Negatively mad

What makes a photograph? I mean – what makes you stay, not look away. Is it the colors, the technique, the subject, the lighting, the unexpected factor? I am asking myself this because I’m contemplating a new photo project. In this project, I take photos of mundane objects in the house and try to make them poetic. A rudimentary keyboard, for instance, with the black trapeze keys rising in perfect order like soldiers, each one holding up a coded flag, all backlit in a discotheque of neon colors. Something like this - only in images. Fernando once told me a story about a class he taught, where the students, with their cameras, were locked in a classroom for several hours and were asked to produce their final class project right then and there, having as subjects only the items in the classroom. They came up with the most brilliant things. The lesson is that limits challenge us and stimulate creativity, leading us to talents we didn’t even know we had. It’s definitely a hypothesis to which I am partial.

But really, I am not trying to be one of those would-be artists, you know the kind, who explain their would-be art and prompt for oohing and aahing from the audience. If I am a good artist, I should at least hope that I wouldn’t have to explain my art. How am I different from a poet, who formulates the lyrical with words and vernacular fireworks? I strive for the same, but use another medium. So then, if the poet’s verbal imagery limps, not lending itself easily to be conjured in one’s imagination, then the poet probably stinks. And in the same way, if my photography makes little sense without my profuse attempts at explanations (where I use tangled abstract words and run-on sentences to mystify the audience, who will nevertheless nod spastically as if they grasp everything so thoroughly), then, well, I must stink as a photographer too. Yes, it really is that black and white.

I have yet again spent the entire day indoors. Such days, when I am cloistered in my tower, are more numerous in my life now. Here’s how the idea for this new project was born, sitting at this table quite simply and boredly, eating a carob-chip cookie that I made myself. I spend so much time looking at these objects every day, and in my dejection they are even more trivial than their mundane design and purpose have already cursed them to be. They are beyond dull and nondescript, they are irritating and exasperating, and they are angering me. I could just stand up right now, get closer to this haughty chair and smack him one with a hammer, just to show him! Serves you right, chair. Or! – tomorrow, when I wake up, I could arrange the blinds just so, make a studio out of the sunrise light and find some inspiration to take a portrait of this chair, as if it is smiling. You see? It really is a challenge. But wait, don’t call the funny farm on me just yet.

A year after

November. A sensitive time for me, a sort of purgatory. This year the topic for December is “aging” – as it is every year, thanks to the relentlessness with which the world celebrates birthday anniversaries. Perhaps we should mourn them instead. I briefly glanced over here last week, with dread rather, and it happened to be November 11, exactly a year since I wrote my ominous last post. So I became even more resentful of myself, if that is even possible at the moment, and resolved to write another post the same day, an anniversary post, if you will.

Evidently, I failed. One cannot simply sit and decide to write, as I knew too well. Words don’t come easily, and even less so when they’re rusted with disuse, as are mine. I’ve tried to discipline myself and attempt one of those spartan challenges, where the gratification of an impending need is conditioned upon the completion of a less desirable and more arduous task. I browsed for ideas through the cliche hand-holding techniques they teach you on Yahoo. No breakfast until I write one page (but I am hungry!). No shower until I come up with one story idea (but I need one!). Puerile as I find these things, they might be the only way I’ve left to marshal my now-slothful mind into some sort of constructive routine.

Halfway through the first paragraph, I did prepare breakfast. I toasted wheat germ, mixed it with some yogurt of a dubious expiration date (but I wonder if yogurt could ever go bad, since yogurt is already milk gone bad, in a sense), and with dried cranberries. But I am still writing. A satisfied stomach feels good, the yogurt did not kill me, the heater purrs happily next to me like a napping cat, no life-threatening things have happened lately. Life is good. Nathan and I arrived at this conclusion yesterday, when we summarized that: we have enough food to eat, we have all our limbs, our minds are healthy and we do not live in North Korea. So we are lucky. And then Nathan made one of those jokes that hardly make sense even to himself, something about grandma’s house, if I remember us playing there when we were children. Then he looked at me with a dumb smile, as if I’m supposed to understand something arcane within. Many of these jokes do, for all their randomness, become prophetic in some way, as most ambiguous things are, and little did he know that I was thinking of precisely that, of grandma’s house and of being young and careless. Neither of us has yet figured out how to be an adult, I suppose, and so far we both find adulthood rather disappointing.

And since my talents are becoming less numerous and I lack a photo of my latest feats, as befitting a resurrection post, I decided that the pizza I made last night could well fall under the “feats” category, since cooking, unlike writing, is still something I am good at. Entirely-home-made pizza with whole wheat crust, evil pepperoni and wholesome vegetables on top. Goes well with a nice Chardonnay, by the way. Thanksgiving is coming, so in the spirit of being thankful, I am happy for pizza and wine, for being alive and for having not lost my marbles yet.

A lack of focus

Since I joined the faction of those who sell their minds to moneymaking ventures, I have felt, organically, my brain contract. And a strange propensity has taken over me, one that I had previously recognized in my working-world friends, but which I thought would have no claim on me: the sin of lassitude. I must have postulated that I was made of a different material, perhaps, that I was far too intellectually-engaged to be conquered, or even tempted, by idleness. How haughty must I have been.

The cruelest part, I find, is that I am fully cognizant of what is happening to me, yet I am unable to curb it. I cower before forces I no longer understand, and my control over myself, over the things that happen to me, dwindles. Mondays segue into Fridays, and the weekend catches me in a stupor. Overwhelmed by too many choices and the terror of limited time that flies, I sit in complete paralysis at the kitchen table, wondering what to eat. This seems to be my most dominant concern. Food gives you an illusion of activity and a prosaic impression of fullness. I am lured into the notion that I am doing something that justifies the time, and the neglect that I’ve shown to writing and aesthetics. And still, although the fridge is perpetually packed, and the seductive smells of your cooking never lacking, I feel empty. E-mails remain unwritten, photographs unshot, books unread. The more these undone things are piling on me, the more I cower, the sicker I get, the stiller I stand, at the kitchen table.

I can’t explain, really, why it’s not easy to simply get off my ass and do something. I marvel at my own brain sometimes, how intractable it is, how resistant to discipline. The strategies I used to employ in college to make myself study or read are inadequate now for this much larger monster that’s challenging me. That this is real life, no longer its dumbed-down replica that was college, lends my lassitude additional significance. For anything bad that happened in college, any shameful behavior, any destructive tendency, could be forgotten in the afterlife. The real world is when we start over, leaving college and its frivolousness behind. But in my case, the evolution is backward. If in college I was studious and diligent, obsessed with good time management and personal conquests -- usually intellectual ones -- it is only now, in the real world, that I’ve become prey to shopping online, reading celebrity gossip and preferring the indoors to the outdoors. That these preferences are even on my list, that I even considered them, shames me. There is no need for a greater penance than the contempt I sometimes feel for myself, the betrayal I’ve committed of what I could do as an artist, as a writer, and the time that’s stolen every day from these possibilities.

I recently received in the mail a copy of a magazine that published my photography. My hands stroked the glossy cover, also one of my photographs, and the contrast between past and present saddened me to no end. The sensible aspiration is to be on an ascending curve where experience and knowledge and value increase with time and age. A parabola, not a hyperbola. And while I am fully aware that lethargy is poisoning me, that it was some time in the past, not the present, that I best approached my desired version of myself, I see no exit from this specious argument. Hours spent at work, office chit-chat and computer nonsense, talk of operating systems and corporate tools to learn and master, lay ravenous claim on my saddlebags of energy. Evenings, I sit at the kitchen table and we play cards, because I cannot decide to whom I should reply first, whom to call, where to begin a blog entry. Too much energy is necessary for anything of value. And I fall asleep at 9 p.m. because my eyes can’t stay open long enough to read a full chapter of East of Eden. If I feel brave, we’ll watch a movie and I’ll be sure to fall asleep, without you even noticing, and at the end I’ll force my eyes open, to save face. The next day is probably Friday, or any other day of the week that looks, from my point of view, just like Friday. And once again, I’ll contemplate myriad options, and choose none.

Frightened Rabbit

Hours pass and no books are read, no pages written, no bike mounted. Today, for the first time, the kitchen sink is dry. Have you made pizza, she asks, and I hide flooding eyes behind a guilty smile. My failure’s well hidden. I could walk the streets and look like a real person, not the specter I am. Only the walls know, having kept me secluded for the past three days. They’re sick of me too, as I am of them. There’s a crowd outside the building waiting to stone me, chanting my name with acrimony, someone who promised and never delivered. I almost hope there is.

Leave it to me to write about depression while depression’s trying to write me off. It’s only the respite that affords contemplation, in the end. There’s too much bedlam here, enough to preclude any explanatory effort. I can’t share something I don’t understand myself. Wounds keep cracking, oozing, hurting. No healing happens. The phone is mute, pokerfaced and cruel. I’ve no pride left for self-persuasion, for silent wars. I stare at the little thing and plead, drops tickling my neck as they roll down, wondering what I’ve done to deserve this. It’s overdue, this self-flagellation, and so is all your advice, years too late, poisoning those phone calls that would otherwise speak of concern and friendship. Stop asking what I am doing. I am sinking. Once the Titanic was hit, what could you have done to keep it from going down?

It would be better if you didn’t have to watch. I’ve half a mind to elope somewhere where nobody knows me, and bleed my failures there. My vocabulary, once a cornucopia, is now a tribute to contingency: could, would, should and should have. I was once told that I was the most brilliant person on campus. I thought it was a joke, but by her face I saw it wasn’t. Today I unearthed my wide black and white prints and looked at them, marveled at the things I used to make. Yes, apparently. I used to make things. And write things. And win things. I think of myself as a discontinued person, like a page break, where a “brilliant” one ends and a failed one takes off, with nothing to link them, save for a name. Had I known that school was the only thing I was good at, I would have stayed there.