The Human Line

I’m not sure what it was this morning that threw me off. I got out of the car, and as I walked through the city, I imagined what a monk must feel like as he enters a city after a long time in his monkish seclusion. Amazement? The good kind or the bad kind? Maybe he wouldn’t be phased by it. I had a feeling of pending overwhelmedment. So many people we are. I’m not really sure why this throws my layers out of register, but it seems so difficult. Where the Jesuses and Buddhi of the world have expanded their hearts to love this sentient mass of needs, loves, joys, weakness, I am tipsy because I am responsible for them. I have to help them. I have to solve them and they are too many to solve. [Personal affects hanging in windows that I can’t relate to and don’t understand.] Perhaps they are even happy, and I am the broken one.

I am on my way to a loud, motivational, expensive tech conference in a stadium and I am stunned by a large charcoal drawing of two men looking the same direction as me—that is, away—at nothing, at something. I am happily stunned because it is art, and I walked by the galleries in hopes of being stunned by art, and I am succeeding. I am also stunned because it is made by a hand.* It wasn’t even worked by a hand, but drawn. And I'm not sure why there is love in it. Not love—a man—a man, I am assuming—why there is a man in it. Our relationship is so easy and filled with nuance, with that thing poetry seems to have. This is an artifact. It is a silent moment of a note to me, scribed by a mute in his oversized notepad, hung in this window, and I get it. I want to buy it. I want it to be in my collection. I want to have a collection. I want to collect single things—wordless writings that have been touched, marked, created, said by a person’s hands, to me. Antidotes to my theoretical virtuality—not ideas of things—reproductions, illusions, copies—but Things Themselves. The magic that makes me melancholy is this: this is real, and I am hoping it all up. 

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*I am also stunned because it reminds me of comic books—bold, graphic—which tugs on a certain pre-teen chamber of my heart, among other things.**

**It should also be noted that I just read the novel The Adventures of Cavelier and Klay by Michael Chabon, which has as a central theme the emotional merits of writing, drawing, and reading comic books, which stirred many of the aforementioned fond emotions.


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I met Mark Rothko in a dream last night. The details are fuzzy, but I recall that I spotted him in NYC somewhere, and had a chance to take a really great picture of him (something akin to the image above), but missed it. The next time I got a chance, he was coming down some stairs, so I just went for it, and my flash went off, which made him very upset. I quickly apologized, and told him that I’m a great admirer of his work—“In fact,” I told him, “I’m in the middle of your biography.”

“Oh,” he replied, with an I’m-rolling-my-eyes tone in his voice—not because he wasn’t impressed: “Have you gotten to the terribly depressing ending yet, where I kill myself in self-pity?”

I am, in fact, in the middle of his biography. Rothko was notoriously predisposed to being contrary. If anyone said something admiring about his work—despite being accurate—he would claim they’re missing the point entirely. He simultaneously desired fame and notoriety, and cursed the impersonal commercialization of his work that fame brought on. So, this dreamed-up response of Rothko’s, where he’s embarrassed by his own life, is quite fitting.

At this point, I start to get a little confused. After being invited by him to his apartment (dirty, messy), I have to ask, “What year is it?”

“1974.”

Rothko killed himself in 1970. It was as if he’d read his own biography, and was determined to rebel against his own status-quo. In the dream, he was sick and dying, but had managed to stick it to his own history.

There was another person there with us, a guy my age, who was constantly interrupting my questions—question, really. I had one question I wanted to ask him, that would have gone something like this:

“In our modern day, bright, saturated colors like those in your paintings are so commonplace—we have unnaturally vivid TVs, computer screens, phones—even print technology is much more vivid and accurate than it was in the 50s. Would you say that your paintings, in the cultural context of black and white tvs, muted color magazines, and centuries upon centuries of a more ‘natural’ use of color, were that much more violent, stunning, and other-worldly?”

But I never got the chance. I’m sure he would have answered it by tearing my question apart—which I think would have enjoyed.


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There is a home video of me when I was about 6 years old that often pops into my head ever since I watched it back several years ago. It's one of those odd experiences where I actually remember doing it, and now I’m watching that moment back through the eye of the camcorder—it’s a weird kind of emotional stereo, I guess. But it sticks with me because it’s as if a sizable chunk of my personality is condensed into 3 seconds.

I’m making it seem a lot more serious than it is: it’s a video of my two older brothers (around 11 and 13 years old), dressed in denim jackets, sunglasses and spiky-combed-back-with-mousse hair, dancing and singing along to “I’m Fat,” by Weird Al Yankovic. They're having a grand ol’ time, doing their quasi-synchronized, mostly improvised dance, singing, “I’m fat! I’m fat! You know it—you know it” and then comes the moment: little Jeremy, in his Spiderman jammies, can’t resist the fun anymore, so he jumps up off the couch and starts gleefully dancing along! Wee! This is really fun! Dancing, dancing and then ohmygosheveryoneislookingatme and I jump back on the couch and shove my head between the cushions in embarrassment.

This funny little scene has reverberations throughout my little life history. It’s a poignant caricature of all the times, big and small, that I’ve wanted to break out and do something ridiculous or extraordinary or unexpected or drastic, but then coil back because of a lack of courage, or a resurgence of practical thinking, or laziness, or the fear of what others may think. I guess it’s a paradox: I love the idea of new, exciting things, but I recoil at the thought of drawing attention to myself—of being different, which is a characteristic almost any great idea requires. Often, there are perfectly good reasons why I recoil, and I rarely regret it. But sometimes, I think I’m going to go crazy with all these piles of unfinished, unexpressed Good Ideas in my brain.

Speaking of which, there are more ideas in my brain about this very subject, but because I’ve done this same little pattern about a dozen times with this very blog post (“Maybe I should say X or Y, or maybe I should just forget it...”), I’m just going to go ahead and post it now before I bury my head again in the proverbial couch-cushions...

Or am I burying my head by posting it now, unfinished and not fully expressed?

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Dawn—

I decipher the colors I see

behind my sun-lit eyelids—

it really is orange, not black—

A bridge,

Dawn, haze, lake, trees—

“‘You do not command us’

the Land says”

they must have thought—

the pre-machine people—

They probably did as they paddled canoes or whatever

looking at this.

But I think,

Aren't we just being creative?

and,

We kinda do.

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Runners

Time has joined the ends of Mercury's arrow-path—

no doubt he laughs

at our mobius-looped short-shorted messengers

urgently sweating through streets

sans-errand, no letter and

nothing retrieved but

relieved when they finally gasping achieve

their starting point.

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Corporate Food

I eat delicious though corporate food

with noise

and among us there are five men in striped dress shirts

no tie

saying words to each other like

“Chaos Creates Opportunity”

“The Fog of War”

“Horizon” with “Them Focused”

and I value them

because they are paid more

and they are talking to each other

Managing

and Money

and they are not talking to each other.

And I

catching my own gaze in the window glass

am talking to no one.

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