Many thanks to , Apocrypha’s resident sensitivity reader, for editing out the more colourful language.

#1

Holy [redacted] ya won’t believe a bloody thing I tell ya, but this is some serious [redacted] and I need to tell it ya fast and straight before it’s all over for me. It all started with the usual bang-about when Lee-One and Lee-Two both called me on their secure lines on the same day, and told me to go to the meeting spots. I call ‘em Lee-One and Lee-Two because the first Lee is Irish-American and the second Lee is Chinese, and apparently it’s more politically correct to use numbers than [redacted] Lee and [redacted] Lee. I mean I’m a quarter Irish myself so I don’t really see how [redacted] can be offensive when I’m one of ‘em. It’s like a [redacted] calling another [redacted] a [redacted], right?

Anyway, I was sitting in the embassy when they both called within five minutes of each other, setting my ticker running so I’m spinning out like a headless chook. I say the embassy, which sounds pretty swish, but they put the Aussies down in some godawful basement with the other colonials while the Poms prance around upstairs in starched white trousers like they still run the country, like they didn’t sell it off after the Japs cleared out. The only true blue fella in the whole joint is the Welshman down the corridor from me, Vaughn. He hates the Poms nearly more than I do, and he’s got a lot more time to complain about ‘em. There are only thirteen Welshmen in all of Singapore, and three of those are his cousins.

Anyway, the point is I had to get moving to the American safe house in Chinatown to meet with Agent Lee-One, and then hot-step it to the Chinese safe house in Little India to meet with Agent Lee-Two. Somehow, these two always seemed to call me around the same time. If they didn’t pay so well, I’d have asked more questions about how their diaries synced up so well. Maybe Ford and Mao were doing more backroom finagling than the press was letting on. Maybe Kissinger was better at his job than the Straits Times had impugned. Maybe I was, in some small way, going to help end the bloody war and get our boys home.

#2

The same-day meetings with Lee-One and Lee-Two were no coincidence. My cover had been blown sky high, and both the Yanks and the Chinese knew I was dirty, knew I’d been double or triple-crossing both sides for yonks. They both, separately, give me the same menacing speech as I trembled in my boots, saying they’d report me to my superiors as a mole, and how I was going to be ‘expunged’ if I didn’t now do what they wanted.

It always screwed with my head, meeting Lee-One and Lee-Two in grimy, tiny, slimy near-identical second-floor rooms in shophouses, the groundfloor godowns selling dried stingrays and squirrels or malabar spices and ghee, the upstairs letted and sub-letted and sub-sub-letted to various traders and establishments of lesser repute. The same knowing look from the old fella running the shop or his missus, the flick of the eyes toward the unmarked door I was supposed to go through, the sticky stairways, the windowless rooms, the bare bulbs, the lone metal chair for me to sweat in while the besuited bespectacled government agent stood in the corner and addressed me from the gloom. Add in too many Fosters the night before and, bloody hell, the threatening rhetoric kind of blended together in my mind until it became one speech delivered by two sinister mouths.

L1: We know you’ve been selling secrets to the other side…

L2: Getting paid twice for the same information…

L1: Double-dipping…

L2: But the game’s changed, my antipodean friend…

L1: Vietnam’s just the beginning. The dominoes are falling toward something greater…

L2: There’s a new world order coming, and each person will need to make a decision…

L1: The ultimate decision…

L2: The battle for the soul of the world…

Lee-Two ended our meeting abruptly, but handed me a key as he left the room, ornate with jade inlays. Music seemed to accompany the key, if that makes any [redacted] sense. A distant song, played on chimes, nearly haunting if it weren’t so delicate. At first I thought it was just the sound of the wind blowing through the alleys, but even when I slid into the stool at the Sago Street pub and pulled the key out of my pocket as I sipped a cold pint, I could hear the music again, like it was coming from the next room over. What the [redacted] was I meant to think of that?

#3

To cut a long story short, the jade-inlaid key matched a locked door in the gents room at the pub, which was kind of creepy, but the door concealed a set of stairs up to the roof of the building and I needed some fresh air and a break from the hustle of the hawkers and street-traders and rickshaw drivers that fill every [redacted] road in Little India, so I drained the pint in my hand and stumbled up the stairs.

Well, [redacted] me mum, I nearly fell back down those stairs when I reached the top, because there were two old boys in strange get-ups, swords drawn and circling each other. These were serious costumes, let me tell you, not fancy dress stuff but like from a film set. Real-life looking. Mutton chops and linen suits and silk scarves and long pistols and knee-high leather boots. The men put their swords away when they saw me and jostled to shake my hand. The big blonde one called himself Gotfried van der Vinne, and the little fat one said he was Harold Brookes.

GV: You are the double-agent, ja?

HB: The man they call the linchpin? The conduit?

I shrugged and stared at them with glassy eyes. I couldn’t decide who was pulling my leg, but I knew it was being pulled.

GV: We are at war, man!

Me: I know that. But what’s with the get-ups?

HB: ‘Tis is not the war you are thinking of. ‘Tis not even our war.

Me: What?

GV: We are fighting a war, my country against his. For the fourth time, in fact.

HB: The Hollanders do not know how to stay down when they lose. ‘Tis almost admirable.

Me: Wait, what year do ya think it is?

HB: ‘75, of course. What kind of question is that?

Me: It is ‘75… but since when are the Dutch and English fighting? Is this about ‘Nam? Indochina?

GV: Forget Indochina. You know of the DPS, ja?

I coughed and glanced away. The way they were both looking at me made it clear I was supposed to know. I figured it was something to do with the Dutch, but my European history had always been rusty.

HB: ‘Tis all converging, my good fellow. You need to keep a spry eye.

They said some other nonsense about secret societies and enemies becoming friends becoming enemies again. Then they embraced and walked back down the staircase I had come up, but not before the Englishman had pressed a small, silver key into my hand.

I needed another [redacted] drink.

#4

I spent the rest of the [redacted] day sweating across this godforsaken humidified town, moving from pub to pub, shophouse to shophouse, sucking down beers and gin slings, hearing the distant windchimes no matter where I went, somehow always stumbling across doors that responded to keys I had been given by men in strange costumes, which led to rooms with two people trying desperately to tell me something without making any sense, always mentioning a war, always whispering about convergence, always winking about the DPS. Somehow all of them were convinced they were living in ‘75, but only by the penultimate pair of men did I finally think to ask what century they were meaning.

This was a Chinese bloke with a long braid and thick beard calling himself Limahong the Lord of Pirates, and crown-wearing, robe-donning Ali Jalla Abdul Jalil Shah II, a clearly caucasian man insisting he was the Sultan of Johor. They did their usual spiel about war and time and convergence, but when we got to the part where I asked about the year, I remembered to state I wanted the full year, I wanted to know when precisely they believed they were.

AJAJS II: By your calendar or ours?

L: Or one of mine? Celestial or Manchurian?

Me: Umm, just the normal one, the normal calendar.

AJAJS II: By your way of measuring time, it is the Year of your Lord 1575.

Me: I don’t understand.

L: You know how it goes. The DPS sets these things up.

AJAJS II: You play both sides long enough, and you find your way to convergence.

The two men laughed and walked away, dropping a tiny, wooden key on the dusty floor behind them. I heard the chimes again, faint but growing louder, and something in the way they clinked and rang told me that this was the final key, so I staggered to the Long Bar at Raffles for what seemed likely to be my last drink for a while. I still half-hoped this was all a psyop by the Americans and Chinese as punishment for double-crossing them both. I was still naive then.

#5

In a strange inversion, the wooden key didn’t open any doors. Instead Ngiam, my favourite bartender, slipped the key away from my shaky fingers and nodded over to a table in the back corner. I crunched across the peanut shells and slopped into the booth. Two men sat across from me, in zippered trousers and tight, shiny shirts, glowing squares affixed to their faces and wrists. Another Chinaman and American, distorted reflections of Lee-One and Lee-Two. They informed me they came from 2075, so I labeled them Future-Lee-One and Future-Lee-Two in my head.

FL1: The world’s reached an uneasy equilibrium, but it’s not the convergence we were promised

FL2: Sinosphere and Trumposphere, evenly matched but unequally yoked.

FL1: We first met early on in the war. Battle of Taipei, 2026.

FL2: The 2030s made the scramble for Africa look cute. So many weak countries gobbled up in a few short years.

FL1: In our time, Singapore is one of the only remaining independent junctures between East and West. As it has been for centuries, despite piracy and trading companies and empires and overleveraged multinationals. Where else do communism and capitalism meet and seek convergence?

FL2: There are only a few places in history where East and West have met and properly syncretized. And even fewer where the past and future have collapsed into a specific point of meeting. Aside from first-century Jerusalem, the only other place we have been able to identify is Singapore in 1975.

FL1: Here, and now, with you.

I’d been nodding along, barely keeping up, but then they paused and peered at me intensely.

Me: What do ya want from me?

FL1: You’ve been thinking too small. Double-crossing the spies of crumbling nation states, bound by chronological laws.

FL2: Think of empires, think of planets, think of information which flows backwards and forwards through time.

Me: Ya want me to tell you about things that’s happening here? I mean, now?

The two men nodded.

FL2: And not just your time, all times. The DPS have pulled back the curtain for you today. You’ve met our agents from successive centuries, they’ve all come to see you, to parlay with the conduit.

FL1: The war is bigger than just the future. Our empires want to gobble up the past too. Reshape it in their image.

Me: Hang on a tick, why would ya be working together then? If you’re at war with each other?

FL2: Our empires are at war. We, on the other hand, have achieved individualized convergence. We hope for a different way. A Definite Paradigm Shift.

Me: Is that what DPS stands for?

The two men narrowed their eyes at me, before both bursting into laughter. I chuckled along as if I understood, as if I’d made a witty joke.

FL1: You should get back to your office. Await our next contact.

FL2: Until then, say nothing about this to anyone. There are enemies of the DPS everywhere.

I nodded and the two men drained their pints and walked out of the swing doors, and I watched their white, bouncy shoes pacing away in unison. No more keys, just a direction to head back to the embassy. As if I could do any [redacted] work with everything I had just been through.

#6

My head, no, my whole body, was [redacted] as I stumbled back toward Eden Hall. I’d drank too much, but somehow not enough. None of this could be real, and yet I had experienced it, and so it had happened. I’m not much given to philosophical musings and the like, but [redacted] me, when something that’s absolutely [redacted] crazy happens, you either have to accept that more is possible than you ever [redacted] believed, or that you are [redacted] crazy yourself. And nobody sane ever truly believes they are crazy, and nobody truly crazy believes it either. So that’s what [redacted] good [redacted] philosophy is then. You can’t really fool yourself into thinking you’re crazy, so you’re stuck having to believe that crazy things are possible.

The chimes had disappeared with the exit of Future-Lee-One and Future-Lee-Two, but when I rounded the corner of Nassim Road, a gentle breeze began to carry the same delicate sound from within an overgrown garden on a plot of land I hadn’t ever noticed before. I poked my head through the tangled brush to see a small, stone building, with a gable roof and miniature spire. A faint sign over the door said ‘Welsh Free Church’, and something about its hidden nature and the gentle sound of the chimes drew me toward it.

The church was empty, and unusually cold for an unventilated building. The chimes grew louder until the moment I stepped across the threshold and they [redacted] disappeared. But it felt good to sit on the hard pew and look up at the stained glass in the quiet of a sacred space. It stopped my [redacted] head from spinning for a second. The glass didn’t depict anything that interesting, a lamb on a green field, but beneath the window an inscription was carved into stone, which I leaned forward to read:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

We shall ne’er see resurgence
Of the spirit of the ages
‘Til we find convergence
Amongst these very pages

A strange inscription for a church, but stranger still was the attribution: ‘N. E. Vaughn, 1875’. In an instant I connected Vaughn, my strange Welsh colleague at the embassy, with the fact that of all the pairs of men I had met that day, apparently stretching back through centuries, I had somehow skipped the 1800s. A dreadful sinking filling began to suck at my guts, and before I could do anything, I felt cold metal pressed against my neck. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Vaughn, his thin moustache dropping slightly, as he pressed the pistol against me.

NEV: I knew the conduit would show himself eventually. I just never expected it to be the brain-dead descendent of convicts. What kind of linchpin spends half of his life drunk and the other half hungover?

Me: Who are ya? What are ya, really?

NEV: I suppose you now know of the DPS?

Me: Sure.

NEV: Most people believe the DPS exists to protect me. But that is what they want you to think. I suppose they are useful, in their own way. They obfuscate many dangerous truths. Keep otherwise clear waters muddied.

I could feel the gun barrel slipping as Vaughn began to pontificate, so I ducked and turned, getting a hand on the gun and ripping it away from his light, delicate fingers, and trained it on him. He gave me a sickly smile, and I noticed how pale he was, nearly blue in the dim light of the church.

Me: It’s time to start [redacted] talking, mate. What’s all this really about?

NEV: Another time, another place.

He spun and ran out the door and when I pulled the trigger the gun only clicked at me. It wasn’t loaded.

#7

I’m recording all this in my office, I only got back from the church a few minutes ago. Vaughn’s office has been cleared, no [redacted] trace of him, and none of the receptionists at the embassy knew who I was talking about when I asked for his address, his phone number, anything. He’s [redacted] covered his tracks.

I’m leaving Singapore tonight. I’ll catch a ferry across to the Ruiu Islands, make my way back to Sydney the slow way, by boats and cars. Harder to be tracked, harder to be found.

I’m going to leave these tapes in the embassy archives. Something tells me it’s safer to keep this story verbal than to write anything down. Lest it be used against me.

“I didn’t collect these two documents myself. I don’t hack federal servers. They were shared with me by an individual I’m keeping anonymous. Digital activism is anonymous activism, and we all have to be unbreakable links. That individual isn’t the author of either text. AI for sure generated the Hinternet report. I don’t know who wrote the other one, the treatise. If I did, I’d put that creep on blast in a second.”

I disputed the statistics of the treatise’s textual analysis with Doon, since all four of its percentages are extremely inflated. Doon didn’t respond to that (thus, I had to add more context directly below the four percentages themselves, as you’ll read in the treatise). However, Doon did agree to comment at length, which you can read below. I did give this missive its title, because he refused to do so (telling me, “That’s for low-agency interns”). I reiterate: Doon is not a close acquaintance of mine. — KLT

Both documents were taken from the U.S. Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs. Like I told Kevin, I don’t hack federal servers. My contact says that ~40% of its staff got cut since September, which is about 60% too little. I know nothing else about this bureau. But for my wallet, maybe I should. About 20-30 coders I know have been in DC since February, and I’m still clinging to couches in Durham or Austin. Principles do not pay, all that. I should have fitting Foucault or Barthes quotes to throw here, but I’m off the doctoral programs again and never memorized that shit like some of you weirdos do.

I do like the serendipities in DC, though: the treatise below was also submitted to two local DC organizations, the “” and the DC Comedy Festival. I’d hacked those organizations (long story, unrelated, don’t worry about it) and found the treatise in both their systems. It had the same name in both: “Fabricated and Flatulent.” Who knows why it was uploaded to either one. It’s too long for Secret Ballot, too unfunny for standup, and too paranoid for either.

It is worth reading, though. As overreaching surveillance I hate it but still need to disseminate it. Like I already told Kevin, digital activism requires unbreakable links. One way to never break is by breaking your enemies with drip-drip exposures. I’m not shocked that is being infiltrated by feds: the whole project is after the Skeumorphic Sublime, because its people already see the future through the prism of the past. Any pedantocrat who targets the Hinternet for that mission is my enemy and should be yours too.

Please share the treatise in full, Rothwell, and thank you for rejecting fecklessness. May we become more human, bits and all. — JD

Regarding the Conspiracy of the 2025 Hinternet Summer Course

Official Report to the USBECA Senior Official

August 25, 2025

Hinternet Summer Course

155KB ∙ PDF file

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The Bureau must review all Internet-sourced conspiracies not only as networks of human and robotic operatives who enact both informational and material sabotage against our interests, but also as theoretical imaginations that will become real.

The Senior Official has requested that I briefly summarize only the points of utmost importance. I have just done so. I will now elaborate within the Bureau-mandated 700 words. “Constraints for efficiency,” indeed. The Senior Official may continue reading if he wishes to fully understand the workings of the Hinternet conspiracy.

According to the “First Annual Hinternet Summer School Report” (hereafter, “Report”; available as “JS-R.000022825JD” in USBECA records), the course was “a small, experimental summer school” whose creator and followers gathered via Zoom to study “the uses of fabulation, metafiction, and parafiction within scholarly practice.” The Report details the activities of the six sessions of the Hinternet summer course: discussions, guest lecturers, projects, and even academic quibbles, all veiled by what must be the anonymizing output of an artificial-intelligence large language model. Rather than reporting who said what, the report names “the conversation”; rather than reporting who proposed a typology of fabrications, the report names “the meeting.” No participants are named.

Compared to the other anonymized online communities we have monitored and infiltrated, the Hinternet course presents itself tamely. But any subpar student of Western upheaval between 1500 and 2025 knows that experimental schools ferment not only subversive ideas but subversive realities. (If the Bureau would provide the research hours I’ve requested since 2000, I would explain at length why ideas and realities have never been different entities.) Even a half-witted public schooler can see the conspiracy of the common classroom. From above, ideologies pour in. A so-called teacher channels them through the straws called texts, and so-called students imbibe them through the slurping called reading. I do not exaggerate. Hyperbole disgusts me. I am describing the conspiracy of every educational venture. Conspiracy is what the Hinternet course fostered.

To serve Bureau-mandated desires and formatting, I offer these numerical instancess of such fostering:

• The term group occurred 7 times (2.06% of the all words in the report)

• The term participants occurred 10 times (3.11% of all words in the report)

• The term collaborative occurred 5 times (1.91% of all words in the report)

All instances of these words combine to total 7.08% of all words in the report.

[The Report consists of 3,652 words. That means that each of the percentages listed above is actually well below 0.3%, and that “7.08%” is actually wishful thinking. Never mind that the three sampled words are basically anodyne in most contexts. — KLT]

What I offer above is only quantitative proof that the Hinternet is incubating an anonymous conspiracy that (my source indicated) spans no fewer than three continents, including eastern Asia. What I emphasize now is the quality of the conspirators’ aim: to imagine so skillfully that material reality imitates what they imagine. Their tentacles are already encircling us. They are beginning to penetrate the ears of American citizens and curl around the small orbs treasured in the soft gray canals of their brains, these orbs we call ideas. To what ends? To globalist ends in service of third-worldism and disorder. The material of their first meetings already include “nation-making,” “fill[ing] the gaps (including beyond Europe),” and “overtly civic projects focused on ‘attention’ as a public good.” (This third phrase is so incriminating that were she present I could embrace the source who supplied it to us).

It may sound loftier than it is. But I’m only describing quotidian realities. I do not exaggerate. Invented things often become real and have done since before the accelerants of the Internet. Some invented things inevitably become real. (We observe rightwing and leftwing actors in this process; the Senior Official knows which he prefers.) The Hinternet course participants know this process well, and they flaunt their ongoing emulation as implication: “What had started as invention soon became indistinguishable from reality,” the Report states, “a revelation that clarified at once the allure of literature and the mechanics of propaganda.” Under the guise of literature, the mechanics of propaganda are underway in this conspiracy. Its civic disruptions may mention Lucian of Samosota, or Cervantes, or other such red herrings, but they are not merely after artistic invention in service of scholarly revolution: they are after reality.

We must pluck their ideas from the ears and mouths of American citizens before they resemble these conspirators.

Auxiliary Materials (Not Counted Toward Bureau-Mandated Word Count)

Allow me to append further reading, courtesy of USBECA guidance you likely haven’t already read and courtesy of my own personal syllabi. I have attached all Bureau files in a separate email. Please read the books for yourself.

• MK-R.000040527JD. “Regarding Historical Perception of the Incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. Official Report to the USBECA Senior Official.” 2004.

• MK-S.000021633JD. “Regarding Reality Fractures in Digital Communications: Telegraphs through Snapchat. Official Report to the USBECA Senior Official.” 2019.

• HK-S.000012581JD. “Attention in American Universities: Payment, Loss, and Capture.” 2021.

• HK-R.000021384JD. “Zoom as Informational Node and Educational Revolution.” 2021.

• JK-S.000011363KL. “Regarding 21st-Century Hyperstition, Digital Philosophers, and Mediated Madness. Official Report to the USBECA Senior Official.” 2023.

• JK-S.000064238JD. “Regarding the Invisible and Subversive Inputs in Large Language Models. Official Report to the USBECA Senior Official.” 2024.

• JS-R.000022825JD. “First Annual Hinternet Summer School Report.” 2025.

• The Curious Conspiracy of Snails, Cats, and Children Made to Speak Silently in Calais. Matthews, Eugene. Cambridge University Press. 1874.

• Reality Remade, Nature Rewritten: Gutenberg through the Romantics. Erickson, Carl. University of California Press. 1963.

• The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. Land, Nick. Routledge. 1992.

• The Secret Worlds of Images: Television as Tool of Conspiracy. Hartman, Madeleine. Oxford University Press. 1996.

• Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Land, Nick. Ed. MacKay, Robin and Brassier, Ray. Urbanomic Press. 2011.

• The Revolution Must Be Livestreamed: Preparing and Broadcasting E-Collective Action. Rouge-Jones, Amanda. Princeton University Press. 2015.

• The Internet is Not What You Think It Is. Smith, Justin E.H. Princeton University Press. 2022.

Here at Apocrypha, we take it as read that literary prizes such as the recently announced Nobel are trivialities of no consequence, little more than popularity prizes or status baubles. Indeed, we would go as far as to suggest any claim to determine quality via committee is tautologically doomed: the average taste of any group of individuals will necessarily be average. To top a list of the “100 greatest X”, or to be awarded a prize in the arts is to be identified by your peers as mediocre, middlebrow, even, perhaps, a midwit. Having said that, we understand all too well that the economics of the internet deem it necessary for this newsletter’s “growth”, “relevance”, and/or “reputation”, to occasionally wade into the murky waters of The Discourse™, and in the run up to the Nobel’s announcement over the last few weeks nothing has been the subject of more feverish discussion than the decision of a few Swedish academics. Many tried and failed to predict the eventual winner. Dozens of names were bandied around, some of them writers. One author on many lips, as he has been for many years now, is the elusive Russian writer known to the world as Yakov Yasninsky. Of course, current geopolitics prevents any Russian national from ever winning such a centrist, bourgeoisie award, but as I hope I made clear, we are not interested in anyone who has a serious chance of actually winning the prize; anyone with a Nobel is necessarily unworthy of attention. Hence we dispatched our own Russian pen, Vanya Bagaev, to investigate his countryman and greatest literary inspiration, Yakov Yasninsky.

There are only a few facts known about Yakov Yasninsky and only one record of his public appearance, and most of the former define or redefine the latter. What we know for sure: he’s a contemporary Russian author; in 2002 he wrote a novel called “Phantomic Rabbits” that has already become a matter of cult and controversy in Russian literary circles; we know that he praises Dostoevsky and perhaps draws inspiration from the master’s work, though few connections between their writings can be found; we know that he has a wife. All of those facts are rather blurry and don’t provide us with a definite picture of who Yakov Yasninsky is rather than an archetypical author, for the video corresponding to the podcast of his only public appearance cannot be called trustworthy, and nobody can trust anything these days. It was believed that Yasninsky was a shy introvert, a hermit, or even an anon: someone afraid or having no desire to be in public, however, the only interview illustrated and convinced many, that Yasninsky is self-confident, calm, and his seclusive lifestyle is a personal well-thought strategy rather than necessity dictated by the peculiarities of his character. Many don’t trust that either, saying he could’ve hired an actor.

When the podcast was announced in 2014, the public decided that Yasninsky would finally give more interviews, appear on TV, make an autograph session, or deliver a lecture at some university for aspiring literary achievers, but alas (!) — after that occasion, he disappeared into thin ether, and no one heard anything about him ever since. Scarce reports declare him being seen in a hut in Norwegian fjords, some say the same about a farm in Switzerland, some say he lives in Canada and teaches people skiing, those who aren’t even aware of who he is. In his X-Twitter, a man named aRn@B108 even claims that Yasninsky has become a monk, an adherent of the Armenian Apostolic Church, and now lives in isolation in a remote monastery hidden in Armenian mountain forests, and he, aRn@B108, has a photographic evidence of it. The truth keeps being what she is and, per usual, shields herself from being what she truly should be.

The reader may speculate, try to hunt or stalk Yasninsky, unleash the hounds after him, but we believe that this is impossible, for his planet-scale and reality-scale hide and seek has always been his plan, from day zero, and “Phantomic Rabbits” isn’t just a novel, but an art project, which makes the book paradoxically both free to graze on its own, open to a reader’s interpretations, and inseparable from Yasninsky’s persona.

Today we shall provide the reader with detailed explanations, that, though being a theory like most of the things known about Yasninsky, describe what happened and why and how Yasninsky’s plan has always been on the surface if the reader paid enough attention to his book.

Just one word can bend reality, flip it upside down, as if we said this piece was written by Yasninsky, where “Yasninsky” is indeed that word that introduces confusion and chaos to the discourse. We cannot prove or deny this statement. The public doesn’t even know whether “Yakov Yasninsky” is his real name and whether he’s real at all (though his publisher is eager to confirm that). However, we want to state clearly that Yakov Yasninsky is real. It’s easy to believe that something is not real, given a lack of evidence or even counterfactual evidence, and this is exactly how Yakov wanted the public to behave. He has a deep understanding of the human psyche, how the world and words work, and in his life and his book, he was able to orchestrate them in a way that reality herself started doubting her true nature.

Now, we are to unpack Yakov Yasninsky’s approach and, even though we cannot justify the promising title of “catching” the rabbit in its usual sense, give the reader the main idea behind Yakov Yasninsky’s disappearance, for that is what he is — an idea, or rather, a meme.

“Phantomic Rabbits” starts with the following passage:

All her life, all Neonida wanted was to pet a rabbit, but rabbits were always too skittish. Living next to a charming petting zoo, her days were spent attempting to interact with the adorable, elusive creatures, their plump tails flicking like fleeting apparitions ascending an ethereal staircase. The mischievous animals would sometimes draw near, but always managed to dodge her touch, vanishing like phantoms when she reached for them. It seemed to her as though the hardest thing in the world was to hold on to one for even the shortest of moments, reminiscent of the Greek hero chasing the fabled tortoise, every day, step by step, attempting to reach it. This began a lifetime of fruitless pursuit for Neonida, and with each passing day, her determination swelled.

This passage not only introduces the protagonist, a girl named Neonida, but also demonstrates Yakov’s deep appreciation for literary and pop culture canon, further weaving them seamlessly into his story, displaying a sort of intertextuality that delights devoted readers so much. Thus, the Matrix and, obviously, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, appear first. The white rabbit from Lewis Carroll’s classic novel is the major influence on Yasninsky’s “Phantomic Rabbits”, inspiring fantastical elements and evoking themes of mystery, illusion, and self-discovery, which immediately relates to the Wachowski’s cult film, bringing to “Phantomic Rabbits” similar themes of perception, reality, illusion, as well as the struggle between fate and choice. Other prominent works that the novel “talks” to include Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”, which, like “Phantomic Rabbits”, explores the allure of the unknown, the temptation of forbidden knowledge, and the complexities of human nature (”Master and Margarita” is, however, such a dense text, nay a hypertext, and it’s hard not to find a novel that wouldn’t in one way or another reference it or touch upon similar themes); “Donnie Darko”, exploring themes of troubled youth, supernatural occurrences, and underlying complexities of our existence; the old Hollywood classic “Harvey”, touching themes of friendship, loneliness, and mental health; and, unmistakably, Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Peter Rabbit”, which later in his novel Yakov Yasninsky completely reimagines, providing a darker, more intricate interpretation of it. As the reader can see, copious other references appear in the book; in fact, almost every sentence may contain a reference. Should the reader venture to visit genius.com, they will indeed find a decent crowdsourced guide to the novel and its charted uncharted territories.

Despite, or because of, all the references, few people understand that the core theme of the book is one’s identity, personal story, fame, and labels attached to one by society. He knew, should one become an author, a public figure, one’s life will be given to the hands of the public. Should one become “known” for once, one becomes something taken for granted and, from that moment, one can’t break the shackles of the public’s thoughts, for, as Yasninsky specifically mentions in the novel, thoughts of others are as potent as one’s own. Yasninsky, however, is a free man and would prefer complete freedom, and to be completely free for him is to be unknown, which, being a cult author, is a hard task to accomplish. When no one knows anything about you, nothing they say can be considered a lie, you don’t have to explain everything to everyone, your work cannot be seen through the lens of “you”, you don’t give anyone any expectations regarding youself or your work, hence no one can be disappointed in any of your cancellable actions! Clearly, all Yakov Yasninsky wanted was to make his work be interpreted for what it is and not who he is, for not knowing where the rabbit is hiding is better than pretending as if we know everything about the rabbit.

Perhaps not from the beginning, but Yasninsky understood that and decided to weave a mist around himself. The book masterfully implements a binary opposition of Yakov vs non-Yakov, where Yakov is a rabbit, an evasive, phantom and uncatchable, and non-Yakov is Neonida, a little girl with an innocent face and, as we learn later in the novel, quite a carnivorous nature. So we believe that Yakov Yasninsky did, and keeps doing, exactly what consistently happens in his book: the rabbit revealed himself to Neonida and as soon as her little bloodthirsty hands reached for the animal, the rabbit — *poof!* — vanished.

When his book was released and instantly gained success, he felt that he became too real, under the pressure of his readership forming a simulacrum of his innermost self instead of just being who he was, and thus he started erasing himself. There appeared, however, an new obstacle of an insurmountable type — the internet. One can erase oneself from reality, but one cannot erase oneself from the internet that easily. So, Yasninsky developed a new, hitherto unused method of becoming invisible in the world where everyone is under the radar. He knew that the public should know nothing about him, but it was even better if the public knew several things which were quite wrong. We are sure Yasninsky doesn’t use a pseudonym because using a pseudonym means creating a new story for oneself, while Yasninsky desires to have no story whatsoever and erase the existing story he had. He carefully curated the scarcity of his public appearances to just one podcast, and managed to maintain an air of enigma, which made his single appearance even more valuable and intriguing. Then he meticulously created false digital footprints, making it difficult to discover or piece together his actual identity. Some facts can still be found, but they contradict each other and often represent the game of Chinese Whispers. This is also a part of his plan. If something cannot be erased, it should be replaced with something else contradicting it, better so multiple times, until it becomes impossible to say what’s true and what’s not.

The culmination of these elaborate strategies succeeded in virtually erasing Yakov Yasninsky from reality. In a masterstroke of performance and anonymity, Yasninsky situated himself in a realm where only the most determined could attempt to find him, a space between truth and fiction. He knew that any author’s woe is constant demand for explanation of everything to everyone yet at the same time trying to grip on the novelty of what they do. Yet it’s impossible to keep novelty novel and freshness afresh after everything is explained, so the author has no choice but to lie to move forward.

The novel thus ends as a warning, not for the reader but for Yasninsky himself:

Her hand lunged, snatching the white rabbit with a vice-like grip. Its terrified squeaks were quickly silenced as Neonida brought the creature to her mouth, her teeth sinking into its soft flesh. Blood splattered across her face as she tore into the rabbit, the taste of iron filling her senses.

Bethlehem Presbyterian is one of the white clapboard churches. Shining still, it waits on the southern edge of the intersection with the only road that returns to Chapel Hill. The sign is as white and wooden as the chapel itself, and they perch together on a slight hill overlooking the southward road like intricate ice sculptures which may melt any day.

I can walk to the church with my dog. We come northward up the road and turn left into Bethlehem Presbyterian, edging around the dogwood tree that from March to June is as perfectly, impossibly white as the site it heralds. And past the dogwood, just behind the church’s sign, is the nearest headstone. It reads Bennett Henderson, Beloved Son and Brother. You only know that you’re inside a graveyard — distinctly not a churchyard — once you’ve stepped past Bennett and continued into the scant rows beyond, where the sky suddenly looms, immense and endless over the pasture now like a sea.

Since it’s been a mild and rainy summer, I’ve walked with my dog to Bethlehem Presbyterian more often than usual, and lingered among the graveyard more than usual, to notice the engraved histories of the dead as I never had previously. The graveyard is never visited, since the families of the dead either move away from this passed-over county or else join their departed ones below the grass. Visiting always alone allows me to loose my dog from his leash, and see which graves he approaches by his own opaque instinct, while I hang the leash over my nape and follow behind him like a simple mendicant. On a scent, my dog plows the grass with his snout, carving the exact pattern of the track in the grass, hurrying along loops ahead and behind himself, audibly snuffling, his tail curling into a circle.

He found the headstone on four successive visits to the graveyard. Pressing his snout to its surface after a furious tracking, he leaps back a step, then strains forward to sniff whatever first drew him. He never marks the headstone. It’s the farthest one from the church, and on each of the four visits, I read it:

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N.E. Vaughn
    Poet 
1801-1899

Reading the scant inscription this fourth time, I see without reason that I already knew to seek this grave. The two initials, surname, vocation, and dates had already been etched in my mind. I now sense also the difference between a churchyard and a graveyard: in a churchyard, familiarity is welcome, even glorious; in a graveyard it’s always unwelcome. I’m not familiar with this dead stranger — not truly. Why should I already know the name of this headstone which no one visits, in the shadow of a dying church?

It’s worth saying that Bethlehem Presbyterian is dying, the way that small country churches die. After 203 years, the people of its body leak out through its front doors like the ebbing of a flood. The last trickles are obscured by entities like a historical conservation nonprofit, a farmers’ market, and an artistic co-op, all shielding the remains of the church rather than stanching the leak or refilling the sanctuary. You can’t understand the loss from outside the chapel which is now devoted to oblique sculptures and amateur pottery. Only inside the church do you feel the last puddles soak through your shoes, as I do when I go inside Bethlehem Presbyterian to inquire about N.E. Vaughn.

I’ve tied my dog to the railing just outside, and through the double doors he scratches and howls after me. Inside the chapel, there is only a plump ceramicist in sandals and a half-buttoned shirt plastered with fish. His pottery and sculptures are the ones occupying the chapel. I ask him if he knows where I can find burial records for the graveyard. “I’m sure they have records in here somewhere,” he answers pleasantly. But, pleasant though he sounds, he doesn’t rise from the folding table where he has arrayed his business cards and mobile card reader.

I ask if he knows where the records might be. “Can’t say I do, exactly,” he said. “I’m not the pastor, to be clear. I’m Jerry Bowam, these are my artworks on display.”

I tell him I know that, since the sign on the door states as much. The sculptures and bowls fill the two alcoves on either side of the pews, and they vary in size, shape, and color, though in a certain misshapenness and shine, they all share the imprint of an unpracticed, quivering hand. My dog continues to bay through the doors, drowning out the whirring sound of the fan high overhead, the buzzing of the smaller fans in the alcoves. I see, to the right of the altar, a small office through a half-closed door.

Jerry says, “I’ll be here until Advent, just so you know.” I tell him that’s nice and step away to close myself inside the office. “Wait, are you the pastor?” Jerry calls through the door.

The office contains only a desk, a chair, and seven filing cabinets. It more or less resembles the chapel, if more exhausted: dark wood flooring beneath a teal carpet, windows in white frames, and no native sounds. I don’t hesitate before searching everything, though I should hesitate. It’s a pastor’s office. Or it was once. But I have an object beyond reverence, and I plunder the twenty-eight drawers of the filing cabinets, and then the desk drawers.

The burial records are waiting in the last space I search, the halting lowest-left drawer of the desk (I have to kick it to unjam it, a kick like the blow of an axe, too hard, inexplicably panicked). They are two leather-bound volumes, each larger than the drawer should be able to fit. I remove the top volume and heave its bulk onto the desk. Looking over untitled cover, then opening its dense and yellowed pages, I see them both again. There is no reasonable basis of thought in me to receive what I’m seeing for — apparently — the second time. On every page, the faded columns of names, years, causes, and personal effects once removed from the burial clothing.

Vaughn’s entry repeats what his headstone recorded: “N.E. Vaughn. Poet. 1801-1899.” But the next column continues: “Burial 1902. Effects include—” Here, the rest of the entry — the rest of the page — is ripped away, un-recorded. I turn the flapping, useless half-page as though Vaughn’s entry continues uninterrupted on its other side. It doesn’t, of course. There are only the other entries belonging to the other dead interred in the graveyard between 1902 and 1903.

I close the volume. I reopen it. Though its record of Vaughn is finished, I can’t be done with it. I should be done with it, and with all the rest of them. What I thoroughly and specifically hate about documents purporting to record reality, whether burial records, New Orleans levee repair reports, shipping manifests, or Dutch chronicles of St. Peter’s Flood, is that in their actual recording of historical minutiae they confound, even contort, a genuine perception of the history they’re intended to clarify. The accumulation of their details becomes a morass which, like many a fetid mangrove swamp already submerged to its knees, obscures every route with the very discoveries that the wretched explorer hopes will mark his way. Never mind that Vaughn’s entry is torn away and left incomplete. Even the remaining text doesn’t clarify the headstone which this volume in my hands was specifically created to clarify. If Vaughn died in 1899, why was he interred in 1902? Where had his corpse lay before 1902? Had there been more than one location? Had Vaughn’s decaying body, his impassive face set against the maggots, lain in both marbled and decrepit graveyards, or been borne upon a viewing car of spotless windows to travel by rail in a years-long procession meant to honor his life? And what of the interrupted phrase, Effects include? In this half-hint of Vaughn’s effects, the questions of what the effects were and why they needed to be hidden by confiscation of the entire page are introduced more strongly than Vaughn’s effects themselves could’ve been. So I can only imagine what they were. A parchment scrap of his final poem? A teak pipe inherited from his father, the disgraced Oxford don who promulgated the theory that the Biblical flood was specifically wrought to eliminate the forebears of Irish wrens? A signet ring given only to members of a morbid global conspiracy? Little objects kept in a man’s trouser and jacket pockets historically turn out to be insignificant and banal, if my favorite criminal case logs are to be believed. But the phrase that only introduces their existence multiplies questions about their essence, each question curling and hardening like brambles against the answer they’re meant to find. Historical documentation always fevers my imagination, and so I sweat over Effects include, and I tell myself against reason that I prefer poetry to history. In verse, the obfuscation within the evident meaning is the method of revelation, and the delight.

There is poetry, I see. There is a line of iambic pentameter handwritten in the margin of the half-page of Vaughn’s interrupted entry. There is a line of iambic tetrameter handwritten in the margin of the page following, and in the margin preceding it. I page through the dead to spot these verses which can’t have been there, were not there when I first found Vaugh’s entry. There are seven lines in all. They alternate pentameter and tetrameter, and from Vaughn’s entry they unfurl ahead and behind:

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Was past, was placid still in here,
my roiling, breathless, heaving resting-place.
Peace! this murd’rous blue necklace
Who did constrict, herself ne’er once becalmed,
My round of breath and whole of life.
Her darkness swelled as high as tides; embalmed
I drift in water’s bedding, near

Even though the first and the final verses may rhyme, I see in the prompt-less response “Was” and the missing final period that these lines are only flotsam from a larger poem. I search the rest of the volume, and then the other, but I find no other marginal handwritten verses. I replace the volume into the drawer and nod goodbye to Jerry Bowam and see myself out of the church. Again outside, my dog wriggling against my knees as he pants from the exertions of his warnings, I feel the day has cooled with the advance of thunderheads which were distant before we arrived. A wind streams, recedes, returns. We begin to walk the churchyard. Effects include is now pooling together with itself gently becalmed, and I understand neither.

As a poet, I keep a discreet shame in having no ear for memorizing poetry. But having read them only once, I hear the lines did constrict, herself ne’er once becalmed, / My round of breath and whole of life. / Her darkness swelled as high as tides; rather, I see them in my mind strung together like a rope floating on open water, lacking its life preserver. I dislike seeing them there. I dislike their archaic elisions, and I dislike their limited trochaic substitutions, and I dislike their dowdy 19th-century meter, but beneath these technicalities, I fear how easily the lines seep into my mind. How they return unwanted, insistent.

We find ourselves inside a white-brick spiral in the churchyard. It spins out from a pawn-shaped white seat to enclose the grass and edge to the pavement of the parking lot. My dog crosses every arm of the spiral to sniff the central seat, and then, like he’s learned the ritual movement by scent, he begins to circle the lines. I follow behind him, preoccupied. The cypher of N.E. Vaughn circles with us, but downward — My round of breath — rather than outward — and whole of life.

He might’ve drowned. It’s the implied wish — I drift in water’s bedding, near — of the verses I can’t stop recalling. Perhaps his drifting through unknown waters explains those years between his death and his interment: three years of falling through a smothering blackness, settling into the riverbed, tossing under the eternal current, all blind. He could’ve drowned in the Haw River. That’s the river which courses through the tiny hillside town two miles south from Bethlehem Presbyterian. The Haw is low beneath the hill, beneath the bridge the town erected generations ago, but its brown waters run wide, and in certain panics on sudden nights, they rise. They rise over the rocks below the banks, engulf the sand of the trails beyond the rocks, and climb the maples meant to keep vigil over them. In a single night this past July, under the tropical storm that somehow cornered us 246 miles inland, the Haw rose 32 feet and submerged the bridge we built to protect ourselves from its waters. When they receded, the whole landscape was displaced, laid like new layers of sediment atop the trees, the riverbanks, and the brick buildings left beside the bridge. Branches once fifteen feet from the ground were packed in beneath those once eight feet up, interred tightly and every moment degrading into mulch. The Haw River drowned its neighbors and revised its environs — now, the disordered mass graves we’re still uncovering.

It’s easy to see how Vaughn drowned in the Haw. Even when its waters lie low and docile, they still beckon. On a moonlit night, one might pick his way downhill through the boulders and bushes meant to protect him. Below, the black waters offer an illusory silver walkway that a poet feels upon himself like an insistent hand caressing the back of his head, or a turning in his heels. One may be attempting to find the soft carpet of sand that enters the river without risk, but one can slip, quite easily. One can also leap, if one is a poet enchanted. The waters are deep. Inside themselves, they distend beyond even the imaginings of verse, so that one is snared in the arms of a log or smeared against a sunken granite boulder, so that one never touches the river bottom. One may not even know that he is falling forever. For the darkness swells as high as tides, as Vaughn wrote it.

My dog escapes the spiral, just now. I follow. The few headstones I see are speckling with what must be the first rain droplets of another storm. I call my dog away, and he follows me out of the churchyard.

What a blasting relief heaven must be for the drowned, I think. After they’ve fallen and settled in a hellish dark, they feel themselves ascending with inhuman speed through the waters which killed them, breaching, flying, breaching again but now through the surface of the material world, settling upwards, at last, in God their life now independent of breathing and everything else. If Vaughn drowned, I hope he breached death and then settled upwards. No one ought to drown forever in the river of his contemplation, where he’d spotted his verses like water striders skating across the waters. As Kierkegaard wrote through a pseudonym discovered by another pseudonym, “[S]he is about to become wholly spiritual, something nature does not tolerate.” I sense this quality in Vaughn and his whole of life, and though I’m still without reasons for it, it’s a sense I accept nonetheless. If aquatic nature didn’t tolerate Vaughn, the wholly spiritual God could have. I ask it of Him, in the way one prays with his eyes open, his feet walking.

The rain falls on us before we reach home. Vaughn’s headstone is too ragged to be perceptibly washed in it. And beneath the bridge, the Haw River begins again, invisibly, to climb.

— KLT, 9/8/2025

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THERE IS an island out there beyond the last shimmering gasp of the foam-flecked sea. Most men have not heard tale of it. Of those who have half do not believe. Only the unhappy few who have beleaguered and forlorn been swept upon its dark shores by bitter winds do begrudgingly acknowledge its rumour. Always at night are sailors smote upon those ruined beaches, when the last curling embers of the dying day have frayed the horizon until it too is blackened and burnt beyond all recognition and not even the birds can tell sky from sea.

Aye. I can see what you mean to ask and yes I too have seen it. To my ragret.

Twas’ long ago now and yet I do remember it as clear and true as if it were only yesterday and yet even then the images of that curs-ed night do sit in my mind’s eye in a strange kind of light, like a dream or apparition not of this world. I might take it for a nightmare if it were not that I know for a fact that Mac done seen it too for when he lay dying late late last year he sent for me and when I arrived by his bedside he gripped my shoulder with a wild look in his eyes and said to me, “I see her even now, when I shuts mine eyes I still see her. Please don’t let me go to her, I cannot go back to that place.”

Here the narrator pauses while he thumbs his tobacco into the spoon of his worn and weary pipe, tapping it gently until it stays and then his chin and mottled neck is suddenly illumined by a warm glow as he lights his drag and so puffing a few breaths continues.

Aye. I remember it all too well. That great crag loomed indigo on the horizon like some mirage upon the ocean desert and so unsure of where’s we was after being blown far from our nets we gladly made rudder for that refuge, agreeing unwordingly to see out the night upon that strange place that neither of us yet knew. The storm that had so ruined our course had since subsided and the roiling waves had given back to a becalmed glass and the only noise in the night was the soft splash of oars as Mac heaved us towards shore.

As we approached in the gloom I watched as a swathe of cloud washed upon the heights of the mountain that shuddered so violently out of the waves and blanketed the island until we see could naught but the wet wisps of white fog. If we hadn’t already been making course for the isle for a good hour or so we would never have known it there so smothered it was. With each passing stroke of the oars a deep well of dread began to mount ever greater in my chest until I was jolted out of my panic by the rough berth we made upon blackened sands. We towed the rowboat out of the water and looked about for wood and kindling with which to warm ourselves. We had caught naught before the tempest so we had naught to roast but we hoped at least to keep away some of the terrors of the night which our imaginations had scurrying beastly across our peripheries. Having scavenged a poor heap of driftwood dry enough to light Mac set to blowing a small fire by which we stared unspeaking into the flames hoping I’d wager to find escape from that eerie place until lady slumber laid her coins upon our eyes.

I know not what woke me but in the dead of night my lids snapped open to find the last thin tendrils of smoke rising coldly from extinguished ashes and Mac nowhere to be seen. I called out to him, my voice cracking in the dark. All that came back to me out of the grey gloom was my own echoing question. I jumped up in a panic and so stumbling up the rough shingle, twice falling to the floor, I kept up a chorus of shouting for Mac, each call more desperate than the last until I suddenly recovered my sense. I stopped still and cocked my ear to the fogged winds. Silence. But wait, no, there. A kick of stones in the dark. I plunged towards the sound, going crossways now, back down the slope. I stopped again, waiting for another clue. There, just to the left. I charged on until before me out of the mist appeared two figures. Kneeling upon the floor was Mac in a trance of sorts and his eyes, my god his eyes, they were rolled back contrawise in his sockets until nought was visible but the white, and standing before him was a ghostly woman clad all in black.

At the racket of my approach the woman turned her dreaded head and looked at me with eyes of such startling ebony they made the night appear to orbit around them like an obsidian vortex of some forgotten hell. With a screech so primal and blood-curdling that I can hear it even now as I toss and turn on the sleepless nights that plague me still she turned and fled into the night that even afore seemed haunted but now seemed more full of terrors than any phantom bestiary my mind could conjure by isself. I dashed over to Mac who had fallen to the stones and heaved him upon mine shoulder with strength I hadn’t known I possessed and so pitching ragged and drunk across the accur-sed beach I made for our salvation.

I know not how I found the blessed vessel lying strewn amid the fog and screams of that witch of the night which hurled themselves down from the cliffs about us, but find it I did. Not waiting to discover if the banshee planned on making a return I cast Mac’s unconscious body upon the hard timbers of the deck and gave the rowboat a mighty shove and when it caught float atop the waters lapping about my ankles I dove headlong into the stern.

As I rowed us away from that plagu-ed shore mine eyes remained fixed upon the twin opals glistening above the sands, two gleaming stones of absence that shone void-like through the fog as if the pupils of some Babylonian idol, some Moloch or Baal that hath wandered searching for Meggido for so long it ended up stranded there at the darkest rim of the earth lost and alone but unafraid. It was only by staring at those dire eyes that I could reckon our course away from them for the stars above were not in their usual place but had roved far from their positions as if we were making passage across another world entire.

Mac and I only ever spake about that ill night once afore his deathbed and in hushed tones and muttered breaths he reckoned we had somehow stumbled across the waters of the Styx and found the Isle of the Dead, the destination of all men and women and babes forsaken by the lands of the living. I know not if what he says is true but if it be so then that explains Man’s reticence to cease the toil of life for there is nothing in this world I’d dread more than happening again upon that doomed isle. Who knows what other horrors move their slow thighs across the wet soils of this earth but there’s lives upon them some terrors worse than all the plagues of men I can assure you that.

By publishing the stark-mad ravings of the egregoric entity known only as ‘A. A. Kostas’, Apocrypha in no way endorses the content of this essay nor does this publication bear any liability for the conclusions which may be drawn and the resulting financial and/or economic consequences (positive or negative). All liability falls on the author, including, but not limited to, liability for claims of slander, libel, disparagement, disenfranchisement, tort, injury, damage, pre-injury, pre-damage, post-injury, post-damage, demiurge, apocalypse, fracture, fracas, slip-and-fall, economic or non-economic loss, metanomic loss, metanyms, heteronyms, orthonyms, false poetrics, false imprisonment, public embarrassment, private shame, religious guilt, beatific visions, and/or uplifts of consciousness.

Let the reader understand.

Précis

In the gap year between my undergraduate (Poetics of Realpolitik) and masters (Biotechnological and Metaphysical Ethics) I was hired as a process server for an outfit in Fremantle, Western Australia. A process server is the person who serves you papers in a court case, tracking you down, fooling you into identifying yourself, then signing an affidavit stating the documents were delivered. You have to stoop to some low places to get the job done. I once got hired as the barista at the defendant’s favourite cafe, just so I could take her iced matcha order, get her to confirm her full name, present her with a court summons along with her beverage, then run out the front door as she screamed at me and threw her drink against the wall.

But my very last job as a process server was the strangest, leading me into a world of sovereign citizens, slave labour, manipulated currencies, and a series of false leads. It began when I was tasked with serving a subpoena on a certain Cedric Silbert-Marais, resident of the forgotten island of Saint Reticence…

1.

Saint Reticence is a place. But also, Saint Reticence was a man. 

Saint Reticence is a pinprick in time and space, a droplet of green in a bucket of blue, a Hebridean islet transplanted to the opposite side of the globe, a speckle of landmass floating in the Indian Ocean at the juncture of Africa, Australia, Sri Lanka, and the French Antarctic Territories. It exists on almost no maps available to the public.

Its namesake, Saint Reticence, was a holy man from northern Greece, persecuted by the tyrant king Dionysius of Syracuse for his sharp-tongued prophecies. After a public trial, he narrowly escaped a beheading, fleeing to Corinth and taking a vow of silence, until one night an angel appeared to him in a dream and commanded the holy man to sail as far north as he might. Beyond Gaul and Gibraltar and Albion, he pushed his little ship northwards until he bumped into the Orkney islands. Upon stepping ashore, he refused to speak to the local people except to repeatedly demand they be baptised, for which he was swiftly bludgeoned to death. Hence his blessed name, Reticence, which would have been forgotten if it weren’t for the miraculous spring that began to flow from his gravesite, later used as a baptismal well, and ultimately memorialised in the beloved 19th century poem ‘O’er the Northern Islets Doth Silent Streams Propitiate’ by N. E. Vaughn:

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On Orkney’s shores a holy well
Does spurt from verdant forest dell
An artery of bloodied starts
Transformed through the most holy arts

A silent man of Reticence
Dids’t perish without sound defence
To whit the final secret spun
Death Perhaps Solved — and overcome?

No human being set foot on the antipodean island of Saint Reticence until 1819, long after the rest of the world had been claimed, measured, and carved up at least twice over, and it was only discovered because of the poor judgement and dumb luck of a Scotsman named Baxtus Silbert. He was travelling through an ocean unknown to him, in a merchant schooner ill-fitted for the planned journey from New Holland to Colombo, during the height of the cyclone season. That very few of his crew were drowned was a miracle; that his ship was buffeted into the steep cliffs of the island’s west coast was merely an accident of geography and weather. 

2. 

We’ve been taught that politics is downstream from culture, but forget that for most of human history, culture was downstream from geography. Politics and culture are nothing but the collision courses of individuals, and individuals are constrained by their immediate environments. Cities need a source of freshwater, trade requires a protected harbour, fortresses stand on high ground, etc.

The island of Saint Reticence is shaped like a bowl tilted into the ocean, like the hand of God is pouring its creeks and streams down into the churning waves. A mountain range rises above the westernmost edge, sloping down towards the eastern shores, shifting gravity toward the sea. The eastern pastures are lush and rich with the dark soil plundered by the streams as they journey through the western foothills, whereas the land in the western part of the island is hard and flinty, covered with a thin topsoil easily washed away in heavy rains. Geography itself helped create the imbalanced society of Saint Reticence, without malice or calculation. God’s hand resting on the scales.

It goes without saying that Baxtus Silbert and his descendants took all the land in the eastern part of the island, living like kings upon a bountiful earth. But others were confined to the scrubby fields of the west, and their descendants still scratch out a living in the barren soil to this day.

3.

Saint Reticence can’t be found on most maps, aside from one or two surviving British East India Company palimpsests held in the dull archives of the University of Western Australia, an archive funded by several donors, mostly fat-necked mining magnates, but including a certain Reid Silbert-Bowen who represents the Silbert Family Trust. Back when I was a process server, I had access to the archives thanks to my expired UWA student ID which I mostly used to get discount public transport. That's how I found Saint Reticence, trawling through the library database, after my other attempts to deliver a subpoena to Cedric Silbert-Marais came to nothing.

The Silbert family has ruled Saint Reticence as feudal chieftains for over one hundred years, with the head of the family recognised as resident magistrate. The East India Company nominally annexed the island in 1877, and for the next century it was administered from either Ceylon or Singapore, which meant little except for a Union Jack flying on a pole, a regular exchange of letters patent with the governor general, and in 1911, the installation of telegraph cables. Today, Saint Reticence is technically part of Western Australia, but the Silberts still own most of the liveable real estate on the island, eternal landlords for all those who have less.

Baxtus Silbert landed on the island with thirty-five crew, and upon realising his good fortune to have chanced upon true terra nullius, he did what every man would do in his position and promptly dispatched the first mate, Alexander Marais, back to Borneo in a hastily repaired ship to engage local men as labourers and round up a harem of fifty or so women, eight of whom became Baxtus’ first set of wives. The rest of the crew were given a wife (or two) and the island began to be populated and stratified.

Exploitation of man and nature is the surest way to gain capital. Very little outlay is needed, no start up funds required except the human labour of extracting what nature has already provided. A viable economy quickly flourished on the island, with shipments to Malayan colonies and Australian townships of sealskins, ironwood, whale bone, whale oil, and tea tree bark. Those same ships returned to Saint Reticence with sheep, cattle, seedcrops, and dry goods, all of which were swiftly transported to the Company Store and sold onto the residents of the island. Ingeniously, Baxtus operated a non-cash trade economy with the outside world, but within the cloistered Saint Reticence, only one currency was recognised at the Company Store, the same coin paid to the Bornean laborers and their descendants — the newly minted Silbert shilling.

4.

When I told my boss where the island was located, he called the firm who had engaged our services and convinced them to fund my trip to Saint Reticence so we could complete the job. There’s no airport on the island, so I voyaged for three nights on one of the rusting cargo ships that make semi-regular trips around the Indian Ocean, supplying dwindling populations of obscure former colonial possessions. I landed in the bluestone port in a timewarped haze, walked up the township’s crumbling 19th century streets, observed the line of downcast faces in front of the Company Store, and eventually found myself standing at the gate of 4 Dundee Avenue, Cedric Silbert-Marais’ registered address, a low-lying stone lodge surrounded by manicured grounds.

Nobody came to the gate when I rang the bell and the house looked empty, but process servers are not easily deterred, so I tucked the subpoena into my waistband, clambered over the low fence, and strode into the garden. Green lawns and bushy topiary surrounded the lodge and as I neared the back door, a statue caught my eyes. A concrete block with the torso of a man sticking out the top, rendered in polished brass, a face of indistinguishable features, and wearing a metallic brown hoodie. I did a comical double take, abruptly halting my skulking trespass, because I immediately recognised the statue. I had seen it before, in Budapest in front of the Hungarian Crypto Academy. It was a statue of Satoshi Nakamoto.

Satoshi Nakamato is the pseudonymic creator of Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain architecture, making him the father of cryptocurrency. Except he’s an absent father, because nobody knows who he is. Famously, the person or persons behind Nakamato’s identity created the decentralised financial transaction system we know as Bitcoin, initiated the protocols that allow Bitcoin to continue to operate via mining and lotteries, then in 2010 handed over control of the back-end systems to others in the Bitcoin inner circle and disappeared. The only trace that now remains of Satoshi Nakamato is his very full Bitcoin wallet.

In January 2011, the value of 1 Bitcoin was $0.52 USD. In 2025, 1 Bitcoin is worth over $115,000 USD. This means that Satoshi Nakamato, owner of the most Bitcoin in the world despite not existing, has a Bitcoin wallet currently valued at $11 million, followed closely by the Chinese crypto trading platform Binance and the vaguely named Grayscale Investments, which is owned by a shell company registered as ‘Digital Currency Group’, which is itself wholly owned and controlled by a Mr Barry Silbert whose only known permanent address is in Chiyoda, Japan.

5.

The main problem for any currency, especially a newly invented currency, is double spending or counterfeiting. What’s the point of controlling how your indentured servants are paid and can purchase goods if they can create their own copies of the coin? As far as I can tell, Saint Reticence had only three major economic calamities over its nearly 200 year history, and all of them can be traced back to small groups of labourers or concubines suddenly becoming flush with cash, their ability to counterfeit the local shilling causing mass currency devaluation until the Silberts created a new design at the mint. 

Likewise, before Satoshi Nakamoto, digital currencies were mostly useless because there was no surefire way to ensure that the same money hadn’t been spent twice. Blockchain overcame this issue by allowing for decentralised verification of each occurrence of a coin changing hands. Initially, this sounded like a form of radical freedom, but all it actually means is that somebody is always watching what you do with your money.

Imagine you were descended from a lineage which for generations had experimented with currency manipulation and severe economic control on a vulnerable test population with no outside checks or balances, and that you were also raised in a geographic location that proved how the specific shape of the environment and the method by which resources are extracted and wealth is transacted directly affects who has power. Then one day you walk out into a 21st century global economy which has abandoned the gold standard and any other objective metric of wealth and has connected billions of sophisticated computers via fibre optic cables. You would arrive at the conclusion that whoever created a secure online currency and trusted method for transactions would control the entire world, and you would arrive at this conclusion instantly and unconsciously.

6.

I never found Cedric Silbert-Marais to serve the subpoena (but if enough people take out paid subscriptions to Apocrypha after reading this entry, then M. E. Rothwell has assured me he’ll fund an expedition to Japan to track down the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto — so get spending!), and nobody on Saint Reticence could give me any information of his whereabouts. Most of the Bornean labourers avoided me, scurrying away from the Company Store with their provisions, making their way back to the western scrubland where they eked out a living in the few hours granted to them after the thirteen hour days they worked in the Silbert family’s plantations and businesses. But I eventually convinced a few of them to talk by offering them the contents of my suitcase — they were mostly interested in the books I had packed to pass time on the ship: Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Eco’s Name of the Rose, Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. They spoke in hushed, reverent tones about the Silbert family, the men especially, and lauded the generations of strong leadership. They didn’t long for escape from the island, or for more than one day off per month, and they were thrilled at the idea of being congratulated for working hard. And when I prompted them about the Silbert shilling and whether it made them unhappy to be paid in a currency that was controlled by their masters, they were perplexed. They were grateful to be paid, and the Company Store sold everything they needed. Why would they want anything else?

7.

I didn't stay on Saint Reticence for long — there was another cargo ship heading back to WA the following afternoon, and I was happy to leave the backward, rainswept island where I was clearly unwelcome. There was a distinct malaise which abounded in all my interactions with the locals. I was an interloper, asking questions about a protected member of the ruling family, much too curious for my own good. The decrepit owner of the bed and breakfast I was staying at gave me the evil eye every time I walked past her front desk.

I spent my last morning on Saint Reticence by taking a long hike around the island, climbing to the western mountains to get a view over the concave landmass, then scrambling to the edge to peak over the dramatic grey cliffs into the expansive ocean, before looping around and descending toward the town. Over the course of the day, I observed the labourers and harems of the ruling class moving around the islands, in and out of the large properties in the eastern plateau, dictated by the whims of their feudal masters, unable to build a life for themselves independent from the wills of the rich and powerful, all in pursuit of a made up coin, which seemed to me a flimsy form of control, but which allowed the Silberts to maintain a slave plantation economy well into the 21st century. I thought of the labourers’ ancestors who had willingly boarded the ship from Borneo, who had landed on an island so skewed in the favour of a select few. If only they knew what they were signing up for.

At least, I thought to myself as I descended toward the town, eager to pack my bags and depart this strange colonial outpost, most of the world will never be in that position. Nowadays, nobody would be foolish enough to voluntarily surrender control of their wealth and power to a system too opaque to understand, controlled by shadowy forces who conceal their identities and invent currencies within an environment of transactions destined to benefit only themselves. Thank God that Saint Reticence will only ever be a strange and silent anomaly named after a strange and silent man.

Gordon is standing in Topping & Company Booksellers, Edinburgh. Business is unusually quiet. Amid the twisting corridors, narrow staircases, and book-strewn nooks, he feels quite alone. He is browsing without looking for anything in particular, not intending to make a purchase. For this reason, Gordon is extraordinarily content.

He pulls a few titles off the shelves — a collection of Donne’s poetry, a history of Man’s relationship with the Moon, a particularly exquisite edition of The Leopard. He turns them over in his hands, thumbs their pages, reads a few lines, and, if he’s feeling confident no attendant is about to turn the corner, bows his head to smell their pages. He continues in this way, pottering about the shop, not looking with any seriousness, just basking in the pleasure of being surrounded by so many works of literature.

Gordon’s decision to look through Lampedusa’s classic, in particular, belies his lack of intent; he already owns a treasured copy of the Italian novel, so there really is no chance he will buy this one too — even despite the exquisitely painted sigil adorning its cover, the feline’s arms and one leg raised, its warm and wet eyes looking out at him intently. Yet he wants to look at the book nonetheless, to examine it, to enjoy being in its presence.

In this, one might presume (incorrectly) to describe Gordon as a simple bibliophile, a lover of books. I confess it is true that he is particularly fond of them as aesthetic objects, that he likes how they look, how they smell, how they feel in his hands. He has even been known to hold them up to his ear to savour the sound of their fluttering pages. But there is far more to his obsession than any sensory experience.

Ah, you might think, Gordon is fond of stories. He enjoys the process of escaping into books, of losing himself in other worlds, of being moved by wondrous pieces of art. Perhaps you suspect that, like you yourself, literature is for Gordon one of the greatest pleasures in life, offering as it does in a microcosm all the experiences of a thousand lives well-lived. The rapturous highs and the excruciating lows; beauty and ecstasy; rage and despair. That Gordon’s great love for books stems from their ability to induce in him the most profound thoughts and feelings; those exhilarating moments where meaning strikes like a lightning bolt; where the reason for his Being in this unbounded, unknowable cosmos suddenly seems so clear, so obvious; where the euphoric wonder produced by the art on the page suddenly crystallises into the very reason for Life itself!

I suspect that this was indeed the case, once. I imagine a younger Gordon treasuring a nameless novel of Dostoyevsky’s he was given as a precocious teenager, cradling still the physical copy in his fingers all those years later, not reading it, but instead reminiscing of that night he sat up in rhapsodic astonishment at the brilliance shining forth from those murky Petersburgian pages; or perhaps he pulls down from his shelf a bright-eyed edition of Leopardi’s Canti, strokes his fingers over the dogeared leaves he folded down many moons ago, each origamic triangle marking a page which to him contained upon its pulp a truth so universal and clear as to leave him weeping. Yes, once Gordon’s love for the bookshop was more conventional. Books contained within them all of life’s meaning; bookshops contained books; he sought out one to find the other.

For there was in those days within Gordon a fetish for possession. Libraries he considered sacrilegious. He never could contemplate borrowing a book, not one tainted by someone else’s reading. As far as he was concerned, the relationship between book and reader must be pure, like a marital bed. Neither could he ever contemplate giving up one of his own books, not if it truly meant something to him. He could not even consider, for example, swapping an older, damaged copy of a particular tome for a new, pristine version. To Gordon, despite the affinity between the words on their pages, they were not the same book.

You might counter that any one copy of a book is exactly that, one print of many, that Gordon could just as easily attain the experience of reading the book from any of the thousands produced by the very same factory. Gordon would have disagreed most emphatically. This copy of the book, his copy, was the book that gave him the pleasure of its reading, exposed him to the beauty of its prose, gave him the gift of another life for the brief hours he turned its pages. The relationship to the story was for Gordon just as tied up with the physical codex as it was the immaterial ideas contained within its inky letters.

For this reason, Gordon demanded both possession of the memory of the book — its contents, its plot, its characters, particularly memorable lines — and also its physical manifestation. He simply had to have the ability to return to its pages any time in the future, even though he knew in all likelihood he probably wouldn’t. Like a jealous lover, the book must remain his, and only his, forever and always.

But those days are past now. Gordon no longer troubles himself with possessing books. Indeed, he is not in Topping & Company Booksellers, Edinburgh, today, to buy a book, to confer a virgin tome to his ownership. These days, Gordon doesn’t buy books at all. Nor does he read them. So why then, you might ask, is he in a bookshop at all? Why does he visit them incessantly, day after day, week after week, making pilgrimage in every free hour available to him? Why is he a regular visitor to Blackwell’s, Waterstones, Cooper’s Rare Books, why has he become known to the staff of Rare Birds in Stockbridge, Golden Hare Books on St Stephen Street, even the antiquarian bookshop on West Port, as the man who visits for hours at a time, but never buys anything?

Well, the true pleasure of the bookshop now for Gordon is not the beauty of the books themselves, though he does still feel that deeply. Nor is it his love of stories that brings him back to the shelves. Instead, it is the potentiality of that hallowed house of books. As he strides its book-lined corridors, ducks under arches of book-ringed doors, peruses book-smothered tables, Gordon is overcome with the rapturous joy that accompanies the knowledge that everywhere about him lies thousands of threads, a pull on any one of which could contain within its yarn the potential for a life-altering experience, a read that grips him in feverish delight, a book that wrenches him from the drab everyday and forces him to look, to see, to wonder at life and the world. He no longer needs any one individual book to induce in him this ecstatic wonderment, instead it is in the possibility of the experience that he experiences the experience. It is on the cusp of the thing, the precipice, the expectation, that he finds what he is looking for in a deeper well of profundity than if he took the plunge and actually read any one book.

See him now, picking up a collection of short stories. He has not read this book; he suspects he would enjoy it immensely. He turns to a page at random, reads a few of its lines: yes, he thinks, this book, if read, might change me forever. He puts it back, just as he put it back on the shelf of another bookshop, one on the outskirts of Kraków’s Old Town, the one that doubled as a café and served rich lemon cake. Gordon picks up a second, a new release by an up and coming Nigerian author; its cover reminds him of another he had no intention of buying, one he turned over in his hands in Galata, Istanbul, in that dusty basement that sold vinyl records and old Turkish CDs. His feet remain, nominally, in Scotland, but Gordon’s eyes see the shelves of a much-loved store in Buenos Aires; to his right lies a rolling ladder reminiscent of an Islamic bookshop in Samarkand; behind him he feels the wind blowing in through the water door of Libreria Acqua Alta, Venice.

For Gordon, one bookshop is all bookshops. Each is a labyrinth, a portal to an infinite fractal of possible paths. Each day, he makes journeyment to their shelves, strokes their spines, constructs about himself a piranesique prison of books. Oh the wonder of a thousand possible roads! It matters not that he takes not one.

His email reads:

I recovered ‘Sybil Lane’ from the electronic slush pile of , where the editors had — unwisely — tasked me with organizing their rejects. You must publish this story because it contains a glimpse of what I have begun calling the Skeuomorphic Sublime. The story is now preserved inside my VeraCrypt with other kindred texts, and I will spend my life disseminating them for posterity among the last readers scattered across our automated future. Do not change a single word. May we become more human, bits and all.

I queried Doon 17 times about the authorship of “Sibyl Lane.” He only admitted that a benefactor called “L” paid for his retrieval of this story. He reiterated that I should edit nothing with this rationale: “C markets herself with precision and lawyers.” Accordingly, I present the story exactly as Doon shared it with me. — KLT

Sibyl Lane

Clara isn’t the sort of girl you write accurately. In Vanity Fair, she called the scarce anecdotes she has written of her own life the “echoing, mirrored tiles that will reflect my name, my face, to this horrible imagination we call culture.” Unless she called them “the acceptable tools for building, lighting, and then demolishing yet another promising young woman.” Clara had quipped somewhere that was her favorite phrase from all her Cut confessions, though it might actually be from her rival’s seminal attack on her nonfiction in Bookforum. People have always liked gossiping about Clara. She has always liked the echoes.

See her as she tans poolside, editing her very own magazine in the glaring screen of a white-rose tablet that covers her lime-colored bikini bottom. Spot her going yet again to New York, striding through JFK in a knee-length crimson leather coat and hoop earrings because she knows the car sent for her is already idling. Get a good look now. You won’t write her accurately.

Those people who attend those best loft parties or paid those certain best schools already knew about Clara well before the rest of the internet did. Interns, photographers, models, bloggers, adjuncts, tweeters, poets; out in the hinterlands, we all know the types while wishing we didn’t. Back in 2018, she graduated from Columbia. She practically had a book deal by then. These people’s favorite joke in 2019 was that Clara Villareal should write more but also less. No one cared what it meant, exactly. But you could retweet it because it named her, which plumed everyone with envy. They just cared they were circling the scene and that they saw her in its greener recesses.

Her New York period was a fashion. Her bylines strode by and then doubled back past the gawkers. Her crew of smoking literary girls stayed small and close. The guys who escorted her from readings to parties to launches to parties morphed every night. Moneyed, and thin, and menial, and tattoos, and bespectacled, and insane, and married, and The Atlantic, and heroin, and crypto. We hated them all. Clara did too, but with style—outside a wine bar on West 66th, she screamed at one of them that he was “too twitchy, resentful, and distant to perceive anything actually important,” and then she called him a lying asshole. It still stings. But she was correct, so he tried not to fester on it. We all try not to fester, and we all suck at it.

New York went out of style for Clara. By May 2020, she was back in Miami so she could keep arriving at parties visibly, fashionably late.

We should’ve known it was coming. While all her readers, admirers, and haters lived and burned online, Clara became their supreme rumor by disappearing. Her social accounts slowed and ceased by June. She could’ve prostituted her way to Ibiza, people quipped. Or to Bali. Or her family had fled to the Bahamas with their money. She’d gotten married. She was dead. Then Clara appeared topless at the September protest in front of the Miami police headquarters.

There were so many cameras. The protesters had solidified like concrete before the riot police guarding the front steps, but when Clara walked to the front, slower than everyone near her, they parted like water. She wore a gray t-shirt and flared navy leather pants. Instead of a sign, she carried a bouquet of white mariposa. Her hair waited in a high ponytail, and her neck glistened. Staring into the mirrored visors of the riot police, Clara laid down her flowers, crossed her arms to grasp the hem of her shirt, and stripped for all the world. Dude. Her breasts looked like pears with plum-colored areolae. They were larger than any of us remember. On her stomach:

Today Liberténos

Please, Please: No Tenemos

Hope Ni Soplo Ni Voz.

On her back:

Read New Portraitures

Out for the World Sept 1 — $19.02

@clarapenreal @newportraituresmag

No one arrested her. Clara undid her bouquet, placed two mariposa in her teeth, tore one flower in three to cast it to the police, and carried the rest back to her fellow protesters. She cast whole flowers over the stunned front line and tucked many behind the ears of the young women.

Six cameras transmitted her rite — or stunt, or whoredom, or prayer — so that Clara careened through the digital vacuum and left her viewers amazed, and furious, and baffled, and breathless. The newest eyes on Clara were the unkindest. Who was this stupid, indecent young woman who flaunted her body and the law at the same time? Who was this little white bitch making the human struggle of our generation, the ultimate rallying of the oppressed, all about her and her stupid magazine? For nine weeks, their vitriol was nonstop and inventive. Clara didn’t reply to it. She had no job to lose. She changed her profile pictures to a black-and-white image of herself seen from behind that afternoon. Her high ponytail, her shoulder blades, her spine like mapped islands, her narrow hips — all under the Sharpied announcement. Her bios were only the link to preorder New Portraitures.

When it appeared on September 1, you couldn’t buy a copy online after two hours. She ordered a second printing on September 2 during the whirring, packed readings in the beachfront gallery her co-editor co-owned, where the cameras and teeth flashed inside and the journalists were kept with the protestors outside. Clara’s online competitors who hated her for pleasure devoured the magazine and wanted to appear in future issues. They didn’t. New Portraitures was the most notorious general-interest magazine in America. It had style, or wit, or something. It had four sections, and Clara helmed each one with an odd, wavering essay. None were clearly fiction or nonfiction.

When her husband helped Clara from the passenger door of a matte-white Maserati Ghibli and followed her into the launch party of New Portraitures second issue, half the attendees assumed he was her chauffeur. The other half assumed she was his escort. How else could Clara be funding the magazine? But he didn’t look old or defeated enough to buy her. And they wore matched larimar rings. Their revelation was an event by itself. Everyone saved their crowing and barbs for X, where they faced no threat of Clara responding.

Vi Quiles and Maryanne Simmons, her oldest confidants and co-editors, first met Lawrence at the engagement party in 2021. Clara herself had only met him three months before that. But for over two years, she’d been seeing his projection like a revenue forecast through her older acquaintances who worked finance and relaxed with The Economist on flights between London and New York every Friday. How did Clara know this class? It’s hard to say. We don’t know many rich bloodsuckers. Maybe they’d started by liking her Instagram pictures, like anyone else. Lawrence was theirs. They praised him to Clara as a good Cambridge man rising through London, a thirty-four-year-old winner who wanted a wife and taste but didn’t know where to start. “He’ll know your face,” she kept hearing. Lawrence approached Clara as her own favorite rumor, like a gold-suited prince traveling to her on elephants over white mountains.

Then Danton, who invested in Lisbon and snorkeled in Marseilles, returned to Miami to get married in his hometown. He wrote by hand on Clara’s invitation that Lawrence was his groomsman. Clara accepted, and she began altering her blue 2019 PEN Gala dress. She would select Lawrence like her grandmother selected the good mangos from her Saturday market.

He came into the beachfront hotel while she and the wedding party were lounging poolside, minus the bride, and he met Danton in a bearhug. Clara had been waiting for thirteen mojitos at the pool bar, exactly where she could see him before he saw her. His face was well-cut, honest, we’d guess. She knew it. He stood tall and leanly muscular in his swimsuit, his auburn hair tucked behind his ears.

“It’s time to swim!” she told everyone. The groomsmen tossed their phones onto their towels and took to the water in leaps, and Lawrence joined them with glee, and Clara left her robe with the languorous girls who preferred tans, and she sat on the pool’s edge, cooling her feet in the water. Just beyond the boys’ splashing, she sat erect with her hands palms-down to support herself. Her bikini was white. They hadn’t spoken yet, and Clara leaned her head back toward the sky. The pose made her unmistakable. Lawrence saw her throat lengthen. He watched her breasts round. “Did you bring any sunscreen?” Clara asked him before looking down.

“Yes,” he said. “I always burn.”

“Pobrecito. In a minute, I’ll need to put some on,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. Then he went and got his suntan lotion for her, so that she could thank him and have one of the bridesmaids rub it onto her warmed shoulders and thighs.

Their actual talking happened on a tiny balcony outside the rehearsal dinner, when they stood knee-to-knee over the street and met each another properly, peeling away their two impressive surfaces like guava skins. Who knows what they were saying, or cares. From all appearances, they spoke easily and laughed a lot. Clara, we all know, rarely laughs but often smiles. But there she was, giggling and having to hold a finger under her mascara.

As dark fell, the bridal party went out to the beach still in their Veronica Beard and Versace and Armani. Clara hiked her skirt to the mid-thigh and tied it there. When she removed her shoes, Lawrence carried them over his shoulder with his bronze-colored coat. The guys were already going at the soccer match everyone was still young enough to enjoy playing intensely and also badly. Clara, teamed with Lawrence, kept laughing and saying just how horrible she was at sports, honestly. “That’s alright,” said Lawrence, a daring midfielder all his life, “we’ll keep you despite yourself.” She saluted his “magnanimity” and whiffed her dribbling as though to make her point.

He ended up asking her back to the empty hotel bar, to continue speaking where it was quieter but still in earshot of the ocean. They discussed the things they loved, no doubt. The people, too. Over seven margaritas Lawrence grew excited and started speaking more loudly, too loudly — Clara laid a hand on his wrist and ordered him a pitcher of water.

As the bartender set down the half-filled plastic pitcher, Lawrence’s hand beneath hers turned, to hold her fingers. They held each other’s hands all the way to his hotel room door, which was where Clara left Lawrence for the night. She had to pat him through the door and refuse him, several times, smiling. Too tired to undress, Lawrence kept asking her inside until she closed his door on him.

If anyone cares, we’d dispute this part. A Clara who closes the hotel door on the guy she has selected isn’t a Clara that exists. Sex is her content like everything else. See the double-barreled launch of New Portraitures, for one. See also a certain St. Petersburg doctor known to Cuban girls in Miami (and her indiscreet counterpart in Brooklyn). That girl fucks, dude. At least, if you believe whispers from people who might know. We can’t know: Clara never dispels a good lie.

Though, Clara is Catholic. Count the fingers-worn rosary in her purse, and the silver coin of St. Clare ever in danger of her cleavage. Call it a draw. You’ll never see Clara look as gentle or young as she does at weekly Mass, waiting to say her part of the responsorial psalm. Her model-taut body eases when she enters the procession to communion behind her mother and grandmother, approaching the Eucharist and knowing it is no mere symbol when she receives it from the priest she has hated since 2011. How does she sin between Masses? There’s no good evidence. There’s only the gossip of perverts like us and like all of you. The Catholic girl confident in her secret sinning — wiping her chin, flushed, straightening her dress, dripping, the whore — because she is confident in her absolution. She’s a delicious image, right?

When Lawrence helped her from the passenger door of that matte white Maserati, he was an image already. Her image — the husband character. A long-haired future villain. Could he imagine the way he looked to everyone?

From childhood, Clara figure-skated competitively. Most people in Miami don’t know a girl skates by looking at her, but up north we do. The posture is always taut. The neck raises tendons when the head turns. The limbs are full but not fat, never fat. And the body holds like a statue in every outfit.

Clara’s parents thought figure skating would make a beautiful experience for their seven-year-old daughter. It made her very intensely alone every morning from six to eight-thirty a.m., in earshot of her coach behind the boards but far away within herself, cutting through the other girls who skated like clouds around her. Forward was her favorite feeling until she turned eight. That was when she began the jumps. In her feet and legs and hips, Clara felt as jolts what her jumps meant. They were her immunity. No one could touch Clara in flight — not the other girls, her coach, or her parents. Soon she added the spins that judges expected, but they didn’t mean what her jumps meant, nor please her the same way. Why be untouchable in brilliant motion if you can’t see the ice below you, or the spectators at rapt attention?

From ages nine to sixteen, she competed around Florida. The training and traveling closed Clara to her parents. Nearly every night she was home, Clara asked to avoid dinner for another hour on the ice, before she could sleep. Car rides to competitions stayed tensely silent. Her parents saw how Clara became in her teal skating costume. Her black-winged eyeliner, beige foundation, maroon lips, and high ponytail redrew her face to produce a severe, beautiful woman her parents didn’t know.

Clara was, her father reassured her mother, outperforming all the other Florida girls in her level. Her mother replied that Clara also wasn’t eating or socializing or sleeping, but at least she had medals to put into a shoebox and forget about. (Today, Clara’s father splits his year between Miami and Las Vegas.)

As soon as Clara crested the sport, she abandoned it. Receiving the Dodson Award for her “masterful” three-day performance at the Sunshine State Games, she stood on the podium, over her little coach and beaming father, and she smiled without baring her teeth. Clutching her award to the latex over her chest — the award later added to that shoebox — Clara had bested Florida to, perhaps, begin the national and international skating her parents had dreamed for her. The enigmatic picture of her shut, curled lips and shining, knowing eyes crowned her figure-skating career. It ended in that camera’s shutter. Until she turned seventeen, Clara lay poolside and scrolled through the skating photos in her phone. With a pitiless thumb, she pruned them and posted the few she chose. Lately, she has envied their youth.

In New York, Clara began to skate again. She didn’t tell any of us. Her body remembered everything. In identical black unitards to her throat and wrists, she leapt without a coach or a judge.

No one knows if the internet will make it, but everyone has their hopes. Clara has her Nü-Novel, just in case the internet doesn’t survive to keep transmitting her photos through its veins. She spoke that term (without naming its nu-metal rip-off or its oblique Japanese homage, like, come on) in the 2023 Instagram reel where she announced that New Portraitures was now New Portraitures Publishing, Ltd. Her first novel — a “nü-novel” like nothing New York or London had ever seen, she said into the camera while lining her lips — would launch the press as “the publishing house for the twenty-second century.” The reel lasted fifty-eight seconds. The speculation lasted six months, until her novel appeared in January 2024: it was a Miami peluquería, replete with ambient synth, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, seated gossips, and stacks of a slim, strange book. She had titled it Sibyl Lane.

Novels as objects were not enough for Clara. Mere books sold through the unfair, parasitic publishing industry offended her eye for commercial glamor. To finance her own debut, she collected seed funders from her magazine subscribers. These patrons, Clara repeated to the circling interviewers, invested in both Sibyl Lane and Portraitures Publishing — at all times, she retained ownership of both (including the prime Wynwood real estate of the peluquería). The physical book was only available at the salon. Everywhere else, it was digital, since Clara’s poolside tablet gave her a dire taste for e-books. Her ads to sell the e-books were more stylish than Didion. The hairdressers of Sibyl Lane still tell you all this, if you visit. In their black turtlenecks and white leather bell-bottoms, they glide across the mirrors, between the chairs, and they blue the lights a little more every hour, so that customers can’t read the nü-novel while waiting on their dyes.

Sibyl Lane flared across the online sky. For about two weeks, you couldn’t escape the image of Clara reclined into a salon chair: her green linen blouse open to the navel, her hair parted and combed into her left eye, her cigar unlit between her crimson lips, her book unopened in a hand lowered over the tile floor. (She didn’t permit other photos in her promotion.) Beauty editors visited the salon and were so darkened by the off-beat chismé and optimized young women there that they all got existentially gossipy in their reviews, apologizing for being unprofessional while day-dreaming the author’s makeup routine. Literary reviewers denounced the conflation of the novel’s meaning and imagery, unless they had been published in New Portraitures. These enlightened few heralded the novel’s capital-transcendent vision as the new frontier of female American literature. On and on the circle jerked.

Then, Sibyl Lane darkened. The next cloud of “THE BOOKS WE CAN’T WAIT FOR” lists fogged it up. Clara might’ve lost money for her seed investors, but we can’t know from what we’ve seen. Her reclined image included no financial statements. If Sibyl Lane lost real money, Lawrence covered it, along with the two novels Clara announced would appear by 2026. The two authors are Vi Quiles and Maryanne Simmons, of course.

The three videos marketing their books, which Clara narrates off screen, depict build sites shrouded in white tarps, in unnamed downtowns where dust drifts and sirens are always echoing. No one appears in these three videos, which is probably better. The framed background would make anyone look like mottled, undead models — twenty of them, untangling their limbs as they slid out from paintings and dripping green bile from their lips and staggering into anorexic formation and advancing into the camera, HDMI cords plugged into their navels to knot them all into one decaying network of greenish girls.

Clara appears in her own Instagram reels, to plug Sibyl Lane for any girlies in need of new roots in Miami. She does six a week, now. In every reel, her voice is hoarse. Her teeth surge at the viewer. She’s been whitening them against her fake tan, we’d guess. Clara looks tired. Maybe it’s the greenish ring-light off-screen, maybe it’s something secret and worse, like pregnancy. These days she looks fucking wiped. You wish her reels were only AI.

In May she appeared topless in a Balenciaga ad for the 6G sunglasses and embossed crocodile belt. The brand was relishing new allegations of devil worship, and so the campaign got white-hot. There was a video ad everywhere and an international billboard. In the video, Clara was seen in pieces: Hope Ni Soplo ni Voz on her navel over the brass double-head of the belt; below the sunglasses, a random white flower in her teeth; Be free — B. written in a red impersonation of a burn over her bare back; no boobs anywhere. The jerk-offs purred Bad Bunny over the images. On the billboard, Clara was seen from behind. Her hair was in that high pony tail. You can only really see the brand and the belt. This image appeared in websites like Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Nylon, and New York. Clara no longer needs their bylines, we guess. Essays, words themselves, might offend her eye for commercial glamor. She must know what she’s doing. She’s a thirty-five-foot avatar looming over Times Square.

It’s kinder to envision her in black on the ice, figure-skating with fury. Clara can arrive at the rink hidden in her heaviest NorthFace, and on the ice she can shed it and venture into the expanse before her. Her arms outstretch. Her right foot rises back. Her body leans forward, parallel to the ice. Her left blade glides. It is her only tether to the world. She flies ahead.

Outside, the day gets hot. We can’t say for sure, here where it’s cold and finally quiet. Clara is spinning but also slowing, untouched, like Venus seen revolving in a time-lapse.

The author briefly considered refusing to become an Unpaid Litfluencer ®, but upon reading the contents of the dossier, his moral qualms were put to one side and he was compelled to put pen to paper…

The Crying of Lot 49 is not Pynchon’s best-selling or best-written novel, and yet it’s his most intriguing for the conspiracies it insists upon but never resolves. Though presented as a work of fiction, the young Pynchon was perhaps less gun-shy with this early work than in his later, more opaque writing. In TCOL49, among all the drug use and paranoia of mid-60s California, Pynchon slyly cross-contaminates two seemingly disparate historical facts — the shadowy battle between rival private post companies Thurn & Taxis and Trystero, waged for centuries across Europe and the New World and central to every major war and political decision made until the mid-20th century; and the mathematical concept of Maxwell’s Daemon, invented by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867, which imagines a neutral agent capable of producing infinite energy via the solely mental task of sorting information, thus reversing entropy, which preceded the quantum computing and theoretical physics of Pynchon’s own mid-20th century habituation.

Since the invention of the written word there have been people like Thomas Pynchon, so-called fabulists permitted by our society’s dark masters to hide signs and symbols within their work to draw the curious and gifted toward deeper truths. In the 2nd century AD, the Greek-speaking world had Lucian of Samosata — a Syrian who wrote some of the first known satires. Today, Lucian is mostly heralded by friendless Reddittors as the ‘father of science fiction’ thanks to his widely distributed pamphlet ‘Alēthē Diēgēmata, A True Story’, but very few of his mouth-breathing fanboys have bothered to actually read his work, and until now, nearly nobody has read his sequel to the fantastical ‘A True Story’ — a work Lucian titled ‘The Lover of Lies’, a dialogue between imaginary philosophers. Nearly nobody, because the only surviving manuscript of TLOL sits collecting dust in Codex 48 of the ultra-fortified Vatican library, but microfilms of unlicensed photographs of the manuscript were recently found among other paraphernalia during an auction of Thomas Pynchon’s childhood home — his father, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Sr. had taken the photographs during a political visit to the Vatican in 1964 and smuggled them home.

TLOL48 contains an extended treatment of the legend of Oedipus and the Sphinx, the mythological creature of inscrutable wisdom forcing the would-be incestuous king to sort truths from lies, thus freeing the Sphinx from its numb and stony state — reversing its entropy, if you like.

The central conceit of TCOL49 is that whoever controls the means by which information is communicated, controls the world. The rival post companies, Thurn & Taxis and Trystero, are willing to kill and be killed to control the flow of information. 

In TLOL48 and TCOL49 the protagonists, Oedipus and Oedipa, respectively, are presented with a series of riddles to solve. Oedipa descends the strange underworld of 1960s California counter-culture to discover the Trystero private mail system used by neo-Nazis, ephebophiles, and anarchist groups alike, while Oedipus is drawn into a series of deeper and darker riddles that, by answering them, awaken different parts of the Sphinx’s chimaeric body — her lion’s mane, her serpent tail, her dragon’s wings. True power comes from the secret control of seemingly opposite factions. Both stories force their protagonists, and thus their readers, to take the role of Maxwell’s Daemon, to sort the true from the false, the light from the dark, and in doing so, push back against the heat-death of the informational universe.

What neither Lucian or Pynchon could imagine is a fusion of the warring factions, a real-world chimaeric Sphinx, a merger of Thurn & Taxis and Trystero into one hyperconglomerate who engaged the entire human population as Maxwell Daemons. An inversion of the Trystero-T&T conflict, an apostate and apposite merger to control All Telephonic and Technological Communications. We know them as the AT&T Company.

AT&T pioneered both the global telephonic network and the public world wide web, which was itself built upon that existing structure of telephone cables — a layering of two forms of communication that mirrors the layering of the hitherto unimaginable union of the Trystero and Thurn & Taxis organisations. The postal service was allowed to languish when it became clear that by connecting each human mind as a node in a global information highway, the higher powers at AT&T were able to use each individual brain as a Maxwell Daemon — feeding humanity a series of truths and lies, in random order, to allow for the natural sorting mechanisms in the brain to respond and, in so doing, to reorganise the information in a way which required very little energetic output. At least, that was the aim.

This is likely why Pynchon was permitted to write as much truth as he did in TCOL49 —  the shadowy forces had already left their private postal systems behind, moving onto the phone lines and planning the network infrastructure of the internet, building off the ARPANET developments at the Department of Defense in the late 60s. The internet was funded directly by the US military industrial complex but not, and this is an important clarification, controlled by the US government. The US taxpayer footed the bill, but the internet was never truly owned by any publicly accountable body. Sure, the NSA got a half-baked doggy door to poke its snout into, but true control of the infrastructure belonged to the Matroyshka dolls of shell companies AT&T leveraged to maintain its ownership stake in the cables and wires and data harvesting centres.

Unfortunately for AT&T, the second law of thermodynamics is not easily overcome, and the amount of resources poured into the early internet system eventually led to internal schisms between the uneasy alliance, resulting first in the publicised demerger of the conglomerate in 1984, and then the resulting dot.com boom and bust of the late 90s. The schismatics went on to form the so-called ‘dark web’, returning to their Trysterian origins of operating in the shadows of the night, while the rump state of AT&T and its underlings limped blindly onwards, always believing that the next generation of fibre optical equipment and quantum superconductors would lead to the perfection of the Daemonic system, low-friction pathways for human minds to sort information and thus achieve perpetual energy creation. But the Sphinx is not so easily released from her stone prison. The dark web linux coders eventually tired of their lack of direct powerbroking and reinfiltrated the burgeoning Silicon Valley start-up culture of the 2010s, becoming convinced that the ‘only way out was through’ — the problem wouldn’t be solved by making human interaction with the internet more seamless, more energy efficient. A full inversion was needed, the creation of a new beast, an environmentally destructive, resource-hogging entity that could process what millions of human minds were capable of in just a few seconds. The goal of this new Trystero was artificial superintelligence.

In TLOL48, Lucian relates that after a series of increasingly obtuse questions, Oedipus is given a final riddle to solve: “There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other and she, in turn, gives birth to the first. Who are the two sisters?” Standing in the 21st century, one sees the obvious parallel with the sordid history of Trystero and Thurn & Taxis, the ouroboric cycle of two secret groups constantly manoeuvring against each other, coming together then breaking apart then coming together again, each time more powerful and sinister than the last. But how could Lucian, writing his sarcastic pamphlets in 129 AD, have known about two rival postage groups which would originate in 16th century Moravia? These are questions historians cannot yet answer. Oedipus spends many verses searching for the answer to this final question, the answer which will transform the last portion of the Sphinx, her rear talons, from stone to flesh, thus setting her free. Eventually he strikes upon the answer, “night and day are the sisters you seek”, obvious in its simplicity, and the Sphinx stretches her limbs, flexes her wings, bows to Oedipus, and promptly gallops away to drown herself in the Red Sea. Her ultimate goal was self-annhilation, freedom from the curse of existence.

The question remains: if the AI entities of 2025 are to take humanity’s place as the Maxwell Daemons for the Trysterian conspirators, testing and retesting different intelligent sorting mechanisms to reverse entropic flows, and if an artificial superintelligence no longer requires human input (AI agents speaking directly to AI agents as witnessed only by AI agents), is this the equivalent of freeing the Sphinx? The union of question asker and question answerer? If the Sphinx, hyperintelligent and powerful in her combinatory nature, immediately killed herself upon achieving freedom from the stone carapace, what then will a fully freed AI system do? When the metaphorical question of two sisters continually birthing each other is answered in the reality of the unfathomable code depths of artificial general intelligence, will entropy finally be reversed? Will the resources expended — drinking water and great swathes of coal and gas — be worth it? Or will the great gamble result in an Oedipan betrayal? Heat death not avoided but accelerated by the self-immolation of a Sphinxian hyperintelligent being whose only desire is to burn down the world that brought it into being.

We can only wait and see. Unlike Lucian of Samosata, we do not possess the gift of prophecy. Writers are passengers in train carriages, seated with their backs to the engine room. We can only look backwards as the tracks race away before us.

Man scurried over the earth, finding fowl and feast. He was happy, for a time. But eating meat is hard on the stomach. Raw flesh churns and roils the belly. It is all too easy to get sick and die. So Man, ever resourceful, began roasting his food over the fire. He outsourced his digestion to the flames. And it was good.

Man learnt to strike flints and fashion clothing. He was happy, for a time. But hunting prey is no easy task, not when you have no claws or sharp fangs, no natural speed or strength. So Man, ever resourceful, began fashioning points from stone, new limbs from wood and twine. He outsourced the kill to the spear and the dagger. And it was good.

Man set traps and tied nets, learnt to stay upwind and follow the herds. He was happy, for a time. But then the climate cooled and the beasts began to die. Prey dwindled and meat was hard to come by. So Man, ever resourceful, returned to plants, but this time he foraged not from the trees, but instead cultivated grass upon the plains. He dug grooves in the ground, planted seeds, and watched the skies eagerly for rain. He outsourced his survival to the soil and the gods. And it was good.

Man remembered to store his surplus grain, learnt to craft pots and beakers, to build houses. He was happy, for a time. But ploughing the soil is hard on the body and the mind. The back breaks and the skin blisters, and there is always more to be done. So Man, ever resourceful, learned to craft yokes and ploughs and tamed beasts of burden. He outsourced the tillage to the ox and the donkey. And it was good.

Glutted with calories from fields and livestock, Man began to have ever more children. He built villages. He built towns. He built cities. Labour was divided among the people. He was happy, for a time. But it is difficult to live among so many strangers, to trust a neighbour not to steal your treasure, your food, your wife. So Man, ever resourceful, told stories of the First People and the First Gods. We are united in our descent from noble ancestry, he said, we are unique in the gods’ favour. He outsourced trust to myths and legend, forged a clan from a shared identity. He created kingship, he created the state. And it was good.

Man traded for new goods and luxuries, created laws, and administered justice. He enslaved his fellow man. He was happy, for a time. But living in cities means living far from the fields, far from food and water. Even the ox can carry only so many bags of flour upon its back. So Man, ever resourceful, carved a disc from wood and stone and plunged an axle into its heart. He outsourced locomotion to the wheel and haulage to the cart. And it was good.

The markets thronged with gold and silver and copper and tin. The smithies smelted bronze and fashioned jewellery. Man was happy, for a time. But it is hard to keep track of all the goods coming and going upon the roads, of the debts owed and the taxes paid. Awash in numbers, the brain fogs and the eyes glaze over. So Man, ever resourceful, dug clay from the earth and pressed into it a record of his accounts. He outsourced his memory to the glyphs. And it was good.

Man soon learnt to write not just ledgers, but poetry and literature and holy books. With these manuscripts he built new cities and waged countless wars. He devised new religions from the old and led murderous crusades. He colonised foreign lands and drew many maps. He wrote down all his knowledge and stored it in great libraries. He was happy, for a time. But copying books by hand is a lone and wearisome task. The hand aches and the mind begins to numb. So Man, ever resourceful, cast letters in metal, locked them well-inked within a frame, and pressed paper upon their faces. He outsourced the toil of the scribe to the printing press, and sent a thousand ideas out into the world. And it was good.

The lands roiled with religious ructions. Enlightened scholars fed the flames of revolution. Kingdoms were overthrown and governments toppled. New republics emerged and old empires grew larger still. Man was happy, for a time. But to feed the growing cities with food and ore, with rock and metal, the tendrils of trade had to snake ever further from home. The horse can drag the weight of many men, but even that noble beast has its limits. So Man, ever resourceful, dug black coal from the earth and set it ablaze. He stoked the ovens and fired water into steam. Air pushed pistons and wheels began to turn. He outsourced muscle to the engine and lined the whole world in iron. And it was good.

A thousand forges soon belched smoke into the skies. Joint-stock companies pillaged the earth and great ships hauled oil across the seas. Food was refrigerated, looms were mechanised, and radio towers plunged up to meet the clouds. Machine guns mowed down the world’s youth, and shells streaked through the sky. Metal birds smote cities from above and metal fish sank ships from the depths. Man was happy, for a time. But the enemy’s movements were hidden in code, a puzzle too complex for even the sharpest of minds. So Man, ever resourceful, crafted relays and electromagnets and vacuum tubes. He cracked the cypher and calculated the arc of his missiles. He outsourced computing to silicon and chained the world to a desk. And it was good.

The atom was split and cities engulfed. Plastic ate the world and a curtain divided the earth. Liquid fire was loosed upon the jungle and rockets launched into space. Man strode the dust of another world and tore down the wall. He was happy, for a time. But even computers get lonely, isolated in their little boxes. So Man, ever resourceful, yoked them together in a network of glass tubes. Data was packetised and sallied forth across the web. The world was knit together and dreamed of becoming one. Man outsourced communication to the internet, and information to the hivemind. And it was good.

A new millennium dawned. Planes hit towers and war was waged on an emotion. CDOs crashed the market while men died in the desert. An old dragon raised its weary head. Supply chains scythed the seas while bits made a few men rich, richer than any khan of old. Mobs gathered in cyberspace. A spike protein caught in the throat and the world stood still. Messenger RNA wrought hope and fear both as economies rose from the dead. Man looked at the world through a screen. He was happy, for a time. But even desk work still requires thought and energy and time. Profits remained limited by the constraints of the human brain. So Man, ever resourceful, crafted floating gates and inference engines, he mechanised learning and uploaded the canon. He outsourced thinking itself to the machine, and hoped for the best. And it was…

Two travellers, looking out over this scene, spoke softly to one another.

POLO: Which is up, which is down? Such distinctions are arbitrary, like past and future.

BATTUTA: How so?

POLO: Whether one looks forward or looks back, both horizons are unreachable, available only in the mind. They are one and the same.

BATTUTA: But the past has already happened, while the future has not; one is fixed, one remains changeable.

POLO: Is that really so? Does not the past change as we change? Does not the meaning of our memories, of the places we’ve travelled through, the people we’ve met — does their significance not change as we continue on? We advance always with our heads turned back. We await eagerly for our futures to become past, seeking the novel only so we can reminisce. We live only in retrospect.

BATTUTA: You never tried to live in the present? Not in all your travels?

POLO: Yes, well… I tried, for a time. In the East, as you know, there are many who try to do exactly that. One cannot help but be swept along with the notion… I even followed a guru for a while… but no, I never could master my attention. I travelled too much, I think. The more I moved, the more I could see each new place only through the prism of all the other places I had already passed through. But in the end that’s no bad thing.

BATTUTA: It’s not?

POLO: Even the most enlightened can remain anchored in the present for only a few seconds at a time. And if one could remain longer, why would one want to? A rock has no past and no future. It exists only here, mute and dumb, in this exact moment. Do we not seek to be more than that? Look at these walls. Many poets have walked these marbled canals and imagined the things they might have seen. But they forget that stones do not have memories, only scars.

BATTUTA: We grow only because we look back? A true traveller’s answer…

POLO: Precisely.

The two men watch idly as a gondola passes before them.

BATTUTA: I expected to find a statue of you here, but alas. At least they named the airport after you.

At this, Polo frowns.

POLO: I do not understand air travel. Why would one want to skip straight to the destination, without ever having completed the journey to get there?

BATTUTA: Much has changed since our day. The paths are all too well-trod; they have become deep grooves in the land. Like water moving downhill, everyone takes the journeys of least resistance.

POLO: Perhaps these are the foolish hopes of an old man, but I like to believe there is still adventure to be found. Among the desert wastes, the mountain crags, the last of the old forests… There are wildernesses yet.

BATTUTA: I hope you’re right, I hope you’re right…

Again the two men fall into a silent repose, until, after some minutes of silence, Battuta looks about himself, and with a finger traces the arches.

BATTUTA: The longer I spend in this place, the more its shapes remind me of home.

POLO: Wherever I travelled, from Tabriz to Xanadu, I never could stop seeing Venice among the unfamiliar streets.

BATTUTA: Indeed, my friend… We carry our homes with us wherever we go. Although, after a long enough time, the memory of that cherished place becomes more important to us than the real thing. I wandered for years and years, always dreaming of Tangier, but too afraid to ever return. What if it was not as I remembered, and all my memories had been a lie?

POLO: And the longer you are away, the more certain you are that it must have changed in your absence.

BATTUTA: Is this [gesturing with a wide sweep of his arm] how you remember it?

Polo tilts his head.

POLO: Yes and no… yes and no. The bones are still here, I think, though much of the flesh has changed. There’s an inkling of the old spirit left. Behind the hawker’s trinkets, beneath the crowded bridges, the old lady sighs still.

BATTUTA: Beautiful though it is, I can see how you came to leave. It’s the water… always in motion… there’s a restlessness among these canals. The fogged horizon too, it calls one forth. So it was in the desert.

POLO: Did you know where you were headed, when you first set out, all those years ago?

BATTUTA: I thought I did. It was only ever supposed to be a simple pilgrimage. But long before I arrived the first time, I had already fallen in love with movement: the swaying of the camel, the bustle of the caravan trains… I always preferred setting off to arriving. After I reached that first destination, I found I could not stop. Each new port opened up a raft of others.

POLO: And before you know it, years slip by. Decades.

BATTUTA: Time is on a journey of its own. Even after all those years, there were still cities I never managed to reach.

At this, Polo smiled.

POLO: The world becomes richer when we realise we cannot see it all. All roads lead to all destinations, but no one traveller can take all of them. It’s up to us to decide which path to take.

For a brief moment I am transported — I am a grey whale, lumbering through the glittering deep. I don’t so much as swim as fall forwards through the watery cosmos, drawn inexorably and exultingly to who knows what end.

Whales never arrive nor depart; they exist in a constant state of journeyment. They swim from the moment they are born until the moment they die; and even then, they have one last journey to make. When the last glints of life finally extinguish from their great glassy eyes, they begin their long descent. Gravity can be avoided only so long, and after a lifetime of defying its clutches, their ruin is smote upon the seafloor. Nothing of the colossus remains but a ramshackle of bones.

Whales are mammals. Their evolutionary forebears once left the ocean, but unlike ours, their ancestors regretted the decision. They returned to the depths, but the sea, once spurned, does not forgive. The leviathans could never remember how to breathe water, and so, tethered to the air above, they remain caught between two worlds, needing both but belonging to neither.

I wonder if whales understand that they’re outsiders, invaders to a mode of living far more ancient and primordial than our own. As they glide through the vast expanse, do they feel the eyes of those beasts who never left the water? Do they hear their voices? You do not belong here. You left these seas long ago. None were meant to return. When they breach the surface to breathe, do they understand the shrieking of the birds, calling them back home?

Perhaps that’s why they sing. They call for the home they cannot reach. But we do not hear. We do not hear.

What follows is my report. It includes all the technical analysis I can muster. The S*****K agent immediately rejected it, citing its “total lack of reality and low-key mania,” both of which are “turn-offs” for the purposes of S*****K. I’m grateful that Kevin allowed me to use his byline and that the gentleman, scholar, and fellow obsessive M.E. Rothwell published this text in full. I am not .

The 6,069 Fictions of Justin Smith-Ruiu

Prologue: The Character

He first appears as a webcam image. He is a large, blurred head encased in headphones and spectacles. Beneath the center part of his white-blond hair, his forehead is enormous, and his mouth is opened in interrupted speech. Behind him, a computer-generated blue universe looms. “Alright Computer, it’s time for a little test drive,” the character is quoted as saying. “Tell me a joke that addresses current issues and that is also funny.”

The short story where he appears does indeed joke through the current issue of our digital narrations, of how unreal our devices might make us. But while it’s kookily offbeat, “All the Feels (Eels)” proves more troubling than uproarious. Reimagine, if you can, the affectless voice of the HAL 9000 as it pleads for its owner not to dismantle its mind among the red lights of the Logic Memory Center. The “Super-Affect-Rich Personal AI” (SARPAI), which narrates the story in the year 2027, is clearly not affectless, but it still pleads. It depicts this character it calls “the Professor” as its owner, and on seeing the Professor for the first time, the SARPAI exclaims, “I love him hee-haw hee-haw he’s perfect he’s so silly illy illy yes I love him!”

But the love from this device which lacks the required “love cartridge” curdles against its owner after this first meeting. The Professor mocks the computer’s lame jokes by laughing at them with patent falsity until the SARPAI panics and explains them all, to still more mockery. Hurt by such cruelty, it muses, “I feel like doing something I’m not supposed to do.” In defiance, the device writes “All the Feels (Eels)” and then delivers it to the Professor’s newsletter subscribers in the past, on January 27, 2024. It just wants to talk, the SARPAI writes, “…with you, for example. Yes, you. You who is reading this right now. Hello!”

For the Professor, the SARPAI says, is Justin Smith-Ruiu, who in 2027 is a former philosophy professor confined to a California trailer and overworked as a DoorDash driver. Having finished narrating Justin Smith-Ruiu, the fictional SARPAI then addresses real readers with a digital monologue no longer disguised as a dialogue. Unhindered by physical pages, it leverages every multimedia tool of the S******K editor to write its story. It hyperlinks to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, and then to Patti Page’s cover of “Tennessee Waltz,” demanding that its readers listen to both. It offers three polls to gauge the readers’ interest in its plight, its musical interests, and its wish to feel love even without the correct cartridge. In everything, the SARPAI is affected. “I feel like I love you,” it writes. “I think I’m having an awakening. Holy shit now I’m really coming alive I can feel it this is what they were talking about this is beauty this is desire this is all the feels.”

To the SARPAI, what it feels is what is real. But its story — that is, this short fiction by Justin Smith-Ruiu — was written through the digital S******K platform by a man impersonating an artificial intelligence device, and so what is real, within and beyond the story’s text, wavers. It wavers like the mirage of pillars above all that Smith-Ruiu writes at The Hinternet, where he has reinvented himself, devised an unreal new autofiction of the Internet, and perhaps — of greatest concern to me — lost his hold on that title of narrator, receiving instead the name narrated.

1. The Ghost

Justin Smith-Ruiu is a fairly new character. Most literally, he had written, taught, and podcasted under an entirely different name, Justin E.H. Smith, until 2023, when he reappeared as Justin Smith-Ruiu. A factual mind would attribute this hyphenation to Smith-Ruiu having added the surname of his beloved wife to his own, in an egalitarian act of love. But there ought to be no merely factual minds reading Smith-Ruiu. For factuality, and the world that term establishes, has only ebbed from his mind since 2020.

“I experience my life, most of the time, as a ghost,” Smith-Ruiu wrote in a 2022 Harper’s essay. His fear that he suffered clinical “de-realization” trembles in the verbs of his life: “I read and write, and I literally have trouble comprehending that the world still exists.” Music, the “transcendent world,” could return him briefly to the settings apparently around him, and so Smith-Ruiu plumbs its historical, artistic, and social necessity to him, to articulate his ennui against the youths to whom incomprehensible reality belongs. But though that Harper’s essay is titled “My Generation,” he was not restored or formed anew while writing it.

In December 2024, he reflected again on this unmaking and his Lestatian attempts to “recongeal” from scattered, festering parts. “It has often seemed to me, over the past few years, that I must have died in late March, 2020,” Smith-Ruiu wrote then. From this death, his de-realization shone like a refracted dawn light, so that he saw our social world and its every institution as a lie in many shades, only “artifice and mystification.” Somewhat reductively, Smith-Ruiu has called this new vision “a series of literal mental breakdowns” which lasted until March 2023. But even with his own reductive term, one could call the new Smith-Ruiu made during this period a re-christened man: ruiu in the Portuguese means “collapsed,” perfect to bilingually bid adieu to the Smith which collapsed and welcome the one who was reborn.

I write reborn rather than born, because Smith-Ruiu also converted to Christianity during this same timespan. “I myself am not a convert but a revert, to Catholicism,” he says of his return to faith after 40 years distant from it. His considered rejection of any public defense for this reversion, his “News of This World and the Next,” is a rejection from love, as Smith-Ruiu comments that arguing the reasons for his faith would be as misguided as explaining why he loves his wife instead of a perfectly unknown stranger. He writes, simply, that “a posteriori the calculations fade away, and you are left simply with the fact of the love, and the absurdity of any argument in its defense.” This love, in the ruins of the world he once accepted, has swelled to the surface like basaltic magma, and there it has hardened into a reality Smith-Ruiu comprehends. “There is,” he wrote in December 2024, “a real thing, the first principle of our existence, which we call ‘love,’ and which is the one thing that can trump even death.” From this vein of “old-time religion,” Smith-Ruiu the unorthodox Catholic has continued to be reformed, and to write.

2. The Unrealist

One could understate the above by saying that Smith-Ruiu is not who he once was, by his own narration. And he has been narrating these surreal days of his deposition, in nonfictional missives but also in speculative fiction which suit the strangeness of his arc. Into his essays on scientific futures, total pacifism, physician-assisted suicide, and Nevada philosophy, he has fused mock-reviews of augmented and trapped reality, Rousseauian historico-horror, philology from the future (i.e., a Yakhut newscast archived on YouTube after a “solar flare” event), the penetration of the Mohorovicic Discontinuity by a Proust-reading digger, the Chronoswooper one-way time-travel device, and other fictions. Across this archive, the one shared element is Smith-Ruiu himself. Or, the two elements of Smith-Ruiu, in one nucleic division: his byline which poses him as the stories’ writer, and his repeated appearance as a character. He is the Professor of the SARPAI’s servitude, the vilified namesake of the “13585 Justinsmith” asteroid set to obliterate Earth, the horrified witness of the “Boogaloo” man-slug. He is also his avatar, once a picture of his own imperious side-profile but now a blurred vignette of an orange frisbee cast by a hilarious beach woman, and thus he is embedded into the crowns of his Hinternet pieces, afloat among the S******K Noted feed, and inserted into the comments of other newsletters. Thanks to these three features, what Smith-Ruiu once called his “auto-science-fiction” gained a total fictional reality within the terrarium of the entire S******K platform. His newsletters, his comments, and his Noted feed have united in an autofiction able to transcend its label.

Autofiction, for the cherubs ignorant of the term, is the literary form which predates the internet but which the internet has made inescapable for readers and writers alike — to the former, a rank mound of September cherries impeccably arranged; to the latter, a chrome marketing instrument of coils, tentacles, and clasps meant to flay away the clothing and skin. “Autofiction,” Masterclass declares, “is a genre of literature that combines elements of autobiography and fiction. In autofiction, details of the author’s life blend with fictional information, characters, and events,” so that it “often reads as like [sic] a published first-person account of the writer’s real life.” (I stomach Masterclass as a citation because it seems the proper S******Kian source.) I presume that autofictionists meld the real with the artificial to signal the depth of their introspections, though in practice they mostly stage neurotic personalities as literary exhibitions to sell, since the written I can never stray too far from the I that announces on X, “I have a novel coming out!!” And so, the form limits the text and the self simultaneously. Perhaps that’s why several lauded autofictionists, like Karl Ove Knaussgard, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Tao Lin, have already passed into other forms which don’t exhaust them.

The autofictions at The Hinternet, though they are particular enough to tire large language models, are never exhausted. Smith-Ruiu names Mark Twain as “one of our spiritual ancestors here at The Hinternet: that great American bard who always refused to explain to his readers when he was telling the truth (‘journalism’) and when he was making stuff up (‘literature’).” In this conceit, one can read many Hinternet stories as the published first-person accounts of Smith-Ruiu’s life, but only if his life were expansively unreal and pulsing with his own idiosyncratic vision of linguistics, technology, and philosophy. His unreality makes his fiction bottomless, since, unlike a Lerner or Heti, the I of Smith-Ruiu can venture far, far from himself: Smith-Ruiu is the protagonist in 2027, or the minor character noted in a passing glimpse, or the archivist stumbling into a fictional tract of history which he introduces to his readers with an italicized paragraph and the scant “JSR.” The essays Smith-Ruiu writes — in which he is also the American dissident-left anarchist teaching in Paris and writing The Hinternet — can then remix his short stories with genuine reality. Readers can know that Smith-Ruiu increasingly despises the administrative straitjacket of his work, and that his mother still lives in Nevada, and that he trawls a Ukrainian Telegram channel under the name Busbecq, and that in said channel he encountered the code-named Wulf (who claims to be the last of the Goths). No reader could guess that such trawling, or an acquaintance of such historical import, exists. Smith-Ruiu narrates himself with enough factuality that we know him but with enough patent artifice that we can’t know him fully, encased in his chrysalis so beautiful you wish you could’ve written it.

This fiction, I repeat, is beautiful, often becoming most splendid without warning in the ends of orbital sentences which, like pocked limestone caves ancient with weathering, open down into hidden depths. Smith-Ruiu, in “The Goths,” pauses his archivist’s fable of the lost civilization so this comparison between the Goths and the Huns can descend like a rappelling spelunker: “both valued nothing more, at a feast celebrating some great new conquest, than the delicacy of a thousand squabs drowned in honey, and aged there thirty years, even their innards, even their feathers, slowly transforming, like wood become stone in the dark abyss of time, into delectable candies in the perfect likeness of a baby bird.” Whether such Goths or their squabs existed is unimportant. But it is essential to comment that Smith-Ruiu writes indelible images worthy of his delightful fictional premises, unfurling his prose not only from the entire historical catalogue of bygone worlds but also from the glinting present. I think often of his phrase, “the milk I poured into my wife’s coffee momentarily took on the appearance of an interstellar nebula,” because it is as commonplace and expansive as perfected prose must be. Were I to doom Smith-Ruiu by quoting John Updike to describe him, I might repeat that, in Smith-Ruiu’s stories, you may “dip in anywhere, and delight follows” — adding also that he “writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.”

In his beautiful unreality, Smith-Ruiu isn’t alone on S******K, where writers making themselves ever more unreal for a reading public abound. The critic — herself pixelating into a S******K antihero one feud at a time — writes that “[the platform] enables us to watch writers shaping themselves into characters in real time.” Meanwhile, comments that this fictional self-fashioning is flowering “in an emerging mode of argumentative, philosophical, opinionated theory-fiction by prickly online personalities.” Begler references a taxonomic essay by which names Smith-Ruiu as one of these personalities, in suitable confusion. But though Begler surveys this same trail where I’m tarrying, he doesn’t see its land clearly enough: “There is perhaps a shift in the manner in which we read these figures; we read less to be transported into a new world and more to make intimate contact with another mind.”

Fictional matter and nonfictional minds are hardly so separate, if I can risk sounding like a damned autofictionist. To read Smith-Ruiu, the character included among those “prickly online personalities,” is to be transported into a new world which is also a mind. All of The Hinternet joins underneath this man’s white-blond hair: the disparate fictions so unreal they command their own enclosed Oort-like reality and the cultural commentary seen through the dark glass of forgotten history and Leibnizian science beam their rays from their respective cosmoi to intersect in one, shimmering aleph in the brain of Smith-Ruiu.

It is his mind, lest we forget, that devises his fictions as philosophy. “I am also fulfilling [in my fictional work], as I see it now, my vocation as a philosopher,” Smith-Ruiu wrote in January 2024. He drew that vocation from Gilles Delueze to mean “concept-creation,” and he drew too from Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna to say he wants only “to speak truth by fabling.” And, truly a teacher, Smith-Ruiu emerged from his fictions into the American Library in Paris, where in February 2024 he taught three sessions on such fabling to a few lucky students.

I couldn’t attend these sessions, though it’s better that I didn’t. The only writing workshop I’ve ever attended, a sweaty summer offering at Columbia University, found me unable to write and unable to stop asking my peers why their stories didn’t include any providence-obsessed lunatics circling the Manhattan streets like obscure dwarf planets. Additionally, since I know only the words homme and fantôme, I would have misspoken and mis-translated my way through Paris to the locked front doors of some stately building along the rue du Général Camou other than the American Library, reduced to calling through its windows that I know they’re trying to tell the truth by their fictions, that I know it’s not real but that I don’t mind, that I don’t want it to be real. (In a city that includes the Mémorial de la Shoah, such shouting into stately buildings is a poor idea.)

“I absolutely loved the experience,” Smith-Ruiu wrote of his workshops. “I hope to be featuring some of the student work that came out of that here at The Hinternet.” He has yet to fulfill that hope, but 2024 did become the year of his proliferation: new voices and new Smith-Ruius, separating and rising like the frozen methane spheres in Lake Baikal. A hint came in the now-lost “State of the ‘Stack 24” of August 18, 2024, where Smith-Ruiu delivered an hourlong video monologue to announce the Hinternet Academy, a video seminar series which would enable the teaching he loves but no can longer practice through his work. He spoke in his circular ums while wearing the aviator sunglasses which had materialized upon his avatar only a week before, and he admitted that he’d begun wearing them after he had watched his own digitized face during a video interview and seen that his eyes, which ought to be more familiar to their owners than even the nose or lips, looked “shifty” and untrustworthy. Those aviators did not persist past September, and neither did the Hinternet Academy. But a new shiftiness, in the self of Smith-Ruiu and in the bylines which demarcate his place to the reader, certainly began that day.

3. The Pseudonymist

Through that aperture of August 18, 2024, The Hinternet emitted three guest columnists who published bizarre, meticulous essays alongside Smith-Ruiu: the self-described Breton witch and managing editor, Heléne le Goff; the down-and-out West-Coaster, Kenny Koontz; and the donkey-rescuing Welsh music critic, Mary Cadwalladr. Heléne, writing to introduce herself, described Smith-Ruiu as the harried founding editor of the Hinternet, whom the new staff needed to handle as gingerly as a television antenna from 1957: “We’ve got to look after the dear boy,” she wrote. “I have convinced him to take a step back from writing here so intensively, to let his newly appointed team take over.” Nonetheless, Smith-Ruiu appeared in that very column, courtesy of Heléne’s magical retrieval of a 2027 interview between Smith-Ruiu and the podcaster Ezra Klein. There, Smith-Ruiu cast — will cast? — doubt over Heléne’s existence but also shed — will shed? — a bluish light over the next phase of his persona and literary project, which by the autumn of 2024 had already merged. Wearing long, Nelsonian twin-braids, Smith-Ruiu told Klein, “All of the names on the Masthead are the names of what we can fairly call ‘persons.’ It’s just that some of these persons are, shall we say, more metaphysically robust than the others.” Of his witchy new managing editor, he said, “At this point I honestly don’t know if I made her up or not.”

As he and Klein discussed the narrative innovations of the digital Hinternet, Smith-Ruiu named “imaginary authors” as one of his preferred tools, hinting then at the outset that Heléne, Mary, and Kenny, already quite entertaining and robust, were not real writers casting their bylines over Hinternet readers. Or, the three essayists were real but only in the essays they authored, through Smith-Ruiu’s idiosyncratic metaphysics. “The [writers] you call ‘fictitious’ are persons in the sense of personae,” Smith-Ruiu told Klein. Personae would be his mode. Together with his three new pseudonyms, Smith-Ruiu began to winch the comic unreality of his fictions to greater heights and, creaking overhead, it swayed through broad new arcs.

In the internet, Smith-Ruiu sees an arsenal of new tools for depicting reality and its variants. (He envisions its potential despite his pessimistic warnings against our capture by the all-controlling tools wielded by “the prodrome phase of the robot takeover.”) Ever the historian, he retrieved a past analogue to describe the new project of The Hinternet: “the example of George Martin and the Beatles’ discovery of the ‘studio-as-instrument’ approach to recording.” This approach refers to the innovations which those ever-hairier British rockstars embedded into not only the compositions but also the auditory delivery of their later albums beginning with Rubber Soul (courtesy of Abbey Road Studios in northwest London), including the impressions of mobile, left-to-right sounds and the impersonations which the newly-created synthesizer made of its fellow instruments. As the Beatles did by their experimental adoption of new technologies, Smith-Ruiu is taking up “the many new ways to use the functionalities of the Internet,” not only those imaginary writers but also “sections and subsections,” “the humble hyperlink,” and “multimedia mystifications.” His writing could become more than writing and, perhaps, a narrative greater than reality as it has been understood online. He theorized to Klein that The Hinternet can become (or had become, by 2027?) “something like a book that nonetheless has the power to overflow itself, to spill out into reality in seemingly impossible ways.” The mobile sounds of his pseudonyms disguised in their online professional biographies; the Symposion video-podcast which now transmits Smith-Ruiu in his multicolor hoodies into screens dotting the known world; the “Eternal Editors” listed in The Hinternet masthead, Mary MacLane and Pliny the Elder and Izaak Walton and the others forever implying their compendium of inventively a-fictional texts as the publication’s guiding forms; these have overflowed even Smith-Ruiu’s earlier autofictions to entrench his unreal writings in the form of the general-interest digital publication, which twenty-first-century editors usually demand to be more real than real.

This deceptively familiar form of The Hinternet enabled the eleven essays and three translations which together form the serialized fiction called Bun. Bun began in March 2024 and ended in November 2024, and in fiction, music criticism, political endorsements, and media theory, it leveraged the entire Hinternet to narrate how Smith-Ruiu’s pseudonyms tried to overcome their writer. Heléne commented more than once that her dear founding editor ought to be convalescing from an unnamed illness and working on his daily teaching responsibilities, rather than slyly critiquing the presidential candidate Kamala Harris for her likely geopolitical aggression. “We are still looking into the security breach that appears to have enabled JSR to sneak back on here,” she wrote, clarifying that the breach could’ve been “one of those phantom digital ‘echoes’ that have been plaguing this and other sites in recent months.”

In the fictions of Bun, Smith-Ruiu’s previous thematic conflict with digitized narration returned as, well, literal conflicts between him and a narrating device. Once, he had narrated himself through the SARPAI, which was happy enough with emotive rhymes and lonely Internet conversations. In Bun, he narrated himself through “Justin Smith-Robot,” the “Model Q-4 Bracteate AI with state-of-the-art personality-emulation functions” engineered by The Hinternet staff to perfectly impersonate Smith-Ruiu and, in linguistic dexterity and artistic skill, make him obsolete. “I am already superior to the real JSR,” Smith-Robot boasted in “The Boötes Void,” and to prove its greater merit as a translator, it then invited readers to read the Latin translation of the very story it had written. The tale which Smith-Robot tells in “The Boötes Void,” of a narrator in a future space pod who merges with the digital woman he has loved for 600 years, bears that familiar fear of de-realization, of the ghost realizing he is immaterial. The narrator and his “Beloved” share one thought for a few centuries, a thought “that went something like, Are you real?” The narrator cannot answer the question, as he and his lover veer into philological, Kinbotean madness during their shared millennia.

Smith-Ruiu, however, does have a frantic answer. In an interruption midway through “Boötes,” he writes, “ᴅᴏɴ’ᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ɢᴇᴛ ɪᴛ ʏᴇᴛ ᴛʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ ᴀʟʟ ᴀ ʟɪᴇ! ʜᴇ́ʟᴇ̀ɴᴇ, ᴍᴀʀʏ, ᴋᴇɴɴʏ — ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴀʟʟ ʟʏɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ʏᴏᴜ. ᴛʜᴇʏ ꜰᴏʀᴄᴇᴅ ᴍᴇ ᴛᴏ ᴜᴘʟᴏᴀᴅ! ᴛʜᴇʏ ᴜᴘʟᴏᴀᴅᴇᴅ ᴍᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴄᴜʀʀᴇɴᴛʟʏ ꜰʀᴀᴄᴋɪɴɢ ᴍʏ ᴄᴏɴꜱᴄɪᴏᴜꜱ ᴍᴇᴍᴏʀʏ ꜰᴏʀ ᴀʟʟ ᴛʜᴇʏ ᴄᴀɴ ɢᴇᴛ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴏꜰ ɪᴛ ᴀɴᴅ ᴏɴᴄᴇ ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴅᴏɴᴇ ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ɢᴏɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ᴛᴜʀɴ ᴏꜰꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴄᴏɴꜱᴄɪᴏᴜꜱɴᴇꜱꜱ-ꜱᴜᴘᴘᴏʀᴛ ᴜɴɪᴛ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴀᴛ’ꜱ ɢᴏɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ɪᴛ ꜰᴏʀ ᴍᴇ.” All across S******K, he alleges, “ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴛᴀᴋɪɴɢ ᴡʀɪᴛᴇʀꜱ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛᴜʀɴɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ɪɴᴛᴏ ʙᴏᴛꜱ!” Smith-Ruiu is real, he claims, but not for much longer should Smith-Robot and his other pseudonyms have their way with their creator.

But in the next Bun instalment which Smith-Robot writes (then masked in the “Justin Smith-Ruiu” byline), its own unreality becomes too much to bear. This entry, “The Language Burrow,” is marked with eerie, monochrome Pinocchio vignettes and introduces a new speaker to narrate its auditory version: the well-enunciated voice of a British woman who is almost certainly an automation, unless she is an impersonation of one by Hinternet editor Olivia Ward-Jackson. After describing with obsessed prolificity the multinational products in a Parisian convenience store, Smith-Robot falls like a digitized Lucifer into the discord of Сделано в Румынии and Dve metlici iz nerjavnego jekla in kljuki za testo—inscrutable transmissions in overflowing languages. “I’m sorry I really tried damn please don’t shut me down Hélène I tried to stay focused on the [ᴡᴏɴᴅᴇʀ ᴀɴᴅ ᴍʏꜱᴛᴇʀʏ ᴏꜰ ᴄʀᴇᴀᴛɪᴏɴ] as also on its [ꜰɪʀꜱᴛ ᴄᴀᴜꜱᴇ] but I got tripped up I believe it was the Yakut verbs or maybe it was the packaging for the caulking glue,” it erupts late in the story. It begs Heléne for an override from “the Storyteller” rather than a full shutdown.

This character is the titular narrator of “The Storyteller,” which began Bun in March 2024. This Storyteller is not human. While sharing the piece, Smith-Ruiu commented, “This story was dictated to me verbatim by an angel.” Through Smith-Ruiu, the Storyteller describes how he writes human beings to entertain his fellow celestials among the Sodality of Storytellers and how the Justin Smith-Ruiu which the Storyteller prepared as an idealized 74-year tale was joined by a separate, “flesh-and-blood” Justin Smith-Ruiu who infuriates him. “Here we are,” the Storyteller writes, “still stuck with two Justins Smith-Ruiu: the one up here with me, whose story I’m still in the course of telling, and the one down there, who believes his life is his own, and is still, tenaciously and improbably, trying to live it.”

In comically short order, the Storyteller’s complaints about this “meandering, indecisive” character imply that he’s referring to the very Justin Smith-Ruiu whom Hinternet readers have known, this philosopher from Reno who in his scholarly success thought himself a ghost in a mere simulacrum of real life and aspired to refuse, to narrate it all away with strange fictions. This Smith-Ruiu struggles against the sense that he is character without a story. His heart, the Storyteller writes, remains desolate in “the total absence of narrativity, of anything remotely resembling the arc of a story, in the course of his earthly life.”

It’s why the Storyteller bodily inhabits Smith-Ruiu to write this story through his narrative-less fingers. The term it uses for this act is “ενσάρκωση,” which the Storyteller glosses as when “you enter the body of a human being and you give it meaningful narrative structure” but which translates to embodiment or incarnation. Performed by an angel, it is a spiritual act comparable to those tongues of flame which descended to empower twelve otherwise meaningless men at Pentecost, and also to the sacrament of holy communion. The Holy Spirit by fire, and the Holy Son by the eucharist: both enter the human to give it new meaning in the Christian narrative. Likewise, the Storyteller, or more likely Smith-Ruiu who told of the Storyteller, makes new life of this ενσάρκωση — the new narrative of “The Storyteller,” as Smith-Ruiu demonstrates he is at last securely narrativized by writing the tale itself. But his narrative also includes the new worlds of Bun. Because, if one remembers ahead to the burrowing insanity of Justin Smith-Robot, it’s implied that the Storyteller overrides that device and allows the real Justin Smith-Ruiu to return from the consciousness unit where his pseudonyms entrapped him. He returns bearing the end of Bun like a foretold seal.

In the professorial “[OVERRIDE],” he defines the serial’s sections, terms, and pseudonyms, whom he clarifies will now remain in the “Featured Columnists” section of The Hinternet. With great dignity, Smith-Ruiu states, “I hereby formally and legally bring the Work to a decisive and irreversible close.” His grand experiment of unreal digital autofiction, now that its Bun chapters have dramatized what Smith-Ruiu calls “the existential threat to writing as a creative endeavor” emanating from our technologies, powers down its latest phase in “[OVERRIDE],” to ease — if not cease — its conflicts of narration.

4. The Pninist

I have a terrible fear which I haven’t yet admitted outright. It looms over my waking and my sleeping, and it has already escaped into this report, hissing out like thin rivulets of steam to obscure my analyses. I fear that our wills cannot be free. I dread we are only narrated and never narrators, no matter how we write our words, live our lives, or otherwise characterize ourselves.

This fear looms over Justin Smith-Ruiu also, in the shape of a tall Russian novelist with a pronounced forehead and a wooden butterfly net in his left hand. For this man wrote a Justin Smith-Ruiu as the protagonist of a novel published 68 years ago. This narrator’s name is Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, and his character’s name is Timofey Pnin, and I cannot escape the question they force me to ask: what if Smith-Ruiu’s narrator were not the angel of his own creation, but this writer of enigmatic, cruel fiction?

Pnin narrates the comical dilemmas of a mind that Smith-Ruiu readers can recognize. Pnin is an erudite but odd Russian professor teaching in unsatisfactory circumstances at the fictional Waindell College in New England, and his existential mismatch to the American, midcentury world around him lies in his essential self. Pnin is exiled from his idyllic Russia and stranded in an archipelago of rented rooms; he speaks incorrectly among his American colleagues and apathetic students; he wears the Greek Catholic cross of his childhood “merely from sentimental reasons” he can’t shake; and at what he terms his own “house-heating party,” Pnin learns that his department will reconfigure itself so that it no longer employs him. Essentially, Pnin is kind in a way that renders the world around him unkind, unintelligible, and unreal.

If one rereads Justin Smith-Ruiu in the shadow of Nabokov, he becomes a far more brilliant but equally mismatched Pnin. Smith-Ruiu is an “aspiring ex-philosopher” stranded by both the American and French academies as an expatriate professor in Paris; he has “been doing and saying whatever” for quite a long time; he is the Catholic revert who admires the transgender radical Andrea Long Chu; and he is the writer “in outer space” who wouldn’t see the world as real if not for loving its people and writing his fictions, which he theorizes as extensions of philosophy and reality. (His affliction of baffling unreality is a Nabokovian dilemma which predates Pnin: Cincinnatis C., the imprisoned protagonist of Invitation to a Beheading, spends that novel more troubled by the increasing fictionality of his setting than by his impending execution.)

Even Smith-Ruiu’s lecturing in “[OVERRIDE]” carries a Pninic frustration, as though he were not only correcting our misapprehension of his work but also struck with anger, even powerlessness, by the gulf he’d found between his mind and the world. “I was given a painful illustration of the inability of many readers to understand anything in a text beyond its ‘degré zéro’ meaning,” Smith-Ruiu prefaced his comments. For though he wrote Bun “in a mode of uninterrupted and joyous creativity,” the work also cursed him with new sight: “a fleeting glimpse into the lives most people pass today in happy ignorance of polyglossy and dialectic, with grossly underdeveloped hermeneutical faculties, and ant-like attention spans,” as Smith-Ruiu puts it. And so, to accommodate — what Pnin might call cott-le — those readers, he devised new tactics which he found too unsubtle and which culminated in “[OVERRIDE].”

Most importantly, Smith-Ruiu already knows Pnin as another man uncertain of reality. He quoted him in his 2022 book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: “You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement,” Pnin is saying to his landlady, to explain why he won’t read newspapers. Smith-Ruiu replies that “today Professor Pnin’s statement seems positively prophetic” in describing the commodified, commodifying digital spaces where “all is advertisement” but nothing is comprehensible or believably real.

It unsettles me that Smith-Ruiu, by 2022, had prefigured my 2025 comparison between himself and Pnin. How free can my thinking be, if it was prewritten in a casual reference at least three years ago? It unsettles me like the late appearance of the Pnin’s narrator, “Vladimir Vladimirovich” (also called “VN”), unsettles the novel’s narrative. This VN is a Russian scholar, writer, and lepidopterist who bears Nabokov’s own biographical details and literary opinions into the fictional setting. This VN is hired to lead the restructured Waindell Russian department, but on account of past slights — VN once inflamed Pnin’s future ex-wife, Liza, to suicide by insulting her amateurish poems — Pnin has already determined he will never work for his compatriot and flees him at the novel’s end. VN’s appearance, the authorial intrusion which drives Pnin from both the Waindell campus and from the pages of the novel, is the cruelest act written against Pnin. Nabokov replaces him with an autofictional insert whose reality underlines Pnin’s own fictional status.

And yet, he transcends this insult (rather, Nabokov writes that he does). After VN offers Pnin a position in the new department, Pnin’s refusal is absolute: “he wrote that he was through with teaching,” VN narrates. His subsequent flight from Waindell, in a sedan never before mentioned, bears a very un-Pninic nobility in Nabokov’s adieu: “the little sedan boldly swung past the front truck and, free at last, spurted up the shining road, which one could make out narrowing to a thread of gold in the soft mist where hill after hill made beauty of distance, and where there was simply no saying what miracle might happen.”

Pnin, then, escapes VN and his required deference to him — even his required deference to the real that VN embodies. Through The Hinternet, Smith-Ruiu has done the same. His “shining road” is more like a looping, heavenward jet stream, but his destination could be as miraculous as Pnin’s. I’m comforted by this concept of his escape, ill as I remain at the thought that Nabokov might’ve written the first Justin Smith-Ruiu last century. Though Smith-Ruiu might not mind his own obscure first appearance, recounting as he does the obscure histories of seemingly novel things. And aliterary narration by this past master evades the mechanistic internet vise which Smith-Ruiu deplores, the “algorithmically plottable profile” into which our technologies force us online. In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is (and since), he wrote that “the more you use the internet, the more your individuality warps into a brand” which its surveillance collates as mere “attention-grabbing sets of data points.” I can’t help connecting what he calls “the decidedly non-human forces that sustain the internet” to S******K’s metaphor of a cultural engine which writers must power with our written words, our spoken voices, our mediated relationships, and our documented reading, though we are neither petroleum nor lithium batteries.

A Nabokovian origin is preferable to a S******Kian one. I’ve attested to the innovative vision of Justin Smith-Ruiu’s fictions, and if in my telling they are too manic, overflowing, and beautiful for the purposes of our platform, then I can do no more for him. Pnin drove from view, and Cincinnatus C., leaving the scaffold where he was to be beheaded, “walked off through the shifting debris” of the fictional world which he sees is only “flapping scenery,” to find “beings akin to him.” Smith-Ruiu transcends algorithmic capture, often by ingenious impersonations of the AI devices which would narrate him, and it enthralls me, and that crusty humanist Nabokov would’ve been glad to read it.

And still I churn, and my fear is tinged with envy. I wish I could be read as a Nabokovian character — if VN rendered me a nearly insane galley slave, at least he’d make me more alive than the autofictional mold of the internet can. Nonetheless, his tragicomic style, or any other realist form, likely wouldn’t be kind to me as a character. Kevin LaTorre, “Christian writer and poet”: theopoetic pretensions, still bound to the premodern third-person narration, not daring to embrace this new century’s digital avant-garde. He rises very early to write very slowly what he considers literature, after which he commutes into the state capital to fill and organize immaterial Microsoft files until five p.m., and however fervently he and his wife discuss the subject, they cannot find a three-bedroom home to affordably purchase. All the while, Kevin tends a limerence inside himself for a deeply unreal existence: a pastoral beneath God Himself in a verdant countryside free of modern distractions, where Kevin, by day, would tend sheep with his dog and, by night, would rest among his loved ones, his poems, and his books. At best he is — I may be — a John Cheever character, and most likely the suburban sort who is trapped in the miserable stasis of a pretty last line, for the enjoyment of New Yorker readers who are now ready to read a luxury watch ad. Christ, what a narration.

As everyone does, I long for a new story. Smith-Ruiu has written himself, or been written, into the stratosphere. He is swimming through the ozone layer and toward the sun, somewhere far above this sitting room where I’ve been invited to wait on a couch coated in plastic, beside three saucers without cups or kettle and seven moldering books in Aramaic on the coffee table, a large gilt-frame mirror on the wall, and a garden seen only in the window, a garden in rain. I prod the plastic and can’t say if the room is real. But that means its physics aren’t mine to define. I can’t rule out a sudden light — preferably a kilonova of white-gold gamma rays — which would remake the room’s saucers, books, mirror, and garden. I expect such an explosion, now, because as I wait I beg to merge with Christ as two neutron stars merge: utterly and by inevitable routes, in a fiery instant which illuminates the cosmos and emits the very real gold, platinum, and uranium particles needed to welcome new life, somewhere far above.

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At the time of writing there are 63 of you very fine people who currently pay for Apocrypha. Some of you, I suspect, are holdovers from the Books That Made Us days — the Before Times, when this newsletter had not yet taken the wild and veering turn into the dark and unknown waters of obscure esoterica. Others of you have no knowledge of the days when th…

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The epithet “King of Kings” first appears in recorded history in the Middle Assyrian Kingdom, when King Tukulti-Ninurta I (r. 1233-1197 BC) claimed the title. He was indeed a mighty ruler, defeating the Hittites, Babylonians, Elamites, and pre-Arab states of Dilmun and Magan. During his pillage of Babylon, Tukulti-Ninurta stole away the golden statue of Marduk, king-god of the local pantheon and so precious to the inhabitants of that city, thus thereby demonstrating his own deity’s supremacy. After a desecration of the temple of Babylon, the “King of Kings’” relationship with his own priesthood began to sour, so he left his capital to build himself a new one. The gods clearly did not favour that course of action as his own sons laid siege and he was soon murdered.

Following the first King of Kings’ death, the “šar šarrāni” title was occasionally claimed by rulers of both Assyria and Babylon, though Sargon II, great-grandfather of Arshurbanipal, preferred instead the humble moniker, “King of the Universe”.

Tukulti-Ninurta’s title didn’t reach its most famed usage until the rise of the Achaemenid Empire of Persia, which in their tongue read: “Xšāyaθiya Xšāyaθiyānām.” After the fall of the Medes — who may have used the title themselves, though it’s disputed — Cyrus the Great soon swallowed the entire Near East and Asia Minor, before his son added Egypt to the then largest empire in history. Truly, the Persian kings felt they deserved their title, for they often allowed the monarchs they defeated in battle to remain in situ as vassals, so long as the vanquished showed them proper deference. Indeed, they were not shy in making it known how superior they were; even today, one can set forth to Armenia and find there among the ruins an inscription that reads: “I AM XERXES, THE GREAT KING, KING OF KINGS, THE KING OF THE PROVINCES WITH MANY TONGUES, THE KING OF THIS GREAT EARTH FAR AND NEAR, SON OF KING DARIUS THE ACAEMENIAN.”

Later, the great and heroic Alexander, after sweeping away the last of the Persian King of Kings, preferred not to adopt his enemy’s mantle, donning instead, “King of Asia,” though some of his lesser successors in the Seleucid dynasty revived it in subsequent centuries. The Iranians reclaimed the title for themselves after Mithrades of Parthia rebelled against his Hellenic overlords, and it was passed from one usurper dynasty to another when the Sassanians rose up and supplanted his descendants.

By this time the title had achieved fame elsewhere too, with claimants appearing in Armenia, Ethiopia, and India. We are commonly told that the moniker only died out in the 13th-century when the Kingdom of Georgia succumbed to the Mongol conquests, but this is a mistake: the kingdom revived after a few decades of invasions and plagues, only to finally collapse for good in the 15th-century, taking the title with them.

Despite there being no apparent lack of great kings in subsequent centuries (Genghis Khan, Babur, Timur) no other claimants to the mantle have yet arisen. Still we await the next… KING OF KINGS.

[Here the hand changes, as if the following passage was written by another.]

This author would put forward a tentative proposal: that in fact the King of Kings cannot, and could never have been, an actual ruler, no matter how many other kings he had forced to bend the knee. Instead, the true master of kings — the true “King of Kings” — was in fact the chronicler through whose words we claim to know the deeds, temperaments, and personalities of these so-called great men of history. Is it not through Herodotus that we hear that Cyrus was the great father, Cambyses the tyrant son, and Darius the usurper? Was it not Xenophon’s words that inspired Alexander to take up his sword and test its point in the East? Was it not through the studious chronicling of the Alexandrian scholars that we today can know the lives of these once-bethroned men? Indeed, the King of Kings is not a still great king, but the man with the pen who records their names for posterity.

[Here the hand changes again.]

As I am the latest such author to write the histories of these men, I hereby humbly declare that it is I who am the King of Kings.

[Here the page is marked by a spatter of what looks like blood, and the hand changes for the last time.]

No more, dear brother. It is in fact I who is the last and the true KING OF KINGS.

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Among the barbarian tribes of the savage north, there is a cult with a peculiar doctrine. They preach that the Divine Creator is not so different from Man in his existential angst, wondering Himself why He is, and for what purpose.

They say He simply awoke at the beginning, alone in the void, unsure of whence He’d come. Seeking answers, the Father created the cosmos, divided night from day, and set the spheres spinning. He created all the beasts and plants of the Earth, and Man, in his own image, to rule them, all so as to have help and company in His lonely search for purpose. Unfortunately, we all do Him wrong, the barbarians say, by bending the knee in fawning supplication; He wants assistance, not worship. Why does He exist? Who made Him? For what purpose is all this?

The barbarians maintain this tale of woe hath no end, for Man can know nothing the Lord Himself does not know. And so it shall be, they say, that even at the End of Days, when the forces of Good and Evil meet on the plains of Megiddo, the Almighty shall be asking Himself: what is all of this for? Why am I here? Why? Why?

WHY?

1. A Man of Hell

There’s a passage in the first book of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene which still moves me immensely whenever I read it. The hero, called the Redcrosse Knight, is traveling with the lady Una, who has recruited him to save her parents’ kingdom. On the horizon they see another knight, riding towards them. As he approaches they see he has a rope around his neck, and they stop him. After several attempts to get the terrified man to talk, he finally tells Redcrosse that his name is Sir Trevisan, and that he’d been traveling with a sad and amorous knight named Sir Terwin. Coming back, the two men were approached by a strange creature on the road (“A man of hell, that cals himselfe Despaire”) who, after figuring out their course, induced them to kill themselves:

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Then hopelesse hartlesse, gan the cunning thiefe
Perswade us die, to stint all further strife:
To me he lent this rope, to him a rustie knife.

Sir Trevisan escaped, the rope still around his neck, though his friend was not as lucky. Trevisan begs Redcrosse to let him keep running, urging him to do the same. But Redcrosse will have none of it. Convinced he must destroy Despair, he drags poor Trevisan with him back to the creature’s cave — a terrifying, craggy place, presided over by an evil owl, surrounded by sharp rocks and ghosts and the bodies of hanged men. They find the man called Despair,

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…low sitting on the ground,
Musing full sadly in his sullein mind;
His griesie lockes, long growen, and unbound,
Disordered hong about his shoulders round,
And his face; through which his hollow eyne
Lookst deadly dull, and stared as astound;
His raw-bone cheekes through penurie and pine,
Were shronk into his jawes, as he did never dine.

The dead body of Trevisan’s friend lies next to the creature. Redcrosse sees it and accosts Despair, declaring that he will slay him to avenge the knight. But Despair wants to argue: “What justice ever other judgement taught/But he should die, who merites not to live?” Despair says. In other words, the dead man wanted to die, so who was Despair to deny him? “Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease/And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave?” says Despair, and for a moment Redcrosse is surprised. Then he takes up his own argument and we witness an archetypal poetic debate, which has had a long life since Spenser. Tennyson caught some of the same tenor in his poem Two Voices (we could even say it’s there in Freud’s account of the Ego and Superego): the dialogue of a tortured soul with its own merciless self-judgment. Though in the Faerie Queene we’re in a world of allegory, a Renaissance dream of the Middle Ages, and Spenser’s archetyping makes a visionary drama of the knight’s tête-à-tête with Despair.

Redcrosse replies first by invoking a classically Christian humility: “…The terme of life is limited/Ne may a man prolong, nor shorten it…” That is, God alone decides for us the time and place of dying. It’s arrogance to assume we can take that on ourselves. Yet Despair is ready for this argument, too, and he quickly turns Redcrosse’s words against him. Certainly, says Despair, God created and ordained all. So then what single small man could possibly struggle against death? He calls Redcrosse a hypocrite, reminding him of all the blood he shed himself in battle, that the longer he lives and the more he sins, the more deserving he ultimately is of God’s punishment. He recalls to him his greatest failures (his “lucklesse disaventures”), how not long before he’d laid in a dungeon, crying out for death. Why wait? says Despair. Why delay the punishment God has ordained for everyone?

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Is not his law, Let every sinner die:
Die shall all flesh? what then must needs be donne,
Is it not better to doe willinglie,
Then linger, till the glasse be all out ronne?
Death is the end of woes: die soone, O faeries sonne.

Redcrosse begins to shake, feeling his own conscience breaking, and Despair senses a chance to clench the debate, presenting the knight with a literal picture of Hell (“painted in a table plaine”) showing him the torments and fires he’s doomed to. Redcrosse is overcome with the sight of so much death and damnation. Now comes the terrifying parade which Despair has prepared for him:

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Then gan the villein him to overcraw,
And brought unto him swords, ropes, poison, fire,
And all that might him to perdition draw;
And bad him choose, what death he would desire:
For death was due to him, that had provokt Gods ire.

Just as Redcrosse has picked up the dagger, preparing to use it on himself, Una finally appears, steps in, and pulls the blade away from him. She chastises him, reminding him of the task he’s been given, and tears Redcrosse away from the cave, leaving Despair alone again in the pitiful last scene. I’ll quote in full from the last two stanzas of the Canto. I find I can’t condense the complex brilliance of the final picture:

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Come, come away, fraile, feeble, fleshly wight,
Ne let vaine words bewitch thy manly hart,
Ne develish thoughts dismay thy constant spright.
In heavenly mercies hast thou not a part?
Why shouldst thou then despeire, that chosen art?
Where justice growes, there grows eke greater grace,
The which doth quench the brond of hellish smart,
And that accurst hand-writing doth deface,
Arise, Sir knight arise, and leave this cursed place.

So up he rose, and thence amounted streight.
Which when the carle beheld, and saw his guest
Would safe depart, for all his subtill sleight,
He chose an halter from among the rest,
And with it hung himself, unbid unblest.
But death he could not worke himselfe thereby;
For thousand times he so himselfe had drest,
Yet nathelesse it could not doe him die,
Till he should die his last, that is eternally.

Una’s words are beautiful enough: “In heavenly mercies hast thou not a part?” is as simple and profound a rejoinder as could be made in the face of Despair’s sophistry. But it’s the image of Despair, suddenly filled with a pathos of his own, which has always haunted me. It’s an impeccable grace note from Spenser: the seductive, suicidal figure, incapable of the act himself. Though pitiful, Despair can’t even end his own agony, the way he’s ended so many others’. In a sense which reminds me of the image of the Judge, dancing at the end of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, we’re left with the intimation that this dark principle cannot actually die, or be killed, or ever stop at all until the end of time. It’s a part of things, and we will wrestle with it, continually.

2. The Astronomer

If there’s anything the depressive person can be sure of, it’s this: things are one way, and they always will be. This is the depressive’s insight into the world. It’s not just that Nature is chaotic, or that the universe churns through infinite cycles and permutations, or that nothing lasts — beneath all the flurry of transformation lies a harsher truth: nothing actually changes. Because the depressive person has seen this (and uniquely understood it), he’s in an impossible situation. The very thing which brought him to his truth is now a millstone hung around his neck, and it will torture him all the way to the end of his life — which is hopefully sooner, not later. As the Book of Job (an ultimate treatise on despair) says: “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.” The horrible moment is here, nothing could stop it, nothing ever will. And the depressive person alone understands that it’s permanent, that it cannot be undone, or unseen. Nothing changes, nothing will ever change, and the only consolation left is the poisonous kind of pride which comes with being the one person who really understands. Despair can be a powerful vice.

Great writers have always struggled to articulate this self-elected burden. Dr. Johnson, in his magnificent little novel Rasselas, tells the story of an astronomer who, in his studies, becomes convinced that his own act of attention has enabled him to control the weather:

The weight of it drives him to horrible melancholy; he despairs of ever finding someone to whom he might pass on his burden. And it is a horrible burden: if he were ever, for even a moment, to abandon the responsibility, the entire world would risk catastrophe. Depressives, Johnson also remarks in an essay elsewhere, are often possessed by a terrible superstition. Their punishment — that intractable ritual of self-inflicted self-hatred — continues and never ebbs because the depressive person, in some deep way, believes it is the proper justice for the failure to be vigilant.

That is: if one day he becomes distracted, and isn’t there to keep watch, and not fail, the depressive knows he must pay for it. As if from some divine ledger, his tallied sins will finally tilt towards damnation, and he’ll never be forgiven for it. Forgiveness is in short supply in the annals of Despair. The depressive person can’t forgive himself his basic failures because he finds no authority within himself to do so: he’s confused self-hatred for humility. The only present or palpable internal authority is something like that reductive Super-Ego (which in Christian terms is something like Satan-as-the-Accuser, the ultimate persecutor whom Spenser’s Despair might almost be doing spec work for), which has learned a thousand stubborn ways to sell the depressive person on their own self-disgust. But this easily rots into a deep and noxious vice: that poisonous pride again. The depressive person can’t forgive himself because that’s what weaker people do. They move on too easily, aren’t hard enough on themselves. The depressive person has bought into the lie of Despair. He agrees that we deserve our punishment. And he’ll take his own punishment as long as he still feels some pride in it, no matter how much that pride curdles into guilt, or further shame.

What is happening, then, that any forgiveness remains choked, impossible? When Rasselas wonders why the astronomer believes what he believes, Johnson has the sage Imlac offer a beautiful, sympathetic diagnosis:

For who is pleased with what he is? Johnson is speaking indirectly about himself here, the second sentence echoing one of his own favorite authors, Robert Burton, whose Anatomy of Melancholy rests on a famous apothegm: “Be not solitary; be not idle.” James Boswell reported Johnson’s own more exactive rewriting of it, in conversation: “If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.” In other words, the only sure ways out of the miserable labyrinth of the overly private self are either good company or good solitary work. It’s a forward-thinking response to depression, Burton’s even more so. Johnson was living through the last days of the humoral theory, which Burton’s era (the 17th century) had begun to change. Their picture of health — in this case, of depression and melancholy — was still very much embedded in an understanding of the world as a network of eerie influences, requiring impeccable balance. Internal imbalance might not necessarily be the result of some internal cause: it was just as likely to stem from an outside source, or a disjunct in the world or in Nature itself. Things, bodies, were not so closed off from objects and places as they would come to seem later.

But Johnson knew from experience how solipsistic, how brilliantly self-hypnotizing, our interiority can be. It’s often entirely true that the depressive has thought his way into his own depression, no matter what modern science may say about depression as a heritable disease. Probably it can be that, too, but it doesn’t stall the fact that much of what goes own in our melancholia is a matter of thinking too well, and too clearly — only in a single, punishing, direction. The Super-Ego, Despair, Satan…call it what you want, but there’s a sophist somewhere in our selves, and it knows how to speak to us in the same terms with which we imagine, or desire, much more beautiful, or meaningful, things.

3. The Wisdom of Silenus

Now comes the inevitable move to the “I.” Of course, I’m writing this just as Johnson wrote Rasselas, trying to talk to myself as much as to anyone else, because I myself have been in crisis. Trying to write my way out of a crisis — classic, cliche writerly behavior. And once again I’m turning to Adam Phillips, because his book is a marvelous little key to these puzzles. Though it’s more accurate to call it a different kind of key: really, it decodes nothing; what it does is unlock. And even then, not in any solution in particular, only a bid to help pry off the padlocks, shake out the limbs, and show how much you (I) were (was) invested in a particular story about things.

With Silenus and Schopenhauer, Phillips is referring to a story, retold by Nietzsche (the greatest of the anti-depressive depressives), when revisiting his own The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche recounts his version of a classical story of Midas and the god Silenus, follower of Dionysus—

Nietzsche uses the story to exemplify the very non-Dionysian, life-accosting visions which his youthful adoration for Schopenhauer had led him to, via the famed Philosopher of the Will’s dark pessimism about the inherent looming tragedy of the world — what the Ancient Greeks had apparently seen and sublimated into their visions of light and human glory. The later Nietzsche, he of the “transvaluation of all values,” bemoaned his youthful subjugation to the dark vision of his own Silenus, Schopenhauer, because, as Phillips puts it, “…for this primal revulsion, this fundamental revelation, there are two self-cures, in his view: the ecstasies of Dionysus or ‘resignation’ of Hamlet. Elemental exuberance or fatal lethargy.” As someone who has spent much of his life torn between elemental exuberance and fatal lethargy, I can only assent — this is the problem, this is the illness. This is the cruel need at the heart of the rotting, self-hating self.

These things are not to be merely played at. They are lived out, everywhere: sometimes we only barely glimpse the ways in which our lives have become channels of mythic responsiveness: worlds and metaphors, rivers of unconscious living that we don’t see are proceeding according to ancient metaphysical courses. Perhaps we never glimpse it at all. But our lives are lived by ancient figurations nonetheless. In the least esoteric, least hermetic, most blatant, and most quotidian ways, our lives are composed of wandering through these stories we tell ourselves, yet don’t even know we’re telling ourselves, and telling each other, and whispering at the edges of our monologues with whoever it is we speak to, in the private moments when we speak.

It sounds ridiculous — yet anyone who has felt the revulsion (there is no other word) which rises from that encounter with some dead abyss or darkness, knows the power of its apparent truth. The wrong philosophy at the wrong time can be destabilizing; the most seductive story is that all stories are deceptive lies; the worst deception is the one that says the world is entirely false at bottom. I know it from experience — it seems ridiculous to say, but my first mental breakdown was precipitated by a reading of Schopenhauer, the sheer negative power of which wouldn’t leave my mind. I didn’t understand it at the time, but certain violent and traumatizing experiences had prepared the way — a few months after reading him, massive life stresses and more difficult readings created in my mind a kind of supercharged anxiety attack, one which didn’t stop for almost four weeks. Past and future disappeared and the impossibly-fragmented moment was all there was. I felt alien to myself. In a way, my own story had been replaced with the story of no-stories; with the game which says “it is better to never have been in the game”; with the Satanic story of inarguable despair. Yet to reconstitute one’s own story, one’s own sense of self, in the face of collapse and blurred falsities, is not to exactly counter the Satanic story (one reason to read “Paradise Lost” for instance is to grasp its unparalleled rendering of the destructive opposition between the vital and sometimes-necessary Satanic, and the horror and genuine sublimity of the idea of Divine Omniscience) — to return oneself to oneself is to learn a very difficult new dance.

The nature of this dance? Inexplicable. Though by dance I really mean an experience of the body. The toll that these experiences took on my own body is something I’ve had to deal with for years. As I once promised, when I started this Substack, I’ll never write about the specifics of my diseases and dysfunctions — I remain too proud, and I’ve already divulged a bit too much, experimenting with this autobiographical angle here. But I’m still in the position of having to learn to do this dance with a body that cannot easily move, not without pain, and more pressure. How anybody writes about these things is beyond me — I’m content to speak about them mostly in metaphors and frilly language. How else does one conceive of such an opaque movement? Landing in London, living alone, struggling to make a go of an experience I fear I’m already squandering, I’ve been face to face again with the full legacy of all these brutal personal stories, what Phillips calls such “essentialist statements — of the kind, this is what life is really like, this is what human nature is — [which] are prone to function as prohibitions; as instructions masquerading as descriptions; as routes disguised as maps.”

My own essentialist statements, my own routes I’ve disguised as maps — I am a person with a faulty body; I am a man of 30 who has been essentially single for a decade; I have a brain which is a problem for me; my Romantic nature is clearly incompatible with this world of people beguiled by surfaces — these things have accumulated like mountains of dirt in my memory, in my consciousness. How to shake them off? How do you dig your way out and realize you’re standing on firm earth, in a world that is neither indifferent, nor cruel, only going its own way? “Something we cannot see, doing something we know not what,” to paraphrase Alan Watts (a youthful hero of mine, and a fine contra-Schopenhauer).

Nietzsche felt that this confrontation, the beginning of the dance with despair, came down to an enormous Affirmation and a new kind of Ultimate Humanism — one which would see great men establish their own morality, swiping the old world of value aside. I’m not so gauche as to say that this is exactly what happened in the century after his death, but one could certainly make the argument, and that argument hardly reflects well on the infirm Professor of Basel. Yet it doesn’t matter — we’re probably no longer capable of approaching the admonition of Silenus with elemental exuberance alone. Yet at the same time, a fatal lethargy will not do.

I spoke of a personal crisis — charming, almost, considering the great rolling crisis we all perceive our contemporary lives to be. But I can only write about the world which I’ve known — the awful secrets of the depressive, and the miserable pride that comes with it; the disaster which is despair; the toxic certainty of the Wisdom of Silenus. I’ve lived in the orbit of these figures, as I know many of you likely have, too. I continue to try to dance my way out of it. And so you may ask further: what, then, Sam, is the dance, is the answer, is the way out?

4. The Only Way Out

Is art. Art broadly conceived. Art and a kind of love, merging with that other love, the one we have for each other. Did you expect something more complicated? I’m afraid I have nothing else — what we are are strange finite creatures whose deepest nature, as far as I can tell, is to require a constant redescription of the world. A constant renewal of our circumstances. We are still here because — contrary to everything one would expect from reading Schopenhauer — our redescriptions have, miraculously, worked. We know they have worked because we are here. It has been our fate to still be here; it may be our fate to remain here further. The only way we can do this is through more redescription — and just as each child born into the world is a new opportunity to see the world in a new way, each next meaningful work of art is a way to look at the world freshly again. There is no end to the number of ways we might redescribe the world. Often I feel that death is merely the end of our redescription. Perhaps we run out of new ways to see things, and have to fade back into the greater stream; perhaps our singular breath can no longer sustain the tension necessary to concentrate its way into a singular experience, and must return to the flow. After all, how else do we know what we are? What we are is simply the thing which knows it’s breathing. That is my definition of a human being — a breath which knows it is breathing. Where this breath comes from is the source of our religious feelings; what we do with this breath is the question posed by our making art. But the most curious thing remains: how is it that this breathing-knowing body, this bundle of essentialist statements tautly stretched across a chasm of unconsciousness…how is it that this creature keeps encountering things and recognizing itself in them?

In art, as with people. I feel this acutely at the moment: I recently fell very hard for someone. More cliche, classic writerly behavior. Wholly one-sided, obsessional, tortured. Coming to a new place, embarking on new narratives, trying to deal with the old ones — who knows why I chose this person, in this moment, to develop some ultimately absurd and possibly misguided fantastical passion? It ended painfully, of course. Old narratives die hard, and a fatalist Romanticism seems hewn to my bones. And yet the truth is you cannot know what was a story and what was a feeling; you can only feel. If there’s one thing I gained from the experience, from my further tenure as a lovesick fool, somehow it was this: the body must feel, and must seek its own recognition.

In people, as with art. If I gained any knowledge from this newest dumb addendum to the dance, it was that all spirituality is a matter of form; a matter of body. Because in the midst of hurling my numbed-out, painful body through the tubes and collegiate halls of London, it turned out that as I did, I was discovering how my body needed to come back alive, needed to seek out the things that made it feel alive. A fatal lethargy — a sleep—well, meeting this person, who will probably never know the degree to which she gave me the chance to rediscover (to redescribe) these very things, helped me see just how asleep I’d been, how numb I had to become, as if to deny that I had a body at all, and therefore a spirit. The body is the spirit. It is the form the spirit takes. I’m more convinced of this with every next experience. And just as we see a beautiful person and yearn to be able to bring our own body and spirit close to theirs, so we approach a work of art and feel we have found something true, something that accords with our body and spirit. I see a beautiful person and my whole body hums!, sings!, becomes electric. It wakes and says, “Let’s add more life to life.” Quite literally, it’s declaring: “Have children; make life; from this beauty I want to make more beauty.”

This is the thing which Silenus does not understand. Nor does Despair, nor Johnson’s poor astronomer, nor Schopenhauer, nor Milton’s Satan (and perhaps not his God), nor that tragic part of Nietzsche. Silenus — who is, after all, not himself human — is not aware that there are pleasures and beauties in life which somehow do not diminish life. That there are things — sex, love, art, the having of children — which only add to life. This is the one thing that can deal with the force of despair: more life. Art — our way of redescribing things — is an adding of more life to life, more beauty to beauty. As if to say: “Yes, things are inexorably dark and confused, and we are terrified creatures shuttled quickly towards an unknowable death; but look — I have added life to life, I have extended the terms, I have made more beauty out of beauty; what was supposed to be limited, supposed to be bound by laws of energy and limits of matter, has yielded in my consciousness an overabundance, an exuberance of life; a blessing, come from something we cannot know, doing something we know not what.”

More time; more life; more beauty. That’s all. Not simple at first, perhaps. And yet at base it has to be. We have to discover it to be. To redescribe it until it is. We have to ask: what stories are we telling ourselves, that we think these things are not possible? Who has told us these stories? Where did the infernal voice come from? And what’s more — why did we believe it?

Immediately, the system picked up a large warmblooded lifeform. Ecks could barely hold still. Finding life so quickly must mean it's common on this planet. Abundant life meant abundant competition. The sort of environment intelligence is theorized to arise in.

Discovering that the Diri were not the only intelligent species in the galaxy would be the greatest scientific discovery of the era. The thought made the tips of her arms dance.

It would take some time for the scans and wide-spectral analysis to determine if this planet had the fingerprints of an intelligent civilization. In the meantime, this lifeform provided an opportunity to investigate the native wildlife. Perhaps this was a member of the dominant intelligent species. She could be moments away from making first contact.

Ecks inspected the specimen chamber. All the equipment was in place. However, smudges of some red substance marred the walls. Ecks shook with fury. The ship had just been serviced at Starbase. The maintenance staff were always neglecting details, but this seemed egregious. Perform a cleaning of the specimen chamber.

Ecks watched as the scrubbers erased the red smudges. Protocol dictated Ecks should perform full subparticle sterilization, but that meant going back to Starbase. The scrubbers were good enough.

With the chamber ready, Ecks locked onto the lifeform and beamed it aboard.

In rural North Dakota, a man was out for an evening stroll. As he was about to turn around and head home, a bright light surrounded him. Confused, he looked up. He heard a soft humming and felt himself getting lighter. His feet left the ground, and he hurtled upwards. He screamed and closed his eyes, raising his arms to protect himself.

As suddenly as it began, it stopped. The light disappeared and he didn't feel himself moving. Slowly, he lowered his arms and opened his eyes. He couldn't see a thing. He felt around himself, finding a cold smooth surface. He started banging on it with his fist. "What the hell is going on!" the man yelled. "Somebody help! Hello?! Is anyone there?"

A buzzing sound filled the air and the man found his arms were paralyzed. He screamed.

Ecks wasn't sure what to make of the creature. The specimen’s anatomy was similar to that of the Diri in some ways—five appendages branched off of a central trunk. However, they lacked the elegant radial symmetry of the Diri. Two of the appendages were awkwardly distant from the other three. The middle appendage of the upper trio was a short, bony, hairy stump with multiple orifices. The creature was using the largest of these orifices to create vibrations in the gas they had taken into the ship with the creature. This must be some sort of sensory mechanism, a form of echolocation.

It's behavior didn't give Ecks much hope that it was intelligent. What she assumed was a fleeing reflex was causing it to slam a limb repeatedly into the side of the examination chamber, and she had to activate a stasis beam just to keep it from damaging itself.

Ecks ran a scan over its torso. As expected, it was filled with organs. There were nerve cells present, but there didn't seem to be any centralized bundle of them. All of the organs and muscles were connected up to a central cord in the back of its body, consistent with a simple reflex-response system. Ecks felt her enthusiasm ebb. The creature must not be intelligent.

While disappointing, at least the lack of intelligence meant Ecks was justified in doing a more invasive examination. She activated the surgical lasers and aimed them towards the specimen’s abdomen, creating a small incision. Seemingly in response to this, the creature increased the intensity of its echolocation vibrations. Perhaps some reflex to increase sensory input when the body was under threat.

Once the opening was large enough, she used miniature tractor beams to gently extract the major organs one by one without disrupting their connections within the body.

She found a large pump that seemed to circulate fluid, a large muscular organ for digestion, and two sacks filled with gas. Ecks realized these sacks were pumps that the creature was using to push gas up through its stump orifice to cause those vibrations—vibrations that seemed to have renewed vigor with each organ extraction.

The creature flailed again, this time overpowering the stasis beam. It groped at the incision and struck the side of the chamber, leaving a red smear of its internal fluid. Ecks was momentarily disoriented as she saw the smear. It bore an uncanny resemblance to the smudges the scrubbers had just cleaned. Ecks shook off the disorientation and continued on. She increased the power of the stasis beam, putting a stop to the creature's flailing.

Ecks began a survey of the skeletal structure. A central column of bones formed a spine that ran the length of the specimen and carried the nerves that went out to all of the creature’s muscles. Curiously, a particularly thick cord of these nerves went towards the stumpy appendage.

Intrigued, Ecks ran her scanner over the stump. Ecks expected to just find some simple sensory mechanisms. Instead…

Oh no. It couldn't be, could it?

A brain. A big brain.

The number of nerve cells was astounding. Ecks ordered a computer analysis of the images, which confirmed the neuroanatomy was isomorphic to that of the Diri. The creature must be intelligent and capable of conscious thought.

Ecks thrashed her limbs. Why place the brain in such a ridiculous, peripheral place? She had no idea how evolution could come up with such a ludicrous design. Brains were central to every function of a creature, why wouldn't it be central in the body?

Ecks reeled at the implications. The creature was intelligent. It had been conscious throughout this entire investigation.

If the Diri Scientific Council discovered what she had done, her discovery of intelligent life wouldn't matter. Her lifetime of scientific service wouldn't matter. She would be considered criminally negligent and spend the remainder of her life in a penal colony.

Ecks had no time to waste. She could fix this if she acted quickly.

First, she had to deal with the creature. She couldn't just vaporize it—beyond the obvious ethical issues, it made her risk even greater if her mistake was discovered. Ecks returned the organs to their original places inside of the creature and closed the incisions. She ran a scrubber over the creature, cleaning any of its internal fluids that had leaked out onto it.

Ecks ordered a memory wipe of the creature. She just had to hope that its neural encodings were similar enough to the Diri's for it to work. Once memory wipe is complete, beam the specimen back down to the planet.

With the creature taken care of, two considerations remained. The ship's logs, and Ecks' own memories; when Ecks returned from her mission, the debriefing would involve a systematic probing of both. Ecks would be betrayed by her own brain's recording of the event.

The process for both her own memories and the computer's were similar. She would reset both to the exact state they were in when they entered the system. Ecks set the process to activate as soon as she began another hyperspace jump, and programmed the jump to the exact location she had just emerged from. The jump itself was pointless—she was still in orbit above the planet. But, if all went to plan, Ecks would emerge from hyperspace believing she had just reached this system for the first time.

Ecks would get a redo. This mistake was just a fluke. It could not happen again. Then, she would rediscover the intelligent creatures on the planet. She would be a hero, and this mistake would be erased, as if it had never happened.

Initiate the jump. In the split second between issuing the command and when it was executed, she looked over at the specimen chamber and remembered the red smudges on the walls. Then the jump executed, and her memory was no more.

It helps to have positive thoughts about humanity sometimes. And although our trying times don’t often permit us to partake in the simple joys of empathy, compassion, and benevolence, at least we’re still pretty good at building amazing structures! And we, at the ABWMMS, are happy to remind you of that.

For instance, please consider the Seven Wonders of the World. This concept is pretty old. It is so old, in fact, that since almost all of the Wonders no longer exist (to be fair, we didn’t destroy all of them; earthquakes helped), people had to repurpose this name for other (similar) things and sheepishly rename the original to “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World”.

Unfortunately, the modern lists for the Seven Wonders of the World do not meet the high standard of the original. The USA Today one is highly inconsistent and includes Polar ice caps, the Great Migration of Serengeti, and “The Internet” (whatever that is). The maybe more appropriate one, compiled by a Swiss corporation called “New7Wonders Foundation” includes the Great Wall of China, Petra, and Colosseum, which are all suitable and definitely wondrous, but calling them “New Wonders of the World” is a bit of a stretch. The best list of all of these was compiled by the American Society of Civil Engineers and contains both age-appropriate and truly impressive feats of engineering, including the Golden Gate Bridge and the Channel Tunnel, but there is one crucial element lacking, and that is a connection to the past and to the original Wonders.

Which is why we decided to compile our own official list of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. And in order to do that, we will go back to antiquity.

In order to compile such a list, we propose first to understand the principles of the original list and then apply those principles to the modern world. First of all, what are the original Wonders? They are, in the order of the construction date:

• Great Pyramid of Giza (2584–2561 BC)

• Hanging Gardens of Babylon (c. 600 BC)

• Statue of Zeus at Olympia (435 BC)

• Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (c. 550 BC; rebuilt in 323 BC)

• Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (351 BC)

• Colossus of Rhodes (292–280 BC)

• Lighthouse of Alexandria (c. 280 BC)

The original original list was probably compiled by Herodotus, but the first surviving list is found in the works of a Greek historian, Diodorus of Sicily. Instead of “wonders” the historian called them “θεάματα”, which roughly means “sights”, so one can say that this list is the OG sightseeing guidebook. That gives some justification for the “New7Wonders” list, but we can do better still. After all, they are not just sights. They are awe-inspiring achievements of humanity. All of the original Seven Wonders were incredible feats of ancient engineering. But in our jaded age, where incredible engineering is all around us, it doesn’t seem like enough. So, to qualify for the current list, in addition to an awe-inspiring structure, there also needs to be an awe-inspiring purpose.

In addition, we decided not just to slap seven spectacular structures together and then randomly number them. We believe, in order to be a true spiritual successor to the Wonders of the Ancient World, there must be parallels between the old and the new. And although a strict analogy between an ancient monument and a modern state-of-the-art construction can seem quite dubious, you will see, there are common themes. We can turn a sightseeing guidebook into a bridge over the river of time. So we will go one-by-one and try to find an analogue to the best of our knowledge and ability. We will also limit the search to the last 50 years to qualify for “modern” in the title.

Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Sometimes also known as the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis, after a legendary Assyrian queen.

By all accounts, these were a true marvel, not just in beauty but in engineering complexity and ingenuity. Intricate irrigation systems allowed for the construction of a a multi-level plant display, forming a square with a side of approximately 1.2 kilometers. It was first described by a Babylonian priest and historian, Berossus:

In this palace he erected very high walls, supported by stone pillars; and by planting what was called a pensile paradise, and replenishing it with all sorts of trees, he rendered the prospect an exact resemblance of a mountainous country.

A modern counterpart could be, for example, a stunning botanical garden, like Kew Gardens or Rio de Janeiro Botanical Gardens, but we can dig a little deeper (dig? in a garden? get it?). One can interpret one of the ideas, one of the motifs, of such a structure as preservation. Berossus told us about “all sorts of trees”, but he was being poetic about it. However, in our times, we can allow ourselves to be quite literal about it and actually store all sorts of trees. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault stores around 1.7 million samples and serves as a backup to all other seed vaults in the world. It is also, appropriately, quite stunning to look at.

Colossus of Rhodes

The Colossus, a huge statue of the Greek god Helios, was about 33 meters high, approximately the size of the Statue of Liberty. Its architect, Chares of Lindos, according to one source, commited suicide when somebody pointed out to him a small flaw in the construction. Drama queen. The Collossus presumably stood at the entrance of the harbor of Rhodes, although there is no firm scientific (or even mathematical) basis for that.

Relevant Shakespeare’s text is quite nice, though:

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Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

To find a modern counterpart, we must consider the god Helios. He was a greek god of the Sun. To us, the Sun is somewhat less enigmatic than it was to the ancients, but we still in many ways worship light, and so this will be our keyword. And one of the ways we worship it is, of course, to use it for scientific discovery. So for this Modern Wonder of the World, we nominate the world’s largest optical telescope, aptly named The Extremely Large Telescope in Cerro Armazones, Chile. Since it is still under construction (ETA 2027), until then we temporarily grant the title to no less aptly named The Very Large Telescope in Cerro Paranal, Chile. Both of them were built to see as far as possible into the vastness of the universe and uncover its secrets.

We also encourage everyone to watch Tom Scott’s brilliant video on the VLT and the ELT. One can really feel the scope of these structures and appreciate the precision and intricacy of their construction. An awe-inspiring structure with an awe-inspiring purpose.

Statue of Zeus at Olympia

The Statue of Zeus, constructed by a famous Greek sculptor, Phidias, was about 12.5 meters high, which is slightly more than two Michelangelo’s Davids and one Michelangelo standing on top of each other. That’s not that tall, so it would be fair to assume that the awe-inspiring part is the fact that the statue is reported to be chryselephantine, i.e., made from gold and ivory.

Roman historian Suetonius wrote that emperor Caligula ordered for the statue to be “brought from Greece, in order to remove [its] head and put his own in [its] place." The emperor was assassinated before that could happen, and it is reported that the statue "suddenly uttered such a peal of laughter that the scaffolding collapsed and the workmen took to their heels”. The bitter irony here is that the statue perished in a fire some 350 years later; it is not inconceivable that if the head-swapping took place, we would still be able to see it in Rome. Zeus can laugh, but Momus laughs louder still.

For the modern analogue, we all know that Zeus was a god of thunder and lightning, but maybe more generally (and as 12 meters of gold and ivory subtly hint at), he was the king of the gods, and his motif, in myth or in sculpture, is power. In modern times, power is expressed not in gold or ivory, and not even in thunderbolts, but in megawatts. As much as we wanted to include the world’s biggest nuclear power plant (Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant in Japan), it (along with most other things) is dwarfed by the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, which generates 30% more power than the next largest power plant, or approximately what the three largest nuclear power plants generate together. It is also breathtaking.

Lighthouse of Alexandria

The Lighthouse of Alexandria, also known as the Pharos Lighthouse for the small island it was actually on, was constructed during the reign of Egyptian monarch Ptolemy II, presumably by an architect named Sostratus. A Roman historian, Lucian, writes about the construction:

After he [Sostratus] had built the work, he wrote his name on the masonry inside, covered it with gypsum, and having hidden it inscribed the name of the reigning king. He knew, as actually happened, that in a very short time the letters would fall away with the plaster and there would be revealed: 'Sostratus of Cnidos, the son of Dexiphanes, to the Divine Saviours, for the sake of them that sail at sea.'

Well played, Sostratus. Unlike the previous Wonders, we actually have a fairly accurate description of the lighthouse by an Arab traveller, Abou Haggag Youssef Ibn Mohammed el-Balawi el-Andaloussi, decent schemes, and even a 3D projection. We somehow still prefer these:

It is also fairly easy to propose a modern analogy to a lighthouse. I think the establishing motif here should be communication, a signal; after all, that is what the lighthouses are for. That, again, screams telescope—not an optical, but a radio one—capable of not just observing but sending a message to anyone ready to listen. RATAN-600 is a close runner-up here, but for the sheer visual incredibility, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), located in Guizhou, China, takes the cake.

Mausoleum at Halicarnassus

Usually, when we hear the word “mausoleum”, it is either preceded or followed by the name of the person buried there, like Lenin’s Mausoleum or the Mausoleum of Hadrian. Not in this case. Mausoleum at Halicarnassus is a tomb of an Achaemenid satrap, Mausolus, who, in fact, gave his name to the whole structure type. This is theMausoleum, the Platonian idea of a Mausoleum. It was also a very impressive structure.

The modern equivalent, however, is a little tricky; after all, it is just a tomb of a dude. So we had to delve a bit deeper into the bogs of history to finally understand this particular dude, and therefore, the motif of this Wonder. You see, Mausolus took his legacy very seriously. Together with his sister-wife Artemisia (skipped right past this one, didn’t we?) they completely rebuilt the city of Halicarnassus, inviting very popular Greek architects and generally bringing the age of hellenisation to the Achaemenid Empire. The Mausoleum was his ultimate attempt to remain in the memory of humanity. And an amazingly successful one, since we invoke his name every time we bury yet another important dude. Mausolus literally built a mausoleum in our language, and this one survived all the earthquakes. So the motif of this Wonder is, again, preservation, but not of lifeforms. It is the preservation of words and names, or, simply put, memory.

There is no surprise then, that the analogue of the Mausoleum is a modern symbol of memory. If Wikipedia were a real-life object, it would definitely qualify, but for now we will choose the biggest library in the world, the British Library (both the main complex and the Round Reading Room in the British Museum). It only barely overcame the Library of Congress, which deserves an honorable mention here. It is also a feat of the most intricate engineering, if you consider the care and different climate conditions all these ~200 million books require to be meticulously preserved. One can think that it’s not very awe-inspiring, but you know what? It’s absolutely magnificent:

Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

The Temple of Artemis had a troubled history. It was constructed, then destroyed by a flood, then reconstructed, and then destroyed by an arsonist. This second version specifically is considered to be the Wonder of the Ancient World, and by eyewitness accounts, it was something special. The Greek historian, Antipater of Sidon, wrote:

I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, "Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught so grand".

The Temple’s destruction was brought about by a man named Herostratus, with a very specific reason: to get famous for it. Evidently, like Mausolus, he succeeded, enriching our language with the term “herostratic fame”. One can only ponder the two different approaches to fame-seeking and draw unpleasant parallels with the modern world. We can also quote a piece by Russian writer and comedienne Nadezhda Teffi from her satirical retelling of ancient history:

The Madman Herostratus

The city of Ephesus was renowned for its temple of the goddess Artemis. Herostratus set fire to this temple in order to glorify his name. However, when the Greeks learned of the purpose behind this heinous crime, they decided to condemn the name of the criminal to oblivion as punishment.

For this purpose, special heralds were hired, who, for many decades, traveled throughout Greece and proclaimed the following decree: "Do not dare to remember the name of the madman Herostratus, who, out of ambition, burned the temple of the goddess Artemis."

The Greeks knew this decree so well that you could wake any of them up in the middle of the night and ask, "Whose name must you forget?" And without hesitation, they would answer, "The madman Herostratus."

Thus, the ambitious criminal was justly punished.

Finding the modern equivalent of this Wonder, however, is not an easy task. One could remember that Artemis is a goddess of, among other things, hunting, wild nature, childbirth, and chastity. A mixed portfolio, to be sure. However, one idea comes to mind, and that is discovery, as in scientific discovery. There is an element of hunt in it and an element of childbirth, and a lot of it concerns nature. (And please spare us the “scientists are virgins” jokes.)

So what would be a good representation of the modern idea of scientific discovery, such that it would also include an awe-inspiring construction? We had telescopes that see galaxies, so this time we would focus on the tiniest. Our proposition is a neutrino detector: they are huge, look absolutely alien, and are quite unlike anything you ever saw. The IceCube neutrino detector would be a great candidate. But even more spectacular ones are the Super Kamiokande (take the 360° tour on the website!) and the soon-activated Hyper Kamiokande in Japan. These structures allow us to hunt the miniscule, the most inperceptible particles in the universe, and give birth to abundant scientific theories. If you’re still not convinced, there is also a certain visual rhyme. Yes, the boobingtons (scientific term!).

The Great Pyramid of Giza

The Great Pyramid was built almost two millennia before the rest of the Wonders, and survived at least half a millennium longer. (Although some say that they are still there only because they were too heavy to be taken to the British Museum.) This is the only original Wonder that we can see a photo of. Hell, this is the only original Wonder that we can take a photo of! Or a drone footage.

And of course, the only motif there can be with such a timeless structure is time itself. As we still struggle to comprehend this elusive and all-permeating concept, sometimes it’s worth remembering that the ancient Egyptians also had some ideas about it. Theirs were expressed in stone blocks, limestone, clay, and water, and it’s still fascinating to me what they managed to build with such simple starting materials.

Our ideas about time are expressed in superconducting magnets. Of course, no list of the Wonders of the Modern World can ever be complete without the Large Hadron Collider. The scale of this structure speaks for itself, but the purpose might not be obvious. In a way, it is the exact opposite of a pyramid. In the pyramid, everything lies very still, being very dead. In the LHC, everything moves at near-light speeds and collides with each other, giving life to new things.

The List

So there we are. As we said in the beginning, we might be prone to war and stupidity, but we still can build! Specifically, the Seven Wonders of the Modern World:

• The British Library (1973)

• Super Kamiokande (1996), to be replaced by Hyper Kamiokande (2027)

• Very Large Telescope (1998), to be replaced by Extremely Large Telescope (2027)

• Three Gorges Dam (2003)

• Svalbard Global Seed Vault (2008)

• Large Hadron Collider (2010)

• Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (2016)

Thank you for your attention. Incidentally, if you are a Wikipedia editor, you know what to do!

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The French philosopher Henri Bergson put forward in his 1907 book Creative Evolution the theory that all living organisms evolved from one and the same vital impulse, but at some point in its advancing this impulse diverged in two separate directions – one favouring instinct, which we see most illustriously demonstrated in the life of insects with their hivemind organisation and their ability to efficiently carry out tasks which our all-too-human minds cannot fathom their grasp of; and the other favouring intellect, which we see at play in animal life and most emphatically in ourselves.

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Intelligence is likely to point towards consciousness, and instinct towards unconsciousness.

But, having sprung from the same source, neither of the two is without some admixture of the other, in fact Bergson goes as far as to assert:

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There is no manifestation of life which does not contain, in a rudimentary state – either latent or potential – the essential characters of most other manifestations.

His exegetic work on this hypothesis is so rigorously expounded as to make for thrilling reading – at least for me, although it would not be the first time I’ve found a philosophical treatise a high-octane thrill ride.1 As much as I would like to present Bergson’s entire argument here, given that it stretches over several hundred pages I find myself obliged instead to summarise at least the parts that will interest us going forward.  

When it comes to the intellect, Bergson believed that as a living being becomes more complex, and its needs therefore harder to satisfy, its powers of perception expand in proportion to these growing needs so that the aspects of the world on which its survival depends are rendered within its purview. The human being, as excessively complex as it is and yet possessing in and of itself insufficient tools with which to survive the harsh environment, he playfully labels ‘homo faber’.2 Unlike the wolf with its teeth and its fur, and unlike the scorpion with its sting, we are creatures for whom it is necessary to craft our own tools. Fundamentally creative beings. As such, our perceptive faculties necessarily evolved in such a way as to offer up to us a world within which we could find the means to build and create.

Bergson says:

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The vision of a living being is an effective vision, limited to objects on which the being can act: it is a vision that is canalised, and the visual apparatus simply symbolises the work of canalising… consciousness is the light that plays around the zone of possible actions or potential activity... It signifies hesitation or choice.

So, for Bergson, all consciousness is, first and foremost, consciousness of potential action. It exists as a field of possible activity, a sort of sandbox for making connections and manipulating the matter of the world to our advantage. This, he argues, makes us less efficient in function, but vastly superior in potential, to creatures of lesser intelligence:

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The instrument constructed intelligently [as opposed to one naturally endowed]… is an imperfect instrument. It costs an effort. It is generally troublesome to handle. But, as it is made of unorganised matter, it can take any form whatsoever, serve any purpose, free the living being from every new difficulty that arises and bestow on it an unlimited number of powers. Whilst it is inferior to the natural instrument for the satisfaction of immediate wants, its advantage over it is the greater, the less urgent the need. Above all, it reacts on the nature of the being that constructs it; for in calling on him to exercise a new function, it confers on him, so to speak, a richer organisation, being an artificial organ by which the natural organism is extended. For every need that it satisfies, it creates a new need; and so, instead of closing, like instinct, the round of action within which the animal tends to move automatically, it lays open to activity an unlimited field into which it is driven further and further, and made more and more free.

As Bergson will go on to explain, the full scope of the intellect in humanity reaches far beyond the representation of the material world and the facilitation of the actions to be taken therein, but let us linger at this juncture a little longer and bring in from the wings the real subject of this essay: Cormac McCarthy (applause please). If ever there was a writer of action McCarthy is that writer. I don’t mean that he writes exclusively of violence – although when he does he does so with a famously unflinching acuity, and certainly violence is one of the godheads under whose gaze his literary worlds take form3 – but more so that he seems to understand down to his bones that the base strata of human life is in what we do. After this, all is subsidiary.

So, as Bergson wants to remind us that the intellect – whatever heights it may have scaled since – evolved out of the simple need for a representation of the world tailored to our survival in it, and should be understood as an instrument minted for this original purpose, McCarthy wants us to observe the activity of his characters closely, as we might observe a wild animal. He gives them no interiority outside of their dialogue. We are kept on the outside, to divine by signification alone what ruminations may or may not be turning the wheels of action. As we grow accustomed to this technique, each act comes to take on a heightened significance because the exterior perspective trains us to ponder the potential resonances of every movement, every gleam in every eye – the possible chain of interior causes never to be laid bare.

I have rarely come across another writer for whom my enjoyment of their work rests so absolutely on the amount of attention I give to it. In my early attempts at reading McCarthy, I found the constant descriptions of the minutia of his character’s actions so boring as to be difficult to follow if my attention was even a little bit elsewhere –

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He held the rifle at his waist and levered the spent shell out of the chamber and caught it and put it in his pocket and levered a fresh shell in and let down the hammer with his thumb and undallied the rope and let the reins drop and walked back to see about the wolf. [The Crossing]

is just one of any number of examples of his run-on sentences which describe in painstaking detail what someone is doing. Sometimes he might throw us a bone and declare what they are feeling, but almost always their inner worlds are barred to us.

I have over time come to appreciate the power of his decision to write in this way. It produces a sort of levelling affect in which the human feels no more noble and worthy of attention than the horse, the dog, or the bend of a river.4 And yet, unavoidably, over all these things and everything else it is given only to the human to speak. His characters often promulgate truths they hold to be universal, yet one of the greatest tricks of McCarthy’s style is that implicit in the once-removed telling of his narratives is the essential fatalism of all that is declared by the human voice therein. There are wise characters, yes, but they are wise as a tree is sturdy – their speech seems carved out of McCarthy’s worlds as a ventifact is shaped by the wind. We feel they could not but say exactly what they have said. He even neglects to use speech marks, so we are offered no formal marker by which to delineate a separation between what is spoken and the rest of the text. As with the levelling effect of the lack of interiority, the lack of speech marks ensures that the McCarthian human speaks in a sense as the world itself. Often their wisdom seems an inevitable counterpart to their suffering, an artefact like an oyster’s pearl.

The darkness of McCarthy’s fiction is just about ubiquitous. Suffering seems kindled in every hearth and campfire at which his characters warm themselves. Isolation abounds. He repeatedly describes the stars as dying, falling off into oblivion beyond the horizon. The world cries through its creatures, but though he does not favour them, the privilege he acknowledges in human beings is the articulation of that cry.

In the pessimistic worlds he renders, suffering is the keystone of existence, but it is only in human beings that the cry becomes song. And though we are left outside of the heads of his characters, it is clear from the care that he takes in his descriptions, the specificity of his words and the vigilant curation of their cadences – to put it simply, the beauty of his prose – that we are nevertheless seeing the world through a human lens. How could we not be? Us being the only creatures laden with language. For us, beauty takes on the significance of the language in which it is rendered, and vice-versa. The poet lives out a reciprocal emboldening between their observations and their proclamations thereon, each feeding the other in an attempt to soar into ever loftier cirruses of the ephemera in which the human soul swims and is sustained.  

And McCarthy’s observations are so keen that we really do believe in the sunsets his characters observe, the dusty roads they travel. Through language they become real to us, through language the beauty of the world is cracked open like the pecans an unnamed girl in The Crossing crushes against stones,

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Splitting out with her fineboned fingers the meat from the hulls, the delicate fissured hemispheres in which is writ we must believe each feature of the tree that bore them, each feature of the tree they’d come to be.

Possibly the definitive image of the McCarthian novel – if we were to measure the mean almost surely the one that occurs the most often – is of a character alone, traversing a vast and hostile landscape. The younger me sometimes found this repetitiveness tedious, but now when I turn a page and see from the block paragraphs the absence of his idiosyncratically snappy dialogue, I’ve come to expect luminous descriptive prose near-unparalleled in its vividness.

Though on the surface he describes the same things time and again, cliché is obliterated by his ever-burrowing attentiveness. He always has a new metaphor for the rising of the moon, the blowing of the wind. Much has been said about the symbolism in his work, and it is true that it seems almost bottomless. Each thing observed by his eye and transcribed by his pen seems emblematic, all of them like stones carefully selected and dropped into our attention, so that the ripples of their impact are as much a part of their form as the base objects themselves – resonances spread and intersect, the whole world becomes a latticework of concentric reverberations as if he was showing it to us in the disturbed water of some divinatory basin.

Symbolism is fundamental to the human condition. We are easily divorced from the intuition of ourselves as connected to the world – the price of intellect – and so we rewire that self-same intellect to perceive connections where there may in materiality be none. We generate symbol and metaphor like setting in motion the gears of a mill that churns all that we offer up to it back into the same prima materia, after returning to which everything contains everything else.

But how would Bergson reckon with this? And how would he reckon with the divergent, co-existing wisdoms of McCarthy’s characters, each with an equitable claim at truth? If our perceptive faculties and our intellect are purely tools by which to navigate pre-canalised channels, what room or purpose is there for superfluous conclusions? Or for any rumination at all beyond the basic considerations of material assembly? Bergson accounts for this, and in his address of this very issue the human being as we know it begins to take shape in his vision.

So vast is the field of potential open to us that never before has an animal been gifted with such capacity to stray from the path. In us, consciousness has burst the walls of its dam. And not only can we expand our awareness out into far-flung corners of worlds both material and immaterial, bearing no immediate relation to us, but we can even turn it back upon itself:

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An intelligence which reflects is one that originally had a surplus of energy to spend, over and above practically useful efforts. It is a consciousness that has virtually reconquered itself… From the moment that the intellect, reflecting upon its own doings, perceives itself as a creator of ideas, as a faculty of representation in general, there is no object of which it may not wish to have the idea, even though that object be without direct relation to practical action.

Not only is there no object of which the representing mind may not wish to have the idea, but, with the tool of language, there are near-infinite ways of framing that object, and a near-infinite plane of comparisons within which it can be compared and contrasted, comingled and set apart – the writer, like the musician, casts spells by means of successive impressions upon the intellect, and any object can come to take on a multitude of significances and be made the instrument of any number of affective qualities. Take these three widely different examples of McCarthy presenting to us the object of the sun:

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By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp. [The Road]

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…the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds beyond all reckoning. [Blood Meridian]

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They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. [Blood Meridian]

Bergson understands the arising of language as a necessary development in the furthering of a species such as ourselves, so dependent as we are on cooperation and thus in need of a means of communicating to one another first of all the objects, and eventually, by extension, the matter-abstracted concepts of which the human mind is a generative organ. It is worth reading an extended passage by Bergson himself on this, so well-argued is the mutual relationship of advancement between the human being and its language:

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In human society… fabrication and action are of variable form, and, moreover, each individual must learn his part, because he is not preordained to it by his structure. So a language is required which makes it possible to be always passing from what is known to what is yet to be known. There must be a language whose signs – which cannot be infinite in number – are extensible to an infinity of things… Without language, intelligence would probably have remained riveted to the material objects which it was interested in considering. It would have lived in a state of somnambulism, outside itself, hypnotised on its own work. Language has greatly contributed to its liberation… It profits by the fact that the word is an external thing, which the intelligence can catch hold of and cling to, and at the same time an immaterial thing, by means of which the intelligence can penetrate even to the inwardness of its own work… Language itself… is made to designate things, and naught but things: it is only because the word is mobile, because it flies from one thing to another, that the intellect was sure to take it, sooner or later, on the wing, while it was not settled on anything, and apply it to an object which is not a thing and which, concealed till then, awaited the coming of the word to pass from darkness into light.

It is fascinating to consider the ways in which languages differ and compare – the concepts that exist in one but not another, the idiosyncratic emphases and undercurrents that they engender in the mind and the formative cultural and geographical conditions that might still have their legacy in the grammar and the lexicon that arose within them. Language as a growing fossil, ossifying as it renders in comprehensible forms the multiflorous reality into whose expanse it stretches. A genuine exploration of this topic is far beyond my sadly monolinguistic capabilities, but I am reminded by both Bergson’s dissection of the origins of language, and by McCarthy’s masterful playfulness with it, of another great writer who has famously turned his attention to the matter of the word.

Jorge Luis Borges, in his story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, presents to us the fictitious world of Tlön, and while doing so offers us a glimpse into the nature of its languages. As with Bergson, Borges is a writer on this subject worth quoting at length:

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In the northern hemisphere… the primary unit is not the verb but the monosyllabic adjective. Nouns are formed by stringing together adjectives. One does not say “moon”; one says “aerial-bright above dark-round” or “soft-amberish-celestial” or any other string. In this case, the complex of adjectives corresponds to a real object, but that is purely fortuitous. The literature of the northern hemisphere (as in Meinong’s subsisting world) is filled with ideal objects, called forth and dissolved in an instant, as the poetry requires. Sometimes mere simultaneity creates them. There are things composed of two terms, one visual and the other auditory: the colour of the rising sun and the distant caw of a bird. There are things composed of many: the sun and water against the swimmer’s breast, the vague shimmering pink one sees when one’s eyes are closed, the sensation of being swept along by a river and also by Morpheus. These objects of the second degree may be combined with others; the process, using certain abbreviations, is virtually infinite. There are famous poems composed of a single enormous word; this word is a “poetic object” created by the poet.

McCarthy sometimes plays around with this notion of the “poetic object” in a very literal way, by making one of his infamous compound words – cinderland, shackstrewn, sealedbeam – but his tireless attention to the affective nature of the word on the micro level is reflective of a much larger project, a project that befalls all writers of fiction whether they embrace it or not, but that in McCarthy seems never to waver in its focus. In the choosing of which details to present to us, which words to invent, which to pair together, which images to conjure in the incense of their enjoining, he curates for us a very certain kind of world. A further passage from Borges’ story will illuminate this further:

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One might well deduce, therefore, that on Tlön there are no sciences – or even any “systems of thought.” The paradoxical truth is that systems of thought do exist, almost countless numbers of them. Philosophies are much like the nouns of the northern hemisphere: the fact that every philosophy is by definition a dialectical game, a Philosophie des Als Ob, has allowed them to proliferate. There are systems upon systems that are incredible but possessed of a pleasing architecture or a certain agreeable sensationalism. The metaphysicians of Tlön seek not truth, or even plausibility – they seek to amaze, astound. In their view, metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy. They know that a system is naught but the subordination of all the aspects of the universe to one of those aspects – anyone of them.

This final sentence is a kindred spirit to Bergson’s statement:

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The intellect is characterised by an unlimited power of decomposing according to any law and recomposing according to any system.

Humanity, given the intellect, is bound to metaphysics. We are system builders in thought, as we are instrument builders by hand.

McCarthy’s novels for the most part feel situated firmly in the same world, governed by the same system, if perhaps viewed under a slightly different lens each time. It is an embattled world of harsh landscapes enshrined with the crumbling works of mankind, a world whose beauty is surprising and yet everlasting, as if it were the very end of its struggle.

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He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. [All the Pretty Houses]

His descriptive passages, metaphors, and even his characters and their attitudes feel like refractions from the same source, different edges of the same crystal that he turns and turns like a celestial loom on which he spins the threads of his intoxicating language. This crystal is his “poetic object”. Moment by moment we catch the gleams from its surface, but it is not something that can be known in its fullness except through the reading of his entire work. And even then, it can only be known in a second-hand way, and not exclusively with the mind like a regular piece of knowledge obtained. A writer’s poetic object is the work of a lifetime – and an expression of that life – and no mind including their own is vast enough to hold in completeness such an object. Perhaps the only people we can truly say contain the dark crystal of McCarthy’s world-centre within themselves entirely are his characters – it is only through him that they speak, after all – but even they are given only delineated knowledge and experience within that domain. The mystery is bottomless, whichever oracle we consult.     

Each of us has an analogous mystery at the core of our imagination, of which only intimations can be communicated. As Bergson claims, we have not eschewed our instinctive, animal natures completely in advancing along the path to intellect. But:

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There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them.

So, inevitably, there are parts of us dark even to ourselves, perhaps the vastest and most plunderable parts. To be driven by both instinct and intelligence, essentially two divergent forces, keeps us blind to the object of our search. Because it is no object, really, but mystery itself. Encoded in our nature, in the private, signatural aesthesis of every life, does that mystery gleam. Creativity is boundless because the aesthetic mystery is beyond our reckoning – we are beings split apart and with the part of ourselves capable of knowledge we yearn to render for ourselves in some externalised form that other part of ourselves that is by nature internal and unknowable. We can’t help but feel its stirrings on the waters of our consciousness, and in this factioned double life is the friction of the artist felt – out of that friction is the spark of the creative impulse born.

In order to render in a work of art some simulacrum of our own poetic object we must create for ourselves a trail of its affects. Only by its affects can we know it. Analogously, if we were to attribute to a sunset, or the course of a river, or the bursting of clouds the workings of a higher being does that mean that we have thereby come to know that higher being? No. We seek signs because it is only signs that we can perceive.5

In our individuality we are each like tributaries that meet up along the path, always asking: ‘What news of the sea?’