There has never been, nor will there ever be, human life without apparitions.
Behold the child.
Behold the apparition.
Breath
On the night of June 30, 2017, twenty-four-year-old Dasha Medveveva is driving her BMW in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Her friend, Sofia Magerko, sixteen, is filming the scene with her smartphone. They’re live on Instagram.
The two friends are drinking alcohol, screaming and joking. One yells “Hi boys” into the camera. Dasha makes the victory sign with the index and middle fingers of both hands. She waves her arms in the air like she’s dancing. We begin to doubt that the car is actually moving; then Dasha takes hold of the steering wheel with her left hand, eyes on the road. Sofia turns the camera back in her direction and stares into the lens again. Victory sign. Another sip. They scream. The sound of “tremendous impact.” Darkness. Silence.
Days later, I watch the video on the website of an Italian newspaper, which declares: “Ukraine, live on Instagram: two girls die in a car crash.”
I watch it a thousand times. First, I examine, between pause and play, the moment when everything changes. The transition between life and death. Which breath is the last breath?
Then I linger on the girls. I try to study every single detail of Dasha’s face, but it’s dark, still nighttime, and she’s constantly moving.
I’m certain of it.
Without a doubt: I know this girl.
Light
What is an apparition?
Everything appears; it comes to light.
Our being in the world is a continuous flow of sudden and unexpected events. Everything that happens to us, day after day, minute after minute, is a sudden and unexpected event: the traffic jam in a provincial town on a summer’s day (a small, unexpected collision ahead of us and there go ten unanticipated minutes), the boiler that stops working, the presence of another customer in a bar where we’re having coffee (if it’s not the presence of another client that is sudden or expected, then it’s the presence of that particular client: why him with the belly of an alcoholic? Or him with the anonymous, forgettable face? Why her with the glittery fingernails?).
To be confronted by an apparition, however, the event doesn’t need to be sudden or unexpected.
An apparition can take many forms. For example, it can trigger hostility (the woman with the glittery nails is not merely a presence but a strange presence: she looks you fiercely in the eye without speaking: what is she thinking? Is she really ferocious? Is the ferocity in your eyes or in hers?). An apparition can shape the linear axis of events as we’ve conceived them (to circumvent that collision we take a side street: there, on the country road, we see the body of a dog that was probably run over: a wave of melancholy washes over us), or change our state of being (the defective boiler will delay an important appointment: will we go out without taking a shower, thus feeling somewhat dirty, sloppy, and embarrassed? Or will we delay and arrive late, giving rise to expectation in those who are waiting for us and causing them to have expectations of us?). Without a doubt, an apparition is brought about by a novelty or a return. It comes from the shadows, perhaps, into the light. An apparition can shape both time and space, distorting the imagination.
In any case, an apparition, as such, brings about change.
Certain preliminary conditions are necessary for an apparition to fully exist. First and foremost, a certain awareness must be possible: to be aware of how an object or a thought is perceived, to be aware of what our emotional reaction is to that object or thought (to think: now, precisely now, I’m thinking this thought), and to be aware of ourselves in relation to context. To try, on rare occasions, to embody the act of observation or at least to be as present as possible. Let’s hypothesize a human being that has no awareness (an unheard-of case): they’d be a human without apparitions.
Another necessary condition for this perception to exist is the willingness for contemplation. “To contemplate,” “contemplari”: to draw into one’s own horizon; to observe (the flight of birds) within a circumscribed space called templum.
There is no human life without apparitions. But to be aware of as many apparitions as possible you must overturn everything: contemplation is more than staying still, immobile. You must carve out an interior space and then remodel it day after day. You must go out to meet the shock of the unknown. Contemplation is not standing still and waiting for the world: it’s going to meet the world, expanding your own templum and simultaneously augmenting your awareness. Contemplation is an important pillar of apparitions: you observe the world; therefore you observe yourself; and therefore you live.
An apparition can change, sometimes only imperceptibly, the flow of events.
Following an apparition, the sensations we feel in our bodies lead to a change in direction, a veering off, or an acceleration. Without sensation there’s no apparition. Without sensation there’s no human being. What’s that melancholy we feel when we see the dog’s body? A weight on the stomach, a shiver of the spine, a gasp of breath. What’s that feeling of annoyance over the broken boiler? An itch, a hot feeling, a feeling of heaviness.
An apparition brings change. Apparitions insinuate themselves everywhere: like microbes they hide in the flannel of pillows. We should thank them. We feel alive thanks to them. Dasha, Hi boys, was an apparition.
Enchantment
The number of thoughts we have each day ranges between fifty and eighty thousand. When this stream of thoughts stops for a moment it’s more probable that an apparition will appear. The denser the chatter is in our mind (if it’s true that a certain awareness is required in order for an apparition to exist, to feel it) the more difficult it will be to experience an apparition. The more willing and open we are to an apparition, the more we can create the necessary conditions for one: experience.
Experiences don’t always coincide with apparitions. Does every experience bring about change? Yes. Does every experience bring about conscious change? No. Sitting still on the sofa, we’re seemingly doing nothing. Is something happening? Yes. The cells of our body are moving. If we pay attention, there is a distant itch in our baby toe. If we don’t, however—and if we are not attentive to what is happening—the possibility that this experience of change is unconscious is quite high. The apparitions therefore, in a case like this, are seemingly far away.
In this case, yes: this experience was an apparition. The spatial-temporal axis of our own interiority shifts, perceptions are more intense, awareness increases, and the mind becomes more concentrated, germinating fewer useless facts, words, and movements that will be forgotten a few seconds later.
An apparition doesn’t always present itself in this way. Sometimes it is more subtle, emitting only a few vibrations, like something telling you that maybe, for some reason, this moment will return, that what you’ve seen will reappear in your mind: this life is like a great literary text. It just happens and that’s that. It’s contemplation more than narration.
On one occasion, an apparition immediately took shape for me this way.
I’d been invited to a small art gallery where an artist unfamiliar to me was giving a performance. Immediately my mind began to race. Tomorrow, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. Watch the match, die, move to a different city. The mind is a horse and we are the jockey: it carries us far.
It had only been a few hours since I’d seen the “live death” on Instagram: I’d already experienced an apparition (Does one possess apparitions? Or does one suffer from them? Do they sink into us and we swim around in them? Or do they sit enthroned like Greek gods in our mind? Do they live when we’re asleep? Yes, of course! Do they live when we die? Of course not!)
But this apparition is of a very different nature.
I’m greeted outside the Il Colorifico art gallery; then I enter. The English artist Tamara MacArthur, who was born in Berlin and lives in Glasgow, is center stage.
Her face peeks out from a female body made of papier-mâché, which in turn supports a male body, also papier-mâché. She is surrounded by a realistic papier-mâché chapel, Romanesque in structure, which took her a month to construct inside the exposition space. The sky is improbably starry, like a cartoon.
The columns of the chapel are blown-up self-portraits of the artist and are very fragile (trying to describe an artistic performance is really ridiculous: words are such human instruments).
Tamara sings.
At that moment, I’m the only visitor in her view. She sings and looks me in the eye. Her voice is broken. She looks you in the eye and her gaze never strays. You want to escape this gaze and at the same time you want it to last forever. There’s no eroticism, there’s no sadness, there’s no desperation, there’s no complicity: it’s all this and more. Tamara sings: “If I had words to make a day for you, I would sing you a morning golden and new.” We’re inside of enchantment. The song by Scott Fitzgerald, a Scot, is the one the farmer sings to Babe the piglet in the film, hoping to nurse him back to health. The farmer sings sweetly but doesn’t really seem to believe in magic. Then something happens: there’s an awareness that something might change.
I’m witnessing an artistic experience: artistic experiences are always apparitions.
I try to escape, tear myself away and go into the other little papier-mâché chapel, but I must go back. The dirge continues. The song is always the same, endless, for three-and-a-half hours. Her eyes are always the same. Every single moment as important as the last. There’s no audience. Each visitor is the only one possible for the artist during these very long minutes. There’s no mother and there’s no birth. There is no origin or goodbye.
Don’t go. Don’t abandon me. The moment of abandonment is suspended. It seems it will never end. Then other visitors arrive. You’re the one who feels abandoned as Tamara stares into the pupils of another. She sings the healing song, “If I Had Words,”, the magic ritual. You’re invisible. You try to close your eyes, but it doesn’t do anything. You feel the molecules moving on your body. Shivers, heat, sensations—exploding from human contact.
The apparition is still there, but you are nothing: not even a little ghost.
Mind and consciousness
Clearly, an integrated system is required for apparitions to occur.
According to Stanislas Dehaene, contemporary cognitive neuroscience distinguishes between three concepts:
- Vigilance, also known as wakefulness: this varies depending on whether we’re asleep or awake. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition for conscious access and processing.
- Selective attention: this is the focusing of mental resources on a subset of information. Attention selects certain information, detaches it from the background, and processes it in depth.
- Conscious access: this is when some of the information processed enters a second post-perceptual stage of cognitive processing, which makes it long-lasting, available for many further cognitive processes, and referable to others. I am conscious that I have changed jobs. I can tell a friend about it. This makes me realize I must take a different route on my scooter in the morning. This information is now subject to conscious processing: channeled, in a serial manner, through a series of controlled stages of processing.
According to Dehaene, in the laboratory it’s possible to investigate dozens of ways in which a stimulus can cross the boundary between unperceived and perceived, between selective attention and conscious access, between the invisible and the visible, allowing neuroscientists to understand what changes in the brain during these transitions.
(How does literature deal with that boundary? Can literature avoid dealing with that boundary? Can it ever be reduced to simplifying the world? Some things can be seen, and some cannot: that’s all there is to it!)
In Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus notes what happens to Aristotle: from a distance, he sees a tower that appears round. He’s certain of it. As he approaches, he realizes the tower is rectangular. He concludes that the apparent shape of the tower depends on where the observer is standing and that only by moving can he discover its true shape.
But if the tower is rectangular—or at least seems to be—it’s not that easy to say the performance of Tamara MacArthur was exactly as described here. Not so much in how it was realized but more in the reaction to it. Where there’s a body and therefore a mind, there’s a particular type of awareness linked to a particular moment and a particular context: what was the predisposition at that precise moment of another spectator? Was he hungry and less focused on the performance? Was his mind leading him to the Mickey Mouse kebab shop next to the gallery—which, incidentally, advertised a fifty-cent discount per kebab for visitors to the gallery with a handwritten sign? What was his life experience, his DNA? Did the artist remind him of his cousin? His grandmother? His trip to Argentina?
The mind is often elsewhere, headed in another direction.
In the intricate geography of what we call the “self,” it is impossible not to outline that often unknown place called consciousness.
In 1804, the doctor and philosopher Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler discovered a particular phenomenon of visual perception. The optical illusion that became the driving force behind the study was called “The Troxler Effect.”
Try to focus on the central cross and be aware of what happens to the surrounding circles. As you’ll see, they’ll fade away, disappear then casually reappear.
The objective fixed visual representation appears and disappears from our subjective representation at irregular, unpredictable intervals: through apparitions.
The effect is due to an adaptation mechanism of the neurons responsible for vision, in particular the light-sensitive cells in the retina: the cells become accustomed to the image and after a while no longer perceive the surrounding visual stimulus.
What, among other things, does the Troxler effect tell us? That optical illusion—which would then be used to study consciousness through research by Francis Crick and Christof Koch—does not require a sophisticated level of consciousness.
The other important aspect is that illusions are deeply suggestive: only the individual can say when and where the circles disappear in their mind. At the same time, the results are completely reproduceable: anyone who observes the figure will report the same type of experience.
The apparitions, then, are numerous—circles appear and disappear “at random.” It’s certain, however, that this is happening. From this point of view, literature—and so also in Tamara MacArthur’s performance If You Believed in Me—thrives on difference: only the individual can say when, where, and how much the artistic experience has affected their awareness—to forget, so to speak, the past and the future—and when and how much it has not. At the same time, the “results”—the quotes are necessary as artistic experiences are not ranked in the charts or the ring—are completely different from one individual to the next.
While many people believe that the Winged Victory of Samothrace, The Odyssey, and Mozart’s Don Giovanni are absolute masterpieces, it’s impossible to say that these works have generated the exact same sensation at any given moment in two different people.
Apparitions in Manhattan
New York, a few weeks earlier.
Breakfast in Soho at Dominique Ansel’s bakery. I wait in line for an hour to eat a cronut, a culinary invention that conceptually melds the croissant with the donut. Pastry as fetish. Pastry as monument. Enter, snap, Instagram, and you’re off, towards another Tower of Pisa, another Sagrada Familia.
Mid-morning at the Guggenheim, where there’s a temporary Agnes Martin exhibition. To look at them distractedly, these canvases might seem like the height of abstraction or conceptual art. Grids of horizontal and vertical lines repeated uniformly on the canvas. The patterns, however, are blurred: if you look at them for a long time it seems they might disappear before your eyes, like the fading circles of the Troxler effect. Every single instant in which the hand moves the pencil—often Agnes Martin uses pencil on canvas: for the pencil, the canvas becomes an unknown place, an unexplored forest—is crucial. Behind every microscopic segment of the line there’s a small breath: but a line is a continuum, doesn’t have segments, sections. Time is the very matter of Agnes Martin’s paintings.
We’re in front of canvases that are pure contemplation: soaked with pure apparition.
If a work is made of the moment it is executed, these scholastic grids, these elementary school notebooks, are artistic experiences of pure life and pure impermanence: they hide behind the white of the canvas, the presence of life, the passing of time—and therefore, death.
On the way out, there is a panel that reads: “My life is nothing—there is no incident—it’s as though I never existed” (Agnes Martin).
After eating a hamburger from a food truck—a small apparition: an unexpected pickle, unrequested, that spoils the bacon’s crunchiness and contaminates the taste of the frozen meat soaked in canola oil, the sort of meat that’s in the hamburgers available at frozen food counters, which announce on their packaging, in very small print, “Despite careful monitoring, we recommend that you be aware of the possible occasional presence of small bones,” which is another apparition, both worrying and somewhat deadly—you go to the movies on the Upper West Side.
They’re showing Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, a film that many consider the first full-length animated film, a so-called “silhouette film” consisting of 300,000 frames. The characters are composed of twenty-five to fifty separate pieces of lead and cardboard that are held together by thin metal wires. To make the film, inspired by A Thousand and One Nights, Reiniger and her collaborators—among whom was Walter Ruttmann, who a few years later would be at the center of a fascinating cinematographic-political-literary case between Mussolini, Pirandello, and Soldati with the film Acciaio—had introduced images and effects realized with other animation techniques, obtained for example with sand, or through the so-called “Fischinger machine,” invented by Oskar Fischinger, an apparatus that consisted of a sort of sharpening machine synchronized with a camera and equipped with a rotating circular blade, which, at each turn, cut off a thin slice from a block composed of countless layers of different colors. The camera filmed in “stop-frame” the surface of the block of wax after each cut, generating a unique abstract animation. Who are the characters? The figures—articulated silhouettes made from cardboard and lead sheets, then crushed by a roller and moved around like puppets on an illuminated plane composed of layered tissue paper—are nothing but Chinese shadows. There is almost no editing. The camera chases the shadows, which appear to be autonomous, skittish, inside a dream. The shadow-Achmed meets witches and sorcerers, confronts them, and wins over the shadow princess. The apparitions are endless: where there’s an apparition, where there’s an artistic experience, there’s shadow.
At Madison Square Garden in the evening watching basketball, the fastest most contemplative sport that exists. The New York Knicks are hosting the Milwaukee Bucks in regular season. They’ll lose at the last second. The cheering is not deafening: the crowd just sings continuously in a slightly phlegmatic tone, “defense, defense.” During half time I line up to buy a beer, but, when I’m about to order, I realize I’ve left my ID in my bag at my seat in the arena. When the cashier asks for my ID, I smile and tell her I don’t have it with me; she denies me the possibility of beer. I say there is no way I’m underage so she can sell me the drink ticket (besides, “I’m Italian . . .”). She says no, the rules are the rules, and begs me to get out of the way, when an apparition appears: a girl behind me, slender with the face of a model, says, “I’ll get it for you.” I smile, give her the money for my beer and hers too.
She orders two beers; we don’t speak; there’s too much chaos. When they hand them to us in the other line, we toast. I ask her name. “Dasha,” she says, “I’m from the Ukraine.”
“I’m Italian!” She smiles and walks off.
Body and consciousness
What is this willpower of the mind, this obstinate preoccupation with the body? Our daily hymn to the body is nothing but a hymn to death. Behold the child, born into a body that then dies.
Dasha’s body alive. Dasha’s body dead.
The body, naturally, is home to apparitions. Oh, a new mole. I remember there used to be three here above my biceps, but now there are four. What is this swelling in my chest I notice while taking a shower? Just an apparition, a small apparition. The apparition, clearly, is not just the mole or the nodule but the bodily sensations they generate.
Every moment is crucial. There’s a moment in a basketball match where, after trailing by a large margin, a team seems about to recover. From -20 to -9 in just a few minutes. It all comes down to this. Attack the team who’s ahead. The feeling is that, if the other team makes a basket, the comeback will be stopped. The inertia will be blocked. It’s all down to this. The apparition in the body: the line between a small, harmless cyst and cancer is very narrow. It’s all a matter of seconds and millimeters. If it’s a cyst, I’ll live—cheers! If it’s cancer, it’s game over.
How many small, useless apparitions dwell inside the tin can of the body. On YouTube, millions of people watch videos where pimples and blackheads are squeezed by a skilled hand. Double apparition: first a pimple, then pus.
Another apparition: a video of a syringe drawing blood from a child has a startling number of views. Terrified, the child screams. We watch.
What is with this looking, laughing, and grieving both inside and out of the body? Rest in peace. Our bodies become ashes. I want to be cremated! I want to be buried right next to her.
Where there’s a body, in some way, there’s consciousness. One of the main roles of consciousness has to do with eternity (even consciousness has its obsessions): create lasting thoughts.
Among the many lasting thoughts, Dasha’s image was cautiously creeping in (yet there was frequent interference from Tamara MacArthur’s song of the dragonflies). It was obvious; I was sure that I’d met this woman who’d died live on Instagram. How to forget that apparition? It was obvious; I was sure that my mind was playing tricks—there are many women in Ukraine. Was I sure that her name was Dasha? And if it really was, how widespread is that name in Ukraine? And was there any reason to believe that it was her in that grainy video, the same woman I’d spent a maximum of one minute of my life with? And especially: What does it matter? Who cares?
Had I experienced dramatic moments in my life? Several despairing ones, I thought. How many people had I been in contact with who’d then died? A few, certainly, like most everyone. Was there such a thing as despair? “Only unhappiness belongs to men, despair belongs to God,” Gesualdo Bufalino wrote, but he was wrong.
Despair is so human, so corporeal—and was this not the case, was this not in fact despair, despair for the death of a person you’d perhaps met, a person you’d had only the slightest chance of meeting—and so hard.
With despair, the mind is overloaded, the body a vessel. True despair is forever, like an earthquake. And maybe this is the engine of our millennial investigation on the body: despair is forever, like skin.
In certain female rats, Fritz Steiniger observed a special way of killing their fellow species. The rat slowly and furtively approaches another rat who is eating and waits for the right moment to attack. A final apparition. Suddenly it bites the side of the other rat’s neck, hitting the center of the carotid with extraordinary precision. The scuffle lasts a few seconds. The affected rat bleeds internally, a large amount of blood transferring under the skin or into a cavity of the body.
This is what we do to ourselves.
We boycott ourselves with our own minds—I know that woman; she’s telling me something; her death is a contagion; I’m going to die; we could have loved each other; we loved each other; we drank beer.
And then there is the body, the gatekeeper, the hero, the first to fall. The body: begging to return to the inorganic, it doesn’t deny anything.
In Monika and Pawel, the sculptor Pawel Althamer portrays himself naked alongside his wife. On closer inspection, the sculpture is made of animal intestines. It’s a dead body that lives on as raw material inside a body that appears both dead and alive at the same time: maybe I’m alive; we sculpt ourselves (we kill ourselves!) and compose ourselves out of living and dead flesh.
In Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H., the protagonist sees a cockroach crawling out of her maid’s wardrobe and, panicking, slams the door—crushing the cockroach—and then watches it die. G.H. stands for “genere umano / human race.” An admonition. A hope. An illusion. A threat.
Expansiveness
There’s always an invisible motivation behind artistic experiences. Whatever the form, artistic experiences have a text: there’s no text without what is behind, in front of, and beyond the text. If a text, by means of a language, reinvents the world, this is not enough: it is possible, however, that a text abolishes space-time, subverts it, expresses the unreal, lives the unreal. Is it then an instrument of truth? This is just as impossible as the contrary. A language, even when manifesting the intention of truth, betrays it: it is still an emanation of the body, a passion. Yet shreds of truth cling to everything, even the inanest propagandas. By way of a text, an artistic experience goes somewhere. Necessarily, it revolves around death. Why? Because artistic experiences always orbit the body. Death does the same: it orbits the artistic experience taking place, eavesdropping on the mind of whomever is carrying it out. It’s not supernatural at all: everything is at best invisible.
In Robert Walser’s The Tanners, the protagonist Simon walks in a snowy forest. There he discovers the corpse of a poet, his last poems in his pocket. This is precisely how the author Robert Walser will die.
Is it possible to not be preoccupied by death? Those who engage in artistic experiences can only feel death—alive, but dying breath by breath, like everyone else. Hastening slowly. Inhabiting the pause, the midpoint: breaking down the midpoint.
By nature, human beings push towards closure. They furrow their brows and won’t look forward. But an artistic experience is spacious. Be expansive, always more expansive.
If everything is usual—or appears to be as usual—the artistic experience breaks this vital dogma: it gives birth to the unusual within the usual or original experience. It is infinite for the simple fact that everyone who writes, paints, reads, and observes—dies.
Expansiveness: live poetically.
Reside then within what need not be said. It is not, of course, a matter of form. Compared to the literary definition of “dystopia” (“Prediction, description or representation of a future state of affairs with which, contrary to utopia and for the most part in open controversy with the perceived trends of the present, anticipates highly negative situations, developments, socio-political and technological structures”)—the medical definition is much more preferable: “The displacement (usually due to congenital malformation) of a viscera or a tissue from its normal location.” An artistic experience is an alteration: a congenital malformation. The Elephant Man is spacious.
To live expansively is to live in doubt, to play zone defense within ourselves. The artistic experience lives in doubt. To be spacious is to constantly carry a prison within yourself. Spaciousness does not have names: “Names,” wrote Claude Hagège, “are unfortunately the names of something.” An artistic experience cannot be a cast of the world. There is never dust in the casts of the world.
An artistic experience is an extreme experience made up of apparitions. A quiet place of exaggeration. The center of every storm.
Every word a stone.
Every moment, an instant.
