The Inutility of Aesthetics: Why Writers Are Not In Their Heads Anymore (They’re Right Outside)
I don’t remember my first Dostoievski. I don’t remember if it was ‘Crime and Punishment’ or ‘Notes from Underground’ because I was probably in love at the time I was reading them. I don’t remember anything from Faulkner except how cold it was outside when my professor preached about his work as if he was God of the South, as if nothing else was written before, or after him.
I was never a scholar, a researcher, an analytical fellow of literature; I was a feeler for the sole purpose of feeling. The only times I managed to write somewhat above average essays on the poetic self in Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’, or the intricacy of vulnerability and violence in Blake’s neverending pile of books was when I meticulously described what *I* was feeling, which is something I always called: the web. The spider-like emotion creates the web which transcends every existing word and scenario into an almost tangible quicksand of literary imagination and connections.
As you can imagine, I did graduate. But I failed. Irrevocably.
And should I be ashamed? Should I crawl back into the fists of my hometown and say: “No, mother, I am not an intellectual. I don’t know how to think, and I still haven’t figured out if the milk upsets my tummy. Maybe those damn cigarettes are to blame.” But this wasn’t quite the case. Because I was writing. Just not about the things that would matter to a 37-year-old scholar who saw the Sorbonne from all angles except the front.
Soon enough I realised that most people are doing the same thing as I am, which was a sweet relief because how could I not belong anywhere? But later I understood that there was no act of creation, but a performance, an aesthetic chaser, a cosplay. Hand-me down romanticism, if you must.
*
In December 2022, I lived the greatest epiphany, my own crucifixion, like I have finally realised why Sacramento was scorching with so much heat after seeing a map of the West Coast: the long awaited awareness that I, in fact, failed both the thought process, and the entire act of creation. I was hollow.
There was nothing to write about. And even if there was, my incapacity to scribble anything longer than two sentences was squeezing the hope out of me like the wet dirt out of a filthy towel. However, I refrained from telling anyone because this was when my shame reached monumental levels of guilt. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t shake the thought that this was all done out of a strange whim I had, that I tricked myself into believing I could, in fact, be a writer. I wholeheartedly believed I was an imposter.
But when I finally got out of the slam after an unfortunate series of heart crashes, I started noticing the premeditated messiness of wanna-be writers who wrapped themselves into pinterest boards, and foolishly thinking that anyone with the capacity of throwing pretty words into a coherent sentence could be a writer. They were miming torture, intellect, sensitivity, creation.
The aesthetic canon is their bible. And no one dares say it.
And my stuck up ex-boyfriend respected that canon religiously. We only watched black and white. He only dreamed of fucking Ginsberg when it was convenient to him, when he related to the exploration of the universe through use of substances. He even dared tell me he is a ‘sort of’ European Patrick Bateman for he keeps his room tidy and would totally murder his unbearable colleague while wearing a Valentino Couture suit. However, he had no foundation of art knowledge. As much as he pretended to not be interested in the contemporary aesthetic brainrot movement, his head was full of it. It leaked out of his ears like blood from a cracked skull on the roadway to Rockville. He couldn’t write but I didn’t dare say it. ‘Cause I am too kind. And he couldn’t make me cum but I didn’t dare say it. ‘Cause I am stupid like that.
His only salvation was that he didn’t believe himself to be an artist of any medium. It was just pure snobbism.
*
This is the crux of the issue: there are no artists, no writers in these hordes of ‘fast-art’; they do not create. The anatomy of an aesthetic chaser lies in the capacity to polish their exterior in order to appeal, to sell. One takes their notebook to the local café, and continuously wonders whose eyes are locked onto them; and they scream: “I do write but there’s no rush to read it. Look how beautifully I stare into the sun, and how I can afford all of these luxuries, and yet cosplay as a bohemian working class murderer of mediocrity. You do want to be me, don’t you?”
But the reality is this: no artist has time to think of the coffee stains. They are only relevant if they were spilled by their lover.
This is precisely what Emerald Fennell achieved with Saltburn because, frankly, no amount of fake blood and sweat will make your work raw if the expertise is inferior to the expectations of the final product. To cut through living flesh is to perform in the ugliness, to let the terrible and the mundane be beautiful as it is. And this is precisely the issue of aesthetic chasers, because I trace my fingers along the curves of my lover’s flesh with the same intensity one handles nails and hammers, without having to question whether the invisible camera filming me is capturing the right angle. Don’t let eyes deceive you. The only truth is hidden in the skin.
Bones and all gave the head start of an entire epidemic of ‘consumption’. It turned (unwillingly) the oh-so-obsessive behaviour of thought-daughters into a constant mediocre belief that the cannibalistic metaphor was never done before, never thought of before. And somehow, they get it. But do you expect everyone to feed on your brainrot?
The crux of the issue is not enjoyment. Being entertained, amused, pleased by what you consume is not, in fact, a concern at all. The marrow is the lack of essence, the empty bones if you must. Joan Didion stated in her interview for The Paris Review that art should be imposing, violent even: “It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.” And aesthetic chasers will nod their heads because they have no power of manipulation (of words or expertise), and their work will only make you feel an aesthetic familiarity, it will make you think “I wish I was that way. I wish I wasn’t boring.” When in reality, the writer should enter the reader’s house with violence, and sometimes caress their cheek as if they are one person in a spinning teacup on Coney Island. The mantra of the art consumer should be: “Yes, this is how I felt when my mug shattered all over my grandma’s floor when I was eleven”, and “yes, yes, yes, I do feel like this – I didn’t know I could feel like this.”
No one dares question anything anymore. There are no ‘fast-artists’ publicly admitting that they don’t like The Beatles, or Jane Austen, or the French New Wave. Because how could they not? How could they not be considered intellectually capable of possessing a foundation of the old aesthetically pleasing times? The trend, the coolness of being different, picks at their brain with a toothpick and, truthfully, it is glad they have no opinion.
Where is sensitivity? Call up Fiona Apple. Ask her why she stopped doing coke after one night spent with Tarantino and Anderson. Frankly, no one cares. Unless you wanna build an elaborate Pinterest board about it.
The most sincere art consumers are the ones who are fully caught up in sensitivity, who are fully oblivious to useless analysis or the eyes of the public. Last summer, a friend from work read a poem I wrote long ago which said: “Maybe that’s why the family’s dog was a much better daughter than I was.” And he laughed playfully, a mischievous gleam in his eyes as if he had read the greatest joke of all time. “I like the humour of it”, he said and I nodded confused because I actually meant every word of it. But we cannot control the differences of perception when the field we activate in is totally ruled by subjectivity.
*
They killed the mere concept of art. The audience is now dead. The work is unimportant; the facade is unattainable. There is no innocence of thought, no unplanned schedule. It is all premeditated, calculated violence which doesn’t sting in any way. The outside became the monument of their existence, the plague which leaves no room for thought, judgement, feeling. It only reflects lack, a snobbishly pretty one even.
Either way, I was never particularly keen on ugliness. But I would damn want a couple of unsightly bruises with my writing.
