FILEP MOTWARY

PANAGIOTIS HADJISTEFANOU: A FRAGILE ACCOMPLISHMENT - CHAPTER XV (PART TWO)

Photographs courtesy of Hedi Slimane

...and therefore truth, undiscovered knowledge, blindness or invisibility an ancient passageway to revelation, as children who play hide and seek know, but adults prefer to forget, except for tonight, when the guests will do their best to remain unknown to each other, some choosing to keep their eyes shielded, and thus deciding they will never meet the temporary though significant gaze of whoever touched them, these being their partners, or at least partners for the night, while the other half, those that choose to roam the party able to see, they are also stripped of the privilege of recounting events and naming names, since they themselves will remain equally unknown, and none the less wiser about their blindfolded and thus masked significant others, their common denominator being that they will remain forever unable to recognize a face whose lips they devoured, however fleetingly, protruding as they are, for a moment, provocatively, the grapes of love spilling over from a napkin of concealment, glistening, under the soft silk eye mask of somebody, or other, since everybody is, for tonight, somebody’s nobody, and if they ever do see the face of whomever they kiss, and thus selflessly, love, then, they will do so in breach of the rules of the gathering, by accident, happy or otherwise, the punishment of those who have seen each other beyond the realms of blind devotion, being, justly, expulsion, from this artificial, and thus, fragile paradise, exclusion from a unique occasion, an eviction from what can only be called an internet, a vast weave of emotions that not only connects but also gathers within its intricate pattern those that swim around it, carefully, since successful invisibility and suppression of identity while making love is a particularly difficult task, requiring not only sexual chemistry, tenderness of touch and a winning approach, but also physical discipline, planetary alignments, fate and chance, this exorcism of shadows and zeroing of external parameters being an incredible feat of happy coincidences, similarly performed by nature everyday, which offers us an existential miracle that remains unnoticed, as we hurry past it, easily ignoring it, the millisecond that the sun stands precisely at the perfect right angle in relation to us, making our shadows disappear, if only for the momentary blaze that is our own personal high noon, our shadow immediately spilling out again after this trick of the light, seeping from under our feet after merely a second of banishment, like so much water leaking into the slowly sinking ship that is our life, our afternoon shadow at first a small puddle, then blown to full glory, a dark caricature of who you are, reborn each and every day, a blurry mess in the early, hazy morning light, progressively growing, as the day fades into night, elongating your and every other shadow surrounding you, joining them into an ocean of universal darkness, the night as dark as the shadows that disappear into it, the night is an ink blot swallowing a whole universe populated by other inkblots, progressively, irrevocably, but within this moment, the one called your own absolutely personal midday, and only for this little, almost stolen, moment of glory and coronation by the sun itself, you and your shadow are free from each other, right there, and then, when the sun hangs exactly in the right spot over your head, and even then, it is only you in the entire universe who is shadow-less, particularly you, since everyone is at a different co-ordination to the heavens every time it happens to them, the world being a cosmic watchmaker specializing in animal, vegetable and mineral sundials, all unconscious of the fact that, for a second every day they have no shadow, and therefore have escaped from time, slipped through a blind spot in the center of their rotating universe, but are still alive, and counting time in their place under the sun, without a shadow flowing out of them, unsinkable, free from the reminder of the ever approaching eternity both haunting and guiding them, free from shadows if only for an imperceptible while, a small fraction of time that, sadly, only a part of humanity attempts to elongate at this party, as the guests mingle to experiment about existence, supposing, on a summer night, that life could be free from shadows even within the dark, this reincarnation of light out of nothing manifesting itself as a nebulous, almost imperceptible cloud of gestures, body heat and deliquescent perfumes, elements blended and shared with the taste and warmth of tanned skin, sensations spinning around the revolving orbits of derailed sounds, following the spaced out music played by our boy, our savior, his audio waves blowing across this emotional darkness as a sudden wind flaps a net, waving it midair, at the very moment it is cast, before it is immediately submerged, the sounds goading the emotions of the listeners along trajectories of ever more asymmetrical ellipses, their souls riding wild horses of chemically enhanced consciousness, summer, sex, music and drugs, stoking ancient fires, both warming and burning everything, the combination of awe, sound and abandonment, lust and transcendence, all tied to the mast of hallucinations sailing away to horizons that are possible only if one searches for the infinity within, this radical critique of the visible world materialized astoundingly by the party décor, a scenery reminiscent of a conflagration of luminescent churches, human in scale, transported from an unknown planet to the arid outlines of a Mediterranean island, a majestic construction that constitutes a maze, a labyrinth of shining walls, erected out of double sided mirror, placed concentrically around various fugal points, the trick being that these walls have their mirrored side facing their insides, an uncanny optical illusion that evokes the optical impossibility of transparent metal, this inter-facing of reversed double mirrors creating a reflective universe, a space penetrable by vision from the outside but impartial to idols of anything not encased within it’s limits, a hollowness that however measurable is still impossible to visualize accurately, since it is represented as the infinite multiplications of the mirrors facing themselves in four directions simultaneously, an unraveling of nothingness expanding endlessly to the power of unfathomable iterations, an echo of zero whose scale and repetition is interminable, these boxes containing a perceptual immensity filled, as if the self replicating void was not enough of an unfathomable chaos, with luminous objects, of minimal technicality but maximum visual impact, for instance artificial flowers, whose stems and irises are made of optical fiber, captivating in their vibrant filaments and reflective petals the chameleonic light that suffuses the inside of these mirrored boxes, the surfaces of the mirrors irregularly sprinkled with light emitting diodes, their microscopic stars flickering gently, their twinkling programmed in sequences that create endless constellations, whose shapes oscillate in waves of phantasmagorical configurations, the purpose of these agglomeration of optical seduction purely the genesis of decorative galaxies to be indulged in by the guests as they wait to be blindfolded, worlds of self regenerating mesmerism surrounding their impatience, enacting luminous magic as an answer to nothing, as people wander, amazed, around the labyrinth, sometimes coming across small, simple stalls, resembling gazebos, amazingly delicate but simple constructions, glimmering state of the art installations, magnificent but demure sculptures, made with the outmost care, shining fixtures gleaming in the darkness, like black lit devotional totems, all of them brilliant reiterations of the same principles of simple but grandiose optical illusions, sacred spots of seductive, hidden light and kaleidoscopic reverie, devoted to deities whose invisibility is their ultimate manifestation, the environment becoming a hallucination park, a theatrical illusion resembling an otherworldly landing, as if an extraterrestrial civilization is visiting the island in the middle of the summer night, a pool of fluorescent light vibrating smoothly within the periphery of this visitation, visible from far away, a party, on a wide slope that leads a softly sloping hill into the calm waters of the sea below, a gently tilting balcony, creating the impression of the guests eventually sliding into the sea, doomed to drown if some geological event accelerates the erosion of land, or even an earthquake, dramatically breaking off this ledge, a possibility teetering on another edge, that of comedy meeting tragedy, reminiscent of the fate awaiting the last survivors dancing on the deck of the Titanic, another shining expanse famously capsizing but still remaining a dance floor, even as it disappeared slowly but surely to the frigid, watery, grave awaiting everyone, dancing as the band played on, no matter what, but on this occasion, the nameless party is safe, the angle of the hill yet so slight that the busy footsteps can not register the inclination as anything other than perfectly horizontal, and to reach this plateau one has to cross a shiny bridge, over a luminescent moat filled with transparent gel and lit with black lights scattered all over its mirrored depths, the bridge itself, hanging like a silvery airplane wing over this hypnotic glow, is made of double sided mirror as well, an elongated, slender box seemingly suspended mid air, resting, on a sophisticated hydraulic system, an apparatus ensuring maximum solidity, stability and smoothness of movement, set in quakeproof oil foundations, themselves immersed in the rapturous river of softly changing colors, the semi-liquid water pumped full of translucent, fluorescent pigment, transparent day-glow ink swirled into the gelatinous flow at appropriate intervals, the hues fluctuating to the drama of the music and pulsating, the vivid purple black lights submerged within their Technicolor swirls, feeding them their peculiar glow, the viscous liquid turning from acrid yellows to effervescent pinks, the guests amazed as they are walking on the rectilinear expanse of the glass bridge that is the only passage leading to the entrance of the party, noticing the impossibly radiant insides of the glass box under their feet, discovering that it is also built of double sided mirror, the insides of which are immediately filled with smoke the moment their glossy surface is stepped on, by a motion sensor programmed to emit churning plumes of dry ice, a storm swirling within the hypnotically endlessness of the expanse underfoot, gas formations refracting across the four sides of the double mirrored pathway, the majestic nebulous multiplications astoundingly lit by green lasers, themselves bouncing off in uncountable directions as they hit the sides of their crystal cage, this artificial maelstrom of cosmic sumptuousness contained in a deceptively transparent glass sliver no longer than nine meters and not thicker than one, a dazzlingly lit pathway almost imperceptibly tilting upwards, reflecting the stars as it silently rises, a slice of the night sky moving on the way to the party, sparkling as it is mirrored, underfoot, the people stepping on this glassy reflection realize that the bridge itself is a gently moving see saw, first serenely rising up and then delivering them down, lowering slowly, changing inclination from upwards to downwards, only when those crossing it reach the apex, a self equilibrating thunderstorm as a way to cross over the glowing fortification protecting an illuminated citadel, a destination that pulsates with inexplicably and endlessly reanimated fireworks contained within the very walls it is built of, the ditch dug around it softly vibrating like a ring of led light changing colors in the dark, the awe-struck guests rocked forward by their own weight as they walk over the moat, their slippery footing changing from effort to a slide as they finally hop over the end of the downward slope, leaving behind them the gently effervescent glow of colored, fluorescent and thickened water, realizing that this is an ecumenical opportunity for anybody to baptize himself over and over in the realms of an ecology of Eden, manipulated on a microscopic level by a higher intelligence whose purpose is to generate only pleasure in accordance to the principles of harmony, a secret kept in a glimmering, crystal safe, it's lock attuned to the particular combination of memories and souvenirs that you apply in correct sequence, as you attempt to find the proper connotations that will open the past and lead u back to a paradise you presume long lost, but can be found, if only the correct combination of lost and found is achieved, tonight, at the wondrous city of double sided mirrors, where angels have alighted to record the prayers of those who have chosen to remain anonymous, and then, rise up to the sky, and play them, their sampled dreams becoming the soundtrack of heaven.

The End

Note: A Fragile Accomplishment is a novel written and presented on Un nouVeau iDeal by Panagiotis Hadjistefanou

All photographs, kind courtesy of  Hedi Slimane

PANAGIOTIS HADJISTEFANOU: A FRAGILE ACCOMPLISHMENT - CHAPTER XV

Photographs courtesy of Hedi Slimane

Tonight, a Storm of Reflective Dust is sweeping Across the Wondrous City of Double Sided Mirrors! /Chapter 15

 

The party, as befits its blind nature and intensifies its anticipatory mystique, is, and shall remain, nameless, this untitled state of affairs just the symbolic pinnacle of a conspiratorial ruse agreed upon by everyone who participates in this ritual, a mass baptism reversed, the summer, and the promises implied within it, cleansing everyone from all belief and hope, which are nothing but crippled logic and postponement of happiness respectively, invisibility as coronation for an unbelievable overcoming of the self, a hopeless leap into the wordless empire of the senses, an absolute regime established by complicit secrecy, the unseen but felt directing the blindfolded and faceless, the actors sleepwalking through the playful drama about to grandly premiere, tonight, a midsummer night’s sleepwalking, around an open air stage where a citadel has been erected, a majestic theater set that would make the most elaborate Broadway production proud, a city without a name, the absence of denomination a ritualistic prerequisite for the worship of what lurks unknown within the visitors and those they meet there, a silent introduction to a scheme of cumulative invisibility, the abolition of names an affront to meaning and words themselves, and therefore an attack against logic, a loss of mind claimed in order to regain the senses, a radical uprooting of social etiquette undermining the very nature of society itself, by destroying its decorous but deceitful reflection, smashing self-identity, by banning the introduction of these strangers, on this night, the chasm of anonymity between them precipitating an instant fall of the ego, unshackling them from their own chains, setting them free from all the transparent metal ensnaring them, the unknown offering an escape route from the hellish contraptions fabricated in the foundry of self-constraints, the silence of the eyes putting out of business the factory of negations run by roles and identities, liberation achieved simply by obscuring the face, and most importantly, veiling the eyes, therefore not only obstructing the judgment that features are conditioned to express but also suppressing any reaction they elicit, this loss of vision, both active and passive, dismantling the binary, and thus conflicting, system, of seeing and being seen, disrupting the polar schema, the ceasefire of this bellicose dialectic creating a peace, a lull, a void created by the artificially controlled demolition of civilization itself, a collapse of you not only within you but in respect to others also, a bilateral annihilation of ready made tactics, strategies and schemes, the splitting of the atom in the existential sense, emitting a chaos of particles flung high, suddenly, the explosion of your spectacles and idols spewing forth volcanic clouds of reflective dust, since even the smallest particle of who you are is a reflection of something else, so when the eternal social constructs of your identity are pulverized, at the stroke of something as inconsequential as a scarf, they leave only nebula of powdery self in their trail, hanging in the air, disorganized, billowing, vulnerable, but luminous, offering a unique opportunity, tonight, a hazy possibility of hope, a silver lining around the fractal blossoms of your existential shrapnel, a moonlit filigree framing a swirl in freeform eruption, yourself as a glowing softness offering volatile foundations, possibilities as infinitesimally existing configurations of nameless feelings, cadences of sentiments that mutate immediately after being glimpsed, this party a planet facing apocalypse, covered by continents of selves reduced to swarms of molecules, floating in the perfumed air between the voluntarily dehumanized denizens, who discover that flickering bridges made of previously owned feelings are being built out of what they thought was thin air, crossings between the guests appearing one by one, between anyone who dares to cross over the darkness and touch somebody next to him, blindly, touch somebody who could be anybody, really, or at least really for tonight, these bridges of liberated energy without a fixed purpose or specific builder possible to be crossed only if time is frozen for a second, capturing, like a snapshot, a particular formation of tenderness, a seed of a feeling which is just enough to grow a tree of trust out of it, this receptivity to the kindness of strangers being the starting point of emotional survival amongst them, tenderness and trust forming a soft passage across which only the invisible and the unknown could step without fear of it’s collapse, this fearlessness almost an impossibility, since movement immediately transports you to the next moment in time, the rippling, fluttering bridge suddenly lost as soon as it is seen, but not everything is lost with its demise, as the clouds of feelings only reconfigure, continuously suspended, just in a different shape, offering another welcoming ground for building even more invisible castles in the sky, envision further temples for deities who are content to be adored by a single follower, this constant fluidity of nameless and faceless emotions leading consciousness to a plane where even breathing becomes an improvisational adventure, the clouds of yourself leaving an emptiness from whence they came, as they are exhaled from deep within your heart, your soul, tonight, becoming a gasp without a name, as you are embraced and saved from loneliness by an invisible stranger, his eventual return and disappearance to the nothingness he came from leaving you feeling like an empty space, a room who somebody left behind, now that you have breathed yourself into the lips of a stranger whose kindness will forever remain nameless, your loneliness is taken to the absolute extreme of realizing it is easily possible of losing your very own self, and keep on living, like a god without believers, and even then, finding that this nameless, blind and unknown faithlessness inside you, can be happily serenaded and comforted by just as invisible and nameless ghosts as your emptiness is, these exchanges, gestures and whispered words, even the nameless breaths uttering indecipherable messages in your ears during an anonymous embrace between two people who believe or hope for nothing, all of these interactions suddenly are transformed, by blindness, to ultimate consolations from suspect exchanges, because love is proven, almost scientifically, to be successfully communicated even in the deepest recesses of darkness, transgressing the boundaries separating everyone from whoever the other is, or might be, this hardiness of love without a face an inexplicable revelation, the emotional equivalent of discovering life in the most forbidding depths of the frozen ocean, this bulletproof existence of love even after the apocalypse of losing everything you think you are, an existential accomplishment that can only be achieved in this artificial world of pristine nothingness and kind nobodies, a truth about love only fought for by an imaginary army, amidst whose ranks there always marches everybody’s somebody, but, usually, in real life, in exile from tonight that is, this somebody is never one who is free from the restrictions inscribed on the clean slate he is born as, since everybody fails, in real life, not tonight, to remain unsoiled, the blank check of their soul circulated and sullied inevitably, as it forlornly walks, another product amongst many jostling for space, in the market of desire and disappointment, a beggar, a thief and a miser at the same time, since real love, the one that sees and thinks it knows, knows of no rules, and is thus fairly coupled with war, the actual libidinal economy of our real lives as unregulated as the most corrupt capitalist empire, the fear of this implication forcing each one of us to build the armor of our personality, acquired obscurity our favorite style, defensively hiding the delicate fireworks of feelings that often erupt, uncontrolled, within us, hoping these nonsensical flashes of light remain unnoticed to others, for fear they might be extinguished, these displays of magical, inexplicable beauty doomed to remain a solitary ecstasy, lighting up the darkest recesses of our soul, each brittle emotion, and its attending light, so faint, it can only be perceivable when the harsh glare of reality is shut out, banished, survival an elaborate cage of concealment out of which the guests of this party can escape, for tonight, by being temporarily incognito or blind, using this fleeting depersonalization as a direct aid for unmooring their feelings and watch them float away from their disappearing self, leaving behind the rules that their ego imposes, like a hot air balloon drops off excess weight, rising up, to the sky, a self sacrifice, a form of temporary and painless suicide irrefutably proving that as desperate an act as self annihilation is, it need not be a melodramatic gesture or an attention grabbing attempt to end it all, but it can equally be a way to show, and not say, to the world, that, however it has beaten us down, we are still capable of feeling, anything at all, pain being the only sign of life for those who have nothing better to feel, and also, self-extinction becoming the only way to suppose we are still breathing, losing our life as the only way of proving we exist, in a world that is so careless it has stopped even hurting us, this final state of numbness a surprise, since it forces us to admit, that, yes, after all, after we have lost everything including ourselves, still, a discovery of infinity is possible, even in the most degrading circumstance, an unexpected gift from where nothing and nobody is expected, or promised, a message of hope from the silent center around which the universe spins, a pregnant void, creating the necessary tension before the orchestra ushers a swelling melody, tonight, coaxing an unforgettable experience out of what can easily be dismissed as a childish game, a gathering that might otherwise be broken apart, and reconfigured, in recognizable and identifiable elements, known and therefore dull, amounting to no more than the collective interactions between specific elements, all doomed to introduce themselves to the other, an act of trespassing, introduction being an elaborate form of violence, the face and sight of the introduced automatically cross referenced to their personality and history, deciphered and explained to the point of blandness and boredom, superfluous knowledge reaching so soon a level of jadedness so deep that it drowns the kindness of strangers, an impasse that tonight is improbably avoided by following a blind course, an improvised narrative inevitably delineated by strictly subjective experiences, the absence of objective witnesses amounting to a lack of martyrs, the miracles delivering an enlightment without the necessity of suffering for the faith upon they build themselves, since whatever is revealed will forever be remembered only as a strictly personal matter, a secret, an anonymous encounter that occurs in a no mans land, where nobody has a face but everybody is allowed to touch each other, their fingerprints not attributable to any one, evidence and proof of nothing, a secret fairytale with an imaginary end, about an unknown saint delivering an announcement that is impossible to preach, since what is experienced tonight does not exist, because it is witnessed by nobody, falling like a tree in a forest when nobody is there to listen to its thump, record it, or even tell us about it, the past created tonight remaining untitled, a song that will remain unheard but for the two who sing it once and never again, but a song that is none the less beautiful for that, a page about beauty torn out of context from the book of the world, an interruption in the flow of attributable and nameable incidents, an effect whose cause will be unknown to perpetuity, another affront to logic, the creation of an occurrence out of history, proving that what is unwritten can be just as important as what is recounted, like a photograph that reminds us, thankfully, that time remembered is time divorced from itself, dying, like a leaf that falls from a tree, no memory existing independently of whoever created it, everything that might otherwise make it recognizable edited out when it sails off from the specificity of recognizable faces, a reminiscence remaining essentially innocent, claiming no victims or pointing to no guilty parties, an unknown incident never presented before a judge, an essential testament to the blindness of justice, and therefore truth, undiscovered knowledge, blindness or invisibility an ancient passageway to revelation, as children who play hide and seek know, but adults prefer to forget, except for tonight, when the guests will do their best to remain unknown to each other, some choosing to keep their eyes shielded, and thus deciding they will never meet the temporary though significant gaze of whoever touched them, these being their partners, or at least partners for the night, while the other half, those that choose to roam the party able to see, they are also stripped of the privilege of recounting events and naming names, since they themselves will remain equally unknown, and none the less wiser about their blindfolded and thus masked significant others, their common denominator being that they will remain forever unable to recognize a face whose lips they devoured, however fleetingly, protruding as they are, for a moment, provocatively, the grapes of love spilling over from a napkin of concealment, glistening, under the soft silk eye mask of somebody, or other, since everybody is, for tonight, somebody’s nobody, and if they ever do see the face of whomever they kiss, and thus selflessly, love, then, they will do so in breach of the rules of the gathering, by accident, happy or otherwise, the punishment of those who have seen each other beyond the realms of blind devotion, being, justly, expulsion, from this artificial, and thus, fragile paradise, exclusion from a unique occasion, an eviction from what can only be called an internet, a vast weave of emotions that not only connects but also gathers within its intricate pattern those that swim around it, carefully, since successful invisibility and suppression of identity while making love is a particularly difficult task, requiring not only sexual chemistry, tenderness of touch and a winning approach, but also physical discipline, planetary alignments, fate and chance, this exorcism of shadows and zeroing of external parameters being an incredible feat of happy coincidences, similarly performed by nature everyday, which offers us an existential miracle that remains unnoticed, as we hurry past it, easily ignoring it, the millisecond that the sun stands precisely at the perfect right angle in relation to us, making our shadows disappear, if only for the momentary blaze that is our own personal high noon, our shadow immediately spilling out again after this trick of the light, seeping from under our feet after merely a second of banishment, like so much water leaking into the slowly sinking ship that is our life, our afternoon shadow at first a small puddle, then blown to full glory, a dark caricature of who you are, reborn each and every day, a blurry mess in the early, hazy morning light, progressively growing, as the day fades into night, elongating your and every other shadow surrounding you, joining them into an ocean of universal darkness, the night as dark as the shadows that disappear into it, the night is an ink blot swallowing a whole universe populated by other inkblots, progressively, irrevocably, but within this moment, the one called your own absolutely personal midday, and only for this little, almost stolen, moment of glory and coronation by the sun itself, you and your shadow are free from each other, right there, and then, when the sun hangs exactly in the right spot over your head, and even then, it is only you in the entire universe who is shadow-less, particularly you, since everyone is at a different co-ordination to the heavens every time it happens to them, the world being a cosmic watchmaker specializing in animal, vegetable and mineral sundials, all unconscious of the fact that, for a second every day they have no shadow, and therefore have escaped from time, slipped through a blind spot in the center of their rotating universe, but are still alive, and counting time in their place under the sun, without a shadow flowing out of them, unsinkable, free from the reminder of the ever approaching eternity both haunting and guiding them, free from shadows if only for an imperceptible while, a small fraction of time that, sadly, only a part of humanity attempts to elongate at this party, as the guests mingle to experiment about existence, supposing, on a summer night, that life could be free from shadows even within the dark, this reincarnation of light out of nothing manifesting itself as a nebulous, almost imperceptible cloud of gestures, body heat and deliquescent perfumes, elements blended and shared with the taste and warmth of tanned skin, sensations spinning around the revolving orbits of derailed sounds, following the spaced out music played by our boy, our savior, his audio waves blowing across this emotional darkness as a sudden wind flaps a net, waving it midair, at the very moment it is cast, before it is immediately submerged, the sounds goading the emotions of the listeners along trajectories of ever more asymmetrical ellipses, their souls riding wild horses of chemically enhanced consciousness, summer, sex, music and drugs, stoking ancient fires, both warming and burning everything, the combination of awe, sound and abandonment, lust and transcendence, all tied to the mast of hallucinations sailing away to horizons that are possible only if one searches for the infinity within, this radical critique of the visible world materialized astoundingly by the party décor, a scenery reminiscent of a conflagration of luminescent churches, human in scale, transported from an unknown planet to the arid outlines of a Mediterranean island, a majestic construction that constitutes a maze, a labyrinth of shining walls, erected out of double sided mirror, placed concentrically around various fugal points, the trick being that these walls have their mirrored side facing their insides, an uncanny optical illusion that evokes the optical impossibility of transparent metal, this inter-facing of reversed double mirrors creating a reflective universe, a space penetrable by vision from the outside but impartial to idols of anything not encased within it’s limits, a hollowness that however measurable is still impossible to visualize accurately, since it is represented as the infinite multiplications of the mirrors facing themselves in four directions simultaneously, an unraveling of nothingness expanding endlessly to the power of unfathomable iterations, an echo of zero whose scale and repetition is interminable, these boxes containing a perceptual immensity filled, as if the self replicating void was not enough of an unfathomable chaos, with luminous objects, of minimal technicality but maximum visual impact, for instance artificial flowers, whose stems and irises are made of optical fiber, captivating in their vibrant filaments and reflective petals the chameleonic light that suffuses the inside of these mirrored boxes, the surfaces of the mirrors irregularly sprinkled with light emitting diodes, their microscopic stars flickering gently, their twinkling programmed in sequences that create endless constellations, whose shapes oscillate in waves of phantasmagorical configurations, the purpose of these agglomeration of optical seduction purely the genesis of decorative galaxies to be indulged in by the guests as they wait to be blindfolded, worlds of self regenerating mesmerism surrounding their impatience, enacting luminous magic as an answer to nothing, as people wander, amazed, around the labyrinth, sometimes coming across small, simple stalls, resembling gazebos, amazingly delicate but simple constructions, glimmering state of the art installations, magnificent but demure sculptures, made with the outmost care, shining fixtures gleaming in the darkness, like black lit devotional totems, all of them brilliant reiterations of the same principles of simple but grandiose optical illusions, sacred spots of seductive, hidden light and kaleidoscopic reverie, devoted to deities whose invisibility is their ultimate manifestation, the environment becoming a hallucination park, a theatrical illusion resembling an otherworldly landing, as if an extraterrestrial civilization is visiting the island in the middle of the summer night, a pool of fluorescent light vibrating smoothly within the periphery of this visitation, visible from far away, a party, on a wide slope that leads a softly sloping hill into the calm waters of the sea below, a gently tilting balcony, creating the impression of the guests eventually sliding into the sea, doomed to drown if some geological event accelerates the erosion of land, or even an earthquake, dramatically breaking off this ledge, a possibility teetering on another edge, that of comedy meeting tragedy, reminiscent of the fate awaiting the last survivors dancing on the deck of the Titanic, another shining expanse famously capsizing but still remaining a dance floor, even as it disappeared slowly but surely to the frigid, watery, grave awaiting everyone, dancing as the band played on, no matter what, but on this occasion, the nameless party is safe, the angle of the hill yet so slight that the busy footsteps can not register the inclination as anything other than perfectly horizontal, and to reach this plateau one has to cross a shiny bridge, over a luminescent moat filled with transparent gel and lit with black lights scattered all over its mirrored depths, the bridge itself, hanging like a silvery airplane wing over this hypnotic glow, is made of double sided mirror as well, an elongated, slender box seemingly suspended mid air, resting, on a sophisticated hydraulic system, an apparatus ensuring maximum solidity, stability and smoothness of movement, set in quakeproof oil foundations, themselves immersed in the rapturous river of softly changing colors, the semi-liquid water pumped full of translucent, fluorescent pigment, transparent day-glow ink swirled into the gelatinous flow at appropriate intervals, the hues fluctuating to the drama of the music and pulsating, the vivid purple black lights submerged within their Technicolor swirls, feeding them their peculiar glow, the viscous liquid turning from acrid yellows to effervescent pinks, the guests amazed as they are walking on the rectilinear expanse of the glass bridge that is the only passage leading to the entrance of the party, noticing the impossibly radiant insides of the glass box under their feet, discovering that it is also built of double sided mirror, the insides of which are immediately filled with smoke the moment their glossy surface is stepped on, by a motion sensor programmed to emit churning plumes of dry ice, a storm swirling within the hypnotically endlessness of the expanse underfoot, gas formations refracting across the four sides of the double mirrored pathway, the majestic nebulous multiplications astoundingly lit by green lasers, themselves bouncing off in uncountable directions as they hit the sides of their crystal cage, this artificial maelstrom of cosmic sumptuousness contained in a deceptively transparent glass sliver no longer than nine meters and not thicker than one, a dazzlingly lit pathway almost imperceptibly tilting upwards, reflecting the stars as it silently rises, a slice of the night sky moving on the way to the party, sparkling as it is mirrored, underfoot, the people stepping on this glassy reflection realize that the bridge itself is a gently moving see saw, first serenely rising up and then delivering them down, lowering slowly, changing inclination from upwards to downwards, only when those crossing it reach the apex, a self equilibrating thunderstorm as a way to cross over the glowing fortification protecting an illuminated citadel, a destination that pulsates with inexplicably and endlessly reanimated fireworks contained within the very walls it is built of, the ditch dug around it softly vibrating like a ring of led light changing colors in the dark, the awe-struck guests rocked forward by their own weight as they walk over the moat, their slippery footing changing from effort to a slide as they finally hop over the end of the downward slope, leaving behind them the gently effervescent glow of colored, fluorescent and thickened water, realizing that this is an ecumenical opportunity for anybody to baptize himself over and over in the realms of an ecology of Eden, manipulated on a microscopic level by a higher intelligence whose purpose is to generate only pleasure in accordance to the principles of harmony, a secret kept in a glimmering, crystal safe, it's lock attuned to the particular combination of memories and souvenirs that you apply in correct sequence, as you attempt to find the proper connotations that will open the past and lead u back to a paradise you presume long lost, but can be found, if only the correct combination of lost and found is achieved, tonight, at the wondrous city of double sided mirrors, where angels have alighted to record the prayers of those who have chosen to remain anonymous, and then, rise up to the sky, and play them, their dreams becoming the soundtrack of heaven.

Note: A Fragile Accomplishment is a novel written and presented on Un nouVeau iDeal by Panagiotis Hadjistefanou

All photographs, kind courtesy of  Hedi Slimane

PANAGIOTIS HADJISTEFANOU: A FRAGILE ACCOMPLISHMENT - CHAPTER XIV

Photographs courtesy of Hedi Slimane

 

A Volatile Mix / Chapter 14 

As our boy, our saviour, nonchalantly hops on the bike, and slides his arms around the barman’s strong waist, just like any other tourist hitching a ride to the party, the day is just about subsiding, the celestial censer empty, another short-lived summer shower squandered, and absorbed, the necklaces of droplets scattered, audaciously torn from the soft necks of billowing clouds by the frantic gestures of seasonal breezes, the airborne, glistening strands of rain broken, the air zooming past their fall, rushing in from the cool sea, storming but amorous, as if motivated by a fit of jealousy, possibly of the setting sun, the universal lover, who is lavishing golden linings on the edges of the travelling mists as they float in multicoloured fractal blooms across the spectacular sky, the sensuous solar kisses adorning the shoulders of the coy cloudbanks like tender caresses, these flirtations glimpsed and gossiped about by the squawking seagulls, across the sky, over the waves and into the envious ear of the seasonal wind, a suitor so elusive that even love finds it impossible to capture, and thus is forever vanquished by the omniamorous sun, and condemned to sweep past any desire, its own and anybody else’s, fuelled by the heat of the very same rival who inspires this furious envy, the atmosphere in constant movement and the clouds in careful avoidance of the turbulent affections and moods surrounding them, both the covetous and the lascivious, as they morph away in endless variations of disappearance and reconfiguration, avoiding evaporation by light or dispersion by gusts, an animated illustration of the fact that meteorology is devoted only to its own protean beauty, never succumbing to any seduction or pressure to commit, either to what lies above or what rests below, even to what whirls around, the weather an accurate reflection of our impossibly mutating souls, as we become a different person from one moment to the next, all the time pretending to be the same, insisting on our unchangeable identity even we move to a different direction, like the clouds that surge away, nominally remaining the same, but leaving their once carefully guarded liquid beads behind, strewn across the island, themselves a miracle waiting to happen, at first falling, deceptively succumbing to gravity, gently slithering through the spidery cracks mapping the earth, disappearing momentarily into the jagged borders dividing minuscule territories of parched earth, innumerable puzzle pieces made of dust, their inter locking shapes creating an abstract pattern on the floor of this and any other landscape, a mosaic which never amounts to any specific image but represents accurately the ungraspable abstraction that is the underworld hidden underneath this crumbling surface, the void waiting for us, into which we will slip permanently, unlike moisture, which disappears momentarily, only to rise back up, almost immediately, on this balmy late August evening, a resuscitation performed for our benefit by temperature, as it returns the drops from the heathens to the heavens, no longer as rain, but as a trembling, transparent film of ascending moisture, an ever so delicately thin waterfall in reverse, undulating over the landscape, liquidising the outlines of everything, the curtain of humidity dissolving the outlines of everything, turning the world into a trembling projection glimpsed on an underwater screen, the vaporous veil unfurling to create a scrim of aqueous modesty, for the night to prepare itself behind, a sheltering fluctuation of focus covering everything as it languidly changes into eveningwear, until the nightscape is as beautifully dressed as befits our boy, our saviour, the world lit in gradations ranging all the way from the warm spectrum of the fading sunset to the flattening azure background of the darkening sky, against which everything is condensed to a silhouette larger than the life it belongs to, the shadows rejoicing in the interlude that is the blue hour, as the breathless hunt for their owners ends, everybody and everything tired of running away from their empty outline, refugees from a projection of themselves that rotates around them, their shadow a hand on the face of themselves as a moving clock, counting the time swept by during the completion of these circles that turn everything and everybody into a sundial mercilessly counting the passage of their own time, until everything and everybody finally surrenders to the embrace of darkness, not only once and eternally, but every time the sun sets, the end of each day achieving a reconciliation between the shadows and their owners, after hours of dogged following and relentless ignoring, a lesson in faith that only our shadows could teach us, if only we turned around to ask them, as they trail behind us, solemn and shape-shifting in their melancholy attempts to capture and idealize our mercurial existence, exactly like the cloud of dust dutifully following our boy and the barman, their shape dissolved, blended and mixed into one another, like a song that leads smoothly into the next one in a perfect DJ set, their heartbeats stepping exactly on each other’s rhythm, an automotive blur as they ride up the dusty hills, the bike bumping over the craggy road, the pale light following the serpentine trail winding through the hills, both feeling the world and each other intensely, warm underfoot and cooling overhead, the wind caressing their sun kissed skin, maybe attempting to fathom if yet another celestial embrace has betrayed his possessiveness, the season enveloping them in a soft and ever accommodating embrace, as if the bike is riding through a tunnel made of invisible, billowing silk, a transparent passage made of the elements, the night imminent, the wheel of the motorbike a rotating circle, like a record, spinning, stirring their shared darkness, deeper and deeper, like the propeller of a ship gliding across the surface of a night that shimmers with a hope so bright that no daylight has yet fulfilled.

Note: A Fragile Accomplishment is a novel written and presented on Un nouVeau iDeal by Panagiotis Hadjistefanou

All photographs, kind courtesy of  Hedi Slimane

PANAGIOTIS HADJISTEFANOU: A FRAGILE ACCOMPLISHMENT - CHAPTER XIII

Photographs courtecy of Hedi Slimane

 

 Arrivals Chapter XIII

“It must be you I’m waiting for.”

“If you say so.” 

Note: A Fragile Accomplishment is a novel written and presented on Un nouVeau iDeal by Panagiotis Hadjistefanou

All photographs, kind courtesy of  Hedi Slimane

PANAGIOTIS HADJISTEFANOU: A FRAGILE ACCOMPLISHMENT - CHAPTER XII

Photographs courtecy of Hedi Slimane

Nesting Pagan-Chapter XII

Reclining in the plush embrace of his airplane seat, he, our boy, our savior, is a unique treasure within the luxurious but interchangeable trappings of the private jet that carries him, airborne extravagance framing the splendor of his youth, this preciously decorated vehicle a mechanical expression of the munificence of his patrons and an affirmation recognizing his talents, a graceful gesture specially extended in order to fly him over, for the party, where his music would serenade the weaponless warriors and soundtrack the charade spun around the empirical pinnacle of the celebration, the acceptance of blindness as revelation, sound providing the impetus for a miracle as personal as the meaning assigned to the sound itself but whoever hears it, our boy’s beauty spreading a secret whose truth is as fluctuating as it is impossible to hide, a different awareness and intensity of admiration felt by anyone inspired by his nimble physicality, his figure gently retracing the whimsical but self absorbed outlines of his youth, his flowering impervious in the unassailable privilege of climaxing self actualization, every twist and shift he takes as he dozes a choreography of provocation, as if idly posing for a sensually seductive and assiduously chiseled sculpture of himself, a moment resplendently surrendering to supplicant surveillance, his modesty only allowing for a reluctant admission of the aura condemning his beauty as worthy of a monument, an eventuality conflictingly celebrating and desecrating the living presence, reality so entrancing that any rendering of it could only be an anthropomorphic vessel, a cold cell, whose pleasant human form would have to pretend contentment, hypocritically seducing the viewer while surreptitiously only falsifying emotional conviction, plotting a feat of suspended disbelief, the power of this spell ascertained only if the artifact managed to arrest and somehow, magically, possess the current glow, incarcerate the illuminated now, cage the highlights that will eventually soften the marmoreal jail of immortalization, a demand for preservation of his astonishing features so vital though, so indisputably evident and impossible to refute, that everyone realizes their blindness the first moment they see him, since anyone daring to concentrate on his beauty feels their vision attracted absolutely, their overpowered retinas incapable of registering anything else, any fleeting glimpse of him lived as a visionary experience in the most ocular essence of the word, the dazed onlooker immediately turned from casual witness to mesmerized viewer, sedately hypnotized by the corporeal echo of somebody precociously aware of his anticipated memorials, the admiring eyes storing his image and thus becoming suddenly owners of a future memory whose solace is appreciated contemporaneously as the event causing it unfolds, vision asserting an indisputable independence from the linearity of time, proving to be a physical precursor of future consciousness, since the eyes are not only aware of registering an image but simultaneously rejoice in receiving a gift for, and from, an as-of-yet, invisible future, in the form of a pleasure remembered, even before it has evolved to memory and therefore appreciated before it tarnished by the passage of time, the sweetness of what is perceived only hinting at the melancholy of the past that will be necessarily reminisced to return to this current happiness, the moments already speeding by, their paths until their recollection remaining for now a mystery, what lies ahead shrouded, by questions whose darkness only serves as another facet of the perfect allure of now, shadows being an indisputable element of any platonic ideal, which is viewed, after all, on the wall of a dark cave, the truth always revealed for our benefit under the charitable halo, and until the anxiously anticipated expiration, of a humble candle, whose feeble light is just enough, fragile but accomplished, just as our boy now is fleetingly but sumptuously lit by the sun, the summer timidly intruding through the minuscule airplane window, our savior as comfortable as a migrating bird that has made for himself, out of the sky, a temporary nest, an ideal transported within a flying cave, the traveling threads of desire he trails behind him delineating the migratory web of the besotted staring at him, a lace of fascination spreading with his every move, even the most imperceptible flicker of his golden eyelashes attracting enraptured gazes, all of them focusing on the embodiment of an inspiration waiting to happen, dreaming of an effigy to preserve his idealized perfection, only appreciation and concentration fueling the impossible but noble task of copying the sublime once it has already been incorporated, the artistic struggle a doomed process as well as a heroic effort, a Sisyphean martyrdom never so cruel as when the object of admiration is living, breathing, even sleeping, since the manufactured resemblance of beauty carries the mortal knowledge of its secondary importance to the fragile reality of what it refers to, therefore, any likeness of our boy, any sculpture or image or monument to him, confirms the existence of ancestry but does not necessarily do justice to these origins, suicidally succumbing to the superiority of the source, fossilizing not only the harmony that inspired it, but also attempting to captivate his hazy sheen, an act of treason, since, anyone who might attempt to petrify beauty can not claim to be an accomplice to the freedom demanded by the soul of the adored, thus ignoring the fact that beauty divorced from freedom is impossible, a guilt of dishonesty that if admitted curses the artist, revealing his true intentions, which are not those of a liberator of what he lovingly represents, the chisel of the sculptor not digging a tunnel through the limitations and volatility of reality, art not offering a passage for the ghost of the beloved to escape through, and as a vulgar insult to the lofty injury of artistic creation, the obviousness of our boys’, or any other boys’, ravishing youth and beauty, is felt as an abasement of the adored, an affront to the admirer, the growth of the number of the converted a mathematical curve that shows the raising stakes of their shared amazement, a popularization of private longing turning any truthfully devoted lover into a potential prison warden, forlorn and unable to stomach the bitter loneliness of being just another swimmer in an ocean of believers, the lover as persecutor, his once adoring eyes now roaming, leaving an ominous but distanced trace, like the shadow of a hawk flying over the landscape of love, attempting to brand it as it begs of it for sustenance, affection resorting, in despair over the impossibility of ownership of what is loved, to the tactics of possessive madness, the lover crazed by the impotence of voyeurism once it realizes the absurdity of the ambition to experience exclusively what is self evident to all, the awareness of a public miracle being a joy whose very preciousness makes it unbearable to share and thus enjoyed, whoever sees our boy discovering, to his dismay, that his image decorates just as beautifully the walls of many other caves, their numbers as many as those who hold their vision as a candle up to his beauty, these multiplying platonic corridors a maze through which a lover can only search for the repetition of his loved one, forever lost in a similar maze to the one Echo found herself, in desperate search of Narcissus, mistaking her own voice for his answer, her auditory hallucination condemning her to the most cruel of fates, the search of love lost forever, and thus proving that love is nothing but echo, since, in order to exist at all, love always carries within it an element of the loved one.

Indeed, he, our boy, our savior, is of monumental beauty, and his body language is obviously a cognizant statement of his physical prerogative, simultaneously proud and victimized as only the beautiful can be, this Narcissus in love not with an image of himself, and therefore not deceived to the point that madness makes him believe in the existential potential of idols, but self-emancipated, not needing a reflection to objectify because he is so much in love with the reality of who he is, that an outside point of reference, even an imperceptibly rippling image of himself on water, would intrude violently on his consciousness, disturbing his inner view with unwanted commentary, the slightest distortion a sacrilege across the surface that separates the most intense depths hidden below it and the most unreachable eternity hanging above it, a safety net between absolutes whose perfect stillness should not be disturbed by the usurpation of an admiring glance across its placidity.

Descending from the sky to the island, he is a vista hovering above a landscape, himself a view just like the hills waiting to spread their benevolent ground below his feet, recessing in shadow and rising to light in accordance to the most muted gradations of chiaroscuro, sketched with the softest pencil, on the creamiest of paper, the looks of those around him each drawing a memory of him, each a different image lathed into shape as it is caressed by the lusty summer afternoon, arresting whatever vagrant remnants of the day loiter in the twilight, patches of sun attempting to hide all over him, brilliant stowaways following the comforting ambivalence of a day spent traveling.

He is dignified but messy, clad in the most refined of rags, slashes, rips and shreds, drips of delicate jewelry sprouting from unexpected folds of clothing and skin, incandescently glowing like the star he is becoming, his glittering aura reaching a dizzying intensity as it radiates from the nimbus around his precious head, a golden cloud formed by the rococo ramifications of his blond hair, a halo of fawning swirls and swooning swerves, a tangle of winding silk roads whose paths begin and end at his face, framing his delicate features, a portrait culled like a rose from a florid palette, smeared softly with the vibrant pastels of luminous youth, even the shadows vibrating with intensity, the mordant purple schism tearing apart the velvet of his lips, the nacreous permutations of pensiveness resting deep in the creases of his glistening eyelids, now half asleep, his mouth softly moving, a perfect cupids’ arrow tensed as if aiming to the center of the heart of an invisible somebody, who could be a nobody to everybody except for him, and thus unique, since the object of beauty can only exist, and therefore succumbs, to the tragic power of its subjective beholder, the possessive admiration of the lover in turn falling subject of the allure of what is loved.

Right next two him, watching his every twitch and listening to his softest sighs, sit two Japanese teenagers, still little girls really, as amused as their extravagant outfits are amusing, both blooming forth from the center of a psychedelic fashion bouquet mixing pedophile chic and Victorian Gothic, their sartorial cocktail so intensely shaken and cockily inventive that it qualifies as a pacifist form of warfare, these two oriental style icons present in the jet because they had won some online promotion offering as a prize a day spent at his side, and of course, giggling uncontrollably, as they endlessly snap him with their mobile phones, jpegs swarming away like butterflies carrying pollen from this unbelievable flower, spreading our boys’ beauty across screens all over the online universe, which in turns smiles back in unison, a chorus of sighs hushing every click lest he wakes up and decides to break the delicious complicity that binds this chain of stolen glances together.

And then, he opens his eyes, their color a green as vacillating as the underside of an olive leaf shifting undecided from silver shine to gray introspection, a perfect opal which becomes a kaleidoscopic lens magnetically attracting and condensing whatever light is still aloft at these waning moments of the blue hour, the blackness of his iris becoming the nothingness towards which the last ray is inexorably drawn, the day deduced to a beam, deflected by the scintillating crystal of his gaze, and flung back outside, through the airplane window, like a thread through the head of a needle, the glow of a summer afternoon about to end concentrated and aiming towards the island, reaching with concise intensity the very target of the barman’s vision, exactly at the moment he raises his eyes from his makeshift temple, almost as if expecting to see the airplane arriving through the parting clouds, the dazzling light tearing them apart now focused to a single brilliant point in the sky, our boys’ eyes a bright star deflowering the coy darkness of the young evening, flickering annunciations of memories not yet experienced and promising to fulfill wishes still not expressed, the inexplicable flash reminding the barman of his duties as official reception, a position important in ways he could not possibly fathom yet, as he hopped on his bike and dashed to the airport, anxious to anticipate our boy’s arrival as promised, on the dark tarmac of the landing strip that was reserved for the descending star.

Note: A Fragile Accomplishment is a novel written and presented on Un nouVeau iDeal by Panagiotis Hadjistefanou

All photographs, kind courtesy of  Hedi Slimane

PANAGIOTIS HADJISTEFANOU: A FRAGILE ACCOMPLISHMENT - CHAPTER XI

Photographs courtecy of Hedi Slimane

Acoustic Analogy

Deep within the hum of the arriving plane, the save button was hit by our boy, our savior, storing his notes safely in the cradle of beauty, wisdom and culture that is his cherished laptop, his digital tablets inscribed with commandments that forbade nothing but offered oracular options, folded and stored carefully exactly at the moment the landing was about to begin, and deliver him to the party island, his duties there sacrosanct, as DJ and master of ceremonies at the meeting of blindness and revelation, a figure already held in awe despite his youth, his talents as a musician already spreading like a forest fire around the world, his years spent as a prophet incognito numbered. If you could hack into his hard drive, this is what you would read:

Note 1

The cracked whistle of hissing butter, sounding off as it hits the hot skillet, is a pathetic equivalent of a death throe, a sibilant sigh concluding a present, barely significant, cycle of existence, fat facing execution by unavoidable immolation, a soulless sacrifice culminating in an appropriately anticlimactic approximation of celestial ascension, a wisp of dispirited steam evaporating inconclusively, a heathen fate without a foreseeable heaven to aspire to, announced with an almost inaudible, and in any case futile and weak, thud, a semi-sound that is not so much emanated as muffled by the semi-solid substance falling unceremoniously, carelessly pushed by a finger, from the kitchen knife to the frying pan, all this a sonic sequence that is registered as meaningful only if one ascertains that a chunk of fat can exist, in the spiritual sense, and therefore feel, and therefore express, something as self important as imminent death or as universally painful as burning alive, an animistic assumption about the material world that can only be empirical, possibly because one has unforgettably screamed, at least once, when feeling the inflammatory self assurance of hot metal right on their own skin, being marked for life inculcating deeply the belief in the secret life of matter, a metaphysical conviction experienced by accidental contact, an almost personalized vindictiveness mysteriously lurking in the other-worldliness of the material domain, scorned pride proving that hell indeed has all kinds of fury, heat not only expanding the volume of a frying pan, but, when ignored, throwing a temper tantrum as rabidly raging as the metal it mercilessly scorches, angrily branding anyone who foolishly dares contact, the cruelty and decisiveness of the burn so specific and targeted that it can be conceivably assigned to a personality, as if things hid character, and therefore, were able not only to orchestrate but also to sadistically enjoy the human scream, or sob, or wail, or any other demonstration of suffering that delineates their vital space, their victim substituting as a siren of alarm, recoiling in vocalized pain, regretting ever trespassing this perimeter of inanimate animosity, the whole sonic sequence, the thud, the hiss, your scream, an acoustic version of the symphonic effects produced by nature and all other similarly, decisively, affected materials and creatures, be they human, animal, solid, liquid or of any other essential permutation, a death knell and an annunciation of rebirth forming a dual but unifying message shared by the variable aural frequencies produced when they are pushed beyond limits, a sonic rendition of the fundamental changes taking place in the core of their very own nature, either burning, crashing or suffering any other event that acts as a catalyst, the material world specifically resonating not with voice but in an imitation of tragedy within the realm of inanimate objects, maybe ineffectively, but conceivably, simulating a human reaction, a dissonant mimicry between two worlds, the sentient and the soulless, a constant séance communicating allegiances between humanity and energy not yet incorporated, a ritual in which everyone of us partakes, a liturgy whose incantations are the sounds recited by nature around us and captured by our very own eardrums, audience to the universe as it endearingly, tunelessly, but convincingly nonetheless, aspires to transmogrify its’ secular emotion into spiritual vibrations, just as humans or animals do, the supposedly unfeeling, unthinking universe, expressing surprising pain during metamorphosis, grabbing the microphone and unhesitatingly belting out an approximation of our greatest hits, the results resembling a cosmic karaoke, the murmur of a snowy avalanche echoing the grumble of a million reluctant soldiers as they are sent to war, the ocean whispering in time to the rhythm of the predictably cyclical hopes of ships departing and the joy, or dread, of those returning, the aforementioned butter lamenting its’ fate as it irrevocably turns into an unguent and then liquefies, forced by a fateful situation to transubstantiation itself into another aspect of reality or migrate to an entirely different level of material existence, as if exhaling hot air in expression of torment over imminent deliquesce is the inorganic echo of renaissance or reincarnation, the direction of this translation, from natural sound to sentient voice and cry or vice-versa, being impossible to define, the kick-off event of sonic transcription lost in the proverbial mists of ancient times, the impossibility of any plausible answer to this question being a result of the multitude of hermeneutic options refracted through the mirrored maze of hearing, the relationships between sound and source mutating endlessly and never keeping for long one or the other meaning or significance or cadence or even tone, because, as sound crosses the borders between inanimate and organic dimensions, it reverberates and shifts shapes, bouncing across the expanse separating anyone who can vocalize by choice and everything that is voiceless unless it dies and is reborn, the sound of burning butter, again, an excellent example of loss as a prerequisite instead of a hindrance to sonic translation, as it can also be compared, shedding its’ meaning but growing the wings of freedom, to the static of an out of tune radio, or even to the nervous crackling of cellophane crumpled by a multitude of hands, humbly soundtracking the joy if unwrapping a present, the feeling aroused in further, unforeseen ways, these sonic allusions not so surprising if you subscribe to the theory of migrating sounds and their ever changing baggage of assigned narrative, all the permutations of improbable auditory simulations being just as evocative, each one conveying the essence of acoustic analogy as a protean procedure, whose results can never be definite, unpredictably changing in interminable ways, the metaphors of listening too complicated to fathom, the universe being a vast auditorium of inter-dimensional aural alliteration, murmuring the hearsay of everything, inter-dimensional gossip metastasizing as it travels from potential transmitter to possible receiver, the transformation sometimes exasperatingly jocular, at others a vividly adventurous, sequential, renaissance that could be described as a Chinese whisper spread around a circle of surrealist poets, a never ending blend of the familiar and the incredibly far out, this magic of innumerable probabilities creating the need for an axial center to hold together an ever widening circle of countless origins that can be attributed to any sound, a flag less maypole of absolute, rigid, non-vibrating silence from which the various auditory ramifications could be tied to and circled around, spun by whoever is hearing them, the ribbons of listening endlessly intertwining and unreeling, as the interpreters twist and unwind around the silence they circumnavigate, the center of this rotation a spindle constantly spooling and unraveling a weave whose complexity is as unheard of as the absolute silence from which it radiates, each strand an explanation, archiving the fluctuating provenance of sound according to the shades of understanding lacquered on its’ surface by each listener, every ear swirling the colors of meanings around, the fractal mutations of alternatives resulting in innumerable emotional reactions reflecting individual characteristics of perception, the uniqueness of which is an existential pin number offering bilateral access between our world and the world of matter, both colliding in reciprocate traffic of meaning and sound, the soul of nature transcribed for human voice or expressive fauna, the constant changes of the material world mimicking the sounds of those living in the environment it fosters, and for both, like a paradoxical loop in the time space continuum, music, never the same as it flutters from ear to ear and absorbs the idiosyncrasies of anyone who listens to it, is the kaleidoscopic keyhole which opens the door between these otherwise totally separate universes, music is the looped labyrinth keeping apart but connected the empire of the listening and the underworld of the unheard, unilaterally and secretly communicating, since what can be heard within the interstitial maze of music is only an indefinable quotation of meaning in traffic between creation and understanding, sound whose identity is not yet formulated, this bridge and tunnel discovered not when a piece of music is performed, heard or enjoyed, but, found during the idle time spent in anticipation, before music erupts and govern your senses, as you hear indistinct sounds in serendipitous rumination and comparative silence, for instance while waiting for a concert to begin, as the wood and metal of instruments discordantly hum, still vibrating with the incomprehensible tunes of forests long extinct and mines forever exhausted, aural history they carry embedded in their grain and shine, until the conductor coaxes the symphony hidden out of these otherwise silent objects, his only instrument a baton, which remains tellingly quiet, moving to the music but not emoting it, as if the sounds were tied from it with invisible strings to the musicians’ movements, another alert and speechlessly beholden maypole being the impossibly mute antenna of a radio, capturing, while retaining an almost avowed silence itself, the transmissions of faraway studios cresting on unseen ripples of air, invisible waves on whose backs whole worlds are sailing, revolving invisibly around a silent wand conducting the ether, a magical configuration delineating an inexplicable but self evident formation that successfully arrests the volatile emissions of distant and fleeting sources, radial connections drawn in exactly the same design as the circle of explanations of sounds, the baton uniting the various auditory strands of the orchestra just as listening is tied by personal interpretations around universal silence, their centrifugal logic propelled by the endlessness of acoustic meaning, a myriad tandems spinning around the eye of a timeless spiral, as many remixes of understanding music as the forms that love takes when exchanged, this endless inter-dimensional transition of matter from silence to sound a necessary trip taken lightly by everyone, everyday, maybe too lightly, if we pay any attention to this ubiquitous miracle at all, if we strain at all to listen closely while a record is about to release the secret of its abstract hieroglyphics, a revelation or a disappointment awaiting just a few seconds further down their engraved orbit, another looping labyrinth, our expectations spinning under the spell of hope for a life changing audition, everything circulating around the silent nothingness of the hole, apparently stationary, remaining silent in the middle of the record, withholding a secret that will forever remain unknown, leaving inconclusive clues in the space between listening and not yet hearing something specific, waiting for a melody to appear, or at least a sequence of sonic events of decipherable provenance, it is at this instance that you contemplate on the crossing over of sound, the ability it has to jump from one dimension to another, as your ears are attentive and prepared for the incoming onslaught of sensory overload, lost at this junction of crepuscular listening, comparing, absentmindedly perhaps, the peculiarly unique static at the beginning of vinyl to a pattern as impossible to repeat as the daily rankings of microscopic gravel, in a Zen garden, the difference of strokes identifiable every time, the pieces of rock clicking, scratching and popping as if they are about to disobey and ignore the monkish discipline they have been subjected to for thousands of years, and flower insurrection ally, just as the record is about to cease its own existence as a silent petrol byproduct, rebelliously resonating with uncontrolled sound, the plastic singing, even by proxy, a vehicle of transporting boisterous spirit through whispering matter.

Note 2

“Out of tune” is an extraordinary instance of language imitating the metaphysical semantics of sound, a peculiar expression used not only for a mechanical contraption so ubiquitous and banal as a radio, but, acquiring different meaning when applied to other subjects, since a piano or a voice or even a whole personality, one that is out of sync with their times and circumstance, all these can be out of tune, and therefore can also be described as such, this turn of phrase supposing an essential continuity running through and joining the disparate identities between the instrument of Chopin sonatas, a failed contestant of a reality show, and a nostalgic pensioner, random associations all sharing a similar appellation, as if what they refer to is one and the same thing when viewed from a certain angle.

Note 3

The design of instruments is a form of shaping the material world according to the specifications of the imagined sound range we aim to eventually produce, desired sound coaxed out of a conscious attempt to concretely formalize the life of the mind, or more precisely solidify the free-form fantasies of our senses, the morphological curviness of a violin or the shuddering glitz of a tambourine embodying a sinuous and poetic outline of self consciousness, a benefit of a doubt defocusing their edges and blurring their shape as if musical instruments themselves are perpetually in the middle of transformation from sound to matter, a trumpet sprouting whorls of metal tendrils before it decides of fluting out in resemblance of a gilded horn of plenty, about to spout forth a cloud of sequined fruit and flowers, a musicians’ tools unable to commit to a self defined paradigm, the horn commemorating the arc of the mythological bone, the skin of the drums a taut shadow of their bovine past, the sticks naked branches broken off trees now long extinct, all of them attempting to formulate themselves within the alien parameters of tangible reality and in the process building whimsical vessels that will carry within their improbable outlines sounds across the sea of silence to the shores of listening.

PS. It can not remain unmentioned that the word “note”, is, of course, both a scribbled page and a mark scrawled across the faint octave lines of a music sheet, the meaning of both unresolved unless listened or read, both activities applying equally to the two different meanings.

Note: A Fragile Accomplishment is a novel written and presented on Un nouVeau iDEAL by Panagiotis Hadjistefanou.

All photographs, kind courtesy of Hedi Slimane

PANAGIOTIS HADJISTEFANOU: A FRAGILE ACCOMPLISHMENT - CHAPTER X

Photographs and film courtecy of Hedi Slimane

Wasted Listening

The party itself is arranged as a contemplation focused on the mechanics and metaphysics of duality and blindness, a game devised as research about the secrets of anonymous desire, an attempt to penetrate the obscurity of its origins and purposes, a social experiment attempting to capture and decode the secrets immigrating undocumented through the porous border of skin that touches, and is touched itself, as two people attempt contact, at first standing on either side of an interpersonal divide separated by a foreignness as terminally mysterious as being condemned to remain unknown to each other, the night a boxing ring set up, within the confines of its emptiness an impatience brewing, a sustained enthusiasm building, for the arrival of the opponents, everything arranged to enable the fight for survival that ignites companionship, this ultimate but elusive goal that is fought for when two disparate parts attempt to merge into a seamless whole, this vital transition to unity, which is the banishment of loneliness, since what is indivisibly unique knows of no other to gaze at from a distance, unity and unrepeatability an elusive goal requiring a negation of each participants’ prior individuality, a repentance of their past, their history, the One needing to curl itself suggestively and effectively around its complementary and reciprocate Other, both of them thus changing their natures in unforeseen, maybe uncomfortable ways, exercising previously underdeveloped nuances of behavior, making art out of manners, enacting a theatrical production of insinuating gestures, staged voluntarily, if only as an arrangement promising to offer a few hours of amusement, as a game, for a party, like the one proposed and organized for the guests tonight, who, by prior agreement, are prepared to traverse the island and then be split in two apparently distinct but eventually symbiotic categories, the imminently expected crowd agreeing, and eager, to be neatly divided into two teams, differentiated by a simple, amusing but also very manipulative parlor trick, since an invitation to this very special night requires that the attendees must decide, beforehand and of their own accord I repeat, to arrive either ready to be blindfolded, wearing the silk hoods provided by the hosts, or, if not so inclined, as the other half opts, by their own free choice as well, to show up a little later during the festive proceedings, and remain un-hooded during the whole evening, roaming the party with their vision unhindered, free, the difference between the two groups an existential mise en scene, a most delinquent capriccio, Shakespeare on empathogens, one half of the guests spending the night faceless and blind, as if sleepwalking in a masquerade, while simultaneously and all around them, like a solar system that revolves beyond the grasp of their benighted vision, the other half of the guest list, is leading a brilliant inversion of blind man’s buff, since those able to see are chasing instead of being chased, a reversal of the roles that a normal rendition of the game would require, those blindfolded feeling like easy prey for the seeing orbiting invisibly around them, the option of pursuit cancelled, thus a void of behavior created, something for nature to abhor, the players needing to fill this lack of purpose with a new perspective, everyone suddenly aware of the darkness as lack of perception instead of impenetrable nothingness, the night an opportunity for trespass instead of a definite impasse, the hooded lain around the premises, resting, unsuspecting, like blind fawns at arrow’s length, safely anonymous, but also unable to see and thus crucially incapacitated, placed by the hosts strategically and totally naked, except for the piece of white fabric obscuring their faces, a gallery of headless statues strewn around, at most slightly moving to the music, their inability to circulate freely around the party lulling them to half sleep, losing track of time as they wait for the arrival of the clear eyed and able, those not wearing hoods, who are allowed into the party only after the first team is hoodwinked and remains nude and idle for quite a while, sitting around and waiting, vulnerably unaware of the perusal they bathe in, this self imposed disability impossible to escape from, since the choice of either faceless blindness or anonymous freedom, once made, is set in stone for the duration of the evening, the identity of those invited never to be revealed to each other, the masked guests leaving only after the last of the seeing had decided the fun was over, a different exit assigned to each team, all of them strangers till the night was over and then forever separated before anybody had a chance of seeing each other’s eyes, their temporary difference in status an uncomfortable, transitory, but fecund circumstance, exactly like a gestation, pregnant with innumerable divinations concerning the initiative of contact and the essence of communication, an efflorescence of mutual co-operation blooming across the party as the night progresses, a relationship arising between the eternal strangers, born from the fact that the hooded were unable to move without assistance, and therefore needing help from those not wearing hoods, who remain an unseen presence moving imperceptibly beyond vicinities of self imposed blindness, shadows possibly conferring help, if so inspired, then, both of them, both the headless, needy statues and the ghosts roaming around their placid pools of facelessness, realizing that an approach must be devised, a way found, a manner forged, a bridge crossed over and a passage opened, a window to the heart flung open, the light hidden within or levitating without must pierce the veil of darkness obscuring both the eyes and the vision of those to be approached, both looker and looked at existing but not to each other, like a tree that falls dead in a forest when no one is there to hear its loud thud as it hits the ground, therefore never documented and historically at least non-existent, the party also a philosophical conundrum whose solution was as counter-intuitive as it was surprisingly emotional, not intellectual, the equation balanced not by the nature of the factors delineating its construction, but by the soul of each participating agent, the invalid by choice admitting and requiring the assistance of the unseen and powerful, blissfully or tediously unaware that a helpful stranger might be about to touch them or presently whisper a sweet word in their ear, blindly hoping of being unsuspectingly approached by a nameless someone who is, crucially, able to see and thus rescue them from despairing indolence and isolating immobility, the potential saviors’ silhouette at most fleetingly obscuring the disco lights, casting a hopeful shadow through the milky fabric fog woven by the white silk hoods, a presence blinking, then ascertained, elevating this unseen but benevolent stranger to the status of a savior, or, at least, to the equally divine role of kind, an existential annunciation delivered in a frivolous circumstance, a second chance for belief in love, offered however imperceptibly by a stranger in a party, a realization whose potential is powerful enough to propel you towards a new life, a miracle of consciousness witnessed within the context of a game played for a reason as random as free will and summer fun, the variations of personal information exchanged non-visually, the voluntarily blind resorting to feel, with tentative and trembling fingertips travelling across the face of their helpful but invisible neighbor, in a bid to follow some remembered trail, trace the path of wrinkle or the crescent of a hairline, the seeing but unseen being their potentially significant others, themselves simultaneously hesitating to touch the faceless and blind, afraid that by doing so they might desecrate the space thickened by the invisibility encircling everybody, both savior and saved remaining bilaterally unseen and thus assured they are never to recognize each other, cancelling all future repeats of tonight’s magic, rendering them impossibly imaginary, since the guests are unable to even find each other appealing or unattractive now, the pleasure of their contact the only guideline which they can confidently follow, this singular atmosphere achieved and established exactly because of this duality of impossibilities, mutual invisibility excluding the future but also discarding the past, isolating the now as the only viable option for happiness, erasing the accumulated blur of obsolete aesthetic likes and dislikes from their eyes, any preferences or standards collected during their lives instantly thrown away, tonight, all the resonances emanating from experience silenced, the years spent listening to echoes of happiness now gone, immediately recognized as a waste of existential acoustics, a taste for blondes or a predilection for young, firm flesh, or any other preferred facial characteristic and beauty standard, now exposed as only a symptom of suffering for previous losses, prayers at currently non existent altars, emotions whose similarity with the original adoration is self-assigned and arbitrarily delusional, each glint of desire in their eyes irrelevant behind the hoods or the blindness, and thus invariably and forever branded as a remembrance of love since surely lost, the anguished search for past happiness offering only possibilities of dishonest revivalism, our attractions a doomed longing for the return of what has long drifted down the river of our lives, gone forever, our enthusiasms a desperate wish for re-enactment, leading us to simulacra we find comfortably familiar or vague enough to not upset any passion inflamed by our hidden wounds, this wish to return towards that which he have irrevocably lost is, tonight, at this party, recognized by all as an attempt to resuscitate themselves by devouring their remains, incest committed with their own memory and its enchantments, all these acquired tastes and comforts whose feeling we designate as confirmation of pleasures now irrefutable proof of both emotional auto-cannibalism and masturbatory necrophilia of the imagination, a victimization and persecution of our own emotional past, this realization exploding and uniting the party in a unique moment of personal transformation for each and every guest, blind or seeing, a renaissance of the soul achieved by the simple banishing of superficial, optical seduction, consciousness enlightened by the simple negation of our inordinately self-evident trust in seeing, the inability to look becomes a key unlocking an eternal secret, since it elucidates the resultant impossibility of following familiar optical blandishments that will help evaluate the object of your affection, making judgment of value an impossibility, since pre-conceived predilection are now beyond reference, blindness revealing itself to be a medium of divination, the ascetics of disappearance perversely producing evidence, divulging the secret of love, namely that darkness is what you should follow when lost in the tunnel leading towards a significant other, this sudden awareness dawning on everyone at once, all of them till now mistakenly following the light, which is the past, whose reflections on the surface of your soul play illusory tricks on you and your wandering eyes, the party proving that if you want to find love, instead of search for it, you must proceed towards the other end of the trail you are walking on, you must turn around, towards the dark, step in the direction of the non-existent and therefore unknown, an absence of definite destination maybe as scary as a black hole devouring the universe, your movement towards it seemingly as fatal an orbit as that of a star drawn to its unthinkable gravitational pull, your wish for love perhaps drawing you towards the abyss of nothingness, the choice of being led by the dark instead of the light resembling the resignation of a falling star following a course to nowhere, darkness a perennial childhood fear destined to be exorcised by this party arrangement, which illustrates how essential the incomprehensibility enveloping love is, the ever deepening darkness shown as only a gradually affirming signal of progress, an inner flame the only light you need to sail through the dark currents separating you from whomever you happen to love, who could forever remain a stranger and that is suddenly ok, because the moment you surrender to this belief an inextinguishable candle is lit, the wick inflamed and spreading a blindingly bright revelation of sudden knowledge affirming ancient but unsaid suspicions, mainly that love, tenderness, companionship and even lust can be as eyeless as justice, an awakening of consciousness that leads everyone to the question of difficulty in ascertaining correct attribution of motives to their past infatuations, to re-evaluate their understanding of the machinations of attraction and acceptance, discard their prior experiences as optical illusions, disown visionary delusions, the party helping everyone to realize that all of their previous seductions originate from the deceiving and superficial images attracting their easily fooled and treacherous eyes, this sudden discredit of vision such an experiential revolution that a shower of emotions is felt on the very skin of the guests, a sensory affirmation of the freshly proven fact that everyone could fall in love with almost anyone, as long as they did not know their image, as long as they chose to be faceless and blind or unseen and unknown, everyone could find love if only they were forced to fill the void left by useless perceptions with the thousand gestures, caresses, whispers, words needed for fruitful human interaction, if everybody would substitute seeing with all these behavioral details and manners necessary to convey the urgent feelings the desire for love evokes, even just to appease the abandonment you feel when suspended in blind and naked solitude, an infantile but orphaned state, seemingly interminably waiting for somebody clear-sighted, like a baby waits for its mother while staring at the ceiling, meditating on the shadows moving slowly across its perceived infinity, in expectation of the seeing, somewhere around them, about to convey care but also enjoying a tactile prerogative, everyone also wondering about the rejections remaining unfulfilled, since they are weaponless, relieved of their greatest defense, this being the callous blink it takes to ignore somebody because of his choice of dress or angle of hairline, desire now blindly following the artificial but effective incapacitation splitting and joining the social fabric down the middle, a line defining a binary rendition of invisibility, anonymity and imperceptibility, everyone experiencing the other, his neighbor, as either version of these two forms of unseen, a cloud of temperature, smell, touch or voice, anything unsaid transmitted over and above the horizon of visual perception, a warm hand smoothing a tense backbone, a tender breath fluttering heat to the lightly perfumed perspiration of an outstretched neck, the two halves of manufactured inscrutability meeting across an invisible but deeply felt line, a destination and a departure equidistant to many possibilities, all of them leading back to this invisible appointment, a date destined to remain blind forever, a temporary wedding between permanently unknown partners, communal and anonymous sex, a mass blessing with the option of the miracle of future union excluded, an inner landscape whose horizon reveals itself to be a dead end, an impasse of blindness facing facelessness, this impersonal vis a vis creating a double helix of simultaneously anonymous and personal confrontations, the seeing deprived of the familiar signs of faces, eyes, smiles to look at and decipher, the blind deprived of an image of what their visionary partners looked like, both disorientated by the lack of information, but each in a different way, all human interactions transformed during the gathering into an unforgettable experience for everyone participating, a revelatory fumble across the seductive depths of what lies unseen, what happens underneath the surface of others, their image rarely and only condescendingly ignored, the seeing interacting with the blind without a single blink leaking the other way, not a peek stolen by either, as the strict rules of the party demand immediate ejection from the premises if anyone disobeys, an eviction from an artificial paradise were vision is sin and the eternity of love is glimpsed, however momentarily, through an evocation of blindness, the party staff hovering always nearby, exterminating angels attentive in case of any misbehavior, constantly checking if an errant hood slipped, accidentally or by cheating, a mishap potentially threatening to tear the cunning but delicate concept of the night apart, nobody wanting to lift the occlusion that does so much more than just dissect the assembled crowd, the two teams gentlemanly obeying to play the game according to the austere but effective rules, following the symmetrical design that reflects as much as conceals, everyone inwardly transfixed by staring into this imaginary one way mirror placed between them and the others, a mirror whose magical property is to divulge the truth of the reflection by erasing it, a mirror that dares to expose the image it projects as the obstruction it really is, an obstacle between our gaze and the hidden truth, looking finally not only accused of treason but brought to trial, cross-examined about hatching a scheme devised to undermine reality, blindness standing as the most improbable witness to the fallibility of seeing, reality freed after remaining hermetically hidden under the seductive but impenetrable skin of the icon, treacherous surface for a few hours removed between the two equally handicapped groups, finally expressing themselves unsupervised by the arbitrariness of aesthetics, ultimately free of judgment, their true selves unhindered by the restrictions that followed from somebody else’s image of them and vice-versa, escaping the optical illusion that hid their souls, understanding that looking for love is a cage whose area is limited to the outlines of what we consider beautiful, whereas surrendering to its offering with our eyes closed is the only way to escape the confines our eyes place around us, this freedom from the prejudice of icons a questionable privilege for the seeing since all the adoration they received came from faceless bodies, themselves paying the cost of disability in order to realize that it only took a random stranger to mollify their anguish, everyone destined to remain a strange stranger to each other, invisibility a fragile spell not to be toyed with, precious contact, under the circumstances, only to be communicated by a touch, a kiss, a caress or any other physical expression of inter-personal affirmation that can be devised outside the realm of vision, the seeing resigned to be present to themselves but invisible to the hooded, as if personifying madness, in the sense that the madman is the only one aware of his tormenting hallucinations, himself an eyewitness, a martyr to the madness defining his existence, but the others, the sane, are only able to guess at their veracity, in this case the hooded only able to guess at the motives or the movements of the free, unable to visually decipher their body language or facial expression, waiting for a tell-tale waft of an unnamable cologne to spice the air around their nostrils or the touch of soft fingertips to trace a path across their thighs, verbal and tactile the only ways of communicating anything unseen between one another, this division of the guests a twist of an old, coincidentally classic and childish way to have fun, a group escapade that resonated with the decorative echoes of eighteenth century oil paintings, adding a veneer of timelessness over the contemporary orgiastic gay scene, a social interaction invoking an evocative but taut schism running right through and under the skin and muscles of any festivity, the prospect of meeting a stranger an emotional spine both separating, supporting and animating the enveloping, reveling body, the whole event a balancing act split between two equal but not equivalent halves, joining into a perfectly functioning equilibrium, the disorientation of the hooded eliminated by their heightened perceptions, their remaining senses refined exactly in the way they had heard about the congenitally blind, whose tragic fate they were borrowing, unbelievably, as if it was a sex game for a one night stand, for a fling with a soon to be forgotten stranger, an eyeless offering of casual passion and promised oblivion, the gazes of the free, desirous or contemptuous, unavoidably ignored and thus liberated from guilt-inducing supervision, everybody’s anonymity strategically secured by the absence of any possibility of recognition, everyone simultaneously free from the restraints of optically perceived delusions, waking up together from the hallucination formerly known as reality, finally wise to the fact that vision is a form of blindness, the power of eyes to delude a silencer of other, stealthier and less corruptible instincts, everyone realizing that love can be asserted and won successfully through the uniqueness of unexpected touch, the traced contours of an invisible body, the pliability of unseen skin tone, the surprising continuity of mysterious flesh as it morphs from softness to hardness, love is only a matter of openness or remoteness, tenderness and affection a seemingly intractable solution between unseen strangers, their hesitation collapsing when submitted to the slightest hint of a kind gesture or the imperceptible motility of an accommodating body, like a feeble lie evaporates when blown away by the merest contradiction, everyone’s emotions tentatively tip-toeing across this tightrope, hovering high over the irrelevant absence of a safety net, their prenuptial insurances and worries forgotten the moment someone crosses over the unseen horizons, surrendering to a blind nobody boldly moving beyond an imaginary frontier created by assumed and therefore temporary non-identities, their souls till today exposed as constructions of prejudiced perceptions, since, what was discovered by everybody, and finally acted as the unifying element of this strange party, what shone as the universality that held all this communal blindness together, was the unequivocal establishment of the importance of reality beyond what is visible, the shared acknowledgment that once our faces, our eyes, our beauty or our wisdom, our age or our innocence, once these givens where doubted, what remains, is most vital, important, life giving, it is the gift of being touched in the dark by a gentle stranger, unforeseen and surprising by definition, a recognition happening only when seeing is limited, our ignorance heretofore accidentally and tragically acquired by our inability to see further than our own fears, a muslin of pain covering our eyes, a gauze of fear across the face of strangers, what lies beneath, unseen, is our own real self, who will respond, if only approached, by the other who we are blindly waiting for and is imperceptibly shifting around us, the other we call out to for help, who will save us, lend us a hand out of our cultivated blindness and affected disability, the other who will pry us out of our chosen loneliness, like a morsel of accumulated tears is torn from the clam-shell, its hairy clamminess ignored, the gritty texture and comic irony of years of underwater weeping appreciated and savored, the false promise of pearly opalescence forgiven, all consumed as improbable delicacies.

This wordless rebirth the belief in love outwardly resembled nothing more than a placid pool of quiet shock, the minds of the guests swimming in a lake of muteness whose reflective surface simultaneously mapped eternity and hid its own depth, a wisdom whose light was equidistant to the sublime and the primordial, the silent but emotional crowd faced with the undeniable fact of vision eventually becoming the darkness hiding below our eyes, illusions of desires past deepening the shadows in us, their depth concealing a sunless abyss of time stored instead of deleted, the heavy weight of the past keeping us earthbound, while the night, ink animated with possibility, still twinkling behind closed eyes, now and forever, is distance covered only by wishes fulfilled by faceless strangers, their unfathomable kindness dashing our fears to smithereens, sparkles of tenderness inadvertently decorating an ocean of familiar nothingness, our own frustrated desire, all destinations from this silent awareness just different shades of absolute darkness, absence of light in both directions, blinding with its non-intensity anyone who dares to peek into the void, infinite both above and below, dissolving the limited powers of vision, nothingness mesmerizing those who choose to stare too much, those who swim too far towards either direction of this speechlessness, upwards or downwards, only to discover, sooner rather than later, that it’s too late to return to the peaceful horizon of silent acceptance, their very being unavoidably falling, or rising, towards the precipitous realization of an ecumenical disability to overcome ourselves when under the spell of seeing, our fate as exiles from the consolations of ocular delusion amounting to a revelation, finally answering a question only humans could ever devise to torture themselves over, the question of the existence of a stranger kind enough to touch us in the darkness of our voluntary disability, the futility of images adored culminating to an ever more blinding light, blindness reversed, from absence of sight to visionary enlightenment.

During the few summers intervening between his underwater walks and his airborne arrival to the party island of the blind and the unseen, the weaponless and the reborn, our boy, our savior, having led nobody but his own beauty down the unseen side of the sunset path, its reflections building a bridge under his secret strolls, connecting a charmed childhood to an inspiring manhood, our boy deciding, choosing, and catapulting himself to a reality of such complexity and potential that nobody would have suspected of him, tonight still a flowering beauty, blooming into a rose that will eventually morph from the vegetal equivalent of a minuscule explosion to a full blown efflorescence of voluptuous light erupting gloriously across the sky, a spectacular result born of an imperceptible atom, now just at the moment before splitting, soon about to release unforeseen manifestations of beauty all tangential to unfathomable possibilities, improbable but as real as an inexplicable wave of hissing snakes, shimmering and scaly like a squirming carpet woven out of rusted sequins, slithering down the steps of the New York Stock Exchange, the dazed serpents rising in perplexed anger to greet the disbelieving passers by, who capture the ferocious display of innumerable reptile retinas reflecting the lenses of digital cameras, the pictures soon splashing across every surface of the planet dedicated to the distribution of information, provoking a growing global awareness of animal life mysteriously appearing, and forging a connection of the inexplicable fauna to the disappearance of humans just as inexplicably missed, the evolution of contemporary technology propagating this information at the speed of sand grains passing through the hole connecting the sinuous transparencies of an hourglass, at every finalized countdown a reversal needed for the grains to continue travelling, perpetuate their motion, suspend their achieved velocity but not let them settle at the end, or the beginning, of the distance travelled, never settling being obligatory for freedom and reversal of direction a prerequisite of continuity

 

Note: A Fragile Accomplishment is a novel written and presented on Un nouVeau iDEAL by Panagiotis HadjistefanouAll photographs, kind courtesy of Hedi Slimane The video OSCAR / IMPROVISATION 1 by Hedi Slimane, features  Oscar who is a dancer of the Royal Danish Ballet. on the drums is Mathias member of the band Supershine.

PANAGIOTIS HADJISTEFANOU: A FRAGILE ACCOMPLISHMENT - CHAPTER IX

 
Photographs courtecy of Hedi Slimane

Plastic Fingerprints

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

All photographs, kind courtesy of Hedi Slimane  
 

PANAGIOTIS HADJISTEFANOU: A FRAGILE ACCOMPLISHMENT - CHAPTER VIII

 

Photographs courtecy of Hedi Slimane

Painless Reincarnation 

“Brevity is the soul of lingerie, a garter whispered to its petticoat, or so Dorothy Parker would insist, though she did kill herself, so, her words should not be taken lightly”, twittered the male peacock to the female cat, recycling another of his many tiresome bon mots, and of course, imperceptibly, fanning his iridescent tail, routinely shaking off the nacreous gradations of glorious twilight glowing softly from his feathered aura, glamour made of organic smoke and genetic mirrors, placid pools of rainbow refractions ringing miniscule black suns, mute stars poised decoratively across a mid-air arc, a display of grandiosity that evaporates soon, like a rare perfume, volatile only in a limited sense, a promise of flight indefinitely delayed by transfixing beauty, the proud bird remaining unperturbed if not satisfied by the hypnotic effect of his paralyzing plumage, as he stretches the dark blue silk of his mesmerizing breastplate, strutting as if in perpetual official arrival or crusading departure, his pose as large as his size would permit, his head as small as his thoughts, nonsense about this and that, little things for little minds picked up from idle gossip and paid for in glittering plastic, issued from exotic bank accounts, his stylized days spent in places like the one he is ruling now, hushed temples of high fashion, serviced by taciturn assistants pretending to be concubines to emperors, all of them looking like the etiolated ghosts you would stumble across the lacquered pages of an expensive magazine, perhaps forgotten in a rented villa on a Mediterranean island, the sort of special edition featuring extremely expensive clothes photographed amidst effulgent displays of voluptuous luxury, exactly like the environment surrounding the peacock now, supra-aesthetically true but only to itself, as it struts, peculiarly aptly, in this decadent boutique, his tail brushing softly against the elaborate productions of rare fabrics and esoteric inspiration, neatly but suggestively hanging from wooden hangers, endless layers of spot lit embroidery floating all around, their delicate tendrils framing celestial shades of evening transparencies, leading to further accumulations of delirious beading, a maze of encrusted armor, thinner than aluminum foil and just as brittle, the victory of manufactured beauty being a fragile accomplishment. 

 The cat, right there, next to the bird, remained indifferent, and in lieu of answering to the tedious literary quotation, malevolently kept on shredding the satin ribbons decorating an embroidered brassiere, a defenseless confection being torn apart by its claws, the feline paws fluffy, and furry, of course, this cat being a well kept Persian, a pet in Paris, a miniature lion, incongruously laden with pearls and almost immobilized by a stiff lace collar of Elizabethan ambition and contemporary audacity, purring, lolling, delighted to rub and spread her silky hair all over the palest and cleanest of carpets, excited at the prospect of so much delicate eveningwear to tear apart, dangling, dazzling, beady, even clinking, a universe with infinite opportunities for destruction, beauty to be unraveled with multiple sensory pay off! 

Between the splendid bird and the playful feline not an ounce of enmity could be detected, these former enemies surprisingly in perfect harmony with each other, pouncing the furthest thing possible in this boutique, the place were their miraculous transformation took place, their painless reincarnation from bored, vicious customers to innocent, beautiful animals, the sudden apparition of the whole famous place turning into a zoo in the middle of the day would soon be heard across the equally bored and vicious city, momentarily enchanted by this amazing scene, which was immortalized in surrealist snapshots of extravagant fauna draped in sartorial statements of heady sophistication, a cobra raising its vibrating head from a sculptural shoe, a fox resplendent in a velvet cape, a rat rushing through an organza sleeve, delirious bats sporting jewels of intense ornamentation, a chic Noah’s Ark being a favorite by line in all the newspapers the next day, the journalists mistaking this spectacle as an art project attributed to the publicity seeking motives of animal rights activists, the human clientele of the shop mysteriously evaporating, like perfume, the store soon an empty shell echoing its times of former glamour amidst walls so sad that not even a ghost would bother to roam them. 

 Somewhere else, entirely, a woman cries “What do you mean there is a goat interviewing the prime minister?”, as she walks out of the kitchen, drying her hands, expecting to see some viral video inanity, when, right there, in the middle of the living room, across the all engulfing surface of the blindingly bright plasma screen, sure as the sun rises every day, a goat, on television, dressed in pale pink Chanel, sat perkily on a sofa, right across the President of the United States, placidly munching on a tuft of grass, later to be confirmed as having been a patch freshly gnawed off the White House lawn, the top executive of this empire smiling beatifically, possibly supposing the anthropomorphic manifestation to be a prank by some inveterate ecologists, his relaxed reaction both quite appealing to the animal and a definitive sign of him not wanting to alienate this harmless voting sector.

The form of an animal, a perfect design, always, is the only vessel that would be appropriate for a lot of unhappy human beings, those who are cursed to live a life of trans-species dislocation, existential entrapment, their soul really belonging to a four legged cat or an eight legged spider but instead living in exile from its truth, trapped in a cage that is the human existence, humanity as an interminable zoo, cages in the shape of human forms holding their animal soul captive. 

This sorry fate, a karmic accident of catastrophic proportions, happens when humans are unable to sense suffering and lack any other purpose but their own satisfaction; therefore their days are consumed in the pursuit pleasing the vastness of themselves before everything else. When human beings are unburdened by conscience, empathy, aim, then, their souls lose all balance, and every animal instinct inherent in their fallible self starts feeding on the interminable void, since awareness is the greatest of all human resources and its absence leaves behind a total blackness, a pit without end. 

It is sudden, enlightening clarity, its origins yet unfathomable, an esoteric revelation that turns all these lost souls into the free animals they were always meant to be, this lonely woman, as small as her kitchen and timid as the life she’s led, transforming herself into a canary, a moment after she opens the cage, immediately after she lets her pet bird fly away, after years of captivity, out the window, a heavenwards path she is about to follow, as she turns fluorescent yellow, light and fleeting in a second, her shared adventure possibly morbidly short, a suicide attempt leading to a foreshortened but intensely lived future, but the view from above invaluable, and the sunshine long underappreciated. 

How could it be explained, this sudden disappearance of so many people? The ones that had lost their way were so many and their reincarnations as animals so spontaneous and eerily accurate, it was safe to assume that their numbers would soon reach critical mass, thus making the strangeness of the situation quite obvious to friends, relatives and co-workers, all of them soon about to notice the funniest of resemblances between the missing persons they were looking for and the fauna they discovered in their place, the seekers in various shades of desperation, unable to make the obvious connection between wanted and the found. 

 Everyone would soon realize that the people being transformed to animals were punished, justly, for their sins, but not in cruel or eternally damning ways: they were just reinstated into the natural order of things at the level where their behaviors, attitudes and beliefs were not only expected but also appreciated, because, on four legs and their own fur, under flapping feathers or scuttling on insect feet, sliding on their scaly bellies or digging a fresh tunnel out of old dirt, then, finally, their form was in perfect accordance to their soul, that is animalistic and to be treated with awareness of its limitations, and death still remained a privilege for them, an escape route from a short, nasty and brutish existence, the nonsense of eternal burning in hell remaining nothing but a silly rumor. 

A pack of wolves is howling at the moon, unconsciously singing in chorus to a celestial obstacle crossing the path of sunlight unseen, the day raging on the other side of the planet invisible and unknown to them, their wild cries serenading this dislocated and floating fragment of daylight, a celestial coin tossed and permanently frozen mid air, an insolvent, barren sun, whose brightness is on loan, incapable of lighting the firmament that supports it, adrift in the dark sky, seemingly as still as the space it’s suspended in, though imperceptibly turning around itself, and around the earth, both of them concurrently rotating around the axis shooting through the invisible center of the universe, everything spinning quietly in the night, as hushed and evocative as a record that is just about to start playing, for a few seconds more remaining silent, a placid pool of quiet blackness, reflecting on its glossy surface the world it is about to put a spell on, a revolving black mirror facing reality, crowned by a white label, a paper moon rotating in the middle of a vinyl night, everything manipulated by unseen forces, the universe twisting thanks to an immensely concentrated source of centrifugal energy, a black hole in the middle of everything, humble but of immense importance, the sound waves tracing smooth trajectories as the grooves spool out of this nothingness generating never ending spirals, music being the art of creating something out of vibrations imperceptible to the human eye and thus the ultimate proof that we are enjoying the results of a dutiful but discreet mechanism supporting the cosmos in the solid but invisible way that an elaborate sound system lends existence to a recording, a silent but pregnant working process which only needs the tentative touch of a minuscule needle, its imminent landing about to fill your soul with the shivers of a magnificent symphony never, ever, heard, before or after, a flight that begins at touch down, the blind diamond creating an alternate reality as it rides over the etched melody, following the shiny path that leads to the center of the record, a slice of light resembling the reflection of the sun as it sets over the horizon devouring its light.

Note: A Fragile Accomplishment is a novel written and presented on Un nouVeau iDeal by Panagiotis Hadjistefanou

All photographs, kind courtesy of Hedi Slimane 

PANAGIOTIS HADJISTEFANOU: A FRAGILE ACCOMPLISHMENT - CHAPTER VI

 

Photographs courtesy of Hedi Slimane
 

Chapter 6 : Centaur on a wheelchair 

He is grizzled, and rusty, for sure, but nevertheless remains dignified, his elegant profile refusing to lower in acceptance of his loss, losing being the only empire that deigns to be ruled by him now, as he slides inexorably towards his last horizons, once pure gleaming bronze, now patches of rust sliding across his still defined and perennially tanned body, as if the passing clouds are projecting their shadows on the screen of his existence, a statue lost in time, a god of sea stranded on faithless land, a conch that no longer sings of the waves but only echoes its own serpentine, porcelain silence, sitting as if ossified, on the throne of his majestic tractor, regally transported but simultaneously incapacitated by this vehicle, riding solemnly on the immense quartet of black rubber wheels, rotating but trapped air being his only foundation, his acquired invalidity tauntingly granted epic dimensions by the mechanical mass imperceptibly trembling underneath, the contrived metal piping emanating a peculiarly lulling metal racket, an incessant firing of muffled automatic machine guns, a miniature war, mockingly donating only fragments of it’s possible spoils to the poor, deluded king that rides it, the tires, pumped, echoing ironically the tautness of his ancient muscles, his beard counting, hair by white hair, the winters sweeping across his face, as the shadow of the oak tree traces cycles on his land, once virtuous, now he is not so sure anymore.

  

His eyes, set deep under the lacy shadow of fraying brows, sharp as they ever were and still as clear as glass, lacking color but agile enough to capture light as fleeting as a blink, his gaze translucent but far reaching, his vision guarded, launched from an infinitesimal point of immensely concentrated energy, a minuscule black hole disappearing in the center of his illegible stare, devouring the universe through a pin hole, the soft orbs quivering around the darkness in their center, transparent crystal, as absorbent to light as sponge is to water, momentarily changing color as the seasons are transmitted and instantly refracted, tracing an eternal loop through the spherical lens, the whole spectrum freed immediately, but only after tentative and thoughtful scanning by the invisible fingertips of his mind, his inner blindness a deeply cherished secret, a power cultivated and strengthened only when the seer chooses never to hold on to what is seen, when the eyes swear not to take prisoner of the merest ray, from red to violet, and back again, but choose to send the images back, faithfully reflecting them to their original provenance, its essence captured but the icon released, a conundrum both existentially humbling and liberating, like the moment a mirror usurps your self esteem by sending you back your own image, declaring that it is able to defalcate your essence, by portraying you exactly in this or the other way, a prisoner of your own avatar unless you turn your back to it, and some never do, his vision never seizing anything, a focal point of clear consciousness, the reflections moving past it never permanently fixed, an innocent mirror at once projectile and reflexive, a ping pong of looks and counter glances, from his eyes to what is, dutifully superimposing the momentarily captured landscapes exactly over the ones that were there all along, never returning afterwards, because he never claimed anything to later call his own, never misplacing a memory because he never manufactured or facsimiled a piece of reality for his own benefit, so therefore, the faces he knew and the landscapes he saw, he never held on to any of them, they never meant nothing, until he succeeded in forgetting his own face and the landscape around him, managed to take for granted the golden field and the ancient oak tree erupting in its center, not even needing to see to know where to swerve when coursing its paths, gliding past the geyser of foliage frozen in mid eruption, an immobilized outburst that successfully put on the airs of a monument, its silhouette becoming a memorial grand enough to fit a snapshot, possessively captured by many a visiting photographer, the thick, strong trunk always circled by its faithful shadow, its movement dutifully counting the time passing through the branches and over the field, this rotating, perforated patch of darkness pierced by flecks of light, drizzling through the leaves, replicating a piece of starry night, a fragment of the sky hiding, mid afternoon, right there, under the impromptu sundial created by the tree and the field.

 

And then, right out of the glittering shadow swirling around the roots of the time defining oak tree, our boy jumps out, his golden youth emerging gleaming and unsullied, refreshed by sleep or even arising as if never existing before, caught in his gaze that knew no memory, in the crystal clear eyes of the man on the tractor, his grandfather, having witnessed this manifestation many times before, but never paying any attention, either to our boy, our savior, or to the landscape, a master of forgetting.

 

He, our boy, not older than 17, gets on his red bicycle, rushes out on the road and zooms away, effortlessly achieving escape velocity from his grandfathers’ crystalline vision, pedaling silently over the hill, a boy now, not his grandson anymore, towards the beach, in the afternoon crowded with youngsters, most of them visitors, some of them locals, like our savior. 

In perfect compliance with a silent but austere routine, our boy will drop a towel on the sand, and instead of lying on the emanated heat, stored during the day, nature a kind hostess thoughtfully foreseeing the comfort of her night visitors, soon to be arriving, in pairs mostly, the durability of sand an impossibly concentrated power contained in imperceptible smithereens, a secret that teaches us of scale and time.

 

He walks towards the water, without making a show of it, alone, not having spoken to any one yet, he wants to dive, speechlessly and immediately, right now, our boy, at this very instant, now that the sun is about to be pierced by the horizon, it’s huge bubble bursting into innumerable flecks of trembling but intense light, the flaming horizon spurting a path of blinding brightness, endless variations of gold strewn across the surface of the sea, the water a flattering, warm shade of gray, barely crinkled silk, subdued to accommodate the mesmerizing sunset, he will not wait a second longer because, our boy, our savior, has a secret that can only be taken advantage of for a limited period of time every day, an underwater ritual, as he slides under the surface of the water, and swirls his lithe body around the enveloping crystalline coolness, his form a cluster of delicate tendrils twisting imperceptibly, maybe tickled by the tentative and thoughtful fingertips of the strong blue current avoiding, if not propelling him, the water sliding inexorably towards nothing and back again, the deep a land without horizons and therefore no destinations, the sea bed disappearing towards soft eternity, the blur of earth and the infinity of the sea neither cracked nor flexible, endlessness visible as a blue curtain, the night is hiding underwater, every day, all day, silently, patiently, as the sea frolics shamelessly above, in the land of the light, until the flaming orb in the center of the sky, exhausted, rests, and breaks apart, a disco ball reduced to its reflections, these clearly demarcating a path towards the end of the sea and the beginning of the sky, a raging line above the surface of the sea, but seen from underwater, this same line, expands into an ever shifting crystalline softness echoing the song of unknown destinations, the surface of the sea seen in reverse is the sky refracted, the water a perpetually undulating screen, touching and reverberating off the outline of myriads of unseen beaches, our boy, giggling through the softness of his air bubbles, swims once in a perfect circle around his heart, that is, turns himself upside down, that is does an underwater cartwheel, a graceful show of gymnastics that only a few fish are lucky enough to be the audience of, turns his point of view around 180 degrees until his soles are eventually touching the surface of the sea, then softly tip tops on the permeable underside of the immense oxygen bubble we call the atmosphere, and finally, he starts to walk on the surface of the sea but underwater, at least on what is called the surface by those watching the sea from outside it, but is the limit of the world for the denizens of the water, from the starfish to the forgotten gods and shipwrecks, their sky a vast expanse of fractal reflections, the deep a dissolving nothingness, our boy moving towards it, slowly following the golden path whose end splits the immense darkness down the middle, walking in a landscape that knows no horizon, the only witnesses of his solitary procession, that is the martyrs of this miraculous but inverted treading of water being the seagulls swooping to find their prey, splashing around his feet, momentarily fixing their beady gaze on our boy, our savior, his arms outstretched, some rays piercing the surface of the water, sunshine sprouting around his soles, lighting him in a way, that if seen from afar, his shape could be mistaken for a burning cross, imperceptibly flickering against the darkness, his steps tentative but concentrated, as if attaining equilibrium on a burning tightrope stretched over a great height, he moves, stepping on the underwater side of the flecks of light spurting from the dying sun, setting on the other side of the surface he walks on, the side we know, because we rarely, if ever, think, for once, for a change, to dive our heads and watch what is happening underwater while the sun is setting over our world, but if we did, at least on this particular afternoon, we would exclaim “there goes our boy!”, ambling aimlessly along the glittering underbelly of the solar footpath, towards the abyss, his eyes smiling at the dark lurking underneath the sea, the bright way he follows leading not into an explosion of colors and light, but towards the forbidding view of the far deep, not at all spectacular, but, from his point of view the only destination, his head held high towards what any other swimmer would call the open sea, but for our upside down, sky-walking boy this blackness is a temporary firmament, slowly darkening exactly like the sky above, our boy hidden by the light gilding the surface of the water, a shimmering shield blinding the beach crowd watching the sunset, his fearless procession towards the land of non existent horizons remaining a secret between him and the creatures of the sea, either those flying momentarily to pick on its abundant riches or those under its thoughtful, provident, eternal folds.

Note: A Fragile Accomplishment is a novel written and presented on Un nouVeau iDeal by Panagiotis Hadjistefanou

All photographs, kind courtesy of Hedi Slimane 

PANAGIOTIS HADJISTEFANOU: A FRAGILE ACCOMPLISHMENT - CHAPTER V

 

Photographs courtesy of Hedi Slimane

A rented world 

 A ticket stub, the direction torn, its price full fare. Glimpsed trapped between the mattress and the bed, at least once used. 

 A postcard, lost amidst the pages of a book missing its cover, now a naked novel, refusing its, unknown anyway, indictment, having passed judgment, the sunset on the card just as faded and yellow as the pages that devoured it, unwritten, never sent, a blank tombstone, not for long, surely, ordered but remaining only temporarily nameless, the equally anonymous, anticipated, in suffering, or miraculously, avoided, or shall we say postponed, death that was the midwife of its existence waiting impatiently for the next one to have his name carved in stone, the text of the coverless book heavily annotated and underlined, maybe in search of words that were supposed to fill the almost invisible grey horizons on the humble back of the glossy, printed sunset, those pale rows of minuscule dots recognizable by everyone as the path that a graphic designer provides for the possibly calligraphy impaired epistolographer, the offering of a few lines providentially avoiding chaotic scribbles and loops of messy writing, the industrial artist supposing tourist are possibly mad with either travel fever or homesickness. 

 On the almond green dresser, obviously and creamily glossed over with a fresh coat of oil paint at the beginning of each new season, in the centre of an intoxicatingly bright patch of light, a piece of sun fallen on the pastel surface as it reflects the window, floats a brush, some hair still there, twisting amidst the bristles, coarse, maybe from the sea, maybe from dye. 

 A stack of mismatched magazines, alluding to a motley group of readers unlikely to ever have met each other, mostly gossip, some crosswords, some news, with naïve covers, heralding history as it was supposed to happen; their headlines now of course a joke, old fashioned. He finds that, if he reads them, he takes vacations from the world of contemporary relevance, a guilty pleasure. 

 Also, amidst the weekly but out of date thrills of celebrity inanity and political sanctimony, he finds some hefty tomes, almost books, just specialist fashion magazines really, and flicks through their pages, frantically populated by etiolated ghosts, mostly naked or, if dressed up, looking like mentally ill aristocrats, roaming across lacquered pages, dripping artfully torn couture and vintage accessories, their model eyes in a constant state of placid shock, or, sometimes, in these same glossies, amidst incredibly perfectionist advertisements and haunted glamour, in a bid for self conscious street relevance, a parade of equally endless snapshots featuring boys and girls whose ordinariness bordered on the exotic, the old cliché of snobbism in reverse dutifully present. 

 Neatly folded, a faded tracksuit bottom, stained and probably still waiting to be washed, forgotten and defenseless in the soft folds of the cotton bedspread, this an antique summer blanket, provided thoughtfully by his grandmother, a landlady in anticipation of her tenants’ comfort, the designs on the thin but adequately woven fabric exploding in a serpentine embroidery of turquoise and white, efflorescent and charmingly color coordinated with the season, as if holding a flag to the summer, a short lived but piously accurate nation, a nation manifested in clockwork cycles of reincarnation, this parade of temporary refugees being the only real population of this land. 

 On the wall, a hat, frayed, the straw brim shredding into an accidental veil, lace evolving in reverse. 

 A piece of chocolate wrapping paper, proudly featuring a lone mountain range resplendently washed out by airbrushed clouds, the foaming white formations accommodating lettering, the agitated logo riding the cracked horizon of snowcapped mountaintops still barely visible but still magnificent nevertheless, a piece of North European exotica. 

 In the bath, a benevolent white cell, on the window ledge, plaster edges rounded, seemingly softened by the glare of the sun raging outside, some suntan lotion, its safety cap still intact, yet another printed sunset, faded long ago, on the plastic bottle this time, its purpose also wasted, like the unsent postcard, the protective ingredients on the back, since years ago, illegible, the ghosts of lettering describing inexplicable chemicals long evaporated. 

 He, our boy, fingers the printed and faded sun rays of the trademark, slightly visible, dry, once viscous, ink raising their outlines in an old fashioned, corporate-psychedelic burst. It is the sort of decorative motif you might see flickering, ironically, behind a consciously street credible advertisement today. Nostalgia before it met fate, memories still young enough to believe in their eternity, to live in their moment, ignorant and dazed. 

 A sheet of paper, scrawled all over its surface, once obviously crinkled, but then, in a remorseful or even frugal manner, repeatedly re-flattened to smoothness, a state appropriate for writing an urgent but inexplicable list: fear, John, school, Monday, car, card. 

 A supermarket receipt, toiletries. 

 Mostly pairs, of plimsolls, kindly donated, either by forgetfulness or abandonment, forlorn but still hoping of graduating to a next life, after having achieved noble uselessness during their previous occupancy, now left behind as unconscious gifts to the next crusade of improvident and therefore barefoot tourists, to the strangers ebbing and flowing, their rhythm as predictable as the waves pretending to rise towards greeting them, the sea as reflexive salutation, some of these holiday faces returning for misplaced memories, regularly, every summer, to rediscover the scorching sand temperatures under the imperceptibly bubbling sun, flames in the sky, the beach a minuscule desert to be crossed before the waving sea, a microcosm of hell, burning skin and flaming rocks, a stretch of wild summer dividing the taut distance from the coolness of their rented rooms to the bracing water, each day beginning with a morning ritual of thankfulness, the bathers trailing a walk whose steps were coolly possible and therefore solemnly devoted to the misplaced flip flops faithfully following their destined path and temporary owners, the rubber soles offering a thin but necessary barrier shielding the visiting, pallid, feed over the blazing hot sand, each step a grateful offering to the memories carried on their colourful, flexible, humble backs. 

 All these objects, and many more, pedestrian but sacred relics by the unknown to the unknown, were forgotten in the rooms that the summer visitors rented, or, shall we say, the things where subconsciously offered to future and therefore imaginary visitors, left for the next round of strangers that might appreciate their kindness, their temporary owners either returning home or about to further amble, hop aimlessly from rented holiday rooms to other destinations, some people chase the summer like others chase happiness you know. 

 These particular rooms are let out to tourists by his grandmother, a silent, kind old woman that was only too happy to accommodate her visiting grandson every year, and watch our boy grow from an adorable child to a handsome, brilliant, hopeful adolescent, see him time-lapse, grow in fast forward, like a flower erupts in seconds, sequenced on a documentary about the reproductive anatomy of plants, our boy transformed to our savior, from a summer to another summer. 

 She doesn’t know though, that, whenever he borrows, for himself, a pair of these forgotten plimsolls, or a dollop of faded printed sunset lotion, whenever he rescues something from the sea of other peoples past, as if picking drifting pieces of unseen shipwrecks, a native sent inexplicable gifts by the horizon, whenever our boy wears these talismans for a walk, to the beach, or to a siesta under the light filled tree in the field, whenever his feet are elevated from the burning ground, held tightly by these slivers of straps and forgotten soles, carriers of donated traces, walking on a protective surface of memories that matter even if they are so worn and thin as to be imperceptible, lost and found in a rented world, their tracks left in the wake of a temporary universe, peopled by transient wanderers and pleasure seekers, whenever he smears some of the cream across his velvet shoulders, borrowed from these unknown travelers, then, a shiver, along the quivering backs of the innumerable destinies of every man, woman and child that has visited this particular beach, is felt, and our boy, our savior, does not even realize that he has changed their worlds, because he is about to dive and greet the sea.

Note: A Fragile Accomplishment is a novel written and presented on Un nouVeau iDeal by Panagiotis Hadjistefanou

All photographs, kind courtesy of  Hedi Slimane

PANAGIOTIS HADJISTEFANOU: A FRAGILE ACCOMPLISHMENT - CHAPTER IV

  

Photographs courtesy of Hedi Slimane 

Misplaced Memories

"Every single moment of each exuberant day, and all the way through the bustling nights, down to the most minute instant of time jostling for a nanosecond of existence in the stroboscopic illusion that was summer life exploding all around him, one by one, each moment, consecutively, kept flicking its golden tongue across his eyelids, the light suddenly popping like a flashbulb, after each intense touch of the rising sun, then, just as abruptly, the flash fading awesomely, like the abandoning sun, comforting with plangent beauty the mesmerized spectators as they both slide inexorably towards the coming night, the landscape once brilliantly lit, then reversing to darkness, and quickly burning up again, photographs developing and fading, their virtuous cycles of revelation and disappearance in constant rewind and never ending forward, looping like a subsonic bassline, his every gaze discovering a new form of visionary blindness, whenever he closes his eyes perhaps to sleep, or opens them, suddenly awake to a retina scorching sun, or even when our boy widens his pupils at night, bravely dilating them against the piercing darkness, his searching stare calmly but ineffectively pulsing across the limits of his vision, constantly, always, he knows, that what he can not see was what he should be dreaming about, dutifully sleepwalking through all his waking hours, seemingly absent minded but really thoughtfully tip-toeing through fields of fingertip-soft inspiration, tossing brilliant ideas from the blond ends of golden hair crowning his stunningly beautiful head, living inside himself, an audience of one in a secret cinema flickering with breathtaking, tantalizing previews, his lips humming a speechlessly brilliant soundtrack, unfinished but in the very last stages of lavish production and evocative remixing, his florid mind writing books about to be published and devoured in a single reading, his eyes painting canvases to eventually ravish any discerning viewer, our boy, alone in his private screening room, orchestrating an epic storm of imminent enlightment, all of his brightness potentially wonderful, mesmerizing, internationally acclaimed and personally adored, successes, all of them poised to change the world, or at least make it see reality through his amazingly beautiful golden eyes, because nothing less than seductive awareness and playfully coaxed elicitation would suffice for our boy, our savior, still not older than 17 remember, still napping on a nearby island, his hair turning brighter, more precious, by the minute, the seconds, the time counted by the rhythm of the fall and the flicker of the drops, as sunlight drizzles through the lacy oak canopy, a suspended storm of leaves shading our boy from the sunlight falling resignedly but dazzlingly, its bubbly photons like grains of glitter sliding through a leafy hourglass, our boy still sheltered by this lonely, but resplendent shadow, under the ancient tree, in the middle of a gleaming field resting on the back of a fossilized sea monster pretending to be a floating piece of Atlantis, an island just a stone’s throw away from the neighboring, other island, the one where the party was about to happen, a few years later, remember, the reincarnated, piously weaponless but eternally and ruthlessly excoriating ex-warrior meeting, techno rippling next to a smoking garbage dump, both the dancers and the trash bags covering the landscape like placid lakes of taut, flammable skin, but that is then, a future that does not yet exist, and this is now, for our boy only, this everlasting today of youth gilded by the summer sun, the now belongs to him and him alone, and so he spends it dozing some of its afternoons away, his sleep a benevolent gesture tossing crumbles of youth to eternity, circling above him and always hungry for lost time, summer afternoons squandered napping just a few years before the barman would recycle the clouds, reverting them from splashy drops to a microcosm of heaven, raising imperceptible puffs from the dark creases that rise while ironing his black as night work shirt, but remember, today, our boys’ mind is fixed only in the here and now, on this specifically hot summer afternoon, everything still malleable, the horizon not cracking if gazed at, but softly stretching, miraculously attenuated, as if watched through the delicate distortions of a soap bubble morphing languidly just before it is about to burst, maybe pierced by what is to be and what could perceivably be possible, its transparent curves drawing an infinitely changeable path, potentially circling around many worlds, a multidimensional line in the dark room of his mind, hung with a parade of interminably drying photographs, an eventual emergence of an image potentially visible through the haze of each perpetually developing picture, yet still barely decipherable, maybe a landscape, or a face, or even just a clumsy shot, one that will dry only to reveal an unfocused blur as its decisive subject, but even then, non committal and austerely decorative, it will still take pride of place next to the ones that were, and still are, perfectly focused but faithfully representing otherwise misplaced memories, emerging evidence of treason against your own past, landscapes you can no longer locate and faces you can no longer name, but our boy, our savior, has no past yet, and therefore is still innocent enough to be able to follow any future he chooses, the view from the peak of his youth fast forwarding and so all encompassing that it borders on all seeing, so many visions, illusions, hallucinations, hopes, desires, wishes, fantasies, and promises, so many probabilities, possibilities and parameters, so many paradigms and stories, both apocryphal, rumored, fictional, factual and anything in between, all of them equally loved and lavishly fantasized, but, remember this, to unlock the key of his magnificently unsullied gates, to open his doors of his perception, and to allow them in, to announce all these swirling possibilities and give them the opportunity to present themselves, to help them find their partner for a lifetime or for tonight, for our boy to see the painting that inspires the book, to listen to the music that soundtracks the film, for him to be the host, the prince of the dance on the immense ballroom of his inner world, all our boy demands for letting this glorious party to begin, all he cares about, is whether these quantum permutations of destiny can be felt, strongly, as feelings only can be felt and words can not describe them, his youthful, powerful senses preferring to either be awakened concretely by his visions, that is in physically understood terms, such as a light enchantment of the heart, or a chilling shade of suicidal ideation, or at least, if no spontaneous light is about to burst and inspire him, if life will not provoke, then, and only then does our boy allow his interest to be aroused by the very impossibility of fantastical fates yet to be explored, discovering within himself additional, fictional feelings, moods elaborated for dramatizing boredom, such as feigned ignorance or acquired taste, the sensations achieved through all this playful enactment not necessarily meriting admiration or even explanation, but awaiting appreciation as seeds of magnificent art, so, inevitably, when fabricating those laboratory emotions, our boy, our savior, he rides them too, just as willingly as he rides those of life, not discriminating amongst what he feels and what is real, taming both the wild and the thoroughbred experiences, and, it must be said, it is especially those, the manufactured ones, that he finds to be uncontrollably seductive, and being so helpless as to chose between what comes naturally and what doesn’t, our boy loves them all, these galloping, unfinished thoughts, because they are horses of the mind that promise to make a rider out of anyone, a magnificent traveler, a crusading knight, both a kind and weaponless warrior, he sees these thoughts as teachers, an inner god waiting to be adored, a truth free of remorse or regret, because, remember, our boy is innocent, his mind is free, no memories to call his own, nothing to cry about, no one to feel sorry about, nothing to recover painfully from, no one to excruciatingly forget, or even carelessly recall, or even, at all, remember. 

So, his siesta, for a while, will remain a youthful, unscripted, slumber, a lidded look free of dreams, a pause between the frantic visions screened across his every summer morning, an interlude between the ever more elaborate embroidering of his velvet evenings, sleep, the only stillness amidst the possibilities swaying imperceptibly across the golden time around him, a leave from the waking hours, when he is busy ambling aimlessly around those slightly interrupted but never broken summer months, days and nights of doing everything that could be called doing nothing but, as he, and only he, knew, nothing was all he needed to do, that is, to be young and free, not a day or a night older than 17, remember. 

Forever."

Note: A Fragile Accomplishment is a novel written and presented on Un nouVeau iDeal by Panagiotis Hadjistefanou

All photographs, kind courtesy of Hedi Slimane