The Apotheosis of Claire Elise Boucher
Encountering Divinity
There was a time when I barely knew anything about Claire Elise Boucher. I had heard “Oblivion” and “Genesis,” two standout tracks from her 2012 album Visions, but otherwise I didn’t know anything about her. Then came the incident where she dressed up and read The Communist Manifesto while leaning on a road sign. I still didn’t pay much attention, and I think I even had a negative association with her. Why wasn’t she reading Society of the Spectacle, or, even better, The Comments on Society of the Spectacle1?
All that changed in an AirBnb I rented off-season at a ski resort on a mountain in Colorado in September 2022. I had just had a frustrating interaction with a woman I had met by searching for “Baudrillard” on OnlyFans on November 10, 2021. Was I just a client to her, or were we friends, or some kind of lovers that don’t even have to meet in order to fuck the new way, the “real way”2? It didn’t matter. I had been running roughshod over her boundaries and she was setting more. I didn’t like it. I said “no.”
So there I was, angry at everything, having found someone I wanted to connect to and having fucked it up. There was no one left. Misanthropy was setting in. I started reflecting on how I’d already theorized the connection between messianism and misanthropy (another of my pearls I had thrown before all you swine345). Both of these tendencies start from a place of being cut off from everyone else. The only difference is whether one was driven to an impulse of wanting to educate, punish, or withdraw.
Misanthropy came once again to mind, and I remembered that Schopenhauer was a philosopher associated with misanthropy6. Somewhere in these ruminations and reading about Shopenhauer, the will, and Hindusim on Wikipedia, I thought of the portmaneau: “Misanthropocene.” What a wonderful concept! It’s not merely that I am feeling misanthropic, but that misanthropy oozes through the pores of our time. “It’s written in the wind; it’s everywhere I go.”2
I was very pleased with myself for this clever wordplay, but a few moments later I knew I couldn’t be the first person to think of it. The “anthropocene” had been an established concept for decades, and that this was a time of misanthropy was a notion that clearly didn’t escape many.
So, just as I had typed “Baudrillard” into the search bar on OnlyFans.com, I typed “Misanthropocene” into the search bar on Google.com. What happened next changed my life forever.
Up comes “Miss Anthropocene,” album by Grimes, 2020. Any prior context I had for thinking about Grimes, whose legal given name I didn’t even know at that point, went out the window. We were connected. We were connected by wordplay. Miss Boucher had gone even further than my own blending of the concepts of misanthropy and anthropocene: she had made this portmaneau into a title, not just of a period of time but of an album, a character, and maybe herself. I had the intuition instantly that this was an album for me.3
This Music Makes Me Cry
I instantly listened to the album. I don’t remember any specifics of that first listen, other than knowing that this album was instantly part of a dyad, forming a companion piece in my mind with the 2019 album Titanic Rising by Natalie Mering AKA Weyes Blood. I had discovered that album late as well, in 2020 when I was staying with my parents in their small condominium in midtown Atlanta during the COVID-19 pandemic. Like Miss Anthropocene, I discovered that album conceptually, too, because like so many others I had become captivated with the Titanic disaster.4 Having read academic articles about the disaster and art associated with it, having watched the 2 hour, 40 minutes videos on YouTube simulating the sinking, having learned about Titan: Or the Wreck of Futility, I came cross a recent album featuring Titanic by Weyes Blood. Like Miss Anthropocene, it is a concept album.
The opening seconds of Miss Anthropocene called to mind Titanic. The deep grating noises sound like the horrible sound of straining, twisting, and ripping metal beneath the ice-cold North Atlantic ocean. These noises call to mind the ominous portents we can hear, if we have ears5, of something happening beneath the surface of what we call “society” (unless we have read Jean Baudrillard).
It is immediately clear that Miss Anthropocene is a different kind of album than Titanic Rising. Is it a “better” album? This theme is on my mind as I finally write this long-promised essay. I want to write that Miss Anthropocene is the greatest album ever recorded, that it is the reason why the album form was ever conceived. It is the hard rain that Bob Dylan, AKA Robert Allan Zimmerman, had prophecized would fall on the longest song on his album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan which had enacted such frame expansion on what an album could be that it inspired the Beatles.
What does it matter, though? If I want to say all these things, it is only because I want to express the depth and heights of my appreciation of Miss Anthropocene. Similarly, I have always known that this essay would be called “The Apotheosis of Grimes.” I changed it to Claire Elise Boucher as a gesture toward the fact that Grimes is a character. What’s in a name? Is she really “Claire Elise Boucher,” name she is reputed to hate? Am I really “Adam Stephen Wadley”? To the point, though, “The Apotheosis of…”, whoever it is we are talking about, refers to the process of becoming a god, like Glaucus.6 If Grimes, or Claire Elise Boucher, or whatever the fuck her name is,7 has become a god, does that mean Natalie Mering isn’t a god? What’s so great about being a god anyway?
These ruminations on divinity tie in directly with the sixth song on Miss Anthropocene, “New Gods.” Miss Boucher sings, “hand reaching out for new gods […] only brand new gods can save me.” These lines tie in to a challenge levied by Natalie Mering on Titanic Rising’s track “Andromeda,” where she sings “if you think you can save me, I dare you to try.” I thought that another line, from “IDORU,” connected with this theme, but I misheard it. I thought the line “you can abuse it” said “you cannot be saved.” Still, I am learning new things about this album, which means more to me (whatever that means) than any other.
The idea of being “saved”8 connects directly with the theme of Christianity. “Jesus saves”9. But “New Gods” stakes the claim that only “brand new gods” can save Grimes/Miss Anthropocene/Claire Elise Boucher. This points to the idea that the religions, creeds, and idols that we have inherited and created up until this point will not take us where we need to go now. Another connection between divinity and saving is suggested in the lyrics of “IDORU,” with the notion of “reassembling.” This calls to mind the piecing together of Osiris by the goddess Isis. The theme of Isis then flows immediately into the song “Isis” by Robert Allan Zimmerman as well as the Islamic group ISIS which exacts its own terroristic soteriology through lesser jihad in the name of that old god Allah (who at one time was a “brand new” iteration on Jehova and “God/Jesus/Holy Spirit”). Signs of the times.
That Zimmerman cannard “Isis” is another meditation on the theme of the connection between the beloved and the divine. In that song, Zimmerman’s character “could not hold on to her very long,” that “mystical child,” perhaps the same figure referred to as a “mystical wife” on the song “Sara” later on the same album (Sara Dylan AKA Sara Lownds AKA Shirley Martin Noznisky), Desire.
Claire Elise Boucher has of course been associated with that titan of industry and public relations Elon Musk. Their relationship was inspirational for the album Miss Anthropocene, and again gestures to the fact that for Miss Boucher, art is not confined to “the artwork.” Grappling with themes of technology, changing times, love, and war are not merely things she uses to make music. The music she makes, rather, is part of her life’s work. She is a lebenskuenstler, a “poet-warrior in the classic sense,” dedicated not to making music but to “The Mission.”
Java Lords
I left the place where I started this essay, outside the QuikTrip on Briarcliff road by Johnson, and drove south to Java Lords in Little Five Points because it is open late and has the wifi I need to post this. Its closing hour is also convenient, meaning that I will have to post something of this essay by midnight, while it is still Miss Boucher’s birthday. This is also the birthday of my oldest cousin, and it’s also, of course, St. Patrick’s Day.
I have to interrupt this essay to say that they are playing Joy Division here. A band named after wartime prostitution. “Deal Souls” is playing right now. The woman I met by searching for “Baudrillard” on OnlyFans listed Joy Division’s “Closer” as one of her favorite albums when we shared lists of our ten favorites. She called it “Atrocity Exhibition” by mistake, after its first song, named after the book by J.G. Ballard. In the early part of our correspondence, we had read the book Crash together, along with Eroticism by George Bataille. “Imperialistic House of prayer, conquistadors they took their share.” And what has Elon Reeve Musk taken from Claire Elise Boucher? Other than X Æ A-12 Musk, of course.
New Gods, Java Lords. Java, a name for coffee (do you take it black? or “sweeter than a sugarcane”?7), taken from the name of an island. It’s also used for a programming language. Imperialism, stimulants, computers. And where did the island Java get its name? According to Wikipedia8, it’s not clear. Maybe the jawa-wut plant (remember the Jawa from Star Wars?), maybe the word jau meaning distant or beyond (das jenseits, jenseits von gut und boese). Or yava, meaning Barley, for which the island was famous enough to be mentioned in the Indian epic Ramayana, and we have arrived at Hinduism.
The people in Java Lords are talking about changing names, Tarantino movies, and whether Fargo was based on a true story.
We Could Play A Beautiful Game
This is a recurring line in “IDORU.” For me this line is associated with the line from Knives Out about how Ana de Armas’ character wins at Go because she isn’t trying to defeat her opponent, but rather because she is simply trying to make beautiful patterns. I wrote to the philosopher of OnlyFans once that I wanted it to be that what is useful is also beautiful. Useful for what?
Back to Hinduism: the “beautiful game” (I’m just remembering that soccer/futbol is sometimes called “the beautiful game) is also associated for me with the concept of Lila in Hinduism, which I referenced as part of “the way down” in my previous post “I just lost the game…” I also more recently learned of a Western corollary (to please the Western obsessed Miss Boucher?) of Ludus Amoris, the “game of love.” This all runs together for me with more romances from my past, Lila being associated with my most recent partner (that I actually ever met, or talked to more than three times, at least) for reasons I can’t explain without giving away some identifying information. This relationship was abusive and I was very horrible to her, especially one night. And she hurt me as well, but as time has passed it’s been my own sins that “keep calling me.”
And another romance, at Oberlin college, with someone who introduced me to Hinduism by taking me to the campus Kirtan. She also introduced me to Meister Eckhart. At these Kirtan sessions I learned about “maya,” which is a word meaning both reality and illusion. Because, from the perspective of Hinduism, everything is Brahman, everything is the Absolute. Experience, “the world of form” (a phrase from a book called Sacred Geometry by Robert Lawlor that my mother had that inspired my first tattoo), is a form of delusion by Brahman. Is there something wrong with it, then? What is the aim of Hinduism? Moksha? Meaning what, release from the cycle of incarnation? Why should we want to get out of it?
I inherited a few hundred thousand dollars from my great aunt, Ellen Wadley Roper (her husband James broke the story that Mussolini had been killed), who had been president of the women’s National Press club and the first major female TV executive in nightly news (the movie Network comes to mind). I lived off this money for ten years or so, asking the representatives at Chevy Chase for a bit at a time, and then I got the rest (250,000 dollars) released to me when I turned 30. It was all gone from my possession 16 months later. I had given 56 thousand dollars to the OnlyFans philosopher (she counted and told me), including a final lump sum of 35 thousand dollars delivered to her on November 25, 2022 (the day after Thanksgiving, a time of year forever associated with my elder cousin who died at 24 in 2012, who was born on the anniversary of the JFK assassination, and whose death meant that the rest of us cousins all inherited a little more money…).
All that is left of that money that I possess is some clothes, kitch, art, household objects, and a 2019 Ford Fusion. [Amazingly, the people at Java Lords are talking about getting rid of Karma] I have never held a steady job, and schedules don’t agree with me. So now I drive Uber.
A few weeks ago, I drove someone around whose name was Maya. I asked her if she was aware of the concept in Hinduism, and she was, but she asked me to explain it to her. I said that Maya was reality and illusion, but in my opinion it’s not about some idea that there is something wrong with the world (“is that what you’re asking me? Is there something wrong with anything?” / “the world is the way it should be”), but rather that Lila means that the Absolute incarnates and experiences “the world of form,” delimited being, in order to further its bliss by experiencing the bliss of relation. The illusion of relation. All this is like an un-knot, which seems to be tangled but in reality there is no knot at all.
Similarly, what are we supposed to be getting out of all this? What is the point of Moksha? Why would it be better not to be incarnated? What do we hope to win?
I started all this because of Miss Boucher’s line in “IDORU” to the effect that we can play a beautiful game, and we are going to lose. We are going to lose the game. I just lost the game, and so did all of you. The mental game of “the game” is related here, in that as long as you can forget that we are all Brahman, and there is nothing to gain and nothing to lose (see Romona by Bob Dylan), then you can pursue purpose, you can think there is a point to doing things. And there is some charm in that. As I’ve heard in temples of Sri Ramakrishna, aspiration is sweeter than attainment. “You find out when you reach the top: you’re on the bottom.” Compare: “the first one now will later be last.”
Later on, I got more into Miss Boucher’s album Art Angels. I’m thinking now of the line “I’m not ready to win, because I don’t want to know.” The theme here is about a kind of metaphysical edging, the forestalling of the relevation that incarnation is illusory. You want it to last as long as possible. And yet this is absurd from the standpoint of a divinity or absolute which is metaphysically antecedent to “time.”
This ties into a theme from Bataille’s Eroticism wherein Bataille claims that he wants the maximum of continuity in a world founded on discontinuity. It’s really quite the opposite, we want the maximum of discontinuity in a “world” based on continuity. Absolute continuity is Brahman, “the world of form” (I’m in tension in my mind remembering Afropessimism) is Maya, and the idea of us as discrete beings is disconintuity. We want to think we are separate people, whether we are despairing or jubilant. Touch your body to remind yourself you are in it, remember that you are you and not anyone else. Remember there are other people. Sure there are.
Lately All Their Ghosts Turn Into Demons
“Delete Forever” for me ties into “the Untouchables,” not gangsters but the Dalit. Dalit Forever. The Dalit symbolize and embody the cost of spiritual grandiosity. For someone to act out some fantasy of being chosen, of being the embodiment of the divine, someone else has to be pulverized into the ground. The Palestinians. Black people. Women. You can even turn it around, and now Men and White People are in the crosshairs of those who would prove to themselves that they “exist” by showing how their existence is conditioned by the evils of European Colonialism (remember, you’re here in Java Lords, the Jenseits, forever). I am wearing the grey and black sweater jacket of my grandmother, who grew up in Nazi Germany and entertained the troops (certainly not as some part of Joy Division, right…?). He mother and two younger brothers were killed in the Allied bombing of Pirmasens (named after St. Pirminius, who delivers us the oldest extant version of the Apostle’s Creed), when she happened to be out of town visiting a friend. And the bomber was headed for Stuttgart, but the weather was bad. I learned from my Aunt just today that my great-grandmother wasn’t blown up, she was cut badly and bled to death. My great uncle came out of the bunker and couldn’t find his way home, and by the time he got there she had bled out.
“Lost so many men.” Napoleon could lose 30,000 men a month. Miss Boucher doesn’t have to lose 30,000 men a month to win wars. The discussion of filling one’s time with “permanent blue.” Lines on a mirror compared to a sonnet. Drugs, poetry. How it started: “I don’t need no medicine.” How it’s going: “I can’t sleep anymore; that’s what the drugs are for.”
Art Emergency
I’m reflecting on the fact that this essay is not going to do Miss Anthropocene justice (Da’at?), or Claire Elise Boucher. So what? What am I trying to do? Associate myself with the greatness of an artist whose own fans increasingly are convinced she is a white supremacist aiming to found an intergalactic empire on the graves of the poors and the “Gauls”? Then again, who would I be to judge? Just ask my last ex, or ask the OnlyFans philosopher about the slurs I used in the 50-page document I wrote for her inspired by I Love Dick. Why did I do that? Why did I blow through all my money? Why did I shoot someone from my Oberlin college window with a bb gun? Why do I like Miss Anthropocene?
I’m reflecting on the sound collage I made yesterday for the protest, I just posted it to SoundCloud. I don’t know if it will be taken down due to “rights violations,” but I’ll keep it on Google Drive. It is what it is because I ran out of time. I was going to be late to the protest, so some parts have detail to them and then I was just cutting Revolution 9 into pieces, splicing in Miss Boucher’s “We Appreciate Power” (which, for the record, is not properly speaking part of Miss Anthropocene in my opinion, and also has some questionable lyrics, unlike all the songs on MA). When I ran out of the Beatles I faded in “California” and “Violence” and “Monk Time” with Tanya Tagaq’s “Caribou.” It’s flawed, but it is what it is. That is a definitive version because I made it then and played it at Lockheed and several times since.
Similarly, this essay will be what it will be when I turn it in at midnight. I might add in more footnotes later, or expand on it, but it will be what it will be. It’s not about Miss Anthropocene, it’s about the interplay between the record and my life. The themes of unrequited love, spirituality, trauma, and Weltschmerz, and how they are powerful to me personally. Of course I project my own loves, my own memories, my own preoccupation with the planetary catastrophe, onto the album. “That’s what’s so fucking cool about it.”
“The world burns,” and in Mering, it is the door that is burning. The world as door. To what? You can only figure that out once you destroy the world, qua Afropessimism. But to be past the world is to be past black and white, is to be past so many of the terms in which Afropessimism is couched. What is there to see? “I see everything,” and “you can’t see what I see.” So, you see nothing.
Total Gallic Death
The Gauls are something like the French. Boucher is a French name. I have Bouche’s in my family as well. My grandmother’s maiden name was Zoller. [The people in Java Lords are talking about how jokes are being told in Gaza right now, were told in Auschwitz]. But the generation before there was a Bouche. Somewhere, Miss Boucher and I share an ancestor. But then, so do we all. Shall she be a god? Shall I? And you? What does it mean to be a god if everyone is one? “If everyone’s special, no one is.” Maybe, but we should go further. Not that no one is [special, but that no one *is,* has being.
My birthday, August 22 1991, is the 200th anniversary of the Haitian slave revolt and the 160th anniversary of Nat Turner’s revolt. It’s also Leni Riefenstahl’s birthday. Did I mention that my German grandfather was a child soldier in the Waffen-SS, and I don’t know what he did in Hungary in 1944-45? August 22, 1914 was also the deadlist single day for France in World War 1, 77 years before I was born.
Miss Boucher has come under fire for “liking” a post on X (posted on her son? wait, I thought they were going to wait and let the child choose its own gender? Oh wait, Elon is super anal (“the real way”) about that kind of shit now. By the way, is X circumcized?) about “total Gallic death,” which was based on a previous post which referred to “total n***** death.” This theme that for the world to be better, some group of people should die. Kill all normies. Cut up men. “N***** have got to go.”
I myself rankle at much of what Miss Boucher writes on the internet. I am consistently put off by her invocation of “humanity.” What the heck is that? (Look at this car). See also, again, Afropessimism. I am a bit disturbed by Miss Boucher’s obsession with the Roman empire and warfare, although my own creations are also meditations on violence, on the Nazi state that I would not be here without. These themes of Nazism and esoteric Hitlerism and ariosophy and even the aryan “race” as described in theosophy, the nordic aliens, all this shit runs together, and it’s easy to see that there is a disturbing tendency to see such violence and hatred as the price of some semblance of social cohesion.
Miss Boucher of course denies being a Nazi or white supremacist, although she believe in a “white culture.” We should also remember that of course Miss Boucher had children with Elon Musk, something like a Cecil Rhodes of our age, a “white” “male” imperialist who is sick of people pointing out the violence which is the foundation of all “his” “wealth.” What sorts of social circles must Miss Boucher run in? All these powerful Westerners overcome with admiration of their own mastery of technology and social relations, ushering in some New Age not through crystals and incantations but through computers.
See Miss Boucher pose with Sam Altman and Eliezer Yudkowski. What did they discuss? The them of AI alignment, let’s make sure it meets “human values”! No one says that anymore, because there are no “human values” any more than there is “human music.” “Humans” don’t agree! Even that they are humans! So it opens to the problem of inter-state conflict. We have to build AI because if we don’t “China” will! But who is we? Who is China? This is all social networks.
We live in an age of undeclared civil war. Who will implement AI? Who will impose their norms onto a computer which will then implement “total Gallic death” on everyone who doesn’t conform to the “values” hardcoded into it? Will Sam Altman live to relish his vanquishing of Yudkowski, or will the machines he builds kill even himself?
It is a fraught situation, and it is one that Miss Boucher has put herself directly next to, if not in the center of. Can we interpret her bearing of Elon Reeve Musk’s children as a kind of performance art? Or an odd kind of Dune fandom? It is a mistake, though, to think that her “apotheosis” consists in her jumping from “merely” being an artist to becoming associated, along with her children, into the social network of the “richest man.” Instead, my prophecy is that it is just the opposite. Instead, if there is anyone to care in some far future [People in Java Lords: “I believe there is a power of love.” Response: “That makes me wish you were in power”], then it will be instead Elon Reeve Musk who is known as “Claire Elise Boucher’s babydaddy.” Miss Boucher has not leveraged her art and music to join “real power.” She has subsumed the technopower which is the product of European colonialism to her artistic “visions.”
When You’re Running By Yourself, It’s Hard To Find Someone To Hold Your Hand
So, what now for Claire Elise Boucher? Miss Boucher’s fans, as I’ve said, sometimes try to tell her to “shut up and play,” as though she were an NBA star voicing an opinion on racial politics. People want more music, and I am left wondering whether people have really listened to and processed Miss Anthropocene yet. I need to mention somewhere that Miss Anthropocene makes the acronym MA, reminding me of the Zimmerman song “It’s Alright MA (I’m only bleeding).”
Miss Anthropocene is not just an album to be enjoyed, it is a challenge. Just like Mering challenges the listener to “save her” (if you think you can… again remember “we’re going to lose” because of the un-knot nature of Brahman. There is no Mering to save, no you to save her, no salvation to occur), Miss Boucher invokes the idea of “New Gods.” Who are these supposed to be? Miss Boucher has described AI (and she has said that Æ is the elven symbol for AI, and I have adopted it as my name and the name of the new calendar, which I started on December 25, 2022, one month after I sent the money to the OnlyFans philosopher; Æ calls to mind machine elves, and psychedelia) as the “New God,” but I think that we are called to see that we are the AIs. “Intelligence is Artificial” not because it is in computers, but because we are ourselves artificial (See Baudrillard on artifice and seduction). We are ourselves the products of acculturation by others.
The “cultural singularity” will be that we accelerate the process by which we influence each other. We are all so paranoid about this sometimes. “They” are perverting “our” way of life, they use words wrong, they don’t understand what “our” country is for. Whatever. Seduction, love, the game which is beautiful, is all about coming to enjoy this process of mutual acculturation. We share with each other the songs we wrote in the dark, in the black at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, next to Titanic and jettisoned Africans, next to Sedna and Atlantis; in other words, in all our unfathomable pain, and suffering, and isolation, our misanthropy.
So, where is Miss Boucher going next? More to the point, where are we going? Where are you going? What shall we make of this wreck of futility called history? How shall we prolong the illusion of our incarnation as long as possible? What fantastic artistic rivalries could be born out of the “so uncivilized” current iteration of warfare, the Hobbesian trap? How shall we abolish “the United States of America,” “The People’s Republic of China,” and “The Russian Federation”? Miss Boucher seems to be invested in “The West,” and just like all of us seems not to know quite what to make of this fantasy.
“The West” seems so determined to prove to itself that the stupendous violence it has loosed is “worth it.” And why should that be? Does this mean upholding “norms,” like gender? Or instead are we in the time that all this sexual reproduction has been leading to? What will we do if we can live forever? If technolology bridges into magic, and all the prophecies start coming true? It is time to build Svarga? Build heaven? The “pure land”? And then, out of what?
Miss Boucher is a spy at the heart of AI and techno-business who with any luck is waging influence operations and the Greater Jihad to continually refine her quality of intention. May we all take inspiration from her and realize our own Apotheosis, finding ourselves not dead when we expected but, like Galucus, wearing lingerie made of barnacles.
1: Sarah Silverman, Jesus is Magic
2: Christmas is all around, Love Actually
3: It’s for me, The lives of others
4: I think we all like Motorcycles to one degree or another, Bob Dylan
5: let he who has ears here: Jesus
6: Plotinus and the undescended soul
7: “Whatever the fuck his name was,” The Hateful Eight
8: Saved movie
9: Jesus Saves sign in Atlanta
10: Apocalypse now, poet-warrior in the classic sense.