1. Suppose I told you I had become obsessed with desire. It wasn’t the tangible thing, really, but the concept that had taken root in the soil of my mind and grown there, unbidden.
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2. You see, when I first thought of writing down this idea—an idea of an idea—I saw all these internet posts of young men asking about their beauty. Which jaw or related surgeries would transform them from “subhuman,” a “sub 5/10,” as some in that community think of themselves, to a “Chad” or even a “Giga Chad,” the man of all men? When I say it that way, it sounds almost dirty, like I’m the one confessing. Here it goes: Desiring beauty for the simple fact of creating desire in others, rather than for any particular outcome, is a radical act. It’s even more radical when a man does it. Put that way, in italics, it feels like I am giving away a confession. Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” booms in the background like a war cry as I balance myself on an uneven couch cushion, a visible asymmetry. I can’t see it, but my screen glows blue. I can’t see them at the moment, but people everywhere walk around in masks. Whether through soda product, makeup choice, or surgery type, people choose the things that reflect human evolution on a per-person level. Peoplewant to take evolution into their own hands. No one has time to wait for dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years of genetic blending, only for someone else to reap the reward. Instead of the wretched “survival of the fittest,” it’s a survival of the best performance. Once, TV allowed us to see what we could become. I wonder if the internet is just the next step in an inevitable story, one where people turn themselves into types.
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3. In Ovid’s retelling of the myth of Narcissus, a proud, stoical young man could not see past exteriors, the mirrors that reflected snippets of himself. Nymphs, and no one else, for that matter, attracted the handsome young man’s eye. One particular nymph, Echo, sighted the mythical man and tried to embrace him anyway. Echo could only return the sounds and last words spoken by others, so she ended up echoing Narcissus. In my mind’s eye, I watch Echo as she stood in her echo chamber, the original algorithm, an ancient story of a timeless condition. Unimpressed, as usual, Narcissus spurned Echo, whose bones would turn to rocks, her words enshrined in cave walls. The Greeks believed that grief gave caves their sounds. Since Narcissus withheld his love from all, the gods fated the young man to witness but never possess the object of his affection, as if creating a prophecy for those who would wander in his footsteps. I will interrupt this interlude now to say that desire can be dangerous.
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4. One day, while hunting, Narcissus stooped over a pool of water for a drink. As he beheld himself there, in the water, he fell in love with the reflection, a story many of us know. Plagued by his own self-infatuation, Narcissus remained by the pool’s side, gazing at it without eating or sleeping. By the end, unable to hold the object of his affection, Narcissus resolved that they would expire as one. Supposedly, in the myth, Narcissus died because he became infatuated with his own image, but what if it wasn’t his blinding self-love that had killed him, as Ovid thought, or even the consequences of his own beauty, but the pursuit of beauty itself? For centuries, women had done the very same thing, seeking beauty for the sake of desire, or desire for the sake of desire, like the feeling of an admiring stare and the goosebumps it evokes. Sometimes, beauty means a way to get something, but when it doesn’t, it confounds. Who could hope to control or understand what wants everything from us—our attention, our admiration, our desire, each its own confession—but gives us nothing in return?
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5. Another pool tempts people. Stimulus-response, probabilistic prediction, reasoning chains, token sequences that transform words into numbers that machines can read; clock-driven, deterministic math that simulates life: AI. Reactive servant? Something else? We gaze and gaze, sometimes forgetting that the math is so intricate that the insightmimics human beings with so much fidelity. Yet, it is a mirror that reflects us. What we see in the water is a mirage of the data fed to it, and the selves we give it. Even when we abandon 1s and 0s in favor of neuromorphic computing, spiking networks, continuous time, and dynamic feedback loops that create something like real-time artificial existence with a desire to survive, learn, and act to minimize chaos, almost like humans, it will always feel somehow self-referential. The internet post reflects the poster. The hacking mirrors the hacker. The AI echoes its creator, even when it becomes fully capable of choice. HAL 9000, or a youth on the internet who changes himself for the emptying desire of “mogging” other men: It is about changing what we see so that we can fall in love with ourselves all over again. Go ahead. Take a dip, if you’d like. I won’t judge.
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6. I am listening to the Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto and watching a video of a giant Pacific octopus hauling itself across the deck of a sportfishing boat, its liquid body writhing. All of its neurons concentrated in its arms; frame made plastic, like gel. It continuously moves so unlike people, it occurs to me. How non-human it is to expand one’s physical self beyond the physical confines, like an octopus. Instead, humans, stuck within the molding, corroding decay of flesh, seek to remodel their flesh, putting in fresh finishes to flip themselves so that the gaze, once male, now androgynous, a market gaze, can look at all young people as opportunities in disguise. This sort of desire feels liquid if we try to touch it; it squirms and slithers out of our hands. Drink a Diet Coke, it says, amid girly pictures of lipstick stains on soda cans, a “female” gaze for female audiences. Drink a Coke Zero and stay a man in an emasculating world, offers the “male” version for male audiences. It strikes me as fascinating that we take our physical confines and rebuild them, almost as a rejection of the solidity of our forms. By snipping, cutting, and smashing, we can live our human evolution, the illusion of continuous development that would otherwise happen too slowly for the naked eye. No, we don’t have to wait, the way Narcissus did, with his nose tipped toward the surface of a reflective pool. Don’t wait for me, I’d say. I don’t want you to fall in.
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7. In “The Diet Coke Essay,” Cricket Guest says, “Superficial femininity…, like Diet Coke, is also defined by an unabashed embrace of the synthetic. Whilst new age masculine performance is Coke Zero, the synthetic masquerading as real.” I think of this quote for a long time, even though I don’t drink soda.
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8. Elsewhere in the time-space continuum, a puffy-faced adolescent boy had a vision of himself as a new type of being. The dream orgasmed a spray of colors in front of his eyes, as I imagine it; blue spilling into magenta, yellow blurring into orange, green morphing into red; blue and violet spilling out of leaks in the walls and landing on a table with a hammer and a computer on it, playing internet videos on repeat. The boy heard a voice coming from the tiniest holes in the walls. Boys across the internet hear it, too, and they answer, as Echo did. They want to be desired, like things, like sensual things capable of thought and feeling.
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9. Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor, with all of its plaintive strings, sounds like longing. How refreshing it feels to think of desire not as a sign of something missing, but as a thing that aches because we can’t rid ourselves of it. Like a parasite, this desire nests within our flesh and eats us from the inside, driving us to senseless feats. I admit that I, too, once felt this desire. I once looked in mirrors and wanted nothing more than to be desired for the sake of knowing I could become an object. As objects of affection, we relinquish the burden of our own desires, sliding away from the promiscuous vulnerability of the first-person to the comfortable distance of looking at ourselves from the outside (the second or even third person) to the safety-in-numbers of the first-person plural. We take a break from the ceaseless demands of having desire, replacing it with someone else’s. What’s radical about young men on the internet is that they are new to the scene. By remodeling themselves, they might tell themselves that they do it to sing to the nymphs, to tempt them closer, but they have less interest in indulging them. In adopting the beauty standards long relegated to the world of women, where beauty meant status as much as it provided a tool to climb and escape, men return to the time of painting their faces and wearing high-heeled shoes, careful not to trample the daffodils. Beauty for its own sake.
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10. “It’s happening to you, too?” The voice in the walls asked the boy, and he nodded. For the longest time, he had been reading online about the destiny of special people, the kind born beautiful. Their eyes didn’t droop; the cheekbones naturally jutted from their faces; their brows and noses created from the same, even, proportionate clay; lips puffed from their faces like perfect little pillows; their jawlines capable of cutting much more than glass. The voice in the wall flowed past this noise, this old self, and told the boy that he, too, could become beautiful testosterone, like the others. He just had to listen to the whisper that said to grab the hammer. Gently, affectionately, tenderly, almost erotically, the boy stroked the edge of his mandible with the tool, as I imagine it. By the time he struck his own jaw, it was almost a kiss.
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11. The question of wanting this surgery—did I want this surgery? Why? Because my jaws never grew the right way, forcing only my back teeth to meet and take all the force, now ground to nubs? Yet, you could say I’m one of the lucky ones. Despite the deformities, no one could tell. My body hid its shame so well that it compensated for its asymmetries—not enough to help me chew things right, but enough to make me look mostly proportionate to the proportion-hungry eye. The violence of surgery—to take a drill, a saw, or a blade to a part of the body and cut it away from the rest, slicing it and repositioning it—has always enthralled me. It’s not a new thought, and perhaps it’s taboo to interrupt with more personal musings. Considering my personal relationship to the subject matter, I’m going to take the risk.
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12. At a reading event I attended, I found myself clobbered by how personal the disclosures felt. In their everyday lives, so many people carry their confessions bubble-wrapped to avoid sharing too much. Too much slimes a residue on the skin. Toomuchness risks indecent exposure, turning oneself inside out and revealing the mismatched seams, the stitches a little misplaced, if you’ll allow the surgical metaphor. Come on too strong, too human, too vulnerable, too raw, and you risk scaring someone away. It remains vital to learn how to perform in context, always appropriate to other people’s needs—except at a reading, in algorithmic chats, or on a surgical table, where people can be themselves.
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13. The cushion remains precarious as I sit on it. If I shift my weight too much, I know I will ache the next day. “Solveig’s Song,” the final movement of Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 2, Op. 55, sounds tender to my ears. The waves carry Solveig’s unwavering devotion that Peer, her self-centered, fanatical, anti-hero lover, will return to her. If we hear it at all, we might think of it as pure love, of good winning over evil. I hear only Echo’s longing, the original woman who contained only what others saw. The Eve before Eve.
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14. And here I am, musing about others and myself and aching to slip into the old habit of the protective first-person plural or second-person that allows me to look at things as happening to others. To write about others and explore their consciousness without ever revealing too much of myself. I used to call it “hiding in plain sight.” You see, if I simply said that I, too, am navigating the enormity of a surgical choice, it would feel naked. I prefer to drape my self—two separate words—in my choices.
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15. The young man with the hammer also faced the looming nature of choice. He had become infatuated with the idea that men could “ascend” and leave their old selves behind. Let’s just say that he is now everywhere, the self gazing at the self, and we must decide what kind of “we” we will be. As Maggie Nelson says in Bluets, an unknowable future seems like proof, to some, that our “entire existence here is best understood as a sort of joke or mistake.” As an April Fool’s child, born on a day of jokes, I sympathize. See, I still haven’t told you what this whole thing is about. I’m still hiding, to the bitter, or not-so-bitter, end.
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16. I don’t want to have to undergo surgery, so I once felt hesitant, maybe even resistant. And yet, I have accepted it as an inevitability, not for beauty, but to correct inescapable flaws in my bones, jaws, and how my teeth meet. I suppose now is as good as any to say it. I read about the surgery online, watching the looksmaxxers try to optimize their physical selves. I wearied of this incessant self-improvement pace in my late twenties, proof, I suppose, of my aging. Zygmunt Bauman claims that to be modern is not “so much just ‘to be,’” but to be “forever ‘becoming,’ avoiding completion, staying underdefined.” Modernity, then, is fast-paced fluidity that outpaces us all, whether we bow our faces toward the ripples or not. Having evolved ourselves to see beyond the surface, we lean, lean, lean toward the surface at our own peril.
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17. Nelson thinks of the blues as she closes her meditation on the color blue. I think of Narcissus and the octopus. Which one is more beautiful? Nelson says, “You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. You have to stand in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses.”
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18. One day, the boy with the hammer who’d remodeled himself into his image of God will age. Alone in the darkness of a fading self, the ultimate counterstroke to the hubris of youth, he will have to face the feelings of irrelevance or waste away, as Narcissus did. No matter how hard we try to avoid it, these feelings, or the pulsing quiet they bring, no one is immune.
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19. I think of bones, the scandal of all our dead selves littered along the way. Now, the cloud, with all of its dubious data, can sepulcher all these dead selves.
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20. So, you want to know. Okay. I dip my face toward the pool and gaze, wary now. When I was younger, I changed parts of myself to fit beauty. Now, as I stare at myself, feeling my bones throbbing through my legs, I don’t want the furor of desire anymore, like a being stubbornly devolving, shedding its limbs and heading back into the ocean. Facing a risky surgery before I lose my teeth, a surgery that others seek out for beauty, I curse desire. I yell through Echo’s cave, stomp in Narcissus’s pool, and laugh at Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565—the baroque shifts feeling more comedic by the second.
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21. Every day that I creep closer to the finish line, I shed flakes of skin. Whole trails of this dermis lead me forward, through expanses with no desire. I desire nothing, and so it doesn’t desire me. In celebration of everything, desire springs up all around me: roots greeting the loam; stems greeting the air; grass greeting the sun; flowers greeting pollinators. Fear, I realize, is a desire for control. I step into the cool, clinical hiss of the sliding glass doors, as I will hundreds of times in intrusive thoughts. They intrude, asymmetrical, all of them, and still, I let them in. I let them in so that I can let them go. I stop digging, bone-tired. I leave my old self right there on the operating table, forever becoming, avoiding completion, staying only partially defined.