Jesse Chehak

Make-Believe

So the stars exploded. So we were and are composed of the matter that henceforth dusted the universe. So it’s still happening—a tiny glaze of battered, blown star to set the earth awriggle. By this, of course, I mean two things. 1) We are walking miracles. 2) The only thing separating us from nothing is stardust. For instance, what is the difference between a wineglass with and without its fingerprint or lip smudge? Similarly, how does a vacated home hold the mundane movements of a person who gets paid to lie? There are certainly cells involved, strains of DNA endowing the rim like a piece of amber, coating the closets with their statistical leavings. But these are largely unseen and celebrity has everything to do with seeing (or not seeing as the case may be). This is the story of how Duchamp’s silence left us in a vacuum that could only be filled with an endless parade of readymades “proving” in the pages of US Weekly that they are “just like us.” This is the story of a conspiracy—and for this I want you to think of breath—the manner in which inspiration has been replaced by the possibility of us all conspiring. Madonna herself, the original goddess of drought, has said she becomes overcome during her concerts thinking of how the air must be shared by all those people, how they enter her and take her away. This is likewise the story of transfiguration, how everyday objects escape the perceived brutality of their perceived banality. A hat, if donned by even the most middling of celebrities, may become a relic. Our eyes grow frantic and in the ardency of their looking create a sort of religious film that covers everything famous. We harvest this Planet Hollywood-brand ectoplasm and soon every hollowed-out reality show reject is King Midas, coating all he touches with a sheen of invisible slime. These relics return our lives to the diminished grandeur of the present. Perhaps they will go so far, and the concept of celebrity will stretch so thin, that the everyday will again appear to us as miraculous. Perhaps our own faces will glow, not in the nuclear reflection of Page Six, but in renewed recognition of their particular strangeness. As they say in Phenomenology, the color of the human face is not less mysterious for its familiarity. What is the color of your face? Where are the star particles? What glorious slug-trail have you left on the world?

-Chris Martin

Permalink / 23 May. '08