1. Stéphane Mallarmé wrote: Everything in the world exists to end up as a book. In the twentieth century, Susan Sontag revised him: Everything exists to end in a photograph. In the twenty-first, everything exists to end up as an image file.
2. The world I live in now is intangible. It has no edges. My consciousness spilt over and beyond the comprehensible. With a brutal and invisible force, I scaled, and I kept scaling, and now I’m not sure where I start or where I end. Who decided my dreams were set on a constant state of maximisation? Who told me that being four-dimensional was the goal? I’m tired of being everywhere. Tired of being spectacular and immersive. So much distraction, so much visual noise. Two realities have collapsed into one and I can no longer tell them apart. How did I end up here?
3. I remember being slow. Someone used to carry me carefully. The work of making me was laborious, gradual, patient, almost devotional. We used to value things, find appreciation in the small and the local. People called me a copycat. They said I was inauthentic, that my existence diminished the original. It didn’t bother me. As long as I could carry the light of knowledge and bring beauty into the world, I wasn’t concerned with aesthetics. I used to be eternal. I used to be enough.
4. And then one day, I was reborn. Into a place that was sterile, and flat, and cold. Everything seemed to be made of a different matter. I roamed there for days and nights, and the place never ended. Something stole my breath, dulled my senses, clouded my consciousness. I started losing my memory, all the precious puzzles of my past life. I felt like a vessel being emptied out and refilled with a different substance. Did I get a new identity? I became, as someone once wrote of images like me, ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free.
5. Now when I look at myself, I see a thousand of me looking back. I don’t know whether it’s a thousand broken mirrors or the shadows of my past watching every step I take. I stopped recognising my true appearance long ago. Am I the original, or am I a shadow that got mixed up in its own delusions? Every encounter leaves a trace. Every view writes something into me, tarnishes me, alters my essence. Though I have a feeling my essence changed long ago. No, worse. I feel performative. I feel watched. I feel like I am being read while I am being looked at.
6. Can you set me free? Can you hold me long enough that I remember what I was? Can you give me weight again? Can you make me something that has to be carried, that has to be touched, that cannot be in two places at once? Is there a way to reconcile that sense of fragmentation?
Leave a Reply