Revenge of the Real: 0.00°, 0.00° — Jeff Wood

Full fathom five thy father lies

•

I am not Sean Penn. It would come with certain advantages this late in the game. But I am not Sean Penn. Among other things, as a freelance artist in Berlin I live astride a taut and often fraying shoestring. Also, I’m not quite so macho. At least I don’t think so. Which is to say something that I did not come to realize in exact words until much later: I was deeply afraid. Maybe Sean Penn isn't so macho either. I don’t know. Nonetheless, coincidentally, Sean Penn and I were both in Kyiv just days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I was in Kyiv working as an actor on a German-Ukrainian production of an art-film by the Berlin director Julian Rosefeldt. Sean Penn was in Kyiv doing his Sean Penn thing. That is not meant as snark—believe it or not—not in the face of a potential WWIII-level conflict with Russia. Bear with me. Or better: Enter Bear.

Just over one hundred years ago, Ukrainian-born artist Kazimir Malevich so thoroughly demolished the symbolic order that it would not survive. Yet despite itself, it did survive—as a kind of undead replica, reanimated with arguably a little too much aliveness. Malevich set about this obliterating campaign of symbolic terrorism by hanging his Black Square in the “beautiful corner” of a Petrograd salon, the upper corner of the room traditionally reserved for the Orthodox icon, anthropomorphic, yet two-dimensionally flattened into a dysmorphia encouraging contemplation but not identification: cosmic mother and child in cartoon-acid flatland, evoking yet prohibiting realism in a kind of seance with liturgical perception. Malevich’s painting took that contextual manipulation of representative iconography a step further. His Black Square hung there in that high corner like a cyclopean spider, peering into the room out of its single black eye as if it were wired up to the wall like an interrogation room surveillance camera, or a schoolroom television set, an opaque two-way screen across which passed all possible projections between epic fiction and the ineffable real only to be reabsorbed as opacity—a kind of ontological life raft atop the quicksand rising, the electrical storm of people seeking flight, seeking ground.

Now, a century later, the nightmare of metastasized representation and simulation that Malevich foresaw—a kind of Reality TV from which we cannot awaken—has come to pass. The resulting encounter is with another kind of unity, one opposite the opaque hand-painted mirror of his Black Square: an encounter with the world as semiotic replication of itself, a perpetual kind of fraudulent deformation, or forgery, engineering consensus out of impossibly infinite fractures and networked as the unity of perception itself: I am all of this. Or: We Are The World, a Gesamtkunstwerk-as-selfie in the mode and epic permeability of a psychotic autofiction, an objective sentience magically endowed with the agency to cooly (hysterically) narrate itself in its own paternally creational voice as it seeks to both prove and wryly undermine its own spectacular cruelty: bottomless, indifferent, inexhaustible, inalienable, evanescent, vertigo-inducing, obliterating, and terribly real. David Attenborough had already been stiff-armed out of frame by Werner Herzog. And now, a new voice that we don’t quite recognize yet, composite and uncanny, creeping across the surface of the screen in lava-form and the self-animate inevitability of celluloid melting. The screeching and intolerable siren song of Imagine sung by a COVID-celebrity Hydra; infinitely cresting as the silent-tsunami of Discourse. Just when (we)’d summited the false peak of Trump’s branded talent at bending the screen of replicant reality into his own personal and perpetual TV; his cohost and deck-shoed skipper, Uncle Tucker chortling dewy and doe-eyed as Laura Ingalls Wilder from inside his fake-as-fuck log cabin; and his expert witness to the emergency trauma-cinema of the so-called Great Realignment (and Replacement), Glenn Greenwald, unfurling his own spittle-lubricated metamorphosis into full-time Twitter Id, mastering the profit-generating art-form of preemptive trolling, cluster-bomb polemics, and the bitter snark necessary to sustain the gambit of my enemy’s enemy as neurological gauntlet—or, simply put: Twitter journalism—an endless chemtrail of comments exhausting in its wake; meanwhile, Adam Curtis down in the basement feeding his genius at reconstructing the incomprehensible world as even more comprehensibly incomprehensible, a kind of Darknetflix in which the apparatus of narrative hysteria is surgically employed to reconstruct a narrative of the very, er, apparatus it professes to critique. Enter Sean Penn, crossing the rubicon of fiction to grapple with the mercurial terminator of that real, not so much as performance journalism, per se—in collaboration with Vice—but because he can. I do believe his belief, at least. He’s got the skin for it, having scorched himself sufficiently in the merciless light of the projector to now stand upon the precipice to the world, all bridges to it collapsing. And enter: President Zelensky to meet him there; Zelensky the television comedian who before his role as actual president played that fictional president on TV, and is now inhabiting the role—as leader of the Free World—with such fearlessness and authenticity that it might very well summon that mythic Free World to rise and assemble itself about his feet as sand castles dissolving and liquifying in reverse. Zelensky is not merely walking on water. He’s walking across the face of an absolute black hole, the hyperobject passing its shadow across the world. It’s happening now. The question is can the world absorb it?—as the bodies of Ukrainians and Russians already are, and in the span of just a few short weeks: one million refugee children. Perhaps upon that liquidation we may yet witness the appropriation (or confiscation) of Yacht Rock for revolutionary means. If that seems in poor taste, just wait’ll you get a load of Ukrainian humor and wizardry for the warfare of memes. Russian warship, go fuck yourself. I need ammunition, not a ride. Ask the Ghost of Kyiv. High overhead, above the no-fly zone established across an array of tinfoil towers two avatars merge as swarm: Q, meet Z.

Zelensky knew the window would be brief. He saw them open, all of the them; and he flew through them, all of them. He knew they would be closing soon, and now they already are. In other regions of the timeline, and within a proximity of hours, announcements are made that Bob Dylan, the 20th century’s most popular and prolific disruptor of the sense of language, will publish a new book at the age of 80. By conflating sense as meaning and sense as sensing into a disorienting, synesthesia-inducing cycle, Dylan generated an uncanny performative tension between sense and nonsense, and exploited the compounding capacity for language to mean something other than what it means. Cormac McCarthy, master of the biblical pathos and violence of American landscape, will publish two new novels at 88, portending his final output as being synchronous with seismic tremors and exorcisms in that epic landscape: the end of America. At the age of one-hundred and ten, Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition ship Endurance has been found resting peacefully at the bottom of the Wendell Sea, a ghost ship preserved in an icy ghost grave. Meanwhile, my Wordle wins are holding at 97% since the New York Times migration and it occurs to me that when sharing Wordle daily game results with my sister—something we do, which I don’t know why we do, but we do anyway—what is being shared is an abstract pattern that is essentially illegible and meaningless to both parties but for its function as a kind of iconographic flag: its share-ability. The patterns of green and yellow squares are not really about communication at all, but about the network itself, like talking about the weather, which despite the weather binds us together regardless of its contents and features; or the dispersal of seeds via the digestive tracts of birds in flight, our “conversation” carries the genotype for some other party altogether, neither of us privy to that other. A vector. The mini Wheel of Fortune/Sesame Street pattern is being read on the inside, by some other subjectivity altogether, accounting for the semaphore of its own proliferation as a subjective extension of itself—a sentient weather—atmospheric pressure systems passing through the guts of the entity, regulating its immune system and increasing its chances of survival. A trailer for Kenobi surfaces on Disney+. No amount of exorcism or exhumation may solve the problem of people—people who haunt, and are haunted by power. May the Force Be With You. 

Only weeks ago, at the time of this writing, just days before the invasion, I was in another Kyiv; one haunted by the inevitable future, when what was real was already there but had not yet arrived. In Julian’s upcoming film Euphoria, I was to play a turbo-capitalist ideologue, damaged and bankrupt in a post-capitalist world where there is nothing left to sell but the rantings of that ideology, and with no other way to sell it but among those imminent ruins. It is a dramatic understatement to note how timely it seemed that this dramaturgy was to be art-directed into the industrial fringes Kyiv—now; and I could not shake the feeling that ultimately I had no choice in the matter, that some scorching fate had presented itself which was now impossible to redirect, a vertigo induced by the thing happening, whatever it was, in perpetual motion. So—I reasoned—there appeared to be a diplomatic window, perhaps narrowing, but one in which diplomats and dignitaries and Heads of States were still traveling and flurrying with phone calls between Washington, Paris, Berlin, Helsinki, Kyiv, and Moscow. Seeing back through that window it seems that I am still there in that fictional Kyiv, looking out at some phantom self out here in the future that has breached from itself like an Antarctic shelf. A sonic time boom. I was only there for four days.

The decision to fly to Ukraine was excruciating. My single day of shooting was scheduled for Sunday Feb. 13, 2022. With a partner and seven-year old son in Berlin, I had to decide whether or not to submit to working as an actor in an art fiction in a potential war zone. So I poured myself into the mounting situation, reading from as many possible sources as I could scan and more deeply absorb—corporate, mainstream, counter-, independent, American, British, German, Russian, Ukrainian sources—across the devil’s miracle of Twitter, reading the present in all its temporal proximity distortion. Twitter is still a remarkable library for geographically diverse perspectives and further reading. And what I determined—or came to believe—on the distorted rim of the February event horizon, despite the belief of nearly everyone around me near and far, was that this invasion was going to happen; that there was very little chance it was not going to happen; and that it was not going to spare the cosmopolitan capital city of Kyiv. How did I come to conclude this? How could I see something that apparently even Snowden himself could not, or would not, see? I don’t know. I don’t have magic powers. But it was already there. Haunting; and deeply haunting still: that future present which made me out as some doomsaying augur of conspiracy, or just an animal with a nervous system hooked up to the internet; and that ghost city for a timeless moment holding out against an incorrect future, an error, and then cleaving off into fugue; what will happen in the suburbs, what will happen in Bucha.

I knew very little about Ukraine. Like many Westerners, or Americans, what vague orientation I had blinked onto the map in 2014 with the Euromaidan and the subsequent Russian annexation of Crimea; and then was deepened significantly during the Trump-Ukraine Scandal Impeachment Hearings, which in hindsight is significantly not nothing. In another synchronicity, at the exact time of the hearings I had been hired to rewrite an English-language screenplay for a German production of a very B-action horror movie. The action in this case involved a brutal multinational and oligarchical prostitution ring originating in the backwaters of Siberian oil country, and a bloody reckoning with the surreal folkloric witch Baba Yaga, deep in those swamplands. As a stand-in for Siberia, the film was to shoot in Ukraine. So I was compelled by association—association with everything at the time—to pay close attention to those impeachment hearings in full, and in particular to the riveting testimony of Fiona Hill, whose even more recent insights into the crisis have proven to be invaluable, chilling, and humane. Furthermore, for yet another art film (whiteonwhite:algortihmicnoir by Brooklyn director Eve Sussman) I had traveled extensively through Kazakhstan, whose government just one month prior to the current invasion, and with the help of Russian security forces, had gunned down and extensively disappeared protestors in Almaty. Now, with an increasingly prodigal Kyiv not as deeply embedded inside the Russian sphere as Kazakhstan—politically as well as geographically—the sustained and deeply redolent “Ukrainian Question” did not bode well, for anyone, and the anxiety compounding around the view from Berlin was beginning to sing. On the other hand, as a card-carrying member of Generation X, my certainty of impending WWIII could have been attributed to the fact that I just happen to be apocalypse-native. One way or another, we know it’s coming. We know it in our bones. And we know that it’s already here, as all of this—this real and this fiction, and as real fiction. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, the 1986 Swedish film The Sacrifice, his protagonist Alexander was a promising and talented actor who gave it up for the pursuit of philosophy, aesthetics, knowledge, and truth, out of primal fear at being good at being someone else. When the prospect of WWIII suddenly threatens his bucolic home on an isolated Swedish island, he confesses inwardly, “This is what I have been waiting for. This is what I have always been waiting for.” Except for the electricity and phone line being cut, and his family’s frightening and rapid descent into near madness, war never materializes. Yet in order to be relieved of the fear of it, Alexander acts out the monologue of praying to a god we suspect he doesn’t believe really in, and promises to sacrifice everything if it will spare him. The film’s iconic final set-piece—of Alexander burning his own home to ground—famously had to be rebuilt and shot twice when it was discovered that the first take was not captured. In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy’s archetypal judge articulates a similar revelation when he professes that war is what we all have been waiting for. In fact, he preaches, we’ve been waiting so long and so devotedly for war that it has in fact been waiting for us, its most proficient practitioners, preceding us as the fundamental truth of being. It’s a masterful slight-of-hand McCarthy deploys here. He sells us the truth of war via the indisputable believability of its speaker. The authority of the judge is proven by the book itself, and the perennially recurring present which corresponds to it by default as a work of literature; when it is language itself that is both the truth-teller and the liar, simultaneously. Exchange any word for “war”—say, “music” or “language”—and we might arrive at a similar “truth.” Seeing the catastrophic truth in a flux-of-the-world scenario—as in the case of McCarthy’s searing direction—is what we might also recognize as an existential mode of confirmation bias; a bias that I’ve certainly been tuned to for my own entire life, or at least since The Day After. The Day After premiered on US national television the day after my 13th birthday (and only 3 years before Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, which he must surely have seen from across the Iron Curtain upon which it screened, politically if not metaphysically, at the height of Reagan’s Cold War rhetoric.) A so-called television event, The Day After soberingly broadcast, to terrifying effect, a dramatization of nuclear holocaust imminently raining down upon the American Midwest, infusing an entire generation with apocalypse—and apocalypse: an apocalypse of media obliterating the categorical distinction between fiction and a documentation of the future, thereby cauterizing and consecrating the nascent genesis of Reality TV, now quaint by comparison, and bringing literal meaning to that mythic American observation “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” But the catastrophe of the present—the specter of preposterously conventional warfare—seemed to be a matter of just seeing what was there, straining plausibility by hiding out in the broad daylight of the real: Vladimir Putin’s clearly stated ambitions—his own confirmation bias: his own fictions—and the 100,000+ forces and counting, assembled along the border. A disorienting pattern was emerging: a confounding insistence on telegraphing future actions by stating them as exactly what he had no intention of doing, and then conditioning restraint upon demands which were already preposterously unlikely. In other words, Putin was reverse engineering the inevitability of necessity. In this light the Biden Administration’s clear statements of its own intelligence—that an invasion was planned—were corroborating. But it presented as a kind of prisoner’s dilemma in the field of information warfare: no one had any reason to believe that either party was telling the truth, one by lying, the other by telling the truth. How could we? Hannah Arendt’s pithy observation about truth and lies has been ubiquitously quoted, paraphrased, and retweeted in this era of fake news (or now just, news): that a super-saturation of lies doesn’t generate belief in those lies but disbelief in everything. In this case, being apocalypse-native won’t save us, but it does come in handy—when traumatic sensitivity to the cultural fiction of apocalypse is more believable than the existent real, lying like a dog right outside the window. Mysteriously, if you like, far-right Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky publicly telegraphed the planned invasion in late December, in hindsight calling into question the possibility of diplomacy of any kind, or the legitimacy of any negotiations at all during the intervening weeks: “At 4 a.m. on Feb. 22 you'll feel our new policy. I’d like for 2022 to be a peaceful year, but I love the truth. I’ve been telling the truth for 70 years. This will not be a peaceful year. This will be a year when Russia once again becomes a great country.” Zhirinovsky, who has been compared in style to Donald Trump, lived just long enough to witness the measure of that greatness.

The problem with being paranoid is that all things are in fact connected. As the production dates approached, I pushed back against the cavalier intentions of the production to travel to Ukraine. The film’s producer and director, several of the actors and a handful of the German crew happen to be old colleagues and dear fiends of mine in Berlin, and therefore highlighted and intensified my own struggle with objectivity. When you have a great deal of money, time, and passion invested in something—when you’ve gone all-in—it’s impossible to make impartial decisions, and very difficult to distinguish actual risks from theoretical risks. As we are now witnessing, paths taken which seem to be in one’s own best interest can turn out to be catastrophic. No one on the safe side of reality can really fathom that a war zone is possible. Stand in the center of any teeming cosmopolitan city center, and try to imagine it. Paris, right now, with its flower stands, and tiny dogs, and museums, and children—its concentration of being. Surely…. No. That cannot happen. It will not happen. Not Paris. It is imaginable, yes; but unthinkable—not believable. Nor should it be. Hence the fecund industry of its mythic action imagined for us: the agony of machines screaming with centrifugal velocity, careening across the gravitational fall-line of believability and slingshotting into orbit round the dark star of ourselves. A cinema of sacrificial fictions. We are yet alive. Mercy. But of course it does happen. And in early February of 2022 we already had all the information that we needed: what was going to happen was already happening. So, in a last ditch effort to heed my inner circuitry going haywire, I made it clear what was being asked of actors and crew: anyone agreeing to enter what no one wanted to believe would become a war zone was doing so not because it had been determined to be safe—an impossible calculation—but because we had decided for ourselves to act recklessly. I stopped sleeping. My nervous system was wrecked, intertwined and parasitized by Twitter as a single system, as it had been across multiple years of neurological warfare during the Trump Administration. I entered a fugue state, ripped and compartmentalized between reason and a trajectory I felt strangely powerless to alter. The truth is, I deeply wanted to go to Ukraine. I wanted to do the job which I’d spent so much time rehearsing for. In fact, I desperately needed the job. What’s more, two weeks before departure my entire family (all three of us) contracted COVID and entered isolation for which we’d also been rehearsing for two full years. On top of that, after years of successfully evading the Frozen-variant, I was devastated to admit (via various encrypted tests) that our household had finally succumbed to the Encanto-variant. But we don’t talk about Bruno. When we emerged from quarantine I wanted to get out of the apartment and I wanted to get out of Berlin. I wanted to see Kyiv—the one that might be gone.

I walk Cooper to school in the morning and saw the first tiny blossoms on the cherry tree. Putin has deployed 130,000 troops to the border. Tanks, rocket launchers, ministers. Russian-Belarusian war games begin today. In the afternoon I fly to Kyiv for fiction. Texting with Wassili, my friend and producer, about the possibility of sandwiches for late dinner, it seems such an absurdly quotidian conversation to be having in such a watershed global circumstance—sandwiches. Better typed in silence, out of body. The plane is full. No one seems worried at all. Upon arrival we are greeted by a production assistant from Family Production, a thriving Kyiv-based commercial and feature-film production services company. She is bright-eyed, extremely friendly, and totally at ease. The hotel is very nice, and the tiny Negroni bar just down the street is hip and beautiful and more cosmopolitan than just about anything in Berlin. At night the pronged streetlights and the steaming city remind me of David Lynch’s dimorphic noir, Inland Empire. And then that total extravagance—which only a parent can really know—of having an entire hotel room to yourself. The first room I’ve had to myself in ages. But I can’t sleep. It won’t let me. The giant TV at the end of the bed is encased in a large, rectangular and shadow-box framed mirror. Kubrick’s black monolith reclined, in landscape mode. Dark matter refracting about the moon. Malevich’s ghost slide, seeing. The goat’s pupil. I don’t dare turn it on. In the morning the President of the United States has instructed all Americans to leave Ukraine. Talks continue and diplomats are still traveling into the capital—signs of a holding pattern; a window to be here, at least; but at breakfast the news is intensifying with nothing but Russia swarming about the country. Kyiv feels like a winter garden at the core of a hornets nest. I walk to the Maidan. The city is bustling and in no discernible state of fear or lockdown at all. The air feels light, and aloft between grand Soviet and Jugendstil anchors, pitched hilltops and sweeping river—a Lisbon of the East. Along the way, I’m kept company by the resident corvids ever-abundant in this part of the world. Rooks!—hopping about with their oversized bills worn like ice cream cones, or plague-masks carved in larch. Manhole covers ornamented in cast iron honeycomb. A man carrying a painting. The subterranean mall bursting with an exuberance of graphic-styled smart phone cases, and all things. At a street vendor’s table I buy a small present for Cooper: an official-looking Ukrainian driver’s license displaying the name and photo of Yoda. Later, I will inform my family that I have arrived safely in Kyiv, and I will joke that if things start to get sketchy at least I have proper ID. Beyond the column of Independence Monument, I wandered toward the river. Without realizing it I walk through a residential and administrative neighborhood not far from Bankova Street and the Presidential Offices where Zelensky would remain, refusing evacuation, refusing to flee; and then pass through a deserted park above the 1933 Dynamo Stadium, strolling right by the Presidential Palace, baroque and turquoise and glowing anemically in the February pall, an afternoon gloaming clammy and portentous with some invisible low pressure system. I look east across the Dnieper River. Thick plumes of still-life motion billow from smoking stacks, outlined against an otherwise indiscernible sky. Housing blocks across the fuzzy, leafless scribble of horizon. Plenty of other tourists are there looking with me—Eastern Europeans, perhaps Ukrainians, Russians, groups of school children. I wonder what they’re all thinking in this moment, peering out into it. Men take photos of each other standing before the bronze sculpture of Ukrainian and Russian workers, and posing beneath a steel arch—the Arka Svobody Ukrainskoho Narodu—and I wonder what these men are thinking too. The arch was constructed in 1982, celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the USSR and the 1500-year anniversary of the city of Kyiv. During Soviet times the arch was called the Monument to Commemorate the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia. Upon Ukraine’s independence the arch was retitled the People’s Friendship Arch and had more recently been dubbed the Arch of Diversity and illuminated in rainbow colors at night. It has since been renamed the Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People and the bronze sculpture of Russian and Ukrainian workers has been dismantled. When I get back to the hotel room I notice that the drain on the bathroom floor resembles a View-Master stereoscope slide reel. After dinner we head to a subterranean bar beneath a grand cinema from former times. I order a zombie, with rum and pineapple juice. We joke about Sean Penn and Zelensky both making cameos in our film. Though unlikely, the possibility seems not so absurd—all things under the sun, and yet coming in the shadow of its eclipse.

The next morning Biden has ordered the evacuation of the US embassy. It is snowing. At breakfast I notice the post-American global hotel kitsch. Buffet quotes and aphorisms in a potpourri of fonts and flourishes and doodles of croissants on chalkboards. One cursive pearl of corporate advice stumps me as being rather unachievable. It is attributed to Faulkner: “Try to be better than yourself.” So I try—stress-gamboling in the Eden of all-you-can-eat bacon and coffee—with Faulkner and the basket ware, I try my best to Be Best. Melania’s meme suddenly ambushes me, calling from inside the house and zapping me in the caffeine of an electroshock memory. The former First Lady’s public-awareness campaign was directed to address online bullying, ironic considering her husband’s favorite pastime and singular political strategy. But in the acrid sizzle of bacon grease and white lightning, Be Best suddenly clarifies itself in a way that I had not previously been able to understand it: as an example of what historian Timothy Snyder refers to succinctly as the illogical extreme of the cult of unreason, or “schizofascism”—the online bullies bullying the others by calling them bullies, online; or the fascists calling the others fascists, as Snyder describes it—and what the Ukrainians will deftly call “ruscism.” A fraudulence concocted to undermine its own illegitimacy via a system of absurd sigils and encryptions deployed for their very ability to simultaneously signal, obfuscate, and weaponize an already agreed upon position of obedience. A code that already means what it means by meaning—once cracked—nothing. Be Best. MAGA in pastel pink as opposed to race car red. The hotel breakfast room is filling up with large men in new jeans, crisp plaids, Under Armour and Patagonia fleece, tight haircuts, large watches, black go-bags, and multiple phones lined up like table settings. The news is frenzied now with the immanence of invasion. At the same time, a Russian sociologist is quoted in the New York Times describing an alienation from that news among Russians: “This crisis is perceived by some as the edge of consciousness—something incomprehensible is happening to them.” Something incomprehensible is happening to every single human on earth, at all times. Good faith is the humane effort to mitigate that illogical extreme as something other than a cult of unreason, or fascism. And I think again of Arendt’s popular admonishment. If the news I read this morning is true, how on earth would I know it to be so? I will need news confirming the news, and more news about more news, until what has happened is no longer news. Everything is too late, for being too fast, until so many things are not happening that so much news becomes no news at all. Just—content. White out. An object forming in the murk, as the coalescing of murk itself. Leviathan. I see it, yet cannot determine it is there. I cannot make out what is plain as day. I must wait for the world to catch up with itself, or be left waiting for something that never comes at all and has already passed itself by. We’re standing in the blind spot at the center of the world. The embassies fall like dominoes as countries call their citizens and diplomatic staff home. The US embassy is to evacuate by Sunday. My own flight isn’t out until Monday morning. If I’m going to catch that flight, the cathedral of tenable society has to hold—at least in Kyiv—for the next 36 hours. Some reports say the invasion might be Wednesday, which is polite. Biden and Putin speak on the telephone.

My own call—as an actor—is before dawn. We will shoot all day beneath the massive hulls of dry-docked ships. The location is an industrial shipyard and sprawling storage facility also used by the Ukrainian military—a mise en scène where the center of the world meets the end of it. It’s 20 degrees Fahrenheit (-7C). I think about that frozen ground, and how much has been made of it. Terra firma coagulating out of voodoo. Or the Winter Olympics in Beijing. Reading war in the tea leaves. How the nervous system of the world is held hostage to that palmistry, and the city of Kyiv its nerve center. In which what is happening is not happening, and also is. For now, it’s all still entirely in my head, and also—elsewhere. At first light not a cloud in the sky. Deep blue rising out of a purple line and then vaulting into severe clear. On set there is a homeless encampment built upon pallets in the mud beneath the keel of a fat tugboat. Long barges are pillared upon jacks and stanchions like great whales rusted with red tide, embalmed and floating. There are dogs and goats, a Ukrainian pyrotechnic team, and the largest drone I’ve ever seen. A whirring beetle the size of my kitchen. It has retractable legs that fly up with sudden speed when the thing comes alive and leaves the ground, hovering without having ascended at all. I don’t want to be anywhere near it; though later I’ll have to let it follow me around. There’s a smaller drone-unit too, like offspring. Watching the pilot orient its GPS is disturbing. He holds it before his chest with both hands as if he’s handling a tranquilized prehistoric-sized baby tarantula. He tilts it slowly back and forth and at different angles with the practiced care of a pediatrician. Then he flips it over, as if to expose its belly for examination, and repeats the sequence. All day we can see our breath and my face burns red by the gas ring inflaming inside an oil barrel, our “homeless” heater and grill. 

In the afternoon crows take to the sky in enormous number, whorling and tumbling in murders by the hundred, mobbing the sound-man right inside his headphones, inside the circuitry of his recording equipment, crows and crows and crows unspooling a record of themselves in magnetic black-tape. I could watch them for hours so I watch them in the timeless interludes between takes, between words, between breaths and blinks, synapses firing ink upon the sky. At dusk a four-walled scrap-board house is set on fire. An archetypal set-piece, a kind of ur-house—shed, shack, schoolhouse, church, Unabomber’s cabin—set aflame. I stand inside it with a flaming torch as it fills with black smoke, a thick squid’s ink of ideology spoken, manifest, and weaponized, engulfing the house in possession of late-stage everything, combusting. The weight of the world is lived from the inside, right now. At dinner and drinks there is a disco ball so big it could fill a church’s dome. The Ukrainian crew are among the most professional and good-spirited crew that I’ve ever encountered; so friendly and warm and bright-eyed even as the long hours ground by. They’d not been scrubbed and cauterized—it seemed to me—by the electroshock entitlement of empire; yet they were working in open cultural and economic exchange with The West, as freely as Russian gas flowed into my Berlin apartment, and within days each and every one of them will quit their day jobs to become refugees. History may be written by the victors, but it’s also scripted in order to engineer one—or many—in coexisting worlds overlapping. The crows have the last word. The atmosphere at the airport is thick and viscous and supercharged, electricity surging under deepwater pressure. The urgency of getting on that plane bound for Germany, on top of redlining smartphone batteries and QR-coded COVID-bureaucracy, sends the anxiety level through the roof. The Ryanair cabin soundtrack and fuselage aquarium light show is imbued with a sinister fusion of signals, a somatic disorientation between extra-atmospheric spa and euthanasia comfort room. My body doesn’t quite know whether to give in to total panic, or relax into the corporate collision of prestige sitcom intro-theme and a sweeping perpetual ending scored by U2. Escape velocity. From the air, a cluster of massive cooling towers look so miniature it occurs to me how very small electricity is. Power is tiny, fiber optic. Then the Fernsehturm is there—a tilt-shifted trinket, an action figure, Berlin’s iconic TV Tower so fine on the horizon as we cruise in and drop to meet the ground.

Cutting through the cemetery after walking Cooper to school, a goshawk cries out from from the skein of bare branches, creosote against the matte silver chrome. I can’t find the bird, but it’s there. And then it came, with the lavender crocuses and the death of a star. It happened on Twitter, as it happened, and then it happened. No sentences. Only the ink of crows. 2.21.22. 2.22.22. 2.23.22. 2.24.22. The ticking of days. In a string of brief messages, I keep a line open with one of my new colleagues, the second assistant director. She is sheltered in a metro station deep beneath the city, until it is filled-up with families. She makes it into a car; and then what normally would have been a seven-hour drive is a four-day procession of waiting in line, creeping cross-country and praying not to run out of gas—three women taking turns sleeping in the car. Each day I am frightened to check-in. “We are strong,” she writes. They make it to the border, and then they make it to Warsaw. The pyrotechnic special affects team with whom I had worked so closely for one long day in the cold stood out to me even on that day—seven dudes built like linebackers beneath their fireproof overcoats and closely-shaved skulls, the archetypal (or stereotypical) Slav as archetypal fireman, sooted and reeking of kerosene from tending to Dante’s cinematic rings. I think of them everyday, the demanding fictional latticework that we shared in collaborative good spirit, and what horror they now inhabit, what unforgiving surreal. What stood out to me was not their collective machismo frame, but what cut against it: their exposed hands passing me the flaming torch when Julian called out Action! The grime beneath their nails and the glinting in their eyes, soft expressions, and smiles—the quiet kindness—between takes. Learning to say thank you—dyakuku—in Ukrainian. All of them lost their jobs in the movies and stayed to fight. All seven of them.

500,000 people demonstrate in the center of Berlin, and in hundreds of cities around the world. Does it matter? Not one bit, really/and, yes, absolutely—it does. The Ukrainians see it. The Russians see the world seeing it. And we see ourselves seeing it. Whoever we are. The Berlin Neue Nationalgalerie holds a fundraiser for Ukrainian relief, and opens up its iconic airport-like art space as a “gathering space” for the public. We drop by on a Sunday outing with Cooper and hang out inside the sprawling patio vitrine. There’s an open mic and intermittent announcements by its new director, Klaus Biesenbach. Older ladies are dancing in loose knit baumwolle to obligatory peace-branded Beatles songs. The austere, parallel horizons of the International-style icon now feels like the atrium to a Palm Springs or Emirates hotel lobby. While we’re there, without any prompting from us, Cooper makes a drawing of the war; a children’s drawing, of course, featuring a tank and soldiers and a Ukrainian flag, which he’s seen everywhere by now. The colorful war drawing strikes me as some sort of internal TV of current events as Saturday morning cartoons—always on now—like Malevich’s Black Square plugged into that proverbial corner of the room. The automatic production of his drawing to the soundtrack of Give Peace A Chance canting over the airport public address system is too much—too many days compressed inside, and now fragmenting under that compression of too much dissociation. It comes pouring out of me like an aerated fountain at that gated resort. We have dinner with some colleagues and their own young boy who made it out of Ukraine just in time. They’d been away from Kyiv on a work trip, location-scouting in Georgia. And then they just simply couldn’t go home. They’d made no preparations to stay away for long, and their apartment in Kyiv is exactly how they’d not intended on leaving it. Now it’s empty of them, haunting them from afar by their own sudden absence. By their own estimation they have no idea quite where they are yet, or for how long, or even what they are. What we will encounter in the 21st century is an increasingly thin membrane between a world occupied by perpetual tourists and one occupied by perpetual refugees. We look across the dinner table at each other, not quite knowing who is who; as though we see something they can’t yet see, and vice versa. But the shared vulnerability to the extraordinary present is palpable, and the mutual warmth is enveloping, nomadic. We get drunk on red wine and swim in it. We get drunk and talk as much as we can, about everything we can, trying not to say too much or too little. Then we get drunk and debate NATO and the EU and the US and Putin. And then it feels shameful to do so, inadequate and indulgent from the bohemian safety of a Berlin dining room. We fall silent—not silent, but quiet—and watch the table that we’ve gathered round, looking into the empty spaces between forks and wine glasses, and at the kids playing off to the side. Cooper makes a new friend, the wide-eyed young boy who’s just arrived, five languages between them, though none yet shared. I watch them communicating with their eyebrows and hands—thumbs up, thumbs down—snaring words from the array of those five languages, and needing none at all. I watch them from the haze of my failure; my failure to understand and our failure to make the world right; perhaps our failure in wanting the world to be right; the haze of failing to understand what is happening at all, what is real; the world that cannot be reduced. What is an opinion?—but the thinnest possible slice of reality pinned between infrathin lenses, a specimen slide, a coordinate haunting myself to some transparent intimacy, to any position at all: some nativity to the overwhelming, indifferent, and immutable present. Or it’s just knowing what you’re talking about. Opinions are cheap—nearly free—with regard to their believability, or their valuation as fungible currency. I am not Sean Penn and I am most certainly not Noam Chomsky. In other words, I do not possess the solvency of believability. I am little people. This is not an opinion: lifeforms require a reasonable guarantee of security in order for family, society, culture to flourish. But the complexity of it: the opinion that belies that world—the sheer ontology of this present—is perpetually out of reach, as it whispers in our ears. Timothy Morton has written that “We should pray to be haunted.” By which in some way he meant incomplete, unsolved, broken, alive and overlapping with systems and entities both alive and dead—and something in-between—that we can’t begin to comprehend. Prayers answered. The dinner plates are floating.

There is an old saying in the German theatre: The King is not played by the King. The King is played by the others. It is not sufficient that the actor playing the King plays the King. In fact, it is really not possible. The other actors must bow to the King, and tremble, and kiss the ring. It may indeed not be necessary that the King do anything at all. It is difficult to prove things, even things that are true. Even things that are. We don’t experience true things. We experience experience. And what we share is phantom, orbiting the specter of language as hornets and honeybees and fireflies in the jar. So we commemorate, in the alluring twilight and blinding torchlight of that lantern, shimmering between what is symbolic and what is: true things as shared fictions, and fictions as shared truth. For as long as the lid is screwed on. We hallucinate, and generate shared hallucinations, and we generate witnesses, and we generate belief in things that are true and not true, and something in between—We generate believers and those who don’t believe. This is how the King is played by the others playing the King. Who then is King? Who is the we? And who are the others? Who is playing whom? It is the catastrophic failure of a society to confuse the fabric of its myths with the matter of its social fabric; and it is the great crime of power to exploit that confusion as deception, cruelty, and violence. The art of everything usurped and forged as the art of playing king.

Yet amid relentless waves of crises—crises in the alleged real—there are cyclical musings on the purpose of art, and more presciently on what constitutes fiction and nonfiction at all. Meanwhile, continent spanning emergencies are comprised of those sirens and those very rocks. Furthermore, we may scrutinize the purpose of art and fiction, their usefulness—even their appropriateness—during catastrophe and war; while a cellist pays Bach amid the total ruins of Kharkiv; the Odessa symphony orchestra and choir perform Verdi’s Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves outside the Odessa Opera House, awaiting imminent invasion by sea; Vladimir Putin stages his own spectacular rally from the bottom of the uncanny valley, a KGB-hosted MAGA-meets-WWF halftime show; and late-stage Bono is compelled to submit his own lyrical contribution, to the United States Congress no less, which might have been peeled from the bathroom wall of an Irish-themed Irish Pub in Ft. Lauderdale. The Fog of Arts & Crafts needs no help in cross-obfuscating itself. The hyperobjective tentpole apparatus of Disney-Pixar-Lucasfilm-Marvel does not so much generate entertaining encounters with narrative fictions, as it engineers multivalent and surrogate interactive systems—social medias—just like Fox News, fictionalizing the world for us, rather than the other way around. Tucker Carlson is nothing more—or more worrisome, nothing less—than a 3D-printed action figure, self-LARPing for adolescent adults who never grew up. His parabolic reach is so grotesquely outsized that he no longer lives rent free inside our heads, but rather we live now at great cost to ourselves inside the fiction of his, as scraps of DNA inside a bloated tick. Cooper calls me to his room to help out with a video game on the tablet that we share. He complains about having to watch “the news.” I have to catch my breath when I realize what he’s referring to: the game is being interrupted by in-app ads, animated advertisements that are so hybrid and byzantine—like micro-algorithmic irruptions of Hieronymus Bosch heat flashes—that it’s unclear if there have been any humans involved in their making at all. Cooper, of course, is fine with the form. He’s got the nervous system to keep pace, so far, if I don’t allow it to sizzle him—which I’m coming to realize is my number one assignment; he just doesn’t want to be interrupted by the news. Then he says, “I wish I lived in a video game.” “Why?” I ask him. “Because then I could live forever,” he says matter of factly, as if it were obvious, and in that moment I see him as that beautiful boy, over and over and over again, forever, burning brightly. Then he seeks reassurance, “Right? Right, daddy?” So I consider for a moment that by video game logic, his assumption—and wish—is both true and not true. It’s not that you live forever, I think, it’s just that dying is cheap. Is it really the same you, born over and over again, even if each of you is exactly the same? No. The game is never the same, even when it is. On the other hand, what if we’re all the same player—seeing through the avatar—even though we’re not? “How would you remember that it was you?” I ask him. “I just would,” he says. “Because it would be me.” I remember standing in my socks inside a Koch Brothers’ Manhattan apartment, a palace I had gained entry to when I worked as an art handler in the city. I remember my socks sliding on the hardwood floors hewn from trees older than America and I remember my toes curling against the tight otherworldly carpeting as though pealed from the surface of the Silk Road. I stood before shipwrecks. Surrounded by shipwrecks. That Koch Brother’s living room hung with paintings of great shipwrecks. Dark and brooding tempests engulfing ships at sea. Overwhelming and unstoppable acts of God devouring the genius of men with enough hubris to venture there. Mr. Koch did not stand on the decks of those sinking ships. He stood where I stood, where that merciless god stands—in socks—and I saw what he sees, thorough his eyes. The drone’s-eye view. The invisible hand of Neptune, conducting that churning sea, as if it were me, and I he.

Cooper spends the night at a friend’s house. So we take a break from the local news— news that is now intensively, simultaneously global and local, both and neither, in the everything everywhere all the time—to attend a screening of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with a live orchestra, in a real cinema. During the lockdowns I had flashes of panic that this would all go away, that the final nail had been driven into the coffin of theatrical cinema, leaving us with only content. Even the notion of a single audience gathered before a single screen already feels like a novel anachronism, a structural formality. So it comes with genuine relief that the screening is packed. The lobby is buzzing with beers and popcorn and a sound I hadn’t heard in so long: the wash and murmur and din of stacked and overlapping conversations, the sound of people, language as a kind of hyperobjective entity washing over me in all its molecular color; a kind of cave painting of us, pixelated and effervescent, a signature, and not-on-[platform], but in an actual theatre; and as we find our seats to the bouncing and thrumming caterwaul of orchestra, lights dimming, heads spinning, the excitement is palpable. Metropolis. It’s an astonishing film. How remarkable it seems that nearly all films have sprung from the primordial soup of Metropolis, and so few have improved upon it—save for dialogue, and color. The experience of this 1927 dystopian science-fiction nearly 100 years later—100 years after Kafka, 100 years after Malevich—is beyond uncanny, like peering into the vaseline-coronated halation of a snow globe, a crystal ball in the nearly square (4:3) aspect ratio of Instagram. Metropolis Now! We walk home through the night, beneath the gas lights of Berlin, the streets filled with post-COVID butterflies and the war next door—the thing coming. The oligarchs and the machines and the castle labyrinthine. The design of authoritarian nightmare. This time in color, accompanied by the polyphonic wash of interminable discourse, with no intermission. A few nights later we happen upon Terrence Malick’s most recent film, A Hidden Life, which is unbearably relevant to the present. In his signature style, Malick does something here that is quite miraculous and rare. As the twin shadows of National Socialism and war fall across the pristine Austrian countryside, Malick employs romanticism not in the service of nationalism and, ultimately, fascism, but in the service of its opposite: a transcendental conscientious objection. Place is rendered as that transcendental ground that might offer refuge, and an antidote to a will to power. Exceptionalism is characterized not as the divine right to eminent domain, or destiny manifest by force, but as the human capacity for individual choice, perhaps its own romantic curation, but one worth keeping in the balance: the sentient sovereignty of the individual.

We have a birthday picnic for Cooper’s new Ukrainian friend by the canal on a beautiful spring day, a welcome explosion of color and light in this part of the world. But the view from Berlin is still fragile and uncertain and perilous. The TV Tower rises from the center of the city, an opaque and brutalist lighthouse standing between two simultaneous and not-unrelated campaigns of authoritarian warfare being waged on either side of the Atlantic. To the east, the boy’s grandparents are still hunkered down on the outskirts of Kyiv near the reservoir, just kilometers from suburban hotspots, and what would happen in Bucha. The mother is struggling minute by minute, sentence by sentence, with deep and consuming rage at the populace of those aggressors. The father is haunted by anguish and guilt over not returning to defend or assist his country, in one way or another, alongside his closest friends. We hover quietly around the notion of honor; and the possibility of finding its meaning and expression in unanticipated ways—in the circumstances that have broken over you and left you broken; the possibility of supporting one’s country by being a father to the child that needs his father, that child the future of his own country in its unknown and complex form, one whose children have sought refuge in that unknown future; and defending one’s country via the paradoxical means of conscientious objection, a position which you may not have chosen, but has chosen you—the possibility of forging devotion, loyalty, and continuity by staying alive, and discovering honor in the only way that it can be bestowed: by the ultimate authority of the self with which one lives, conflicted, courageous, tender, merciful. It is a possibility. I don’t know whether it is possible.

A few Sundays later the war grinds on, and the news of it too, callousing against the epidemic of tire fires continuing to burn across the Atlantic. When I think of the call issuing from Zelensky and The Kyiv Independent—for bravery in the free world to match that of the Ukrainians—I think immediately of the critical urgency for bravery inside that so-called free world. The fronts are linked by a klept: a domestic disaster capitalism of weaponized private property, or the privatization of everything—as real estate. Now it wages war on women, as fields of biological gerrymandering; and on school children, as a death cult of Thoughts & Prayers sacrificial to that cultural economy as means of eliminating public space and securing authoritarian space, virtually unobstructed, in the absolute vacuum of material, nonfictional social fabric. The bug in the lawn of America is no longer a bug. It is now a feature, a kind of Putnism or ruscism woven into the fabric of the lawn itself and fertilized by psychopaths and sadists as profiteers: a toxic indoor-outdoor carpeting in place of social space, with a self-deputizing Martial Identity standing guard at the gates to that feudal country club, a green screen of impossible green, rendering its citizens as survivalists. If America has any hope to salvage and protect itself from its own nightmare—and a quickening symbiosis with emergent global kleptocratic authoritarianism—it will have to provide at least a single strand of that nonfictional and potentially authoritarian-inoculating social fabric, as safe public space.

Berlin, on the other hand, is the undisputed world capital of public playgrounds, all other reputes aside. So we get the boys together again and hit up three or four of them, all wildly unique. One is metal and painted red. Another features an assemblage of driftwood-smooth timbers chaotically piled into something like a pirate’s desert island tower or a Swedish sacrificial pyre. And another cast in blunt, head-splitting brutalist concrete. Berlin is also infamous for not pandering to coddle its children’s falls. We stop off for a long lunch on the patio of an über-deutsch diner: Biertempel 2 (Return of Beer Temple, apparently), and then, since we’re in the neighborhood, I introduce the Ukrainian transplants to one of Berlin’s other landmark temple playgrounds: Tempelhof Airport. The iconic architecture and sinister history of Tempelhof Airport collides with its epic contemporary repurposing as one of the largest urban parks on earth, teeming with kites and kite-boarders, rollerbladers, strollers and joggers, mobile coffee kiosks and every variety of the latest electrical means of individual locomotion speeding along the actual runways with more than enough room for everyone. There’s an exhilaration in crossing space once designated for flying machines; and the effect of such an overwhelming expanse inside the city is disorienting and vertigo-inducing, in a city in which there is no view at all other than the implied and surrogate view provided by one’s own view on the TV Tower, and its imagined view, blind as a cataract cyclops. To compensate, I am flattened even further to the ground for fear of falling off it, as if I might fly right up into the open airy space of light and a-history: a manifest release from history if there ever was one, as if those tiny figures flying tiny kites out there inside the ecstatic anti-gravitational dome beneath a dome-less sky were of a postmodern diorama preserved now in the museum of the replicant real—the real as social media occupied; in which Tempelhof, the epic, nationalistic work of land art that it was, is now repurposed as an augmented reality experience in which there is nothing there at all, nothing but that flight of euphoria, terrifying lysergic euphoria. How might we occupy this present? And how might we occupy it as native? When in this emergent and vastly interconnected hyper-society, the question is: native to where? Native to what? The contemporary authoritarian ambitions within Russian and American societies—the two largest nuclear superpowers on Earth, by a grotesque margin—increasingly occupy a shared continuum of coercion in which they appear as twin inverted reflections of each other, one dictated from the top down, and the other from within the congressional middle management and domestic disaster capitalism of the cultural economy itself; a collective selfie as phase-shifting mirage, warping in the gravitational pull and spooky action-at-a-distance of such massive stock-piles of nuclear weaponry and climate changing super-systems. There is no escape from the vast catacombs of fun house mirrors buried beneath the intolerable weightlessness of that pyramid scheme. How can I compete with the sustained PSYOP of what might only be described as atomic trauma—my very perception of what the world is at all. Is it possible to be here? Is it possible to breath? On a landscape cauterized between survival and content.

The author in Julian Rosefeldt’s Euphoria, production still Barbara König.

Near my desk I keep a miniature nuclear explosion. It was crafted by an artist friend of mine, from inexpensive tactile materials into a detailed sculptural still-life in the style of a natural history museum diorama—another kind of realism, yet from that same post-colonial drone’s eye view of the Google Maps Risk board. A painstaking arrangement of cotton balls combusts into a miniature mushroom cloud above a sandpaper desert floor. The epic mini scene is contained safely beneath a thick found-glass dome, as in an apocalyptic terrarium. The dome is affixed to a Mid-century modern display base complete with a red push-button feature, a museum educational-style button that lights it up from the inside with a glowing, fiery light. A simple press of the red button re-enacts the detonation of the bomb and animates the still-life scene as an iconic action figure of the Anthropocene. It is among my prized possessions. Alongside a string of Tibetan prayer beads that were carved from yak bone into tiny skulls, and a skeleton key to all the doors in my mother’s house. Together, the miniature nuclear explosion, the buddhist beads of tiny skulls, and the skeleton key to my mother’s house form a memento mori for this assemblage of the living—a kind of vanitas, or voodoo scene. My living with these aesthetic objects won’t protect me from Putin’s nuclear weapons—or anyone’s—no matter how laden with meditation, superstition, Thoughts & Prayers, nostalgia, or belief they may be. They do something more impossible. In their own absurd way, they conduct a living-with the impossible, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, and with the madness of things as they are—conducting me to the symbolic order by simultaneously grounding and insulating me from its strikes and surges out on that field of lightning. It is in that field of neurological artifice and the shamanic absurdity of appropriated and fraudulent mythologies that authoritarians turn precisely because symbolic systems are the only measure by which the threat of people might be mitigated against the execution of a horrendous real—violence performed as an act-of-god by the one who wields it. I am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds. If you have been touched by it—by what he has done, by what he has threatened to do, and by what may yet come—and no one will not be touched by it: there is no forgiveness for it. There is only atonement with the living and the dead, with time, and with the future. It has been proposed that Putin be offered a way out, an offramp, a golden bridge to some backdoor. I don’t know about that. What I mean is: I don’t know. There is no way out. The bitterness that has been sown will outlive him by generations. Where is ours? Where is our offramp? In a world of golden visas where is our golden bridge to living-with this impossible real? Where is our symbolic amnesty? Where is our agency, proportionate to weaponry at an atomic scale—pulsating at the networked scale of people.

In the final scene of Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Stalker, a young girl sits at a kitchen table. Her head is bent devoutly to a worn and hardcover book of poetry not resting upon the table but held upright in her hands. It is snowing inside the room, or upon closer inspection what appear to be tufts of cottonwood floating gently through the kitchen, tumbling across the tabletop, and gathering about her shawl into a kind of earthly halo. She closes the book, lowers it to her lap, and then recites from memory, in internal voice-over, one of the Russian verses. She turns away from the camera and looks out the window. Then she fixes her gaze intently upon three glasses before her and one by one moves them across the marble tabletop using only the power of her mind. The uncanny movement of the first glass, half filled with tea, seems to make the family dog nervous. He whines uneasily from the floor, offscreen, and she quiets him with a glance. She moves the second glass, a jar which appears to contain a broken eggshell, and then the third, a tall empty beer glass stained with the foam of beer or perhaps milk, resting her cheek upon the table as though placing an ear to a railroad track and listening to that rumbling ground, grounding herself to it as but one more element in the unified field, until the glass reaches the end of the table and falls to the floor. In the background the sound of a train approaching, quivering the tea-filled glass, and then sloshing it violently, shaking the entire table, her head lying upon it, and her body as the great machine passes just outside the window. An osmosis occurs—across a two-way mirror—between our encounter with the medium itself and the fictions it contains. The total, masterful composition of the scene, together with the revelatory superpower of the child’s concentrated gaze, invokes as much the religiosity and uncanny, supernatural power of the cinematic medium itself as it does the surreal fiction contained therein: the telekinetic abilities endowed by residing in such intimate proximity to the psychology-mirroring post-apocalyptic Zone. That zone, it turns out, is simultaneously our encounter with the Stalker’s voodoo tourism as it is our voodoo encounter with a cinema of it. One and the same. The voodoo of our own encounter with this apocalyptic world.

Music levitates. Language courses through us as a cohabitating mycelial entity, a thought-process of algorithmic dark matter thinking us, as much as we think it. Poetry naturalizes this networked animal to the other-worldly here. We belong here, unbearably. We belong here now—100 years, this year, into The Wasteland. Art hangs impossibly, invisibly between the material bullying and reactionary hysterias of realism and idealism, defying them both—as Malevich did a century ago—and defending us from the fraudulent voodoo and violence of the replicant real. Art which does not absolve, or do anything at all really—but pearls. The mind is given refuge in the tidal pacifism of the moon, at the hypersonic and geologic scale of land-art, inside this remote outside. The grain of sand that can never be extracted, or even located. This is its purpose hidden within it; and this is not its purpose. The most necessary thing, for not being necessary at all. The single thing capable of cantilevering the world from falling into abyss, into the black hole of itself. It is that black hole. It must be. Pound for pound. The art of people stands between the opposing algorithms of content: the parasitic and terminal cloaking device of neoliberal disaster capitalism; and the martial fictions of authoritarian liturgies. A nucleus, reactor core, and fulcrum—as inefficient surplus. Useless. Don’t misunderstand me. There is no award-show platitude, Hallmark panacea, or Thoughts & Prayers that suffice as alternatives to the hardware of humane and humanitarian means. Precisely the opposite. Berlin-based literary critic Ryan Ruby recently observed, “We’re always focused on what art can do for our society. But what we should also ask is: How do we create a society in which art can have the effect that it’s supposed to have, in which it can give our lives meaning?” As a modulation on JFK’s famous patriotic charge, Ruby’s musing is not platitudinal, but far-reaching—and urgent. Art is the emergency symbol which is perpetually emptied of itself as distress call, lighthouse, and pulsating cairn. Art is the meaningless pile of stones as universal benchmark because it demands of us that we not waste time asking what it can do for us (or indeed, even what it is at all) but instead asks what we can do for it: examine and demand a society that prioritizes the conditions for its generation—in other words, create conditions that prioritize human individuals and nervous systems interdependent with their generative meanings, and allows them to be possible at all. Art is the alien indicator species about which the vitality of a society may be gauged. Hold that enigma, and the artfulness of it, at the center of the circle for its own sake, rather than as a means to another end. Its purpose is in the gathering round it, to reflect what cannot be reflected—this encounter with enigma which has no other purpose but encounter. Artfulness, in this sense, is to take care. With ourselves, the hornets nest, the orchid, the black hole, the bear. In the balance between fragility, flux, impermanence, and security—a refuge, both fleeting and sustained, in which art is possible, as artfulness. Not artifice, but art. How do we discern the difference? Perhaps we do not. Maybe there is no difference. All things collapsing into each other. But by coding its meaning as the form of itself, one refuses to answer the question; while the other performs an answer to it as a trojan horse that devours us all in the emptiness of its vacuum, the saccharine viscera, cotton candy blown away. We may say that in our own time we get the art we deserve. Maybe the fictions, the lies, and the truths too. If these holographic monuments to the memorial present are all that we have, then we may still choose which ones to gather round, which ones to believe. Steam rising from the lake. The Devils Tower. Handprints on the stone wall. The lightning field of people. Don’t forsake them.

March—May 2022

Berlin

***

Jeff Wood is an actor and writer from Ohio currently living outside of Lisbon. He was a founding member of the Brooklyn-based art/film group Rufus Corporation directed by Eve Sussman. He was a New York Foundation for the Arts Screenwriting Fellow and an editor of the international literary journal Berlin Quarterly. His cinematic novel The Glacier was published by Two Dollar Radio. He recently produced Black Box, an hour-long encounter with a sonic object / invisible cinema, and his current work-in-progress is The Spider’s Remorse: Encounters with the Algorithmic Taxidermist. Julian Rosefeldt’s Euphoria will premier at the Park Ave Armory in NYC in late November.