I have decided to abandon my child. This piece is less an essay than a ruin. It's an assemblage of fossils into an incomplete skeleton from which I will beseech you to try to resurrect a once living, breathing dinosaur.

I began writing this in the spring, although sections of it can be carbon-dated years earlier. I leave it here, as excerpts lifted directly from my notes, because I am tired. I have left the responsibility to you, obliging reader, to extrapolate all the connective tissue that I've forsaken.

This essay was meant to be a mapping of different modes for reinventing ourselves. How our fantasies are shaped by the lessons of our past. How our desires to create the stable ‘self’ are ever-evolving and inescapably doomed. It would, of course, do this by synthesizing the show House Hunters, with the novel A Court of Thorns and Roses, and put them in conversation with the “Man in a Room” films of Paul Schrader.

Like so many of the subjects that catalyzed this essay, I have felt the need to move on. And so rather than revisiting this for some morbid Weekend-at-Bernie's hijinks, I have decided (for now) to let it rest here, pathetic and unfinished. Welcome to the club, pal.

Rough Outline

1. Nostalgia, wanted to write about Paul Schrader

2. Watching House Hunters

3. Talking to mom on the phone - parents and house flipping shows

4. The mid-life crisis, a trope of so much late 20th century fiction.  Now it seems it has become a ubiquitous structure of feeling 

5. ACOTAR, romantasy tropes

6. Paul Schrader’s man in a room series

7. Reincarnation, the family model, investing oneself into the future as a way of meeting a fantasy of the past

It seems to me these days that all that’s left is nostalgia. Of course, we know nostalgia is nothing but fantasy. A desire twisting into a revisitionist past – rose-tinted, amber-coated, sepia-toned, home-movie-fuzzed memories. In our news, our politics, our aesthetics, it's a barrage of nostalgia, nostalgia, nostalgia. Or maybe, more soberly, I’m just now old enough that nostalgia means something – it’s not just empty historical signifiers, but a real lived-in past that I can never return to. 

I bring up nostalgia in the issue devoted to reincarnation because the fantasy of resurrection and renewal is a fantasy of nostalgia — of rewinding the vhs tape of our youth. Righting old wrongs. Saying what wasn’t said. Finding the path untaken. 

[This essay, in its circuitous formation, originated as a meditation on the repetitions in Paul Schrader's filmography]

I was struck first by this knowledge at a friend’s parents’ house. It’s strange to watch our parents settle into old age. Habits’ calcified. Comfort commodified. After our evening constitutional, we had all settled around the couch

• What is my

• What is it about houses

• I suppose I’m as obsessed about houses as the next person

• equally signifying crib & coffin

• But this essay isn’t about houses. Houses matter here because they are obvious receptacles for our repressed desires. House Hunters is an easy target because it teases our desire for choices. It lays out life into a simple tridential path.

• No, this essay is about the desire to be reborn – as they say

• My father and step-mother, always working on their houses, always painting bannisters, laying stone, refitting light fixtures, renovating, tinkering,

Reading through ACOTAR, I was at first hoodwinked by its YA trappings into believing that its target audience is indeed young adults. But dutifully trudging my way through the book I realized this was my own blunder – The fantasy is NOT about being 19. No, I discovered, the fantasy is about returning to 19. You see Feyre is not your average 19 year old. She’s world-weary and bears the thankless task of taking care of 3 inept sisters and a self-loathing father. The family is poor, starving away in the cabin.

She spends her days hunting and her nights badgering her family to fulfill their basic responsibilities. She’s obligated to be mother and father to her pestering and incapable family – but what's that? She has secret creativity – In her soul, she’s a painter trapped by familial burden! If only a beautiful man would come to whisk her away, take care of her family, and give her all the space and opportunity she needs to express her artistic passions!

[You have of course heard the phrase: “Youth is Wasted on the Young.” That, it seems, is the guiding mantra of this text and the escapist incantation for its readers.]

[Maas’ seemingly-clumsy repetition is not, as I had first assumed, aimed at the young,

I now find myself on the precipice on middle-age]

• “Once it had been second nature to savor the contrast of new grass against dark, tilled soil, or an amethyst brooch nestled in folds of emerald silk; once I’d dreamed and breathed and thought in color and light and shape. Sometimes I would even indulge in envisioning a day when my sisters were married and it was only me and Father, with enough food to go around, enough money to buy some paint, and enough time to put those colors and shapes down on paper or canvas or the cottage walls.” “I was left with moments like this, admiring the glint of pale winter light on snow. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done it–bothered to notice anything lovely or interesting.”

Repetition is conversation.

– the transcendental style in film, the stillness is a desire to

converse with the image. It does not flit through the eye and mind but rests, comparing each second to the last. Finding a new tension in each tiny revelation the wandering eye and mind discover.

Repetition breeds molecular creation. In organism-ic life, repetition is reproduction, and

reproduction is the opportunity for mutation, subversion, deformity, adaptation. The

imperfections of each reproduction, however microscopic, become gargantuan through

comparison. A trait, a feeling, an urge – variations on a theme

What is the repetition? In Schrader’s agoraphobic worlds, it’s all disaffected men,

sleepwalking through life, self-medicating with healthy cocktails of booze, pepto-bismol,

and rigorous self-ritualized habits. Oh, and of course, they must journal – narrating their

emotional arc from listless flaccidity to a monomaniacal crescendo.

[If they’re all the same Why do these films exist and why do they converse? You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. But Schrader draws us always back to repetition] 

[It’s through these repetitions that Schrader’s films themselves take on such honesty and transcendence. The ritual of telling this story over and over. Each image] 

Each contribution is a visitation into Schrader – and the Schradarian hero’s – head. Each new variation offers both a contemporary update to the story and a semi-autobiographical update on Schrader himself. Viewed in series, the film’s map the anxieties of the zeitgeist – post-Vietnam disillusionment, 80’s consumerism and hedonism, 90’s end-of-history malaise, climate change & spiritual crises, global violence, racial discord, etc. These changes feel so raw and prescient because they feel as if they’re Schrader’s own personal emotional-bulimia purges – anger, ennui, despair, love – they drip from the screen. Like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood or Before Trilogy if they were about spiritual self-flagellation. I could write for hours details these repetitions and divergences – the romantic desires and femme fatales, the professions and their labors, the settings [editor’s note: I haven’t]