I spent my summer reading A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, a story about a frail young misanthrope named Des Esseintes living in 19th-century Paris who moves to the countryside and focuses all of his energy on turning his house into an artificial paradise. Shunning all contact with the outside world, he becomes a monk for art, celebrating the mysteries of sublime tapestries, florid Latin prose, and delicious liquor. Turning its leaves, I felt my eyes were singed with screen-glow once again. Like the libertines living in the French provinces Huysmans describes, who seek in perfume a “Platonic substitute” for “the atmosphere of the Paris brothels,” this book brought me back to COVID-19 quarantine.
For instance, when Des Esseintes is deciding which colour to paint his wall, he seeks “colours that increased in intensity by lamplight; little did he care if they appeared insipid or harsh by daylight, for it was at night that he really lived […] he found too that there was a particular pleasure in being in a well lit room.” I was reminded of the delight I used to take in the thick, white, film that my TV would cast on the living room wall all those years ago, when I, like the protagonist, would stay up until five in the morning, immersed in the music videos of my favorite rapper Bladee, lost in the “haunting presence” of his nasally voice. Like Des Esseintes, who searches “through pages of mediocre writing for sentences emitting a kind of electricity that would startle him,” I was stimulated by Bladee’s shortcomings: he rapped in broken English, and his verses were comprised of completely unrelated sequences of images. In “1million,” his verse begins: “the shining; going crazy off a pain pill / I’ll never see you again, I know I never will / I’m in this situation, feel like the time is still / I’m in this situation, I’m tryna make a million”—confessions reminiscent of social media statuses give way to the hedonistic braggadocio typical of his genre, yet the dominant impression these half-baked lyrics produce is one of surrealism: this is trap music under dream logic.
Through Bladee’s lyrics, I developed an obsession with artifice which, unlike Des Esseintes, was stirred by contact with the outside world. In her essay “Melancholy Objects,” Susan Sontag discusses the archetype of the flâneur, “the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.” Words like “stalks,” “reconnoitering,” and “voyeuristic” testify to how alienated this character is from the city he inhabits—it’s enemy territory, and in exploring it, he feels like he’s doing something wrong, perhaps even unconsensual. Maybe the flâneur disdains his fellow citydwellers—his sense that he’s “cruising the urban inferno” evokes images of Virgil and Dante among the damned and gestures to the sinister elements of his hungry gaze, his attraction to the city’s “dark seamy corners” which makes him see slums as nothing but “the most enthralling of decors.”
I have always loved traipsing around the city of Chicago. Since I was little, I had taken endless joy in the wild caverns of its Orange Line stations and the exquisite pastels of its boba shops. Over quarantine, however, I grew into a /flâneur/ as the city I loved transformed into a gorgeous shell of its former self: the charms of days spent shopping with my mother at the bustling Water Tower Place gave way to the charms of a Michigan Avenue on a Saturday completely hollowed out, to a Canal Street you could take all the way to Roosevelt without encountering a single person. I started sporting thick, noise-cancelling headphones. Of course, there was only one artist on my playlists. I became the only living person in the land of the dead, and in this, Bladee became my Virgil: under the guidance of his album “AvP,” I sought the bridge between Grand and Fulton Market, where I could walk among sleek high-rises that chimed with Bladee’s metallic autotune, or JJ Pepper’s, the gas station convenience store, at night, where I would stop to pick up the most lurid, chemical-looking MTN Dew flavour en route to the hill in Palmisano Park, where I would watch the Dan Ryan expressway send cars roaring underneath a skyline where faint blues and purples pulsed like Whitearmor synths. Fueled by Bladee, surfeited on the stark glow of my neighborhood’s streetlights, my mind bubbled with fantasies of all of the things that were going on behind the closed doors around me.
My quarantine life was basically grotesque: my hair grew giant, un-combable knots, my room was full of moldy food, and I cut off the few friends I had in high school in favour of people I had met on Discord. At the end of quarantine, I escaped this lifestyle and ditched the artist who was its soundtrack. Yet the world is starting to embrace Bladee’s internet-oriented death drive: I hear the rhythms of his Tweets in the ironic vernacular zoomers have adopted, and the glossy stimulation offered by the Instagram layout seems an aesthetic ideal for him. When I was first introduced to AI, the horrific images generated by Dall-E 3 reminded me of Bladee’s album covers. And while the celebrations of artifice and isolation in Huysmans feel inoffensive, their modern-day equivalent in Bladee and his patrilineage terrify me. In his final years, Des Esseintes turned to Catholicism; post-2020, Bladee’s music developed a highly religious flavour (the cover art for his 2022 album /Spiderr/ featured an illustration of a golem, a being from Jewish folklore). When I wake up and know I’m going to scroll the day away, I head to Quaker meeting, where worshippers sit in silence until they’re moved by the spirit to speak. I’m not sure if I believe in it. But right now, it’s really helpful to have something beyond this world to take solace in.