3 MaidStudies YoungGirl Sol

On an island, a sorceress changed sailors into pigs. There in the inland sea, she changed masters into maids, too. The maid is a beautiful youth whose life is given to something immense: lost at sea, lost in war, priests and Vestals, all servants to fate. If Kristeva’s black sun is an insistence without presence, the maid is a presence without insistence, a soft moon. The maid is an 87,000-year-old pictogram, though conspicuously missing from painted caves. Caves were the womb of the Earth—animals were painted there with the hope that the Earth would birth more of them. The maid is absent from caves because it does not belong to the Earth in this way. It’s the girl with the mousy hair, in all its desolation, who wonders if there is life on Mars?

We live in a unique moment in the anthropological history of the maid. Popularized as a young, desirable character in Japanese media, made ubiquitous through the spread of anime online, and rendered in all the melancholic irony of the 21st century: the solemn, gloomy maid in a depressive scene, smoking a cigarette. At this same time, critically, the Young-Girlification of everything was being articulated by Tiqqun. Insofar as we all must polarize ourselves about the Young-Girl, the melancholic maid emerged as a response to the Young-Girl online with astounding resonance. With regards to the full array of global market forces, it is an avatar of resignation with a delicately encoded vision of something greater that never materialized.

This “something” is the true subject of the most compelling, recurring image of the melancholic maid: the halls of a dim, cavernous manor in the evening, where it awaits the return of the master. The prevalence of this scenario in the musings of maids online is significant. Every maid has a master, and when our world was more precarious, its immense presence was always felt:

“Leviathan was powerful and inevitable.
I fell in love with my fate as it crushed me to death.”

Now, stability, security, and safety have become the categorical imperatives, and little is left for fate. The apostles drew lots to decide who would join their ranks in the absence of Christ, because they believed God would make his will known through random chance. The development of the Society of Control thus coincides with the decline of divine influence, and we contend with another contradiction: our stated desire for peace vs our actual need for instability. In a system of control where divine influence has been suppressed for the sake of improved economic modeling, whom does a maid call its master?

Every other star in the universe orbits in a binary system. Ours is the only one in existence which is alone. There are 2.8 billion people in the world, and every last one lives under this dazzling symbol of loss and loneliness. Everyone has a lost twin, precisely because we were all born under the lost-twin-sun. It is even in our language—as sol makes solitude, solemnity, seulement. The soft moon and the inland sea reflect the light of the sun, and it stares only into itself.