it is crucial to have an active fantasy life

'i have no delusions, i am playing'

around the time that i wrote my w.g sebald essay, i began to grow depressed about the state of my life. not because anything bad was happening, per se, so much as i was constantly unsettled by the ugliness and sterility that seemed to pervade it. put shortly, i was upset that, without my noticing, the magic had gone out of my life, and wading through an inadvisable amount of w.g sebald’s european melancholy was of NO HELP WHATSOEVER.

i’m aware that this probably sounds frivolous, but you really shouldn’t underestimate the effects of a lack of magic, and what that does to your life. when i say a lack of magic, i mean a lack of significance. you find yourself waking up one day to the sight of objects which seem to have arrived in your life completely by accident. their places in my room, for example, had no reason to be there. they were ugly and old and had taken up space for as long as i could remember, and for this long, familiarity – and the aforementioned thoughtlessness that it entails – was enough to keep them around. i’d never bothered asking myself, ‘do i actually like the old porcelain cats that sit on my bedside table? why have i been using the same perfume for 3 years, even though it’s starting to feel like an itchy sweater? why have i kept that book that i didn’t like and will never read again, even if you paid me?’ my life had become a series of surfaces that i passed through thoughtlessly every day, buoyed along by mere repetition. nothing excited me. how could it, when i refused to give myself the grace or space to play?

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sickened by all of this, i eventually started doing Julia Cameron’s 12-week course, The Artist’s Way to try and fix it. as you might imagine, the impasse i’d arrived at also meant my creativity was spectacularly blocked. i was so frightened by the fact that no ideas seemed to materialise when i reached out for them, i’d ended up forgetting entirely how to just sit still and listen. in his book The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, the theorist Byung-Chul Han writes that “Thinking has the character of play. […] the steps in thinking are not the steps of a calculation which simply repeat the same operation again and again. Rather, they are moves in a game, or dancing steps, which create something totally different…” (83). rote repetition couldn’t save me. i’d trodden the same pathways too many times, and i was beginning to grow bored of myself, which was what freaked me out most.

all of which resulted in me 1) doing The Artist’s Way, finishing it just last week(!) and 2) realising that i need fantasy to make life bearable, because fantasy is done ON PURPOSE. it is intention, against the thoughtless enactment of an ‘authentic’ version of life, with no frills whatsoever.

i am so tired of authenticity. i feel like i see the word thrown around a lot, used for describing things as varied and inconsequential as a neighbourhood Thai restaurant to the persona of a celebrity. authenticity has become a buzzword, a nebulous belief in a kernel of something real and true that’s remained shiny despite the world. conveniently, authenticity has become enfolded in the anxious pursuit of betterment presented in self-help literature and advertising. marketing has always been nefarious, but now it feels like these companies don’t just want my business, they want my soul.

the pursuit of authenticity also means the performance of morality has become a ‘requirement’ of brands in the 21st century (and this expectation of morality is itself wrapped up in a set of beliefs about having a soul, redemption, betterment…)

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this kind of authentic living has made for a very boring, very sad life. everything is too real all the time, which only draws my attention to how much of a performance that ‘real’ity is. Instagram photodumps and the cultural conversation that took place a while ago about ‘making Instagram casual again’¹ are a perfect example of what i mean here. ironically, a commitment to spontaneity must first be declared, curated, and then performed repeatedly until we believed that this artifice was something at all.

it doesn’t stop there, either. in cultural objects like film, it’s become normal for directors on a press tour to set up an aspirational vocabulary for their work via curated authentic experiences. Criterion Closet videos, for example, become prime opportunities for the director to profess their love for another film, setting that up as a tasteful reference point² regardless of whether or not their film successfully makes the reference (most do not). this is most gratingly presented in Brady Corbet’s Criterion Closet video, where the director of the insufferably self-satisfied film The Brutalist talks about how much the ending of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev influenced the ending of his film. having seen both, i can tell you that all he did was excise the technique of Tarkovsky’s spiritual ending, and copy-paste it into his film without integrity or thematic coherence, for seemingly no other reason than to make the reference. today, pop culture and its objects have become the objects of worship, rather than the material of life which made these works of art possible in the first place. WHY are we looking at the finger pointing at the moon instead of the moon!³

authenticity gives the impression of eliminating distance. we want to be as close to everything as possible, because that allows us the teleological fantasy whose elusive destination is ‘the most authentic version’ of ourselves. but, all we’ve done is create a series of surfaces across which our attention atrophies, then disintegrates. you can’t pay attention to everything at the same time. i feel that distance has gotten a bad rep over the last 10 or so years, i think, for merely suggesting that not everything should be within our reach, immediately. a lack of distance has also caused people to lament, for example, that there are no movie stars anymore⁴. we’re losing the fantasies that used to make life not just bearable, but fun. ENJOYABLE, even!

which brings me to my point: sometimes, you need a good fantasy to live. you need distance. there is nothing natural or bearable about being this close to everything at all times. i want MYSTERY and i want OPULENCE. both of these things are made better by distance. this fidelity to the real has reached its expiration date. it makes my commitment to being in the world difficult, because authenticity so often brings with it ugliness, and the vulgarity of performance, and i am SICK OF IT! i want GLAMOUR. i want FUN. i want life to feel EXPANSIVE and i intend to practice the CURIOSITY necessary for that.⁵

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thank you, as always, for reading, and a massive thank you to the people who’ve become paid subscribers recently! being a freelance writer is not the easiest route to take, and your contributions are massively helpful in allowing me the time to write the things i actually care about.

one last bit of housekeeping: i’ve got an essay out on the Singaporean performance artist and poet Lee Wen, where i got to write about bureaucracy and the enigma of play(!). if that sounds up your alley, you can find that here.

right, that’s all from me. see you when i see you!

1. i also think this has a lot to do with nostalgia for a childhood or adolescence that never existed but that is a different essay

2. “Self-referentiality only concerns its form, namely the form of self-fulfilment […] Authenticity only proves itself insofar as the identity created contains an explicit reference to a community and so is able to hold true independent of one’s own self.” (‘The Compulsion of Authenticity’ in The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present by Byung-Chul Han tr. Daniel Steuer, 2020, p.17.)

3. an old Zen poem/concept: “Consider this example: suppose someone is pointing to the moon to show it to another person. That other person, guided by the pointing finger, should now look at the moon. But if he looks instead at the finger, taking it to be the moon, not only does he fail to see the moon, but he is mistaken, too, about the finger. He has confused the finger, with which someone is pointing to the moon, with the moon, which is being pointed to.”

4. specifically: “I also think Social Media has had a larger factor in this than anymore wants to admit. The idea of stardom used to be elusive and mysterious. We almost knew nothing about these people, except what they revealed in magazines. Nowadays, stars are on social media, acting just like us. We have access to them, so they're losing the ethereal quality that made them so wonderful in the past.”

5. title of this substack is from Jenny Holzer’s 2021 exhibition, ‘IT’S CRUCIAL TO HAVE AN ACTIVE FANTASY LIFE’, and the subtitle is from Leonora Carrington’s Down Below.