This place I live, it used to be one of those great inland oceans. Not a few hundred, but a few million years ago. Doesn't it seem as if everything used to be a great inland ocean?
That place I grew up, the one with the weeds, Swedes and serial killers? That used to be a great inland ocean. I remember finding fossils of little crustaceanish creatures in the shale that lined the shores of Lake Chautauqua on summer breaks, and often, I'd trace the space their body had left in the rock with my finger and thoughtfully considered what they had looked like, what colors they had been and what they might think of the world today. Like, what if time was an illusion and flexible, and it bent back upon itself? What if this Nautilus-like critter suddenly found itself in Jamestown New York on the shore of Lake Chautauqua in 1985 between a Dairy Queen cup and a broken beer bottle? What would it think of its bizarre surroundings? What would such a thing feel like?
Bear with me; this will meander. I'm not a writer. I'm an artist. I don't get the whole: first, then second, then third thing.
So I drove out to one of the neighboring burbs this afternoon to get a new pair of sunglasses. Retail therapy; my sister would be proud.
The closest Walmarts and Home Depots and Targets are a dangerous half hour's drive via a highway littered with the aged and Asian drivers, people who go whichever way they choose through a roundabout, people who play with the settings on their single lens reflex cameras while driving. Hippyville is at the bottom of a bathtub of sorts--an evaporated inland ocean--surrounded by great, green rims at the North and East, and a mountain range at the West. Anywhere within the basin you can see it, because Hippyville is day-glo pink. No shit. Pink, like hot pink; seriously fucking pink. Pink as my watermelon bowl.
And today, on my drive home from the neighboring burb, through the lenses of the new sunglasses that were supposed to assuage my pain--but of course did not--I noted the pinkness, and I'll be damned. People, I'm living in a giant vagina.
I've literally crawled into a womb.
The town in which I went to college was once at the bottom of great inland ocean. Apparently, everything was. We used to collect rocks from the creekbed that lined campus and make impressions of the fossils for design class, you know, so we could talk about symmetry in nature and other fun stuff. In ceramics class, I pressed porcelain into different fossils I found and adorned my poorly thrown pots with them. It was kind of the only way I was able to get a decent grade in that class. Fucking clay sucks.
For Theories and Concepts class, we had to put together a collaborative project. This dude with a wood major built an enormous structure out of plywood, a collapsed corner of a room, with an ascending floor and descending ceiling meant to play with the concept of perspective. A fine arts major painted it all sorts of dark colors. Other people adorned it in certain ways, trying for a grade the way I had with the pots in ceramics.
Now, the shape of this thing really got to me. I had a hard time dealing with it. I wasn't the type that got overly artsy about art school. I was a design major for Christ's sake, and my specialty was logos. What the fuck was all the black and the clove cigarettes and the blathering on about Sam Beckett for? I considered it hubris; but this big black hallway type thing, it really got to me. It made me very uncomfortable. I'd spend whole sessions of Theories and Concepts just staring into it with this choking feeling in my throat. A discomfort, a twitching. The panic I felt in my bedroom at night. The anxiety that made me check my dolls and my Holly Hobby lamp for recording devices. The nightmares I'd have when I fell asleep on my boyfriend's chest, and the desperate breathlessness I experienced when I woke from them. The dull ache of knowing in my heart, that I was inherently alone, no matter how much company I surrounded myself with.
The subconscious notion that everything about the real world was false, and all that seemed good was bad.
I decided the concept I'd explore would be one I didn't actually understand, but was obsessed with nonetheless. I pulled a little piece of The Republic, The Allegory of the Cave (a description courtesy of Wikipedia):
Socrates begins his presentation by describing a scenario in which what people take to be real would in fact be an illusion. He asks Glaucon to imagine a cave inhabited by prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood: not only are their arms and legs held in place, but their heads are also fixed, compelled to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which puppets of various animals, plants and other things are moved. The puppets cast shadows on the wall, and the prisoners watch these shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the noise produced from the walkway.Socrates asks if it isn't reasonable that the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen. Wouldn't they praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world? And wouldn't the whole of their society depend on the shadows on the wall?
I read this as part of AP English in my senior year of highschool, and like I said, I never understood it much, but it haunted me. I had printed out a copy and put it into my diary. I thought about it a bit too much. Maybe it was an obsession. Something about that man, chained up, staring forward and being fed a reality that wasn't his...it felt so real, and when I walked up and down the ascending floor of the dark hallway, I thought of him. I thought of what it must feel like to think all reality a few false shadows. What it must feel like to live in that cave, to want to leave, and to be unable to understand why.
So I drilled a hole through one wall, and shone a light through a warped, colored piece of glass that cast a shadow on the other side of the wall bearing no resemblance to the piece of glass that had mothered its existence.
As it was the only authentic act of my undergraduate career, it was an A+. My mother took a picture of my standing next to it, anorexic in a pink top, perfect makeup, perfect hair, the flash from her camera erasing the beam. It looks as if I'm gesturing toward nothing.
Maybe time isn't flexible, for you. For me it is. One day, I'm an ancient crustacean. I'm uncomplicated. Simple. Easy. And though there is an undeniable ache in me, reality is a finite thing with parameters and boundaries and rules. It is false, but tenable. Next day, I'm scuttling across the floor of an evaporated ocean, a giant pink vagina, a womb, and nothing I see or hear or feel makes sense. I have to learn the world again.
I imagine I feel the same way that crustacean would feel. The same way the man in the cave would feel. Broken.
But at least the real is actually real, and it will never be false again.
Posted by The Bunny at 10:17 PM