the aesthetics of the End

the secret behind MythoAmerica

The final leaves have choked and died onto the fading earth below. Their remains are scarce, lying scattered like gravestones in memory of another autumn past. The most we seem to come upon cemeteries are when we drive by them on the road. Death is hardly on the mind alongside our journeys of many places to go and people to see— even less for what is dying. Yet, that is where we find ourselves, at the End of another Fall in what feels like a blink.

It’s on drives like these that we realize, only moments before we arrive, that we’ve been stumbling half awake on a road with only one true destination— a final winter some distance away. It is then that we gauge both the horror and revelation that it’s just around the corner.

At a similar pace do we find ourselves in the midst of holiday season, in what has taken no time at all. One moment we’re saying grace for a bountiful harvest and eating like its our last meal. The next we’re decorating the house and trees with lights that dazzle in anticipation of the darkest nights approaching with the solstice.

We rummage frantically through the mall, spending our remaining dollars on gifts in fevered hysteria. A countdown commences as checking accounts hit zero and credit cards max out. The year culminates in a climax.

We are so unaware of how steeped in religiosity these sacrifices are. Our American rituals. They demand total devotion to the present, at a material expense deemed completely worth its price. We reason that money and debt are things we won’t take with us anyway, and so we pretend whatever follows won’t come— whether that be in the coming year or the afterlife.

For who or what do we make these offerings at the altar of? The spirit of Christmas? Our families? One can hear the chides of know-it-alls unveiling a secret truth, that we’re just cogs in the consumerist scheme to buy, buy, buy as capitalists get richer and we get poorer. They say the mass produced toys are hollow in both weight and value. If only we’d “wake up” and see the true overlords inheriting our collective oblation. Then we’d be somehow better off.

Still, those disenchanting voices never register. We prove that we cannot be steered from the blind force animating us in these crucial moments. Through toil and ever-so-careful precision, our grand performance continues.

Parents in-the-know conspire with hushed voices to relive the old myth, of the awaited arrival of Santa Clause down the chimney and reindeer prancing through the snow. Wrapped gifts are hidden for weeks from unknowing children, only to appear like magic under the sparkling evergreen in the quiet of night. Until dawn breaks and these miraculous sights ignite their faces to glow brighter than any ornament. Milk, cookies, and carrots are left mysteriously half-consumed, showing the mythic figure was once here and will return.

All rejoice in worship. All await the arrival of the unseen.

And when the day does emerge, and we hear that the spirit blessed us again in our sleep, the clock restarts. We revert back, hand-in-hand, in prayer, preparing to devote ourselves once more to the return of something which may or may not ever appear.

And when it does, it will feel like we never saw it coming at all.

When I started MythoAmerica on a fateful December night three years ago, I wanted to express something that I could not through words. It lurked within our homes and the places we dined. It was out in the woods, along the highway, and even in our schools. I could not tell you at the time what phantom it was that haunted and enticed me everywhere I looked. But this Twitter page was my attempt to find it.

Of course, several hypotheses arose from an audience that grew larger than I could have expected. Through the myriad of mysterious and caption-less posts, the consensus seemed to be that MythoAmerica is a nostalgia account, though that never felt right to me. Sure, many of the images I share are sweet memories from a recent past, but many aren’t so wistful. At times you’ll see scenes explicitly in the current day, and others that are not warm, but nightmarish.

Because of the latter, you’ll hear another label get thrown around: “liminal.” However, I feel the things I share are much too human for that to be even close to an accurate description. Even the most vacant homes and rooms look lived-in— every forgotten object once held and cared for. There is nothing middling or transitional about Mytho’s content. Every inch of American life is presented as both sacred and profane, and not some vacuum in between.

So, then what is it— what is the secret behind MythoAmerica?

The answer came to me in what can only be described as a Revelation.

Countless hours were spent scavenging the web for photos that carried the particular spirit I had become enraptured by. In every post, I was attempting to invoke it, until soon an entire page with thousands of carefully curated photographs became a shrine to this unseen entity. It was the wear in the siding of our homes, the plastic bottles that litter our dwellings, the musty carpet with the accumulated remains of decades of life. Everywhere was the trail of some ghost that drifted through every place we’ve ever been. For so long, I was unaware of what MythoAmerica was until I was finally able to “wake up.”

Just as we stumble blindly through another autumn and Christmas at the final days of the year, we also do so throughout the course of our lives, failing to ever contemplate the reality that everything eventually meets its End. Even as the trees decay around us and the casualties amass by the pile on our lawns, our focus immediately shifts toward the obligatory demands of the holiday season.

These feel like distractions that, with any thought, become imbued with contradictions. What compels us to commit so sacrificially to festivities whose origins are dubious at best? Why do we give so readily to unclear idols, and during the most morbid time? How is it that we will spend a lifetime looking forward to tomorrow, just to mortgage the future for these annuities as death looms nearer with each new year?

But above all, why are these the happiest moments of our lives?

I’m going to let you in on the secret— the End is near.

Deep down you can feel it, just as I did in my investigations with MythoAmerica. The country we’ve known and loved is dying and the evidence is all around us.

The clues are in our towns, our families, our food, our institutions. Some gothic apparition has marked every place and object that we’ve held close to us, cursing them to wither and cheapen in what feels like a spell. They constitute a superstition that is easily dismissed, but experientially undeniable to Americans with the memory to recognize it. And it’s the truth one realizes after a scroll through Mytho’s feed. More effective than any statistic or study, the way we respond towards these images reveals our Fallen state.

America has not felt as demonstrable a decline in a lifetime. Everyone from the populace to our leadership have sleepwalked into disaster, completely unaware of the decisions and symptoms that have made its illness terminal. It’s as if we were divinely compelled to bring about this End by an invisible spirit that possessed us against our will. But now we find ourselves in dire straights, in neighborhoods we no longer recognize, with pastimes that have passed us by and second glances that remind us we can no longer catch up.

Of course, we delude ourselves by never consciously addressing this truth. The economy is always expected to grow. Technological progress was said to be a continued inevitability. Even when our bibles tell us the Rapture is coming, we focus on the promise is of a Heavenly future, while glancing over the decay required to get there. And so we rest assured that things will work out, as the horror looms in the back of our minds that they likely will not.

It’s clear in hindsight that MythoAmerica was a product of these decadent times, and that its purpose was to “wake up” viewers to the reality that it will all be over soon— a Revelation in its fullest religious sense.

From photos of forgone memories we can never relive, to evidence of our civilizational rot, from all the dilapidated houses, poisonous fast foods, and empty shops, many feel a distinct sense of loss emanating from Mytho’s posts. They grieve as if they’ve just attended the funeral or wake for a magic that no longer exists. Perhaps this is why they call it nostalgic, though it was always much darker than that— a recognition of the last breaths of a fading dream, one that lives on only in glimpses. And I mean that literally.

All along, the secret behind MythoAmerica is that it is a simulation of the images that are said to flash before our eyes moments before we die. It’s everything that brought us to our fateful End— from the memories we held dearest to those we have completely overlooked. On a personal and national scale, Mytho’s timeline is a sequence of all that we get a second chance to account for, and ultimately bid farewell to, one last time.

It is the bittersweet fantasy that when we one day meet the end of the road, wondering how we got to this final point, we will see that the answers have been there from the start. From here, the best, worst, and most insignificant moments will suddenly take on equal weight, as each were consequential for bringing us to where we were always going to end up.

With this secret now known, one might ask why I kept it hidden for so long. Why not tell people so that they can fully appreciate the purpose of the account?

It is here that we arrive at the most crucial aspect, and where we can revisit the significance of the holidays by which we find ourselves transfixed. The answer lies not in the Revelation that everything we have will soon slip through our fingers. It is precisely in our unknowing that we could have the Revelation at all.

Our blind devotion to Christmas, the ceremonial feasts we cook for Thanksgiving— the magic is that we miraculously bring about the moments we will one day cherish, which at the same time leads us to our demise. We add to our debts. We load up on sugars and oils that make us swell and perish. We laugh, smile, and reconcile differences with family, even for just a day. All of it is done in an unconscious, religious intoxication in service of the ultimate truth that things have to End for the little time we have to have any meaning at all.

And so as the autumn falls into winter, we preoccupy ourselves with our offerings. We commit to leaving certain things unsaid. The true workings of the holidays must never be uttered. In some Christian sense, we engage with each other as God’s children, with grace and the preservation of an ignorance that suspends any disbelief that could impede the magic of the times. In this season, we are like kids playing in empty husks of browned and bloodied leaves, rejoicing that everything around us is dying. All the way through until Christmas passes, and we have one last week to finally account for all the things we couldn’t in the haze of living as blindly as we should.

And so why do I share this secret with you now? Because I can’t shake the feeling that we are living in those final moments. I’ve felt it from the beginning and only become more sure of it now, even in the face of ever-growing hope to the contrary. Whatever our Fate holds, we will one day recognize the stakes of the situation we find ourselves in— the reality that our inevitable deaths are what give birth to all meaning, the entirety of our national consciousness, and every sentiment behind the banalities that make up our lives. So, too, do they combine, in some unseen way, to build the vehicle that delivers us to the End of it.

Myth only becomes myth once the civilization that produced it collapses, and all we are left with are the artifacts and ruins of great people and the grand dramas of their lives. MythoAmerica is the recognition that the same will occur for us and our country. The Revelation is that we can know this while we witness the Fall.

In memory, or in hand, grab it before it’s gone.