A black hole of vanity and delusion

[Coss]

A black hole of vanity and delusion

The Press ~ Joe Bennett ~ 15 Apr 2026

I shall come to the astonishing thing by and by, but first let’s consider the teeth. They are all american teeth, gleaming in the mouth of an octogenarian. They are hundred thousand dollar teeth. And they are teeth that lie before they even speak, by pretending that their owner is not ageing towards death like any other organism. See how white they are, how teenager bright.

Look at the hair too. Nothing says youth like hair. See the trouble taken to preserve the stuff, to regrow it, to coif and plump the last few strands of it. But see, too, how a strong wind lifts the woven thatch to reveal the bald truth. Who does he think he’s fooling? Does he believe his own hair? Does he believe that we believe his hair? What is it all for? But all the bells of the city Began to whirr and chime ‘Oh let not Time deceive you You cannot conquer Time.’

Look at the women at his club, the ageing women in the awful ball gowns in the awful ballroom. Look at their faces, cheeks plumped and dimpled, chins firmed, eyes debagged. But somehow it has all gone wrong. They are gargoyles of Botox and surgery. Youth is unfakeable.

Yet still they try, in doomed pursuit of the unobtainable, the mad endeavour to turn back the clock. Plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed.

See how the ageing women stand and applaud when he enters, preening, in his golf shirt, with his own name stitched on the breast, as if he were some orphan evacuated in the war. And on the cheap trucker’s hat, there’s a political slogan which, like the fake hair and the fake teeth, is a bid to go backwards, to reverse time, to return to some mythical golden age, some imagined prime.

Look even at the skin on his face. That skin is the colour of raw pastry, but he slathers it in heavy duty bronzer, something close to paint, to suggest rude health and youth. You can see the edge, where the bronzer ends and the pallor resumes. Who does he think he is fooling?

All of which brings us to the astonishing thing: despite all the evidence, despite all experience, people still pay attention to the words he speaks as if they meant something. They don’t. His words bear precisely the same relationship to meaning as his hair does to actual hair, his teeth to actual teeth, his skin colour to the colour of his skin. His words are a mask. They may give the illusion of meaning, but there is no sequential thought behind them, no reasoning. They are just an attempt to reconfigure reality to a shape that suits him, a shape that will be plausible enough to get him through the day.

The words will change tomorrow. What does lie behind those words, however, is a seething pit of appetites and grievances. He’s a psychopathic black hole, of vanity and delusion, in desperate need of praise and validation, for the talents he knows he does not have.

And when reality threatens, when a reporter asks a question that pierces to the truth of things, see how furiously he turns on the questioner, accusing them of being fake. Every such accusation is a confession. He’s an old man who lives in fear of being found out. The glacier knocks in the cupboard. The desert sighs in the bed.

And the crack in the teacup opens.  

A lane to the land of the dead.

 

 

 

 

 

[Coss]