THE SIMULATION
- helenspetkoff
- Feb 11, 2019
- 8 min read
Updated: Jun 18, 2024
On killer cities, depression and hope.
Long Island City, New York, 2019
11 feb
Why would one ever come here, I wonder? I could have done anything I could think of and still I chose to come here. This hour is horrible. This lucid hour. The weather is horrible. Windy, with an overcast, gloomy sky. My room is small and cozy like a hospital salon. Victoria seems well-intentioned, with a touch of fraud. I didn’t know that she paints. Her walls are saturated with pastoral nature. I suspected she’d spent a small fortune on a few works by Grigorescu until I noticed her signature. An apocalypse is well-due on these streets. Miller said it best: an entire city built over a giant pit of nothing. Here nothingness takes shape, you can feel it lurking around the corners of supermarkets. Still, there is a congestion that suffocates all freedom. The aesthetic of american ugliness has no rules, no boundaries. It’s an eclectic ugliness, illuminated in flickering advertisements and consumption myths. Posters, merchandise, repetitive brick houses with the same curtains and the same sorrows, cars clashing into each other, ancient mesh fences and raging poodles barking in the night. Whatever were these people thinking? I wouldn’t raise a dog in this town.
12 feb
It’s raining. From the open window I look into the small garden to the right of the house. I wish I could invent new words to describe what I see. If I were a poet, I would put this garden into verse. If I were an artist, I would paint her on a blue canvas.
Cherry trees in bloom. Powdered rain. Green grass half covered by blush petals. On the edges of the alley, apricot flowers. A wild thought invades me: that this garden has an enchanted vegetation, bound by God knows what spell to my very own destiny. Behold, dear girl, Paradise! Right before your eyes! And yet how far it is from you.
15 feb
This is not my city, even though I lived here for a while. It’s cold, like death. On the other shore lies the language of my heart, the places I have wandered and the people I have loved. As humans, we carry in our tissues the places that gave us our love. The places that bred our innocence and then took it away. I feel the sadness that my eyes spread into the empty space of the foreign city. I would sleep, to forget. I would sleep if I could.
1 mar
Today I went to Jones Beach, it’s a half hour drive from my aunt’s house. I took advantage of the solitude and gave myself unto the grace of nature. It is a divine feeling to be a girl, and to be alone in a wild ocean. I have trivial fears, feminine fears, but surrendering to an unstoppable force awakens the most voluptuous of pleasures. It is in these infinitesimal, equidistant moments that life and all its primordial mass reveals itself. And because the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there rejoice, or shiver, or laugh as they escape the tide. I sipped the air greedily – half in shock, half tyrannical – and the smell of salt reminded me of something. Something old, very old. Something indefinable.
6 mar
I woke up at six and took Daisy for a walk around the neighborhood. Sometimes I love this dog. Most of the time I loathe her. She is governed by an impossible will and has insufferable human attributes. No more than a small flock of white curls, yet she does not move unless she feels like it; she has her own routes, her own habits. It drives me mad. I abandoned the struggle, eventually, and sat down on the first bench. There, for the first time in seven days I considered the victory of that miraculous, unyielding morning and it wasn’t much in an ocean of crap, but it was something, and I knew I’d done the right thing in moving to New York. Say a word for Polly May she can’t tell the night from day they threw her out in the street but just like a cat she landed on her feet. Lou Reed has been singing the same words to me for a week. There is no better voice to listen to in New York. Oh! Sweet Nuthin’, my new anthem of confident despair! We must have spent an hour or so on that bench. In that hour, I think we both inhabited the same confusion and spoke the same language. I shuddered at the thought that, perhaps in the face of our fate, we are all a pack of dumbstruck dogs, stupefied by moving cars.
Then I had this idiotic idea that Daisy might be a supernatural indicator, sent to trigger my most candid revelations. In all truth, she is the one that walks me. I lit the last cigarette in the world.
17 mar
I discover the city of my childhood with a touristic fascination. It is an inexhaustible space. A paranoia invades me, that I’m in some sort of determined simulation. It’s enough to pass an outdated advertisement in which an agent with gigantic teeth promises you life insurance, to be certain that someone has tampered with the laws of nature. The poster is anachronistic, but crisp, beaming with a fresh glaze. Its smile unsettles your heart, you cannot forget it, it has a salesman cruelty to it that infects its beholders with a strange revelation of decay. You understand in such moments that this city is devoid of any earthly sensibilities. It has a frequency to it, repeating itself viciously. Every slum resembles the last, with a few particular rearrangements. There are biblical boulevards in the middle of commercial areas – destitute and deadly like leviathans — boulevards on which you don’t remember walking and are guaranteed to lead – without abstract exaggerations — to the pits of hell. Indeed, the road to hell must look like this — shopping malls, deserted storage spaces and greasy repair shops where the men are drunk and the air is thick — crowded derisory areas where no happy soul has ever landed. A ubiquitous sense of graveyard flickers in your fingertips, seeps into your blood and penetrates your loins. No matter how far you go, no matter how well you get to know these streets and neighbourhoods, you cannot shake the feeling that you are lost forever.
20 apr
The literature that glorifies this city is unbearable. I discover all sorts of hallucinatory elucubrations of an extraordinary, valuable city, inhabited by superhumans! There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride and exultancy! This aphoristic nonsense is contagious and international. Of course New York has its good sides, but such paroxysms in literature are quite exasperating, quite cheap! I would force all of these would-be writers to live underground for a week, to trudge from day to night through the heat of the train platforms. Only then does the city reveal itself to you, stripped of its cinematic screens, nostalgic winds and promises of fame. That is where the true price of glory is hidden, in the subway, this vascular system that carries its plasma to the vital organs. Sometimes I feel like it’s all that’s left of life – something horrible lives there, but very real, so real that it squeezes your faith out. The travelers’ faces, once seen, stay with you forever. They are uninhabited faces – they have no eyes, no nose, no mouth, and no ears. Just heads, distorted heads sleepwalking their way to traffic lights in the dark. You see them get up at every station and lumber toward the doors like sleeping giants. Everything works perfectly, everyone uses their space with an impeccable instinct.
There’s a mortuary rustle on the platform — like a thousand shadows clashing into one another — and it smells like boiled waste. From time to time you hear sirens from the world above. Nobody cries, nobody laughs. This is the world of soul merchants.
The rats rule here.
28 jun
Central Park. This place I think is the only one not incapsulated by the simulation I’m logged into. It’s too beautiful, too romantic, here there is no break from nature. One feels at home. I am comforted by a clear spring sky with a few clouds to the right, enough to enhance the cerulean. And the grass, this growing grass that is not like the grass of summer, but clearer, and fresher in its native youth. And the trees in bloom, scenting the air all around. I become joyful, happy, untangling — in all its incoherence — the thread of my beautiful, unreal dream. A tyrannical desire seizes me — to roll around in the flowers of a wild region. Imperial green. Lucent yellows. Miniscule blues. And white magnolias falling from the sky, millions of them, cradling my body in their gentle petals. Today is my birthday. I turn 26. I wish to grow old here. Under the millenary trees that are softly sighing: I’ve had enough.
28 jun
Today I moved into my first apartment. To find an apartment in two days in New York is more of a death sentence, than a miracle. The landlord is a fat man with a portruding belly, and a blonde plastic wig. It wasn’t the wig so much that unsettled me, in only he had stopped there, but the greasy, shrouded gown, with cemented mayonnaise stains, and in the spur of a blink I imagined that all the capital sins had somehow collided and smashed into one another, and in that biblical explosion this man, my landlord, was born onto the Earth. He did not draft me a contract. Nor did he have to. He will probably just shoot me if I don’t pay the rent. Or sell me to wicked Japanese cripples. Either way, I reckon that won’t be an issue. I am ecstatic to finally have my own place. There is nothing waiting for me other than an inflatable mattress and the stale, murderous heat of vacant apartments. It all happened on such short notice that I did not have time to think of conveniences.
If I learned anything from this experience with my aunt and uncle, it is that false cultivation rapidly reveals itself in a few situational inconsistencies; that one’s character is equally important — if not more — as one’s intelligence, and that I am capable of a remarkable level of self-control. I will not bother with vile thoughts. After all, they have given to me much more than they have taken from me, and that is a first-hand accelerated program in character development. I did not even have to pay for it.
7 jan 2020
In the air-conditioned nightmare, some winter evenings are like a warm spring. And you can go out on the fire escape to contemplate urban life. The apartments opposite of mine look miniatural, like a scale model. Through the windows of the cubical rooms, I see the ethereal shriveled bodies of unkept women and shirtless men. They have the appearance of surrender. Somewhere in the background, dominating the skyline from the top of a skyscraper, a blue light spans the sky. Steadily gliding, swirling over the black water, floating, rising above the horizon, circling the night, as if it is looking for something. Some logic, that is, some binder that holds it all together. And I know what it is. I search beyond the immediate world of nostalgia — something lost in the moment — something found in the park, in the small cubicle rooms, and the jungles of the broken hearts. An eternal pulse of hope, beating violently against all odds, awakening the spirit from its obedient slumber, exalting it with courage to fight and conquer its inescapable grief. I see the blue light every now and then, on the rare warm winter evenings after seven, and I am certain that as long as I continue to see it, we will someday leave this terrible city that deceived us and betrayed us, and — occasionally — nurtured us into better men and women.
And I think to myself, for the first time really: Is it possible to hate this dirty world and still love it with a curious indebted affection?
コメント