γνῶθι σεαυτόν
an archival piece of semi-fiction from 2021
1. The Delphic Oracle[1]’s a bitch[2] currency trader now, with an office with a view of the Thames, just the slapping river and the waves. Every day she intentionally makes and loses fortunes, leaving just enough for new pair of Yeezys[3] for the next one. Today it’s the tripartite heathered grey/dark taupe/beige Yeezy BOOST 350 V2 ‘Ash Pearl’. Their boxes with the sans-serif zeroes have crosslines through the gap of the numeral printed in thick black. They line the floor-to-ceiling windows like a car crash tissue paper monument. She throws the new box on the pile and adds the shoes to the line. Unlike the Sybil, no one even bothered asking if she wanted to die.
2. There six rock quartz dice, fifteen lot sticks, and scraps of paper with the lost language of the bone priestesses on her desk, along with (gold) Ray-Ban aviators she wears to disguise her solid gold sphere of a left eyeball when she goes out for her fiftieth iced latte of the day. The glasses and shoes are branded because she likes wading into the wet blackness of capital like a deep puddle after the rain. If time’s syrup and barely moves on her papery skin, capital runs off and off and pools in barcodes at her feet. Gum soles, reflective lenses, reflective windows getting hit again and again by unwitting pigeons; it’s a look. She knows she knows she knows. And then she doesn’t again.
3. On a bad day she looks like Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo. On a good day she looks like Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo.
4. If you look out her window at the clouds, they might look like a Constable or even a Whistler, but not a Fragonard. Constable’s cloud studies really do look like he stared up at the (pseudo-random) sky. Fragonard’s skies don’t. His clouds are so goddamn composed, they look like topiary. They are the perfect mirror for his trees. But the world doesn’t work like a Fragonard.
5. Until it does. Look at his most famous work, The Swing [4]. First of all, you can’t even see the clouds. Those things that look like clouds at first glance are actually just more trees. The cottage cream woman in the aristocratic shepherdess dress with some many frills it looks like an undiscovered deep sea vent creature. The man pulling the swing, the friend in the front looking up the woman’s skirts. This is supposed to be the erotic frisson of the painting. The real frisson is the one that happens when its original owner’s head came off with the whole Rocaille world. What did you think you were the woman, her pale skin blushing until it matches the tonal compact-powder-blush-pink of her dress? Did you think you were gazing up her skirt? They always think that, sweetcheeks. You’re the reeking peasant in the hut. You were and always are, even standing there like an idiot bird in front of the new golden frame in the air conditioned coolth of the gallery while the world burns.
6. The Delphic Oracle saw that one coming, by the way. She liked to stand by the guillotine and feel the stray blood from the severed carotid spatter her lips.
7. What would amuse the Oracle most, though she knows the exact statistical improbability of it ever happening, is if Toshiro Mifune jumped out of a postwar Japanese bush into the Wallace Collection and sliced the canvas in half and all the clouds ones hidden by the dense grotto foliage came pouring out.
8. The Enlightenment would like that too much maybe. Or the version of the Enlightenment that grew up into Steven Pinker giving another macaron of a neoliberal interview on NPR. The Delphic oracle normally likes the radio but she kicks it across the room. Motherfucking Reason!?!? She hasn’t seen her[5] in centuries. And they used to be friends.
9. She watches garment workers in a factory in Bangladesh die in a fire. She watches Evia burn in a fire. She, personally, sends the water running down the back of the British Museum’s Greek Galleries until all the Parthenon marbles look like they’re sweating[6]. When you know everything’s coming and you tell them a great empire will fall and it’s so obvious it’s trite and your priestesses still can’t even save them? That’s when you watch samurai movies until 2 AM again and gnash your black teeth and paint your nails the color of the muddy bottom of the Thames under the Frost Fair when it was secret and new.[7]
10. Reason’s gone and Honor? Honor was just a fantasy the dead jacked off to for too many millennia. The statuary base of fat putti just behind the eponymous swing now balances a box of Yeezys on it.[8] Is nothing sacred? Wait-- is nothing profane? Consider that the Hesychasts may have been right.[9] Consider that you could contemplate and fast and pray yourself into becoming one with God. Consider how much that would suck, actually.
11. There’s a guy in a grainy transfer of VHS to YouTube[10] of an iaido instruction video from ca. 1996 that matters here. The Oracle plays it on loop for a while. The guy’s dead. He said he wanted to become an iaido master after Second World War, even when steel blades were banned, because of the films of Toshiro Mifune, because Toshiro Mifune embodied the beauty of the budo of the Samurai. The Oracle, even knowing the relative historical accuracy and inaccuracy of this claim by turns, does not entirely disagree. Can you learn to become a thing from the simulacrum of one?
12. The Delphic Oracle sells converts GBP to USD to ETH.[11] She takes another loss. She hires a man to kill even though she knows, because she always knows, it will fail. She specifically requests a samurai who is not a Mishima-variety asshole. At least watching him try would be fun. That’s the entire point of that Fragonard, sof lots of Fragonard. Dead Rocaille breasts with nipples so kissable you could lick the paint. When they were being painted, she did. She presses the return key on the transaction with a long, acrylic talon emblazoned with a small artificial pearl on Vantablack. She rolls her ankles deliciously in the Primeknit uppers of the Yeezys.
13. The Enlightenment never applied to you anyway. Lots of things you think you merit never applied to you, or were never meant to be applied to you. Lace thinner than a human hair on the edge of a skirt. A window with a view of the cloudscape growing thick with rain. Dignity.
14. Death applies to you. The Oracle knows this, and knows precisely when and how. But you don’t have to be an Oracle to know it does. It’s not by fiat. It’s perhaps by fate. Roll the dice. Consider the crematory vibes of Yeezy Boost 350 V2, in the Cinder[12] colorway, released March 2020. The tent hospitals in Wuhan have become tent hospitals in Italy. The morgues are full. It’s possible, but irresponsible to speculate, that Kayne has schizophrenia anyway. All the Oracle knows is that you’re dying from the moment of your birth and that they’re good shoes.
15. Death is cruel. Summer is cruel. The syrupy texture of time is cruel. The regime of Louis XVI was cruel. The way the French language makes you say numbers like “86” is cruel.[13] The way Marat died in the tub was cruel too. Oppression is cruel. Revolutions are cruel. Ending things, even knowing they themselves are cruelty, is cruel. All the Bolsheviks had to line them up, the Tsar’s family, and shot them point blank against the beautiful wallpaper. You’d be fucked for life too if you had to shoot someone against the wallpaper. Yes, Tolstoian suffering. Yes, yes yes, it’s all cruel. The Delphic Oracle gets this question a lot, about how to prevent cruelty, and at this point she’s just sick of being asked about what’s already always ineluctable. Some lots just can’t be uncast.
16. The basement where the Romanovs were executed, behind the locked double doors, has an elegant curved ceiling and the wallpaper is traced with gilt lines that softly gesture to the imperial crest embedded in them. It was beautiful wallpaper. It looks like it might be a like pink-red, or perhaps blue. It is likely the same pinks and blues that are in the clothes and skies of Fragonard. The last thing you see will probably not be nearly so beautiful. But even the Oracle can’t tell you that for certain.
17. The clouds blow across the Thames and the rain pours down into the river making impact like a series of explosive rings. The swords used by samurai in the films that star Toshiro Mifune had to be fake. The real ones had been used, only about twenty years prior, to publicly execute Allied prisoners of war by beheading, usually in front of all the other prisoners, often on beaches.
18. The Oracle thinks the world might be Rocaille sometimes when she considers the cyborg mesh-frame of her expensive Herman Miller desk chair. It looks like it is made of out infinitely tiny fabric spines. It curves like the lower back of the undergarments you can just glimpse underneath the petticoats in The Swing. The people in the offices below her have started to return. They have fantasy grottoes and they talk about bubbles where Everything Is Almost Normal Again. They order the clouds themselves. You don’t even have to paint them. One of them compliments her shoes in the elevator.[14]
19. The Oracle thinks the world might be just accidentally. If she just learned to roll right. If the lid just didn’t stick over the orb of her gold eye. If the pigeons stopped hitting the window.
20. The Oracle installs a swing in her office, which is too minimalist to have wallpaper. She swoops back and forth, savoring the small pause at the peak of Newtonian velocity[15]. But maybe the fate of this world is multiply quantum. Maybe the forking paths of photons dodging existence don’t all converge but diverge here, as possibilities go. Maybe she just once, cannot know. She stares at the crisp laces of her sneakers, parabolically canting up and down again, and smiles. Maybe the man with the sword she has hired to kill her will succeed. Maybe the end of history isn’t a plea for mercy but a cry of ecstasy and relief. Hold a single black icosahedral die in your palm. Close your fingers and kiss them. Throw.
[1] The Delphic Oracle, otherwise know as the Pythia, is associated with the shrine to Apollo at Delos. Delos holds the navel of the world. There are other oracles—at Didyma for instance—and one limited edition figurine of each was made inside a spherical gashapon vending machine capsule. Delphi still has not located the capsule of herself, so the chance to collect them all remains. For this purpose, you should always keep spare change on you.
[2] Helen herself was kunopis, after all dog-faced, which is Homeric for “that bitch” and the Oracle knows better than to pretend that things are now otherwise, not for all the black-prowed ships and dissolving paper straws strewn across the glass acreage of her desk.
[3] Why Yeezys? Say the word to yourself Yeez EEe. Two long syllables, two stressed words. It’s a spondee, and the Oracle, as per above, has a fondness for both literal and figurative spondaic feet.
[4] Originally entitled Les Hasards heureux de l'escarpolette, which if you ask me, by homonym with the English word ‘hazard’, if not by literal meaning of ‘happy accidents’, is an incredibly accurate title.
[5] Reason has very carefully maintained pin curls and a desk personally designed by Ray Eames in a kind of lacquered midcentury orange-red. She can be, admittedly, very annoying.
[6] Yeezy Foam Runners, which encase the foot in a combination of Greek sandal and Ridley Scott’s Alien, are partly composed of the same algae a distressed curatorial intern will find in the back of a Lapith-Centaur metope five years from now, in a dangerous hollow in the stone. Of course, this is not a coincidence.
[7] Climate change raises the possibility that the Thames might, in the absence of a functioning Gulfstream, freeze over hard again, which would mean skating on long curved blades and facing the end of the world in costumes from Sally Potter’s Orlando. This strikes me as ideal in many ways. But who am I to know? Not an oracle, or a sybil even. But neither are you.
[8] Yeezy Boost 350 V2 2019, in colorway “Cloud”, of course.
[9] Hesychasts are monks who pray in order to know capital-G-‘God’ intellectually, as in with an endpoint that specifically results in a kind of direct experience of divinity resulting from mental ascesis. Had you been alive in Late Antiquity, or indeed Byzantium, you would never forget about the Hesychasts either. The never-ending synods alone! Here Delphi rolls her eyes a little. But you and I, who have had so little unmediated experience of anything, only gesture halfheartedly at the sacrality of inbox zero.
[10] These transfers, are in some cases, secret uploads to YouTube by the Fates, who were responsible for preferring VHS to Betamax and still nostalgically like to use the medium to nudge things along a bit. The noise artifacts from medium transfer are maybe where the likes of you and I find this missing sacrality. Or not. Maybe you need a rocky cave instead. I can only speak for myself late at night, hunching over a laptop screen.
[11] ETH is Ethereum, which is to say, not a fiat currency. The idea of fiat currency makes the Oracle laugh. Having personally sat atop bronze tripod cauldrons and gold laurel wreaths in a hoard in the back of a cave at Delphi for not inconsiderable centuries, the idea of a guarantee of anything providing value, even nominal, seems silly. Nothing is guaranteed. Not that she would prefer a gold standard, mind you. She can gnash gold with her back teeth. She thinks maybe we should go back to sinking giant carved rings of stone in the sea like the island of Yap. Or sneakers. She here thoughtfully mashes a price-gouged slab of rubber composite into the grey industrial carpet.
[12] Cinders specifically derived from the 946 eruption of Paektu Mountain, which even Delphi admits was pretty epic. It’s in all the chronicles. It’s in the ice and the rings of the trees. Like this one will be, this end, whatever it is.
[13] Quatre-vingt six. Which is four times twenty plus six. I KNOW. I FUCKING KNOW.
[14] These are the Yeezy Boost 350 V2 in the late 2021 colorway “Light”. They are UV sensitive. If enough photons hit them on the way to her thirty-sixth latte, Delphi will know the woman in the elevator will die at sixty three after a long illness at home with her loving son. If less than this fixed minimum, she will live until ninety, when she will look up between the clouds of her cataracts to watch the same son’s raft-ship winking out just as it leaves the orbit of the dying world. Fate is weird that way. Even photons cannot escape a black hole.
[15] v = Δs/Δt, which is to say displacement over time. But displacement for Delphi is infinite. She never had a fixed place to begin with. But her momentary displacement, which is to say the parabolic arc of the swing, is pinpointable enough for an estimate (for which you will have to integrate, both mathematically and in terms of the assorted prayers of the Hesychasts for clarity amidst the blips of the tape). It is fixed; sort of. Barring: Volcanos. Frost Fairs. Aristocracies. Clouds.