by Hari Kunzru
One night, as I followed the forking paths of the Starhemberg content, I began to find my own picture. The image had been taken when I confronted Anton at the screening. I was holding the mike, speaking and gesturing with my free hand, my eyes wide and my mouth hanging open in an idiotic “o.” I looked angry, slightly unhinged. The picture was given various captions, mostly satirizing hysterical “social justice warriors” as brainless authoritarians who shouted and screamed. A popular one just had the word “RAAACIIIST!” in all-caps.
I tried to work out who’d started it, and sure enough, the earliest variant I could find was posted a few hours after the screening, from an account called StabRag1683 that put out a steady stream of content, mostly GIFs of gory scenes from old Italian horror films. I wasn’t posting to the boards and forums I was watching, so I didn’t think there was any way for Anton to know that I was paying attention to Starhemberg, but as soon as I saw the memes I knew they were not only of me, but directed at me, a taunt or joke. From now on when you see something, you’re seeing it because I want you to see it. When you think of something, it’ll be because I want you to think about it. I knew it wouldn’t be long before they doxxed me. They would find out where my wife and child were sleeping, behind a flimsy front door.
One night I was looking at a subreddit devoted to Nazi polar mysticism where a prolific poster called Rudi Stroembourg was insulting anyone who knew less than him about Vril energy. To my surprise, as he rambled on about Hyperborea and Miguel Serrano, he made passing reference to a “mongrel book” that included an essay on sunsets that was “little more than a porridge of half-understood concepts drawn from the great German Romantics.” Though he didn’t say so explicitly, I knew the book he was talking about. It was mine. I checked on the big sites and found, just as I suspected, that they were all carrying the same newly posted one-star review of Seven Types of Vacancy, focusing on a chapter I’d titled “Wasting Light.”
User: Erno Strindberg
*Would be improved by actual thinking
This is the work of a writer whose modest intellectual abilities have been scattered to the winds by the most degraded type of postmodernism. In this mongrel book, rootless cosmopolitanism finds its aesthetic correlative in shopworn irony. Among the low points are a flaccid discussion of French New Wave cinema, in which the writer inhales the last fumes of 1968 and strikes postures intended to impress us with his radicalism, and an essay on the figure of the setting sun in Western art that tilts at being a critique of Eurocentrism and the notion of decline, but loses its way in a porridge of half-understood concepts drawn from the great German Romantics. Seen from the cliff top, with the sea wind in your face and the ancient stones close at hand, there is no challenge here, just cowardice and confusion. True wisdom arises out of primordial fear, which is fear of the unknowable essence of things from which all authority derives. The author of this collection of platitudes is neither smart enough to intuit that essence, nor self-aware enough to know how afraid he ought to be.
It was unpleasant to read, of course, in the way of any bad review, but more importantly it was surely by Anton. The language was unmistakable. The reference to the cliffs and the sea and the ancient stones would have been proof enough. I might be a coward, confused and intellectually limited, and he might stand on the high cliffs of ancient wisdom, regarding me with pity, but he was definitely regarding me. The more I read and reread the review, the more disturbing I found its tone of mystical threat. He was issuing a challenge, telling me where to meet him.
After the screening, the vodka brand had put the film up online. I watched it again, frame by frame. The narcissistic cliff-top yoga, the Modernist hut. I took grabs of the scene in which he chopped firewood. In the background you could see a stretch of water, and beyond it a mountainous island or peninsula. The footage had been shot during the golden hour, and the sun was visible, setting over the sea in front of him, so I could tell that he was more or less facing west. It was most likely somewhere in Europe. I tried to get a good look at the dolmen, only briefly visible as he walked past. It was an irregular pile of stones and on second viewing I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was a man-made object. To me the scene seemed like the west of Ireland, maybe Brittany or Scotland. I supposed it could also have been Scandinavia, perhaps some island in the Baltic. If the dolmen was just a pile of stones, that would open it up. New Zealand, South Africa, Patagonia. Or it could be a place that didn’t exist at all, altered or generated entirely in post-production.
Eventually I found a sort of gazetteer, a site whose contributors painstakingly listed all manner of ancient remains around the world. On a page of amateur photos I saw something that looked very similar to the dolmen in the film, tagged with the name of an island off the west coast of Scotland. I searched for more photos, and found one that seemed to show the cliff top where Anton did yoga. Then in the background of a snapshot of someone’s birdwatching vacation I saw the hut or bothy where Anton had chopped wood. It was unambiguously the same place.
I went straight to the Gare du Nord and caught a train.
Twenty-four hours later I was on another train, heading from Glasgow into the Highlands. We sped past lakes and mountains, bathed in the golden light of Anton’s film. The landscape shimmered. Across the aisle, a man in Scottish formal wear, a kilt and a jacket with silver buttons, sat at a table, listening to music and drinking his way steadily through a six-pack of beer. I felt as if I were traveling into the afterlife.
I stayed the night in a room above a pub near the port, and the next morning caught a ferry, a small boat just big enough to take a dozen passengers. We made our way out to the island in light rain, spray scudding across the bow, seabirds wheeling overhead. The boat was not full, just me and three young local men in overalls who spent the journey chatting to the captain in the wheelhouse. I checked and rechecked the backpack resting on my legs. Bivvy bag, waterproofs, water bottle, dried fruit and nuts, a flashlight, binoculars, a vicious-looking camping knife with a serrated edge, the largest one the Glasgow shop had in stock. In my pocket was my phone. I took it out and turned it over in my hand. Holding it over the water, gradually, as if by accident, I relaxed my grip until it slipped out of my fingers. Not a thing I’d willed. Not a choice.
A stone breakwater protected the island’s little harbor. By the dock was a snack bar and a little store, where I bought canned food and gave a vague answer to the girl serving behind the counter when she asked where I was staying. I headed uphill from the dock, along a well-maintained single-track road which took me through an area of woodland, past two or three houses and a school. No one was around. Once a delivery van passed me, otherwise all was quiet. The road climbed up onto a high moor, grazed by sheep. I walked until I reached a kind of saddle or gap from which I could see down to a little bay, where a scattering of farmhouses lay in the lee of a range of high cliffs.
There you are, I said to Anton.
As the road began to slope down I turned off it and crossed a boggy field, scrambling up the rocky hillside. From there I could get a better view of the dale, the good land sectioned into strips of pasture by dry stone walls that ran down to a beach of grayish sand. On the other side of a channel was another island, purple crags crowned by mist. I walked further up onto the moor. Below me, a steep hill choked with bracken gradually became a cliff. Near its foot, well above the highest of the farmhouses, there was a glint of glass. I trained my binoculars on the spot and saw an angled roof, a solar panel. Anton’s bothy.
I couldn’t be sure if he was there. I didn’t want to take the risk of going too close, and I didn’t want to approach from the road that ran along the shore. By that time it was mid-afternoon. We were far north and there were still many hours of light. I retraced my steps, came down off the moor and then skirted the base of the cliff, diving into the bracken some distance above the bothy. I proceeded slowly, army-crawling so I couldn’t be seen. By
the time I’d worked my way round to a position just above the hut, I was wet and cold. The bothy was a neat little hut of tarred wood, with firewood stacked under a tarp by the side wall. The cliff loomed over me like the judgment of God but I kept watch, looking for anyone coming or going, any sign of life.
As I waited, the sky cleared and over the water a sunset began that made the clouds look like falling petals. I felt unbelievably calm, a feeling that persisted until, without warning, my mind was peeled open by an ecstatic vision, a flood of elation at the peachy orange light that became anxiety, then pure terror as I saw sunlight glinting off a reflective surface, turning high in the air. A satellite, a drone. I threw myself down on the ground, clawing the dirt, squirming in the petri dish of the sky’s empty regard. Maybe there’d been no one up there before, but now we’d built it. Out of neediness, pathetic craving for daddy’s attention, we’d built Him to watch over us, to witness our abjection. A black disc passed over the sun and began to spin, just as it had in Anton’s film. Exposed on the hillside like a hare under the eye of a raptor, I understood for the first time the extent of the malevolent energy Anton had directed towards me, how completely I had put myself under his control. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I was trapped in a game, a simulation, some sadistic overlay on the real world that he had devised specially for me. In a state of abject terror, I zipped myself into my sleeping bag to shut out the light.
The night was interminable, one of the worst of my life. The next morning I woke up exhausted and hungry, the sleeping bag soaked through. I was sick of everything, and maybe it was that irritation, the wish to push against things rather than surrender to them, that grounded me. In any case, something about the day felt less treacherous, more solid and plausible than the one before.
By then I was more or less sure that no one was in the bothy. I army-crawled closer but the ground exhaled a freezing mist that made me shiver and I thought to hell with it and stood up and swished my way downhill through the bracken. I peered through the window of the hut and saw bare board floors, a stove and a bed raised on a platform. A strip of decking faced the sea. The door was locked. I checked around for a key—and found one under a large rock that sat at the center of a sort of mandala of sea shells.
There were no signs of recent occupation. A gas bottle was connected to a pair of cooking rings, fixed to a chest-high shelf. Another shelf under the bed held a few volumes on natural history and a torn map. There was a table and a chair, a little cupboard containing a few basic cooking things. I fumbled with a tin mug and a saucepan and a jar of instant coffee, shaking with cold.
I took my coffee outside to the deck and sat for a while, feeling the warm breeze on my face. Gradually the chill went out of my bones. I took off my jacket and sweater, then my boots and socks, my feet emerging like alien creatures, bloodless and damp. The sight of the island across the sound was infinitely calming and I surprised myself by beginning to laugh, first silently, then out loud as I realized the irony of the situation: Anton had found the kind of privacy I’d been looking for at Deuter Center, somewhere to be alone with himself, free of judgment and observation. For a while, I got lost in the possibilities. I would stay a month, a year, experience the passing of the seasons, write a book. I could finally set down on paper all the things I’d been struggling to express. And then I remembered that I’d broken in. It was not my place, not my deck to sit on and drink coffee and daydream about a book.
I spent the day in and around the hut, mostly sitting outside looking at the water, waiting for Anton to walk up the path from the road. I ate most of the food I bought at the shop. When night fell I listened for sounds outside in the darkness. In the bothy, the shadows were unquiet, full of slithering creatures. From the darkest corner my adversary kept up a stream of chatter, raising up dust in my mind, a cloud of debate. I thought solitude would solve my problems, did I? Well, solitude was corrupting, he should know, he’d spent enough time alone. Too long in the wild and men lost their humanity, their ability to be around other people. They began to slobber and howl and walk on all fours. You envy my clarity of purpose, I told him, casting my voice into the darkness. You hate and envy all that is good.
The next day things were treacherous again. The island across the sound shifted on its haunches, the undulating bracken was sown with eyes. A fine blanket of gray cloud covered the sky and I was no more than a thin skin over a hollow, a drum, a cave, my head aching, a metallic taste in my mouth. Outside was no good, but neither was inside; I lay down on the bed but the room began to spin, and I realized I hadn’t eaten, so very slowly I climbed back down from the platform, feeling like an old man. I laced up my boots, an operation that seemed to take hours.
I trudged out, sick and light-headed, my body complaining with every step, then moving a little faster as my legs gained strength. I followed the road up over the moor to the other side of the island, and down through the woods to the little shop at the quayside, where I bought provisions and looked for paper and pens. In the absence of anything better I had to settle for souvenir pencils and spiral-bound children’s notebooks with rough paper and pictures of ponies and dolphins on the covers. I made no conversation with the woman who sold them to me, and walked slowly back to the bothy. On the road above the bay, I saw a man leaning over a wall, watching me approach. I nodded at him and he nodded back and as I passed by I could feel the full heat of his scrutiny, a physical sensation like a fire burning in the small of my back. He couldn’t place me. He was wondering where I was going, which of his neighbors I was staying with. I turned off the road and followed a muddy path down to the beach, where I walked back and forth touristically for the benefit of anyone watching through binoculars. When I was bored of picking up seashells I took a route back to the bothy that kept me out of sight of the houses, plunging into the bracken again so I didn’t have to approach from the road.
I watched the bothy for ten minutes or so, to check no one had gone inside while I was away. When I was satisfied, I went back in, took off my boots and half-collapsed on the floor. I was feeling sick and my hands were shaking, and it took me some time to get a fire going in the stove. I ate and drank water, then sat down at the desk. I felt incredibly weak, but also clear, transparent to myself. The only way out was through. I would let Anton out through myself, let him speak through me. I would follow where he led, and face whatever I found there. I arranged the kitschy little notebooks in a pile, lined up the pencils, and began to write.
I no longer have the pages. I left them on the island. Even if I’d kept them, I doubt I’d want to look at them now. I have no interest in reading my own writing as a symptom, or using it as material for some assessment or diagnosis. My project was an Apocalypse, a revelation of last things, an ancient genre that seemed right for a man who’d crawled away to a desert place to meditate.
I wrote about a paradox, how the earth is in flames but we still find it cold and difficult to touch. How we are not at home. How despite—or perhaps because of—our distance, our inability to experience ourselves as nature, we are in crisis. This “we,” of course, was really just an “I,” a universalization of my own panic, but I knew I was not alone in my thoughts, even if the conclusions I came to might be unacceptable, even unintelligible to others. We face, I wrote, a risk that is immeasurable, in the sense that it’s impossible to quantify. An externality that sooner or later will blot out the sun. I wrote about plagues and melting glaciers and drowned cities and millions of people on the move, a future in which any claim of allegiance to universal human values would be swept away by a cruel tribalism. I wrote about a system that would eventually find itself able to dispense with public politics altogether and put in its place the art of the deal: a black box, impossible to oversee, visible only to the counterparties. There would be no checks and balances, no right of appeal against the decisions of the deal-makers, no “rights” whatsoever, just the raw exercise of power.
I wro
te about how our senses will begin to fail us. As the old world of words gives way to the world of code and the only measurable output of the Anthropocene earth is dust and radiant heat, every technical advance will make our human intuitions less reliable. Machine vision is not human vision. Nonhuman agents will have interests and priorities that may not align with ours. With metrication has come a creeping loss of aura, the end of the illusion of exceptionality which is the remnant of the religious belief that we stand partly outside or above the world, that we are endowed with a special essence and deserve recognition or protection because of it. We will carry on trying to make a case for ourselves, for our own specialness, but we will find that arrayed against us is an inexorable and inhuman power, manic and all-devouring, a power thirsty for the total annihilation of its object, that object being the earth and everything on it, all that exists.
I wrote about pointlessness, the utter ruin of all my projects, the supercession of all that I was or could ever be. I described the reduction of my most cherished mysteries to simple algorithmic operations, instructions that could be put on a chip, a disenchantment so total that afterwards, after the shift, it would be impossible even to think back to how it was, to imagine what it was to be alive in the old way. My luxurious mental furnishings, my sensibility and intelligence and taste, all would turn to ashes. And the same thing would happen to everyone else on earth. The destruction of culture was only the beginning. Meaning itself would be revealed as an artifact of a period that was slipping away into history. Afterwards, there would only be function.