A Freer State of Being
Many thanks to Griffith Review, where this essay was originally published.We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura.
– Don DeLillo, White Noise
THE ROAD IS a serpent carving a path through the landscape, coaxing me from Brisbane towards my rural hometown in south-west Queensland. The final hours of this drive are always the most arduous, the most dangerous. The novelty wears off, the twists and turns subside; I am left with nothing but a barren stretch of bitumen and my unfamiliar, glassy gaze reflected the rear-view mirror, the eyes of a stranger I no longer recognise.
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I am settling into my childhood room in my family home in the rural town that raised me. Outside my bedroom window, the tray of my grandfather’s bright blue Ford F100 is piled high with detritus from days gone by, an aged tangle of chicken wire, yabby traps, old tarpaulins, jumper cables and empty Great Northern beer bottles. I hear my father packing his truck with tools and supplies for a carpentry job in a neighbouring town. The familiar clang and scrape of metal on metal sends me hurtling backwards through time. For a moment, I am a boy again. The boy I was. An effeminate, tightly wound overachiever, trapped in a town that failed to understand him, envisioning a future in which he was free from the invisible forces – the heteronormative and patriarchal constraints – that mapped meaning upon him.
I am sitting on my bed, surrounded by the few artefacts that signify my life: a tattered, leather-bound notebook, a hardcover edition of essays by Joan Didion, a stack of polaroids depicting faraway faces and places. In the corner of the room sits a collapsible cot which has, at one point or another, cradled each of my six nieces and nephews, a looming reminder that I am not as young as I once was, that time marches on. A large black backpack lies open at the foot of the bed. From where I am seated, its size, shape and position resemble one of the many wild boars which, in these parts, are hunted and gutted for sport. I stare intently at the half-empty husk that, for the past nine months, has contained almost everything I own.
I am here, in my childhood room in my family home in the rural town that raised me, in lieu of succumbing to a total nervous breakdown.
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Thank you for seeing Mr Darby Jones for a further six sessions of psychological treatment. We have started a new mental health plan today as attached.
Principal diagnosis: Depression and anxiety.
Presenting complaint: The patient is struggling with low mood and anxiety and is feeling disillusioned by the state of the world in general. He recently returned from extended travels abroad, which gave him a significant amount of time for introspection. The patient is presently in a transitional state and is ruminating on both his professional pursuits and his identity. The patient struggles with interpersonal relationships. He is distrustful and feels as though many people are motivated by an agenda to uphold contrived public images.
Current Mental Health Treatment: Lexapro (10 mg). Referred for further psychological review.
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If the minimal information I share online is to be trusted, then I am succeeding; I am doing well. Over the past three years, my work has been published and promoted by reputable publications. I have been awarded countless scholarships, prizes and accolades. At the end of 2023, I received my Bachelor of Arts (Writing) from the University of Queensland, where I was the valedictorian of my graduating class. In the twelve months since then, I have worked for myself as a freelance writer and editor. While this glossy list of achievements may seem impressive to some, and may even conjure an idea of the kind of person I am, it is nothing more than a façade I fashioned, an image I curated, fragments of my life I deemed acceptable to share.
I am not entirely sure when I started to unravel, but I suspect it began sometime after graduation, when I could no longer shake the feeling that the window for reckless abandon had closed. My friends and family, most of whom adhered to the traditional social norms of relationships, marriages, properties and children, seemed to be drifting further and further away. To me, their achievements reaffirmed both the dying of my brightness and my rapidly increasing unintelligibility. While it is true that, in the briefest of moments, I felt no further from the person I used to be, it is undeniable that everything around me had changed. I witnessed the birth of our family’s next generation, my baby sister bought a house, an old friend’s father passed away. Everyone, everywhere, everything: stark reminders of the passage of years and the death of an elusive yet possible self. Time became a catalyst of reckoning, reminding me that the leaf that once was lush and green gave way to deciduous shades. I was plagued by the notion of decay consuming vitality. Almost overnight, I relinquished my need to keep up appearances, to strive for perfection, and opted instead to escape – to flee from both myself and the world, a world that I felt I no longer belonged to, an electric world borne from a relentless, indiscriminate flow of information that claimed to constitute reality.
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Donald Trump receives a thunderous applause from a large crowd of raucous MAGA supporters.
‘This was a movement like nobody’s ever seen before. Frankly, I believe this was the greatest political movement of all time. There’s never been anything like this in this country, and now it’s going to reach a new level of importance because we’re going to help our country heal.’
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Trixie Mattel, dressed in a tailored floral suit and an oversized, bottle-blonde beehive wig directs her unmistakable eyes down the barrel of the camera.
‘Hi, it’s Trixie, welcome back to the channel. If you’re new here I’m a world-famous drag queen with a passion for make-up artistry.’
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Lidia Thorpe is removed from a parliamentary reception for King Charles and Queen Camilla.
‘You committed genocide against our people! Give us our land back! Give us what you stole from us! Our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people! You destroyed our land! Give us a treaty! This is not your land! You are not our King! Fuck the colony!’
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In 1981, French sociologist Jean Baudrillard published Simulacra and Simulation, in which he claimed that rapid technological advancements had transitioned the Western world from a state of reality to ‘hyperreality’, a postmodern epoch in which our excessive exposure to, consumption and replication of visual culture threatened the implosion of subjectivity.
Today, we live in a time in which self-worth and value are often signified by a numerical figure – how many followers we have, how many likes we receive, what level of traction our posts incite. We live in a time in which this numerical figure equates to social capital, with digital ‘celebrities’ gaining varying levels of access to places and perks on the basis of their following. We live in a time in which the aesthetics and metrics of this burgeoning digital realm pervade and influence not only the way we live our lives but what we perceive to be reality. We understand ourselves and the world around us through the cultural codes, signs and symbols we consume. We depend upon and wield such cultural codes, signs and symbols to inhabit narratives in which we wish to belong, fashioning them like an armour that tells the world who we are. Appearances are everything.
But hyperreality is an unstable landscape. When the frailty of our cultural codes, signs and symbols give way so too do our carefully curated identities, which inevitably implode.
I first encountered Baudrillard while studying postmodernism at the University of Queensland. In that week’s tutorial, the class discussed my favourite novel from the list of required reading: Don DeLillo’s White Noise. In one of its most impactful scenes, the protagonist, Jack, is escorted by his colleague, Murray, to ‘The Most Photographed Barn in America’. The pair watch on as countless cars and buses descend upon the site, each one full of tourists with cameras, tripods, telephoto lenses and filter kits. Jack notices a nearby booth selling postcards, slides and pictures of the barn. Eventually, Murray turns to Jack and delivers a dark and prescient observation:
We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack?
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Summer in Siem Reap, a tangle of tourists in the midday heat. I have employed the services of a former Buddhist monk turned travel guide named Bun. Together, we venture out on an expedition of the Angkor Archaeological Park, which was once the beating heart of the ancient Khmer Empire.
Bun teaches me many things about Buddhism. At Preah Khan, he speaks of energy and form. By Neak Poan, he teaches me about the elements, that in each of us there is a fire that burns until our bodies expire. At Banteay Srei, he tells tales of impermanence and learning to let go of things that are already gone.
‘Everything is mind-made,’ he declares, leading me deeper into Ta Som. ‘When you don’t love yourself, when you don’t believe in yourself, you feel fear.’ He pauses beneath the temple’s keystone then turns to look into my eyes. ‘When you feel fear, you’re afraid of everyone and everything. You’re stuck.’
Towards the end of our second day, Bun leads me into Ta Prohm. Deep inside the temple, we come across a queue of tourists standing beneath the midday sun, which beats down relentlessly upon their sweating backs.
‘What are they lining up for?’ I ask.
‘This is the Tomb Raider temple,’ he replies. ‘They want to take a picture in the spot from the movie.’
I fix my gaze on the long line of tourists, each one patiently waiting to strike the same pose, replicating a popular scene from the film.
We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one.
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A plastic surgeon appears on the left side of a split screen across from a recent photograph of Donatella Versace.
‘You can see her looking up, so the jawline’s going to appear tighter. It’s so smooth and glistening. The total cost of these potential plastic surgery procedures is $190,000.’
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On the twenty-third anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, eyewitness footage is posted, along with audio from the studios that broke the news. Confronting images bombard the screen.
‘We understand that there’s been a plane crash on the southern tip of Manhattan. As you can see, there’s smoke coming out of at least two sides of the building.’
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In an advertisement from 1985 for Andy Warhol’s television show, Jerry Hall, Debbie Harry, Sally Kirkland and countless other personalities flash across the screen.
‘In the future, everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.’
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At twenty, I started to starve myself.
Almost overnight, my personality changed. I invented excuses to miss meals and started exercising excessively. Anything I did consume was monitored to the very last calorie. I lied to my family and friends. I withdrew from the world. My evenings were spent poring over a carefully curated Instagram feed full of photographs of the people I followed: ballet dancers, fitness experts, celebrities, international male models – young, talented, beautiful people. As my body began to consume itself, as my shape began to shrink, I felt powerful. After all, I was choosing this, wasn’t I?
Perhaps I had internalised the prejudice around me, invoked the kind of reckoning that, as a young gay man, I felt that I deserved. Perhaps I believed that my fragile spirit required an equally fragile vessel. Perhaps I was trying to make myself intelligible, if not to the rest of the world, then to myself. Every meal missed was an attempt to fashion myself into a narrative, a world, a home in which I wished to belong, a space inhabited and run by the young and the beautiful creatures who flashed across my phone screen every evening. I flaunted my skeletal frame in front of my camera for painful amounts of time, ensured the light was just right, that my figure cut the perfect silhouette, that I maintained the image, became a part of the aura.
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Christmas morning in our country town. A mess of wrapping paper adorns the living room floor. My nephew, barely eighteen months old, crawls towards me, his flash of fine hair as white as his cheeky, toothy grin. He shuffles past his gifts to an old mobile phone on the floor before picking it up and swiping his finger across the dead screen. He continues this way for a while, swiping and swiping before lifting the screen to his ear and grunting salutations. There is an eeriness to his proficiency with the device. He shuffles off, phone in hand, leaving me to wonder what will become of his generation.
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After six months of backpacking through Asia, I decide to pause in Hanoi, where I secure a job as an ESL teacher in a language centre. In the weeks leading up to my commencement date, I search for social groups in the hopes of meeting fellow expats.
Everyone I speak to about this search says the same thing. ‘You should join Facebook,’ they proclaim. ‘That’s where all the best social groups are.’ I reluctantly create yet another social media profile – entirely private and devoid of information, pictures or friends – before joining some digital noticeboards. Three days later, I receive an alarming email.
From: Facebook
To: Darby Jones
Hi Darby,
Your Facebook account has been suspended. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Standards on account integrity and authentic identity.
If you think we’ve suspended your account by mistake, you’ll have 180 days to appeal our decision. If you miss this deadline, your account will be permanently disabled.
I decide to appeal the decision. As part of my appeal to keep my account, I am required to defend the authenticity of my identity. To do this, I must film my face, documenting it from every angle. I follow the instructions, send the footage into the ether and await a verdict.
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Joined by Michelle Visage and Carson Kressley, RuPaul sits regally behind the judges table for RuPaul’s Drag Race. She stares intently upon the bottom two Queens of the week, who are about to compete to stay in the competition.
‘Two Queens stand before me. This is your last chance to impress me and to save yourself from elimination. The time has come for you to lip-sync for your life.’
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A fragment from an ABC News report regarding the Truth-Telling and Healing Inquiry:
‘The LNP is using the first official sitting day of parliament to rush through law changes to axe Queensland’s Truth-Telling Inquiry.’
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On the set of The Graham Norton Show, Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal discuss the fact that Andew recently taught Paul how to pose on red carpets.
‘You walk up to the mark, you walk past the mark, you rock back onto your left foot and you kind of just lean back.’
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One week out from my commencement date at the language centre, I can no longer delay the inevitable. It is finally time to purchase work clothes. Dressed in a worn-in pair of hiking boots, tattered cargo pants and a faded, plain black T-shirt, I begrudgingly peruse pristine shelves lined with overpriced clothing. Immaculately dressed retail assistants hover nervously, monitoring me in their peripheral vision. I grow more and more frustrated when I realise that, due to the way I am dressed, I am perceived as an outsider, someone who does not belong, someone who may be capable of stealing these overpriced garments. In this glossy and sterile environment, where what I wear is inherently linked to who I am, I am perceived as a threat. As several sets of eyes survey my every move, I wonder: if I had entered this store in a suit and tie, would I have been received differently? I leave the store empty-handed, marvelling at the fact that what people perceive on the outside is deemed an acceptable indication of what an individual is capable of, of who they inherently are – that the work clothes I will inevitably purchase and wear will render me a more acceptable teacher, a more intelligible human being.
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My doctor warned me of possible side effects: lethargy, nausea, diarrhoea, insomnia, headaches, weight gain, dry mouth, dizziness. What I did not expect were the dreams. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors suppress the REM stage of sleep, often resulting in ‘REM rebound’, a period of time in which the intensity and frequency of REM sleep drastically increases, thus too increasing the likelihood of vivid, disturbing dreams.
In one recurring dream, I wander through an empty graveyard in the dead of night. The soil feels unstable beneath my feet – I have the sense that every step is precarious. Above me, technicolour stars twinkle and blink, cutting through the dark like jagged shards of glass. The sound of a stream, running water somewhere out of sight, penetrates the silence. Silver light gleams off the face of each tombstone. I notice that, rather than etched stone, the tombstones are mirrors, each one reflecting a former version of myself: the baby boy in the satin nightdress, the ‘at-risk’ teen in the therapist’s office, the anorexic twenty-something small-town boy wreaking havoc in the city, the health-conscious yogi, the valedictorian, the traveller, the mangled husk of a man on the brink of a breakdown. Eventually, the rows of tombstones open into a clearing, where a shadowy figure stands stoically. The figure tilts his head, offering a devilish grin that implies he has been waiting for me. As I cautiously approach, I realise I am staring at a polished, perfect version of myself. We come face to face in the flickering, technicolour hellscape. Maintaining my gaze, he puts his fingers in my mouth, one by one, until all ten fingers are gripping my teeth, tearing my jaw wide open. I try to scream but I am incapable of making sound. The sound of the stream fills my ears as, inch by inch, he shrinks and shifts his shape and crawls inside my oesophagus. As I take my final breaths, it occurs to me: it is not the sound of a stream I can hear. It is the sound of static. The irregular hissing and crackling of white noise drowns out my muffled gargles.
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From: Facebook
To: Darby Jones
Hi Darby,
We’ve disabled your account.
We’ve reviewed your account and found that it still doesn’t follow our Community Standards on account integrity and authentic identity.
You cannot request another review of this decision.
To learn more about the reasons why we disable accounts, visit the Community Standards.
The irony in this response was not lost on me. In as little as forty-eight words, the power of cultural codes, signs and symbols was affirmed. It was now abundantly clear that without them – the photographs, the ‘friends’, the profile discoverable by the general public – I am unintelligible, devoid of integrity, I am inauthentic. I am a problem to be dealt with.
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Late that night, a storm ravages Hanoi. In the morning, I wander leaf-littered streets as the sun rises on a new day. I weave around debris beneath trees with their branches stripped bare. When I encounter a fallen powerline, coiled across the street, I decide to turn around. I get back to my blue and grey flat; I realise that, like the trees in the streets, the past six months have stripped me of everything but my most fundamental parts. I am an ocean away from everyone and everything I know, the people and places that affirmed who I always thought I was, the cultural codes, signs and symbols I wielded to make it through the day. Who am I without them? In their absence, do I cease to exist?
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A now infamous mother cajoles her crying child to hold still so she can capture a clear thumbnail for her video.
‘Come here, come closer for the video. Come CLOSER. Put your head right here. Act like you’re crying, really quick.’
‘Mum, I’m seriously crying.’
‘No, I know, but go like this for the video.’
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Sweeping aerial images of cars being washed away by floodwater flit across the screen, an erratic sequence of carnage ensues: gnarled metal wrapped around trees, cyclonic winds, a woman crying, clutching her baby.
‘Torrential and persistent rain has caused havoc across the south-east, putting us on track for the wettest December since 2010. Roads have been cut and cars swept up in rising floodwaters.’
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Sitting before a bright white background in an equally bright white long-sleeved T-shirt, an impossibly fresh-faced Gwenyth Paltrow smiles into the lens of the camera.
‘I’m Gwyneth Paltrow, and this is everything I eat in a day.’
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Our mini-van winds its way through the narrow streets of Da Lat – Vietnam’s ‘City of Eternal Spring’ – in the early hours of the morning. My guide and I sit in silence, sipping our coffee and watching the world come to life. We are on our way to climb a mountain. As we approach our destination, we begin to speak. I ask him how he became a hiking guide.
‘I worked as an engineer in Ho Chi Minh City,’ he explained, ‘but I left it all behind to move back here, to my home town. I wanted to spend more time in nature.’
The mountain is cold and quiet. With every step I take, brittle pine needles crunch beneath my feet. The ascent is one of the steepest I have ever attempted, and I am impressed with the level of ease with which my guide handles the climb.
‘See this path,’ he calls back to me, breaking the silence. ‘I made it. I’ve been walking this path for eight years now.’ When we reach the peak, everything changes. The fog begins to twist and dance, swirling upwards towards the rising sun. My guide serves tea made from the sweet roots of artichokes. I sip the warm, syrupy brew slowly, savouring it as the sun cuts through the fog and the verdant peaks and valleys below begin to reveal themselves.
It is not until later that day that I will learn this mountain’s name: Hòn Bồ (Lonely Mountain).
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‘Darby Jones’ is nothing but bricolage; a queer amalgamation of the cultural codes, signs and symbols he consumes and replicates. They shape the decisions he makes, the stray thoughts that derail him in the middle of the night. Like the place he was born and raised, his chosen amalgam of codes, signs and symbols has determined where he is in the present. He wonders: must he make peace with the way that he has fashioned himself, maintain the image, fuel and embody the aura? From what I know of Darby Jones, I know that he needs more – a place to lay in the dew-drenched grass, to feel the sun on his body stripped bare, to eschew the meaning mapped upon his soft, slouching figure, to return to a freer state of being.