The monstrosity, the beauty

 I could kiss you, lines of escape in my mouth. – Jeff Buckley, Vancouver

Introduction 

This is an article about romance and fascination. Or, more succinctly, how monstrosity and beauty arise, in ever repeating death and rebirth, from the living symbiosis of romance and fascination that beats like an immortal heart in the ego-wounded, creative void of narcissism.

Nowadays, if I gaze at monstrosity and beauty long enough, I can hardly tell one from the other. It’s this blurring of these apparent opposites that triggered this article, which I think is highly apposite in today’s rapidly unravelling world.

Listening again recently to two songs from Jeff Buckley’s posthumously released album (Sketches for) My Sweetheart, the Drunk coalesced for me the themes I was failing to develop in what has proved a difficult article to coax into coherence. The songs are Morning Theft and Vancouver. The former is allegedly about Elizabeth Frazer of the Cocteau Twins, a band that covered one of Jeff’s father’s more famous songs (Song to the Siren), a cover which caught Jeff’s ear. He was so taken with it, it led to his seeking out and meeting Frazer. She has stated publicly that she and Buckley had an affair.

The latter song is apparently about a primary-school teacher Buckley met at a concert in Vancouver. He was deeply moved by their encounter (just listen to the song), as, despite what he obviously felt to be the powerful, fated nature of their encounter, he could not reasonably ask her to come away with him for the rest of the tour, breaking off her career for a nomadic musician she had just met. Later, he apparently lamented that he could not form lasting relationships while a touring troubadour.

The romantic anguish in both songs is searingly earnest, yet each love song laments the passing of a different relationship. How serious was either if both were so agonisingly intense? What time ought to pass between romances for them to be meaningful? (Are such questions even remotely helpful? The answer is part of the meat of this article.)

The earnest but endless romancing I’m drawing into focus happens to be symbolised by the Knight of Cups tarot card. It represents an honest, charming, somehow eternally young, die-hard romantic questing endlessly to discover True Love, while penning beautiful poems or songs about his experience. Jeff Buckley was the Knight of Cups personified. He met a tragic, untimely end.

Some excerpts from Morning Theft:

Morning theft
Unpretended left
Ungrateful

[…]

True self is what brought you here to me
A place where we can accept this love
Friendship battered down by useless history
Unexamined failure

[…]

What am I still to you
Some thief who stole from you?
Or some fool drama queen
Whose chances were few?

An excerpt from Vancouver:

I am your failed husband contender
I’m your loan shark of bliss.

Now, smile, the rain of London it still insists
That we beg for our purity
As if we are pure in the rain of our contentment
As if I can think of this no more.

What catches my imagination perhaps more than any other facet of Buckley’s work is his compulsion to be ruthlessly honest. Romantic yearning and lament is, in many of his songs and all of his performances, inseparable from searing honesty; indeed, they are almost the same thing. What is most important about the Knight of Cups in my view is that he is genuinely earnest. He means every word with all his heart, passionately performs every deed. And yet he must move on to the next romance, the next quest, forever. It seems to be his bitter fate. He is thus earnest and insatiably restless. Does the latter vitiate the former? (Are such questions even remotely meaningful? How long does something have to last for it to be real? Why are we so unsettled by illusion, by deception, by the fleeting?)

For Buckley, I feel, earnestness demands ruthless self-honesty. Perhaps this intermingling of emotional forces can be cast as beauty and monstrosity entangled with each other forever, where neither makes lasting sense without the other. How can the beauty discernible in romance be richly meaningful until the full emotional truth of what both parties are is shared? Idle fantasy has no wholesome value; it is but one half of a process. Romance must die in the thorny embrace of the naked truth, but only to be born again precisely there, from full confessions of our hidden shame, of that which we find monstrous within. In another song, Fall in Light, Buckley sings: “Where you fall, I adore you.”

Where does fascination fit into this? Revealingly, the previous card in the tarot sequence is the Page of Cups, which symbolises self love. One interpretation equates the Page of Cups with Narcissus, i.e., self fascination. It’s not hard to discern a direct line between the two cards, from fascination with Self to fascination with (selected) Other(s). Both characters are romantic. In my view, this means both are governed by fascination. And, as I see it, death is never far from either romance or fascination, whether physical, spiritual, or emotional death (think Romeo and Juliet). There is something inescapably compulsive about both: in the Knight’s insatiable questing, in the Page’s insatiable gaze into the pool of his own eyes gazing back at him forever. The Truth both seek is necessarily beyond the horizon, whether inner or outer, forever out of reach. Fascination holds it there. And where the compulsion of fascination rules, there death is also.

What I’m attempting to bring into relief is a flowing, unbreakable connection from narcissism to fascination, from fascination to romance, and from romance back to narcissism, albeit this time as an interlocking embrace with Other rather than Self. This eerily nihilistic ouroboros, once fully exhausted, lands us on the shores of unconditional love. Love has little to do with any facet of the initiating cycle, even though romantic love is in my eyes a window onto unconditional love: true love, God as love: Love. An image that perhaps conveys what I mean here is the gaze shared by mother and baby as the baby feeds at its mother’s breast. I sense fascination in that gaze, and for me this fascination has a lot to do with the allure of death, or, expressed more gently, return to the womb, death being that final – though illusory – escape from all responsibility. The very escape with which nihilism is romantically fascinated.

But death is more correction than escape.

As humanity stands at the threshold of its evolution into a more mature version of itself, it is adrift on the intractable issues the constellation sketched out above must produce. If we do not land on the shores of unconditional love, if we are not yet done with this cycle, humanity will find itself locked into a brief but horrible period of global totalitarian rule. Totalitarianism’s predictable implosion will yield another opportunity for humanity to plant its feet firmly on the right path.

Anna Delvey and the reality of illusion

Anna Delvey is a real illusion, an illusion that fascinated Netflix enough to bankroll Inventing Anna, a compelling true and fictional account of her story. I won’t detail it here, except to point out that Ann’a surname is originally Sorokin, a common Russian surname (which interestingly means magpie, that jewell thief among birds).

“Anna Delvey” (devil?) is a character of Anna Sorokin’s invention, designed to be a vessel for carrying her to fame and ‘success’ as defined by modernity’s take on The American Dream: the finest champagne in every fridge of every luxury kitchen in her luxury villa in the Hamptons, a luxury apartment in every major capital city, luxury yachts moored in harbours on the world’s most beautiful coastlines, the very best designer clothes, and of course A List access to all the right places. Fiat luxus!

What more could anyone want. A young girl called Anna Sorokin gazed out into the world through the glossy windows of magazine culture, fit two and two neatly together, and dreamed Anna Delvey into being, made her real. She promptly fell into the eyes of her monstrous and beautiful creation and has yet to escape, as far as I know.

The materials used to power Anna Delvey towards her ambition were deception, brazen chutzpa, and social-media savvy, apparently mostly Instagram. Image is everything. Artful manipulation and command of one’s appearance is the royal road to ‘success’. An idea of success, however, not native to anyone, but instilled in most of us by The Way Things Are. The base qualities we reflexively associate with ‘success’ are not up for discussion. They are the solid, unquestionable facts that, properly understood, free us to be masters of our fates, to soar above the pathetic failures that make up that seething mass to which no one in their right mind wants to belong.

The crass short-sightedness of her ambition is in Anna’s story entirely unmentioned, seems beyond any possible acknowledgement. And this fascinates me. How old is this rags-to-riches tale? As old as civilisation as far as I can tell. Perhaps it defines civilisation’s soul. And yet here we are, regurgitating it ad nauseam. However, this is a minor point.

The more important point is raised by the downstream Anna Delvey, as played by Julia Garner; the professional reenactment of the raw original performance is likely the more persuasive. After all, a team of seasoned experts were assembled to produce it. Screen acting, with cameras focussed on every facial twitch and every emotion the eyes can convey, is now virtually indistinguishable from ‘real’ life in the sense of the emotional authenticity communicated. Screen acting is so achingly intimate. The viewer is connected to a (‘fake’) stranger’s soul through the professional and magical expertise of those involved in the production of modern film. When an actor weeps as her character with the camera in tight focus on her face, is that fake or real crying? What do “fake” and “real” mean here?

We want to be convinced. We don’t want to see the wig, the boom mic, the director, the cameras. We want our disbelief suspended, we want to be consumed by what we see, fascinated by the reflective pool of the screen as it gazes back at us amazed, fascinated by its power to convince, enraptured by how easy it is to enthral us. I think of this symbiosis as the narcissist’s embrace, which is somehow akin to the paralysis observed in a prey animal as a cobra rises to strike. We are invested; the illusion is as real as our commitment to it, and thus deadly. We give ourselves to it wholly and are thus at its mercy. It is a thrilling commitment, a dangerous, delicious flirtation with power. It is emotionally, psychologically reminiscent of our potentially fatal dependence on our mother’s love.

So we have a fusion of womb-like safety with deadly threat: an intoxicating and addictive mix. This is the source of the narcissist’s charm as it feels its way into the eager hunger of the empath’s receptivity. Can you hear the whisper? We two are one. As one, safety is assured. We are bound to each other by the contract of our mutual need. The devil’s chains are made of this. And they lead us to the dead end of nowhere. All sorts of social pairings are marked by this dynamic: “mortgage”, for example, is French for “grip of death”. The social contract between presidents and their people is characterised by the narcissist’s embrace. The media are relentless charmers of their audience’s narcissistic appetites, and so on.

The film industry itself is of course romantic at heart. Even gritty realism is idealised, distilled, and thus romanticised. Humanity seems to vicariously exorcise its pain and pleasure through art, now most often through the art of film, which is several art forms fused to one.  And the films keep on coming. Yes, this repetition is about profit as much as anything else, but the cyclicality of the romance we experience with each passing blockbuster and news item is more than reflective of the Knight of Cups’ endless questing. In our case, most involved are passive consumers where the Knight is a creator of art. We are the multitudinous Pages of Cups as so many embodiments of Narcissus gazing into what we know of ourselves as reflected in the pool of cinema screens, computer screens, TV screens and magazines.

They feed on us as we feed on them. Who is innocent? Who is guilty? Is not each of us responsible for our power?

Somehow, this all seems of a theme to me. And the living theme embodied by this uroboric cycle must reflect society’s quality of being – infantile –, just as it magically guides us forwards into new cultural possibilities.

What are those possibilities?

The death of idealism

Idealistic people, like me, are wont to seek out the beautiful and do battle with the monstrous. It is, perhaps, an unfortunate reflex. It is romantic, and thus narcissistic, and thus nihilistic at root. And I don’t even mean that disparagingly. It’s simply a cycle we learn from.

A few weeks ago, I made the time to watch Dark Waters. The film impressed me deeply. For me it captured how history pushes mercilessly on. The film also conveys how self-destructive groupthink can be, and how much individual effort can accomplish in redressing the ills born of history’s monstrous momentum. Dark Waters is based on a multi-decade legal battle between a relentless lawyer (Rob Bilott) and chemical giant DuPont around the environmentally toxic nature of Teflon’s manufacture.

“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” said Spock in a saccharine Star Trek film of old. When I heard the line decades ago, I agreed. Now, I just don’t know. The many can become monstrous. When they do, they refuse to accept this has happened, do not want to have their true face reflected back at them. Fighting against monstrous groupthink is expensive, seemingly counter-productive for a long time, and of uncertain outcome. But remarkable individuals do selflessly stand up for what is right, and in so doing unintentionally unleash destructive forces they had not reckoned with. Is the charge that powers those forces drawn precisely from the tension between the monstrous and the beautiful, and how we perceive both into antagonistic interbeing?

The monstrosity I saw in Dark Waters is breathtaking. Twice I had to pause the film to cry, to process what I was seeing. For DuPont, the damage done is just doing business. My guess of any corporation’s base mindset is that they are vehicles for doing good in the world, that their size, power, reach, influence, and harnessed expertise are far more valuable than less efficient, less effective alternatives. People’s lives are made measurably better: just look at all those helpful products! Sadly, though, corporations do have to break eggs to make those omelettes. On both sides of this harsh reality, the successful are rewarded for their efforts, the unsuccessful punished. That’s how nature works. Pragmatics and logic require us to accept this. There’s no use fighting the way things are.

But – I protest – the utility of fighting monstrosity lies precisely in not knowing all outcomes, lies in the immeasurable. Doing the right thing, taking the loving course is a good in its own right, a priori. Perhaps this is tautological; good is good, love is love. Perhaps I want to believe this too much. And yet I see value in this particular tautology. It too captures the nature of things, the way things are.

And yet. And yet…

One of the babies born in the area of West Virginia where the film is set, is exposed in the womb to the toxins manufacture of Teflon requires. He is born with only one nostril and a very disfigured eye. His parents named him Bucky. Bucky makes a cameo appearance, as himself, now a grown man. He is happy, healthy, generous, warm hearted: a beautiful human being. While the film’s protagonist, Rob Bilott, had been duking it out with DuPont lawyers in West Virginian courts for most of Bucky’s life, Bucky just went about the business of growing up, and did a fine job of it.

Bucky’s beauty, or rather the beauty Bucky represents, does not vindicate the corporate criminality the film reveals, but is somehow born of it. Does it instruct us on something far more profound, a something that can only escape our control? (Is it monstrous of me to ask that? Aren’t there unforgivable sins?)

I feel we are not meant to robotically follow minutely defined life paths. If we try to build a reality free of tragedy, we will create more tragedy than we avert. Life’s terrible beauty – I now see a very different meaning in that famous oxymoron – can only emerge, as it does, because life – nature, God, All That Is – escapes our control. Life cannot submit to our egoic desires and fears that it be safe, secure, minutely predictable. We cannot ‘civilise’ reality. We are of it, in it, constitute it as one in diversity. And we simply cannot appreciate the immeasurable value of this truth through romantic-narcissistic eyes. However, as we choose love, as we move beyond romance, beyond idealism – beyond all isms –, reality changes before us. We begin to see differently. The filters through which we peered out at reality start to fall away, and we see more.

The bifurcation point that is covid19 and The Great Reset, generated by the demise of multiple isms, is an historic crucible inexorably forcing our attention on to the dysfunction of fearful tyrannical rule and the terrible beauty of more open, more humble, more liberating alternatives of social governance. To realise what the future offers, we must step into our courage and move past our fears. Only this will take us beyond the cycle I’ve tried to describe here. This too is the nature of things. This, too, peers out at us from between the blurred lines that will always fail to divide monstrosity and beauty, and hints at a love we are just beginning to learn.

Pandemic or plandemic?

What is real? What is a pandemic? Exactly how many people have to die, provably of some apparently infectious something, across exactly how large an area, for some authority to objectively declare a pandemic? Is such an event remotely provable in some impartial, ‘scientific’ way? Surely such events are primarily political, matters of power and persuasion.

How ‘real’ is a king? Surely it is collective belief that makes a king a king. (I’m certain kings know this.) If everyone stopped believing person X is a king, person X would no longer be a king. Doesn’t this apply to pandemics? Can, therefore, the tension between those who believe there was a ‘real’ SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and those who believe it was a plandemic and thus ‘fake’ – as I do – be resolved? I don’t think so. Except perhaps at a level above the tension between these two interpretations of reality.

Humans cannot live on romance alone. There is more to us than romance. But how much of what we are fits comfortably with what we think we are? How much can we admit? I have this strong intuition that we are terrified of the fact that illusion (perception) is as real as it gets. We are terrified of our power, our sovereignty. Anna Sorokin fascinates and terrifies us because her brazen deception as Anna Delvey – the very Devil – is exactly as real as anything else. So we bind ourselves to a deal that outsources our own power as institutionalised authority, an authority that commands us to ‘know’ that she was a fraud, a ‘fake’. A legal pronouncement is made within the institution of a court and our nerves are settled. I mean, what if anyone could claim anything about themselves? There’d be chaos!

(That chaos is an impossibility is lost on almost everyone. Equally invisible is that we are each responsible for our fate.)

I am a committed advocate of truth and authenticity, but am steadily losing my grip on what those things are. I suspect my experience is currently shared by most. There is a core religious assertion that Truth is immutable, with God as Truth, as the unchanging foundation of reality. In this assertion, the immutable core somehow sets illusory change into motion to allow us – we children of God, we souls of God’s making – to learn about truth. I find this unpersuasive. For me, if there are absolutes – and I feel strongly that there are – they are paradoxically emergent from dynamic context rather than ‘solidly’, ‘objectively’ immutable. The only ‘things’ that can exist are ever evolving facets of All That Is, which itself evolves (changes) as we evolve. And of course, All That Is has always been evolving. It is impossible for some fundamentally unchanging thing to produce change. So I feel – I don’t like “believe” – that it is our particularly human need for solidity and predictability that gives rise to the sense that that which is solid and unchanging – reliable!! – is the essence of the real. Aren’t sneezes and blinks real? What about passing fancies? Fleeting thoughts? Isn’t everything we experience just as real as, say, the alps? How can there be shades of the real? What use is an asserted hierarchy of existing based on duration? Can such reflexive hunches that reality is kind of like that somehow accurately reflect reality? Not in my reasoning.

The logic that reality ought to be somehow ‘solid’ is probably a projection of the profound utility of predictability that is an emergent consequence of how civilisation demands highly effective planning to work. Any civilisation’s success, composed in part of accumulated power and longevity, must depend very tightly on how well it plans, builds, constructs. The sorts of qualities peoples in civilisations will revere, then, will be closely aligned to these necessary properties of civilisation. Peoples outside civilisation will revere different qualities, I suspect with more emphasis on dynamic change. As civilised peoples, we are profoundly suspicious of constant change, of the illusory, the unreliable. So suspicious, in fact, that we reflexively reject it as unreal. If there were nothing solid to stand on, we would be lost in a terrible and unending swirl of vertigo. Or so we fear.

What awaits us over the horizon of our cultural imagination? I suspect it is something vaguely Anna Delvey, something freer, less fixed, less nailed down. The more we respect free will, the more we mature, the more we step into our power and sovereignty, the greater the diversity of expression we will produce and enjoy. Change is pushing us that way. Look around you at the abject and total failure of hierarchical authority, of centralised power, of ‘elitism’. It’s a mess of desperate, knee-jerk decisions leading the Old Normal over the cliff. What politician or judge or central banker or board member in some mega media corporation actually understands all the nuance that constitutes this historical moment? Which of them is an expert on reality, on wisdom, on patience? How can billions of people be instructed in the majority of their movements and decisions by some partially AI, global authority without carpet bombing cultural diversity? How on earth could a system of such petrified rigidity be wholesome?

History is pushing us towards greatly increased personal sovereignty. Anna Delvey is a pallid and dysfunctional foretaste of the freedoms modernity permits, a foretaste basted in the infantilism of our decadence, and thus wholly devoid of the wisdom required to wield such freedom with grace. Which is not to say her story is devoid of pathos. I see much beauty in it. But humanity has handed itself powers it is culturally too immature to use wisely … for now. The crisis we are passing through is teaching us this. Our job is to notice and learn.

As we grow into what we can be, so our fearful need for outsourced authority to instruct us on the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’, whether of pandemics or fraudsters, will fall away. We will outgrow it, are outgrowing it. The dizzying truth is that we make our own reality, albeit together, in dynamic consensus. Reality is not solipsistic. We are co-creators of the real.

Soon, it will not matter whether there is currently a pandemic; we will be adults who know what to do. Soon, it will not matter that some like to deceive us; we will be adults who can handle ourselves. We will live our responsibility for our own lives, knowing we are powerful and impact our environment profoundly. We will know that as we act outwards, so our actions return to us as fate, as karma, as consequence. We will be patient, not frantic; curious, not addicted; mindful, not fascinated; loving, not needy. This is what history now requires of us. Current structures were not built to accommodate this transition and so must give way, just as a snake must shed its skin to grow.

I have a sneaky feeling we know exactly what to do.

Postscript

Of detachment in the spiritual sense I used to think, nah, that’s just aloof avoidance of the beautiful messiness of life. I see it very differently now. Detachment is full freedom from ego addictions and fears that requires no reflexive suppression of negative emotions, no splendid isolation from the noise and bustle of rat-race living; it is freedom as honest and graceful as the sky, but rich and varied as a rain forest. You earn it just as you earn wisdom, love, true maturity. Detachment is not an easy goal, but its qualities include clear awareness of the intimate interconnections you have with everything around you, knowing how best to help others and whether help is the right response at all, an active intuition unaffected by the worries and stresses of others, keen empathy with no complicating co-dependencies developing in its wake, and so on. Properly detached, we see far more, are less cluttered in our being, are more creative, and care more but with joy rather than worry.

Hard to attain, yes, but ‘real capitalism’ and ‘true socialism’ are flat impossibilities, lite utopias that must crush their acolytes. I find detachment far more attractive and promising as a guiding principle for society that any ism.