August 16, 2006

• A Postcard from Europe

  

   

   

  When I was in Paris I visited the Pompidou, a modern art museum.  To travel to each exhibit I waited on tubular escalators remniscent of a robot's bloodless intestines. Each room was either too bright or too dim, and I affected fascination with each piece, my feet echoing on the glassy floor.  I once asked my art teacher if she knew the secret behind contemporary art, and her answer was that it created a 'mood.'  Vainly, I tried to look at the art for what it was.  I stood with the pixie haircuts and designer jeans, the black nail polish and skinny cigarettes.  I stood with these hipster art freaks and tried to understand what I was seeing, let it enlighten me.  I walked forward, backward, and squinted my eyes until everything blurred.  

   

  The next room was for films.  It had mostly short films of neon people screwing in painful positions; but one intrigued me.  It projected a man writing outdoors.  As he wrote on the paper, the sky downpoured.  Soaked, he continued.  And every time he wrote, the rain freed his ink from structured letters, swirling them into limpid images.   During my third viewing of this film, all feeling clogged my throat, and if I tried to laugh I would cry. I stood and floated to the next room. 

   

  That’s how I ended my trip to Europe, anyway.  The first week was spent in Athens, the second in Rome, third in Florence, and the last was in Paris.  Athens, Rome, and Florence all contributed to my new view of the world.  By Paris, by the time I reached the Pompidou, even the cleanest, most robotic, machine-like piece of ‘art’ couldn’t have laid a metal claw on my newfound inspiration.  Things had already begun to look different to me by then.  There were colors I never saw before, or just never noticed before.  Everything I came in contact with had a life of its own.  Everything greeted my eyes as a beautiful experience and nothing more than that.

   

  When there's a stain in life it can be magnified times a million of its actual depth.  Sophomore year sucked, but in petty ways.  Mom grounded me for two whoollleee weeeekendzz.  My art teacher didn’t like me.  I had ‘problems at home’. Everything multiplied into clusters, clogging my senses and my outlets.  That’s what problems do, they stuff your ears so you can only hear your own cynical thoughts, they drape a gray veil over your eyes so all you can see is the repetitiveness of your stupid life.  It’s solitary confinement. You're deaf, blind, and beauty is alien.  You listen to depressing music, sense the emptiness in your writing, in your art, until they're no longer outlets.  And then?  Then you seek professional help. 

   

  I’m talking about the day you implode, and how afterwards you are ashes. 

   

  I arrived in Athens thinking I would spend my adulthood behind a greasy Burger King cash register.  Music was empty, and I listened to songs only to analyze their sound, to control my moods.  Songs were prescription drugs.  Sad? Belle and Sebastian. Pissed off?  Pixies. The world was a jigsaw puzzle that only made sense when I was a little kid.  But now I felt obliged to deconstruct the puzzle and scrutinize each piece to find its deeper meaning.  No piece made sense alone. 

   

  Athens was a dirty city, but we explored other regions in Greece.  The first was Delphi, where the oracle once prophesized.   During the three hour ride there, an instructor told us to write a question for the oracle.  I took this assignment so seriously that I wrote nothing.

   

  Staring out the bus window, I listened to a song called “Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons” by Pixies, and suddenly mountains engulfed us.  My hands migrated over to my camera.  I checked to see how the picture turned out, and it resembled any two dimensional glossy postcard ever to grace the shelves of souvenir shops.  Once again I gazed out the window gaped at the mountains; I smiled at the city of Delphi. 

   

  Every ruin for Apollo was enormous, standing wizend under a halo of clouds.  Overall, the tour focused on the accomplishments of the Greeks.  Every ruin was oozing with “See how smart they were?”s,, and “Damn, I can’t believe they could do this three thousand years ago”s.  To be honest, though, I wasn’t paying much attention to the tour or even to the ruins themselves.  The only time I listened was when the oracle was mentioned. Apparently the oracle was an illiterate woman who made her predictions by inhaling some type of hallucinogen and then squabbling in gibberish to a translator.  Other than that, the only thing that truly caught my interest was that rare but familiar sensation of feeling completely insignificant.  I couldn’t focus on those tiny crumbling ruins when there were miles and miles of mountains all around me, making me feel free but comfortably snug at the same time.  It was the first time in over a year that I felt like a human being.  I was standing on top of the world, but I was so, so small that it didn’t even matter. 

   

  Because along with my petty problems last year, I was also developing this boiling hatred.  At first it wasn’t for anything or anyone in particular.  It was just anger.  Then I started hating myself for being angry all of the time. And then, by the middle of the school year, my hatred was not only directed at myself, but broadcasted out toward all of humanity.  I hated people.  I hated people and I hated the way people lived their lives and I hated what people created. I hated that my entire social life seemed to revolve around whose parents weren’t home that weekend.  I hated how so many of my relationships were typed out and saved on a hard drive.  It killed me to see everyone live such routine lives, do the exact same things every day until each day was the same day and they only lived to pay the bills, buy the groceries, succeed.   And all the people I met were polite because their parents taught them to be polite and told them what to say to strangers.  And all the people I knew did what they did every day because they had goals they wanted to accomplish, set goals written in stone, written in resumes, written in college applications, tests, quizzes, myspace profiles.  As far as I could tell, the world was flat and the people were made of machinery.

   

  But there I was, high in those gigantic mountains, feeling such a rush that I could hardly contain myself.  I still hated humanity then.  I still hated people.  And seeing these beautiful mountains made me feel vengeful and relieved at the same time.  This, I thought as I smiled to myself, is what humanity wants to create.  They want to create mountains.  Cleaner, taller, laser-powered mountains with glossy windows and room for escalators and elevators and spotless restrooms.  They’ll call them sky scrapers, too, and they’ll stand tall and proud in the center of cities, reaching toward our infinite sky like untainted syringes filled with radioactive pollution and a dash of conceitedness.  And when their artificial mountains don’t leave a mark, they’ll create artificial birds.  Cleaner, larger, engine-powered birds that slice through the clouds and serve cute little pretzels in cute little airtight packages.  They’ll do all that because humans want to succeed.  They are driven to succeed even when there’s nothing left to accomplish.  They are so driven that they dare to replicate the forces that created them in the first place.  I hated how people seemed to think they could play god, and I hated how all they were really doing in the midst of creating was destroying. 

   

  I still believe we’re killing nature.  However, the difference between now and then is that at that time I was nearly convinced there was nothing more powerful than what people created.  I chose to forget about the hurricane and the tsunami and the mountains.  Mentally and sometimes physically, I lived in a city.  I was surrounded by people and their creations all the time.  I was suffocated by my own miniscule problems.  Only on the rare, celebrated occasion might I have seen a single star in the sky.

   

  I brought my camera with me for the tour, mostly taking candid pictures of people on my trip and odd stones with ancient etchings on them.  At some point, I got up on a ledge and once again aimed my camera at the view. Once again the picture was just another postcard to send to my relatives.  “Delphi, Greece” would be the yellow-lettered, italicized caption beneath the picture, and I’d mail it my grandparents who might hang it on their refrigerator.  But this time I looked at the picture and something in me settled.  No longer was I too low or too high.  My mind settled into this serene state, this rare, undisturbed placidness.  I breathed in the cool air, I smiled, I turned my camera off.

   

  Beauty can’t be captured, and people can't create the earth.  Buildings, airplanes, cameras – I wanted moutains, birds, and presense.  What we’ve invented, they were only machines, and no one could give them the beauty of living. 

   

  Humans were robots.  Their creations were as dead as their routine lives, and my camera proved it. 

   

  But in Paris the first art museum I visited was the Orsay.  Every room contained living pictures. Their colors summoned me, making me wonder about the stories they were trying to tell.  Each painting was a window into another world, a lingering glance at beauty viewed through other eyes.  Sunsets ranged from smooth strokes of reds and yellows to orange and purple splatters.  Self-portraits were as realistic as photographs, as distorted as one’s reflection in a rippling puddle of water. 

   

  That was the day I abandoned my anger, and the world was no longer a puzzle. I saw it as an infinite canvas, painted with every color, every texture, every stroke.  And although it made little sense up close, I only had to step back and feel small, not insignificant, but small.  Then we were beautiful, the buildings were beautiful, and I thought nothing of our dying batteries.

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