Prone on the floor, I have a vision I have the body of a caterpillar and the head of a pig. My skin and invertebrate inners take the shape of the juts I crawl over, my many legs ripplingly suctioning to surfaces. When I snort and sweep my rude pink snout against the ground to get that smell-taste, it—wet with sweat and spittle, rimmed with white bristle—lifts the orts, looking like a dredged cutlet.
I look out the window at the Bloodgood maple as I chew salad leaves and think the tree and I agree, body and body, we are each other now; and the tree is whole without me and wavers steady and windily, tonguing the edges.
I am partly the rosebush, too, in that I’m getting beyond speaking. Instead of talk, scents. And instead of errant gesticulation, I stand and ramify.
The wild turkeys have taken over the rose garden. Park officials fenced the entrances and posted signs saying they were “[providing] some time and space to work to prevent human-wildlife conflicts.” With the help of other agencies, they hoped “to retrain the turkeys” and “educate our residents.” The City professed its respect for “the rights of wild animals to inhabit their natural homes” and encouraged “all Oaklanders to support the right of our wild residents to remain wild.” I imagine, while we’re gone, the neighborhood cats, who will not have curtailed their visits, sitting regally all along the garden’s upper terraces, slow-blinking as they watch the offending male turkey strut the central pathway below, fanning his tail feathers, jerking and jiggling his snood and wattle and caruncles, wearing a crown of roses.
We found out in an e-mail copied to the building manager that the neighbor’s cat, Bubs, alerted its carers to a rat running on their window ledge late at night. They watched as the rat tested their window and followed the ledge to ours. The manager said she’d have “the pest control guy make sure the bait boxes are full,” and Jorrit put in an order for more Bubses. Rats are not new in our neighborhood. I’ve often nearly tripped over them during my night walks around Lake Merritt, they are so abundant. Now, without their usual food supply from restaurant waste, the rats have diverted to dwellings. This move might be why, the other day, I spotted a county Vector Control van under the 580 at Grand. Inclining us toward life, hunger choreographs us outward, where we communicate what we carry.
This time in place contracts and expands across a nation and the globe within a split second. This week at the end of May, I’ve remembered, through suffering, to ask myself whether I’m inclining toward life. This week, protestors are leaning with violent optimism into life, becoming more intimate with death. This month, the racist state-condoned murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd have erupted into the broader consciousness and have been happening all along and known all along to those who have been dying and mourning. This year, black and brown people have been dying disproportionately more from the haloed virus, and, now and before that, from so many other causes and conditions. “Disproportionate” gives no sense of the proportions. Governments would like to diffuse the consolidating vitality of protest with curfews, barricades, flash bangs, teargas, arrests.
My writing broke off from June to December because of despair, study, action, and not knowing whether or how to place my voice. I’ve learned my silence is violence. I’ve also learned that I should take a step back in conversations. I’ve learned my consolations take up space and asking “How are you?” can tap emotional reserves, can sound like “Teach me about your struggle” or “Make me feel like a good person by allowing me to enact my sympathy.” Sometimes, the more needful questions are “How can I help?” and “What do you need?” I’ve learned my grief siphons away support from those who are experiencing the actual injury. I’ve learned that so much of what I need to know about racism has been said and written decades, even centuries, ago, and I haven’t been paying attention. But I can pay attention. If I want to disrupt racism and the other kinds of politically empowered identity-based hate that intersect with it, I’m tasked with paying attention for the rest of my life. No path to impunity by castigating other offenders. No ten easy steps to disentangle myself and become an unimpeachable saint: only attention, investigation, adaptability, and the ability to hold and transform failure and suffering through love.
I’ve been meditating on an image for this year’s losses—where loss is a death, the grief of the survivors, and a harbinger of more death—which are a continuation of losses we didn’t notice or connect. I think of Rachel Whitehead’s Ghost, her plaster cast of the interior of a house, like her childhood home, before it was torn down. “Mummifying the air” in a place that’s since been demolished—room blocked. I imagine doing the same for all chambers of the hearts of those who died from state neglect and violence this year: taking plaster casts of each atrium and ventricle, and putting them in a pile, where they’d settle and mix: a heap of misshapen dice. The casting process would be meticulous, bloody—the artist an anatomist and manufacturer. The monument, though it would succeed in overwhelming one who sees it with sadness, would also be terrifyingly antiseptic. As a corrective, my mind goes grotesque, thinks of trying to shove all those casts in my actual heart, stuffing the muscle till it rips. The gluttony murder in Se7en, but a different organ. (Did this image induce my bout of ventricular ectopy?)
Since summer, I’ve been meaning to describe the Gingko biloba trees lining Lake Merritt. Back then, green and leaved, they looked like octopuses in rumba shirts, sleeves ruffled the whole length, raising all their arms, eager to answer a question or show they’re unarmed. Now, the Gingkos’ leaves have turned chestnut and shriveled on the limbs or shed on the ground like swarms of still, bodiless moths. I’m impatient with these landscape descriptions in novels. But to see the landscape such that I can say something of it backfills my senses.
The night after Christmas, light refracted and reflected in wet air widely enhaloed the waxing crescent moon, making the negative of a large pupil and iris in the sky, which bathed me in its gaze.
Billy filmed me for near four hours over two Zoom meetings for his submission to Gay for Replay’s Róisín Machine drag show. Take one: I feigned waking up, donned one of Jorrit’s button-up business shirts, drew on drag king eyebrows and stache and womb broom, put on black-rimmed glasses, lapped the apartment pretending to slug down coffee en route, and washed the liquid liner facial hair off in the bathroom sink. Take two: I parted my hair down the middle, braided two small front sections into limp antennae, put the two bigger back sections into high side buns, painted black wings on my lids with holes in the middle, contoured my cheekbones with lipstick and concealer, put on a rhinestoned black lace dress, renamed myself the Duchess of Done, lip-synched the “Kingdom of Ends” (“Keep going on, going onwards / Ever in, ever downwards, yeah, yeah, yeah”) with the green virtual background appearing randomly in vibrating patches on my skin, washed the layers of liner and lipstick off in the bathroom sink, and feigned going back to sleep. The footage wasn’t editable in the time Billy had. I missed the chance to use the five-foot-long hanging philodendron in the bedroom as a wig.
The New Year approaching, Jorrit and I watched the funeral service for a friend’s father streaming from the Netherlands. I didn’t know our friend’s father beyond Jorrit’s comments about his conservatism and the causes of his death. The service was in Dutch, so it was mostly lost on me. Between the fragments I understood and the ones Jorrit curated, I heard: “He was a success in business, but struggled in his personal life,” “Traveling was his passion,” “Italy was his passion,” “He became a member of the fraternity before hazing rituals were democratized after criticism in the NRC,” “When my mother died, he became both our father and mother.” His identical twin brother said they’d decided to distinguish themselves from each other early on; their paths forked and they didn’t keep in touch. The photos showed him mostly alone, mostly smiling, mostly in a luxurious setting, like the balcony of his Italian villa or in front of a Michelin-starred restaurant. At the end, attendees passed the family then the coffin, some pausing to touch it or nod a goodbye in decorous silence. In sum, the event left me with an impression of bland worldly success and great stifled sadnesses.
As antidote to the anonymizing formality of the ceremony, Jorrit and I began imagining his eulogy for me: “Her average heart rate was between 60 to 100 beats per minute, except for the very end.” “The only thing she was good at was walking.” “I spent every day in a cloud of her farts.” “I constantly had to swat her hand away from my dick. She was a real terror when she heard Moonchild Sanelly’s ‘Where De Dee Kat.'” “She laughed like this: [witchy cackling].” “She hated whistling indoors.” “She was always planning what she would eat next.” “I wished I had her hair.” “I was sensitive to all the noises she made: walking too heavily, chattering spoons in bowls, burping like she was pushing it out, singing, listening to R&B, eating potato chips. But she was my kitty.”
I’ve been insulated from death so far, by luck, by privilege, by choices, by culture and the present accumulation of history. No one in my inner circle, except for grandparents and pets, has died. Very few in my life are obviously threatened by death regularly. I also grew up in the mass media center for the Cult of Youth and Immortality: Los Angeles. As a child, my imagination blithely contained the contradictions that I’d keep on living another day, ad infinitum, but the reel would stop when I turned thirty, to ensure my iconic celebrity and because beyond there surely was no life worth living. Now nearer to forty, I’ve wanted to become more intimate with death—without anyone having to die for me to achieve this intimacy—because I suspect my insulation harbors a deadly moral flaw.
I came up a with a plan of approach. My launching pad for greater intimacy would be a visit to the Museum of Death in Hollywood (which I’d lucked upon while scanning Google Maps as I planned a visit to LA) and a barely remembered essay I’d read over a decade ago that I believed equated death and the faked realness of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
I’d set the vague intention of visiting the museum before the pandemic, but didn’t manage to get there in time. I had to settle, in the mean time, for a visit to their website. I could’ve guessed what kind of museum it would be. I’m not sure whether I deluded myself or if I sought unconsciously what would’ve been easily supposed. The website’s banner was blood red, textured with splatters and tire tread marks. At its center, in the middle of the museum’s name, sat a black-and-white “ink” etching of a skull, evoking nineteenth-century slasher pulp and heavy metal. Underneath the banner, links to the museum’s webshop are prominently featured (SHOP » NEW ORLEANS Merch, Shirts, Womens [sic], Hoodies, Swag). At the time of this post, my cart contains 0 items.
In the body text on the Info page, I read two pioneers founded the “World Famous” museum about twenty-five years ago “to fill the void in death education in this country […] [making] death their life’s work.” Founders Healy and Shultz originally housed their collection in San Diego’s first mortuary, which was supposedly owned by Wyatt Earp. Thus, they attached the museum to Earp’s hunting, gambling, brothel- and saloon-owning, gold mining, gunslinging, kill-or-be-killed macho Wild West boomtown outlaw-cowboy-lawman-film consultant individualism contingent on genocide, land grabs, and storytelling. The original concept was more a gallery than a museum, showcasing the serial killers’ artwork, acquired by Healy and Shultz through pen pal correspondence. Later, our death educators expanded their collection to include enough artifacts from the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide to recreate the scene, causing a media stir that likely led to their eviction. They persevered in their mission, however, and landed in another legendary location that added the aura of rock ‘n’ roll to cowboy: a defunct music studio in Hollywood, where the likes of Pink Floyd recorded. (An Info page picture shows the former Producer’s Workshop bedecked with a flat large-scale version of the banner’s death’s-head topped with the red blooms of bougainvillea trained to the front gate—a Día de los Muertos skull wearing a flower crown.) Since setting up shop in phoney super-Coney Hollywood, they grew enough to open a second branch in Louisiana: Musée de Mort Orleans. Between the two museums, the current collection includes taxidermy, funeral curiosa, mortician and coroner tools, and one of Jack Kevorkian’s suicide machines. But most of all, it celebrates cults and murder, especially mass death or serial murder inspired by or inspiring cultish devotion: in addition to “the world’s largest collection of serial killer artwork” and the Heaven’s Gate re-creation, they have photos of crime scenes and autopsies, “Manson Family memorabilia,” and the guillotined head of Henri Landru (a French serial killer whose trial attracted hundreds of spectators, including celebrities, such as Maurice Chevalier, Colette, and Rudyard Kipling). The museum also hosts an annual Black Dahlia look-alike competition, in which entrants must believably portray Elizabeth Short in life, as a glamorous Black Irish aspiring actress, and death, as a mutilated murder victim. So, according to the museum, death (nearly synonymized with murder) immortalizes via celebrity or taxidermy, both gross transformations of identity that focus on surfaces and projection.
Along with a summary of exhibits, the Info page included instructions inoculating the curatorial message (murder breeds greatness) with the cultural message that this is a formal museum space: “The Museum of Death experience is a self guided tour lasting approximately 45 minutes to an hour, however those who can stomach it may stay as long as they like, as there are hundreds of items on display.” An extended visit is a test of the visitor’s mettle. If you have the intestinal fortitude to stick it out, you belong to the in-crowd with the curators. Forced teaming to preempt disagreement.
The Info page went on to caution: “There is no age limit for the Museum of Death because death affects us all, however we STRONGLY recommend the museum only for MATURE AUDIENCES! Some content within the exhibits may be too graphic or explicit for children, and no children will be allowed inside without a parent being present.” This admission that “death affects us all” struck me with both its mock-philosophical gravity and unspecificness. If we were to literalize the statement with the museum’s curating in mind, we’d have to assume that one-to-one murder and serial killing affect us all. Real violent deaths do affect whole groups of people; as I understand it, in the States, those groups are most often communities pressurized by poverty, whose basic human rights aren’t honored. Otherwise, the literalized translation is only true for all of us in a mediated form: movies and TV programming are saturated with documentaries, docudramas, and fictional stories of murderers, serial killers, and the (often specialized or preternaturally intelligent) detectives and crime units investigating them. Assuming the museum’s description of its contents is accurate, the collection contains nothing about the leading causes of death, most of which are circulatory and respiratory diseases and cancers. In the States, accidents and suicide are in the top ten as well. It also covers little of ceremonies marking deaths and mourning traditions. Every purveyor of knowledge must make their selections, necessarily leaving things out and, thereby, expressing a worldview. For example, if I were to helm the MoD, I wouldn’t touch ideas about what happens to a living being’s “self” (or “soul”) after their death. I also wouldn’t like to emphasize the legal or traditional intricacies of willing or transmitting one’s earthly effects. But this museum’s omissions and accentuations lean clearly toward a definition of “death” that sensationalizes aberrant cruelty and self-immolation.
The most generous reading of this choice would be as an allegory of the causes of many deaths. The serial killer—symbolizing a sociopathic center of power—murders many—causes the deaths of thousands through direct and indirect physical and psychological violence (e.g., negligence, denial of resources, criminalization and other forms of state abuse)—and then, with the help of media feeding off a juicy story, becomes the object of public fascination—holds power through consensus. The basis for that reading seems too thin. The actual result of centering blood and gore is to distract from any meditation on your, on my, mortality.
[As I try to work through these ideas, they begin to take on the flavor of “academic” that means “frivolous”: the Electoral College vote certification is happening, and pro-Trump protestors have pushed their way into the Capitol. I fear for the representatives. I fear for the political life of this country. I can’t concentrate.]
[On January 8, in the hours nearing dusk, I hear helicopters and a murder of crows. The crows caw more in unison the closer the copters fly. The copters’ chop, a commonplace since Occupy.]
A motive for this distraction clarifies on continued reading of the Info page’s advice to visitors: “There have been a number of ‘falling down ovations’ (people fainting) throughout the years so we encourage you to prepare yourself before arriving!” The curators (or their PR people) again hype up the power of the exhibits to inspire shock and awe while urging the patron to take personal responsibility for their safety (let alone the safety of the exhibits should a swooning patron flop their dead weight down on them). The museum’s first concern then is liability, and it’s second and linked concern is ownership. The museum concludes by listing items and actions prohibited on the premises:
- Photography of any sort
- Cellular phones / cellular phone use
- Large bags / backpacks
- Food and beverages (including chewing gum)
- Smoking, vaping, or chewing tobacco
- Weapons (or anything that would interfere with another guest)
The first and second items concern reproducing images of the museum, a threat to their proprietary rights to the materials and profitability. The third through fifth concern damaging or stealing museum property. The final item, masquerading as concern for guests’ safety, is more likely a concern, once again, about liability and harm to museum objects (vandalism) as well as the loss of business (developing a bad reputation as a pilgrimage site for homicidal maniacs). The official rules, therefore, don’t support the badass bandit, celebrity mass murderer, and rock ‘n’ roller myths they’ve called in. No killings permitted in the Temple of Murder; no drugs or cigs at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Shrine. Only fantasizing allowed. The invocation of these myths and their squelching maximize money making and minimize loss while promising to titillate. The rules conclude with the reminder that, as with all respectable businesses, the museum “reserves the right to refuse service to anyone.” Crazies not welcome. Manson himself might have been ushered out if he started playing the “insane game.”
Parallel to visiting the DoM website, I looked for the mostly forgotten essay. Keyword searches led me to a dissertation on city planning and architecture in Las Vegas, referencing an author and title that rang a bell: Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality. I followed Oakland Public’s COVID-19 procedure of reserving the book online, and, once I got the ready-for-pickup email, I masked up and headed over to the Lakeview Branch. About twenty feet from the barricaded entrance, I texted the library to say, “I’m here.” A library staff member appeared from the building, called my name, and I approached just long enough for him to hand me the book in a paper bag.
The first few pages of the eponymous essay made me think I’d guessed right, but I’d gotten so much wrong. I misremembered Eco’s focus on city planning and architecture as cultural messaging and reproduction. The essay looked more at America’s obsession with the Absolute Fake by critiquing museums (wax, curiosity, history, art), ghost towns, parvenu hoarders’ hodgepodge castles, zoos and marine parks, cemeteries, evangelism, and amusement parks (Knott’s Berry Farms, Disneyland, and Disney World), mostly in California and Florida. Eco only briefly mentions Las Vegas, giving the city something of a free pass as far as scrutinizing its falsities (possibly because he finished the essay in 1975 before a lot of the present-day development of the Strip). He also doesn’t seem to explicitly equate the Absolute Fake with literal or moral death. His observations aren’t so crude and reductive as my fuzzy conclusion.
Traveling to these monuments of a peculiarly American realism, Eco defines the Absolute Fake, or the “real” copy, through example: it can be a life-size “perfect likeness” preserved against the tooth of time, a re-creation or display that mixes replica and historical artifact (“the fusion of copy and original”), an invented castle or palazzo or villa choked with incongruous acquisitions (the camp failure of American nouveau riches to flaunt their affluence and shore up their legitimacy and legacy with “old-world” objects), a fake city (amusement park) with fully realized fake people and animals (animatronics), a collection of animals in reconstructed natural environments (where “[Nature] is erased by artifice precisely so that it can be presented as uncontaminated nature”), or a cemetery with “nonstop Muzak” and “reproductions of the most beautiful artworks of all time” imitating “a natural and aesthetic life that continues after death.” The practitioners of this realism often have archival neurosis, maniacal attention to detail in the execution of the illusion, and an “accumulative instinct.” Their hyperreal productions characteristically immerse the viewer fully in the experience (their senses “overloaded in an uncritical way”; think temperature control, music, lighting, audio narration, even scents), replace the original (when the reconstruction as sign “[abolishes] the distinction of the reference”), subordinate the original (when “the imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it”), confuse historical time periods and history with fantasy through admixture and proximity causing dreamy disorientation, interweave depravity and horror with sanctity and idealism, exalt the craftsmanship of believable fakery or obscure the “revelation of its own falsehood,” make claims as to the authenticity of duplicates, cram every empty space with an object, regulate the behavior of visitors, ease consumerism by repackaging it as role play in a fantasy city, present a utopian vision of an accord between Nature and Human (and its dystopian complement), and attempt to attain immortality (via archive, acquisition, or reproduction).
If this was the right essay, how had I come to categorize it under the header “death”? I think the answer has something to do with my feeling that being insulated from death relates to a moral deficit or failure. My memory had mixed up biological death with a more abstract physical death and its consequent psychic or spiritual death. I’d processed the idea of a fake supplanting its reference as death by numb detachment. What happens when we no longer feel for the reference? What happens when we have no sense of what it means to be in the presence of the reference? What happens when we prefer plastic?
I had, still have, the notion that we grow less concerned if the reference dies, because we can manufacture a replacement. If we agree we can achieve immortality through replication, there’s no need to come to terms with the death of that plant, or that bug, or that person, or those people. Moreover, fake death is far more entertaining than real death; it’s a mystery to watch someone solve and moralize about or an action hero’s bloody justice or a horror sight gag or a first-person shooter game, where no one dies, most importantly, not us. Meanwhile, who died yesterday?
I wonder whether the fact that my instincts led me to an American museum and an essay about quintessentially American museums was both my disease and a symptomatology for diagnosis. I was trying to learn artificially what I had been kept from through artificiality. Instead of integrating death, I’d gotten instructions for becoming conscious of my alienation from it. In fact, MoD fit right in with what I already knew. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read it (and by proxy myself) in the way Eco read the ones in “Travels” because I couldn’t visit it, the possibility of real death prohibiting. I could, however, deduce it belonged in the family of his museums because of its re-creation of the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide and its assurances of its artifacts’ authenticity (“[The LA and New Orleans locations are] entirely unique as the museum does not feature any replicas or duplicates of the exhibits or artifacts”). Maybe speculating about the visit more accurately metaphorizes my degree of remove.
I read further in Eco’s essay collection and ran across thematic coincidences to my present political moment (the Storming), drawing me back to what I saw as an intrusion on thinking about my topic. The coincidences were so astonishing I almost ascribed a mystical meaning to how the book had come to be and come to me. Eventually, my first mystical ascription revealed itself as combination of surprise at my areas of ignorance and admiration for Eco’s ability to patiently read cultural signs, contextualize them historically and philosophically, and compose these thoughts with enough coherence and humor to publish them in a weekly magazine.
In the “Suicides of the Temple,” he cites thousands of years of millenarian cults to call out the hypocrisy of “normal” people’s shock at the People’s Temples gruesome devolution (a group based on the ideological negative of our current predominating reconfigurable cult; there are modal and practical commonalities among political extremists of any stripe). Eco distills historical examples to name the qualities of a cult: they arise out of “spiritual, social, economic” crisis, engage both the poor and the rich, predict the End of Days and the arrival of the Antichrist (Hillary, QAnon, Antifa, Big Government, Socialism, Communism, Trump, Pence, the Surveillance State, Big Tech, Unbridled Capitalism, etc.), “start a program of common ownership of property” (substitute “property” with “a grievance” or “identity that’s ‘under threat'”), persuade followers they’re the Chosen Ones, “progress to practices of extreme sexual freedom” (where other types of freedoms can be substituted for “sexual”), and their charismatic leader “subjects everyone to his own psychological power and, for the common good [which Eco should’ve dissolved in scare quotes], exploits both the material donations and the willingness of the faithful to be possessed.” Here I quote at length:
The leader proceeds through successive stages of divinization. The group goes from self-flagellation to violence against the unfaithful and then to violence against themselves, in their desire for martyrdom. On the one hand, a persecution delirium rages, and on the other the group’s oddness actually unleashes genuine persecution, which accuses the group of crimes it hasn’t even committed.
And persecution can fuel the cycle. But Eco doesn’t toss the cult into the “bad” bin. Cult can, he says, “take on socially positive forms (revolution, conquest [for which I need more clarification], struggle against the tyrant, even nonviolent pursuit of martyrdom […].”
[Late afternoon, January 15: While I was showering, there was a shooting at the Chevron at Grand and Perkins, a block away. I said, “What the fuck was that?” to check if Jorrit was hurt. I couldn’t hear what he said over the running water. Our building manager messaged tenants two people were shot. We don’t know how badly they’re hurt yet. The police have blocked off the street below our window. The helicopters chop overhead.]
[January 16: Votives flicker at the base of the trashcan by the hydrogen fuel pumps. Our building manager said one killed and one hospitalized.]
In “Striking at the Heart of the State,” Eco agrees that multinational capital, not governments, decides international and local policy, and asserts that terrorism overestimates its efficacy as a systems theory approach to destabilizing “headless” and “heartless” multinational power. He explains that multinational capital accommodates terrorism as an acceptable outlet for “biological aggression” and alternative to atomic world war, which isn’t in the system’s economic interest. A hijacked plane, a sabotaged factory, a murdered manufacturer are “peripheral” wounds, which the system rapidly heals. In fact, these wounds may generate capital in other areas, for example, through advertising revenue and sales of news media. The only real threat terrorism would pose to multinationals is if it became overwhelmingly widespread, but “the system manages things in such a way that, except for the inevitable outsiders, everybody has something to lose in a situation of generalized terrorism.”
In “On the Crisis of the Crisis of Reason,” Eco skewers the abuse of the word “crisis” as a marketing ploy that “sells well,” places definitions of “reason” in the context of philosophical tradition, then uses logic (the science of reasoning) to show specific crises endemic to each of the definitions (or no crisis at all). The essay brought to mind the left’s outcry for rationality (and implicit criticism of the right as irrational) at the beginning of the administration now coming to a kind of close. I had the gut feeling that outcry missed the point by a wide margin, leading me to consider the significance of intuition, emotion, associative thinking, the peripheral, the mystical, and the moral. Taking the opposite tack, Eco drills down into reason. I don’t have any experience in philosophy, so I’m sure I’ll give his ideas short shrift, but I think I detected a preference for his final definition (because he models it all along). Both Aristotelian and Kantian, the final definition seems to say rationality is an inescapable fact of humanity: we will always make “propositions” about “the world.” But to test the “truth” of these propositions, we must first take into account the ambiguity and multiplicity of language, and come up with shared definitions and linguistic and logical rules specific to the situation—a chain or network of conditionalities that allow for contextually verifiable inferences.
In “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare” (1967), he works from the by-then accepted axiom that industrialized nations belong not to the person who controls the military and police but “to the person who controls communications.” With the advent of the Age of Communication, information has transformed from instructions for making commodities to the commodity itself. He develops a scenario that predicts Big Tech, envisioning groups that control both information media and the means of production and “a communications network that expands to embrace the universe.” A universal network, he says, submits us all to subjection and alienates us all, even if it were to be in the hands of the community.
Despite this conception of mass media culture, he troubles the notion that the media consumer gets a “global ideological lesson” by suggesting neither the medium nor the contents of a message will affect every person reliably on the receiving end: “the receiver of the message seems to have a residual freedom […] to read it in a different way.” He explains by first identifying the parts of a communication chain: Source, Transmitter, Signal, Channel, Receiver, Message, Addressee, and Code. For the addressee to interpret the source’s message with any kind of faithfulness to the source’s intention, the source and addressee must share the same code. But in the case of mass communication, addressees belong to vastly different psychological, social, economic, and geographic contexts that inform the code they apply to the signal, resulting in diverse interpretations of the message. For that reason, a TV ad for a peasant could be “a revolutionary message” rather than “a stimulus to buy.”
I don’t think this formulation accounts for today’s algorithm-driven, personalized online media that factors in “discordant interpretations” and designs messages to be containers for multiple ideologies. I believe mass media’s top influencers have figured out how to design container messages, compatible with a broad range of codes, that produce statistically predictable behavior (within a margin of error). The emphasis is on the outcome no matter the rationale.
Even so, Eco’s guerrilla tactic to break up the power of mass media might still apply somewhat; he proposed devising complementary systems to engage each individual in the “universal audience” in order to hash out mass-media messages with them by comparing source and recipient codes. In the 1980s, he called this tactic a pipe dream that had lost its relevance because mass media had already become an “incontrollable plurality of messages that each individual uses to make up his own composition with the remote-control switch.” When a brand’s presence can be multiplied across contexts, sellers, and users, or when a private message can be leaked and broadcasted, the identity, authority, and intentions of the source are obscured. I hope he’s wrong that teaching critical thinking skills was a dream of the late sixties, because, if he’s right, we’re at least half a century behind in our media literacy curricula.
[Our next-door neighbor told us a Reddit thread alleged the two shot were part of a motorbike posse that’s been passing through the Perkins-and-Grand Chevron lately. January 17, I can hear the posse’s chorus of revving engines down on Grand—their funereal procession, their death wail. When I’ve seen them come round before, they leaned back and rode on their hind wheels, like their bikes were rearing stallions. I wonder if they’re rearing up as they pass those votives.]
The final detour that returns me to this national moment and fakery, the theme I associated with my relationship to death, is Eco’s “Falsification and Consensus.” I’d bet Eco would rip me a new one for conflating the Absolute Fake and the kind of fakes in this essay. The two types of fakery aren’t related in motivation, but they’re related by both being kinds of misrepresentation with trickier relationships to reality.
In this case, Eco looks at a different guerrilla approach to dismantling systems-based power in the electronic information age. This approach is to introduce falsifications in order to “[upset] the fine network of consensus” supporting the system on the “molecular” level. Looking at some real-life examples in journalism and political propaganda, Eco shows that, on a small scale, these fakes are either too isolated or easily noticed and disproven. But what happens, he asks, “if it were all done better and at a faster pace?” The result would be a never-ending thrust and parry of falsifications leading to a situation of total disinformation. This situation, in turn, would cause three outcomes, all probably undesirable to those hoping to destabilize pro-fascist multinationals: an initial stage in which trust (necessary for some kind of mutualistic coherence), not power, has been destroyed; a power structure in which the best liar is king; and later the “fanatic” and reactionary reestablishment of consensus (e.g., “[cutting] off the tongue of anyone who lied, even in a figure of speech” to “defend the ideological bases of consent”). (I hear echoes of the disinformation campaigns on social media and Fox News, Fake News, and Alternative Facts.)
[January 20: Momentary relief: inauguration day went off without a hitch. The entertainment industry rose to the occasion: Lady Gaga with her imperial bearing and her oversized gold mockingjay/dove-of-peace brooch and matching gold mic; the “Everyman” actor, Tom Hanks; Kerry Washington, whose seven seasons in Scandal seem to have qualified her for a long-term contract as an emcee for Democratic Party events; and a grand finale of Katy Perry, skin puritanically covered in gloves and gown, singing “Firework” with fireworks multiplied in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The innocence of children was deployed liberally (for example, the entrepreneurial young lady remotely selling IOUs for lemonade, primed for a career trading lemonade futures). Biden’s presence was less featured than segments honoring Americans in helping professions. The mantra: unity, unity, more perfect union.]
Why am I obsessed with truth? Why do I equate fakery with moral and literal death? I worry about my tendency to moralize realness, my attitude that “realer” things are better. There seems to me to be something at odds with the way things are in my valorization of realness. Expecting things ought to be real or truthful, I either become a nag or am disappointed because the definition is slippery or the object, situation, person proves false by my definition.
I think of the time Jorrit and I joined for a family vacation at a resort hotel in the East of the Netherlands. Jorrit, his parents, sister, and I sat in silence around a long table after filling our plates from the breakfast buffet. The luxury of the place and the banality of that kind of vacationing made me anxious. I felt hemmed in by the obligation to enjoy myself. Out of nervousness, I broke the silence, reaching for the nearest object as a kind of conversational life raft: the vase of flowers on the table. I took a petal in between my thumb and forefinger, and asked, “Do you think these are real?” Jorrit retorted, “They’re real. They’re just made of plastic.” His sister laughed. I felt ridiculous at my difficulties adjusting to the situation.
One category of being-something-other-than-supposed-to-be that doesn’t provoke my nagging or disappointment and manages to hold different truths is drag queen realness. (And I do think these observations match femme-presenting drag more than they do kings, who, in my limited experience, seem to speak a different cultural dialect, less rooted in glorious failure.) Realness used to be the most faithful impersonation of a category, usually a role in hegemonic society, such as soldier, college student, rich woman, businessman. These days more categories are visible closer to the mainstream, for example, femme queens with beards or body hair, nonbinary queens, ugly or scary queens.
Good drag is eminently imaginative (i.e., beyond established reference) and aware of (pop and sub-) cultural references. It exaggerates and remixes the iconic and stuffs it with signification. It pays homage to, critiques, reifies, and subverts its references all at once, speaking in double entendre and going wink, wink. It’s extravagantly self-consciousness. The best drag queens know that achieving the “full illusion” requires self-aware delusion (see Jinkx Monsoon’s Little Edie). A legendary drag queen becomes more themselves (in and out of drag) by discovering their drag persona. Their costumes can externalize and elaborate a protean inner life (inseparable from communal joy and grief) and be armor. In the drag scene, there’s a tradition of outrageous truth telling: spilling the tea and reading to filth. In the drag scene, when we’re feeling a queen, they’re giving us life, they are EVERYTHING.
I’d like to avoid my usual trick of indicating a caesura before the coda with asterisks. Instead, I try to smooth passage over the railway switch by calling it out. Originally, I’d thought to end with the image that follows, but I’m not sure it fits anymore. To be faithful to my first gut feel and to invite the “residual freedom” of the recipient, I include it anyway. You can decide how it inflects what comes before or mentally delete it from the essay.
The image came to me during the second sound bath I’d ever done, streamed over the webs from Long Beach Compound. Sound baths sound woo woo, I know. But I don’t attach any cosmology or dogma to them. When I tried it for the first time at the invitation of my sister-in-law, it did something to me. I tried it again recently because relaxing has become more of a matter of survival and the event sort of fell into my lap.
To begin with, the piped-in sounds gave me a mental itch. I heard the rustle of clothes against microphone, a dog barking nonstop in a neighboring yard, sirens over the singing bowls, gongs, and chimes. Then, I don’t know when, the hums and ringing moved to the foreground, filled my bone brain box, and I receded into vision.
I saw a pale, pale person hiding in a close space—even their irises a near-white blue. Were they colorless because they were vampirish undead or tender larva? Either way, they’d paled from etiolation. Their milky eyes darted back and forth in fear. Of what, I couldn’t tell, but I was replete with sadness for their fear, and tears spilled down to the tune of ringing, gonging, dinging.
Pigeon Review 