They are among us, the gods, you think to yourself, much in the same way as D.H. Lawrence, dying in the South of France, imagined the old gods of the sea were alive for ancient peoples. There were gods ev'rywhere, he thought. And men went slimly like fishes and didn’t care. And how do we go through the quotidian? Like slim fishes? Either way, the gods accompany us, and we know they are close. There they are, the gods, on magazine covers.
We read of the doings of the gods, of the young ones, Girls Aloud, and the older ones. We read and imagine it is they who are active, truly active, somewhere in the sky, while we are passive. But in truth, they are also alive in us, Aniston and Pitt, Jolie and Thornton. It is said young women like to read about celebrities who’ve had babies. It is necessary to follow their lives, these celebrities, to compare one’s life to theirs.
Are celebrities are part of the spectacle, that great evil? Are they woven from ideology, from the dreams that capital wants us to bear. Perhaps they are not unreal for all that, and besides, we, too are dreams of the great streaming of capital. The old division of orders of being was correct: capital is realer than us, and so too celebrities. The rest of us, barely individuated, live because they are already alive and live for us.
Some tell you that you should turn from the heaven of celebrities to more serious things. But you’ve seen them reading Heat, oh yes, reading it as it lies among other things in the office. Yes, you leave it there in my office and it calls out to them. It calls them and they pick it up, attracted by its brightness. And you think to yourself: what they despise is what is greater than them. They're full of resentment and what they resent, first of all, is their own desire for bright things.
Heat is a flower than blossoms in the office. It flashes around the office. How happy it makes you! There is something to talk about. Your attention has been seized; it turns you from what matters, but what can you do about what matters? Politicans lie; ecological catastrophe looms, but meanwhile there is the long afternoon of office life. Meanwhile, there are celebrities, the bright world of celebrities.
‘Meanwhile’, yes, but do not think Heat is a distraction. Celebrities are real, you think, and realer than us. Do you love them? Do you love them with all of your heart? How upset you were to miss the documentary on Agnetha from Abba who fell in love with her stalker. Truly she was a fallen god and more glorious for that! How well you remember Margot Kidder’s breakdown. She passed, it was said, through backyards and swimming pools. She went among us, mad, among the lawn sprinklers and wendy houses. Marvellous that she came to us, you thought! Marvellous that confused, dazzled, her great wings hidden, she passed like a fallen angel through our world!
You would like to write the words Mariah Carey, but it is unbearable. Will your heart explode if you write of her struggles, her unconfidence which led her from the toughest of upbringings to the house of Tommy Liotta? You have not seen her film, Rainbow, but you know you must. you’ve failed her, this woman who was always on MTV when you turned it on (the video for 'Honey'). You will not think of her breakdown, or that of Stephen Fry who, decamped like Oscar Wilde to the continent, admitted ‘I am a silly old thing’. You were relieved; the director of the play he fled forgave him. You would have forgiven him, have him kneel and then place a crown of laurels on his forehead.
Britney Spears passes among us, too, disguised as a mortal. She has allowed herself to be reborn as a young, pregnant woman. Will her rough husband mistreat her? Will he lead her to damage? Vishnu and the other gods once gathered to accuse Shiva of being unworldly. You are always meditating, they said., what do you know of life? Shiva opened his eyes and interrupted his meditations and caused himself straightaway to be born into the body of a householder who was then at the point of death. He rose, the Shiva-householder, lived a life and then died. All this happened, for the gods before him, in an instant. Shiva spoke of his death and his rebirth. He smiled. The gods went away and left him in peace. So too with Britney Spears. Do not fear for her, you think to yourself. A god inhabits her.
Meanwhile, capital is streaming. Pythagoras told us that if we had ears to hear it we could hear the celestial spheres grinding against one another as they turned. It made a great and beautiful music. Capital streams, but there is no music. A kind of humming, a rustling without rhythm or regularity. The air says: I am not capital. The sky and the trees say the same thing. But what can you hear beneath them, above them, permeating them and the whole universe? The great rumbling of capital.
Capital is the oldest god, the god before the gods. He is Chronos, the oldest one, the one whose name is a name for time. Understand that he is the dealer of time, and controls the fates. They answer to him. But understand, too, that he has no plan for us nor for himself. He is the god unaware of himself. Scarcely a god, he is an event, time’s division, the apportioning of time into the time of capital.