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Maquette
We’re sitting in a bar.
He has a girlfriend, I say that I’m in love with him.
We share a fascination for the concept of ‘love’.
Does love exist? I cry and drink my beer.
Why do you ask?
Tao Lin writes somewhere* that if love was an animal, it would be the Loch Ness monster.
Maybe it doesn’t matter whether love is real.
Or does it become real by identifying it?
He doesn’t know.
Then what are we talking about?
Remember when I started working for Tarik Sadouma?
The artist that established a harem?
I had the feeling everyone thought I was crazy. And I felt how all the grip I had on reality slipped away.
I believed the mythology of the story I was writing myself.
I decided to give the ideas of other people about me a place in an Instagram-post. I showed him the screenshots from my notes-app wherein I declared to have escaped from a harem posing as an art collective.
Remember?
I did something.
And the belief in the idea grew stronger.
The Instagram-post was a hommage to the classic piece of ‘hypersitional fiction’, Who’s Pulling Your Strings? from the CCRU, written by Mark Fisher.
The CCRU?
The Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit. A group of students and professors at Warwick University in the nineties concerning themselves with experimental philosophy and literature and that were fascinated by the 1984 William Gibson novel Neuromancer.
Maybe I’m trying to impress him, but I go on.
More than the content of this novel they were obsessed by the fact that the concept of ‘cyberspace’, that originates in this book, was realized in the mid-nineties on a massive scale in the form of the internet, I tell him.
He looks around restlessly.
The future operates in the present.
Sciencefiction is not only an instrument for dreaming the future, but can create that future, I hear myself say.
What do I make real?
What would it be like if we were in a relationship, he wants to know.
Does that mean that he believes in us as a couple, I think, but I’m too scared to ask the question.
H.P. Lovecraft shows us only fragments, that make everything seem more real.
Just like Borges, he says.
Does something seem more real because of footnotes and citations?
Have you seen the film In the Mouth of Madness by John Carpenter?
Insurance man John Trent follows some clues to the village Hobbs End.
He has been hired to investigate the disappearance of their most successful author, Sutter Cane. But because Hobbs End only exists in the books of Sutter Cane, Trent senses that he is part of a publicity stunt for the books of the dissappeared author, and wouldn’t the dissapearance be part of the stunt as well? When Trent starts to believe in the books, is own image of reality starts to fall apart.
The monsters from Canes scienfiction novels are in fact responsible for the existance of the texts - not Sutter Cane himself.
Really?
It’s a strange loop.
He nods.
It;s a feedback loop, as described by Mark Fisher in Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction: the ‘cybernetic’ part of fiction begins when fiction instead of reflecting reality, starts to influence and even create it.
The author isn’t important, he says.
Yes, I say, and neither is the text. This is about what happens in the exchange between ficition and reality.
Love and life.
And if you believe something, you are automatically not able not believe the opposite anymore, which according to Terence McKenna makes belief into a ‘self-limiting fuction.’
What do you think?
If we believe something is real, and act like it is, and build infrastructures and institutions around this ‘reality’, than the effect will be similar to if it had been ‘really’ real.
When clients of a bank belief rumours about a bank’s bankruptcy and they want to protect their money by withdrawing their savings, they will produce the bankruptcy themsleves.
So it doesn’t matter whether it is real, I say.
The love that I feel.
It is about giving form to concepts.
Naked thoughts.
Hesitating to make a fiction come true.
Like I’m hanging above the maquette of my own life.
published in De Gids (2024)
footnotes
* Tao Lin, Bed, 2007.