Fairyland, Virtual and Vanishing

Fairyland, Virtual and Vanishing Ostensibly, Epstein’s island ‘Little Saint James’ was purchased in 1998 through his company LSJ, and is situated within the Virgin Islands archipelago amidst the Caribbean Sea. It is a real place that returns aerial images on Google Earth and Microso Flight Simulator. It can be visited anecdotally through reports from those who have worked and visited there. The island’s existence has also been reified through flight records and guerilla photographic documentation, architectural plans and real estate correspondences. It seems to be the case that what reifies the island the most, however, is simultaneously that which mystifies it; the plethora of forums, podcasts and articles that speculate its geography and the purpose of its landscape development, which create a sprawling web of associations across place and time, drawing on familiar folk and mythological motifs. The event of its unmediated visitation by UrbExer Bracco in 2020, who provided a video of himself traversing the place (which has since been shadowbanned on Youtube), has accelerated the particular phenomenon of ‘Epstein-brain’, an obsession with theorising about the man, his connections to the global stage and his island domicile. To consider the landscape of Jeffrey Epstein’s island is to consider the landscape of the internet and its related media forms. Otherwise inaccessible to us - with the exception of a few successful urban explorers (UrbEx) - the internet is our means of travel to the island and is, therefore, the site, origin and producer of its folklore. This essay will attempt to extrapolate the overlap of fairylore and internetlore, pursuing the process through which the folklore of the landscape is inscribed in 21st-century socio-political concerns and forms of transmission. The island will be suggested as a virtual representation or simulacrum as well as a physical place. The gap that is opened up between the virtual and physical I argue is a place fertile for folklore-making; it is an event that is seductive in its flickering. A broader consideration will be made of the relationship of folklore to conspiracy theories, acknowledging that the categories are distinct but related. It may be tenuous, but necessary to assert in this context that conspiracy theories are at least a facet of contemporary folklore. It is important to note that anyone attempting to purpose a folk motif as a prism through which to understand the Epstein phenomenon, as I do here with the concept of fairyland and the otherworld, may be construed to enrich and as such affect the folklore already extant. Therefore it must also be clearly said that my intention is to unpick the associative matrix at play rather than to leverage a conspiratorial agenda. I acknowledge my fascination with the island may bear similar motivations to those creating this lore, yet for the purpose of this essay, and to distinguish myself namely from Q-Anon and TrueAnon, the main two camps engaged with the issue in a quasi-folkloric fashion, my fascination is to be said, a fascination with fascination itself. Fascination appears to play a crucial part in the creation, transmission, and study of folklore. It may be useful to start by introducing Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590). Although a fictional literary work, the poem contributes to folklore in its rich amalgamation of fairy folklores. A particular focus is on the poem’s Bower of Bliss, a landscape which Mattison identifies as a landscape acting as a “veiled mirror” (2010, 80), a seductive and enchanting place whose entrances and exits are simultaneously sealed and open: Goodly it was enclosed rownd about, As well their entred guestes to keep within, As those unruly beasts to hold without; Yet was the fence thereof but weake and thin: (Spenser, The Faerie Queen, Book II, canto XII, 1590) In a 2020 interview with TrueAnon podcast hosts Brace Belden & Liz Franczak, Sam Jaffe Goldstein asks pertinently, “there are pictures documenting it, it was all done in the open, yet it’s all still shrouded in mystery. How do you two handle that paradox?”, to which Liz responds “this is a feature, not a bug.” The fact that the fence of the island much like the Bower is “weake and thin” is not accidental, and as Liz points out, Goldstein is mistaken in framing it as a paradox. Liz identifies the island’s simultaneous mystery and public image as an expression of a sovereignty issue, whereby people ‘know’ but nothing can be done because authorities are themselves implicated. I would argue that there is more to say here regarding how the formation of the island’s landscape as a virtual and physical object has contributed to its very public yet very hidden nature. The “fence” in question here manifests both physically as the island’s border and fortress of sea, and virtually as the membrane of the internet and the confluence of lores that create an open yet clandestine truth environment, complicating the image of the island and in turn perpetuating its inability to be held to account. “Where the Bowre of Blisse was situate,” writes Spenser, “a place pickt out by choyce of best alyve” (Canto XII, 1590). The choice of Little Saint James the place that centralises the global paedophilia conspiracy is perhaps one in lieu of socio-technological changes to geographical representation. Maps are no longer comprised of static images but are built through transmissions of information online, which are their own territories “slowly rotting across the map” (Baudrillard, 1994). The geography of the island appears to have been built via virtual landscape tools such as Google Earth and perhaps even Youtube, as well as through its accounts and speculations. Brace and Liz involve themselves in the interstices of this information landscape, and with a huge following on the internet, invent the landscape through conversations that o en dri into the folkloric, “psychic vampires, money vampires, sex vampires, blood vampires, they have a totally different, absolutely warped sense of morality and society” says Belden (Goldstein, 2020). The process by which TrueAnon have become participants in the folkloric legacy of the island expresses a broader notion of how the particular landscapes of the internet and island are ‘the best alyve’ as sites for folklore. Much of the fascination with the island between 2020 and 2022 speculated on the purpose of a particular building on the island; the oddly striped ‘temple’ with the golden dome atop, which was later “blown away during Hurricane Maria in 2017” (Anon, NBC, 2019). NBC News determined the building “bizarre” in their 2019 article, informing that it was supposed to be a music pavilion, designed as a haven for music and housing a grand piano, “Epstein was himself a talented pianist”, it states. The temple is located on the southeastern edge of the island and looks out over the sea; here we are reminded of motif F165.1, ‘door to otherworld island sounds sleep-bringing music’ and F175 ‘magic music lures to otherworld journey’. Part of the suspicion around the building is that its 2010 architectural plans look “nothing like the structure that was built”, and “was not made from stone” as planned (ibid). The suspicion generated here is fascinating given the other implications that the island’s primary function was to be an otherworldly place that operated outside of regular protocol; clearly, laws were not abided by here, so why would an architectural project follow its blueprint? We are reminded that the landscape is composed not of “describable objects” but prisms, or as Spenser puts it “Christall” (Mattison, 2010, 80). The indescribability that interests Mattison is a result of this refraction in which the territory is not the map (Baudrillard, 1994). Which begs the question, how is the precession of the temple via its blueprint entangled in its representation as a virtual landscape a er its differing reification? And how does this particular quivering affect its folklore? This betrayed prototype possesses a legitimacy that seems to enrich the Island’s lore by highlighting the real difference between the temples ‘original’ and representation. Where the physical temple is perceived as a representation - a deviant - the failed sketch provides insight into a truth slippage and as such is revered as a moral object. The plans are themselves an empty simulation which in being empty assassinate the physical landscape and accelerate its continued virtualisation on the internet. Interest in the real physicality of the temple is restricted and therefore requires the virtual to be reified. The structure of the ‘virtual’ landscape in question is formed of these hard image and video-based internet representations, as well as the more ephemeral and evolving anecdotes and conversations held in their comment sections and within opinion articles. As Doval points out in his 2019 Medium article, speaking in relation to Baudrillard’s 1994 assertion, “the “vehicles” of the Internet not only travel the territory but also expand it”. In framing the internet as a landscape through which we travel at the same time as forge, places otherwise inaccessible in real life are themselves expanded within internet corners that are like new lands. The internet is a landscape that thrives off of refraction. Like a crystal with its users both inside and outside, chiselling its faces and caressing it in their palms. Mattison writes, “the artificial landscape complicates the geographical model, since it means that the landscape is always constructed; the difference between insider and outsider lies in the appearance of the means of construction” (84). In this sense, the reconstruction of Epstein’s island through its online folklore may be considered an opportunistically insert oneself into the island, finding portals where its geographical ontology wavers. Wherein the island has the potential to be considered artificial, there lies the possibility of becoming a true insider if one is to access and evidence the intention and means of its construction. Image via Nation & State The horizontally-striped blue and white patterns on the surface of the building are offset by the fragmenting, geometric designs in red that cover the terrace. The patterns are evocative of mazes but without the ability to get lost; one design consists of squares within squares that cannot be entered, the other a path with a clear start and end. Wherein these are mere observations of the architectural and landscape decisions, they perhaps draw to attention a methodological issue; what is at stake in analysing images of the island in a folkloric context? In the former, I am looking for evidence that the landscape follows, for instance, a Spenserian organisation, and as a result stray into questions and suspicions about its purpose and meaning. Where I wanted to go on to say that these red patterns possessed some theoretical aesthetic similarities to Spenser’s Bower of Bliss; applying folk motifs in this context suggests me less as a folklorist than as a participant in the folklore, or conspiratorial by proxy. In short, asserting that the landscape of the island itself follows and expresses folk motifs is distinct from analysing the folklore that has gathered around it; it follows then that the folklore of (this) landscape cannot be found in photographic form or artistic rendering, since aesthetic analysis risks paranoid assumptions. Though it may be worthy to get into the mind of those participants in its folklore (to develop Epstein-brain for oneself), how such images are framed and spoken of is far more important. One of the assertions made is that the temple hosts tunnels underneath in which depraved things are done to the young girls flown out to the island. In their 2021 article ‘What Jeffrey Epstein’s eerie private island is like now’ the Independent argue these claims are unsubstantiated. The tunnels are of course invisible and evidence of them would need to be gathered from the limited external details that are available. The will for the triumphant uncovering a truth, through piecing together such mysterious and mediated pieces of evidence immerses the speculators (or, spectators?), making those in pursuit of the truth like heroes in their own folk tale. In this sense, the island is its own perfect self-generating folklore in which those who study it actually become its characters. Despite the fact that in Spenser’s tale the Bower is entered in order to be destroyed, its pull is sustained by this reinvigoration of heroic transcendence, folk motif F176, Hero fights in otherworld and overcomes king (queen), or fairy. “To view the Bower as landscape is to be between inside and outside - between the occupants’ naive self-abandonment to the Bower’s seductions and the Palmer’s destructive resistance”, writes Mattison (2010, 80). In this sense, the island’s magnetism marries the internet hero’s will to destroy it. An actual crossing from the virtual to the physical space of the island was enacted in 2020 by UrbExer Bracco. His two-part Youtube video ‘Sneaking Onto Jeffrey Epstein's Private Island - in front of which he posed and attempted to look in - serves a fascinating function in the development of the narratives surrounding the island in both a personal and collective sense. Bracco’s gesture here provided the online community of Epstein-brainers with what they desired; a look inside the temple around which so much lore had accumulated. His filming of the island was generous but not comprehensive, and when it came to trying to peer into the temple, all that was seen was a dark murky room and the reflection of Bracco staring back at us through the window. (The NBC article notes “on the plans there were windows - the structure that stands has no windows” (Anon 2019). Myths that are debunked are replaced by those that are not. Bracco himself in a later interview is intentionally unclear about what he saw, probably for the sake of his own safety, “if I was to have entered the unlocked temple, that I clearly came into close contact with, I would never self incriminate by showing my audience how I got in. Getting in would then subsequently have allowed me to access the tunnels” (Fowler, 2021). Here, the temple stands as the apex allegory for the entire island; although we see the island through Bracco’s video, we do not truly see what is inside; its insides have been abandoned to a reflection; the surface of a dark room. The search goes on; the quest is sustained through what is not revealed, conspiracies flourish, folklore proliferates. “I knew no one had been inside” (ibid), Bracco was perhaps himself embarking on the journey of a hero, enticed by its virtual landscape he entered this dark fairyland island (motif F213 Fairyland on Island), his physical sneaking a virtual reference, enriching the folklore of the landscape across multiple planes. A 1997 article about Private Properties in the Wall Street Journal includes a quote from Little Saint James’ previous owner Arch Cummin, saying of it, “you can hop off a plane and never see anyone again”. Part of the island’s appeal for those who visited it was, of course, its seclusion. What this seclusion may afford is a sense that one has crossed into an other space with alternate metaphysics and ethics. Reports about the island suggest a utopian, paradisic function. In ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967), Foucault writes that utopias are “sites with no real place” and giving the example of a mirror he postulates a relationship between the utopian and the virtual. A mirrored reflection is an opening that positions something as “there while absent”. This way of conceiving utopia as essentially an absence is especially interesting in the context of the folklore surrounding Epstein’s island and how it has been sustained. In Spenser’s conception of the Bower as a crystal, we find an idea of the landscape as a kind of “veiled mirror one step removed from mimesis”. The absence of a clear reflection is an apt metaphor for how what is obscured about the island is compensated for in desires to remove the veil and uncover its secret ‘true’ representation, reminding us that “the role of the reader in that representing is neither passive nor static, and that the task of the writer in relation to history is not, in fact, representation” (2010, 82). Metamorphosising from writer to reader and back again, those engaged in trying to see the island necessarily become part of its landscape, as well as its distant observers. The folklore perhaps occurs because of this close otherness; in which the details of the island are scrutinised, but it is not ever truly entered. Superstructure’s 2021 podcast ‘Robinson Crusoe Didn’t Kill Himself’ discusses the island and analyses the phenomenon of TrueAnon, a podcast hosted by Brace Belden and Liz Franczak which in reporting the ‘true Epstein story’, posits itself as an antidote to internet conspiracist QAnon. Superstructure describe the phenomenon by which the island is perceived, both generally speaking and in reference to Little Saint James, as a place that structures the possibility of creation, is a place abundant and not yet depleted. They frame the island’s abundance as an “elsewhere capital” that generates desire. “We have to go to the island and get the money, except it's not money, it’s knowledge and information”. Superstructure assert that “dreaming of islands” is precisely what TrueAnon is doing, “how bound up in desire for the island they are.” Referring to Deleuze’s ‘Desert Islands’ (1953-1974), they imply that the phenomenon of the island is philosophically striking because surrounded by guarded seas, it is always on the horizon; and therefore exists in the virtual. Its absence, like Foucault’s mirror, generates desire; a fascination that drives the proliferation of its folklore. “The conspiracy loop is constant”, here a taste of the otherworld is felt, and “podcasting itself becomes the resolution, it’s this desirist knowledge relation that ultimately always fails”. As such, TrueAnon’s “alleged truths” (TrueAnon, 2020, Ep1) are sustained by their “dream of pulling away [...] the island is that which one dri s towards” (Deleuze, 1953-1974, 10). Wherein the conspiracy loop is constant and mediated by the virtualising of the island, those attempting to report on the matter risk becoming lost in this dream, themselves engaging in folkloric evocations of what the island promises. Epstein’s actions aside, the function of the island as a landscape object is to entice and seduce folkloric projections; it is the perfect dark fairytale that begs to be read (motif F129.4.5, Voyage to Island of Darkness). Superstructure finish by noting that internet podcasters such as Brace & Liz clearly gain pleasure from their “joyous picking apart of the gruesome details”, while accusing others following the case of being “sick with a kind of perverted madness” (Goldstein, 2020). Returning to Spenser and his description of the Bower, then, we find this same allusion to pleasure and intrigue as a deterrent to the truth: Nought feard theyr force that fortilage 2 to win, But wisedomes powre, and temperaunces might, By which the mightiest things efforced bin : And eke the gate was wrought of substaunce light, Rather for pleasure then for battery or fight.” (Spenser, The Faerie Queen, Book II, canto XII, 1590) The lightness of the gate serves the purpose of seduction, allowing them to freely enter -- “Bill Maher has been joking about “pedophile island” for 20 years”, says Liz (Goldstein, 2020), but Spenser reminds us that “natures worke by art can imitate: / In which whatever in this worldly state / is sweete and pleasing unto living sense”; the island is a masterful artwork that returns a satisfaction for its spectators. TrueAnon perhaps themselves generate exponential satisfaction through transmitting these ‘gruesome details’ to their listeners. The island is continually reinvented, through its partial absence, in this autonomic loop between people and place. The landscape of Epstein’s island both hides behind and emerges within different media forms; paving the way for a slippery and complicated set of folkloric associations which are themselves difficult to locate. Against the backdrop of what may be perceived as hysteric conspiracy, identifying the relationship between these forms as a kind of folklore has been an attempt to deconstruct, but also legitimate speculations about a place that has become a mythical otherworld. Epstein’s island has become more than a conspiracy; it is a now-abandoned landscape, self-galvanising its own literary legacy in the collective imaginary. Mattison reminds us that the word landscape originates in painting (83), and ultimately implies an outsider’s point of view, “the landscape as a unified whole only exists for the outsider”. The position of the outsider in this matrix is summarised well by Zizek, writing of these otherworlds he notes: “they must remain at a distance if we are to sustain the consistency of our symbolic universe” (1999). No true ‘insider’ has spoken and as such those dwelling with Epstein-brain are inclined to inscribe themselves in the landscape, willfully caught in a “superposition of pedophiles that are and aren’t, hypervisible and invisible, absent presences and present absences” (Burgoon, 2020), the island is a means through which to drive these absences and presences towards some semblance of truth. We have our portal, our ferry to the island on the internet, but our transportation shapes the narratives; in other words, how one gets into the information determines how one perceives it. The role of a folklorist in considering questions of information, origin and transmission is applicable here. Burgoon writes of TrueAnon “the valence of the project is of course its ability to grapple effectively with uncertainty” and that “their project is as much attempting to hold together a story which is to us shattered and irreconcilable, as it is the definitive pinning down of who did what when”. In this sense, TrueAnon seem to be both the folklorists and folklore of pedophile hauntology; their pursuit of Epstein’s island is at once like that of a folk hero and at the same time an ethnography of belief. The folklore of the landscape is inseparable from the people and the forms they use to transmit it. Fairyland is a state or condition, realm or place, very much like, if not the same as, that wherein civilized and uncivilized men alike place the souls of the dead, in company with other invisible beings such as gods, daemons, and all sorts of good and bad spirits. Not only do both educated and uneducated Celtic seers so conceive Fairyland, but they go much further, and say that Fairyland actually exists as an invisible world within which the visible world is immersed like an island in an unexplored ocean, and that it is peopled by more species of living beings than this world, because incomparably more vast and varied in its possibilities. (W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, 1910, 18) References Primary BRACCOZ. Sneaking Onto Jeffrey Epstein’s Private Island 2020 (Part 1). [online video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aux8tSBFdHk. BRACCOZ. Sneaking Onto Jeffrey Epstein’s Private Island Part 2 (Extended Footage). [online video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrqI5kmoKvc&t=0s&ab_channel=BRACCOZ Superstructure. (2021). 12 - Robinson Crusoe Didn’t Kill Himself. [online podcast] https://soundcloud.com/user-250837592/12-robinson-crusoe-didnt-kill-himself TrueAnon. (2020). Episode 1: The Ep Files. 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