>>1914111521525 (OP) #2

So you are still here. You won’t believe what happens next! /s

What’s the point of a story if you know how it ends? I alluded earlier to my fate, so this is us working backwards. And I don’t believe in editing (make of my errors and contradictions what you will). You should know that when this finishes, I will be no more.

I’ve been acting like we don’t already know what we’re look­ing for: it has always been comfort, the pacifier of belonging which makes child of adult and tragic adult of child. The root of soothing lies in this knowledge of sameness, endlessly assured pre­dictions. All pop songs are lullabies.

Consider whether a part of us knows in advance how our dreams end. We are in an oblique way the singular authors of our dreams. Some nightmares offer relief when we wake, while others hold terrible in their vivid potentiality. This lack of prescience suggests that we are unknowable to ourselves.

It’s natural, of course, to tell the truth while lying, or to not know the part of you that knows yourself. The moth is a great example there too, how it simulates a face on the wings, nature’s meme, evolution of evolution itself. I wonder if they scare one another while representing the same threat they need to survive. I read once that some elephants have evolved to lose their tusks to evade poachers. Beauty is terrible, and at its heart is a sanguine battlefield. Maybe all I am is contrivances, the more so because online we have no need for memory. Lest my identity shine through opaque self-knowledge.

I once decided to comment on my favorite of her videos, the one known as [MV] IU(아이유) _ Twenty-three(스물셋). I won­dered what to say, or even who to address the comment to. I planned to correct the common misreadings of the video, of which there were many. Then I asked myself, ‘What would Ji­eun do?’

Well, I must’ve spent hours reading through the English com­ments, trying occasionally to translate the well-liked Korean. What does this have to do with my dream meeting? I can only say ‘carpe lemonade.’ Up to that point, I had been myself, a one fan to her grace. Surely her divulgences in Twenty-three and BBIBBI were an attempt to connect with her fans, albeit in exasperated dissociation.

She wants us to know that she doesn’t know herself and that she has more than a little disdain, insecurity, fear, even hatred of our love for her. I had to know her suffering—I had to confront it as she did, not from the roaring crowds, but that maddening silence, that oblate truth of fans’ lives so inaccessible to her except as an infinite other. And maybe she could know her fans in frail individual—just as she knew herself (see her inward-turned Palette Feat. G-Dragon), because of course self-knowledge and ignorance, just as external knowledge and ignorance of others, are not mutu­ally exclusive but actually co-informed and radiating in conflict’s resumption. Yes, my comment would be this, only more elegant and precise.

So what were people saying in that music video (MV) that was so meaningful yet banal as to warrant many hours of research?

Get ready for a wonderful list of all things true and highly liked among her fans:

“I’m 23 and I can relate to this ;(”

“this is such an interesting music video haha”

“‘i want to fall in love. No, i want to make lots of money.’ I’m now 23. Relatable.”

“she’s a genius.”

“IU puts own face into a cake- Me: same girl same”

“personally i think IU is the prettiest girl in the korean enter­tainment industry omg i just cant stop staring at her face”

“why is she so damn cute”

Now do I agree with particularly those last two comments? Yes, of course, IU is the cutest girl in the world. But do you see the issue? I’ve scrolled through all 30,000 thoughts (roughly, though I’m dating myself) and they are essentially the same. Her Korean audience at least occasionally engages in paragraph form. I found one ‘gghoop01,” who wrote a 1,643-word essay, which is honestly phenomenal, a considerable outpouring of emotion, and I wish I could include it in full here. I giddily imagine that user spending hours typing and revising directly into the YouTube client. I’ll include a select few phrases that I wish I had written. Don’t believe me? This is all real, public, decentered—for all I know, you could have written it.

“If you ever want to know how you’ve touched us, look at us for a reflection of your character. We are what you give to us, and countless of people are living honestly and hopefully because of you… You are sincerely an angel sent from heaven to help piece together this fragmented world. You are the glue holding us

together, and the light that is left in this world. You are beyond beautiful inside and out, and I hope you never change. Please don’t overwork yourself. I pray that you and your loved ones stay safe, and find happiness and worth in the future. Happy birthday IU, and we adore you more than we can ever say.”

;) It’s a good world we live in. I’m moved by the thought that gghoop01 believed they could reach her through YouTube com­ments in a language she can’t read and on a video now many years old. I told myself that if I faced IU again, this would be one of the messages I delivered.

I ended up leaving a comment which must’ve been too diffi­cult for her average fan, because I have yet to receive any notifica­tions in reply. I outlined the central misreadings without directly attacking those viewers who wanted nothing except to identify with or be gratified by IU. In short, let it be known that Lee Ji-eun is a performer with the world’s eyes on her, and her desire to be impossibly related creatures (identity as sly fox or soft bear or fox ad infinitum) or to assume moralities which are diametrically opposed (seeking wealth or love, regressing to childhood or accel­erating to womanhood) are exactly the facet of her being unable (as a performer) to collapse in on meaning. When the only sign is a warning that there’s no signs left. No synthesis to an impossible dialectic. The only identity which remains is that she’s “being seen through the sunglasses,” which ends the song.

Not to even start on the visual imagery, which in order to approach, I submit this delightful comment from Sarah A: “Yo I thought IU was sweet and like sang songs about love or something but she’s singing about literally hating her life, the music video is

fucking weird, it referenced smoking, her stuffing her bra, and a skeleton flipped her off. Man, I like her even more now.”

Do you see now? Do you see how her life is not like ours? That her attempts to portray fame kindly can only be in self-dep­recation and caution and overwhelming confusion, so that she’s sincerely lost herself. To use her own lyrics, and here’s where I get full body chills, “Actually I don’t know either/ At first, I never wrote even a single line of lies.”

Who—what is she?

I have given you my history, but not hers. There could be said to be two births. The first, Lee Ji-eun, born May 16, 1993, in Songjeon-dong, Seoul, South Korea. The second, 2008, after ten months of training and many more quiet years trying out and singing alone and living with her grandmother and brother in deteriorating poverty. Starving not only for aesthetic purposes. At 15, Lee Ji-eun was dressed with the name IU by LOEN Entertainment and given a pre-written/produced song called “Lost Child.”

Do not sleep on the artifice in her name. This was crafted from past triumphs, coached into paralyzing temptation, in the likeness of commercialism’s lustrosity. I and U.

What could be wrong with so much love given to you? We could ponder utilitarian goodness. If there is a genius about celebrities, one ability that stands above talent, dedication, charisma, and the rest, it’s their pinpointing of the cultural center. In America, this includes such acts as Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Drake, and Ariana Grande. Swift, to her credit, is very open about her single desire: she wants people to like her. Her documentary

lays childish her motivations—this woman we are supposed to be awed by. Well, all four managed to reach fame through a mix of sex, scandal, and a distanced affectation hiding the truth of their instability, and also scavenging cultures, pandering upon disparate lives for an illusion of unity, though again, seeping through every­thing, there’s that genius. Those TikTokers who found it in hand­some dance. The two everyboy-toy actors who receive every damn role (and the same girl across two cinematic universes). That spe­cial sauce into which they get lost, redrawing the map from their perspectives in the center of attention. And IU has it too. It’s in her name. They’ve all focalized themselves in the torrent of present value, there cultivating as fiery achievement the reified, idolized, personified human belonged.

Culture—etymology ‘to cultivate,’ emergent with the discov­ery of farming, allowing our present worldwide career specializa­tion. Grown into the cultural heads: just the right mix of all the choice aspects of mind and body. Hyper-confidence here, a wealthy dash of beauty, a gorgeous drop of luck, and a splash of privileged talent. They are the endgame of billions in a lottery, and everyone loves them and hates themselves.

There are all sorts of genius; them, they belong. They’ve fabri­cated maximum likability, calibrated, become it. Is this obvious? Do they get the credit they deserve? There is a split in respect that veils each side. Performers have much in common with the net; their intelligence is algorithmic. Artificial intelligence is a mis­nomer—the patterns are ours, written and rewritten by us. Evolving hieroglyphics mapped onto circuits. That is why recom­mendations feel so natural. They are our reflections, an uncon‐

scious knowing, just the same logic as dreams. Celebrities? Uncooled plastic made in the likeness of humans. Melt down the ore of ephemera: entertainment magazines, Styrofoam insulation, a million million water bottles. That rich blende stone of con­sumptive waste, a sort of negative energy in sore potential. Forget the dregs, but to recycle into human renewal—that some may prove and make rich of that fertile backlog, and thereby connect us to our latent desires, making more waste and then teaching us that the wastelands are mountains to enjoy. We are what we con­sume, of trash immaterial.

Was this what I wanted to tell her? That I could see the way her personality was assembled and torn again by all attempts to please? I’ve often wondered what she could be thinking during a closeup—when she spikes the camera and imbues her face with saccharine subjugation, as if to enchant the lens into myopic love. I can picture it now in my vault of memories, every love song, those few small diversions of the same expression. Those open eyes looking straight back at you; the smile presented to you. She’s done it thousands of times, and then there’s the final flourish that sells the convincing: the camera cuts away. Everything is implied in that cut away; a relationship is drawn together unending. There is an oceanic promise left in her eyes more loyal than the tides, and when the video ends, we are the ones forced to look away (with the ___ of her forever presence). Because, fuck, it works for me. To tell her that I’m so sorry that it works for me.

I will never be able to put into words the merging of con­sciousness that I was then after. Part of me wanted to lose myself, to die, to sleep. Maybe to broadcast my mind into all of her fans,

to hide in the shine of what we all shared to see. To see? Perchance to dream. For in that sleep of life what dreams may come when we have changed realities, must give us play. There’s the vision that makes miracle of so short a life. For who wouldn’t give under the gentle caress of time, the seducer’s right, the narcissist’s regard, the pangs of unrequited love, the clip’s speed, the futile politics, and the burns that innocent suffer from boredom’s grip, when we our­selves might consummate with a tissue lotioned? Who would blessings bear, to supplicate weary life but that dread of some pre­mature death, the nigh unreachable port from whose coast all inti­macy recoils, pauses the will, and portends us to deny those ills we have and fall to others we know not of?

I dreamed again of IU. We were in a jazz club; she sang on a small black stool by the Steinway. The curtains hung low from the ceiling, deep red velvet that matched her lips. She was singing bal­lads to a rainwater audience, and there I was alone in the front row before a thin black table, circular and metallic-cheap, resting my hands on the cold. The comely glance of streetlights and cars on the floor, slurred neons, red-yellows whispering fast through the upper window. Just like in the movies. Like in Akira or Chungking Express. That lonely glitched night look, or where you press your eyes into a blur and light fans out of focus, spacey, puffy-yolked, exactly like you used to do as a child, everything glinting.

Song after song was performed against the shadowy backcloth in perfect wistfulness. I could tell she was enjoying it—the roman­tic anonymity in the ambiance. She glowed from the soft light and the tables’ candles. She had a glass of white wine crying into a nap‐

kin, resting atop the piano. I knew it was a dream immediately, yet for a long while I was content to stay there. The songs were old and the dress was familiar, it was blue-black and hugged her body. She wore black satin gloves—no, a tulle in a rose-petal motif. It let the light of her skin through. Lunar songs, nocturnes about the cold distance of the moon as love as lost thing, melodies which wake in you the strange warmth of longing. Why do the saddest things save us? I must’ve been the only one in the club who knew her, she forgotten or undiscovered or living out an alternative life.

Smoke reshaped the air like prose. It could’ve been the past— thinking back, I’m sure of it. Everyone wore old suits, 60s and 70s suits. The time before recorded history. Which meant, of course, that it was going to be gone. No video. I wish I could show you, but I can’t translate chords. The best you could do is find a com­pilation of her ballads and imagine dreaming yourself. The fae-like detail of the real. The immensity of textures and our insufficiency to them. Her voice so familiar, her face bare yet concealed, and in her heart—she was deeply lost, sounded away, vainly guiding con­fused spangles of emotion.

We’d forgotten ourselves, and the claps woke me up. I was cry­ing. The band packed and left the stage for another just entering. You know what’s great about never understanding the words? The song is merely noise. The voice is porous. Layers are all sim­plicity; you take things in and they’re your emotions. Art is that intimate passing of consciousness. She rested in the spotlight and looked at me while she drank, holding a curious glance, maybe a little surprised. I’m not beautiful—I can’t picture how I look.

It caught my breath, and I wiped away my tears. She looked around, seemingly having forgotten where she was. Then the next singer came, and I could tell from my seat that she was startled to embarrassment. The new singer was a man with a nice jaw, and he laughed at scaring her; she bowed and held the wine to her waist before taking stairs down into shadow. She leaned on the wall by a darkened bathroom. The new band was tuning saxes and guitars. She listened to them warming up and watched the crowd. The pianist met her and said a few things too quietly for me to catch, then he laughed and nodded until his face got very sincere. He must’ve been encouraging her; she just looked at the floor and smiled. That damned smile.

I read once that some movies are made for remembering. The memory, of course, lives longer than the real thing. We try so hard just to survive in the moment and are left piecing together what happened into an indeterminable future. The truth is, writing this, I miss her so much. Love is solitude with her. I wish we could be steeped forever in these wavelengths, dreaming of our dreams, but life opens like a cut.

She sauntered over to me (you laugh, though this is the best word for what happened). I wasn’t dreaming. She revealed noth­ing, just that she was looking me in the eyes. Yes, these eyes cried for her, or maybe with her. Here’s a question: given that perform­ers love to make us cry, which reason is the greater compliment? What I mean is, would they be happier to know we’re crying about them, or about something they’ve reminded us of? That they’ve awoken something dormant in us? It’s a miracle that mere vibrations can take you away, into the past or into yourself.

Memories can usurp the present, they dominate with more verity than a time machine (re: video/internet/this). Could music be a predestination of sorts? That it is magic is a given. She stopped and placed the drink before me. The fluid was rickety with the table. She folded her arms, giving me the up-and-down.

Okay, I will admit that this moment seemed injected with time, was grotesquely moist with time. If this was indeed my world, then her autonomy needed to be exerted; it was only in fairness that she would be given the right to speak first. I, on the other hand, had had many months (almost years now) in prepara­tion. You must consider what it would be like with your celebrity. Think of the power dynamic. It’d be as if you’d studied a thickly researched file, and your partner only a line. I’ve been preparing to speak since my first introduction. This wasn’t about me.

“Have I seen you before?” she said.

“God, I don’t know. Really,” I said.

“Why do I feel like I know you?” She looked out at the careless crowd and sat down. She must’ve had no place else to be.

A million simulations prepared me for nothing. It was almost like I didn’t know her. Or the fear/terror/awe from before was gone. I wanted to stow and suppress all history, to meet her as naively as she met me. I wanted to say something cool like, ‘I don’t know, and I don’t know you, but I’d like to.’ I wanted to squint and sigh, pause and say, ‘I’ve never heard anyone sing like that before.’ And then, ‘You remind me of someone I used to know. Actually, to tell the truth, someone that I used to love.’ Then I’d blush and backpedal, having thoroughly surprised myself—that

very contradiction being proof of its authenticity, of it lunging forth by some unconscious trusting ahead of my saner etiquette.

I said, “I’m a fan of yours. I’ve listened to you for a long time. You got me through things. That’s the truth.”

“The truth,” she said, as if it were a landscape to admire.

“What you do is important. You have many fans,” I said. She frowned. “Maybe not here, or now, or what I—.”

She sat down. “Thank you. Sometimes I’ve been embarrassed that so few people know me. However, other times I think that after my audience surpassed a few listeners, it became too much.” She looked away from me. “Honestly, I only seem capable of wor­rying that the crowd has shrunk. I dislike that feeling. Sometimes I believe I can quiet it, but that’s only a lie I tell myself.”

The guitarist was serenading drunk patrons in front of us. I thought I saw in her a fleck of jealousy as she watched them together. Or perhaps it was admiration, and the jealousy was my own.

She said, “I remember you from somewhere else?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we’re imagining it—the last time I saw you, I tried to dance with you. Your song was playing, Good Day.” As I talked, a memory seemed to ache in her eyes.

“We were in a black practice room that was once a stadium.” Note, I didn’t say that it was vacuumed liminal, nor the darkness a ‘gored midnight.’ Carefully, though, I unwound the experience.

“No, I don’t—” she said. “That does sound a bit like a dream I had. I have recurring dreams that are specific to each night I per­form. They can come whenever, sometimes long after the perfor­mance. I know it’s years later because my memory seems to be

formed around these experiences. A stadium, uwah! That does sound like a dream.”

“You were a much better dancer than me.”

“I was never very good at dancing.” She finally looked towards me. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I do that. What I meant to say was—”

“That you think of yourself more as a singer than dancer. I don’t disagree.”

“I—yes. You know, I feel as though I can’t always see the world for how it really is, and this worries me.” She leaned in. “If I could see through your eyes in addition to my own, think of all of the songs I could sing.”

The thought that this held the trappings of a rom-com passed my mind. Just at that moment, she pulled back.

“You’re not crazy, right? No one has cried like that before. Not while I’m singing.”

“Is it crazy to believe you? Is it crazy to show it?” What was I saying? Whatever it was, she smiled. I found myself staring down at my hands, and when I looked back up, she was examining me.

“Sometimes I do feel crazy up there. It’s a boldness to expect them to watch, though this motivates me.” She squirmed as if she wanted to travel far but had no place to go. “If there were a way for me to sing in the background of peoples’ lives, I would be happy to do so. That’s a dream I have on occasion. I think about it when I see a couple laughing or arguing without regard; it would be easy to sneak in and magnify their feelings. I hope that doesn’t sound greedy.”

“I think watching you, like before, is the normalest thing in the world. If you weren’t here for us, what else would we be doing?” I wanted to press her hands so that she knew how serious I was. “Should it even be your decision? If people desire your voice, then who are you to deny them?”

“You’re such a wise kid.” She laughed, shaking her head. If she only knew how many simulations were run to speak like this.

“Where are we?”

“I’m here every Tuesday,” she said. I pried for information with my eyes. “After I finish, I find a seat alone to drink and listen to the other performances, hoping to learn something.” My silence forced more, more. “There aren’t any regulars. Maybe once a month you get the same face, and it’s always the loneliest people —the people a little too young or old, you know, and drunk and alone.”

“So it’s Tuesday. You didn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t understand, didn’t you come here? We’re a hole in the wall.”

“I followed the music.”

“But you were here when I started.”

“Was I?”

“You clapped to welcome me,” she said as if narrating my life. “I hadn’t yet stepped past the curtain.”

“I believe you. I just don’t remember it.”

“You really are strange—”

“This is all just a dream to me,” I said.

“That’s funny, when I used to dream of my life, it felt nothing like this.” She withdrew somewhat. “I thought that it would be

like sun-bathing in a hammock at the top of a breezy hill. I thought—this is embarrassing.” I nodded. “I thought it would be as soothing and bright as the stories about heaven.”

“Talk of heaven and you disgrace yourself.” She looked at me like she was dying. “No? But then you disgrace me.”

The piano gently conversed with the rain. It sounded like a parent explaining the concept of work to a child. I listened to third rounds of soju being argued over and then ordered, and then how the glass thumped against wooden booths. No one was going to leave until the sun required them to remember who they were.

“You’re American?” I never told her this. “I hear that in America, people get tips for their services. Sometimes I think that the other direction would be more appropriate.”

“You mean that you should tip me?” I said. “Maybe the act of paying is the gift. As for me, please don’t worry. I’ve only paid with my time.” This is unfortunately true—I even turned off ad­block for her (how romantic). Ads make me feel worthless in a real grounded way.

“I would like to subsist on something pure and sustainable, the way plants do.”

“You want proof of my love, how I photosynthesize you,”

“What?” she said.

I reached into my heart and found a wallet, vegan snakeskin, and pulled out all the cash I had. It was throbbing under a mucilaginous paste the color of lipstick or carrion. I gave it to her, hoping the blood would be a confession, fearing only pain was exhumed.

She cackled abruptly and then paused before the frames could change. She said, “Maybe you’re confusing me with someone else.”

I looked again. The wallet was clean except for a few tattered bills. Maybe you won’t ‘collect’ this reference, just know that I would do it again in a heartbeat. And it was the perfect time to use my line from earlier.

Instead I said, “I think maybe you’re almost right. I’m not confusing you with anyone else. However, I’m confused and I’m not sure if it’s you or me doing the confusing. See, what am I say­ing? You’re very good at dissociating. This is maybe the one thing you really know. We all recede, but you, who are you? I’d never understood the need for a secret identity until you. Giving your­self away is the precursor. By disappearing, you become heroic.”

She was quiet, meditative, feeling probably that she owed me something. And why shouldn’t she? Without us, she’d be nothing.

She said, “I’m more selfish than I will ever let you know.”

“Please don’t be so hard on yourself.”

She flicked the soft tissue between her collarbone and right breast. “Even that, how can you be sure that wasn’t a bid for your affection?” She looked back at the stage. We were talking over them like everyone else.

“If you’re too shy to praise yourself, it’s just as well. If you’re pathetic and vying for my sympathy, it’s just as well. If you want my heart, my time, my secrets, my shames, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care. Don’t you get it? It’s you. You’re here, alive— you—whoever you are. Getting to know you means everything.

Not because I should ‘love you at your worst,’ not to love you in spite of this, not even because it’s you.” I could hear my voice trembling, vibrating the boundaries of this reality. I didn’t want to embarrass her, especially if it was all in my head, and yet, “You’re here. And so am I. And if we traced it all back to the beginning but switched places so that I was you, it would turn out the same.”

She burst out laughing, again. “Who are you?”

I was going to tell her. Really I was—I have no intention of dragging this thing out, but then I woke up.