Tertium Quid
As the sun swells its molten frame, and the moon bows and bids in ellipsis its polyglot horizons, we come together and ponder. Over the course of hours, we’ve explored vastnesses in ourselves. Places you alone can reach. If we are to return, the reliving is staggering, fathomless. I’m surprised to have lost myself in it. We may be in the hollow of those memories now.
Our pilgrimage has taken us from one to many and many to one. Remembering is polysemy. And now, we glide to one landing in preparation for departures. Browsers unfetter, decomposing us.
I hope you can help yourself to these immanent feelings. Later, we’ll surely forget the rest.
We share in having seen this world—be not fearful of anachronisms. Time is odorless and has no color or reflection; we can’t sense time on our skin, or taste it, or gather it to make use of later. We don’t respire or perspire time. It comes and lulls as it goes, and we reckon with this synchronicity, perhaps witnessing it atemporally, in time.
When we think back on this story, what questions will come to mind? How will you judge the boy for living the only life he’s known? And has the artist succeeded in her quest? I have my opinions.
Will you share these words? Like how I hacked, curated, and stamped just as they would’ve wanted, assuming a north star where none were offered.
Will you keep this story a secret from those who would judge you, or will you deceive yourself, believing you can’t identify with Snake-boy’s plight, or else will you dismiss it as useless and intuit forgetfulness? Have shades of us found existence in this binary, or are they bits to snuff out with the light? Have you read them into life, or laughed it all off, or rewritten, or lied by claiming the authorship as your own? Really, the questions are yours to answer.
We are lucid dreaming together. Fantasizing as we are, from beds past bedtime and desks after work, skipping dinner for this, eating breakfast with this, who are we and for what and from where? As a collective, an ‘apperceiving mass,’ remember?
Maybe we’re like children, having stumbled upon this, having been—stuttering, being recommended this by a current we can’t see, under duress from a world we don’t understand, let alone recognize. Finding what we didn’t know we were looking for, which only teaches us to search again.
I’m talking to you, yes you. Before each of us is the screen. A door to control, to reshape the light. What have we lost in a language that does away with ideographs? Whereof one cannot type,
Well, I don’t really know what to say. Maybe there’s something else revealed in sleep that we bring back to the world, in a premonition we once saw, the unfinished vision of a dream! waiting to be recognized in a world anticipated, if only we attend,
with cliched weight—that capitalistic metaphor of exchange—to ‘pay’ attention.
We’ve dreamed of being one boy so full of daemonic love that it became incarnation. Drawing upon cyberhermeticism, technoshamanism, invoking alcheGPT, his seems to be a cautionary tale of exhausted language: a prophet’s musings of degeneracy/crackpot’s fantasy/ode to I-and-you. When we are him, writing this now from his desk, virtually noctivagant, feeling like our entire life has led up to this moment, knowing as we now know that the release of this thing will be the most important act we’ve ever done in our piece of shit life, also knowing that it’s a failure and yet still imagining it with a sort of irreverent joy, which has even matured to include pride, and so can picture this easily— the giddy, unctuous anticipation as we finalize before submission; dreaming about this, okay maybe even dreaming that a certain someone sees this, and getting everything in order probably takes us months longer than we’ll ever admit, though even if only one other soul reads this, it’ll all be worth it in the end.
Or the words may have originated from her diary on the cloud. We might’ve suggested that the story was leaked by some sasaeng or was perhaps voluntarily shared after translation through an AI. We understand that this would’ve been an act not authorized by our company. We’ll have prepared an alibi yet will need to maintain reasonable suspicion, not unlike another snapshot mistake in our past. It would be like telling the truth by showing that we’re lying, because that’s the only way we can gesture freely. We’ve lived the sacrifice required to be everything for someone. Yes, we’d like to personally greet others with a bow or
even prostration if we’re ever to pass by, or to at least promise the feeling in our performances. We can imagine speaking together with our fans for so long at night that it’s day and we’ve forgotten to sleep. Our perfect fan knows when to suspend disbelief, when to participate in the illusion, and when to create it.
And so, I’m asking you to finally wake up from this story. In these last moments, our kaleidoscopic vision may bend prismatically inward. We must pander widely, you understand. You penetrate to the core of things or wonder.
Dreaming one last dream.
With eyes open, you dream as such: controlling the content and speed but not the memories, which are surely yours. The game of yourself has surreptitiously challenged any self-aware intentions, and yet this dream was made from the rib of you.
You’re alone in a high green meadow, recalling no principal knowledge of the place. This dream is extremely vivid and reminds you of a childhood memory severing tufts of grass from the ground. The verdant smell of sod blood tempers you; your strength is at play. You turn around and see a tarn the classic blue of a swimming pool’s sky, core memories compounding, and as you approach, you notice just below the surface of the water is its screen. Words lick the inner of the water, ‘altitudinous’ and ‘vertiginous,’ demonstrating how you feel, and then the text desilts into narrative:
‘And we bring ourselves to sleep. An endless queue of her greatest hits. The words were your lullaby. He will awaken like everyone else. I’m still listening.’
Not in that order. There is no order except for what is imposed by the rigidity of individual consciousness.
You’re reading yourself reading this. We are encroaching behind you. The screen is not a portal, yet it’s beckoning ingress. The world is neither wholly bright nor tenebrous, like a wallpaper of Sonoma County. An interstitial egression, perhaps veiling the ‘real’ of the world.
The more you look at the text, the more it seems possible to consume the words. They would sustain you, transfigure you into something numinous.
You hear yourself think, ‘I want to go there before I die.’ This refers to an impossibly large itinerary. Eating is an approximate metaphor for your desire. Engorgement nourishes you without escape like a black hole: the content of your memories, the repository of your joy, including this dream; all that is within you will remain, teaching you, sharing, stealing, gestating within and redefining your language, culture, finally you.
Black holes are the metaphor of our time. They represent the only absolute threshold in a world of ambiguity. It’s like death in a way, except maybe greater than death. For who’s to say that death can exist within it? And even light cannot escape. Such a force would have to possess more energy than what can be stored in matter. Said another way, it would have to be capable of synthesizing contradictions. The laws of the universe. Does such a thing exist?
Before I too disappear into narrative, please let me confess something. I had a tryptamine vision of us—all of the billions of us—raising our arms into the sky like antennas or tree branches to
catch the currents of all that we knew. My puerile revelation was that we’d been doing this since our beginning, technology merely extending the range, and that we would go on connecting until the last of us died. The currents traveled through us and altered our branches, tuning us together, however great or brief. I was listening to Blond(e) and saw this from the hill of a school behind my apartment where a seminal novel I’d loved and hated was explicitly based, overlooking the city on a hill and many naked black trees and the sinew of telephone wires. The gray sky set like a smoking match. It was so beautiful. If I’ve ever had a reason to do all of this: I thought how enormously sad it was that we were so often unconscious of standing with our souls stretched as loving antennas, and worse, unconscious of why we stood. When I stumbled upon his text, just as he had first discovered her, I thought that it was my chance to continue the chain.
How else do we know that we’re awake, if not for oneanother? Some things are simply too great to have been made up. And being together, that exceeds my wildest dreams.
It doesn’t have to be over.
You see him as he sees her, from his bedroom in the dark. A guitar lifts a melody that you’ll remember remembering for the rest of your life. This is neither the beginning nor end.
Your yearning for song and story becomes her pretending and his living, or his dreaming and her creating, or her ballads and his texts.
1) You make a momentous choice. The screen is one of your visions, dislocated from the eye, and as you travel between the lines, they uncover paths which are yours to follow [go to 2].
2) What is he doing late at night? You see the way he smiles and decide to either stay with him for a while [go to 3], or to follow his gaze, striking through the screen [go to 4].
3) The room is umbrageous except for slips of light wetting the floor and his laptop. You feel his fast pulse on your throat, and your cracked lips smile. As you recognize the MP4, you begin to think of things which scare you [5].
4) The stage is shatteringly loud, and the lights are blinding until your senses adapt. You’ve never seen so many people staring in your direction—at you. Your body is screaming with pleasure and danger, yet you have an uncanny ability to silence it, or at least that which could dilute your image. You don your mask, a bare smile [6].
5) You fail to put what attracts her to you into words, and your schizophrenic vision, your schismatic heart, flirts between admiring and leering and respecting and glorifying and ogling and adoring. You find your left thumb working below in a clockwise orientation as your heart aches. Do you pursue the longing above [7] or below [8]?
6) You resurrect the canon of your performance; you’ve lived it many times. Each decision sculpts a new personality into their idea of you, which is the gossamer heart of real intimacy. The you which permeates between atoms, beyond all artifice. Do you try your best to stand course [9] or betray it to express your secret truth [10]?
7) You love her too much to blaspheme. She is a totem. The calming force of her voice is miraculously sensitive to the weather of your life. She proves that generosity and beauty are refined
truths about the world. You know she would feel love for you, or not that she would fall in love with you, but it doesn’t matter. You feel only compersion watching her dazzle others. This moral beauty transcends the physical. Oh God, life, oh please forever [12]!
8) In deference to your base cravings, you circle around her frame, x-raying past her clothes, all but gazing directly into her eyes. The pale skin glistens and is shapely, alluding to something perfect; it’s the resolution of stochastic genes, images, all flesh. You would like to twist her in your mind’s eye, while forgetting her, watching her dance for you [11].
9) Your own desires are superseded by the needs of those around you. The appeal your fans require is overwhelming. Feeling their eyes on you, you flutter your own, and as you bashfully approach your dancer’s arm and tap it, and when he turns around, you’re thinking these thoughts about the crowd and your awe feeds the audience’s wonder; the downbeat approaches. You pull your hand back with the elegance of a robot yet deft as an archer, and you glance up to the sky, slightly, just as you’ve rehearsed in your head as a ritual before the mirror, and you brush your hair behind your right ear (it was never out of place), wet your lips (to reach the highs) while retreating from the stage, and the downstroke is imminent, you can feel it in your flesh and have already taken in the breath which plays on your mic like the pneumatic hiss of a gun, and begin again to take steps forward so that your hip sways to rest on its right axis—it’s been 15 downbeats exactly—then it begins. You’re there with your lover [13].
10) There’s a question you’ve asked yourself ever since your first show: if you knew the curse of your fate, but desired it as such, what freedom do you have to change it? Your intrusive thoughts still whisper the worst possibilities. They are about the value of your work. For years, you lived timidly in this shame, though others have done their best to convince you. Just once, what would happen if you stopped pretending? All you need to do is pause, and your world would grind to a halt [14].
11) You search for a way to make her yours. In a different life, you imagine wiping her tears and telling her that everything will be okay. How small she would be beside you. You’ve Googled her height; you know her by heart. In your mind’s eye, you’ve rewritten history and gnarled time to align her I with yours. Do these pangs and pleasures come easily [25], or has she merely made you hers [15]?
12) Everyone is brought to such heights of collective effervescence that performers like her must contain the secret meaning of life. When you’re with her, you wish to never wake up under the sublime threat that nothing will feel real again. Were you always this way, loving so that all else would be unfathomable [16], or does this tenet, under careful examination, deny itself [17]?
13) What can be said of your thinking now? Each action is seen and felt preemptively—pulling a string through your emotions, exaggerating for those in the back; it’s all before you, and your head, rather than quieting, seems to ascend on so much life. You cross your arms and pose after the hook, winking which looks like blinking in the sun of everyone. You won’t miss the next downbeat. You’re more agile than you can believe, inhabiting
with each turn of phrase a gesture or affectation that encapsulates the meaning of being a girl (playful, coy, kind, and the notion that you are approaching something vast), and a woman (self-assured, a nurturing voice, the fact that you have passed through various darknesses), and, in parallel, all humanity—these realities flowing through you—as they exist in the crowd, one part of a whole, feeling finally gorgeous and translating the whole. ‘Taking in the whole of the crowd.’ Awaking in that cliché, which flits not as a thought but as states of beings. Taking in this moment and reflecting our love back [18].
14) However, your fate is to sing for us, and so you have the chance again to choose. This solemnity deserves your assuredness. Do you really want to stop singing? To what? To prove that you’re a real person, no matter what harm is caused [19]. Or do you end this childish, selfish desire for novelty? Then you’ll stand course for the benefit of all other souls in view [9].
15) You thought such a possession would make you proud, but you lack the will or know yourself too well to be able to desire her in this way. It’s only pathetic. She’s ruined you. You can no longer convince yourself that this phenomenon is merely erotic. How are you to behave in the real world—love a person who can fall for you—when you’re forever given away? It reads like fiction even to yourself. This is an unrequited love where passions developed under no false pretense. If a rootless love has triumphed over space, time, the confines of reality/rationality, what hope could retire such a miracle [20]?
16) You’re convinced that you’ve never looked hard enough. Everything she does, and therefore everything anyone does, is the
blackest enigma. People are all infinitely subtle, worthy of moremore study. Can it be called insight if you must discover it always again? Else it never existed. Forget words, what of the cultural resonance of a sound or face which we all come to recognize? What does it mean that she can exist [21]?
17) She reminds you of how horrible it is that you can’t be as beautiful or talented or loved as her. Your identity disintegrates like a time-lapsed flower, its dust falling away in a confusion of desires. You’ve advanced beyond ruminating on whether you are worthy of love; the question lives in you without ceasing. What is left except to rationalize her experience [4], or forget about it for a time [12], or continue down your path of envy, a path you’ve avoided [22]?
18) You’re presenting your past for everyone to see your matted childhood crushes with boys and heartbreaks with men you once thought you’d known. Now you miss not them but the lovely person you became around them. You point at someone in the crowd. Who have you chosen? Is it no one [18a]? Or that one there [18b]?
18a) You’ve been here before. There’s no way you could choose one face. Instead, you worry whether 12 people will tell their families that they were singled out by IU, or perhaps that thousands won’t [23]. Maybe you’re still looking, and because of your hesitation, you find yourself locking eyes [18b].
18b) You beckon to that young girl drowning among bodies. In this moment, the boundary between her and you blurs like the gradient where blue becomes green; you hope that your message reached her [24].
19) You… Who are you? You’re in a trance or autopilot, knowing these actions aren’t ‘yours.’ You look down. This body would be familiar on someone else. You think this with self-disgust, all the while maneuvering a gorgeous frame. You must be dreaming, yet you can’t remember who you were before this. By deduction, you’re a brute and pervert. You wonder the following: while you’re in this body, might you act like the person you’re affecting to be? The prospect is ensnaring [24].
20) You decide to confront your avoidance and so plan without confidence in its success: you will think it all. Everything about her. And you believe that by exhausting all possibilities you can recognize yourself. Reality will be your bare bitch—and she, your cathexis. Or you’ll go completely insane. However it resolves, the exit is reached by backtracking to where it all began, to psychoanalyze the “I” in parsing you, and so escape from your heaven into someone else’s hell [40].
21) You find yourself responding to the aesthetic symmetry in her face with the consideration of art; however, unlike art, it is wholly earnest. Life goes on there. Despite everything logical in you, or your capacity for self-exegesis, you retain the conviction that you know her intimately. You must know more. The effects of this are bewildering. Like the sun overexposes a photograph, she distracts from yourself [4]. No, like a full moon after dark, she gently reveals who you can be [27].
22) Of all the sins, nothing is more difficult to admit to others than envy—every other sin feeds wantonly into pride. To indulge your lust or gluttony or greed or sloth or wrath are media for your ego, whereas envy stands against it. Now, watching her, you’re
filled with self-disgust; in privacy, it offers absolution. Does she know? It must be apparent that you don’t deserve anyone’s love, let alone your own [26].
23) Your guilt disrupts your line of thought. You’ve learned how to manage these moments of itinerance from the zone. However, magical powers are awakened by attention. There’s another pause before your next line. With the drifting of tension, you come outside of yourself. Who are you to be standing up here singing and dancing? You point again! Are you the one that sings and dances [32], or the one that, untethered, sees yourself singing and dancing, choosing when to stop or go [33]?
24) In search of a seal for the moment, you stop singing. Skillfully, you order the music to pause with a laughing frown. This ripples across the crowd as whooping confusion. You say sorry and receive the ovation of another’s lifetime—a crack in reality, which causes the resurfacing of separate memories. And in your confusion at having arrived in this bardo, or rather a commemoration for some undisclosed goodness in your heart, you don’t realize that you’re smiling. The crowd sees all and roars. Then you’re biting your lip, driving the crowd to ferality. You could be yourself [28], or forget by considering the enduring question: WWJD [29]?
25) Until now, you’ve managed to avoid the other precept, which hibernates and must be confronted if you’re to know (let alone trust) yourself. Using your best judgment, and significant shame (aren’t you ashamed?), you stop to think again of who she is and whether or not she would want you thinking like this [21]. Or you think that no one’s watching, and indeed there’s only your
conscience with you. So you follow this scintillation to pleasure’s proof of paradise [31].
26) You wonder if she had a premonition of this, causing her work to assume a sinister tint. How does she sleep at night? Instead of bettering yourself, her work keeps you weaning, and yet she sings the opposite. Where is there to go? Either you refuse to believe her, or else you do, and if you listen, then you can’t. A double bind with only self-mutilation as an escape. All that’s left is to leave yourself behind [4], wander dumb [29], or tail that ineluctable comet [30].
27) And who can you be? Every time you see her, you meditate with your muse. She flows through you like blood; you desire to hybridize, complete the pattern. Is there space for two [26], or must you become one [30]?
28) You can’t believe that you’re here wielding such excess. The first thing you do, now that you’ve decided to take advantage of this situation, is to speak into the mic. Unfortunately, all you can speak is English—it’s the language you’ve been thinking in. And your voice goes too low, then too high, and you giggle. You find that you’re holding yourself in a certain way belonging to neither of you. The crowd is too stunned to speak. A breeze tickles your inner thighs, and with your left hand you brush at it, which draws such attention that you apologize (in accented English), which brings you back to the crowd’s heart, and all you can do is laugh shakily as you place your hand on the palpitation of your heart at its crest [33].
29) You choose not to compare/contrast yourself with a creature who has lived nominally > 2 lives well. Instead, like some ser‐
vant of the lord, you recognize that a shining surface is due its light. Or like a shepherd is named for their flock. Or how an angel can only travel to the world when it has a message to deliver. Maybe a boy needs a girl to untangle his gender as much as a girl needs her mother to explicate herself. When it’s late at night, you travel there. Though her effulgence dims you, perhaps it’s befitting [34].
30) What if there was something you could do to bring yourself to her level? To become what you love? You don’t have her looks or talents. Or you could fantasize—no, but that would— you fill in the ___ without meaning to. And let go of your voice, like an armor or abstraction, in search of something transparent. Where should you begin [35]?
31) Admit it. Aren’t you ashamed [21]? Maybe you can’t help it. You tell yourself that this is only natural. It wouldn’t feel this good, or smell like sweet chlorine if… You have time to turn back [1]. Yet you’re still picturing her there, willing, waiting. This time you’ll be the one performing. You can try to intellectualize your fantasy, or lay it bare: you want to screw, to shag, to bump uglies, fornicate, procreate, kä-pyə-lāt, to fuck and finish (in) what you’ve started [36].
32) Any memories from a past life have been extinguished. You are IU and remember nothing except the hyperthymestic inpouring of your history. Presently you’re enmeshed in a trance of movements that develop like solving a jigsaw puzzle by pure retrieval. No one can take this moment away. You feel as happy as you look. Too happy. If this is a dream, and you were to wake up,
you probably wouldn’t believe it for a long time. You find yourself singing, “All of you comes to me as an unsolvable riddle—” [38].
33) WHAT IS GOING ON?!? You’re trying not to have a heart attack, but it’s like you’re naked in public, and everyone is upset with you for lying about the body they want you to have. Your weight seems to have dramatically redistributed overnight. Your black boots do not conform well to the arc of your foot nor the temperate ground, and your hair is very long, and your breasts are small, and your wrists are frailly elegant. You’re shivering while overheating. So, how about now? Do you finally let IU resume, saving yourself by obliteration [37], or can you invoke your own destiny [39]?
34) What would it feel like to be loved by those who don’t know you? Questions preoccupy your mind to the point of losing yourself. How would you sleep at night? And who can you trust? And when can you relax? Like art, your soul no longer belongs to you after it enters the public. You make art that is open to interpretation, nonetheless you know the answer. If experience is the meaning of life, and love is the meaning of life—as you’ve concluded or will conclude in this line of thought which is all lines, then you’ll have already discovered how only the blind can see her, only the deaf can hear her, and so the lurkers know what it’s like to live, and the writer to perform, and the performer to watch. And all is [1].
35) You become giddy as the thought of this transference frees you. You would provide her with the truth that she could never say. In a broader sense, you would give people the experience they deserve merely by translation. And you know the secret and its
blind spots, that which dazzles and torments you. Yes, you could become her the other way, leading the world to her through you. By being yourself, by forgetting, you could do what she does; by feeling for her, through her, for you. Is this so mad [41]?
36) What the fuck is wrong with you? After all you’ve seen, this is your choice? What did you think you’d find here? Clean yourself off and please get help. She’s a real person. After you close the screen, take a long look in a real mirror. Curiosity absolves nothing. If you’re still lost, email him. Or, I don’t know, ask God, your mother, a therapist for forgiveness. This is not a joke. Don’t read on. You’re done.
37) You feel a consciousness loading from within, like a deep forgotten knowledge has been summoned—astral, ethereal, of cosmological import, while also being uncannily familiar, and under this spell, as if a deity is encountering you, you let Ji-eun take the wheel. You shift into a fourth dimension and can feel the dexterity as well as the cardinality and precision of her thought, which overlaps your own, so that ‘you’ are lost [9].
38) All that’s left is to embody the music. The chorus of The Meaning of You propagates through you and into them. Their singing is like a microphone. When did they all learn you by heart? You ask them to sing it on their own while you follow on the inside, savoring the meaning: ‘Neoye geu han madi maldo [Each word you say], geu useumdo [each laugh]/ naegen keodaran uimi [They have such big meanings to me].’ The phrases are long, earnest, and freshly realized each time. This must be why they ask you for an encore as it ends. That is, after finding something in themselves, they mistake it for you [42].
39) As you fall deeper into the reality of this situation, you become perversely untethered from your last identity. One can imagine stringing a causal line through the history of your life from birth to now in order to confirm that you are one and the same. However, if you trace your causality for long enough, the line bifurcates. Physics cannot contend with the phenomenology of her song, of your love, of their oneness. From the fans’ perspective, there’s only one person in the world whose history brought them here, with thousands screaming for them, and none want anyone other than you [43].
40) You read this forty times without ceasing (literally counting in your head to forty, else the magic chant is of no use to you), and even then you understand it is inadequate:
40a) spinning you around, rotor—repaper mirrorrim repaper —rotor, around you spinning, loop: [40a].
Yes, gradually the compulsion becomes clear. You grasp the lack within a word which dissolves beyond the margins. Where does semantic satiation end, and can it open to something transcendental? With patience, you accept the journey. You go all the way back to the first page, the very first word, ‘I.’
41) Missing her one place, you find yourself turning for U. Coming to understand that the perfect thing she’s become so effortlessly is like fire: warmth spreading into exhaustion. This combustion renders us all ashen, chemically indistinct. You can stoke it with extraordinary effort in yourself if only you love her. Let yourself be tended. You can stop waiting for here to come to you [44].
42) It was nice to feel so loved. And yet, you know that the love wasn’t for you, but rather a character you were playing for them. Contradictions of culpability, charisma, and beauty remain. You wonder if you’ve ever, even for a moment, adequately expressed yourself. Wasn’t this why you began all those years ago? Not to love, but to speak to them by remaining steadfast to yourself? Perhaps there are no contradictions in love. You could daydream of parallel universes where you diverge [6]. Or you can be more generous to yourself [18b], or else you take your rest [46].
43) You stick out your tongue. It’s the only test you can think of doing. Ridiculous. They stop, stare, and then all laugh for you, and you for them. It’s like how you’ve imagined your wedding as a child. You look very beautiful, surrounded by the smiling faces of friends and family, and are supporting a deep confusion at the prospect of solving a pillar of adult life which is as opaque and shifting as a swelling raincloud. You pan your head across them like you’re taking in the sacred maw of a gorge, only the emptiness is inverted. To focus on any one of them reveals a level of specificity that has no single sign. Instead, what comes is a jumble of unordered words which flash in you. Unraveling them reveals how the order is irrelevant, escaping you: impossible, alarming, glass, close, kōan, child, addendum, you, tree, cellar, sweet, cyclone, ammonia, intransient, daunting, tendrils, eschaton… [45]
44) You begin your quest, for once not imagining what it would be like to be her, but to be someone else tertiary to your quest. At first this feels awkwardly sacrilegious, after all, your bedrock, metaphysics, and duogrammaton is ‘I’ and ‘you.’ She is more discerning. Her voice becomes a part of your mind. You hear
her while lurking and try to place the sound, only to find that the act brings you closer to her than any amount of fantasizing in the dark. It’s time finally to remember, who are you [4]?
45) pantophagy, vitiliginous, polysemy, bunny, assiduous, intimate, basalt, autochthonous, telomere, charnel, telepathy, slumber, quart, enigma, cascade, all, we, serene, take, whirling, euphoria, serendipity, Zembla, celestial, blossom, numinous, nuclear, awake, entelechy, luminary, ecumenism, elusive, thrall, pleonasm, set, mellifluous, tachyon, love, verdant, white, fruiting, quixotic, chalk, cornucopia, thesaurus, pander, maggots, polychrome, subatomic, anathema, cholera, no, Lemuria, wedding, I, phantasmagoria, stranger, makeup, timely, touché, torpid, fae, hot, petunia, fall, onomatopoeia, elysian, coprophagic, lady, soteriology, narcotic, reverie, pensive, casuistry, cicadas, reify, ouroboros, prism, umbra, dollar, run, chagrin, yes… [48]
46) The cameras and eyes lose their hold on you, and you retreat with the pleasant weariness that accompanies expended work. You notice divergences between this world and the one that you remember. For example, the apartment of your memories is abstract, whereas the one before you is heavy with additional details. You feel like you’re leaving your childhood home, as if for the first time. This is disconcerting because instead of feeling anxious, part of you is relieved to be free of your life. Your two halves are severed yet chained together, even as the older half turns limp and black. What happens next is either a focusing of consciousness [49], or the courage of resignation [50].
47) What use is ordinality to you? You who can move freely between lines, who can choose as from a deck of [52], reordered
roughly 8 * 1067, or to simplify: infinity. You’re figuring out the figure 8. No sleight of hands, neither illusions nor distractions, because the magic—a lovely cliché—was already within you. Are you him, or her, or you? Have you figured it out yet? Do you understand what this is about? Who this was written by? HA! Why it needs exorcizing alongside a divining rod? The movie is ending. Bubbled like a God out of the sweat of a nightmare and fed on the clement laugh of whoever wants you to stay. You’d like to know my name. Keep your eyes peeled while walking down the street. I’ll be looking in your direction, waiting for you to look back with the face that knows.
48) You remember getting it. That you’ve always understood it is the revelation; articulating in words was what hindered you. Her existence, your response, and the crowd, and the viewer, the reader. You’ve been organizing information all your life. You can watch a video and from its cradle comes a whimpering world— like it’s some event out of your right armpit, painless and pure. It’s not him, it was never her, and you’re merely a conduit. Our call and response, this antiphonal game we’re creating. You stand up on this stage in skirt and skin as they dream of you, thousands hold and chant for you, and you’re them. It’s through you that they read or dream. You can only ask yourself how it feels, osmotic or transmissive? Where do you end and I begin? Is it iterative, recursive, or entropic? Are these words in your head my thoughts in your heart? You have the answer, now you go to experience the question [and read it all ordinally, in the vertical: 1-i].
49) After the last song ends, you’re brought home to rest before the nighttime session. The sun has already set, submerging
your bedroom in melancholy, as though the space remains locked until an achievement reveals it. You don’t have long to spend here and so approach a mirror to recognize and soothe yourself. Your makeup has run due to the heat, in addition to when you smudged it in the car. It feels heavier than you’re used to. You push your cheeks in with your left hand the way a child explores clay. It’s her face, you remember, and think about how it’s so familiar that you’d recognize it anywhere. Of course you would. It’s your face. What had you been worrying about before [51]?
50) You remember: There was who you were, and there’s who you are now. Neither is less true. You are IU, a K-pop idol who sings, acts, and speaks with the public. Your birth name is Ji-eun, you like chocolate, and you have a brother who studied in America. However, you have another name, or rather names, depending on who is present to observe. You’re exhausted; your head is spinning; this performance is settling into closure, and with it, the one who sings will be retired. Cold air washes your skin, catching each hair. You look forward to resting. To sleep is like the tides lulling the ocean of your life. You thank the ocean. You can dream anywhere that’s safe, and it’s safe now.
51) You’re still sad and holding guilt. There are things you don’t verbalize. Looking at yourself in the mirror with cosmetic ephemera greasing more than your thumbs, you once again work through your purpose. What happens when you’re up on stage, and not a doubt crosses your mind? When you’re here alone, it’s like how children only believe in monsters after the sun’s gone down. You’ve told yourself that these feelings were good for many reasons, such as helping you understand sadness in others, and the
hollowness of receiving your dreams. Both concepts are human emotions that keep you well-adjusted and true. You know that you can speak of your anxiety before a performance, though it would be unkind to tell your fans why. These negative emotions are mere allusions. They refer to a source which will never die. Each performance changes things. Yes, it’ll all be worth it. And then there’s the next show. Go on. Close your eyes and dream. Now write.
52) You know, it’s more than funny. My favorite of her songs isn’t even one she wrote. It’s a cover called Sogyeokdong. There’s something glorious yet ugly in the sound. “Don’t fall asleep; it all disappears when I open my eyes.” English translations of Korean are tricky because subjects aren’t required in Korean, which is to say, it could just as easily be ‘your’ or ‘our’ eyes. And don’t get me started on ‘it all,’ when it could all be in reference to nothing. However, that’s not how I see the world.
i) So, do you believe me [∞]?