Parts per Million

this text was written during the pandemic lockdowns, and translated to Italian and published in La Lettura supplement of Corriere della Sera on Aug. 22, 2021

Tadashi Kawamata – Over Flow (in Lisbon's MAAT, 2018)

David Fincher said that he wouldn't be able to make Fight Club today. I don't know where he said that, I just picked it up somewhere. I picked it up, or it was lodged into my mind, somehow. Why? Who knows. At this point my brain is like what I imagine the planet Earth would look like post space disaster. You know, like in Gravity, a satellite collides with another satellite, Starlink, ISS, GPS, all the twinkling unblinking eyes zooming down on us, they all just burst in an orgy of spare parts, and suddenly the sky above us is once again the texture of TV, tuned to a dead channel. Pixels of white noise, falling down sideways, missing the Earth, flying forever. Our space dreams are dead. We are covered in trash. That's my brain on the internet. Nothing can come out, just sometimes, like in Armageddon, things streak in, and I get to remember. »I don't want to close my eyes. I don't want to miss one thing.«

Why wouldn't he be able to make Fight Club? The studios wouldn't let him. Too dark, too pessimistic. Which line is better, »I want to have your abortion,« from the book, or »I haven't been fucked like that since grade school,« from the movie? Toxic masculinity, there was an essay about that, wasn't there? The movie came out in 1999, like The Matrix. Fear of the Y2K bug, the return of the new dark age, trying to ease people into the possibility that underneath the shiny surface there is something called reality. “Welcome to the desert of the real.” Where men fight in basements for scraps of dignity. The food is blended, tasteless gruel. The soap is rich people's fat. Where people with boxcutters fly planes into buildings.

And it's true. When I was a kid, every time I watched the movie, I headed out to the woods and spent days rearranging streams. Thinking of time in an epochal scale; I move this rock with my arms, and in a million years my tiny effort will be multiplied a million-fold, the shape of the canyon will be enormous and it will be designed specifically by me. Does this matter? It extremely did, to me. Of course an industrial effort would rip out the stream and flatten the land and pour cement and kill the seed of my creation. But maybe it would forget to do so. Maybe the stream could be allowed to follow my lead for a large swath of eternity, here left, here right, I'll block this passage, dig out a new one with my bare hands. All we need is gravity and time and being overlooked, and we will grow large, we will grow deep.

The real reason, I suspect, why I yearned for significance after watching the movie, was simple. I am powerless. I will always be powerless. All I have available to me is basic physics. My arms, my fists, my fingers. Is pulling a rock out of the mud and observing how keenly the water fills up the space of the hole just to anchor yourself to the earth, to bind yourself, however tenuously, to the fate of the planet, violence? You know nothing of violence.

*

David Lynch recently said that the rosebush has many thorns now, but that the forces of negativity will soon rot and disappear. He said that on my Twitter stream, sitting in a black-and-gray room with his purple tinted eyeglasses, and I want to believe him. A lie in each belief. Is it violence to pluck a rose, even if you don't bleed?

My mind parses the sentence, turning it around, inhabiting all parts of it from all perspectives. Is it not honorable to protect a rose from being plucked? Will I rot and disappear? Or am I the rot when I wait for the thorns to disappear. On a long enough timeline ... All we have to do is wait. Is rot. And the thorns will rot, and the rosebush will rot, and our hand reaching for the rotten rose will rot. The bonds that bind us will grow loose, new growth will harvest us and display our recalcitrance in fresh plumes of its own.

I would prefer my hands bleeding and the rosebush unharmed.

*

When they move backwards in time in Tenet, they have to wear a mask. That is us. You would think that time is standing still in a pandemic, that our lives have been put on pause, but it is not and they have not. Time moves against us. The future has launched its attack. If you are stuck inside with someone you hate, or someone that hates you – you could be alone, and this could still be true – you cannot leave. Each day moves you further into the past that has been chosen for you at the point of the break. Watch yourself dwindling, eroding. You try to move forward by pressing yourself against the screen, against the eye of the camera, by pushing the keys on the keyboard, by clicking your mouse, but electricity flattens you, reduces you, you begin to feel how you are perceived, translucent, static, caught in the lag.

You dream of going places, going to school, getting a job, meeting people, getting laid. Your dreams will come true. In the sense that you will get to dream them, over and over again, in the confines of your mind, until you accept them as true. Because you are going backwards. The only question you are left with is, have your dreams come true? This is as far as you have come.

So, put on a mask and walk among the things strengthening their bonds, un-rotting. Petals, un-shriveling, returning to the flower. The depth of canyons, shallowing, the bruises on your body turning back into the color of your skin. You are young again, and strong, as gay as a second-hand button sown on a brand new coat, and you can think. Nothing will ever happen to you again.

*

In the nineties they feared that the people could not handle raw reality, the scene that lurks behind the curtain. Today, the very curtain is diseased and killing us. We have to put on our own personal curtains, hide our faces, so we can interact with the diseased unreality that must continue to obscure the truth. Because the truth is, simply and finally, completely obscene. Offensive and disgusting by any standards of morality and decency, offending against moral principles, repugnant. Private property must have its limits. Wealth must have its limits. Possession must have its limits.

We are possessed by the possibility of a future. We cannot be possessed by memories of the past.

*

The highlight of my year on screen so far has been Kendall from Succession getting into meth. Hitting that last line of the run on the rocks under the early morning desert sun, smiling into oblivion. It was so extremely real that I understood why they used to prohibit depictions of drug use on the screen. I am one hundred percent sure the scene kicked a lot of people back into the habit. Because the truth is, there are no consequences anymore. Sure, hit that pipe, kill the season that only goes in reverse. This is your brain on drugs, fried eggs from Breaking Bad, I think. What use is the brain anymore? The brain that makes you aware it’s all kot-kit.

Requiem for a Dream. I know why we care about the rich people. They’re the only ones whose lives make individual sense. They get to choose, and carry their choices to the end without interference from reality, limited only by their hurt, their psyches, by the things that make them human. The rich are the only true characters we have. The rest of us lead our lives in the eternal blur, on paths so limited they might as well be invisible, without defense from the incursion of whatever whim. Powerless. Insignificant. Not only insignificant to the wider world, but insignificant to ourselves; we can’t even carry out our own tragedies. They all get caught in the bog, making us unsure whether it’s even our own fate we’ve been dealt, or someone else’s. When the rich have daddy issues, they stage an opera. When we have daddy issues, we go to jail.

The irony is that we are condemned under the model of liberty of the rich man. Condemned as heroes in a naturalistic universe.

*

Bernard Arnault said that Greta Thunberg demoralizes young people. Too dark, too pessimistic. Saving the planet should be fun. Rich people should not be made to suffer their young children crying to them at night, daddy, why are you choking turtles, why is the rhinoceros gone, why does the forest sound like the insides of your chest. The raindrops hitting the windowpane on the one hundred and eleventh floor. Baby, the world has always been this gray. You put the plastic in the plastics, metal into metal, bio into bio, and you’re just one. They are so many. If you want to change the world you have to find your happy thought.

My happy thought is a huge hydro dam powering a carbon sink. Bring that PPM down. But then the forests and the oil still burn. My happy thought turns sour. We’ll deal with that later, first we have to quell the seas, the hurricanes, the droughts. Bring that PPM down. Parts per million. Carbon footprint. Breathe into the sink. Dust to dust. To go out, you have to wear a mask. Could it even get any darker?

The koalas and the kangaroos and the emus and the recluse spiders un-burning, growing pink pale soft again. Rhinoceroses growing their horns again, roses growing their thorns. Icebergs draining the oceans. Whales multiplying, the deserts encroached by growth. The air is clear. The virus is everywhere. It’s turtles all the way down.