FIGURES WITHOUT MEANING
ersatz
TAPE 2026
[TRANSCRIPT]I remember reading one writer writing at this time when the forces of violence and ecstatic hate were emerging, and the conflict that was expressed across many pages between different ideas of what was happening. And the basic idea, the starting point that kept needing to be returned to, was the age-old idea of demons and evil spirits, of hell unleashing agents of destruction and deception. But at the same time a countercurrent of hesitation and upon deeper thought, on closer consideration, the assertion that this picture of spectral/demonic invasion/eruption was too easy. And it gets contrasted with something else, and that something else is much less obviously frightening. It doesn’t belong in a religious world-view. This alternative has more to do with theatre and the idea of a stage and a stage set where props and backdrops and indeed actors are not real in themselves. They are flimsy, artificial, shallow objects or performances: imitations. Or else there is the image of the fairground, which is a place of gaudy decorations, a place of noisy fun, with its rides, its hall of mirrors, its freak shows, its ghost trains.
The writer can’t quite put these different world-views and ideas of what’s wrong together, and so he shuttles backwards and forwards between them. There’s a moment when he observes young devotees of the ecstatic movement and they look to him like fallen angels at one moment and then at another moment they look like cardboard cutouts with no depth, no minds of their own, and it becomes difficult to work out which of these two impressions is worse, which is more frightening, which is more violent. And it comes to seem that it’s the cardboard cutout which is more the essential nature—the fake, the pretender, the con artist, the one-dimension figure … where “figure” has no poetic meaning, is just a template or a mould. And there’s something very compelling or worth thinking very carefully about, that what is to be noticed and feared isn’t the dark demonic spirit peeping out of the underworld—and there are other images of this same force, other people think of it as a machine or as a monstrous creature. But what if it is the cardboard cutout which is the true menace?
And then there is the mental strain that comes from trying to adjust between these different views, where the more vividly/obviously frightening version, which is to say the demon/the phantom/the creature of darkness, is much easier to think about and therefore more comforting paradoxically than the empty, hollow, fake alternative.