Two More Days

Went to Tallahassee for the last real visit. Taking a couple of days to think this trip over for myself has helped immensely. I was all caught up with my friend in the portion I’ll be sharing with him, and I wasn’t even real sure how I felt about the rest of it. I knew it was coming up, and that I had to take some time to get my head sorted about it, but I wasn’t doing that. I always get so agitated when I don’t have time to consider how I feel about big, exciting life changes.

I’m beginning to realize that the time-fairy doesn’t come grant you those hours, you have to carve them out for yourself. So often I compare my level of contemplativeness to when I was about nineteen, which isn’t fair to myself. At that age, that year, I really didn’t have anything to do but take mythology and creative writing classes, and sit on my ass and think. Obviously I reached a level of self-reflection that I just couldn’t attain in the last five years or so, taken up as it has been with finishing my Associates degree, getting into art school, enduring my boot-camp first year of that, and getting prepared for this journey. In there also was my relationship with Rance, someone so similar and yet so different from me, that it distracted me from myself.

I’ve accomplished so much in the last six years. You would just have to know me to know how different I am now, how much more purposeful, capable, just how much farther along in the “real world”. But you also would have to have known me then, to know how the lack of an intense inner life has hurt me for a long while. I’ve done what I unconsciously set out to do in 2000, which was to turn my life around. The headspace and lifestyle that got me from there to here is not going to work with what I now want to go on and do. Big changes are in effect, in how I see the world, in what story I tell myself about what I’m seeing, in how I choose what action to take. I want to get back to my old way of being, of living life deeply and recording it thoroughly. This skimming of the surface and sketching out the details is necessary when you’ve got a goal in mind, and are trying to catch up with where you think you ought to be. But I’m caught up now. Time to shift gears back to what feels most true and right for me.

Two more days after today until I leave America, to go live in a foreign country for awhile. No, in no way did I think this is how it would turn out. I had vague hopes that someday…but to have my truest wishes so concretely satisfied–no, I’m not wasting this time with to-do lists and grim determination. Let it all go to hell, my degree, my worldly ambitions, all my structures.

I want this to turn me inside out.

Last Week in America

Countdown’s standing at five days until I get on the plane for Paris, bound for a year abroad. What could I possibly do to my brain to make it grasp this reality? I’ve tried repeated dosages (some quite large) of Yuengling beer and Diablo wine, I’ve tried taking it out in numerous checklists, and I’ve tried ripping up the checklists and just burying my face in my cat’s soft grey fur. I’d like to take my brain out, blow on it, shake it a few times, stick it back in and see if it’ll jump start.

After a spring of applying to the study abroad program (as well as my Painting department) and a summer of alternately lolling around listening to Mofro and frantically running trip-related errands, it seems I’ve finally reached a deer-in-the-headlights mind-numbness about it. I’ve played the same fantasies in my head so often of how it’s going to be over there, that the mental pictures don’t excite me anymore, and anyways I’m bone-weary of preparation. But at the same time, I’m panic-stricken at the thought that it’s about to really begin. I don’t feel ready, but I’m tired of getting ready. Can you tell that there’s been a emotional roller-coaster aspect to this adventure?

I do feel certain, though, that once I get in the truck to ride with my dad to the airport, my natural love for new things will take over, and give me the rush it’ll take to move out of this fog. Maybe I’m clinging to my boredom now, because I know instinctively how exciting everything is about to get!

City Spirit

Today Lance Armstrong won his seventh Tour de France. We watched it from the cyclists’ entry into Paris, to Armstrong’s winning speech. Of course, seeing the Tour Eiffel through the gray rain sent me into a tizzy about Paris.

I needed to see this—not just an American doing something positive and heroic, but also to see an un-romanticized, non-glossy view of Paris. That city as backdrop, not subject.

And what I saw on the t.v. brought it all back to me, and then some: the place is as majestic, as gorgeous, as indicative of human triumph and accomplishment as I’d remembered from my trip there in 2003. Paris just doesn’t disappoint.

So much more than the sum of the river, old buildings, monuments, well-dressed people, human scale; so much more than just knowing that it’s Paris. There is something there. Some alchemy has been performed in that part of the world. It’s magical because it represents, in stone and action, the upward thrust of the human spirit. Clumsy, abrupt, unpredictable, inconsistent…but inevitable and beautiful.

Conservator

It’s hard to believe I’m actually going to France for a year. There really isn’t anything left to do for the trip; all plans are set. In a way, this summer is going so fast it’s scary—I want time to conclude all my projects and soak up Florida and America. But in another way, I’m also afraid that these last five weeks will drag agonizingly.

I’ve been thinking about pursuing a career as an art conservator. The job would definitely use all my talents and interests; unlike painting itself, where I’m only supposed to be interested in painting alone. I spent the night looking up art conservation schools. Cambridge? Cortauld? Delicious, but intimidating.

And today I felt scared about it all. I didn’t want the trip to be railroaded by any career plans. I still wanted this upcoming year to be fluid and open, just living and art-making. It’s really sinking in that I’m going there, not only for a novel little junior-year experience, but for the purpose of advancing a career. It’s also a trial run, a laying of groundwork, and a possible training for residence there.
That’s pressure.

I feel myself backing away a little from grand plans. Not unreasonable at this stage.

Dennis

Branches come first. You start with the easy things, get them out of the way; otherwise, you tire quickly on the big stuff, and end up just kicking the small pieces around. So we told ourselves, though I admit finishing our preliminary beers had something to do with our decision. Still, it was an important job, and we wanted to be thorough.

We stood around the front yard of his grandparents’ house in north Santa Rosa County, an isolated property on the Coldwater River. It was still and hot that July morning, the blown-out dankness that hangs in the air after a hurricane. The sun shone brightly down on the blasted green leaves littering the yard, remains of Hurricane Dennis. From one end of the property to another, branches—and sometimes whole trees—pulled at the limbs around them, scrambled and pitiful.

Tossing our empty bottles in his truck bed, we set to work.

No one had heard of Katrina yet. New Orleans was still a vibrant—if apprehensive—city that afternoon in September 2004, when I put my face in my hands and cried in Richmond’s public library. Having no cable or internet yet in my new apartment, I relied on the library’s internet to show me what Hurricane Ivan had done to my hometown. There is nothing worse than being far from home when people you care for are in harm’s way. I had spent an agonized night as the Category 3 storm struck Gulf Shores, sending ten feet of water surging over the beach, tearing off my friends’ roofs. At the hour the library opened, I had gone straight back to the computers, bringing up the Pensacola newspaper’s website. I was afraid to look, but I had to know.

There was my favorite bar on the beach with its innards sucked out, looking less like a club now, and more like a wobbly old pavilion. There were houses of old high school friends, reduced to swirls of wood. Fort Pickens was underwater. My home, the place in the world that I love most of all, was truly battered.

My back had begun to ache from the bending. His grandparents’ property, while well-kept, was still a basic country A-frame, deep in the north county woods. Trees outnumbered open spaces by a large margin; but there had been enough room for the wind to pick up and fill the clearings with debris. The easy twigs and small branches were long since piled up. We had paced ourselves carefully, neither of us wanting to be the first to have to start dragging the large branches. We ranged over the property, sometimes following the strewn saplings to opposite ends of the field from each other; sometimes working side by side, him holding the black plastic sack and me filling it with sticky pinecones. I took a grim delight in the work, despite the increasing pricks and splinters. After all, I’d have given anything to have been here, doing this, the previous fall.

When my friends had seen the large green swirl bearing down on them on their television screens that September, almost all of them fled the area. The lucky ones stayed in motels, or found family out of the warning area. The unlucky ones got stuck in their cars on random Georgia and Alabama roads, listening to the remains of the storm pass overhead from inside rest areas and truck stops. When it was over, a spooky stillness fell on Pensacola. The town’s online newspaper was one of the few sources of information out of the suddenly-isolated area. I had internet access. My friends did not.

The newspaper sent helicopters with cameras to canvass the city, photographing damaged areas and posting the photos on their website. From all over the south, evacuated residents looked to the site to see if their homes still stood. And from my seat in the Richmond library, I looked on behalf of my friends, as they waited silently on the other end of our cell phone connection.

Large branches down. Split trunks, limbs tangled in the powerline. Utter stillness. We got the chainsaw out, as the sun balanced at noon. The quintessential post-hurricane racket. Sawing through the still-living wood, dragging the pieces over to the bonfire pit, straining to lift them and fling them atop. The labor reduced itself to an endurance of unthinking motion—racket, saw, drag, lift, throw. With each step, I crushed underfoot my memories of last autumn’s agony, my fears for my friends, my remembered helplessness. I dragged it to the pit and threw it in, later to burn. My palms turned red and raw, the sweat covering me. All the frustrated pity I’d felt last fall, loosened and flowed out of me, leaving my heart through the ache in my muscles. This time, I could act.

When I’d been on the phone with my anxious friends, clicking hesitantly through the galleries of photo carnage, I thought it couldn’t get worse. When one of my friends, unable to evacuate, was missing for over a day, I didn’t think I could take any more strain. But the worst outcome of hurricane Ivan took longer to unfold. It began when my evacuated friends went home. The majority fortunately had homes to go to, but their tales of the wretched destruction all around them broke my heart. Here I was, stuck in Richmond, with no money and no way to fly down there and be with them. No way to help them. As they pitched in with their neighbors to repair roofs, bathed out of bottles, and ate a month’s worth of Army MRE’s, I slept in my air-conditioned house and wished I was anywhere but Virginia. All that was asked of me was that I turn away from their problems and focus on my easy life of being a painting student, but I couldn’t. I would have personally unearthed Pensacola Beach with a teaspoon, if I could have just gotten down there. I would have tirelessly worked to fix even the smallest piece of my hometown.

Soon there was more cleared ground than covered in his grandparents’ yard. The piles to burn had multiplied and towered over our heads, but the job was nearly done. Hot. That wasn’t even the word to describe us. We walked over to the well, our vision nearly tunneled with exertion and beer. As he primed the pump, I swayed a little on my feet. The water ran clear into the plastic bucket, and I could smell its coldness. He pulled on the handle, all machinery silent now, dead with lack of electricity. He’d gone a month without power, the previous fall. He’d lost ten pounds from the crappy packaged meals. But that was ten long months ago; and as he lifted the bucket and poured the shocking icy water over both of us, that time was washed away.

Escape

I meant to stay in Richmond this summer, I really did. But I’m finally fed up with this sticky heat, my trashy crackhead neighbors jumping on the roof until 3 a.m., the prospect of walking to work down empty streets that smell like melted trash. Much better to spend a couple of weeks packing and drinking ice-cold Pastis, fantasizing about France. I bought my backpack for the trip, a green Diesel bag, and sent off for my visa to study in France. We’ve ordered our plane tickets and planned to spend our first week in Paris.

So there’s not much else to do, in this city I was so excited to get to know. The emptiness of my life here, of wandering through my quiet apartment, spending days just looking up photos of Europe on the internet…it’s a relief and a blessing after the mad hustle of this past school year, and the struggle it took to get up here. Should I have done more? Perhaps. But it’s over for now. Noting to do but look ahead.

I’ve passed through the “there has to be a catch” phase, and the “oh my god, it’s too much, I’m embarrassed” phase, and am now in the “tentatively blisteringly excited” phase. It’s funny—while I don’t doubt for a second I’ll be going (I have the acceptance letter, the means and the ticket), it’s still impossible to believe.

~~~

I told my friend that lately it doesn’t feel like America wants what I have to give, and that I didn’t feel like a valuable citizen here. He replied, “Well, maybe you’re not really a citizen of America—maybe you’re a citizen of the world.”

Once upon a time you could be both, an American and a world citizen. I remember when it was practically encouraged, when it was seen as important to bridge the distance between America and other countries. Now I feel disloyal for even valuing another country, let alone wanting to go live in one, let alone France! “Unamerican” is like “unfeminine” or “unmasculine”, one of those labels only applied by the backwards. You have to choose your battles, and I’ll only fight those who fight honorably. So now it feels I’m running.

I’ve learned that the people who are judgmental and disapproving of you all the time—no matter what you do—are the ones who actually know the fewest things you need to know. There’s no great secret wisdom that they have that you don’t, either about yourself or about anything. Though they’ll do anything to make you believe they do. They actually know less than you, and they realize it, and cover that up with impenetrable meanness, deflection, and judgment. They call their hostility “the truth”, and accuse you of being too weak to face it. But if they know any great truth, why are they so darned unhappy?

So am I less of a citizen of America for desiring to live in France so fiercely that it makes my teeth ache? The answer isn’t “yes” or “no”—it is, as my friend so succinctly put it, “who cares?” I don’t owe allegiance to anything outside myself. Nobody ever did.

Paris Hilton = Damien Hirst

After reading many, many websites over the course of the last ten years, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three main types: those that say something, those that ramble on about not much, and those that are carefully crafted to say a whole lot of nothing.

It’s the same way after a year of art school. The vast majority of student art is a whole lot of conflated blather about not much: labrynthine, “mysterious” depictions of repetitious personal issues; sophomoric,  cookie-cutter attempts at current-event “statements”. Late-adolescent self-absorption aside (and I’m not judging; nobody was more self-obsessed than me at 19), there are left two camps of relatively serious artistic types–those who believe in meaning, and those who don’t. Those who believe in meaning view art as a way to say something, to place something of value from the inside of themselves, into another’s insides, through the medium of art. Symbolism, emotion, wordplay, mood, and setting, as well as all the formal elements of art, are simply tools to get the thing of value—concept/feeling/belief—across. Medium might be slightly subjugated to message, but both have a place of respect and a relationship with the artist.

Those artists who don’t believe in meaning would never tell you so. They make the kind of art that everyone pretends to understand and use big words about, and are in various stages of denial or cynicism about its true quality and worth. They are the current darlings. They wear trucker hats. They claim to play with the medium and let it speak for itself, but that’s a lie—the medium, as well as the audience, the concept of art, and reality itself, are victims of an attempted subjugation by the hollow ego of the artist. Every aspect of their art, formal and theoretical, is carefully calculated to add up to a great big nihilistic zero. Their artistry lies in how ambitious or complicated a piece they can make, and still have it arrive at complete meaningless degrading emptiness—either that, or how many people they can fool into thinking they’ve made something “so profound” that few could understand. They may not be completely responsible for the enthronement of empty trash, but they sure don’t mind benefiting from it. They are the ones who, having found their precious niches in postmodernism, absolutely refuse to let that movement organically die and be replaced by the next big thing—leading to a repulsive and ultimately empty cycle of conceptual bulimia. Garbage in, garbage out.

And yes, I think one way is better than the other, at least for now. I know, “values”, how biased and regressive of me. But you’d have to be a complete fool not to realize what a dark patch we’re going through right now, both as a country, and in the world. Nobody’s unaware of the horrifying illogic and madness the world is capable of inflicting on itself. Raping ourselves with nihilistic, meaningless imagery will only further teach us that insanity is normal. We don’t need any more education in that.

Believing that, and believing in soul, is one of the reasons why I feel perfectly alienated in the  heart-of-darkness art world of America today. It’s claimed its position, and so have I.