Small Comforts

All our names are fake, all seeming to default to some Anglo-Biblical middle ground by at least the second generation, if not already switched on the journey over. Carried over on the crossing or linguistically interbred to the basic minimum, it’s a rare sight to still see the last few holdouts who’ve retained enough patrilineal stability to hold onto their unpronounceables. With time, even the dimmest traces of heritage disappears as Kevin Nguyen and Shelly Ivanikov fuse down to a corium-mass of every gene and no nation, some sixth generation Jimothy Orangegrove, a beige intermediary between whatever new mutation will result centuries ahead and what once was.

The fantasy of air travel has always been the fantasy of comfort, in freedom, in sterility. Crossed between a train station and a hospital, the Apple-store opaque shine promises cleansing, renewal, breaking free of the hypertrophied mold grown over long days of captivity, a suitcase full of case and an easy-breathing, disinfected set of clothing, darting on a slim contrail through the becoming gates of the clouds to end up at some dreamed-of home, in whatever color palette you’ve found appealing of late. Like a garden of pasteurized delights, each fruit in the duty free store is polished in the same, the newest and best of whatever you’re carrying, outmoding the old shackles of your dusted suitcase, your torn jeans, your unclean sneakers…

The land of the country is surreal to any not raised among this strange way of organizing. If it had been seen in history, it would have been used as some obscure system of calculation of distance for trade routes, a method of locating lost merchants in the empty tabula rasa of the Arabian sands or Mongolian steppe, not an honestly-stationary parceling of economic meaning. A forest is quadrisected along square boundings, lines cutting as if there were no topography, hydrography, flora, fauna, environment, in open regard for the lack of traditional meaning on the land at all. The forest promises the same meaning it once had, the wilderness that’s as a library, an infinite density of mystery in an infinite labyrinth of abyss. No longer, the forest’s promises all fall flat, laid bare in cold maps named blandly for their writers, sectors named like columns on an enormous spreadsheet.

The highest fantasy of the scented candle is to ignite a perfume cloud, misted nearby into the air, only to catch the entire room, the Aramis or Chloe spreading about the building as it catches, a final orgy of conflagration to burst, a final orgasm releasing the pressure of what could have been decades of performance. Bathrooms are typically brightly lit while cloistered, if there is a window, one to a picturesque scene, a skyline well above any street-level movement, a beach immune to tidal drift, or frosted-over to be as if it were a lamp. The orientalist bathhouse is still, after all this time, the ideal strived for in so many dirty masturbations of decor, overplushing furniture, aerosol perfumes, like little tokens hoping to bring the same opiate-comfort in a stiffly limited microdose.

The American worker oftentimes has a fantasy, one scarcely realized even in the day it supposedly was, of the permanent company. Without regard for profit or pressure, the company that stays like a surrogate father, gold watch when you’ve attended at his bedside at enough time, six figures in the final five years to settle into an inheritance to last out another fifteen wired up to the parasitic tendrils of hospital equipment. To this day, Enron still catches the blame for all the failures to realize this fleeting image, with its fetishistic idea of itself as an energy company leaving many stranded without raft or floatation when their dreams of simple enslavement were denied them. As countless others have said however, “it’s not about the money”, and they’re right. If every need were provided in a total package, the prole would gladly resubmit to company rule and just the same, portfolios fluctuate wildly in their monetary value seemingly without cause or reason. The reason? Who can bother with the reason? The company was a brief fiction that never was, a fantasy that was financialized into complex instruments, resold as securities, prostituted to the joint-stock casino floor mere moments after it was brought into being. It’s not about the money is correct - it never was. It was never about the company either, that ever-so-fleeting signifier at the center of some transnational motion of value distantly representing power.

The fantasy of water is that it can make itself to be the whole of the river. That there can be no rocks, banks, obstacles, directions, no bounding solid to make the river itself, only the water as if cutting the course through space. The water images it to be flowing across the milky way, like the figure-eight in Mario Galaxy, bounded by its own will to move forward against all costs. At the same time, the fantasy of the bank is that it can remain stable in ownership of the water. That its meandering won’t take the banks on which houses are built, that the loping s-curves won’t crumble and be remade through that grove, that the rocks making the bottom, making the little trickling falls, won’t erode into a smoothness and then a nothingness over time. The fantasy of the river is dual and contradictory, each part imagining itself to be not only independent, but in opposition to and eternally existing beyond its opposite.

Beside the city of Las Vegas, a dam-made lake begins to run dry. Beneath the southern plains, pumps over an ancient aquifer begin to suck fumes. On the emerald isle, fields long thought eternal begin to go fallow. With a lifespan of only eighty years, few realize the immensity of history, the periods that rose and fall in descriptions now relegated to footnotes, despite magnitudes easily reaching out own. Over a thousand years, the fertile crescent reigned, crumbled, unified, broke apart, and finally fizzled out. The modern nation of China only makes itself after the cauldron of four thousand years fused an ever-decreasing plurality of warring kingdoms into the Imperial mass known today. Very few truly desire immortality, in fact, the common desire is for its opposite, a crunching, not an expansion of time. The terror of entropinous decline is a terror of being denied the glory, apocalypses of triumph or defeat unrealized. In brilliantly colored Victorian paintings, Rome feels like a pair of rapturous orgasms, an explosive expansion before götterdammerung, and if one squints, one can almost imagine it being a single lifetime. The fear most common is not that eternity should never come, but that eternity should be made so painfully present. That Rome should fall in a slow, barely noticeable decline. That Rome should rise in a steady expansion. The fear has never been of change, but of lack of it, a fear of dying too soon, of living too slowly, to feel the raptures imagined.