So. The blog thing. Guess I’m onboard now, for want of a better outlet at the moment. Introductions are in order, I suppose, in the event that someone’s reading.
I am, by nature, a writer, though by trade I’ve been numerous other things in the 33 years I’ve been on this planet. Youth and inexperience tainted most things I wrote up until my third decade, but I’m now in the process of figuring out just what it is I’d like to say in the limited time I have left to say it. That, for the moment, is what this blog is for.
I suffer from no fatal diseases thus far, nor from extreme psychological distress. But I burn with a desire to understand this world, this existence, and I possess an inexplicable desire to say things that have not been said, or at the very least to rephrase and revisit good observations that have gone unnoticed.
I like things that are hidden in plain sight. These are numerous, and no less invisible for their seeming obviousness. Genetics, geography, and accidents of history have made me into someone who does not fit into the society at large very well, and so a great deal of my time is spent poking around the edges of the canvas, while others lounge in the middle, trusting that all is secure in their painted world.
I enjoy florid language, as you’ve no doubt noticed. It’s an affectation likely born from my desire to set myself apart from my Middle American neighbors, but can be more directly traced to watching far too much PBS-imported BBC programming as a child. I don’t speak this way in person, but when writing, it comes out unbidden. It’s not an unusual problem. Twain used words far larger than most of his fellow steamboat passengers would’ve bothered with, or even known about. Pretension, when not used in the service of obfuscation, can bring invention.
Four of the last five paragraphs begin with “I.” No doubt that tells you something.
I work in an office building in downtown Dallas, Texas. My work is not important, except to keep me fed and sheltered. I am not wealthy, nor am I truly poor. I would use the title “middle class,” if it really meant anything these days. Everyone thinks they’re middle class, as I did when I was poor. In my case, it’s because I was born middle class, and so that’s always been my self-image. But as recently as a year ago, I was in fact very poor, saved from the street only through the largesse of middle class friends and family. Absent those connections, acquired through no real effort of my own, I really don’t know what would have happened to me.
But for now, I’m solvent, and fairly happy. Happier than I’ve been in a long time, actually, which is unusual. Very few of my life goals have been achieved, and I remain artistically stifled due to the pressures of being an employee, husband, and father.
However, as senses of purpose go, few things are as potent as parenthood. My 2-year-old son is entirely dependent upon his mother and me, and that will only change gradually over the next 16 years, if not longer. When viewed through the prism of my family’s average lifespan (90 at the youngest), 18 years doesn’t seem like that big a chunk of time for total commitment. But of course it falls right in the brackets of midlife, when, depending on your level of curiosity about the world, life is at its most confusing and terrifying.
In many ways I know so much more about the world than I did when I was young, but so many more questions have popped up in the learning process that I remain in a bit of a fog most of the time. I know what I’m doing, and what I’m doing it for, but I can never escape the feeling that, just at the corners of my vision, dark things are moving that, if not properly understood, will one day bring the whole thing crashing down. Paranoia? Perhaps. Refer to our friend Joseph Heller for clarification.
Civilization as delicate veneer over brutal nature is self-evident, in my experience, and constitutes a great deal of my anxiety. While in many ways humans are more civilized than they have ever been, the near-ubiquity of civilization can blind us to the truth of human nature. When learning of a brutal act, I have never once asked, “How could someone do that?” I understand the potential for cruelty and brutality in every one of us, and I find it surprising that someone could be surprised at such things. One of the things I feel compelled to explore is how to understand the beast within, and how to reduce the chances of it coming out, not only in myself, but in society at large. We can civilize ourselves into ignorance about what lies under the surface, and we do so at our own peril.
I once fancied myself an artist first and foremost, and most days I still do. But increasingly I find my self-identification skewing normal, and it frightens me a bit. It’s not that my ambition is gone, it just seems to be on indefinite hold while I wait for proper motivation to gear it back up.
I have well-placed fear about this state of affairs. My father, an artist himself in younger years, deferred that dream indefinitely and let it disappear, so that by the time he returned to claim it, it had slipped away. I worry about Act II featuring the son’s folly, but I must acknowledge that I’ve tried much harder to make my art stick than the old man did. I also didn’t have parents who told me it was a waste of time, and for that at least I have my disillusioned father and frustrated mother to thank.
But what I have developed over the past few years is a different sort of realization of what art is for. Rather accidentally, I found myself fascinated by the art of the photo monograph. For those unfamiliar, research Bill Brandt or Henri Cartier-Bresson. The general idea is that there is value in documenting life as it’s happening. Commentary isn’t always necessary, and in fact it can sometimes detract from the power of capturing a moment in time. This can be done photographically, musically, theatrically, cinematically, or in words, the arena I’m predisposed towards. I have since read works such as Orwell’s Down & Out In Paris & London, Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, and much of Bill Bryson’s writing. These are snapshots of life in a given moment in history, the Holy Moment sought after by filmmaker Francois Truffaut and others.
Probably due to mild colorblindness, I find the black-and-white photography of early photo monographers to be some of the most compelling, though many paintings from well before that era can also evoke a sense of captured time.
With time being the feistiest dimension, the one we can’t quite get a firm hold on, it’s hardly surprising that freezing it for closer examination can become an obsession. Of course, these snatches of time pressed down into our pages may not look like much in the short term. But as years pass, and our memories grow thin and porous, seeing a concrete piece of a bygone time can be riveting, even shocking. This is what the best documentary art does, and it’s what I would like to be able to accomplish in some measure before my body and mind cease their loose affiliation and the matter that was me moves on to other activities.
Pretty lofty goals for a blog, I know. But I have to start somewhere. Consider this a scratch pad for…something. The world moves fast enough now that I can’t with any confidence predict what I will eventually create. So here’s me, talking to you. Whoever, wherever, and whenever you may be.
Post a Comment