Only Americans Burn in Hell
Page 23
Back in those days, William E. Jones was an excluded voice.
Now he’s a faithful viewer of Reality TV!
RuPaul’s Drag Race !
Things change!
Capitalism can eat anything!
The 1993 AD Biennial presented two particularly controversial representations of three-dimensional reality.
The first was a video of the Rodney King assault, which was shot by a plumber and depicted the Los Angeles Police Department beating the shit out of a motorist descended from people brought in chains to support America’s original economic scheme.
The second were the admissions badges, which everyone had to wear if they didn’t want to be kicked out of the Whitney Museum.
The badges were designed by the artist Daniel Joseph Martinez and spelled out various iterations of the following phrase: I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE.
Everyone freaked out.
They freaked out so hard that they created a physical, and conceptual, environment of malice and paranoia.
If you think this is an exaggeration, reader, then I recommend that you read contemporary reviews of the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial. If you can find anything more positive than qualified sneering and affronted guilt, then you are a much better researcher than me.
And remember: the qualified sneering and affronted guilt came from people who were sympathetic to the show.
Fern and Anthony paid their collective $12 and were given admissions badges.
Fern’s admissions badge said: EVER WANTING.
Anthony’s admissions badge said: IMAGINE.
They wandered through the rooms and galleries of the Whitney Museum, bombarded by abstract representations of three-dimensional reality.
When Fern and Anthony arrived at the Cindy Sherman photographs of mannequins and exaggerated plastic genitalia and reproductive organs and BDSM masks, Anthony looked into Cindy Sherman’s abstract representations of three-dimensional reality.
And Cindy Sherman’s abstract representations of three-dimensional reality looked into Anthony.
“Here we find the nature of knowledge,” said Anthony.
“What?” asked Fern.
“We can’t know anything that isn’t first filtered through our senses. There is no knowledge beyond that which is observed. There is no first truth. Sherman is presenting us with a moral lesson on instructive epistemology. This is the real nature of sex. This is the desire of all men. It may arrive disguised, but this is what happened when you allowed yourself to be fucked by beasts. The constructed nature of sex, informed by the media, informed by society, informed by ten thousand years of patriarchal society. Cindy Sherman has stripped it away. Now you can see them how they saw you. This is the truth of letting yourself be fingerbanged by animals.”
For centuries, people had been dragging Fern to exhibitions of abstract representation of three-dimensional reality.
She’d been stuffed full of the nonsense that people said in salons, in museums, and in galleries. She’d suffered through endless men talking about abstract representations of three-dimensional reality.
And Fern was nobody’s fool.
She hadn’t endured these exercises in tedium and learned nothing.
She had cottoned on to the underlying, and unjustifiable, delusion that animated every one of these discussions: the religious belief that art, rather than money, was the most influential thing imagined by human beings.
And here was the only person with whom she’d ever fallen in love and he was condescending to her with an even older bullshit than discussions about abstract depictions of three-dimensional reality, and he was disguising it as bullshit about abstract depictions of three-dimensional reality.
Fern cast another spell on Anthony.
Right there in the Whitney Museum.
Right there in the Biennial.
It was one of the weirdest spells cast by anyone from Fairy Land.
The underlying nature of art was the ability of human beings to perceive an implied whole from the presentation of its parts.
Imagine the human face abstracted to the furthest degree:
No human face has ever looked like this.
And yet your brain, reader, has interpreted it as a face.
Fern’s spell was intended to scramble Anthony’s ability to apprehend the whole from the presentation of its parts. When the spell took its effect, and Anthony looked at the above, he would see this:
The spell was designed to wear off when they left the Whitney.
Its assumed virtue was this: it would make Anthony stop condescending to Fern about epistemology when really he was telling her she was a slut for sucking so much dick back in the suburbs.
But something went wrong.
For two years, Anthony had been saturated with the radiation of primal magic, and those two spells had sat in and on his body. They had done peculiar things to his biology.
This wasn’t like messing up the mind of a landlady in Udine.
This was magic without precedent.
Anthony’s biology rejected the third spell.
When Anthony’s biology rejected the spell, the feedback caused an invisible magical explosion.
This explosion created a magical avatar of the 1993 AD Biennial.
In its most abstract form.
Here was the abstraction: the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial, focusing on artworks touching on issues of identity and social discord and presenting a critique of how very rich people had constructed the world, existed entirely as the largesse of very rich people.
The Museum and its Biennial were gifts from beyond the Cash Horizon.
All of the bad reviews, all of the upset, all of the guilt, all of the empowerment, all the renewed focus on marginalized voices.
It had happened because some very rich people wanted bragging rights. Through the arcane processes of those who had passed the Cash Horizon, the social capital of these bragging rights would be transformed into an actual capital.
And if you think that’s an exaggeration, reader, then you could always look at the patrons listed in the catalogue of the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial.
The list is this: Emily Fisher Landau, The Greenwall Foundation, Philip Morris Inc., Sony USA Inc., Henry and Elaine Kaufman, The Lauder Foundation, Mrs. William A. Marsteller, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mrs. Donald Petrie, Primerica Foundation, The Samuel and May Rudin Foundation Inc, The Simon Foundation, and Nancy Brown Wellin.
Andrew W. Mellon was a war profiteer. He made a killing during the Spanish-American War, a conflict that was precipitated by an imaginary attack on an American sea vessel.
Primerica Foundation was the philanthropic wing of Primerica, a multi-level marketing operation that targeted lower- and middle-income Americans and got them to buy term-life insurance, as opposed to whole-life insurance, and invest the difference in mutual funds operated by Primerica subsidiaries. Multi-level marketing, by the way, was almost indistinguishable from a pyramid scheme.
Philip Morris Inc. sold a very pleasurable form of suicide.
Nancy Brown Wellin was the daughter of George Brown, who co-founded Brown & Root, which ended up as a Halliburton subsidiary.
Brown & Root supplied almost all of the logistical support for the Vietnam War, a conflict that was precipitated by an imaginary attack on an American sea vessel.
And here’s a funny anecdote, apropos of nothing.
Nancy Brown Wellin was at the Armstrong Ranch on February 11, 2006 AD.
This was the day when, and the place where, then Vice President of the United States Richard B. Cheney, architect of the First and Second American Wars against Iraq, was trying to murder innocent animals and accidently shot a lawyer in the heart.
It was like gladiators before a Roman emperor.
You fight, sure, because otherwise another gladiator would kill you, but ultimately your life and your death and your fighting were interchangeable.
It was all someone else’s entertainment.
Then Fern’s spell did something funny: it took that abstract representation of the Whitney Biennial and shot it forward through time.
The abstraction landed on the Twenty-First Century AD.
And that abstract representation infected the Internet and all human culture.
Fern doomed everyone in the Twenty-First Century AD to the worst possible fate: rehashing the Cultural Wars of the 1980s AD and 1990s AD, with all of its direct and internecine fighting, and doing it purely for the amusement and enrichment of people who had moved past the Cash Horizon.
When her spell fizzled, Fern took a good look at Anthony.
It was one of those things: when you live with someone, it’s harder to notice subtle changes in their appearance.
Fern had missed it.
But now she could see.
And something was dreadfully wrong.
Fern left New York City.
In the Year of the Speckled Band, which roughly corresponded to 1995 AD, 1415 AH, and 5755 AM, Fern returned to New York City and moved back into Anthony’s apartment on St. Mark’s Place.
Anthony was not well.
It could not be ignored.
Anthony himself seemed unaware of the change.
Anthony kept plugging away at his PhD.
Anthony contributed to a handful of minor academic papers trapped in an arduous process of backbiting peer review.
Anthony kept teaching classes at Eugene Lang College, the undergraduate division of the New School for Social Research.
But his every step was tormented.
Fern cast spells trying to remove the primal magic and its radiation, but these too were repulsed by Anthony’s biological transformation.
Fern left New York City.
In the Year of the Salted Earth, which roughly corresponded with 1997 AD, 1417 AH, and 5757 AM, Fern came back to New York City.
Anthony’s apartment was empty of Anthony.
His possessions were there.
Anthony was not.
There was an eviction notice taped to the apartment’s front door.
Fern cast a spell that handled the pressing issue of outstanding and future rent.
Then she tried to find her boyfriend.
It took some high-grade magic, and a ride on the Long Island Rail Road with a transfer at Jamaica station, but Fern found Anthony in the same state-run institution where his uncle’s useless machine had run out of fuel.
Anthony had his own room.
The useless machine of his body had sprouted wires that were attached to other machines that monitored, and influenced, his weakening vital signs.
Sometimes he was lucid. Sometimes his useless machine would stop processing data.
Fern touched his face.
Anthony woke up. His milky eyes focused on Fern.
“I wondered when you’d show up,” he said. “How was Bloomingdale’s?”
Anthony’s mother was in and out of the room.
His siblings were in and out of the room.
Fern never left.
She cast a spell which made her invisible to Anthony’s family and the state-funded institution’s staff.
When Anthony slipped back into consciousness, he and Fern would speak.
“Oh God,” said his mother. “Now he’s talking to himself!”
Fern tried to remedy Anthony with magic, but his body repulsed the spells.
She stayed in the room and watched as her boyfriend died.
She knew that she was the one who had assassinated him.
A day before Anthony died, he told Fern that he’d managed to complete his PhD dissertation.
“A lot of Maimonides,” he said. “More than I would have thought fucking possible.”
“And it was accepted?”
“I’m a doctor now,” said Anthony. “Not that it helps.”
When the end came, it was gentle, except for a brief moment in which Anthony began speaking with the dead.
“I see her there,” said Anthony, his useless machine arm lifting itself and pointing to the empty doorway. “Why are you here, Edith? Keep away! Keep away! You never understood. Everything you said was a lie. Every word. Keep away! Keep away!”
Anthony’s family thought that Anthony was talking to himself.
Fern looked at the doorway with the eyes of Fairy Land.
And for a moment, a luminescent human form was present.
It was a woman dressed in costume from Eighteenth-Century AD America. She was carrying a bouquet of flowers in her right hand and a scythe in her left. A fake beard was plastered on her brow.
One minute Anthony was there.
The next he was gone.
His mother wept.
Fern couldn’t figure out how this woman had given birth to Anthony.
She couldn’t understand how any of his family shared his lineal biology.
The things that they’d argued over while he lay in his sick bed.
Money, property, romances.
He was a man who’d dedicated his life to escaping the suburban isolation of Long Island. He’d thrown himself into the world. He had not left his home in shame or fear, but with the spirit of a conqueror, with the thirst of someone who wanted to know everything.
He is me, thought Fern. I am him.
She too was from an island.
She too had chafed at the isolationism.
She too had fled everything.
Fern returned to their apartment.
She found a xeroxed copy of Anthony’s PhD dissertation.
She read it.
All 263 pages.
She had absolutely no idea what the hell it said.
She walked to Fifth Avenue and went into the Graduate Faculty building of the New School for Social Research.
Before its acquisition by the university, the building had housed a department store.
It still felt like a space dedicated to shopping.
Fern took an escalator to the second floor and wandered past an abstract representation of three-dimensional reality. The abstract representation was a painting that depicted the Bacchae.
Fern found Anthony’s advisor.
He was in his office.
By human standards, he was on the threshold of being ancient.
By Fern’s standards, he looked like a baby.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“I am Anthony’s girlfriend,” she said.
“It’s a shame,” said Anthony’s advisor.
“Yes,” said Fern. “It is.”
There was a long silence.
“I read his dissertation,” said Fern.
“Did you?” asked the advisor.
“I did not understand a word,” said Fern.
“I’m afraid that we don’t write for the layman,” said the advisor.
Fern left the New School for Social Research and went south down Fifth Avenue, and through Washington Square, and through the West Village until she found herself on Jones Street.
She stood before Caffe Vivaldi.
She went inside.
Folk singers were performing.
The historical anachronicity of Caffe Vivaldi had increased after seven years of globalization.
Fern sat down. She ordered a cappuccino.
She realized that one of the folk singers performing historical anachronisms had also performed historical anachronisms on the night of Fern’s third date with Anthony.
In the Year of the Baroque Promise.
The same person.
Doing the same thing.
Singing the same songs.
James wasn’t there.
He’d taken his filthy mouth back to Columbus.
The advisor’d said that Anthony’s dissertation was one of the best that he’d ever read, that Anthony was a star pupil, that Anthony had conquered everything he’d set out to conquer, that if Anthony had lived he would have made an immeasurable mark on the f
ield, and even if Fern couldn’t understand Anthony’s abstract depiction of three-dimensional reality, she should take pride in it. The advisor was working on posthumous publication. The advisor would write an introduction that served as an in memoriam.
One of the folk singers sang a song by the Carter Family. It was called “Can’t Feel at Home.”
Part of it went like this:
Over in glory land there is no dying there
The saints are shouting victory, there’s singing everywhere
I hear the voice of them that I have heard before
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore
You could be like Anthony and go out into the wide world and chase the only thing that was worth chasing, which was neither money nor power, nor love or comfort, but knowledge.
Escape the suburbs, rise through the social ranks, read more philosophy than is good for anyone, achieve a practical application in 263 pages.
How does the world work?
The thought was trapped like methane in tar, rising up, until she heard the folksinger, until she’d spoken to the advisor, until she’d read the dissertation and understood nothing.
Oh I have a loving mother over in glory land
I don’t expect to stop until I shake her hand
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore
You could figure out how the world worked.
Anthony had.
You could develop a working model of how everything fit together.
Anthony had.
And it would mean nothing.
Knowledge was not power.
One person learning how the world worked had zero impact on how the world worked.
The boy who escaped his island only to be poisoned by the girl who’d escaped hers.
Years of fleeing Long Island.
Centuries of visiting the mortal world.
And he died six miles from the house in which he’d been raised.
The folk singer did one more verse:
Heaven’s expecting me, that’s one I know
I fixed it up with Jesus a long time ago
He will take me through though I am weak and poor
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore
Fern left New York City.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Full Throat of Christian Virtue
Back in the Twentieth Century AD, there was a genre of writing called Science Fiction.