There is no dead matter. . . . Lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life. The range of these forms is infinite and their shades and nuances limitless.
—Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
We need to know that puppets are puppets. Nevertheless, we may still be alarmed by them. Because if we look at a puppet in a certain way, we may sometimes feel it is looking back, not as a human being looks at us, but as a puppet does.
—Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
I. On the Marionette Theater
Ever since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated by puppets. When I got to college, interested in filmmaking but uninterested in going through the documentary-focused curriculum required to make live-action films, I found my way into the animation department. Although the animations I went on to make used only pen and ink, drawn one frame at a time in the middle of the night with a coffee mug full of Guinness on the table beside me, this period led me to discover the stop-motion masters—Jan Švankmajer and the Quay brothers foremost among them—as well as the literary works of Bruno Schulz, upon whose stories many of their films were directly or indirectly based. This in turn led me to the Symbolist art and literature of the early 20th century, especially to the eerie drawings and writing of Alfred Kubin, whose Other Side, as he called his 1909 novel about a remote dream kingdom, written in the immediate aftermath of his father’s death, seemed already to exist on the margins of my imagination.
From there I ventured further back, to the early 19th century and the works of Heinrich von Kleist, whose 1810 essay “On the Marionette Theater” has been a staple of my thinking and teaching ever since. Through a series of dialogues between two friends, Kleist considers the ways in which marionettes (the progenitors of the figures used by stop-motion animators, all of which I’ll call puppets in what follows) can attain a level of grace, through their lack of self-consciousness, which is beyond the reach of human dancers. He concludes by pointing toward a Third Age in which humanity overcomes or relinquishes the very knowledge it gained by eating the apple and going into exile from Eden, which separates the First Age, of supposed premodern innocence, from the Second Age of alienation and frustrated modernity, an age that may only now be ending:
Grace returns after knowledge has gone through the world of the infinite, in that it appears to best advantage in that human bodily structure that has no consciousness at all—or has infinite consciousness—that is, in the mechanical puppet, or in the God. Therefore . . . we would have to eat again of the tree of knowledge to fall back again into a state of innocence. . . . That is the last chapter of the history of the world.
Most of our adult lives, like most of our known history, exists between these two idealized states: too late for the infantile or ancient state of “no consciousness,” too early for the postapocalyptic or transcendent state of “infinite consciousness.” As they say, the human is the bridge between beast (or puppet) and God, and it seems to be our fate to look backward and forward with equal longing, hoping to overcome the awareness of death that we gained from eating the apple either by retreating to a time before we knew it was coming, or leaping ahead to a time when science or magic will allow us to live forever. Unlike with other animals, children, and (as we understand them) prehistoric peoples, modern adult human consciousness is sufficiently evolved to imagine and require gods and other immortal beings, but not evolved enough to become them.
As Freud notes in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” “Children are not afraid of their dolls coming to life—they may even want them to.” It is only adults who, forced into the belief that they alone are truly animate, operate in a world where everything else seems either devoid of life entirely, like rocks and water, or suffused with a form of life that doesn’t attain true consciousness, like plants and other animals. The dream of return to the Garden or of salvation from exile by reaching a new paradise is likely no more than the dream of reintegrating with the world around us—the world that we separated from in the Second Age, under the belief that we could dominate it without destroying ourselves in the process.
The scholar and novelist Victoria Nelson, while analyzing Kleist’s essay in her 2001 book The Secret Life of Puppets, writes, “What seems on the surface like a hollow shell, the antithesis of life and a parody of its expressive nature, [the puppet] in some ineffable way embodies its deepest essence.” My goal in what follows is to consider what this “ineffable way” implies about the relationship between life and death, and therefore how, while we still have the chance, people in the 2020s might move toward the former and away from the latter not by further separating from the “dead” matter that surrounds us, but by integrating into it in some way prior to the final integration implied by the saying “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
In the aftermath of my mother’s death over the summer, I’ve had to consider what it means to watch consciousness disappear from the world and what effect this has on the consciousness that remains. Both personally and historically, it feels as though we are at the end of the Second Age, striving to reach the Third, or striving to acknowledge that we’ve failed to prevent its emergence. In our apocalyptic imagination, the Third Age may correlate to the Other Side, to a genuinely new world, perhaps even to the place where the dead go; but, as anyone who has witnessed death understands, all we can truly witness is the vanishing of consciousness—we cannot glimpse the place (if there is one) where it vanishes into, just as we cannot recall the place (if there is one) from which our own consciousness emerged. Therefore, among those living in the aftermath of death—whether the death of a loved one or the death of a culture and a once-familiar mode of thinking about ourselves and our future—the Third Age is not a rapture or a sea change. It is instead an infection or infusion into the known world of something unknown, or, as Freud would have it, something known once and then imperfectly forgotten. As Karl Ove Knausgaard, no stranger to the loss of a parent, writes in My Struggle: Volume 6, “The occurrence of death opens up a new reality within our preexisting reality.” The reality of the living becomes haunted by the presence of absence: the feeling not just that someone or something is gone, but that the fact of their being gone adds a new dimension to all that is still here: a seemingly empty space that is, like a puppet, nevertheless full of something.
As I settle into this haunted state, I’ve been trying to conceive of what the Third Age might look like more broadly, and what we stand to gain by letting go of the Second Age’s doomed dream of mastering reality and achieving the status of gods on Earth. There is no returning to the Garden of the First Age; no regressing to childhood either. But remaining in a Second Age mindset once that age has run its course is an even more deranged and immature prospect. As I saw firsthand in the fragmented and maddening world of elite cancer care, we can abolish the thought of death as much as we like—after abandoning God, we can even abandon any comprehension of natural cycles and patterns of life—and pursue immortality through medicine, and yet, in the end, reality calls our bluff. Whatever may change in the future notwithstanding, from today’s point of view, the only sane adaptation to our obvious failure to conquer death is to find a new means of living with it.
Returning to my college years in the mid-2000s, when all things morbid were a purely aesthetic fascination—when the dead and dying hovered in what Knausgaard calls the “sky of images”—the atmosphere that lives most vividly in memory, other than those middle-of-the-night drawing sessions in the bright, silent studio, were the department’s Friday-afternoon screenings, when all the animation students gathered to plunge together into a series of netherworlds, some of them cozy, others blighted and alienating.
Not only were Švankmajer’s and the Quays’ herky-jerky puppets emissaries from this twilit realm, covered in the blood and dust of some social order that seemed to have collapsed just offscreen (or “upstairs” from the basement in which these films seem always to take place), but they reached me in twilight as well, in the New England dimness of fall and winter afternoons like the one on which I’m writing this now. At the screening, I sat there in my sweater with a paper cup of coffee between my feet after a long week of schoolwork and dozed, enjoying the feeling of becoming less and less certain whether the symphony of clacking automatons and grinning dolls—freed from the puppeteer’s string like humans cut loose from God—existed on the inside or the outside of my eyelids. As I loosened my grip on consciousness throughout the screening, the unconsciousness of the beings on screen grew increasingly familiar, until it seemed I, too, became a puppet, passively absorbing images and ideas that had nothing to do with me and yet, for that reason, struck me as more familiar than anything I could think of while properly awake and compelled to live only the life of “David Rice.”
This state of mind has resided deep within me ever since, but quietly, never foremost in my thoughts, until my mother’s death brought it to the surface, or dragged me down into it. Given that my first truly firsthand experience with the permanent cessation of consciousness occurred in 2025, in the midst of a massive and rapid shift toward AI that has revealed humanity’s willingness to gamble with our own species’ consciousness—a mass, barely voluntary soul death, even if the body lives on—I’ve found myself pulled back into those dusty basements in an attempt to develop my understanding of how spirit and matter, and therefore life and death, actually interact and what (if any) difference I can be certain exists between them. What does it mean to be alive and, if we can never be certain, why do we nevertheless take this apparent fact about ourselves to be the absolute groundwork of everything we think and do? What does it mean if our lives are rooted in a void whose bottom we cannot glimpse, and does the word rooted mean anything in this case? Whose Will, if not our own, moves us throughout our lives, and if that Will is our own, where does it come from and where does it go (and why is this not obvious)? If it simply emerges from our cells, why can no one explain how? What is the thing within us that reaches out to embrace AI even as it runs counter to the core of what we once called “humanity”?
At the heart of stop-motion animation is a paradox that highlights these conundrums: On the one hand, as Kleist illustrated, puppets appear entirely self-possessed, moving fully of their own volition, in a state of grace, unlike human actors, who know (and who know that we, the audience, also know) that they are playing made-up roles in the hopes of justifying their own fleeting lives. On the other hand, stop-motion puppets aren’t moving at all and, as far as we can tell, have no inner life of any kind. The force moving the puppet—that of the puppeteer—is both everywhere and nowhere in the frame, completely suffusing it with its obsessive presence (unlike in live-action filmmaking, nothing in a frame of animation can appear there by accident, and the actors cannot ad-lib or react in the moment) while never actually showing itself. In a surprising and discomfiting way, the overwhelming artificiality of this art form brings us back into harmony with nature, where all things move as part of a hidden yet palpable whole, where nothing needs to be isolated or explained, and yet this oneness is achieved only through the very isolation of parts it attempts to overcome. The animator’s attention to each detail in its own right is necessary to conjure the illusion of a free-flowing totality whose existence we perceive in the depths of our imagination, even as we’ve lost access to it in the lives we lead.
I am not the first enthusiast of this art form to see it as a scaled-down version of the human predicament on Earth, in which the presence of some larger creative spirit is evident everywhere yet tangibly present nowhere (Nelson cites both Plato’s cave and Kafka’s burrow as examples of the human tendency to conceive of a fake world nestled within a real one). Further, stop-motion raises the question of whether matter itself is conscious—is the animator “freeing” the dolls and puppets to behave as they truly wish to, listening to their will rather than imposing anything upon them? Or is the opposite true: Is consciousness itself a kind of matter, a fixed and inert property that only appears independent of its host and free to make its own decisions and chart its own course? In other words, is stop-motion a “parody of [life’s] expressive nature,” as Nelson puts it, or an uncomfortably accurate microcosm thereof? Is stop-motion abuse, forcing the puppets to perform actions they would never choose to perform if they could choose anything, or is it the sole reprieve from the abuse of apparent inertness that these puppets—conscious yet, like coma patients, unable to show it—could ever hope to enjoy? Have these puppets, in the end, possessed the puppeteer to the same degree that the puppeteer has apparently possessed them, thereby mocking the rational mind’s desire to distinguish between the two?
Death Travel: Approaching the Other Side
As anyone who’s had a terminally ill loved one in a different city will know, the travel to and from the sickbed and then the deathbed is an immensely important and destabilizing experience of uncertain length and with a certain though incomprehensible destination. Over the course of 2024 and 2025, I traveled by train between NYC and the hospitals in Boston, and to my hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts, dozens of times, endlessly repeating the same process, the same chicken bowl at Penn Station, with a coffee when it was a morning train and a beer when it was an evening train, and the same route out of the city, through the tunnels and then along the Connecticut River and up through the decaying postindustrial corridor of New England, each time moving deeper into the twilight zone between the realms of the living and the dead.
As I chugged back and forth and back and forth on that train, I could see the veil between realms thinning and preparing to lift, affording me a glimpse of the place into which my mother would go forever—or, if not a glimpse of that place, at least a glimpse of her disappearance into it, bound away on an invisible train of her own while I took the same old Amtrak back to Penn Station.
At the same time, I began to suspect that energy flows the other way as well—that life can suddenly appear within us just as quickly as it can disappear. I came to believe that some unknown and unpredictable force can bring us to life within the dead episteme that we otherwise inhabit, and that this force—the same as that which animates puppets in their moments of sublime grace, when something hijacks or rides in on the puppeteer’s Will that goes beyond the intentions of any one artist (a quickening that characterizes all great art)—is not only what makes life worth living, but actually what makes the period of time that we call life meaningfully distinct from that of death, which may be the state in which we spend most of our time already. In short, I felt that the train laid a new set of tracks every time I rode it, a ghost network extending toward every horizon; and that, once you’ve seen these tracks, you see that they’ve been there all along, filled with far more traffic than the terrestrial infrastructure of the Northeast Corridor could ever accommodate, just as the rise of AI feels like a nonhuman entity forcing its way into the human realm through a door that we’ve left open, swarming and swamping us from every angle.
A truly spooky coincidence: I’d bought a ticket for the Quay brothers’ long-gestating stop-motion adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s 1937 story “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” about traveling by train to visit the narrator’s dying (or secretly already-dead) father—“Here your father’s death, the death that has already struck him in your country, has not occurred yet”—for the very day, August 29, when my mother died. Of course, I wasn’t at that showing. But when I did see the film several weeks later, and reflected further on the story, the image of that ghost train crossing an invisible border into the land where the living and the dead are able to meet long enough to say their goodbyes, I knew that my relation to its imagery (it has been a favorite story since college, a constant companion) would never be the same.
Just as the dead cannot remain for long in the world of the living, the living cannot remain for long in the world of the dying and the dead: In each direction, the train is always about to leave the station. But you don’t leave that sanatorium, whether it’s located along Schulz’s “forgotten branch line” deep in an imagined Eastern European forest, or in your own childhood living room, made into an unrecognizable welter of wheelchairs, bedpans, and breathing tubes, the same as you were when you arrived. After departing from the town he would “never see again,” after his father’s (second) passing, Schulz’s narrator admits: “Since then, I have traveled continuously. I have made my home in that train.”
The conundrum of what truly makes us alive, and what we lose when we die—what principle of apparently self-generated motion and speech ceases to function—grows only more daunting once we see how futile it is both to remain at that sanatorium and to depart cleanly from it. Having seen the birth of my daughter and the death of my mother up close within a three-year window, I can say without doubt that my understanding of where life comes from and where it goes has never been less settled. Today, it feels simultaneously like my mother is still alive and like she never was. It may be impossible to say what making a home in that train means, but there’s no question that this is the state in which much of life, on the far side of youth’s innocence, plays out.
The attempt to process this uncertainty sends me back to those long-ago college years when the hermetic activity of automatons in underground workshops and dusty cupboards so captivated my imagination, though now with a greater and grimmer understanding of why. As Freud elucidates, when you embrace the dead body of someone you’ve loved, you’re torn between hoping they sit up (animated by some unknown energy from outside the room or from deep within their own matter) and hoping they don’t. You’re torn between hope and fear that death is less than it seems (that they’re only sleeping) and that it’s more than it seems (that they’ve graduated to a new and better phase of existence), while suspecting that, in fact, it is only and exactly what it seems: cessation, coldness, stink. A fly on your eye. Knausgaard ends the first volume of My Struggle by admitting that “there was no longer any difference between what had once been my father and the table he was lying on.” The dead body is at once exiled from the ongoing flow of human activity, and integrated back into the realm of matter from which only the living imagine it ever emerged.
Real death is not part of any story, because stories are not only about life but also exemplary of it. Death, if we take it as we see it, draws a hard boundary, both temporal and spatial, around storytelling as an enterprise. In this light, any story that tries to include the dead automatically renders them undead, ghosts or zombies called back to life for a contrived narrative purpose, while the dead as dead remain beyond the page.
At the same time, as Thomas Ligotti counters in 2010’s Conspiracy Against the Human Race—surely the greatest work of puppet theory in contemporary pop culture—death is purely a product of human consciousness and thus underlies and even necessitates the entire storytelling enterprise. “No death, no stories with a beginning, middle, and an end,” he writes, in characteristically mordant style. Death is at once anathema to our consciousness and its inevitable and perhaps ultimate concoction—as far as we know, death does not exist for the dead, but only for us, the living, and only within the self-consciousness that Ligotti views as an abomination.
Furthermore, a bluntly materialist understanding of “death as only death,” of the dead body as no different from any other object you might zip into a bag and put in a car, feels not only too sad to bear but also too reductive to enable the necessary work of integrating an encounter with the dead into the life that continues beyond it. This is the genius of Schulz’s “Sanatorium,” whose core ambiguity becomes all-encompassing. As with most of Schulz’s fiction (and the body of stop-motion films based upon it), here we see a world that ends and fails to end at the same time. The world grows enchanted through being forced to contain its own ending while going on anyway, just as death represents both an absence and a presence in the world of the living. Our world is defined as the antithesis to death, the place from which the dead depart; and yet it is also the only place in which the world of the dead can be found, so that what we call loss adds a destabilizing dimension even as it subtracts a stabilizing one. (In this same way, AI creates the “new” by relentlessly scanning and repackaging the old, revealing itself as a form of cancer that spreads by using dead human material to occupy and eventually destroy the living human hosts it proliferates within). Sooner or later, all train tracks become ghost tracks and all travel becomes death travel.
The friction caused by the world’s tendency to contain its own end, and therefore by the inability of the dead to truly depart, may be a reproductive process every bit as generative as the physical interaction that results in new life. The more the narrative of life in this world seems like it has to conclude but then doesn’t, the more the Other Side encroaches onto This Side, and the more our world fills with art—as Georges Bataille said, art is an “accursed share,” a grotesque excess or luxurious waste, while, for Ligotti, it’s a pathetic response to human consciousness’s inability to accept that it has no reason for being and no ability to perpetuate itself beyond the body’s narrow limits.
For better or worse, art is a force beyond the bounds of what is necessary and even what is seemly, and in this regard it runs counter to life. Yet, by this same token, art, in the most capacious sense of the term that includes dreams, myths, games, and fantasies—perhaps imagination is the better term—is also the force that makes life worth living, overcoming the pointlessness of mortal biology not through denial but through active and joyful acceptance. This festering surplus of meaning and possibility characterizes Schulz’s world too—a real town filled with phantoms and reanimated entities that have no business being alive and yet no choice but to remain so, even if they’re also long dead, crammed into rooms that’ve been rented to others.
Schulz must’ve been well aware of the nature of this surplus, living as he did in the town of his birth while slowly turning its streets and houses into the fantastical world of his mature work. This is the state of the adult artist: alienated from childhood’s unbounded possibility and multiplicity, yet equally or even more alienated from the world of adult reason and economic productivity (and frugality). The mature artistic process of harnessing imagination toward the goal of producing something with a tangible existence in the world of adults is a means of integrating the Other Side into a world that we cannot break free of. Art is not, as I once believed, a means of overcoming death; the notion of “living on through your art” belongs to the Second Age, the age of striving, of seeking oases in the desert. A new understanding has replaced it, a Third Age understanding wherein art is a means of living with death not just as a means of “accepting the things I cannot change,” but as a means of interrogating the feeling of living in a world that seems also to contain another world, populated by other beings, that can be neither directly accessed nor safely ignored. After a loss of this magnitude, it felt like life could not go on, and yet, to paraphrase Beckett, it has.
II. Molten History
Something was happening in the world and no one knew what.
—Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Volume 6
Death takes you outside of history, into eternity or into nowhere at all, while also making you part of history, making history the only place where you can remain. Losing your mother does some version of this to you as the child as well: Large parts of your own history, of the ways you were and how you came to be the way you are now, also vanish, rendering you a stranger to yourself in a way for which you could never have prepared. Just as this occurred to me, it seemed also to be occurring to the world, like we’ve crept across a threshold where now we live only in the present, informed by an infinite stream of possible histories but not by any stable lineage. The term alternative history is at once ubiquitous and meaningless now, since, increasingly, one has to ask, Alternative to what?
I can almost see and smell the steam of history melting down, or being smelted, into a form of energy that permeates the air, free for the taking and impossible to resist, a queasy fuel that powers the entire contemporary enterprise just as surely as fossil fuels represent geological history going up in smoke. I picture all the vaults of the past coming unsealed, as if the Apocalypse in its original sense of “unveiling” really has occurred, yet what emerges from these vaults instantly melts into the clouds already clotting the sky, so that nothing from that past, from the death throes of the Second Age, has any definite form. Everything is in play but nothing sticks.
It’s like we’ve all become orphans from the worlds we emerged from, carrying our early lives behind us in rotten boxes, as we trudge into a new, relentlessly mediated space, toward a future that feels increasingly hard to imagine having any say in, or even knowing that we’ve reached. The rules of fate seem to have tightened by the same degree as that to which the illusion of free will—of each of us living in a customizable physical and epistemological realm whose only purpose is to cater to our whims—has become dogma, repeated by many and believed by none.
This loops back to the realm of puppets, to the feeling of everyone being puppeted by something else, of invisible strings extending everywhere out of sight, but no longer with the paranoia of the past decade. It feels now like we’ve entered a post-paranoid era, a time when it’s no longer fruitful or even interesting to go down rabbit holes and peer behind curtains, to wonder about networks of power and complicity and who’s been captured or bought by whom—that all feels quaint now, a type of thinking that, when we do still enter it, has the coziness of reenactment and ritual, like laser tag, with none of the excitement of approaching a breakthrough or risking real danger, as the puppet masters have now ascended beyond the level of the human and operate somehow invisibly and out in the open at the same time. Even Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Shadow Ticket, while as crammed with influence networks and shady affiliations as ever, no longer features a protagonist determined to unravel the conspiracy. This novel’s hapless private eye, Hicks McTaggert, seems resigned to drift where history takes him, into the shadows, without even pretending that it’s still possible to exchange that ticket for a different one.
The climax of the Second Age, which occurred sometime in the past decade (perhaps COVID was its death rattle), was marked by a sense of extreme and omnidirectional paranoia, obsessed with hidden strings and unknown forces hacking our self-awareness and making us and our ready-made enemies into minions of a larger plot. But now, the Third Age pushes us to embrace the puppet state and admit that none of us are free of unseen influence and no one is truly “speaking their mind” in an authentic, uncorrupted sense. (The origin of this intuition is of course also obscure.) Today it’s hard to deny that all action is performance and all beliefs are incepted. In this way, the internet seems simpler—more purely poisonous—than it did a few years ago, when the game of going down the rabbit hole and putting the pieces together still held some appeal, and when the possibility of reaching solid ground at the bottom still seemed plausible, even if, as in a falling dream, it never occurred.
When my mother grew too sick for my family to stay in the house, we started staying in the old Hotel Northampton, a landmark that had, throughout my childhood, tantalized me with the uncanny prospect of being an anonymous guest in my own hometown. When I finally got to find out what that felt like, the uncanniest moment of all came when my then-two-year-old daughter climbed into the window well, grasped the string that adjusts the blind, and, apropos of nothing I could see, shouted, “Welcome to the puppet show!”
I knew in that moment there was nothing more I could do. I was a pure observer, a participant in body alone. I looked through the window at the gas station where, in my childhood, a convenience store called Grampy’s had stood, the only one in town that was open all-night and thus always where we’d stop for milk upon returning from a long family trip, the beacon in the night that meant we’d made it home. Now, gazing at the pumps and the weeds cracking the asphalt beneath them, I felt the definition of home that had sustained me all my life disintegrate, vanishing into some realm where I’d always know it was there and yet never again be able to access it. Through that hotel window, I could see the cloud of molten history descending from the sky and rising from the ground.
From that night on, I began to pray, not for my mother to be healed—that ship had sailed—but simply for whatever was going to happen to happen. I knew I had no say in it, that it was going to happen anyway, so my prayer was a kind of vocalized surrender, a way of declaring that I intended to submit to reality, to eat what was on my plate with the understanding that no one would eat it for me, nor would anyone replace it with something sweeter. All I wanted was to be included in my own life, to reenter the experience that fear and the fantasy of reprieve had alienated me from over the past eighteen months.
As this final period deepened, life took on a quality that is often, lazily, called “surreal,” but I knew it was only growing realer. I could see that whatever had existed up until that point—38 years of pushing this moment away, of imagining that it would never happen, or that, if it had to, it would always happen later—was far less real than what I was experiencing in that hotel room, and in our converted living room a few blocks away.
This was the transition into the Third Age of my life, beyond the First Age of my childhood and beyond the Second Age of my early adulthood, the Promethean Era of seeking my fortune and destiny in the world beyond my town, of imagining I was the puppeteer and not the puppet and that, with enough effort, I would “make it” as an artist one day and thereby slip through the net of reality and into a paradise beyond. Now, in the Third Age, I’ve returned to being the puppet, just as I was as a child, yet with the new perspective of having come through the years of struggle and “chosen surrender” even when there was no other choice.
This feels in sync with the state of the world here on the cusp between the new century’s first and second quarters, where struggling against the current feels increasingly futile, and the ways that things actually happen feels increasingly obscure and even occult. The experience of witnessing death strengthened my belief in some kind of God, not through any desire for mercy or belief in an afterlife, but simply through witnessing the awesome power of reality as it is, without mediation or compromise, entirely impervious to human intervention. One need not use any divine term for this, but I’ve found it useful as a means of denoting some “realer-than-real” stratum of being that seems to assert itself only in moments when the ground of life opens up and reveals that it was never ground at all.
The Third Realm (and Holy Spirit)
Despite the overall deadness of the current era, the feeling of the larger culture spinning its wheels until it jams and grinds down—a low-energy system in which the same undead narratives and public personae are continually resurrected while the question of what purpose human beings serve grows ever murkier—flashes of insight and shocks of aliveness do still occur. We do suddenly gain ideas and the energy to act upon them, though I’m less and less certain of how this happens, and quite certain that it cannot be forced or even predicted.
If the First Age was the Age of the Father—the Old Testament, the age of childhood, of being fully under the yoke of definite outside powers with ironclad rules—and the Second Age was the Age of the Son—the Christian age (as well as the humanist age it bequeathed), the age of young adulthood, of feeling embodied and free to act on our own initiative upon a redeemed and clarified Earth—this now is the Age of the Holy Spirit, a time of disembodied and all-pervasive power that can enter and leave us at any time and for any reason, imparting any message it wants or no message at all, squashing and empowering us with sudden and random intensity. If the First Age saw everything as living, and the Second Age saw everything as dead (humans as pure matter, devoid of souls), then, in the classic pattern of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, the Third Age combines these worldviews in a novel and so far incomprehensible way.
This is the theme of Knausgaard’s ongoing Morning Star series—one of the most exciting recent projects in popular fiction, and the only one I’ve encountered that attempts to express why things feel the way they do in this decade, on a cosmic as well as a mundane level. In these books, death has ceased to occur and yet life has also entered a holding pattern in which it has ceased to evolve, or else has begun to evolve into a postlife configuration, a new form that is neither organic nor inorganic but some third thing. As the author explained at a recent event in NYC, he’s interested in considering the ways in which the past (and thus the world of the dead), through its endless reproduction in photographs and video, never degrades or fades away, and how this capacity for never letting go cancels out the future, causing the entire world to feel dead rather than immortal.
The Third Age in Knausgaard’s Third Realm (fittingly, the third book in the series and the last book my mother ever read) feels like an era of the soul’s revenge, of the return of an incompletely denied God that has now spread everywhere throughout the human realm, like a jellyfish pulped by a boat motor spreading through the sea (or like a cancer that returns more virulent than ever after all attempts to suppress it have failed). As one character explains about another, “When he spoke about the Third Realm, it wasn’t the Nazis he was talking about but something people had believed in the Middle Ages, that the First Realm was the age of God, the Second Realm the age of Christ, the Third Realm the age of the Holy Spirit. ‘We’re entering the Third Realm,’ he said.”
The Wolf House: The Animate Background
If, as in Pinocchio, the puppeteer is the Father and the puppet is the Son, then the energy that binds them together and brings both to life before the eyes of the viewer—mediated by the illusion of movement that only projected light, having replaced Kleist’s living puppeteer, makes possible—is the Holy Spirit. The Third Age is marked by the return to a world where everything is alive, an animistic world we all recognize from early childhood, no matter how hard we try to repress this memory.
Stop-motion reawakens this inner primitivism by presenting animate and inanimate objects freely interpenetrating and interfering with one another. In 2018’s Wolf House, the best stop-motion film I’ve seen since college, the spirit of “animate-ness” never resides within any object, whether it’s a person, a pig, a room, a tree, or a common piece of household junk, but rather in the environment surrounding them. Every inch of every frame in this masterpiece by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, about a little girl who escapes from a German cult in the Chilean countryside, trembles and seethes with energy, growing, decomposing, and merging in ways that defy description.
Within the house where most of the action takes place, anything can come to life and pass out of life at any time, suffused with the filmmakers’ superabundant energy and attention. Objects even segue between 2D and 3D—drawings become sculptures and sculptures flatten into stains, while papier-mâché characters collapse into smudges, then rise to walk off in new bodies. The distinction between what and where breaks down in such an environment, merging character and setting in ways that literature can but theater and live-action film cannot. Everything is so suffused with the potential to degrade and transform that the viewer ceases to focus on any one object and focuses instead on the potential itself, which becomes, in effect, the film’s protagonist. This potential is never visible in its own right—no human hand or enchanter’s wand descends into the frame—yet all the objects we see cease to have any definition except as temporary vessels for Holy Spirit that will soon transfigure them.
This state of affairs is at once fully alien and uncomfortably resonant with what I sense to be the underlying truth of the world. Everything is connected by a life force that manifests only through the movements of the objects onscreen, and yet it resides in none of them, so the purpose of these interactions and transformations is never knowable locally, only in the sum total of the film they add up to. This totality also boggles the apparently definitional distinction between concrete and abstract, since the separateness of objects, which would seem to be our only means of defining what they are, also ceases to hold. If anything can become anything else, then what does it mean to say that something “is a thing” in the first place? As the poet and theologian Christian Wiman put it in a recent essay, “What holds [things] together, what gives them their thisness, is not some property inherent to them. It is . . . their relation to other things; ultimately, to every other thing in existence.”
Stop-motion is grotesque in the core definition of that term, “grotto-esque,” events occurring as in a grotto, beneath the level of normal human perception, in a way that seems counter to nature even as some part of us suspects that it better exemplifies nature’s essence than any surface-level phenomena can. If the grotesque always arouses both repulsion and attraction—this is what separates it from the disgusting—the core of this boggled response is, on the one hand, our feeling that we’re witnessing a perversion or abomination of the natural order of things, and, on the other hand, our dawning and perhaps unacceptable realization that the natural order of things is indeed perverse and abominable in ways that our mind, outside the relatively safe arena of art, is designed to unsee.
Literature also offers a means of accepting this. The motive force that flows through a literary artwork is always the same, a disembodied Will that becomes embodied through the context—a free-flowing interchange between foreground and background that breathes life into the dead words on the page while draining the life that the person encountering that page believes they contain within them, until the story resides neither on the page nor in the reader’s prior life, but only in the synthesis between them. In this way, reading turns readers into dead creators of living worlds, housed within notional spaces rather than physical bodies, just as writing does for writers, allowing them to summon their own mysterious life-giving potential, which otherwise lies dormant within them, or perhaps doesn’t reside within them at all.
As I spent night after night in the animation studio in college, pressing my soft black pen against the underlit paper, I became increasingly aware of the line expressing its own desires, teasing something out of me that I didn’t recognize as part of myself. Copying the same image again and again, with the tiniest possible differences each time, I felt some force (I wouldn’t have called it Holy Spirit then, but I would now) binding me to the paper and working itself out through my attention upon it, coaxing me into a place I didn’t recognize even as I also, to return to Freud’s “Uncanny” yet again, understood that it was more fundamental to my being than any other. This is the place from which I’ve worked ever since.
The Doll Shop
One of the most provocative ideas that Ligotti puts forth is that puppets are not only inanimate without the puppeteer, but also incoherent. Like Frankenstein’s monster, puppets are made up of disparate pieces that have no intrinsic reason to exist together and, indeed, no means of gelling or communicating except through the motive force of the pulled string. We appreciate and enjoy this fact when it’s scaled down to the level of the puppet theater or kept out of sight in a doll shop, like the “cinnamon shops” so frequently described in Schulz’s 1933 story collection The Street of Crocodiles, all dangling bobbleheads and piles of arms and legs that no body lays claim to, nestled in wet cardboard boxes and beds of mangy fur (or hidden behind old dresses and antiques, as in 2024’s Oddity, a brilliant horror film about a sentient wooden statue). But there are moments in life when the Doll Shop threatens to emerge from the background and swallow the foreground, determined to reveal that all the world partakes of this same incoherence, made coherent solely through the unknown Will that passes through it—a human “being,” after all, implies an active process rather than a settled state (which is a large part of why the total inertia and “there-ness” of a loved one’s dead body is so disturbing).
This incoherence, repulsive as it may seem, therefore masks a deeper and more fearsome coherence, a secret order that we can intuit through the workings of things but never understand in its own right, because it cannot be parceled out as a separate piece and studied from a sober remove. If meaning comes through coherence, through accessing a harmonious and uninterrupted unity of action and intent, then meaning, too, lies beyond comprehension. This again reveals that what truly doesn’t belong—the fearsome incoherence that inert puppets force us to confront—is our own consciousness and the picture of the world that it generates by attempting to separate reality into components and then reverse engineer the ways they fit together. As Paul Kingsnorth writes in his new jeremiad Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, when we ate the apple, we chose “knowledge over communion.” Our exile from the Garden meant not only alienation from nature and a dawning awareness of death—and hence an alienation from life itself, once we came to see life as cruelly delimited, a resource in need of validation by the individual—but also alienation from what remains of our innate ability to grasp life’s wholeness.
The worst idea of all, I think, is to assume we need to make reality work by anatomizing and cataloguing its parts, rather than accepting that it works already, in ways that we, immersed in its workings, cannot comprehend. (As an aside, I know I’m not alone among the relatives of cancer victims in my intuition that the disease will never be cured by studying individual parts of its progression or focusing on specific organs or administering drugs that target one mutation or another—only when some truly novel and complete, big-picture understanding occurs to us, if it ever does, will a paradigm shift in our approach become possible.)
We are comfortable believing that the Doll Shop is a “creepy little place inside” our world, “behind the scenes of life,” as Ligotti puts it, yet much less comfortable in those moments when we come to suspect that the Doll Shop is the world, and that life has no foreground or background, and thus no “scenes” to peer behind. But how different are our own bodies, with their ghastly assemblages of limbs and flesh and organs, any of which can destroy all the others if they get infected by a foreign (or terrifyingly native) piece of corrupted code? How much sense does it make to think of ourselves as individuals, organized under the rubric of one name and one story, when in physical reality we are no more than complex assemblages of largely interchangeable parts that, for a time, appear oriented toward the purpose of remaining alive and then, abruptly, toward the purpose of ceasing to be so (no one can know the meaning of the phrase active dying until they’ve seen it)?
The widespread abandonment of this kind of thinking that is going on everywhere today—the decline of the sovereign individual, stably defined by its own reason and purpose, in clear-cut distinction from nature—is another sign that the Second Age is yielding to the Third, in which a new harmony between humans and all other objects will assert itself. The only question now is: Do we forfeit our individuality for the sake of simulated ease and comfort, as AI pushes us to do, or do we forfeit our individuality out of a desire to free the unknown and even monstrous potential that lurks beneath the collapsing narrative of personal sovereignty in order to welcome whatever wants to emerge from it? As there is no sparing the individual anymore, the choice now is between waste and sacrifice.
III. The Last Chapter of the History of the World
The space beyond life is the space of art and also death.
—Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Volume 2
A Shard of Ice: Superficial vs. Profound Deadness
If we imagine the living person as a spirit or soul housed within or generated by the brute matter of flesh and bone, it would seem that a dead body should sink down to a simpler level—pure matter at last, harboring no secret thoughts, feelings, or intentions. And yet sitting there, beholding the dead body of the person who brought me into this world, nothing was simple. In fact, no thinking at all was possible in that moment: It felt like something dead in me was rising to behold what was dead in her, pushing the moment onto a peak from which I could see the rest of my life shimmering in an icy clear light, on the far side of a deep lake. Sitting there made me feel at once more alive than ever (“My job is to remain while yours is to depart”) yet also not alive at all, unable to respond with any of my living faculties. “Our unconscious is still as unreceptive as ever to the idea of our own mortality,” Freud writes, though I perceived this unreceptivity as a kind of deadness in its own right. The long hours I spent with her body changed my life by calling into question how and to what degree I’m alive at all, and whether the dead thing I discovered inside myself had been there all along.
It has often been said that artists need a shard of glass or ice in their psyche, an ability to dissociate and stand outside what’s happening to them. If the job of an artist is to translate personal experience into universal experience (or at least into impersonal experience ready to be re-personalized by the strangers who encounter what that artist has produced), then an artist has to see their own life as an example of what life itself is, just as a scientist might by studying subjects in an experiment. This, too, is a puppet state, an ability to toggle between “I” and “it,” between immersion in the ordeal you’re living through and a dispassionate, disembodied vantage upon it.
It has equally often been said that we could master the art of living if we could do it twice: once to explore and rehearse, and once to apply what we’ve learned. Given that the nature of life is precisely our inability to do this, the only recourse is to do both at once, to either fragment or double our consciousness so that we are both acting and observing at the same time. To admit of this inner shard of ice is not necessarily to forsake our own humanity; if deployed conscientiously, it’s a means of accessing a level of humanity that is otherwise obscured and wasted in the struggle to survive as individuals, trying to win a game whose rules we don’t know and whose board we can barely see.
This shard, insofar as I discovered it in myself while gazing at my mother’s body in the rented bed in the living room (where, in 2000, the whole family, including our cockatiel and our golden retriever, lived for a year while the rest of the house was being renovated) also came from her and her own cool, collected approach to the abyss her body had condemned her to. My sense at the time was that this was my best attempt to honor her. Just as her body had remained in the room with the rest of us while her spirit had ceased to exist or gone elsewhere, I found that my body, too, remained in that room without any discernible spirit inside it. I was, for a little while, either an automaton or a god, but not a man.
Running counter to any humanistic, Second Age concept of art as self-expression or self-improvement, this state may be the actual origin point of all artistic production, insofar as art is always communion with the dead. The attempt to enter a state where you are nothing but your imagination is to flee from apparent life, from the state of being “only alive” and fearing death, into a space that is dead and alive at once, where no one—whether puppet in a cardboard landscape or character on a page—is truly alive or truly dead, but rather in the third state that everyone in the Morning Star series has entered. In this state, the individual attains its greatest potential by forsaking individuality and dissolving into that which the conscious mind tries so hard to protect itself from. Art is neither a guarantee of immortality nor an escape from mortal limits, but it is a space where the questions of who’s alive and who isn’t, who’s animate and who’s the animator, who’s in the foreground and who’s in the background, all cease to require an answer and can even thrive on their own indeterminacy.
Reflecting back on those silent, shocked hours when I sat there with her body, with my father and my brother on the couch across from me, I want to draw a distinction between superficial and profound deadness, both of which can be experienced while still alive. Superficial deadness is the feeling of being spread too thin, of doing everything and nothing at once, of being immersed in the world but not integrated into it, constantly putting out fires without ever letting your attention settle on or penetrate anything. A state we might call “trying too hard to live.” The state of anxiety and distraction, in other words, where life is frittered away through a superficial desire to avoid thoughts of death and de-individuation—the state that makes us forever susceptible to advertising and envy and propaganda and the million flavors of brain rot that populate the internet. This is what it means to be a weak puppet, which is everyone’s default state in a consumer society.
Being a strong puppet, on the other hand, means relinquishing your freedom through your own supremely free choice to do so in order to access your “true work,” whatever that may be. Perhaps this is the kind of fanaticism that cropped up more often in antiquity. My brother, who moved back to help our parents for nearly a year, said that, grueling as the work often was, it was meaningful to a unique degree because of how thoroughly it overrode the “option paralysis” that often ruins contemporary life. For those long months, he knew there was nowhere else he should be, and he felt cleansed and strengthened by that knowledge.
For myself, outside the crisis of the past few years, there have always been moments when I’m fully immersed in writing, reading, drawing, or conversing, thinking of nothing at all except for the conceptual worlds emerging through these processes. This is also the state I entered while sitting there with her body, a state that could be called grief but which had nothing to do with sadness or mourning. There was no feeling of “woe is me” because there was no “me.” It was a state of pure identification, deeper than attraction or revulsion, simply a period of pure beholding while I realized that what I saw out there, across the room, that thing which both was and was not my mother, existed to the same degree inside me—indeed, to the same degree as I inherited life from her, I also inherited death.
This is the state of profound deadness that is terrifying to consider, yet even more terrifying to ignore. It’s the state of being coterminous with something outside the self—with reality as such—so fully that the concept of self ceases to apply and there is thus nothing to preserve and nothing to fear. If my experience of staring at actual death is to have any lasting positive impact—if I’m to find any reason to be glad I went through this in my 30s rather than my 60s—it’s to remember how important it is to meet reality on its own terms, as it exists concretely in the present, on the far side of fear. How important and how possible.
“Human puppets could not conceive of themselves as being puppets at all,” Ligotti writes. “Once you begin to feel you are making a go of it on your own—that you are making moves and thinking thoughts which seem to have originated within you—it is not possible for you to believe you are anything but your own master.”
At its greatest, the experience of animating (and of writing) frees you from this illusion. It inducts you into a zone where you embody the paradox of being at once at your most alive and your least alive through the process of dissolution into the materials of your project. This feeling reveals, troublingly, that the effort to stay alive, which may be the same as the effort to remain distinct from the background of life and the all-pervasive humming of Holy Spirit, actually diminishes your ability to do so in any sense beyond the corporeal, thus inviting zombification.
The difference between puppets and zombies, therefore, is clarity: A puppet knows it’s a puppet or knows nothing at all, whereas a zombie is just conscious enough to believe it isn’t a zombie. When art reaches its highest potential, beyond the ego’s thirst for fame and fortune, it nullifies zombification in both directions at once: The puppet guides the puppeteer just as much as the puppeteer guides it, and together each attains the harmony between life and death that the zombie is definitionally precluded from.
I feared that I couldn’t watch my mother die and found that I could. Those last weeks and days and hours were like descending into a place I’d been before, a place whose familiarity exceeded that of any other place, a lurch or gully between realms of existence—my inner Doll Shop—where, I now believe, all of what I’ll call honest energy, the only energy that powers true work, comes from. (Perhaps a well-lived life simply means using all this energy before it’s too late.) Harnessing honest energy produces a simultaneous feeling of going out of life and of arriving more fully within it, of finally recognizing the truth that life tries to define itself against. The genuine familiarity revealed when you see the Doll Shop for what it is renders all other places, all our bright and cozy rooms, deeply alien and suspect, so that only clear-eyed contact with the Doll Shop itself, however sinister its essence, offers any real chance to come home.
The Second Apple: Purgatory Redeemed
Throughout the drafting of this essay, which I’ve started and stopped many times along the so-called roller coaster of grief, I’ve tried to push my mind toward a glimpse of the ultimate point where the puppet and the puppeteer merge not in opposition or in friendly reunion, but in recognition of the fact that they were never separate to begin with. This is, as I understand it, what Kleist means by the “last chapter of the history of the world.”
What might it mean to “eat again of the tree of knowledge,” and what might the second apple be? The internet, through which we have attempted, against Lovecraft’s famous advice, to overcome “the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” has indeed plunged us into the “new dark age” that “The Call of Cthulhu” warned of. Vast swathes of history exist online in molten form, sickening us with its fumes as we mourn the Second Age’s failed promise to conquer death and uncertainty by aggregating infinite information. The second apple may be no more than the full and final acceptance of this fact—the cessation of the belief that we will ever know the world in the way that our parents and their parents believed we would. (Perhaps AI will “know the world for us,” but, if so, this will only deepen the darkness we’re heading into.)
Surviving the Third Age as humans therefore means relinquishing not only the rationalist hope of knowing the world, but even the underlying belief that the world is a thing that can be known. From today’s vantage point, it seems there is no world separate from our consciousness of it, which is not a retread of the postmodern idea of radical subjectivity (postmodernism feels, in retrospect, like a symptom of the Second Age’s terminal condition), but rather a reemergent objectivity, a sense that we are all objects, integrated in the field of a Will that has no shape except that which we temporarily give it, just as we have no shape except that which it temporarily gives us.
The urge to overcome or blot out consciousness is everywhere in our culture today, though most of the methods on offer are cruelly commercialized, anesthetics that may numb but can never save the patient. What I’m straining to articulate here is the possibility of a good-faith nullification of consciousness—a nonsuicidal merger with the world of the dead while still alive. A deliberate snuffing-out of the will to live, not toward a will to die but rather a will to enter a third state in which the mind, free of both the will to live and the fear of death, allows for full immersion in the realm of pure creativity, a kind of dreaming while awake, which the entity or force that created this world must’ve felt while creating it.
I’ve always known that the warm living room and kitchen of my childhood home rests atop a cold, dark basement, down in which I imagine the Doll Shop to lurk, but what would it mean to leave the basement door open? This state would correspond not to heaven or hell but to a redeemed purgatory, a purgatory defined not by waiting to go up or down, of hoping for or fearing the Other Side, but rather a place autonomous unto itself, about which we could say simultaneously “This is all there is” and “I’ll never know what that means.” This is exactly how I feel about my hometown now, made fully uncanny as both my most sacred refuge against the terror of motherlessness and the site upon which that terror was realized. There’s no overcoming this paradox; I see it as my duty now to sync up with it and let its alien energy flow through me.
Humans have always made microcosms of their own powerless situation in order to taste the possibility of power—my daughter puts her dolls to bed just as firmly as my wife and I put her to bed, scolding them for their intransigence just as we sometimes scold her. But perhaps it’s not simply “playing God” that motivates this behavior. Perhaps, by putting ourselves in the position of puppeteer over a tiny imagined world, we can channel the same energy that God channels, or seems to channel, over our world. Just as many religions posit that God needs us as much as we need God—that we are, in essence, here so that God can be there (or here too)—perhaps the puppeteer needs the puppet in order to come alive just as much as the puppet needs the puppeteer, and for the same reason. It’s obvious that the puppet remains inert and incoherent without the puppeteer’s intervention, but less obvious to consider how this relation runs the other way. But who are the Quay brothers when they’re not animating?
What I loved so much about those films in college was the combined feeling of unpredictability and inevitability: that whatever happens is going to happen no matter what, and yet, moment to moment, there’s no way to say what that’s going to be, or why. It’s a layer of motivation and action beneath the way we tend to understand history as a series of causes and effects, of the needs of the individual bolstered by or foisted upon the needs of the population, of great thinkers and great events set in motion by human goodness and human evil. Perhaps none of this is really the case, but in stop-motion it obviously isn’t. There is, in the greatest stop-motion films, a purified perception of Holy Spirit, a sense that all these pieces are moving for no reason except the ultimate one, which is that they can’t resist the force that’s moving them. Stop-motion in this sense is the least psychological art form, in that it posits no interiority at all for the puppets; and also the most psychological, in that it’s a pure and uninterrogated expression of the puppeteer’s psychology, which, as I’ve come to believe, would have no bearing on the world if not for the puppets waiting to submit to it, just as God is nothing without believers.
A great puppeteer therefore becomes great by overcoming the paradox in which animation, the most rigorously planned and obsessively detail-oriented art form imaginable, the furthest from improvisation, nevertheless attains a level of pure spontaneity—a feeling not only that anything could happen but that anything will happen, that there are no laws of physics or of morality or even of time and space except those that the puppets dictate through their movements, which have no purpose except to be those movements—yet this wild freedom is attainable only through absurdly slow and complex planning, and is in this way an illusion, as false as the puppets’ movements themselves.
Maybe this concept scales up to the level of human reality in the 2020s, and reveals a middle path between pure striving and pure surrender, beyond the 2010s’ despair over our growing inability to master our own destiny amidst the insidious rise of what economist Yanis Varoufakis calls “techno-feudalism.” In the Third Age, perhaps the goal of human ingenuity and will (free or not) is to work out the kinks that keep objects from doing what they want to do, to free the potential latent in everything around us (and, recognizing ourselves as objects, in ourselves too), not to get out of this world but to further ensconce ourselves within it, exploring possibilities that we’ve been too rigid in our thinking and too focused on our own uniqueness to so far even consider. The goal of a cusp era like ours is to sow the ground, just as the decomposing dead do, with the seeds of a future paradigm whose shape we may never see. Never before in my life have I felt so clearly that the ground of my being is torn up, and therefore, painful as this state is, I can also tell that now is the time to plant new seeds and to nurture old ones that have never before come to light.
Down in this ground lies the so-far untapped potential of the Doll Shop, locked away beneath the roving eye of progress and thus free of the need to justify, explain, or sell itself. As Nelson writes, “Our culture has a long history of pushing discredited religion and science alike off their former pedestals and recycling them in works of imagination.” In the 25 years since her book came out, this process has only accelerated, as the old certainties and promises of science and religion have warped and worn down, filling our surface lives with volatility and despair while seeding the Doll Shop with more and more potential. In that darkness underfoot, molten history is coming back together in bizarre and enlivening new ways. (During the long cancer ordeal, I imagined my own inner being, itself riddled with the genetic propensity toward cancer, as a cancerous process in its own right, a process of alien shapes growing and mutating and connecting within me, preparing for the moment when they will at last overtake my outer form, whether psychically or physically or both, and hatch into a shape I will be unable to recognize.)
In the Doll Shop Age that is now dawning, we may become gods not through empowering ourselves above others (the fantasy that technology frees the individual has never seemed more absurd), but by embodying the unified Will of everything around us and seeing ourselves as fundamentally part of it, not separate “users” of puppets and dolls, nor as puppets and dolls ourselves, haplessly used by feudal overlords, but as beings who exist to be used as objects to the same degree that those objects exist to be used by us.
Through this symbiosis, all is not lost. I don’t believe my mother is in a better place, intact as herself in some dream sanatorium I can’t visit. Neither do I believe that she’s gone forever, or present only in the memories of those who knew her. The forces that animated her, that made her who she was, exist still, distributed throughout reality, and, while they coalesced in one form that lasted for 73 years and then succumbed to the overproduction of its own cells, they can just as well combine and act in new forms in the future—perhaps not quite “as themselves”; then again, whatever selfhood they once seemed to possess now strikes me as an obsolete concept.
Maybe the work of the animator—the deranged monastic commitment to breathing life into a miniature world by manipulating tiny figures with excruciating slowness—is therefore an unusually clear model of the work everyone must do to achieve harmony and discover meaning in a meaningless age, to access what is inanimate in us and animate all around us, and therefore to bridge life and death in ways that neither science nor religion can. If a life beyond the alienation of late modernity is possible, it will come through deliberate reintegration into the world as it is, not the utopian construction of or messianic escape into a new one.
They say that undergoing trauma builds character. But when I ask myself what character actually means, I find the question only gets stranger the more I think about it. A character is not exactly a real person, even if it’s based on someone real, but it also has to become real, or more than real, during the writing, drawing, or puppeting process. Then, if it’s been conjured well, it takes on life in the reader’s or viewer’s mind—just as we strive to take on life in our own minds by directing our actions in the world toward pride and away from shame—taking root in memory just as firmly as living people do. All of this feels like a biological process, like some network of pregnancy and delivery that mirrors the physical stages of reproduction.
A character’s job is to know they’re a character and yet not let this knowledge spoil their ability to be one. Only through this double knowledge can the character integrate into the world of the story, neither vanishing beneath the level of plausibility and becoming a cipher, nor attempting to rise above it and exit the realm that was created for them. Just as we can’t exit the world with any part of ourselves intact, characters cannot act on the knowledge that the world they’ve been cast into is not fully real. Indeed, their power as conjured beings who make their fantasy worlds seem real depends upon the ways they move through the story and into our minds without admitting that they don’t exist.
Artists create characters by absorbing unformed potential from the world—ideas, impressions, intimations, heresies, feelings of history and futurity—and letting them grow into new forms that emerge via materials, whether words or wood and string, that already exist. By doing this work, the artist hopes to in turn be made real, or to at least escape the zombie state of unrealized aspirations and unprocessed impressions of what the world, beneath what it seems to be, actually is. In the end, this is how imagination redeems purgatory: by overcoming the dream of escape in order to reanimate the dead materials that surround us, and gain entry to the truly living world that has been here all along. The relief I feel upon nearing the end of this essay, after months of work, is that of having made the realm I’m trapped in a little more livable than it was before.
Having lost my mother and thus been forced to embody her in the ways that she once embodied me, this is now the approach toward my own core of deadness and my own dead era that I hope to take for the rest of my life. I would not say that I feel reborn by this experience, but I do feel newly aware of how tenuous and ongoing a process being born in the first place really is, and how naive is the view that we are ejected from harmony with our mother into a dead world in which only we are alive. This is the trap of modern human subjectivity. So if the objective incursion of death into the prime of my life has any value at all, it is to break me out of it once and for all and send me down into the Doll Shop, from which I will never again pretend to emerge.
As a culture, we have gone too deeply into the material to infuse the spiritual back into it. As Kingsnorth writes, “We are living inside an obsolete story.” Accepting this and moving on is like the moment of leaving the grueling regimen of hospitals and choosing hospice instead—a decision that brings awful but genuine relief, along with the ambivalent but very real hope for a chapter of life beyond the ordeal of death. The “brute forces of matter,” as Kingsnorth calls them, that the Second Age unleashed and believed it could harness have overtaken all attempts at containment, killing both the God of the First Age and the Second Age’s confidence that we could go it alone.
Now, in a dead world, mediated by a dead internet that is spawning its own undead successor, the only means of attaining a new chapter of life is to open ourselves to Holy Spirit as it emerges from this decomposing matter and to go wherever it takes us, without asking or even wondering where or why. The age of submission to a divine Will and of unshakeable belief in the efficacy of human will are both over. Looking ahead, I see no path of sane and honest autonomy; only a decision between drifting deeper into the realm of the living dead, or using the last of our consciousness to renounce the desire to master the world, and, as a puppet that knows it’s a puppet, submitting to the Will of whatever is straining to emerge from the dead materials of the past, and from our own dead cores, thereby bringing about a future we’ll never know that we’ve reached because our consciousness will at last have become infinite and indivisible from all that it once struggled to become conscious of. 
David Leo Rice is the author of the novels Angel House, The New House, The Berlin Wall, and the Dodge City trilogy, as well as the story collections Drifter and The Squimbop Condition. He lives in New York City.
Illustration: Jan Robert Duennweller
