Ever since I was a child, I have had a fetish for the unreal. To communicate precisely what this phrase means is a difficult task for me. Writers and thinkers have laid out similar sentiments in the past. An example which quickly comes to mind is Yukio Mishima’s famous dilemma in Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mizoguchi, the tragic monk who’s corrupted by beauty, many times expresses the dichotomy between the eternal and the finite but concrete. In a revealing passage, Mizoguchi and his date engage in the beginnings of sexual activity in a beautiful park, far from the temple where he resides. Very quickly, Mizoguchi’s attempts to involve himself in the immediacy of his bodily sensations are made impotent by his obsession with the eternal beauty of the Golden Temple, many miles away. The Temple quite literally blots out his vision (including the girl) and overcomes any sense of presence, desire, or activity he has. The contemplation of beauty—to many a passive beholding—is pitched by Mishima as the opposite of action. This feeling Mishima describes: an obsession with the eternal, with the immutable—it comes close to capturing the longing which has followed me for many years, starting with my adolescent trips to the Hirshhorn Modern Art Museum.
It is hard for me to pinpoint a moment in which my epiphany about this fetish for the unreal came to pass, but a helpful clue comes in the form of a gallery plaque inside the Hirshhorn. This plaque was situated next to a video exhibit which I thoroughly enjoyed at the age of 12. I have since forgotten the title and artist corresponding to the video exhibit, but from my recollection, the video was a series of recorded miniature cityscapes, all of them created with mundane objects. The sequencing of the video was important: the audience would watch as a hand enters the frame and arranges the objects in front of them. For 99% of the scene, the objects would look out of place, banal, entirely identifiable. After all of them were placed, however, the artist would flip a switch, reconfigure the lighting, and suddenly the audience would be transported into an austere, eternal world, where the objects composing it lost all identifiable essence. The plaque described this work as a “collection of surrealist dreamscapes.”
This word stuck with me for a long time. Its meaning is quite simple, almost redundant, and yet I found myself repeating the mantra over and over again as I grew older. Soon after seeing this exhibit, I tried to write a short story about a group of pilgrims in an underground neon-plastered city. The plot was vague, but from what I remember, the characters were attempting to journey along a famous underground highway known as the “Electropath.” The title was the key; the idea came to me in a dream. There was never anything concrete about the short story and it never came to fruition past the first few lines of a lonely google doc. In fact, I still have access to the writing:
“I stared up at the dark sky…
As black as it was, it seemed to project an impossible amount of light. As if it was artificially made…
I would stare up at the dark sky for what seemed like endless amounts of time just thinking.”
As cringe-inducing as it is for me to look back on this substance-less adolescent writing, the very fact that I never completed anything about the story says a lot. The inspiration I had drawn from the video exhibit in the Hirshhorn, the feelings which it had brought about in me, the artistic longing it had triggered, none of this could be thoroughly captured by words. The major caveat, which I have since discovered, is that the previous statement is not actually true (certain Borges stories have since captured nearly the same feeling I was striving for) ... however, when I was 12, this was true because I, a 12-year-old, was unable to capture this feeling in words.
As time went on, what I slowly realized is that there was an internal homology in my aesthetic imagination which identified the artificial with the eternal. The appeal of ElectroPath was the cold neon geometry, the seemingly infinite power of human constructs. The fact that the story was set in a cavernous underground complex also revealed that I wanted to write a story where the day-night cycle, unpredictable weather, and the general fluctuations of the natural world did not factor into its austere beauty. The dark cavernous digital underground was static, eternal, thoroughly unreal.
Further along my development, I started playing video games more and more. A secondary epiphany which struck me was that this fetishization of the unreal could be very accurately manifested in the “Spectator Mode” of video games. What I found in Spectator Mode was the precise answer of my need to become a Ghost or Specter. I realized that part of this fetish for the unreal derived from my fear of the temporary and the bodily. Personal decay, withering, radical finitude—these were fundamental aspects of human existence which I could not, and still can’t, cope with. My fetish for the unreal was, in a certain way of putting it, a fetish for the Ghostly. From the deepest recesses of my mind, I strove to inhabit an eternal wandering body—free from the contingencies of a living body, but still caught up in some kind of spatiotemporal world. This was not a longing for the eternal or divine, where I could dissolve into abstract contemplation of the infinite beatitudes; this was still an earthly wish, a fetish, a desire to remain in the (perhaps not this world, but a world) as a disembodied consciousness, and do no more than watch what happens.
