Ordinary Lies
By D. Swensen
Oct. 1, 1997
All that is necessary to be an artist is the ability to make the ordinary interesting, or at the very least, more profound than it actually is. This is an oversimplification, of course; talent in one's medium should not be ignored, but often is, especially where Hollywood is concerned. But I digress… which is quite the sin even when you have a thesis to begin with, much less when you have no idea what you're talking about.
I speak, mostly, of fiction, writing, or, as Stephen King puts it, "making things up for money". The province of fiction is the glorious appeal of the exaggeration, the idealistic bending of the truth, or the outright bald-faced lie. The victory of art is the momentary suspension of what Clive Barker calls the "tyranny of the real", the momentary glimpse into the fantastic. The triumph of the real is the transitory nature of that art. A painting, let us say a Botticelli, a Dore, or even a Giger (if we must bow to modernity after all), looked on once, provides a glimpse into the unknown, and the soul takes flight, if only for a few moments. A painting looked at a thousand times offers more sophisticated admiration, maybe even jaded criticism if one is exposed to too much greatness, but never that same frisson. The most one can hope for is a memory of that moment, which is a muddy reflection, at best, a painting in a puddle. I think of these things as I leave my house to go to work, a mundane experience at best, about as un-extraordinary as one is likely to get.
The apartment is an Apocalypse of undone dishes, dirty clothes, reams of waste paper from credit card companies urging us to fulfill out financial responsibilities. My room is a minefield of compact discs bereft of cases, PC gaming magazines, crusted silverware; the carpet a deep shag of brown and oily black. I can no longer remember its original color. There will be no crusaders come to clean up this battlefield, no varnish-haired media clones barreling from brightly-colored television vans to tie in the saga of my domicile to the latest death of some celebrity I never met and alert the ignorant masses of the globe to this tragedy. I suppose I'm just not extraordinary enough.
Extraordinary might be a better word for the cataclysm of twentieth-century junk that has amassed in the living room. Pizza boxes; plastic Star Wars lightsabers; a fully functional if dull Indian sword; Lego submarines; the Masonic Encyclopedia; a concrete statue of St. Francis, patron saint of suburban crapola. He is truly at the proper altar here. I once had to write a paper on what some archaeologists discovering this apartment a hundred years from now might make of our surroundings, and was honestly perplexed about what to say. I can only suppose that future archaeologists will have enough historical education about the twentieth century not to assume every object has a practical purpose. Otherwise, simply put, they're screwed. I often think about cleaning this junk out, of purging my life of this burdensome mass of brightly colored plastic garbage, of toy Klingon phasers and Conan comic books and empty computer-game boxes and that electronic Battleship game that I always wanted but never got as a kid, and which my parents bought me on my twenty-fourth birthday as their idea of a joke. I will sort these things, I tell myself, and weed out what I no longer need. I will hold the biggest junk sale of the century, and walk off laughing, with enough money in my pocket to replace all that crap with newer, shinier crap that uses larger batteries and breaks in half the time.
This, of course, assumes that anyone but me would want these things. They don't clog up the closet, the storage space, my grandmother's garage, and a half-dozen locations God knows where else, for no reason. I may kid myself about chucking it all and going to live like a Dominican friar, but the truth is, it's too late. We are the children of the atom bomb, flush with postwar prosperity, better off than our parents, spending our hard-earned cash on bits of flotsam, nodding sagely and smiling as our grandparents regale us with stories of getting a dime and thinking it was as good as a hundred dollars, and smiling and nodding some more when they genuflect against the dreadful malochio of Progress and talk about the days when you could buy a car for twenty dollars and rent a house with the change. All right, so there is no 'we'; there's just me. I like to pluralize when I make sweeping generalizations; it makes me feel less alone.
The truth is, I keep these things because they define me. They preserve memories of an earlier time, a time that I nostalgically pretend was simpler and happier. A closet full of junk is a closet full of good memories, that you can dig out and wade knee-deep in, wide-eyed, and think about how long it's been since you played with this gewgaw or read that book. As materialist things go, I find it among the profounder joys of life. If my soul is so empty that I must find nourishment for it in the collection of material things, then, by God, I'm not going to sell them. The Dominicans wouldn't take me.
I leave the apartment and close the door behind me. The mailbox is stacked with the bills I've spent the last three days perusing and promptly putting back in place. If I don' t have the money to pay these faceless automatons, I really don't see the point in opening the letter to read their demands. These bills are like ransom notes to the parents of Dickensian child laborers. There are two kids mowing the lawn of the apartment complex as I leave, and I wonder idly if I would seem more profound by describing the older one as a bare-chested, flaxen-haired Adonis, flinging the mower about with the guileless focus of a Greek athlete. Probably more pedophilia than profundity, I suppose, and truly without merit in either case. It's just some kid mowing the lawn. Later on, as I'm driving, I think about exalting the damn cherry-picker that's holding up University traffic as the Great Stork of Modernity, snickering to myself behind the wheel and drawing stares from the pedestrians crossing the street in front of me, who all assume I'm laughing at them. And rightly so.
Pedestrians at the University are an interesting phenomenon to me sometimes. They come in breeds and subspecies, like paramecia under a microscope slide. You could almost rate them on a confidence scale. There are the cautious waist-bending rubbernecks, who stand at the corner swiveling their heads like swing-arm lamps, checking to make sure there isn't some baseball-cap-wearing yahoo about to tear around the corner of Eddy St. and flatten them into a flannel pancake. These are the court astrologers of the Pedestrian medieval hierarchy, I think; their dedication to decorum and respect for the superior bargaining might of the half-ton pickup shows their intelligence, but their lack of assertion is their own glass ceiling.
Then there are the brazen upstarts, who parade confidently in front of onrushing vehicles as if the notion of legal right-of-way meant something to your average University area motorist. I simply have to admire this sort of foolhardy optimism. These are the tribal chieftains, the Arthurs, the Alexanders of our age, who simply stride full-on into the face of death with a bold smile and a steady gait. Being a male driver, I have to admire the male bold-crossers doubly, because as my roommate has proven many a time, an attractive female crossing the street is in significantly less danger with a sexist male at the wheel in front of her. The male court-astrologers are destined for old age waiting for some courteous guy to stop and let them cross. The males have to be Alexanders, simply because they'll be waiting forever if they don't take their lives in their hands and cross. Maybe they're looking for pink triangles on the bumpers. I don't know.
I pull into the parking lot, the fan belt creaking like a fan belt that's loose. I suppose I could say it creaks like the joints of some old man with an albatross around his neck, or screeches like a Genoese fishwife, or maybe groans like the piers of Old Salty at high tide. These are rich man's vanities, pedestrian palimpsests. When you can't afford to fix your car, a squeaky fan belt means plenty enough on its own and there is no need to make it more profound than it is. The wages I make are more academic than the classes I attend. I find grim irony in sitting at lecture, listening to my history professor's polemics on the failures of capitalism and the soul-destroying destructiveness of the capitalist system while my student loans slowly accumulate to Melvillian proportions. Many are the midterms where I have considered seriously bringing the biggest damn Sharpie I can find, scrawling "CONSUMER CULTURE SUCKS" on the first page of my blue book, handing it in with a flourish and declaring my college education complete. I consider this even more seriously than I consider strapping a bomb to my back and detonating myself on the Oval, or buying a Weatherby and popping off some frisbee players from below the pumpkin in the Main Hall clock tower. I even consider it more often, and more gravely, than I consider standing up in the middle of French class and declaring my hatred for those nasal-syllable-blowing, culture-purging, gastropod-eating, Arc de Triomphe three-cornered hat, World War Two losing, eel-head soup croissant-baking bastard asswipes. And I think about that pretty often, as you can probably discern. The ultimate problem with the blue book maneuver is that personally satisfying moral victories don't show up on your transcript.
These are the ways I make my ride to work extraordinary. It helps to keep things fresh. The effort, of course, is futile. This pondering is a fundamentally Western idea, an artistic escapism. Colin Wilson tells us that the human mind needs to fly away to other places and times, that it desires this flight, and the soul grows sick without it. That flight is part and parcel of childhood, and so many of us spend our lives trying to recapture that feeling, to see more light, to steal a phrase from Goethe. Well, at least I do. I like to pluralize when I make sweeping generalizations. It makes me feel less alone.
D.
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