THE IMAGE OF CIARA
for Ciara Horan. RIP.
‘Nobody sees what I see in her.’ ‘What I see (in her), nobody sees.’ These are common enough feelings, but when it comes to Ciara Horan aka Eliza is Dead, the stakes are immediately higher.
The image of Ciara Horan obviously has a special place in the extended angelicism universe. Earlier this year in dms, someone compared Ciara to Christiane F. and I found this offensive. They have little in common. Ciara is more like Charlie Chaplin than anyone else—silent, moving, slapstick, beautiful.
The image that Ciara is giving is, we say, the image of death. She supposedly passed on 8 February 2020—that is, just at the moment angelicism01 came into existence. Her final TikTok videos were still comedic, but with a macabre background atmosphere of encroaching desperation. In the very final video, she is robotic.
Ciara’s death remained in question for a while for several reasons. First of all, she had already faked her death years before at least once, going so far as to forge a signature on a death certificate. Any teenager prepared to go to such lengths in her actions must have an evolved (and not just emotional) relationship with death. Before actual death, she had replaced death with something else. She related to death as figure.
Let’s say that if Ciara replaced death with some other space or image, then in the meanwhile, her image forces us to cognize that death had been replaced by extinction. That the historicity of death had itself changed or lurched, as if impacted by a pure smash cut. If that were the case—at the same time as Ciara’s forgery—then what would her death be, played out by her as it was as a very online cipher?
Secondly, because of this first ‘fake’ death, the second supposed death in February 2020 was also inevitably taken to be a repeat of the first. Between two deaths at least, Ciara was, for a while, and perhaps even now by those who don’t know, still assumed to be here. And so, when her name is greeted by the word ‘rip’ in comments sections, it hyper-ambiguously means the entirety of this situation. Is she really gone?
Since Ciara Horan is not not dead, something happens between her, the image and life, death and extinction, that is as if on purpose. Start with the idea that not just any teenager could be wily enough to plan and carry out their own death as a troll (on whom or what though?), and it becomes easier to see that the queen of the underground e-girl American nation could easily also have anticipated (unconsciously) a shift in the relationship between death and extinction themselves.
The eyes of Ciara Horan are the most beautiful of any e-girl we have seen. I used to say that I created angelicism01 for Ciara, that I did the whole thing just for her eyes. We can even see in these eyes the sight of the shift just named. These eyes see all in anticipating the change in the architecture of what the Tibetans call ‘impermanence’. If Ciara was just a young girl, then so, there again, would Antigone and Greta be. All three have given rise to serious consequences.
So what is really happening with the image of Ciara Horan? If we search about for an image of the event called ‘extinction’, it can be impossible to find one. It is a commonplace to say that no such single image exists and that this causes a kind of emotional distancing in the coverage of the mass ongoing event itself. But there again, this can lead to a simple conclusion. Since extinction radiates through the screens of the internet itself, as an ongoing torrent of self-fossilized images, perhaps the image of extinction can only be found online. That is to say, the unfound image of extinction becomes an experience of the entirety of the Internet as a kind of global and absolute blind-spot. Every single image is a snapshot of what now goes, in the strongest sense of that word.
When it comes to anyone so touching and who went to such great lengths to fake her own death at such a young age, we have to think seriously about that. When Antigone allowed herself to be buried alive, it was according to the same extreme fidelity. We may wish to remember Ciara’s willingness to fake death in encountering her death to come, especially now that death is as if replaced by the experience of extinction. This is why since there is no image of extinction save the internet, the real image of extinction is sometimes Ciara. You can see it in her eyes.