It’s very chilly out today, and gray, and has been raining on and off, adding to the dampness. Trees look like gaunt figures with pointy, rigor-mortised limbs. The last of the "pretty" foliage has fallen from all the branches, and most of it is now that yellowy jaundice color, or burnt flaky brown. And getting soggy.
(Refer back to my first blog post about the migratory patterns of these leaves at this time of year...)
Yes, November is definitely in the chair. I know it should be no surprise. The weather the past several days was warm even for October’s good taste, but if ever there was any doubt, just look outside. He has taken the spot; October has long abdicated and November is in the middle of his grim, sometimes misunderstood tale.
(And I want no ‘rubbing in’ from those San Diegans out there. We KNOW. It’s ALWAYS sunny in a whale’s vagina.)
At any rate, if I’m looking to scapegoat anyone for the gravity and tone of this post, it may as well be the month, the wet gray mare he rode in on, and his chilly tale... And the tomb-like dampness of his breath.
I read something yesterday in a local newspaper. I can’t adequately call it a column, but a Q&A section devoted to the seedier, more taboo issues in love and relationships. People write in anonymously under special acronyms and ask "The Expert" for advice on things. Some concerns have been:
A girl weighing the evidence and ruling that her boyfriend may be fooling around with his best (male) friend and what that ‘might mean’.
Another had to do with a young, straight man wondering if it’s normal that he can only ejaculate with the aid of rectal stimulation.
...
I swear to you all, up and down, that was NOT me.
I read these mostly for entertainment, though the columnist does offer pearls of real wisdom from time to time. Browsing through the latest issue, I stopped at a man whom, enduring almost 20 years of little to no sexual contact with his wife, asked if he, if everyone, was entitled to an active sex-life.
The reply he got was that no one is actually entitled to that, that we all have the "freedom of consensual sexual expression" and that we need to "find, marry or rent a willing sex partner."
He then stated that unfortunately many would not find it, that some people are just unlucky or, in his own words, unfuckable.
You take these things for what they are, but those words stopped me dead, and made the room a bit colder. A recurring anxiety cropped up then that’s become difficult to shake.
Is it possible that some people are just destined to live unsatisfied, and unfulfilled, despite their best efforts? Are there just some people that are cosmically earmarked to live in some kind of social caste system; a serfdom that life oppresses onto them wherein upward mobility is impossible?
The context spans far beyond sex. (For the record, I in fact deem myself quite "fuckable.") There seems to be restrictions on everything; a predisposed salary cap.
They lose so others can win; they live poor, so others can have everything; they have their hearts broken repeatedly, so others can find their soul-mates; they are told no, and are continuously made an example of so others know just how good they have it.
It’s not something I want to believe. I want to be wrong. For the first time I actually savor the thought of being proved wrong.
Pounding my fists with desperate fury like a man under a frozen lake, I am constantly trying to break through this barrier. I don’t walk around with a sense of entitlement, but I believe I’m worth the complete extent of my happiness.
Like a white-knight on a spiritual quest or pilgrimage, I use every opportunity I can to prove myself. I fight hard to make my life all I imagined. I arm myself with ideals like chasing dreams, and trusting what my heart tells me. I am, as Paulo Coelho calls it in The Alchemist, "Writing my own personal legend."
But maybe I’m delusional. Out of time, and out of place, like a modern Don Quixote in rusty, antique armor and a bent lance about to lose what little he has left of something, making a pathetic fool of himself in the process.
Or, maybe it was just Friday, The 13th and this is just a lingering tale of horror November is weaving from his seat. One so frightening I can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. Such suspension of disbelief is paramount for any potent scary story.
Maybe it's just Early winter doldrums. That must be it..
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Serialized NOW
Bill Shakespeare once said that the whole world was a stage…
Walking out of the Yale Art Gallery several weeks ago, my uncle commented on how he was beginning to see the world around him more and more as a play.
The actions of everyone contributing somehow as choreographed parts in some grand, ongoing pageant. I guess your mind may take things to that level after an hour and a half of a modern art exhibit called "Continuous Present," a series of modern pieces emphasizing among other concepts the passage of time, and cause and effect.
On our way around the corner of York and Chapel St., we passed through the gravitational center of a conversation, or what was more like an informal interview between a pair of Yalies and a street-hewn local. In passing, and from over our shoulders, we saw another student directly across the street, trying not to be obvious, with a camera recording the whole thing. My uncle and I, still very much internalizing the art we had just viewed walked right through this exchange without realizing it (or, at least I didn’t realize it), and hence right through the filming. It was about here he made his observation.
He then, the spontaneous photographer that he is, snapped a unique photograph of a young black woman, probably also a student, waiting at the corner passively negotiating one of her iPod’s many play-lists, seemingly unaware that she was juxtaposed to the white, twenty-something male, very professional looking and very animated, pantomiming the subtle nuances of his cell-phone conversation. From that distance we couldn’t hear the particulars of this conversation—he was like a silent film actor.
People came and went, holding bags of things and coffees. Construction rumbled on across the street. And in the background of my uncle’s photograph well across the street, if you look close is the head of a man, his features blurred partly by a screen door, his eyes fixed directly on the lens of my uncle’s camera, and no doubt studying him as he shot the picture.
There is a distinct rhythm in the bustle of New Haven since Yale's been back in session. I've never been around at this time to really experience it.
I think the world around us is a production put on daily; it’s a play with ever changing scenes, spanning countless acts, an endlessly cycling cast of characters and taking place on a proscenium stage that’s as large as the context you choose to live in; your world, your own social circle. Where you:
exercise, go to cash your check, attend class, work, eat, get coffee, fish, bike, roller blade, surf, feed the pigeons, swim, grocery shop, cow tip etc...
There is a cue for everyone to enter, I think. Multiple ones maybe even, at many different times. Listen close enough with your eyes, ears and yes, even your nose, and you’ll realize your cue. They come around a few times, so, don’t worry if you miss the first call. But it’s important to be poised near the stage, listening and ready.
Tunnel vision can really hinder that. With regards to myself, my attention was always turned inward at these times, to a spot where something was missing; a vacant spot I couldn’t fill; someplace empty, where I wondered why there was nothing instead of outward to where there was everything, or at least a great deal of things. Walking around like I had been, I was a lone audience member apart from it all, rather than a player in it.
But perhaps we voluntarily balk at the opportunity to enter at certain times, and who could blame us. Duels are usually a bit over pronounced and gratuitous. Attention seekers pollute the air with their trite, self-aggrandizing soliloquies and I refuse to grant them any. And what serious actor wants to perform in some gaudy Masque, dancing under intrusive iodized lights amid a decadent array of brightly colored clothes, Our view of one another filtered through the false masks they don?
It’s true that in order for artists to internalize what they see, and project a representation of it through their work, they must take a scrutinizing stance just outside of it. Being so immersed in something we don’t truly see and understand its many parts, and can’t adequately address a problem therein. Being so saturated in it, we may become a part of this problem. Most work, a painting, sculpture, novel, etc...functions to identify a problem, societal or interpersonal, and maybe proposes a way to solve it.
But this can become a trap I think, if we allow it. Over time, a mechanism is sprung that takes over as habit, and it confines us to, as Paulo Coelho eloquently states in his novel, Brida, "The worst torture humankind ever invented for itself: Loneliness."
We can learn so much more by being a part of the production than ever we could as just a discerning audience member. Being a part of something unique going on also beats the pants off the role of that griping critic who sits alone up in the balcony somewhere, constantly searching for flaws in the performance through the lens of his stuffy theater binoculars.
I find that the more verbs I fill my daily existence with I expand and diversify my contexts, hence the grander the scale of the stage, and the greater my role in the production.
If you have to stand outside of it for a while and wait, then wait patiently, and never forget the beauty of it that draws you back in.
Walking out of the Yale Art Gallery several weeks ago, my uncle commented on how he was beginning to see the world around him more and more as a play.
The actions of everyone contributing somehow as choreographed parts in some grand, ongoing pageant. I guess your mind may take things to that level after an hour and a half of a modern art exhibit called "Continuous Present," a series of modern pieces emphasizing among other concepts the passage of time, and cause and effect.
On our way around the corner of York and Chapel St., we passed through the gravitational center of a conversation, or what was more like an informal interview between a pair of Yalies and a street-hewn local. In passing, and from over our shoulders, we saw another student directly across the street, trying not to be obvious, with a camera recording the whole thing. My uncle and I, still very much internalizing the art we had just viewed walked right through this exchange without realizing it (or, at least I didn’t realize it), and hence right through the filming. It was about here he made his observation.
He then, the spontaneous photographer that he is, snapped a unique photograph of a young black woman, probably also a student, waiting at the corner passively negotiating one of her iPod’s many play-lists, seemingly unaware that she was juxtaposed to the white, twenty-something male, very professional looking and very animated, pantomiming the subtle nuances of his cell-phone conversation. From that distance we couldn’t hear the particulars of this conversation—he was like a silent film actor.
People came and went, holding bags of things and coffees. Construction rumbled on across the street. And in the background of my uncle’s photograph well across the street, if you look close is the head of a man, his features blurred partly by a screen door, his eyes fixed directly on the lens of my uncle’s camera, and no doubt studying him as he shot the picture.
There is a distinct rhythm in the bustle of New Haven since Yale's been back in session. I've never been around at this time to really experience it.
I think the world around us is a production put on daily; it’s a play with ever changing scenes, spanning countless acts, an endlessly cycling cast of characters and taking place on a proscenium stage that’s as large as the context you choose to live in; your world, your own social circle. Where you:
exercise, go to cash your check, attend class, work, eat, get coffee, fish, bike, roller blade, surf, feed the pigeons, swim, grocery shop, cow tip etc...
There is a cue for everyone to enter, I think. Multiple ones maybe even, at many different times. Listen close enough with your eyes, ears and yes, even your nose, and you’ll realize your cue. They come around a few times, so, don’t worry if you miss the first call. But it’s important to be poised near the stage, listening and ready.
Tunnel vision can really hinder that. With regards to myself, my attention was always turned inward at these times, to a spot where something was missing; a vacant spot I couldn’t fill; someplace empty, where I wondered why there was nothing instead of outward to where there was everything, or at least a great deal of things. Walking around like I had been, I was a lone audience member apart from it all, rather than a player in it.
But perhaps we voluntarily balk at the opportunity to enter at certain times, and who could blame us. Duels are usually a bit over pronounced and gratuitous. Attention seekers pollute the air with their trite, self-aggrandizing soliloquies and I refuse to grant them any. And what serious actor wants to perform in some gaudy Masque, dancing under intrusive iodized lights amid a decadent array of brightly colored clothes, Our view of one another filtered through the false masks they don?
It’s true that in order for artists to internalize what they see, and project a representation of it through their work, they must take a scrutinizing stance just outside of it. Being so immersed in something we don’t truly see and understand its many parts, and can’t adequately address a problem therein. Being so saturated in it, we may become a part of this problem. Most work, a painting, sculpture, novel, etc...functions to identify a problem, societal or interpersonal, and maybe proposes a way to solve it.
But this can become a trap I think, if we allow it. Over time, a mechanism is sprung that takes over as habit, and it confines us to, as Paulo Coelho eloquently states in his novel, Brida, "The worst torture humankind ever invented for itself: Loneliness."
We can learn so much more by being a part of the production than ever we could as just a discerning audience member. Being a part of something unique going on also beats the pants off the role of that griping critic who sits alone up in the balcony somewhere, constantly searching for flaws in the performance through the lens of his stuffy theater binoculars.
I find that the more verbs I fill my daily existence with I expand and diversify my contexts, hence the grander the scale of the stage, and the greater my role in the production.
If you have to stand outside of it for a while and wait, then wait patiently, and never forget the beauty of it that draws you back in.
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