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Posts from the ‘essay’ Category

Jul 13

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I Want the World to Be My Sad Dream

Everything dies. But only humans feel so goddamn bad about it.

We feel bad about death, about decay, about endings. Despite religion. Despite philosophy. Despite our enlightened minds and all the scientific knowledge we possess. We fear death, for ourselves and the others we love. In the same vein, we fear the lesser forms of death: pain, loneliness, anxiety over being. After all, we invented existentialism.

We are depressing, sad creatures, us humans, so no wonder we want to bring everything else down, too. Well, maybe you don’t. But I do. I’m a writer and a neurotic–and an agnostic, too. I don’t have the faith of the religious in an afterlife–the world for me is only here and now and all my stakes are tied down here, and all my love and loss lives here. So maybe that’s why I want trees to long for the past, balloons to suffer crises of faith, the sun to feel sorry for itself because it always misses the moon.

I keep reading reviews lately–in journals, on Amazon, online, most recently, I think, in the Georgia Review–where some writer bashes some other writer for excessive use of the pathetic fallacy (the gifting of human attributes, actions, and emotions to animals, plants, and objects), but I think it’s all a matter of taste and desire. I want the universe to be as crazed and miserable as me, so of course I’m going to love Calvino’s Cosmicomics. Others may find it too cute by half, but I say why not find solace in the fanciful thought that even ions can wander and weep and want, just like us humans? If existence has made me a melting mass of nerves and depression, then why can’t I define that existence any way I want to? Why can’t I mold it, box it in, expand it, frame it, give it the ability to share my pain and maybe my joy, too?

Some of us want to feel less alone in the world; we want the world to live and be as we are.  Some of us like to dream the world the way the world will never be. Some of us just want the world to be a dream.

Jun 4

Hope for Ugly Ducklings?

This blog is awesome. I like that it offers hope even while we’re laughing at these poor, sad, dweeby nerd-children.  I would totally submit to it, except that there would be a “hmmm, she’s not really all that much better now…” factor to my submission and that just would be awkward for all involved.

Just the same, I really do always always always win these contests. I was officially the world’s most awkward, gangly, giant-pink-glasses wearing, short-thick-puffy-perm-triangle-head, “creative” accessories queen of the nerds.  We had this office contest once, where everyone brought in the worst pictures of themselves they could find. It was all fun and games  (“You were so pregnant!” “I wore funny pants!”) until I set my two pictures down. A hush settled over the office. In awe, my co-workers gaped and gawked at these sad, amazing, nerdy pictures, all the more inspiring for the total lack of self-consciousness the kid in them exudes. I thought I was hot. I thought I looked good. And that is what makes these pictures true marvels; they aren’t the usual pics of hunched-over, downcast pre-teens who look profoundly uncomfortable in their own pimply skin. No, these are pictures of a girl so nerdy, so weird, that she didn’t even know enough to be ashamed of it.

I’m kind of proud of this; to me the pictures show how happy anybody can be in their own head, despite the world. But for everyone else, (especially peeps who were popular kids and only awkward in the way everyone was: “I wore Eastlands! I tight-rolled my pants! Ha!”) there seems to be some sort of willful societal rejection in these pictures, and it clearly makes them squirm. I enjoy that. It’s what I try to do with much of my writing. Upend the social order! Even just enough to make the laughter a little uncomfortable, a little forced. Just a little.

May 25

The Misleading Myth of the Conservative Utopia

Great essay by J.C. Hallman on Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, Glenn Beck, and why conservative utopias aren’t really utopias at all:

It’s fashionable at the moment to conflate Glenn Beck, the Tea Party movement, and, now, Rand Paul.  What’s not been discussed so far is the wide range of open religious sentiment apparent in all of these.  Ayn Rand was a famous atheist.  Glenn Beck is a curious and dangerous mélange of talking head and televangelist.  And the Tea Party wants to regard the Constitution as sacred document.

There’s a reason they’re all in bed together.

In In Utopia I make the argument that extreme conservative utopias (everything from Theodore Hertzka’s Freeland to a range of twentieth century novels suggesting that the path to peace runs through holocaust) are not really utopias at all.  Rather, they are reconciliations to an imperfect world.  These “utopias” reject the idea that government or planning of any kind can make the world a better place.  Much better is a policy of not planning, small government, the invisible arm of the market, social Darwinism as nature’s intent, and so forth.  In short, no plan is a better plan.

Read the whole thing here.

Mar 31

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Someday We Will All Be Ruins and It Makes me Claustrophobic

I have a lot of dreams about light. Not light from the source, but paintings of light, artificial light, shadow and contrast and sharp edges. Light contained. Flat canvasses filled with color, blooming and spinning with brightness. Light as the origin, as the beginning of everything. As the only thing.

These abstract dreams are clearly ripped off from Mark Rothko. I feel slightly embarrassed when I wake after dreaming them, recognizing the paintings for what they are: a cheap imitation, a riff, at the most. It’s never enough for me to say I interpret, I understand. No, I have to go and dream someone else’s paintings to understand myself. To understand what it means to wish for a time when light was a window open wide.

When I was thirteen, my family moved from Nebraska to Wisconsin. It was then that I first lived among hills and woods and shadows, in a house surrounded by huge soft evergreens that blotted out the afternoon sun. It was then that I began to have dreams about light. I dreamed of running against the sky and watching the land forming before me, of early dawn and cruel white glaciers sweeping back rocks, pushing forward through buckling, bulging soil. I dreamed of heaps of earth, lit by a fuzzy, incandescent sort of sun.

Understand, I didn’t grow up in a wheat field. I grew up in big city suburbia, among seamless mint-colored lawns and beige and brick ranch split-levels. There was nothing wild about that landscape, nothing untamed in the four lane highway to the west or the vast mall complex to the east.

But it was the last of childhood, and so there was a yellow halo, a diffuse glow over the last uncomplicated spaces I would ever occupy. And so too, there is a thing long unresolved in me since we moved away from the plains, a kind of freedom that seems to have gone. Its shadow sits unsettled and burning just under my collarbone.

In my writing, Nebraska loses its finite place in space and time. It ceases to become a state, full of cities and people and things. It becomes flat land and bright open spaces everywhere. Strangely enough, it is this Nebraska that has moved into my memory. I live in the city now, and I love being surrounded by clamor, laughter, bodies, lamps, litter, rooftops, iron grates, things. The city is my world and I am very much at home here. But once in very great while, I dream of the light filtering through the bluer Nebraska sky, and suddenly I want to knock the city down, buildings and cars, everything, and find the land underneath. To make sure it’s still there. Not out of respect for nature—but out of fear that, like Babel, the world of people and things will suddenly slide into ruin. It’s a sort of claustrophobia, brought on by the weight of too much history. It’s the paradox of suffocating in the dark, hungry middle of life while obsessing over the ends of it. So soon born, so soon to be snuffed out.

Rothko thought we had lowered our standards, that we had become too complacent. In his work he tried to capture what he saw as the tragic essence of man: that we are forever caught between birth and death. He finally chose the latter. He chose to stop dangling in the middle. Of course, most people get used to the middle; in order to live most people get used to anything. Even the way space feels when you are driving away from it. Even the sideways pull of nostalgia’s gravity.

I rarely dream the light anymore; only in the most cramped of moments when I’m full of the awful anxiety of existence. When space becomes too small at the same time living becomes too big and my brain seems to go vast and dark and heavy as boulders. That’s when I dream those primordial paintings now.

Rothko once said that he had “visions of space expanding to infinity, the spaces of the beginning, when the world was clear.” I wonder if that’s not what my dreams of light are: a wish for beginnings. For the time before birth, before middles, before the muddle, before anything at all. The glaciers bulldozing the new world clean and blank as a canvas.