Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column Objects of Despair examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them. This is her final dispatch. 

Somewhere in the desert of western Texas, in an underground chamber beneath a remote mountain range, a clock is being built that will last for ten thousand years. The clock is five hundred feet tall, and its pendulum is as large as a man. Its Geneva gears sprawl eight feet in diameter. The clock will be functional, perhaps more functional than any clock ever made, but it will not measure minutes or hours. Where the second hand should be, there will be a marker that advances once every century. The cuckoo will emerge at the dawn of each millennium. Each time the clock is wound, its bells will ring out in a different permutation of its algorithmically programmed sequences—no melody will be played twice. Reaching the clock will require something of a pilgrimage. The nearest airport is several hours by car, and to find the clock, visitors must travel through the desert, hike a rugged trail that rises up the mountain, then descend a spiral staircase that tunnels down into the earth.

The 10,000-year clock, or the Clock of the Long Now, sprang from the imagination of Danny Hillis, a supercomputer designer who proposed its creation in a 1995 article for Wired magazine. It was a response to a problem that Hillis called “the shrinking future,” or the inability to think beyond one’s own lifetime. The most ambitious and enduring projects of former civilizations, he argued—the Egyptian pyramids, the medieval cathedrals—were constructed across several generations and required a kind of long-term thinking that had become lost to us. “I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me,” he wrote. The problem was that he couldn’t visualize this story. The clock was to become a symbol of this expansive outlook, one that would by its very nature encourage people to begin thinking again about the prospect of the distant future. Over the years, he built several prototypes. The clock garnered fans among a certain type of male celebrity who regards himself as forward-thinking—Brian Eno, Stewart Brand, Peter Gabriel—all of whom contributed funding and creative input. But for two decades, the clock was simply an idea in Hillis’s mind: a symbol without a referent.

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Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column Objects of Despair examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them.

A drone (Photo: Pexels)

There was a big magazine story several years ago—I don’t remember where—about drone pilots who worked at an air force base in Nevada’s desert. The pilots spent their days in a windowless control room at this complex, which was some distance outside of Las Vegas, operating drones in Iraq—or maybe it was Afghanistan. I can’t seem to remember any of the details precisely. At the time, drones were still novel, and the central thrust of the article seemed to be the ethically troublesome fact that a strike could be enacted from a distance of 7,500 miles. One detail I remember clearly was that the base was deliberately remote, so that the pilots, after their shifts were over, were forced to drive several hours back to civilization. Whoever was in charge decided that humans who had been at war should not be allowed to simply zip home and eat dinner with their families, or grab drinks with friends. They needed time alone in their cars to decompress and segue back into ordinary life, to transform from soldiers into civilians.

After reading this article, I tried to write a short story about a drone pilot who worked at this base. The story took place entirely during his drive home, and was largely interior, unfolding in the character’s mind. It was the kind of premise that interested me at the time. I envisioned a claustrophobic moral drama unfolding against the desert landscape as the car hummed across the interminable highway and the sun went down, turning the mountains the color of blood. But in the end, I couldn’t finish the piece. I could not imagine myself into the pilot’s head. Had he truly been at war? Or had he spent the afternoon in a Naugahyde recliner, pressing buttons?

This is the enduring question of foreign policy in the age of the drone: Are we at war? A strike kills six civilians in Yemen. The headline scrolls across the ticker on an airport flatscreen, appears on a news app amid the noonday quiet in a corporate office park. There is little or no context, little or no commentary. Outside, the sky is a clear and endless blue. The drone embodies the remoteness of modern warfare, but more than that, its thoughtlessness. It is the symbol of wars that are without leaders, of conflicts so diffuse and underreported they seem to have no face, no soul. Drone is a type of bee that is believed to be entirely mindless. It also describes the monotonous hum that machines make—or humans, when they are speaking like machines. Both meanings reflect our era of perpetual war, which is so unvaried and automatic that it can transition seamlessly from one presidential administration to the next, radically different one. (As the bumper sticker on my neighbor’s car puts it: AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY DRONES ON.) At the time, I thought my failure to write the story was due to an epistemological problem—that I, a civilian, could not understand the psychological demands of war. But the problem was actually ontological. I was looking for consciousness in the byways of bureaucracy, searching for thought and conviction where there was none. Read More

Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column Objects of Despair examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them.

Mars is an impossible planet: waterless, desolate, barren. Its atmosphere is drenched in UV radiation and contains only trace amounts of oxygen. Temperatures in the winter are comparable to Antarctica’s, and in the summer there are dust storms that stir up the toxic soil and blot out the sun for weeks at a time. Any reasonable person knows that humans will never consent to live there. This is why Mars is the ultimate utopia: a planet where no real future is imaginable is a planet where any future is imaginable. The writer Wladislaw Lach-Szyrma, who coined the noun Martian, wrote his utopian novel Aleriel (1883) to remind readers here on earth that “there may be brighter worlds than this, and a happier existence than we can have here.” Mars is red, the color of roses and revolution. The Bolsheviks imagined socialist uprisings succeeding there even as their own were being repressed. (The “red star” of communist iconography was inspired by a 1907 Russian science fiction novel of that title, set on Mars.) On earth, movements fail, rights are revoked and denied, injustices of all kinds prevail. But on Mars, it’s possible to envision—as two nineteenth-century Iowan feminists did—a world in which gender roles are reversed. In Unveiling a Parallel (1893), by Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant, female Martians vote, control the levers of power, and unabashedly solicit the company of male prostitutes, while males are relegated to the errands of the domestic sphere. In a world with forty percent gravity, a planet unburdened by the weight of history, such things can happen.

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 Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column, Objects of Despair, examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them.

Rolf Armstrong

“I was the guy who, with a viral Tumblr called Selfies at Funerals, made ‘funeral selfie’ one of the most noxious phrases of 2013.”

—Jason Feifer, The Guardian

No common object has inspired as much dread, confusion, and morbid anxiety as the mirror. Superstitions exist in practically every culture: sickroom mirrors are covered in many countries, lest they lure the soul from the ailing body, and are cloaked after a death in others to prevent the spirit from lingering. A Chinese myth once held that images in the mirror were actually demonic beings who were pretending to be our reflections, while silently plotting our deaths. When I was a child, the popular folklore held that if you stood before a darkened mirror and chanted “Bloody Mary” three times, it would conjure a witch who would, if you failed to pass her tests, murder you. I never took the dare, but the story spooked me enough that I spent years avoiding my image in darkened mirrors, afraid that merely thinking the incantation could invoke her. Narcissus was the first to die from looking at his reflection—though the gnostics perfected the myth by reattributing it to Adam, who lost his divine nature, they said, by gazing at himself in a pool of water. I have always preferred this version of the Fall. The mirror, after all, is an apt metaphor—far more so than the apple—for what the Genesis story is meant to dramatize: the moment when humans evolved to self-awareness and understood, for the first time, that they would die. This primal epiphany persists in the dual meanings of “vanity,” which lock self-love and futility in an etymological death-brace. (That hevel, the Hebrew word for vanity preferred by Solomon, can also be translated as “mere breath,” only underscores the morbid undertones.)

Anthropologists have long suspected that reflections inspired the first conception of the soul: early man saw his face in a pond and believed it was an alternate self who would persist after his death. But if having a double gave you immortality, it also presented a new anxiety: your likeness could detach itself and take on a life of its own, or fall into the hands of your enemy. Many primitive taboos about reflections, shadows, and effigies stem from the conviction that you could harm a person by damaging their likeness. Witchcraft and voodoo introduced into our collective memory a nagging fear that we might one day become the slave to our shadows. I think of the scene in the 1944 musical Cover Girl, where Gene Kelly’s reflection in a store window comes to life and entrances Kelly into aping his erratic dance, as if puppeteering his marionette. The same choreography can be found in the countless Romantic-era fables where the hero trades his image to the devil for the love of a woman or the promise of eternal youth. The bargain never ends well. The reflection, once brought to life, acts out all of the hero’s repressed desires—an id made flesh—and ruins his reputation, inevitably driving him to suicide. As the psychoanalyst Otto Rank pointed out in his study of doubles, all these stories contain a moral: no matter how miraculous a reflection may seem, it is always a harbinger of death.

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