There is nothing there. And there’s not even that.
As you march through the corridor of your life—its graduation ceremonies and heartbreak—from the infinite promise of adolescence and on into any given number of cardboard cut-out futures and their many alternate endings and bonus tracks—bankruptcies and biopsies—the webbing of your daydreams strung with meetings and the occasional colostomy bag—where are you in this equation? At what point are you? Because you are not the person in this corridor—this corridor that never was.
We believe ourselves to be stuck in the most lost place in the larger library of lost places—when this is an optical illusion of a room. Our hands fly about as a particulate mush and our eyes can only see—and we are forever being funneled through these devices of the self—the skin that contains our thoughts and the tongue with which we speak them—these falsehoods of the body that color the universe we traverse—that was already unraveling when it first appeared upon the scene. We believe ourselves stuck in a room, a room that has some depth to it, as we zip out over the emptiness like Wyle E. Coyote and are only moving forward because we have yet to notice the ground’s given out. The ground that was never there in the first place.
So—what? The face doesn’t fit the parameters of the skull? There is no me in me and all the many versions of you I come across throughout the day also are very much not?
Maybe you’re trying to control hiccups of tears in the elbow of your blouse on Route 5 and announcing, You fucking failed me, as you lurch through the mid-afternoon gridlock. Or maybe you are a cartoon demon and I have known you from when I first experimented with thinking. In both these cases, it’s a pure conjecture of the senses. The point is isn’t it always?
*
I’m home again and sat in my kitchenette, computer unfurled upon the black marble of the countertop, on monastery grounds and dreaming of the destructed future because this is the stuff my dreams are made of—the halftimes of history—when the working classes get to working themselves up in a sweat over their failed leaders and failed states become all the rage and the rage become an all-consuming bloodsport sort of thing and things get to taking themselves apart until all that’s left are parts and the people are nowhere to be found. This is us. This is now. This is what we’re all rooting for.
At least that’s what it looks like from the bleachers—even when nothing can ever be out of balance—as the scales tip around and about themselves in an endless braid of timelines—still—considering the sorts of leaders we’re electing and the sorts of policy decisions they’re making and the sorts of scenarios we’re seeing played out in the various arenas of the world—the human side of the spectrum has begun to tilt and veer into a cavernous uncertainty with only bones at its bottom—and still we are singing like songbirds as we tumble into the breach.
Maybe through some manner of uncertainty qualification we could come to grasp the trajectory of our path into the abyss and maybe a human constitution needs drafting—one that declares sides and leaves nothing to the imagination—a paring back of the eyes to that original sketch of the first eye—back when we wrestled with God and back when the ideals of our forefathers were shiny and new. For example, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” When did those truths cease to be self-evident?
The good has always been an intangible something—an art of uncertainty—a practice of ‘I’m going to trust you on this’ and a willingness to look beyond the immediacy of my self and my community and to extend my home to whoever needs it—and evil is similarly amorphous—the shutting of the door and the eyes, the turning away, the willful forgetting—and when we step away from the clearly defined parameters of some legally exact moral document, like a Declaration of Independence or Bill of Rights—when the essential truth of objective knowledge and reason come into doubt—we open the pandora’s box of the mob—of the swarm—of the radicalized shill and the bot farms of foreign powers. Postmodernism is the seed and Fox News is the result. Baby Baudrillard grows up into authoritarian Trump.
Postmodernism naturally evolves into the Premodern. The end of science and objective reality is the beginning of tribalism and post-truth.
Of course, the manipulation of “the good” in service of practices that are far from it is a method dating back to the Age of Empire and beyond—to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment that made it possible—to the Age of Exploration and the Reformation and religious wars that fueled it—to the Renaissance—Medieval Period—Roman Era—Ancient Greece—and on back to the mythical spirits of the wood.
The question has always been how to define what the good is and for whom it is good. What we are witnessing is a reversal from a universal good to a tribal good, and why are we witnessing it now? Because of an underlying terror that the world as we know it is ending. My advice—befriend your neighborhood Zulu or ingratiate yourself with the Navajo people—because the future is tribal, my friend.
But what does all this mean for the future of literature is what I’m honestly asking myself? Can you speak of experimentalism in art when the apocalypse is just around the corner? How can I possibly be part of the next big thing when the only next big thing is a tsunami of death and destruction? Of course there is no next big thing.
But there are many small and enduring ways individuals can work to maintain their community and other like-minded communities. Think TAZ—or Temporary Autonomous Zone. Create a human constitution behind the sofa. Declare your independence into your desk drawer—or at the bar after work. These are the sort of chores we need to be doing. Whether we are novelists or night managers, we need to be making the most minuscule of revolutions with our coworkers and trivia night drinking buddies—as the bar burns down around us—because we need to be girding ourselves for what’s coming—because the stage of history is about to come apart around us one floorboard at a time—at first—then in clumps of floorboards—then nothing but flying splinters and slivers of wood shredding the already annihilated props of our government—what was once believed to be the impregnable modern world. We need to reach out for each other because it’s the only way we are going save ourselves, and we need to be doing the same thing with our words and images.
*
And—as my home country turns a jungle of yes men and storm troopers working to ingratiate themselves with their yes men overlords, I have chosen to instead run off to a monastery in the mountains on the other side of the world—where it’s safe—and down the rabbit hole of introspection—where both God and the government are become a fifth wheel to any cosmological vehicle—its six realms and three thousand universes—while back in my hometown and its environs, the government’s being gutted, commandeered, jerry-rigged, turned a black magic of itself, and the great military might of America is switching sides, while all the while you watch on with eyes look like they were drawn in after you’d had one too many and your mouth is a scrawl scribbled at high speed. As the AI universe is expanding into ours—and illusions are increasingly being given the veneer of things—and the people are weathering the burden of it all—and we holler about how, This is not fair, or, How can they expect this of us, when—we are the cattle—and you need to leave the ranch. As it careens around the many corners of our five-cornered cube—and infests the wilderness we inhabit when we’re alone in the back corner of the kitchen—and multiplies the dead we’re currently digging up to fill in the corners of the future—because that’s the kind of history we’re writing right now. So—who are you again?
I’ve been watching this Yale course online about the American novel after 1945. The professor, Amy Hungerford, makes a strong case for a particular trend in the novels of this period, that they often revolve around what she calls the Identity Plot, in which a character is working to define themselves both in relation to a majority group they don’t belong to and a minority group that they also find themselves at odds with—using books like Franny and Zooey, The Bluest Eye, and The Human Stain as examples of this. And as I watched Ms. Hungerford make her case, it struck me that this is exactly what the novel should not be in the Apocalyptic Age that we find ourselves in. That trend signifies all that an apocalyptic literature should never be.
The twentieth century with its style over substance, its fetishization of pure meaninglessness and absolute selfishness, its ‘The Individual above all else’ and endless disposable everything, its have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too of both the rejection of the idea of progress while also very much living in the comfort of the paradigm of progress—as in, I will cynically attack the society that makes my particular type of existence possible because my faith in the stability of this society is just that great—has naturally evolved into a pariah state parody of itself—what has been glibly described as late capitalism—and our literature is no better.
Think of the breath, the place where the body meets the mind, the mystical project. Create narrative landscapes that teach you how to see further in. Utilize the methods of the surrealists to come to understand your symbological framework from the back end. Grow metaphorical puzzles of a complexity you will never be able to untangle. Work to to counteract the corrosive effects of technology through a kind of centering of the mind between my own pretty blatantly internal experience and the internal experience of others through the practice of the MS. Manuscripts teach us to see in new and unusual ways. We need to push this exercise to its limits because we need to do a lot of thinking in a very short period of time—i.e. things are coming down around us and we need to figure our path through the tsunami.
But even as our art is turning inward, we need to be marketing the end times to our friends and neighbors. Carve your poems into the oaks lining your community park and spray paint the clapboard front of your local abandoned church. Blubber out some nonsense by the steel frame pool in the backyards of long lost sweethearts now married with kids. Prophesy over whiskey sours upon the carpets of your peers. Croon your cabaret half-truths in the post-apocalyptic speakeasies of Gen Z and their borrowed lofts.
Our progress is killing us. And things do need to break and they are breaking. But none of this wreckage will solve the wreckage that’s coming. There was never going to be a smooth transition to the apocalypse.
At the dark heart of progress is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be human—because—we were never going to be rational animals.
So what is a person? A story unraveling? The hole in the room? A confluence of tendencies that are corralled through this same story even as it unravels with old age and the inherent disappointments? The room becoming aware of itself through this aforementioned hole occupying the table by its far corner? An accident of space? A necessary component in the larger functioning of the universe? How about—a person is something that cares.
What I want for you is that you see that whatever happens, it’s your fault. Because you couldn’t do anything to stop the monsters from occupying their cubbyholes beneath your bed. But now we have to live without our beds so we can do away with the monsters we’ve been growing there as we also look through the fields and declare that whatever is beyond the horizon is ours and that no matter how many eyes we lose in the process, we are going to love whatever it is that comes for us. We can make it through. We can make it home.
This is what I’m writing to tell you.
*
Being lost can become a way of life. It can get so that you’re only comfortable when you have no idea where you are. But sometimes you get so lost—forever slipping round the far side of the world—home and away lose all sense of meaning—and the foothills of the Himalayas turn familiar while the dying strip malls of Upstate New York become an impossible thing—poignant and intricately strung in American accidents and the dead eyes that house them, sure, but also now impenetrable to the mind in its endless discounts and work vests glittering in flare.
As I age out of my lifestyle, the angles of the room are increasingly playing tricks on me. Sometimes my black marble countertop is the most comfortable entertainment center I have ever had and sometimes it’s like the props that fill my room are from someone else’s life. And generally speaking the threads of the skull’s operating theater slip off into impulses and compulsions as the light leaves the sky and the Internet’s talking heads crowd themselves into the curves and swatches of a man’s theoretical soul turned cancerous and closely knit about itself. I become a crowd of one. I become somewhere in between.
But even such a specimen as me can stand up and make some noise on occasion. And I did—I decided it was time to step out of my hermitage and play some songs—for the people of India and beyond—flew to Doha on Christmas Eve and then to San Francisco—and from there to the cabins of Puget Sound and the condos of Chicago—to the hippy houses of Woodstock, NY and the reanimated loft spaces of Boston—I jockeyed about the country on Amtrak. From—a conference with my publisher at a Chick-fil-A in Silicon Valley while his three tiny ones bounced down the slide in the accompanying playroom—to—massacring my own songs on the “Deathcab for Cutie grand piano” at a recording studio turned performance space in Seattle—from—the ongoing party at a cabin overlooking pods of dolphins and nestled in the evergreens while the drugs flowed and ironically self-aware videos were never-ending—to—the wintry desolation of Montana zipping past while my dinner companion rattled on about his wife and her need to have children around and what she’s going to do now that the nest’s turned empty—from—a discussion over cigarettes out front a dive bar in Chicago about how we’re living in the Apocalyptic Age and the art world needs to catch the fuck up while my beautiful Lithuanian artist friend speckles her invective with tiny screams of excitement as we hop in the cold to keep warm—to—the discussion round the grand piano at the Mothership in Woodstock with the literary types to be found there—to—the next generation coming out of the woodwork in Inman Square in Boston.
At the end of a performance at the Lily Pad, a young man I had never met before came up and handed me my diploma from the Boston Archdioceses Choir School and said, I believe this is yours. It turns out he is living at a loft space I moved out of more than twenty years ago, called Hardcore, and apparently when I moved out, I left that diploma behind.
Hardcore’s a loft space—with plywood floors and action figurine stapled to the walls—at least in my day—and it had a jukebox and we used to put on performance art nights there once a month—a guy spat fireballs and another guy fell through the drop ceiling onto the audience—I often got naked—and—my rooms there were always windowless—I lived there twice, in two different rooms, one with a dentist’s chair and one with a small stage—the one with the stage actually had a wall of windows concealed behind the velvet curtain with a view of the adjacent hallway just beyond—and up until that point when my roommate changed the light bulb, the only light had come from a few scattered lamps wreathed in secondhand smoke, while maybe Leah and I sat on the couch eating Moo Shoo Pork (at least I would—Leah’s vegetarian) and plink away on the synthesizer with a pen in the air to halt conversation. Or Adam or Zach would come over and sit with my chain-smoking self while arguing over the merits of suicide or disemboweled puppy love. And when I was alone, I would usually be at my computer, hunched over the keyboard and experiencing apathy in the direction of the screen.
I ended up performing there a few days later. The jukebox had been replaced by a victrola and somehow that said everything.
The youth I met there had a more elusive happiness than how I remembered ours to be. They came on strong and vanished. They were intensely interested in the ephemera of before. The same pictures still hung in the dark room turned guest room—of 90’s punks grinning sadistically and performers in spandex—but the darkness had been expunged and the performance area had been turned into a jazz club.
Not my best performance, but I learned a lot that night. I learned what it means to live in the Apocalyptic Age—because this is it. These youths are living the future. Not just a return to representative painting and a radical retro—as in, We’re bringing the Middle Ages back with a violence—or a sincerity that is actively undoing of the cynicism of my youth—a cynicism that we once believed was leading us closer and closer to the truth—but more a collective being-with that’s displaced the anti-social me-ness of my own times in that same loft. The people I met that night were both kinder than we were and also more of a piece. They were curating this alien past even as they were also already morphing into some new unknown and unknowable thing. This is the apocalypse. This is what the apocalypse should be.
Only at the moment of death will you hear the standing ovation.
*
I get back to the monastery and immediately the news starts pouring in. Freedom of speech is being trampled on. The government is being gutted. America’s allies are now its enemies and its enemies are now its allies. The economy’s crashing. America is for sale to the highest bidder.
It may be that the systems of the past are coming apart, but we need to create our own systems, not by creating a new kind of art or a new kind of literature, but by creating art and literature in a different way and for a different purpose. We are creating anti-consumer goods, talismans for small communities of the like-minded, a kind of thing that can carry through the end times and come out the other side. We have become paralyzed by the coming storm, but the thing that stands in the way becomes the way says Marcus Aurelius. Our walls are made of corridors and our corridors are made of walls. The obstacle becomes the path.
We will look back on these times and speak of the Dark Enlightenment and Mencius Moldbug—Aleksandr Dugin and his “divine absence” and—a return to a Maoist China for fear of a Gorbachev-like breakdown of party and country—and the puppets these ideas are playing—Trump and Putin and Ci—the true axis of evil. Those of us who rise up in the larger context of this Apocalyptic Era are the opposite of this. We are threading a path of meaning through the dark.
We see things as coming and going when in fact it is always us. In our stationary universe, the violence is out there and we are safe in our beds, when the reverse is true. The universe sings and we are the song it’s singing. The thicker the walls, the more dangerous the darkness becomes. Live on a razor’s edge and you will wake up.
My entire body’s gone asleep and I drag it about upon the backdrop of the Himalayas. In living rooms empty of everything but the one chair.
But more than this—we have been living in this Apocalyptic Age for some time now—while pretending that it’s still the twentieth century—that miracles of innovation are just around the corner—that the wheels of progress will never stop turning—that this current madness is just another fluke in a long string of flukes and we’re going to make it out swinging after all—even as we watch our politicians cannibalize the state and the genocides are just getting started—as God and the Devil take to shooting their craps over the exact nature and outcome of the coming apocalypse.
“What then is the American, this new man? He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced,” Hector St. John De Crevecoeur [Letters from an American Farmer].
We’re trying to figure out who we are just as we’re unraveling around the tatters of the globe. We are looking in our respective mirrors and taking up our respective hatchets and running at the walls. How did we end up like this? Will any of us survive to the closing credits? That’s the big bet.
My last stop on that journey back to America was to Canada. I spent my time there shouting about publishing over jazz concerts, drinking from the bottle in the dive I was staying above that jazz club, breakfasting with poets while we recounted what we’ve been up to the past decade, saunaing and sampling Guinness at Hooters, and coming to understand the Canadian soul, its tendernesses and truths. I will never forget my early morning walk through the driving wind and down pedestrian paths lined in colorful swaths of graffiti, past sleepless Canadians nodding silently at me struggling past with my rolly, the hopelessnes there too, behind the aluminum siding and past the rust-rotted grill. The rage I found there was often directed at me as the American who failed to stop Trump. There was a beauty as well, but it was the beauty of another falling star.
And that final day, as I struggled across the bridge while glancing off to my left and at an icy Niagara Falls, while again I wove my way through tunnels of wind and dragged that rolly full of books up endless avenues on the American side, consisting mostly of ghetto and kids dancing in the slush of the ghetto, and a Chinese restaurant that appropriately was actually an Indian restaurant. And me on my way back home to a monastery nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas on the far side of the world.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release can be found below. You can read more about him here.
