Through the looking glass
Just over a year ago I lost someone. It happened over a few weeks, after another long, stagnant period of quarantine. I felt like I was moving through those preceding months, day by day, but actually to say moving feels like a betrayal of that time, which quickly bore none of the characteristics of a trial. There were very few moments of movement and increasingly longer stretches of nauseating stillness, a swampy permanence that slunk over every surface. I was learning that there’s a quality which colours too much or too little time to yourself. A kind of giddiness, an unsettling lightness that eats away at your concentration.
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Why put a new address on the same old loneliness?
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Hell is empty and
all
the devils are here
This was supposed to be a new chapter, the next chapter of our lives. But we had all started self-harming again. Bodies were inert, souls were hysteric. I would scroll online with my mouth open, speechless at the vanity, at the awful, applauded attempts at describing the worlds’ sickness. I’d seek them out and swim in them, like rivers of white hot bile.
Instagram is a shopping app, I’d constantly say to people. It’s a shopping app that shows you your worst fears. That shows you the worst, most abhorrent things about yourself. Through the looking glass and into the fire. Glimpses of secret affairs, petty allegiances. And the relentless perseverance, which is perhaps the most damaging thing of all.
The inability to quit anything for good.
Offline
Online
monotony
Isolation
My Body
pain
Grief
My Soul
One will burn.
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As I sat in the hospital I felt that my phone had become my enemy. Photographs of intertwined hands, photographs of precious unconsciousness, these were too profound to live behind the same screen I stared into for what felt like hours, tens of hours, hundreds of hours every day. What kind of monster would choose to project, declare those images to the public? To parade that unfolding tragedy while death drums rolled in the distance. In those weeks I saw the outline of a shadow emerge that felt as clear as the white sky, as the black shapes under my eyelids. The opposite of dignity, the dignity made plain in the delicate dying body in front of me – slipping, smiling, saying my name – became hawkish, compulsive self-promotion.
I would
After she died, her soul grew until it filled everything. it bloomed
It shone in the light of a new moon that bore, through some strange
fate, her Irish name, the name of the ocean, of Gods.
in a rainbow.
Online
Offline
My soul was nowhere. Where was mine? It felt like I was careening through time, wild. My body was splitting into fragments, it was bleeding and breaking. I left my glasses under a bench at the crematorium. I absolved myself of vision to hide the fact I couldn’t see. Desperate, I thought it had to be that disconnect between offline and online – that ungodly split between body and soul – which was the reason for my schizophrenic flimsiness.
monotony
pain
Offline
Online
Grief
It didn't used to be so hard
I went offline
It used to be impossible
And yet
And yet
My soul was not restored.
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Isolation
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The smartphone is the cult article of digital domination. As an apparatus of subjugation it acts as a rosary and its beads; that’s why we keep the cell phone constantly in our hands.
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A few months after I went offline, I started going to church. A specific church, Our Holy Redeemer, which was always empty and dark and always smelled of frankincense and torn paper. At first I went as part of a performance to myself, and then out of necessity. I would speak to Mary, whisper to her. The cool air was like silk on my cheeks. I watched a postman who, thinking he was alone, fell to his knees before Jesus, and a black man with a soft fabric briefcase who stood facing away from the altar, beaming into a ray of bright, blue sun. I watched gold leaf catch the light and lose it, round windows burn enormous white clock faces on the walls. I begged for darkness, cried for forgiveness, lit votives with a Clipper and licked lipstick off the inside of my bottom lip. In those months, Mary sent me her own blessings. She sent me Joseph, she sent me a child. I learned hard lessons the hard way.
pain
In different times there might be roses
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3
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10
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To choose between monotony and pain is to choose between pain and pain. To believe you have a choice at all is an even greater mistake.
monotony
pain
pain
pain
And when I waked I cried to dream again.
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After a year offline I still cling to my phone like a rosary. It’s clearer to me now that it’s not social media that makes us monsters, just a space that amplifies those desperate qualities. It’s clearer to me now that we are all paranoid and self-promoting, that vanity is a condition of human nature so eternal it is immortalised in sin. I deleted social media in an attempt to delete ugliness, to purify an ugly world, but there is an ugliness to all of us that is so beautiful, that is so useful as a shadow for dignity, imagination, stoicism.
you are never really offline
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises.
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With distance, a lot of distance, I’m learning how to thread together clues about myself, without weaving in endless suspicions of other people. To move my fingers gradually between each thing I seem to find so painful, so threatening, until they string together in tiny epiphanies. Until I can hold them all together in my hand, defined, and count along each bead.
This morning I woke with a fresh sense of total, desperate hell.
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In truth, everything is just as painful as it was before, and I am just as vain.
What can we do? We must live out our lives.
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But in this ugly reality, perhaps people are more beautiful than before.
Songs: Ohia - Just Be Simple 1
Ariel recounting Ferdinand, The Tempest 2
Joy Division - Heart and Soul 3
Songs: Ohia - Almost Was Good Enough 4
Bella Hadid cuts a stylish figure in a plunging white 5 shirt and black corset as she steps out for a swanky dinner in Rome with beau Marc Kalman 5
Said to me by a drunk stranger about his garden 7
Caliban, The Tempest 8
Caliban, The Tempest 9
Maggie Nelson, Something Bright Then Holes 10
Sonya's monologue, Uncle Vanya 11