Books reviewed in this review: None. Instead I will review you, and that’s You with a capital Why. You—you are everybody and nobody. Both one and many, both present and absent, you act through speech and speak in acts. Riddle me this: Who are you?
For example, you are the brash, nebulous, bending, carnassial mass whose teeming myriads of face-tips chatter at one another on review sites, your hydra-head profiles spewing all comments and slurping them back up, iterating on into the most noxious infinity imaginable. A hall of self-reflecting mirrors, you are the babbler inchoate, the dragon of dragging on—that’s you, with your pinball-machine mega-brain of cross-fired dopamine, wild for likes; and your many-faced, hirsute, red-mouthed mug is one that not even the bonded power of a billion mothers on ecstasy could even begin to hope to love.
But you are more, and worse. You are also the lustrous, well-fed mask-miens shining above paid reviews in the last remaining magazines, squeaking your clean opinions as if you were squeeze toys in the drooling jaws of an investor. Mouthpiece of career, history, and gene, somehow you manage to believe yourself an original, though your editor has long since stopped having to cut you to fit. Just deposit a coin in your palm, and from your mouth a moist article descends, panting. Anonymous in a psychic sense, you will be remembered, at best, as a symptom of your times, of your owners, of your audience.
Yet you have even uglier faces with nastier motives. Art as art? Art as heart or dart? Forget it—you are every book-clubber and glib blabber calling out an artist for not conforming to your parochial politics, sludgy opinions dribbling from the stirred sore of your brain as you autodrunkenly demand an image of yourself. But you are also the insufferable steroided supremacist chewing the globe like bubblegum, unable to see past your own protruding brow, using your tough grey brain as a club which rebounds. You are every scraggle-bearded dude sketching with your stubby finger in the condensation from a beer as you outline the technical infelicities of a text, drawing a wobbly line between the awesome and the noisome—all while plagiarizing your favorite podcast. Or, constantly maneuvering to look your prettiest and petitest for the camera filters, you are the preening chick lip-deep in a wine glass, judging protagonists by how much you relate to them. Or there you are, a woebegone sniffler in a sad shirt in a sad bedroom, afloat on a lifeless raft on a sea of self-pity, trying to blow out your brains with a book. You are a teenager scribbling crayon on the canon until you see only your own grand theory of the universe. Or you are a hound who has appointed yourself the favorite pet of your god, and so you feel licensed to bark your injunctions, trying to earn a pat on the head from the divine. Not even wrong, not even right, you wouldn’t know complexity if it ramified you in the face, and you shake off ambiguity as if it were stuck to your shoe. Ever ready to jeer, you always keep your critical torch close at hand, beside your cash and your phone charger.
In other words, you are a judge.
You are a scowl. Rhadamanthine and aloof, you judge everything by what you already know, demanding more of the same or, at most, a twist on what you already enjoy. Long ago your neurons crystallized around some chance stimuli, and since then you have never defrosted. You—you who are slave to a few seconds in your childhood—know umpteen ways of saying No and so very few of saying Yes, your negations and affirmations framed by the rules of your training. Every observation you’ve ever made was a decision reached while under fire, as the rude world battered coaxing at the drums of your ears; every opinion you ever oozed was in self-defense, a pungent argument exuded to plug the leaks in the splintering shell of your self-delusions, your hasty self-hypes that hardened. Now you speak from bile or from infatuation, but either way you put a lid on the All, constricting the unlimited to the barbed-wire corral of your miniature conception. Oh Judge, you reduce the irreducible, then search in the vain for the remainder, having grown stone-deaf to the true wassail! Oh, ya flap open yer muzzle and a smaller You flops out, come to shuffle crude illusions into the deck, acerb jokers who turn the circus black-and-white! Oh, you believe yourself good-natured, but the generosity you assume reveals only your contempt for the world—attempting to review art, you review the artist and reveal only your unsightly reflection! O, you make every murder into a mirror, every fuck into a photo of your soul! O, Soggy Soldier of your Basilisk Ego, you treat art as just another chance to prove you were drilled in how to think, boxed in forever by a restriction told as history, seduced by an art story! O, all folly, all sin, all secondhandedness reside in you, and when you talk you just show off! O—but your showing is off, and I’m so sick of your telling!
You. Now you are angry at me. You are enwrathened by my arrogance. You’ll spear me down and show me my place. You’ll downvote me, then dub me Honey and instruct me to fry up some positive vibes. Your eyes wet spiders, you’ll demand to know which cockroach crawled down my craw and croaked there. You think I don’t sense you fidgeting like an adult baby? Waving your whirly lollipop, you’ll pry apart your sticky, putrid teeth, unfold your single-ply-tissue mind, and ask whether I truly think I know you, whether I actually believe I’m right. Which: oh no. No no no, don’t get me wrong. You’re right. You’re always right, about your needs. Frankly, your fantastitude is ineffable. I buzz around you waiting for golden freshets of wisdom to dribble from your sanctified lips. I watch in awe as you blare, calling on us to coalesce around yourself. I adore how you think that just because you feel something it’s right and real; how you believe that just because you know a few things you understand anything at all. A stringent customer, you buy your paradigms one at a time. A pinch-throat competitor, you play tug-of-war-of-words and win every single game—otherwise you wouldn’t play—but do you know we’re all afraid of you and your tantrums? It ain’t fear of your power, but fear of being bored by your self-advertisement.
And worst of all?
Worst of all, you’re me.
You’re me, and this review has reviewed itself, and I’m writing about the human precondition. What can we say without talking about ourselves? Only I should admit that when I include myself in you, then suddenly our composite self seems more sympathetic to me, and my condemnations soften. Let me see: just like you, I am the squawking outcome of thirteen billion years, heir to the unseen strangeness that preceded the Big Bang; the whole of history has lined up my notions like dominoes; and my hands are manipulated by all my ancestors at once. All learning is a response, and we are prolonged, overlapping reactions. We remember through pain but love what helps us forget. Thus we remain passive, worshipping dreams, logrolling on our precarious stability. Pairs of eyes on sticks, we watch time wheel over us, sun and moon twirling in a mobile over the cradles of our graves. Stuffed full of past, facing into chronological wind eroding our skin, we must believe we know what we’re talking about, else we fall into disrepair; must trust our mistrust, else wither. Every critique is an implicit argument for the salvation of its reviewer, even if their soul’s S has been slashed into a $—but that same symbol is required to spell $urvival, and aren’t all actions ultimately understandable if you hover far enough above? The squirming of worms is an alphabet, and soon God will step on us too.
But that idea of god is just another spinning top, a gaudy bauble from the human library—and if we snatch such an idea and trace it back, then we might arrive somewhere novel to us. Just think: our shared imaginarium hosts a horde of hells and a heap of heavens, a paradise of paranoias and a catastrophe of utopias, with the rarest conjectures lacing along the rims of the possibilities available to the strangest minds of our times. All the shimmering threads of our voices, tripwires plangent as piano strings, finally weave back toward one another and intertwine into the chromatic pavilion of our agglomerated imagination, into the prismatic architecture of our arcing perspectives, which sweep in parallel or cross or knot or curve up and merge into superhighways of consensus, forming the intricate, race-track-shaped ruts of popular takes, or flowing down eccentric paths and florid dead-ends and newborn dimensions, racing to the extremities of ideaspace. These septillion spools of psychic causality appear as chaos only because our eyes can’t contain the patterns: this tapestry is too large to read, and we live within it, spun from its fluvial fabric. Each of us, derived from the entirety, is a unique miscellany of recycled tropes; at once universal and particular, our depths are both incommunicable and unbelievably basic, while our truths are diluted through the language we sweat so incessantly—nailed to the wall by a passing phrase, we squirm for the rest of our blursed spans, held back and held out and held down by everything we ever thought, anything we were ever taught, ever mental construction a destruction, our minds A without the I. Or is it that our intelligence is not intelligent? Take comfort, maybe, if comfort is something you need: we are all skewed together, and the spectra of our perspectives form the cathedral of our species.
Consider that the essential element of a bow is neither its string nor its body, but the tension between the two: the body bent back by the string, the string tautened by the body, pull against pull. Just so, every person is strung on society, every mind on flesh, every opinion on a context, whose tips are life and death. The arrows of our thoughts launch like feet kicking out from tapped knees, but all those potshots crosshatch into the overarching dome of human thought; and whoever is pierced shoots another arrow. We should never believe that our precious conceptions float alone in the void, special tensed cries borne from sui generis junctures of person and event. If we think we obey no laws and follow no forerunners, then we are blind to our own genesis. Search the tree of history to find exactly what tip you represent; only then seek the open air. Above all, remember that every theory you’ve ever had is a story curling from a story curling from a story—for a story is the master form of understanding, the shape of our consciousness; and you must trace its leaves back to where they grew from the branch—for the tree is the master metaphor for all human knowledge, or if not one tree then the full forest, the riled and unbridled wilderness.
Consequently, there is a way out and a way above, sort of. It involves learning to shed your skin temporarily. It means transcending the personal to contemplate the larger shape, to understand where your parameters end and how to push past them, how to squint through to the parrot-bright intricacy that roils beyond the lash-curtains of your eyelid-windows. Listen: above our infinitesimal heads, yet threaded through them, there floats a colossal polymental construction, a circumvoluted psychic basilica of palaces that drifts through the difficult sky. It is the transcendent multi-mansion of the human, a zoological Alhambra of minds, situated over the central point of our seething billions; and any given book, song, dream, brain is just one of the many paths through its proliferating labyrinths of hallways and rooms, its serrated staircases leading to claustral attics, to conceptual terraces swarmed by the birds of theory and patterned by the salamanders of suggestion. The Tree of Lives burgeons through it, spreading superstructures and fruit which contain enough nutriment for all, if you can labor outside to its pulsing trunk; if you can glimpse even briefly the incandescent-windowed, diverse-doored aggregate of the human vision; if you can make your thinking into a supple skeleton key, fashioning from frustrant banality your own beauty; if you can grasp that all mind is your heritage, that every deathblow and flybite belongs to you, every pang of childbirth and every gripped kitchen-knife; that morality is mud; that muck is mother; that Yes strangles No; that even the sin-stained may often, cored by an oracle, speak past color or sex or age, past the swastikas of crosses and the murder-engines of moons and stars, beyond the capture-the-flag-of-the-nations, to the omnipresent cosmic of the quotidian, the individual universal. Wrench yourself from your tin mirror and stagger to your miniature aperture, so you might finally see not silver fog but luminescent mist. Take the dialectical knife to your eyelids; the pain from their parting is pure. Climb, oh climb, climb with all your might—but be warned that you may never get there. That, while trying to explore the ecumenical palace of mankind, you will probably want to fall, to fall with a resounding crash back into yourself.
Yes, I see you naked, falling in a thrashing mass of bodies, plummeting in the millions through air, shrieking amid handbags and vape-pens. The transcendental embrace was too much for someone like you, gritty with embitterment, even to dream of sustaining—well, me too: of course I see myself among your number, paralyzed in a familiar scream. The nondenominational congregation was not meant for us; we are too seasoned, too disenchanted and aggressively defensive, slave-chained by the navel to our past selves. We love shoving, we delight in fighting and we revel in demolition. Plunging we rip at one another, gnashing and clawing out constellations of blood drops. Teeth sink into flesh; fingernails carve eyeballs; pens slide up nostrils into encephala. Sounding a solipsistic cacophony of screams we, the falling, who no longer have a deity to defy, console ourselves by maiming one another, critic on critic, flaying and abrading, faux-glorious in war, scrambling over the dying in pursuit of what we fear might be the last epiphany we’ll ever steal. Tumbling glittering through diamond air, our mutilated multitudes of broken bodies spin and flip and twist down toward indisputable death; yet in our best vigor we grapple over lower punters, heading further down with daggers gripped twixt our lips, stabbing as we go, singing Yes to the No.—See, personally I ain’t never been at home amid royalty. Chaos is the only garment that lets me move freely. Enlightenment gives me a headache, tranquility kills me and serenity is just menacing. Impropriety is my piety. Hysterical laughter is my rocketship. Attacking is my rest. Destruction is too funny. Evil too fun.
Besides, just imagine the pain of God, if Satan were to disappear. Muse, grant me the ability to ruin the youth! May I fountain poison for a thousand years!
Every criticism manifests the story of its critic. Critiques could not be more revealing. You are a story judging other stories; you are a character; and now I’ll switch off my waves of words, recline on a sofa of flames, and watch to see what you’re going to say next.