Keller Easterling

For the believer there is only the tautology of belief, a fairy tale musical uncluttered by details. The believer, Hegel’s “beautiful soul,” exists in a utopia within which a few convictions are sufficient. The big picture is always available and always unaltered in the solipsism of innocence. The believer fights only “just” and righteous wars and is capable of the most aggressive gentleness as well as the most unrelenting violence.

For the cheater, the proliferation of lies achieves roughly the same effect. There are so many lies that it is difficult to achieve the traction necessary for their reconciliation. Ironically, more and more masquerades and fictions continually refresh the originally attractive myth. Indeed, without shifting stories and multiple disguises, fame diminishes and celebrity falls away.

Since, the stone cold bluff of the liar and the sunny elegiac aphorism of the believer are both more successful than measure or reason, most politicians campaign and most urban spaces advertise with a slippery combination of the two dispositions. Just as the cheater needs the masquerades of the believer, so the believer often needs to cheat to survive.

Architect-at-Large

Architect-at-Large

Volume 1 — 2005