It's Okay To Cry

Preface:

I wrote this text on January 30th 2021, a few days after SOPHIE tragically fell to her death in Athens, Greece. I chose not to edit the little original text that I wrote to preserve the associative emotional charge, despite being slightly disjointed. The more important part for me is the collection of links and comments, in the attempt to capture the affect.

---

I recommend first watching this music video first

and then have the song on repeat while reading the following short essay.

This is the moon SOPHIE tried to see when climbing to the roof of her Athen’s apartment this past Saturday. And like Eurydice many centuries before, in some Deleuzian irony, she was sucked into the underworld. Or rather she was the one leaving there, manifesting herself as the ultimate performer Orpheus, leaving us, as Eurydice, behind. She ascended, got to see the moon and the ambivalent skyline of Athens. Just like the last look Orpheus gave Eurydice, which must have been engraved onto her cornea, we have the engravings of SOPHIE’s sound-waves. Which for both Eurydice and us will never be satisfying. Or did we get more than just that last look and vague memory of divine performance? Perhaps the most striking thing Orpheus accomplished was not the infamous “head-turn” moment, but rather becoming the person that they were. The person that performs music with such power and novelty that it convinced the literal god of death to grant life. That is not unlike how SOPHIE and her affiliates are managing to fight against the capitalist death-grip on pop music. Breathing new life into sounds and phenomena that were drowning in the toxic amniotic fluid of uncreative reproduction. Even in the face of death, there’s something in music that aligns the world to produce some Pythagorean harmonia.

According to SOPHIE God is trans. In It’s Okay To Cry I can only imagine an Angel seeing everything I do, seeing everything I’m becoming, stating that they also like the magazines I like, whispering it’s okay to cry. However if we would reduce SOPHIE to a mere sophist, we would miss exactly the glorious fantasy that makes the Angel real: the roaring bass, ripping apart all that is holy, tearing open the face of the earth to reveal an incendiary fissure. Above the fissure there is the horse of Apollo, φοῖϐος, prancing to the playful piano, floating from one note to another, while lightning strikes in the background, forcing the rolling thunder of the production to spread.

Is this then what Aristotle meant with Eudaimonia: Orpheus as the ultimate performer, SOPHIE becoming a potential everything, a pop-star. Or is Eudaimonia what I feel right now. I don’t feel empty nor do I feel loss. I feel full(-filled), that is to say I am overwhelmed. Is the tear SOPHIE sees rolling down my eyes then exactly this: the overabundance of Eudaimonia trying to find a way out. SOPHIE was possessed, and now she possesses us. Orpheus never died.

Εμείς φιλούμεν σοφία.