June 11, 2010 On Learning to See
It is against this white wet screen that I define myself. This windy, rainy city in winter. Against the blank canvas sky, my trench coat is bright red, bordering orange. I am in Boston, and I have come here to color parts of myself that are still left untouched by pigment. I have come here to work at a paper, to be a reporter.
I never quite understood the phrase be yourself–a phrase that haunts the teen magazines I devoured as an adolescent, the after-school television specials, and the tongues of every well-meaning parent giving advice to their angst-ridden children. Perhaps even more unfathomable is the phrase don’t stop being you–words scribbled countless times in my high school yearbooks, as if I were to, at a moment’s notice, somehow transport my consciousness into another body, another mind, and resume my existence there.
That winter in Boston, I became someone in order to escape the hollow hunger the city brings. I had a job. I dressed the part. I thought the part. When I came home from reporting, I turned on the news.
Why do we feel such an overwhelming need to define ourselves, to understand who we are? We look to our past for an explanation as to why we are the way we are, why we drink too much, why we have an attention span the size of a poppy seed, why we craft wars with those we love.
Getting to know yourself is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, once the cause of a problem has been discovered, it can be untangled, maybe, a with greater ease. On the other hand, because a reason for its existence has been found, some may allow the issue to rest unresolved. We play the victim who must shoulder our beautiful burdens in all our chinked-armor glory.
I pass insanity every day on the sidewalks. The clowns, the schizophrenics, the psychopaths. Men that mutter. Men that shout out tourettic poetry, who plead and bend and grovel, who leer and loom, who hoard, who have no home. I pass by, closing myself off from them like someone whisking through a carnival crowd, the caricatured voices of the carnies entreating you to sit down and take your best shot with a water-gun to win an oversized toy animal bursting at the seams with styrofoam beads. Hello, Chloe, one man says to me as he holds out a Dunkin Donuts cup. He raises it out to me, a toast; my name is not Chloe.
There are days when I catch myself staring at strangers with tears in my eyes. The man at the Barnes and Noble who speaks to an invisible man about his acquaintances in 18th-century Russia; the boy in the park teaching his St. Bernard to play dead; the woman and her child at the market putting their hands all over the mangoes, in search of the perfect one. They all carry their deaths inside them. They are all already dying. I watch them all like bits of the universe that have come to life for a short time, sculptures of stardust that have been put under a spell of sentience, of animation, of the in and out rhythms of breath and water and fuel.
Two billion heartbeats–that’s the allowance we’ve been granted. Two billion, then the beats run out.
“I am learning to see,” Rainer Maria Rilke writes in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. “I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to.”
You remember when you first began to see. You were ten years old and you came home from school and put in the mixed tape your best friend left in your room and you dug the worksheets your teacher had given you out of your backpack and you smoothed them out onto the desk and, for the first time, you wondered why you were doing what you were doing. So you began your search for truth, you began looking. You thought that maybe the world was a big trick that was being played on you, that if you looked hard enough maybe you would see something everyone else missed. What was it though? You knew, but you couldn’t get a clear picture of it. It was a hunch, a sense, an unspeakable inkling of understanding. You understood it as a frequency, a vibration, not a concept to be explicated.
I went to Paris eight years later. When I stepped into the reconstruction of Brancusi’s studio I forgot, for a beat, how to breathe. There it was: what I had begun to feel eight years earlier. Those white, undulating figures. Yes, I thought, this is what the world is like beneath the veneer our pattern-seeking eyes have built. These lovers, this muse, a bird in space–they were all suggestive of form, though never explicit, never obscene. They were stripped down to the essence of the thing.
We are reactive things, responsive, reflective. We take in and we put out. We take in the air and the water and the fuel and we put it right back into the world. We take in art & knowledge and twist it to our liking and let it spin off in its brand new form for someone else to swallow & spit out.
At the end of August you drive to Nova Scotia with a stranger and lose your sense of self in the vast blue sky stretching out over the empty highway. There is literally no one in sight for miles and miles at a time. You become an echo in the passenger’s seat, a shell that has evicted its tenant and now has the joy of tumbling through the sand and sea because it is light enough for the wind and water to carry. You sleep in the car, in little enclaves off the side of the highway. At night the sky is riddled with stars, more stars than you thought the sky could hold. And you look up and remember that the closest star besides the Sun is about 25 trillion miles away, and that you’re actually looking at that star, Proxima Centauri, as it was four years ago. You will never see a star as it appears in the present moment, in your present moment, not while you are on Earth. Even light, the fastest thing in the universe, is slowed by great distances. The thousand-mile drive is suddenly nothing. You are suddenly nothing.
What is it that keeps us alive, I wonder? How do we stay alive for so many years with such frail bodies and so many ways to die?
- Leave a comment
- Posted under current issues, time
