A Mannequin Cult Holiday Missive

It looks like we haven’t done one of these in a couple years, which is both a surprise and also totally unsurprising, because as I am fond of saying, the last several years have been a sickly pink slurry and I’ve lost track of a lot of what happened. It has been a difficult couple of years in large part because many things in my life — and, I suspect, in others’ — have been either very good or very bad, with no middle ground, both extremes somehow overlapping without mixing. And now we are on the edge of another godawful presidential election, in which two useless sacks of shit will vie for the privilege of quashing any civil liberties remaining, whether by force or sheer indifference, and more innocent people will die, in Palestine, in Sudan, in the USA.

Which is not to say we are allowed to deliquesce into despair. Others have done better work than I am capable of about how to help and what to do; here are a few. If anything, we must be ready to put up a fight again (the previews for this Missouri legislative session are bad). The question, I think, is how to find the strength to do that after trudging through so much horror, more with every passing day.

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I’m surprised to see that, according to my records, I read John Berger’s About Looking a little less than six months before the last Mannequin Cult holiday piece. I’m surprised by this because, as I noted in the book round-up in which I discussed it, the book contains Berger’s essay, “Between Two Colmars,” a brief reflection on Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim altarpiece which has rarely left my mind since I read it.

The Isenheim altarpiece, in one of its forms: the side panels are hinged. This image from Wikipedia.

I didn’t mention it in that holiday piece, but I have returned to it again and again in the interim. I’ve read it out loud to friends in parks; I’ve shared a link to my own transcription with many people (and here’s the text from Internet Archive, available with an account). In it, Berger uses his experiences of visiting Colmar to look at Grunewald’s magnificent altarpiece, an example of religious art that is simultaneously nightmarish and salvific, painted for display at a lepers’ hospital and emphasizing both the light of heaven and the horrors of war and disease, to parse through his own experience of disillusionment by the failure of ‘68. Berger does not dwell so much on his personal disillusionment, nor, indeed, on that of his friends — but his almost off-hand description of how they have fared in light of the rise of neoliberalism feels very a propos.

I genuinely believe, with every connotation the word can lend, that all is not lost; nothing is written in stone but the past, and even that is carved by a victor’s hand and must be questioned. I note this because, quite frankly, I became alert to political history as something I was personally living through — which is not to say that my father, may he rest in peace, didn’t try to awaken that in me by pulling me out of a playdate and sitting me down in front of the television to watch Great Britain return Hong Kong — with 9/11, and, as Dan Sheehan noted in a classic tweet, nothing ever got better. Far be it from me to claim that I arrived early at Berger’s realization that “there is no exemption from history” precociously young, but when I drew to the conclusion of Berger’s essay (indeed, each time I approach the conclusion of Berger’s essay) I cannot help but feel a frisson of recognition. If nothing else, have the last several years not taught us to “place [ourselves] historically”?

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The cover of Cibola Burn, because I wanted another image in this piece.

—it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out—

One hundred and thirteen times a second, it reaches out, and its reach broadens. If the signal came, the acknowledgement, it could stop, and it does not stop. It reaches out, and in reaching finds new ways to reach. It improvises, it explores. It is unaware of doing so.
— James S. A. Corey, Cibola Burn. New York City: Orbit Books, 2014. 340.

I wouldn’t say that the authors who make up James S. A. Corey are the finest prose stylists, but the Investigator interludes from Cibola Burn certainly stuck with me, and specifically that refrain, “—it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out—” That refrain, narrated by a consciousness that forms part of the greater alien being/s with which humanity has come into contact in the course of the novels, bespeaks that entity’s attempts to understand what is happening around it, what happened before it got there, what led it to this place.

I’ve spoken elsewhere about hyperobjects, about the human person as holobiont (or rather, cited others discussing these concepts). The borders between thing — the very nature of thingness — breaks down on close examination, and the idea that things are separate from each other is the child of typology, not fact.

We cannot help but reach out.

This suite of concepts is at the forefront of my thoughts lately: approximately 48 hours from now, I will be returning home from a (fun, cool, gender-confirming) surgery. And much as I have planned and prepared for it — my body a canvas I have prepared and on which is written my life, but I must turn over certain aspects of the underpainting to others more skilled than I — I am still preparing to lose a knife fight on purpose. And loath as I am to admit it, knife wounds aren’t as ignorable in real life as they are in fantasy and science fiction: they require care, and the recipient of the wound cannot do that alone. So I have been reaching out to my friends and loved ones: for company; for move recommendations; for healing.

I also plan to reach out to “friends” from my youth: in the interests of keeping things pretty low-impact, I’ve compiled a nebulous list for myself of books I loved as a kid, and about which I still think often, to reread as I recover. This is important, both because it illustrates my point — it reaches back to something I loved, and forward into the open question of whether I still will — and because it offers a warning to readers that that will probably be a lot of next January’s book round-up. But I also recently acquired some books I had not planned on reading: perhaps I will make new friends. There is meaning to be found, and new ways to reach out.

Ave atque vale, say the mannequins — ideally better than the plants in our house.

I will not understand the body I am going to have until I have it (approximately 48 hours from now). It is a mystery into which I will be baptized by a period of unconsciousness, and into which I will have to unfold in the arms of my friends and my partner. I am lucky to have that support — but the mystery is undiminished. It reaches backward in my life, through the last year or so of trying to prepare my body for it, and forward, into the altered embodiment I will have.

But what about the mannequins?

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Well, what about them? They’re us, and we’re them. Microplastics in our blood, in our rains: what difference can there be? The borders of things break down on close inspection.

The mannequins are us. We are our own nightmares. What can we do but our best to steer the course of the dream?

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