Photographs courtecy of Hedi Slimane
Cheap plastic cups, as flimsy as the negligible strength needed to crush them, their use as swift and instantaneous as the gesture one makes to carelessly throw them away, right after they dutifully quench your thirst, delivering vessels soon to be forgotten, messengers of satiety achieved, their liquid gift used up, so soon, mass produced grails held only for a few moments in the nervous hands of hopeful partygoers, either brittle and transparent, or milky white and pliable in a peculiar, crinkly manner, retaining their material continuity even when squeezed in somebody’s fist, collapsing improbably into sketchy snowballs, wrinkling like a nylon cousin of aluminum paper in your clenched palm, impermeable and difficult to tear apart but easily burnt, inexpensive, humble substitutes of glasses, a peculiar hybrid of fragility and endurance, losing their functional but identical shape to be reincarnated as unique statuettes commemorating nameless consumption and expiration, actualizing their potential for mediating manufactured meaning exactly at the moment they are about to become feather light garbage, their smashed contours and spindly cracks as individual as the fingerprints that have rubbed off from sticky fingers over their embossed ridges, or smudged by a thumb thoughtlessly caressing their glossy, synthetic surfaces, soft evidence of identity communicated and discarded, each digit that held them tentatively against thirsty lips, each fingertip that felt the coolness of the ice cubes sloshing inside, each different pressure, in the end, creating the improbable miracle of innumerable variables distinguishing the shape of every single empty cup thrown away, the party staples an artificial necessity whose time passes instantly as they become ignored sculptures, their disposability a perverse guarantee of newness and purity, their transformation into gestural, incidental, unconscious monuments to vital desire passing unnoticed, a self portrait made of trash and unconscious prestidigitation, innumerable abstractions representing singular existence, the fidgeting hands expressing the most self confident of desires, love, the whole ritual an attempt to escape the here and now.
Such are the trains of thought the barman hops on, a passenger of his own mind, aimlessly shuttled between fleeting associations, his feelings a silent, unopened, unaccompanied parcel, anonymously sent from station to station, recipient unknown to sender, emotional muteness as a ticket for sentimental travelling, this endless, wordless journey even now unraveling in his head as he dutifully places the columns of brand new plastic cups along his make-shift bar, just a white sheet over a table, a gentle priest building a temporary pulpit from which he is about to offer communion to the holiness of the thirst of strangers, upright stacks of austere ridges formed by modular repetitions of plastic rims waiting to be dismantled, and touched by the lips of the attending, one by one, eventually dislodged and separated from their cozy and successive structure, the skyward pillars erected from the repeated vertical interpenetration of equal parts, disappearing as the night progresses, the rhythm of this evanesced perfectly paced with the thirst of the revelers, the barman playing a crucial role, an architect as well as earthquake personified, him being the one that builds and then demolishes this colonnade, its brief existence a testament of need to be recycled into singular but scorned memorials of the party about to start, the shape of every used and crushed cup representing each drinker, its abstract form faithfully honoring his unrepeatable indescribability, a non denominational manifestation of selfless faith in miracles that despair will not notice, hopes of love expressed in discarded plastic, in the international meeting of reincarnated weaponless warriors, an amazing party happening on the island neighboring the beach where our boy spends his summers, our savior, who was only 17 a few years before this party, back then still a golden youth walking on the underside of the surface of the sea, tentatively stepping along the unseen side of the sunset path, coming out of the water unnoticed, and walking towards the people sitting on the sand, the night already fallen around everything and everybody, all of them unaware of the miraculous underwater walk, the sunset over, exactly 3 years before the barman begins to face the sea of guests about to crash in waves, smashing against the façade of his imperceptibly crucial post, a congregation of unknown believers beating a path to his gentle temple, their hands unconscious sculptors of doomed self portraits, the cheap plastic cups immortalizing their soul thrown away en masse, eventually huddling in cracked mountains of snowy white plastic, their minuscule peaks filling the black vinyl night of the trash bags, the pregnant darkness of which would, inevitably, end over the stone ledge dividing the party from the garbage dump.
The clouds above have cleared, the barman notices, parting like an opera curtain floating unapologetically in the sky, and through the glorious opening he can clearly see, not just the summer afternoon sky, but yet another airplane that is about to land on the island, amongst its passengers, our boy, our savior, now a young man of 20, about to visit, if not become, the party he is about to rule.
Note: A Fragile Accomplishment is a novel written and presented on Un nouVeau iDeal by Panagiotis Hadjistefanou
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