american symbolism

an insane year (already)

Hello friends—

I spent the evening of New Year’s Eve at Newark Airport, and I was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean when the year changed in New York. I say in New York because the year had, of course, already changed elsewhere in the world. In Stockholm, for example, where my ex lives. In Australia, where tennis players were already practicing for the United Cup, an international team competition. I say in New York because we had left New Jersey, and all of our watches were still following the eastern hour. Actually, the plane must have already been over France by the time the hour was changing in New York. We must have already begun our descent through the dark rain to the city below. I say must because when I checked the texts I sent to my friend at that time, I saw that I had sent a photo of the wet tarmac through my window about an hour after we wished each other Happy New Year. So, I must have not have been over the Atlantic after all. I must have been over France, moving south over its dark forests, passing across Normandy, down and down, until we landed at CDG.

The trip was not for pleasure. I saw no art. I did not go to museums, galleries, or exhibitions. I did not go to markets and run my fingers meaningfully over produce and baked goods. I didn’t gaze longingly and with great tenderness at inconsequential objects into which I could pour incommensurate amounts of significance and libidinal investment. I took no pictures. I recorded nothing and documented nothing. Which is to say, I didn’t upload anything to Instagram and I didn’t post about my daily life on Substack notes. So what did I do? First of all, that’s none of your business. What a weird question. Why would I tell you that. Why would you presume that this essay is about what I did? That’s because we live in an era of biography poisoning. Your whole conception of sociality has been hijacked by mutual biographical exchange that traffics in anecdote and personal disclosure. It’s evil. You should stop. I should stop. We all should stop. It was actually very hard not to take pictures of my little amusements and my little routines and my little nonsense life and to curate them for public consumption. I don’t want my life to be content for essays or for Instagram or for consumption. I want my life to be my life. I wanted (and want) to resist narrativizing my life. I want to resist turning myself into an abstraction. I want to resist being made into an abstraction by others. I do not want to be an idea of a person. I want to be…a person. Of course, this is impossible, as Althusser tells us. We are already interpolated. We are already subjects. I’ve already done this violence to myself by writing this essay, in fact. By even thinking about myself or my life, I render it into a subject, which is to say, into a subjective projection of something that is, in the immediacy of my living, quite real to me.

I went to a reading by the novelist David Szalay, who won the Booker Prize last year (crazy to be talking about 2025 as last year already) for his novel Flesh. The reading was at Shakespeare and Company, an Instagram famous and also famous-famous bookstore in Paris that traffics in new releases. Flesh was my very favorite book last year (again, how is that even possible), and I think it is simply the best novel of the 2020s. I know people don’t like it. They don’t care for the books extremity of form and tone. They don’t care for the evacuation of thought or consciousness from the book. They don’t care for the seeming unartfulness of the writing. It’s too plain. Too severe. Too male. Too boring. Too much lessness. I understand this complaint. But I loved the book for its dedication to drama, and for the emotional force of its observations about its protagonist’s life. It does get…a bit silly at the end, when it turns into more fable than novel, but whatever. They’ll never make me hate David Szalay. He’s my father. (Don’t tell my actual father, Karl Ove Knausgaard that I said that). Anyway, at the reading, Szalay said something interesting, which was that part of why he wanted to avoid “psychology” in Flesh was that he wanted to resist the reduction that is inherent in thinking about something. “To think about something is already to reduce it.” That’s not an exact quote, but it’s something like that. Anyway, I thought two things about this (how reductive of me). My first thought or reaction was what I often feel when novelists start talking all that philosophy stuff, “Ah shit, here we go again. Pack it up. This isn’t a seminar. GROW UP.” That is to say: repulsion and profound irritation. My second thought or reaction was, “Oh, yeah, I kind of get that.”

It was for this reason that I deleted my Twitter account and also deleted all of the posts from my Instagram and now plan to never upload another Instagram story if I can help it. I was tired of meeting people who arrived with all of this stuff they called foreknowledege but which I considered assumptions and misreadings of my characters. I say was tired like this has somehow stopped. It has not. Over the Atlantic Ocean, I was scrolling through my Instagram feed, watching everyone posting about their 2025. They were posting about the books they read, the books they wrote, the articles they wrote, the movies they watched, the songs they listened to, the miles they ran, the weights they lifted, the number of days they had gone without this or that object, this or that activity, this or that cherished product, the number of days or nights without sex, without calling their ex, without falling back on old habits. They were laying out their life in the same way that people lay out complicated dinners, not for eating so much as for visual consumption and invidious comparison. Except the thing they were laying out were not rosy slices of stake or the slick gray insides of oysters or delicate sugared fruit—no, they were laying out their souls on cold glass slabs and smiling for all the world to see. Then, their 2025 thus sliced and sectioned and braided into posts, they drew out a fresh length of soul and began to do the same thing to 2026.

When I was very young, I used to watch my grandfather skin rabbits and deer. The big rusty hooks through the tendons of the back legs so that you could suspend the deer from the big brace. Then point of the knife through the fur above the knee joint. Then you work your way down the animal, drawing the skin away from the muscle, revealing the silver membranes below, passing the point of the knife, wedging the skin loose with the thumb, inch by inch until the whole animal was slick and white and bare before you. That’s how it feels to watch people post about their year behind and their year ahead. Like they’re processing their soul the way we used to process deer out in the cold. It made me profoundly, profoundly sad. So I started deleting posts, thinking that I no longer wanted to be seen or known or witnessed. That I didn’t want to participate in the casual consumption of my life.

This is a new feeling for me. I grew up on the internet. I grew up on message boards and in chatrooms. The idea of privacy is a foreign concept to me. I’ve never considered myself as having much of a life worth preserving against intrusions. In fact, my childhood was filled with so much apathy that even vague interest in me inspired profound, immediate intimacy. But I also thought, you know what, that’s enough of that. In part, because people arrive at encounters with me already presuming to know a great deal. Even glancing encounters on the internet have this weird buzz where people feel comfortable being quite rude and mean to me because of a story they have about the five things they know about me. It is impossible for these people to encounter me as a person because I am already a story, an object, a subject, whatever. I am already an aspect of their story because they are dimly aware of me. I don’t know that I knew I was consenting to that when I started posting jokes on Twitter. I might have gone about things differently if I had imagined that there might be a day in which I would care about this sort of thing.

If it sounds like I think I am above all of this, please know that I do not think that and I am in fact not above any of it. By “it,” I mean this impulse toward abstracting other people and narrativizing their lives. Or rather, of interpolating them into my own narrative. In some sense, yes, we all do this. Otherwise, we would probably dash ourselves upon the rocks out of sheer madness. But in another sense, I wonder if it isn’t rather an evil way of denying the dignity of human life. Let me try to explain what I mean.

Some days ago, I woke up to the news that there had been explosions in Caracas, Venezuela. “That’s horrible,” I thought. “I hope no one is terribly injured.” At the time, I thought it might have been a gas explosion or an act of terrorism. I certainly did not think that I would read, about fifteen minutes later, that Donald Trump, President of the United States of America, had claimed credit for the strikes. Then I read that he had taken the president of Venezuela captive under dubious circumstances. It seemed absurd. Wildly absurd. I don’t mean in the sense of unlikely. I guess I mean in the sense of unreasonable due to the extremity of the event. It this sense, it felt completely and totally absurd. However, in the scheme of Donald Trump’s activities, it seemed, actually, entirely plausible and therefore believable. Yet there was a part of me that simply could not force the event out of the realm of symbol into the realm of the real, the immediate, visceral reality, something I could feel urgently in my body. It felt too remote, and, yes, frankly, too absurd to integrate. And yet, I did think, those poor people. Meaning at once the people proximal to the explosions and also the people of Venezuela who had been struck at and interfered with by a foreign nation. I kept thinking, imagine trying to get up and look after your kids, and then there’s this crazy, totally insane thing happening. And then I thought of the Americans and the Palestinians and the Ukrainians and the Sudanese and the people of the Congo, all of these people who are getting their heads kicked in by the imperial American regime on a daily basis, and I had to sit there and stare out of the window for a while.

A couple of days later, I woke up to the news that Renee Good, a poet living in Minneapolis, had been killed by an ICE agent who shot her in the face. I read a great many posts. I watched a great many videos. I saw how quickly her death decomposed into abstraction. But each morning, I’d wake up and say to myself, “They just…killed that woman.” And I’d think about her children. Her wife. Her family. Her ex-husband. Her neighbors. Her coworkers. The other parents at pick-up and drop-off. The people she might have seen on errands or just looking out the window. Then I saw that the pundits and politicians on the Right, including the Vice President, began to say that her death had not only been justified, but that it had been good, I thought, this sort of thing is only possible if you view other people as abstractions more than people. It’s a kind of thought that requires a total eradication of the human in the other. Which is to say, the inability to see the self in the other. Which, I guess, is another way of saying that to say that this woman deserved to die (as a Catholic, no less) is to view her as…subhuman.

This is not new. After all, the President and his regime have been doing this kind of scapegoating of minoritized populations since their first term. That it has reached a new violent tenor is not surprising, but it is chilling and it is frightening and it is dangerous. Their motivations for this kind of scapegoating are not difficult to parse. They need villains. They need monsters. That is how they stoke fear. That is how they justify the violence of their actions and wipe the blade clean.

On the other side, there is the canonization impulse. Again, the right is instructive here. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated last year, there was an immediate and concerted effort on the Right to enshrine him as a hero. A martyr for the cause of…well, virulent white nationalism, for one thing. The Trump Regime pursued a program of social persecution of anyone who dared criticize or raise Kirk’s bigotry or history of provocation. It became a kind of witch hunt.

The Right is not alone in this. On the Left, there is a strong desire to uplift, sanitize, and make saints of our own who die. Dying is the ultimate form of virality. The ultimate anointing in the religion of attention. But somehow, in all of the rush to analyze and parse these deaths for symbols, I sometimes feel that we lose the human scale of it. That is what is so astonishing about all of this. The utter absurdity of it. That people can go on an errand and be kidnapped and disappeared into an extra-judicial system and sent far away from their loved ones and neighbors without a word. And that if you speak out against this, federal agents can shoot you in the face and the president or vice president can call you a criminal as though mere criminality were a reason to be killed.

That’s the thing I can’t get over about the ICE footage. The abject human cruelty of it. Handcuffing these people. Dragging them over ice and sleet and concrete. Bloodying their bellies and their backs. Punching them in the face. Hitting them with the butts of rifles or choking them until they gasp and wheeze and their eyes turn red. Wrenching them from cars and throwing them to the ground, as if to stun them the way we used to stun roosters we knocked from the trees. I keep thinking, that is going to scrape that man’s back. He is going to be bleeding for hours. That is going to break that woman’s ribs. And they are going to leave her in a cell or in the back of a freezing van for hours. I keep thinking about the smell of those vans and those cars. The sweat and the blood. The ticking of the turn signals and the wheeze of the bruised people locked in the back. I keep thinking about the ICE agents stopping at Dunkin or Starbucks or buying Kratom at the gas station before parking outside of a school to drag mothers to their knees. I keep thinking about the faces, the way the people gasp when grabbed, their mouths opening in shock, their eyes going wide. How every video begins already in the thrust of the assault, as the dark agents swoop in on these people the way I’ve seen a large dog dart in upon a group of chickens at the corner of the fence. How quickly the blood comes. It’s astonishing to me, the scale of the cruelty and the immediacy of the cruelty. The pointlessness of the cruelty. The cruelty feels abstract to me, absurd. But the impact of the cruelty feels very, very real.

And we wake up every day to this. Have been waking up every day to this. People getting snatched. And the President and his regime posting about it. Posting through it. Making memes. Turning the abject human suffering into laughs. Because these are not people to them, but rather problems to be solved. Their most hated enemies.

I don’t want people to read this as me saying that you shouldn’t post or that you are complicit in the evils of the Trumpian regime by participating in the tropes of sharing your life online. I don’t want people—you—to read this as me thinking I am better than anyone or that I am free of the evils of sharing. I don’t think that. I said that before, but I really do feel a need to express clearly what I do or don’t think because, again, people love to make up a story about my thoughts. I suppose if this essay has any “point,” if it can be said to have a point at all, it is only that I am wary of our tendency to render other people into symbols either positive or negative or neutral, particularly when we are not aware of this tendency toward abstraction. I guess what I mean to say is, Beware! Caution! Abstract Thinking Ahead! Beware the Symbol in the Mirror. Something like that.

Maybe still another way to say this is this. The other day, I posted something on Notes about people needing to go outside and feel the bracing cold on their faces. Someone replied and said that that was a cliché. My reply to that was that there are no cliches in actual human life. Cliché is an aspect of narrative, and life is not a narrative. Life is not a story. You are not a character in a story. You are not the main character of your life because your life, ideally, has no characters. I am on philosophically dubious ground. But you know already how I feel about writers and philosophy.

Let me make a peace offering. My tennis coach in Paris recently found out that I am a writer. I had told him very little about myself over the last couple of years. But he found out and revealed himself to be very bookish and interested in literature. After my lesson, we sat in the club house and he asked me about my work and I asked him about the publishing house his friend had started. Then he told me something about his family that to me was so astonishingly intimate that I felt momentarily like the narrator of Rachel Cusk’s novels. But before he told me that, he told me that his mother had once called Bukwoski on the phone and had even written him a letter. My coach’s mother had received a letter in return with some drawings. He offered to take a picture of the letter and show it to me the next time he went to visit her. Then he said that he had started to read Bukowski and really liked him, and I asked him who his favorite writer was. My coach made a thoughtful face. Not like, angelic thoughtful. Like, man in his forties, really thinking thoughtful. It was not a performance of thought. Not affected, intellectual posturing. This is a man for whom thinking is genuine effort, and I could tell. Then he said, “You know, I don’t really know much about literature. I enjoy it, but I don’t read much. I am much more into cinema.”

So I asked him who his favorite filmmaker was, and he said, “I love De Palma. Carlito’s Way is my favorite movie.” And I thought, that is the craziest thing I have ever heard. Then, over our shoulder, the guy running the coffee bar in the club house said, “Training Day!!!” My coach agreed loudly, and then he said, “I love Al Pacino. He is so good. You know, Oscar Isaac—do you know him?—he has something of the Al Pacino. He is very good. But then he did Star Wars.” Have you ever heard a French person say Star Wars? It is the most endearing thing I have ever heard.

“I love Oscar Isaac,” I said. My coach said, “He is a serious actor. Very good. I hope he is in something good again soon.” I agreed and told him that I’d seen Oscar Isaac in a play a couple years back and had also enjoyed in him the remake of Scenes from a Marriage.

“They remade that?” he asked. “Where???” He seemed genuinely interested so I told him I’d seen it on HBO but that he could pirate it if he was interested. He nodded. Then he said the thing that was crazy that I won’t repeat here, but then he mentioned that there was a very good theater nearby and that I should go see it sometime. Because his father had worked there many years as an actor. He said that the theater part was whatever, but that the Comedie part was very beautiful, architecturally speaking, and it offered a great view of the surrounding area. We drank our espresso. He was wearing a purple TCU hat. I think he saw my eyes move to it. Because toward the end of our conversation, he put his cup down and said, “It’s a gift. From my previous student. She is coming from there, I think.”

Then he told me something else I can’t tell you. But it was very cool and very interesting, and shortly after that, we stood because he had a lesson starting and I had to take the train back to the 11^th.

b

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Justine Jones at Minneapolis Magazine has complied a list of resources for those looking to help out the communities being impacted by these raids. Have a look and see if there’s something you can do.

Also, Sarah Thankam Matthews wrote a really brilliant exploration of the “snuff film” era we’re always living through.