, crisp and die in the blazing sunlight, in the fire: chaos.
I could not myself have fully seen what was to come, but Oracle Girl did. Seneff did. So many. I heard them all. But I did not truly understand that Disneyland was dying. That my beloved L.A. was to be truly gone for me. That so many relationships would become brittle. That so many (actual beings!) would be so unceremoniously disappeared.
It’s happened before. Maybe it never stopped happening.
This morning I feel it all too clearly, too sharply. The cold Fall sun not yet having warmed the earth, I find myself in a stark reality that was always there while I was laughing, playing, enjoying the sun, riding the rides. How could I have missed this? The Holocaust was there, the Trail of Tears, The Dirty War…endless and on and on. I saw but didn’t see.
And here we are.
Feverishly, I gather a small stack of books from my shelves…Blue Nights, The Great Gatsby, The Absent City, Simulacra and Simulation, Osho. I could add more, but these will do for now.
Stories of the loss of stories.
The old, panicked part of me starts to make another stack: Jung, The Places that Scare You, Rediscovering Life. Write a new story! Find the meaning, the lesson! Create something truer! But this is a betrayal, and I disassemble and return this second pile. The grief must grip and rip. The tears must flow. I keep trying to start over, skipping this step; it’s painful, sad, and lost—who likes to feel this? And because none of this is all that new, I am also angry. Unconsciously, I seem to be working my way through Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ legacy.
Denial.
Anger.
Bargaining.
Depression.
Acceptance.
I am horrified (and perhaps also a bit relieved—maybe I’m almost out!) to note I appear to be simultaneously experiencing all but the last stage: acceptance. An inkling tells me I must fully experience all of it before I win the prize, acceptance, which seems like no prize at all.
I have to not want out.
How do you say goodbye to something that never was? Baudrillard (my new best friend, apparently) insists the real is no longer accessible, no longer exists for us. I silently rail against this, holding up mosquitos, spiders, handful after handful of dirt, sweet peppers, dog poop. But at the same time, I understand what he means: that the real has been replaced by the simulacra and simulation in the culture of our own current minds. But it cannot be complete, can it? I hold out hope, a four-letter word if there ever was one.
Pleasure (whether perverse or not), was always mediated by a technical apparatus, by a mechanism of real objects but more often of phantasms—it always implies an intermediary manipulation of scenes or gadgets.
—Jean Baudrillard
For the first time I see the awful truth of his assertion: “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
I want to fix this, place my feet on the Earth, bury my fingers in my dog’s fur, listen intently to my daughter. I want to prove him wrong, and maybe, just maybe, I can. I think he was wrong about other things, but it’s just my small opinion. But just thinking and especially writing about it sours, ferments it all into information, entropy, the untrue truth. It occurs to me: the fix is Now and only Now. But as soon as this leaves my neurons, then my fingertips, it becomes the simulation—flash frozen—and immediately falls lifeless.
It cannot be expressed in any way.
There is no fix in words, in thoughts, in writing. The escape is the not-escape; it all boils down to nothing, the sand has already slipped through the fingers. I can think and write only about stories. And about losing them. The truth is not here. Information is, as Baudrillard warns us, entropy. To live (is it possible?) one must exit the dream, or as Alan Watts reveals, steal out in the night when the guards are asleep.
And never, ever return.
The cost of the real is the stories. Is the mind’s entertainment and satisfaction in its own stage play. The conversations, the analysis, the writing, the discussion: The Game.
Can one exit one’s own mind? Don’t discuss amongst yourselves: stillbirth.
The question is always this (and the answer is always, I intuit, a requisitely unthought, unspoken—oops, too late, I’m about to kill it, close your eyes: yes): can you give up everything you thought was real? Can you die to all of it? To live? But, we must ask ourselves, will we? Will I? Who is I? The story still unfolds. Am I (you ain’t me—Jake Green) ready to disappear?
How radical are you prepared to be, Mr. Green?
—Revolver
i'm S0rrY ChRiSTY...
i D0n'T ReALLY UnDerSTAnD...
...i WATCheD ThiS M0Vie Bef0re w0rk T0DAY:
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& JuST H0wLeD LAUGhinG ~&~ LAUGhinG;
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