Kipple is what we love and loathe at the same time; it entices us and it utterly disgusts us; it draws us in, and then it sickens us for having been so drawn in.

 

 

 

Kipple is defined by its having these two self-cancelling faces – the one face which looks luxuriously rich and glossy and full of tacky promise, and the other which is mean and empty, and banal like a cheap and shoddy lie which has now been found out. It is like a man who looked like a great fellow the night before when you were drunk, but who you now plainly see to be the worst sort of a windbag, and a dirty scurrilous, two-faced fool of a knave to boot.

 

 

 

Kipple is our attachments, it is our thoughts, our ‘objects’, our games. It is the things that we live our lives in orbit around; it is the glitzy, glittery, cheap and trashy world that we immerse ourselves in everyday.

 

 

 

We love kipple so much because kipple helps us to forget how much we hate ourselves for loving kipple. We depend on kipple so much because kipple allows us to forget the horrible fact of this terrible dependence.

 

 

 

Kipple starts off on a slow cycle – in the early days it doesn’t seem to show its dirty underbelly hardly at all. Everything is fine and grand and it takes a long time for the spell to slowly spoil. Later on the cycle speeds up and the attractive face gives way very quickly to the jaded horror that lurks beneath it. The disguise has worn thin through use. Eventually, at the end of the road, the mask has come off altogether; or rather, it is as if the mask and the horror under the mask are shown together, simultaneously. This is how the kipple mocks us, at the end of things. At this stage it could be said that there is no more attempt made to deceive us; none is necessary, for my soul is now sold (traded in for a thousand lorry-loads of kipple). This is when I see beyond any doubt that the kipple has finally triumphed, when I see that I am now no more than kipple myself.

 

 

 

We live for kipple; we live in thrall to its horrible cheap attraction. We are made rotten by it, we are sunk by it. We are inundated by it, suffocated by it. We are fascinated by it, magnetically held by it, made to hate ourselves by it, degraded and made useless by it. We are daily consumed by it, and in the end the kipple is all there is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit – productiveas.com/the-first-law-of-kipple