PARASOCIAL LOVE
YOU FOUND MY NUDES FOLDER (I PUT IT WHERE I KNEW YOU WOULD FIND IT)
Does loving someone parasocially make it impossible to love a real person?1 If you love someone online does that mean you cannot IRL? Like you’re lacking in some capacity. Are you guys in love or have you ever been. Yesterday I read Randy’s latest piece which is ostensibly a review of the beginning of Infinite Jest but really it’s more than that (just like Infinite Jest is more than Infinite Jest).
While I was reading his piece, I thought to myself, “I love Randy.” And I’ve had similar experiences with other media: while reading Infinite Jest, I thought, “I love David Foster Wallace.” And perhaps even in the previous sentence I wrote and you just read you see a problem (or maybe even now I’m doing the pre-emptive critique that no-one is making except me (I am projecting my neurosis onto YOU, I am SORRY), effectively killing myself which Randy is explicitly warning against, man, I love him): namely, the word “media.” I love Randy when I’m reading his work and I love DFW when I’m reading his and one is a review and analysis written in first-person-singular and one is a sprawling piece of fiction written from multiple perspectives and yet, to me, to any reader, to any consumer, they both coalesce into “content.” And somehow I’m making a judgment about a person, or really the idea of a person; I’m falling in love with this totally unreal idea in my head and supposedly I don’t have brain damage and Randy literally does and he is screaming at us to go outside, lift weights, touch grass, and fall in love with a real woman.2 Maybe the real brain damage was the lack of brain damage we made along the way.
I love my previous girlfriend more now than I ever did while we were together. I think this is a problem (you should listen to Randy about love, definitely not me). And I dunno man, it makes me wonder. Our relationship ended (I will take ownership, I ended the relationship) due to my own cowardice: I had a low-paying job out of college (I was literally digging holes) and I didn’t know what to do and my girlfriend was a young woman whose time I thought was more valuable than my own; I didn’t want to waste her prime child-bearing years being a loser idiot and I didn’t want to start some career that I hated at her behest, thus making me resent her. (I have since learned that all jobs are basically terrible, maybe you can find something tolerable where you are left alone and can write self-referential Substack articles if you’re lucky.) Would I have stayed with her if I truly loved her? Did I make the right choice? She’s engaged now and posts pictures on boats, she certainly seems better off (and again we come back to media and digital identity: what the fuck do I even know about her any more? That she is engaged and posts pictures on boats and didn’t want to talk to me the one time I asked her about it.) If I loved her then how could I break up with her at all? And now when I think about her I just love her and we haven’t talked in like five years so I’m pretty sure that whatever it is that I’m loving is not a person, it’s certainly no one I’ve talked to or interacted with in years, my brain damage is progressing nicely. Is my growing love for her a symptom of the primacy of the media-dream in my psyche? Is it another way to lie to myself, to stay asleep, to deem myself beyond forgiveness?
I loved David Foster Wallace and he also terrified me. I read all his work (fiction and nonfiction), watched all his interviews, listened to his graduation speech. There’s a smoldering, almost desperate lust3 for life in DFW’s work. He is begging you to open your eyes, to connect with others, to live. And this message resonated with me, I loved David Foster Wallace and his art, he was Literally Me. And he fucking killed himself. So I was terrified and I couldn’t help loving him and asking myself, if DFW is Literally Me and he killed himself then what does my future have in store.
Randy says that love will save the world. I believe him. David Foster Wallace never loved me back. One of the key differences between the parasocial love I feel for characters in my media-dream and Jesus is that Jesus loves you back.4
A JUNGIAN CONSIDERATION
In Aion, Carl Jung writes:
"Fortunately for us, the threat of his [The Devil's] coming had already been foretold in the New Testament— for the less he is recognized the more dangerous he is. Who would suspect him under those high-sounding names of his, such as public welfare, lifelong security, peace among the nations, etc.? He hides under idealisms, under -isms in general, and of these the most pernicious is doctrinairism, that most unspiritual of all the spirit's manifestations. The present age must come to terms drastically with the facts as they are, with the absolute opposition that is not only tearing the world asunder politically but has planted a schism in the human heart. We need to find our way back to the original, living spirit which, because of its ambivalence, is also a mediator and uniter of opposites, an idea that preoccupied the alchemists for many centuries.
If, as seems probable, the aeon of the fishes is ruled by the archetypal motif of the hostile brothers, then the approach of the next Platonic month, namely Aquarius, will constellate the problem of the union of opposites. It will then no longer be possible to write off evil as the mere privation of good; its real existence will have to be recognized. This problem can be solved neither by philosophy, nor by economics, nor by politics, but only by the individual human being, via his experience of the living spirit, whose fire descended upon Joachim, one of many, and, despite all contemporary misunderstandings, was handed onward into the future."
I see this all the time here on Substack: Jung’s prophesizing of the recognition of evil, the living spirit manifested in individual souls. We feel that we are in a dark age of great transition and psychological turmoil; if we stick with Jung’s notion of the Age of Aquarius, then part of this transformation will be in how we conceive of the God-Image: God offers redemption, will you redeem God? Stephan A. Hoeller says5:
God’s unconsciousness, Jung said, has one primary manifestation - the loss of its feminine side. In Answer to Job, Jung wrote that the Creator-God once had a feminine side who was his sister, consort and possibly his mother all at once and that her name is Sophia, which means “wisdom". By losing contact with Sophia God became unwise or, in psychological terms, unconscious. Thus it is evident that the Creator-God’s way to consciousness leads to the feminine which he needs to recognize and to rehabilitate, and with which he must achieve union…
Perhaps in the changing conception of the God-Image we can redeem God through love? Maybe in loving a woman we will individuate the God-Image, restore His Anima? Maybe love will save the world. We’re gonna need to log off to find out.
Do you love Her or the Hyperreal Her. What if she wants you to love the Hyperreal Her. What if she loves the Hyperreal You. What if you love the Hyperreal You.
I do lift weights and make a point to go outside for walks every day, just fyi (you should too).
I was struggling with this word choice, I wanted to say “love.” But I don’t think I can, my gut tells me I can’t.
So I’ve heard and Randy says (I believe him). To be honest, I’m not there yet but I am trying.
I saw this quote in this article by Neoliberal Feudalism.
Your writing has a worrying quality of honesty without much buffer that sounds like thoughts rattling around a head that I really appreciate.