Sacred space

Eliade talks about modern man as a creature mired in practicalities, leading a profane existence that breeds confusion because all things are relative, and all contexts are always in flux. Admittedly, as a Westerner I feel beset sometimes by aggressive advertising. Billboards everywhere encourage me to buy, to use, to discard, and for a few extra cents to supersize my experience. Temptations are everywhere and they are juicy, cancelling for a time all other voices in my head that whisper about health and wellness. But some people hear no such voices. So I imagine they are easy preys for temptations. American advertising stirs, dares, pokes, lurks and stalks. An ad will linger, through some mnemonic and subconscious legerdemain that only advertising people know, on our mental taste buds long after we've ingested it. What is the most effective thing that displaces the memory of an ad from our mind? Another ad. They never shut up. And so it is that time off from work does not give me the respite my brain needs and I return to work just as lethargic and fed up as I left. I often long for a vacation from advertising.

And yet, according to Eliade, modern (nonreligious) man is also capable of creating his personal sacred space, despite his pragmatic and unsentimental environment:

"There are, for example, privileged spaces, qualitatively different from all others — a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the “holy places” of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life."

I do remember certain firsts as landmarks in my life, far more memorable than other subsequent similar episodes. For instance, the first time I traveled to Belgium - also the first time to Western Europe - everything was magical. The streets sparkled under the incessant drizzle, the French-speaking people were chic and picturesque, as if teared right from pages of Vogue. The bread was fluffy, the pastries light as air, the beer more flavorful than the richest mulled wine I'd ever had. I idealized everything.

And then there I was, my first time in the States, on the shuttle ride from Atlanta to Macon. It was like a journey to another planet, and I was full of trembling excitement to hear a Southern lady at the back of the bus speaking in her native droll, talk which a few months later I found especially irritating. The lush, humid heat of the green Georgia summer was exotic and intoxicating, like a mind-altering drug, and this heat too I later grew averse to. Yet in my mind, that first ride to Macon was like going to Wonderland, and I not realize that a starry-eyed, 20-year-old me experienced, in that beatific heat that steamed up the windows of the white minivan, a shard of sacred space.

About a water pump

Here I am, trying to write something at Starbucks. Part of my ten-step back-to-writing plan. I remember an episode of Sex and the City where Carrie moves in with Aidan, and discovers all the inconveniences that come with togetherness. A writer with a deadline, she has to relocate to a local Starbucks to write her column, since she can’t find peace in her own apartment. She used to think, she says, that those sojourners in coffee shops, mugs of coffee by their side, silver apples glowing on their laptops, were posers. But now, in her predicament, she realizes they are just people who recently moved in with someone. She meets their eyes, smiles, and empathizes.

And so it goes. I’m here for pleasure rather than necessity. Walking here is my daily cardio work-out. I walk fast, trying to down out the noise of cars revved up, of rude honking, of the loneliness of walking in Albuquerque. Unless you are clad in some type of athletic wear, some Adidas or Nike or Pearl Izumi gear that justifies the activity, you feel you’re trespassing upon some unwritten code of conduct. Walking, for the sake of it; for zero emissions; for exercise; for slowing down and looking around; for a change. Locals don’t understand it. They slow down by my side, roll down their windows and offer me a ride, honestly wanting to help. I still can’t get over it. For thousands of years people have walked without asking why, and it’s only now, in the 21^st century, that we’ve reduced this antediluvian praxis to an athletic niche. You have the bikers, the runners, the rock climbers and... the walkers (and the power-walkers, but they are just walkers with pent-up anger).

The pair that sat down on the sofa next to me talks as if they are either slow or positively crazy. They are mother and son, both seemingly addicted to meth or some such mind-numbing agent. For the past half an hour they have been laboring to look up “auto repairs” online. But they are stepping on each other’s toes like an old married couple who loathe each other with a passion.

“Mom, get me a chocolate scone!” he demands before even sitting down.

She starts to protest, but he raises his voice, sounding now like an overgrown, hormonal child.

“Mom, get me a chocolate scone,” he clamors a few more times as if he knows for a fact that Starbucks has bore and nurtured a chocolate scone destined precisely for his highness. He looks about seventeen, a tall and ponderous American boy raised on hamburgers and deep-fried delicacies. With an apathetic, unfocused gaze, as if his eyes are almost rolling in his head, he accosts me.

“Excuse may, what’s the Way-Fay called here? His teeth extend over his underlip rodentlike.

The mother is in her mid-fifties and flaxen-haired. Dark shades cover half of her face and she makes no sign to remove them despite the nearing evening.

“They don’t have a chocolate scone,” she says after having inspected the pastry window. “But they have a huge chocolate chip cookie.”

They proceed to negotiate, the son insisting on his predestined scone, the mother touting the oversized cookie, their voices overlapping, indistinct. I know every one in this coffee shop can hear them even though they’re pretending not to.

“Just sit down here,” he commands suddenly. His voice sounds like a digitized whine. He reminds me of Beavis and Butthead – even the shape of his head matches. And the mother, I’m almost sure I’ve seen her in Breaking Bad as the crack-whore who dwells at the Crossroads Motel downtown.

“No, I’m not getting you anything to drink, sorry,” she says stiffly.

He must have asked for a beverage while I spaced out. All right, now I’m curious. You come to Starbucks but you don’t get drinks. What could they have come for? The pastries? Hah. Is she trying to cut down on sugar? But then a cookie is out of the question. Does she not want to spend too much? I smile at my own naivety. For any sane American, eating expenses are not to be tallied, doubted or given any thought. So it can’t be that. By this time I’m absolutely riveted with curiosity: why the embargo on drinks?

Finally, they connect and are now typing away into a search engine. Meanwhile, the mother has brought over two large chocolate chip cookies, wrapped separately. Last time I was paying attention, they were talking about splitting one. Two large cookies, but no drinks. How enigmatic.

The mother has now turned to calling auto repair shops. A timing belt is the object of interest, and she wants to know what it will cost. Earlier today, Pep Boys tried to rob her blind for the item.

“How much did he say?” the son demands.

The mother looks at her idle phone as if expecting it to deliver the right answer in the form of a prophecy.

“No, he’s talkin’ about a water pump, too.”

This is her answer. The same inane conversation repeats itself identically.

“How much did he say mom?”

“He’s talkin’ about a water pump, too.”

Hardly a conversation, but rather two separate conversations played at the same time.

To my joy, they’ve now decided to move to another table nearby. I can still hear their exchanges. A cat could make more sense than these two. It seems they’re each talking to somebody else, someone in their head.

“If we was in California, I’d’ve gotten it cheaper,” she says with a loud snort.

“Mom, you’re sittin’ on the cayble.”

“What, baby? He was sweet-talkin’ me. He was talkin’ about a water pump, too.”

Negatively mad

What makes a photograph? I mean – what makes you stay, not look away. Is it the colors, the technique, the subject, the lighting, the unexpected factor? I am asking myself this because I’m contemplating a new photo project. In this project, I take photos of mundane objects in the house and try to make them poetic. A rudimentary keyboard, for instance, with the black trapeze keys rising in perfect order like soldiers, each one holding up a coded flag, all backlit in a discotheque of neon colors. Something like this - only in images. Fernando once told me a story about a class he taught, where the students, with their cameras, were locked in a classroom for several hours and were asked to produce their final class project right then and there, having as subjects only the items in the classroom. They came up with the most brilliant things. The lesson is that limits challenge us and stimulate creativity, leading us to talents we didn’t even know we had. It’s definitely a hypothesis to which I am partial.

But really, I am not trying to be one of those would-be artists, you know the kind, who explain their would-be art and prompt for oohing and aahing from the audience. If I am a good artist, I should at least hope that I wouldn’t have to explain my art. How am I different from a poet, who formulates the lyrical with words and vernacular fireworks? I strive for the same, but use another medium. So then, if the poet’s verbal imagery limps, not lending itself easily to be conjured in one’s imagination, then the poet probably stinks. And in the same way, if my photography makes little sense without my profuse attempts at explanations (where I use tangled abstract words and run-on sentences to mystify the audience, who will nevertheless nod spastically as if they grasp everything so thoroughly), then, well, I must stink as a photographer too. Yes, it really is that black and white.

I have yet again spent the entire day indoors. Such days, when I am cloistered in my tower, are more numerous in my life now. Here’s how the idea for this new project was born, sitting at this table quite simply and boredly, eating a carob-chip cookie that I made myself. I spend so much time looking at these objects every day, and in my dejection they are even more trivial than their mundane design and purpose have already cursed them to be. They are beyond dull and nondescript, they are irritating and exasperating, and they are angering me. I could just stand up right now, get closer to this haughty chair and smack him one with a hammer, just to show him! Serves you right, chair. Or! – tomorrow, when I wake up, I could arrange the blinds just so, make a studio out of the sunrise light and find some inspiration to take a portrait of this chair, as if it is smiling. You see? It really is a challenge. But wait, don’t call the funny farm on me just yet.

A year after

November. A sensitive time for me, a sort of purgatory. This year the topic for December is “aging” – as it is every year, thanks to the relentlessness with which the world celebrates birthday anniversaries. Perhaps we should mourn them instead. I briefly glanced over here last week, with dread rather, and it happened to be November 11, exactly a year since I wrote my ominous last post. So I became even more resentful of myself, if that is even possible at the moment, and resolved to write another post the same day, an anniversary post, if you will.

Evidently, I failed. One cannot simply sit and decide to write, as I knew too well. Words don’t come easily, and even less so when they’re rusted with disuse, as are mine. I’ve tried to discipline myself and attempt one of those spartan challenges, where the gratification of an impending need is conditioned upon the completion of a less desirable and more arduous task. I browsed for ideas through the cliche hand-holding techniques they teach you on Yahoo. No breakfast until I write one page (but I am hungry!). No shower until I come up with one story idea (but I need one!). Puerile as I find these things, they might be the only way I’ve left to marshal my now-slothful mind into some sort of constructive routine.

Halfway through the first paragraph, I did prepare breakfast. I toasted wheat germ, mixed it with some yogurt of a dubious expiration date (but I wonder if yogurt could ever go bad, since yogurt is already milk gone bad, in a sense), and with dried cranberries. But I am still writing. A satisfied stomach feels good, the yogurt did not kill me, the heater purrs happily next to me like a napping cat, no life-threatening things have happened lately. Life is good. Nathan and I arrived at this conclusion yesterday, when we summarized that: we have enough food to eat, we have all our limbs, our minds are healthy and we do not live in North Korea. So we are lucky. And then Nathan made one of those jokes that hardly make sense even to himself, something about grandma’s house, if I remember us playing there when we were children. Then he looked at me with a dumb smile, as if I’m supposed to understand something arcane within. Many of these jokes do, for all their randomness, become prophetic in some way, as most ambiguous things are, and little did he know that I was thinking of precisely that, of grandma’s house and of being young and careless. Neither of us has yet figured out how to be an adult, I suppose, and so far we both find adulthood rather disappointing.

And since my talents are becoming less numerous and I lack a photo of my latest feats, as befitting a resurrection post, I decided that the pizza I made last night could well fall under the “feats” category, since cooking, unlike writing, is still something I am good at. Entirely-home-made pizza with whole wheat crust, evil pepperoni and wholesome vegetables on top. Goes well with a nice Chardonnay, by the way. Thanksgiving is coming, so in the spirit of being thankful, I am happy for pizza and wine, for being alive and for having not lost my marbles yet.

A lack of focus

Since I joined the faction of those who sell their minds to moneymaking ventures, I have felt, organically, my brain contract. And a strange propensity has taken over me, one that I had previously recognized in my working-world friends, but which I thought would have no claim on me: the sin of lassitude. I must have postulated that I was made of a different material, perhaps, that I was far too intellectually-engaged to be conquered, or even tempted, by idleness. How haughty must I have been.

The cruelest part, I find, is that I am fully cognizant of what is happening to me, yet I am unable to curb it. I cower before forces I no longer understand, and my control over myself, over the things that happen to me, dwindles. Mondays segue into Fridays, and the weekend catches me in a stupor. Overwhelmed by too many choices and the terror of limited time that flies, I sit in complete paralysis at the kitchen table, wondering what to eat. This seems to be my most dominant concern. Food gives you an illusion of activity and a prosaic impression of fullness. I am lured into the notion that I am doing something that justifies the time, and the neglect that I’ve shown to writing and aesthetics. And still, although the fridge is perpetually packed, and the seductive smells of your cooking never lacking, I feel empty. E-mails remain unwritten, photographs unshot, books unread. The more these undone things are piling on me, the more I cower, the sicker I get, the stiller I stand, at the kitchen table.

I can’t explain, really, why it’s not easy to simply get off my ass and do something. I marvel at my own brain sometimes, how intractable it is, how resistant to discipline. The strategies I used to employ in college to make myself study or read are inadequate now for this much larger monster that’s challenging me. That this is real life, no longer its dumbed-down replica that was college, lends my lassitude additional significance. For anything bad that happened in college, any shameful behavior, any destructive tendency, could be forgotten in the afterlife. The real world is when we start over, leaving college and its frivolousness behind. But in my case, the evolution is backward. If in college I was studious and diligent, obsessed with good time management and personal conquests -- usually intellectual ones -- it is only now, in the real world, that I’ve become prey to shopping online, reading celebrity gossip and preferring the indoors to the outdoors. That these preferences are even on my list, that I even considered them, shames me. There is no need for a greater penance than the contempt I sometimes feel for myself, the betrayal I’ve committed of what I could do as an artist, as a writer, and the time that’s stolen every day from these possibilities.

I recently received in the mail a copy of a magazine that published my photography. My hands stroked the glossy cover, also one of my photographs, and the contrast between past and present saddened me to no end. The sensible aspiration is to be on an ascending curve where experience and knowledge and value increase with time and age. A parabola, not a hyperbola. And while I am fully aware that lethargy is poisoning me, that it was some time in the past, not the present, that I best approached my desired version of myself, I see no exit from this specious argument. Hours spent at work, office chit-chat and computer nonsense, talk of operating systems and corporate tools to learn and master, lay ravenous claim on my saddlebags of energy. Evenings, I sit at the kitchen table and we play cards, because I cannot decide to whom I should reply first, whom to call, where to begin a blog entry. Too much energy is necessary for anything of value. And I fall asleep at 9 p.m. because my eyes can’t stay open long enough to read a full chapter of East of Eden. If I feel brave, we’ll watch a movie and I’ll be sure to fall asleep, without you even noticing, and at the end I’ll force my eyes open, to save face. The next day is probably Friday, or any other day of the week that looks, from my point of view, just like Friday. And once again, I’ll contemplate myriad options, and choose none.

Frightened Rabbit

Hours pass and no books are read, no pages written, no bike mounted. Today, for the first time, the kitchen sink is dry. Have you made pizza, she asks, and I hide flooding eyes behind a guilty smile. My failure’s well hidden. I could walk the streets and look like a real person, not the specter I am. Only the walls know, having kept me secluded for the past three days. They’re sick of me too, as I am of them. There’s a crowd outside the building waiting to stone me, chanting my name with acrimony, someone who promised and never delivered. I almost hope there is.

Leave it to me to write about depression while depression’s trying to write me off. It’s only the respite that affords contemplation, in the end. There’s too much bedlam here, enough to preclude any explanatory effort. I can’t share something I don’t understand myself. Wounds keep cracking, oozing, hurting. No healing happens. The phone is mute, pokerfaced and cruel. I’ve no pride left for self-persuasion, for silent wars. I stare at the little thing and plead, drops tickling my neck as they roll down, wondering what I’ve done to deserve this. It’s overdue, this self-flagellation, and so is all your advice, years too late, poisoning those phone calls that would otherwise speak of concern and friendship. Stop asking what I am doing. I am sinking. Once the Titanic was hit, what could you have done to keep it from going down?

It would be better if you didn’t have to watch. I’ve half a mind to elope somewhere where nobody knows me, and bleed my failures there. My vocabulary, once a cornucopia, is now a tribute to contingency: could, would, should and should have. I was once told that I was the most brilliant person on campus. I thought it was a joke, but by her face I saw it wasn’t. Today I unearthed my wide black and white prints and looked at them, marveled at the things I used to make. Yes, apparently. I used to make things. And write things. And win things. I think of myself as a discontinued person, like a page break, where a “brilliant” one ends and a failed one takes off, with nothing to link them, save for a name. Had I known that school was the only thing I was good at, I would have stayed there.

The devil you know

Somebody flushes in the apartment upstairs. I jump in my seat, silence the online radio. The carpet feels soft and warm under my feet, like a freshly dead animal. A wood splinter from a certain sunny deck in Macon has left my heel tender. I walk like a thief. Behind the door I expect to find somebody and I prepare my vocal chords for dramatic yelling, no less. In my dreams, someone is chasing me, and I try to scream, my mouth open, taut, but nothing comes out. Nobody saves me. I stand there silent, waiting to be killed over and over.

When I look at people, I wonder if they’re smarter than me. I lose at chess twenty times every day and I come back for more each morning. I’m thrilled by being humbled by a novice computer. The plight of being intellectually less equipped than the majority of the population consoles me, like the empathic hand of fate fondling the rough edges of my head. I’ve succeeded to deceive everyone. It is entirely possible that my infrequent accomplishments have been the result of the fortuitous alignment of chaotic elements, the same kind of alignment that now stubbornly refuses to occur. Is it not possible that an otherwise second-rate person to appear, under certain contextual light arrangements, exceptional? Such an inference depends as much on the onlooker as it does on the subject, and with society defining common interpretations according to a variety of signs, it is likely that several onlookers will infer similar conclusions when looking at the same thing. And they could be wrong.

If I were to receive an award each time I am told that my resume is “impressive,” my very resume would expand exponentially. With all the career advice I am reading these days, instructing me to translate my pedestrian projects into coming-of-age experiences, I feel virtually pulled by the sleeve to be original, outrageously original. Chances are that others will find my originality outrageous. Fortunately, I can write to Yahoo and complain about being screwed over by their advice. They will fondle the rough edges of my head.

These days, I imagine myself ever more often in Bucharest. Places have a familiarity to them, although really in this city I am more of a stranger than I’ve ever been. In this barroom I’ve landed, there’s a guy who feels like family. Every single thing about him reminds me of someone I know. His face, of my grandfather, a young version. Light skin and reddish around his blue eyes, the nostrils and along the edges of his ears. His hair reminds me of my librarian benefactor, light blond and grey. His peaches-and-cream shirt, of my grandmother working in the garden at the countryside. His running shoes, well, of someone I know who wears running shoes in all the wrong places. His walk, of Katherine’s lopsided gait.

People are so much alike that it scares me. But collectivities are different. People negotiating coexistence, giving and gambling, playing, strategizing, compromising. In these practices, people are remotely dissimilar. I like the collective American, rather than the individual. As to the Romanian, I like neither the collective nor the individual. Come to think of it, I am not so crazy about myself. Especially not right now.

But I, at least, am a devil I know.