Adulthood

This entry was originally posted on 15 March 2004 at 2:11 p.m.

When i was a kid i used to think that there was some quasi-magical point in a person's life when they become an adult--and once they'd reached that point, they'd be confident, secure, and knowledgeable about the world. Over and above that, they'd know their place in life, what they were meant to do, who they were meant to be. If they knew an answer to a question, they knew it and if they didn't, it was no big deal; presumably, they knew everything they were supposed to know to do their job, deal with insurance companies, own a house, buy a car, balance a checkbook, and so on.

What an incredibly naive outlook on life! Not that it's embarrassing; at that age, simplicity and completeness are the only things that make sense. In reality, if there is any embarrassment, it lies with the "adult" for not ever really reaching that state. I think of all the supposed adults i've known in my life, and i have yet to meet one who doesn't doubt some facet of his or her being, who doesn't have regrets, who isn't confused about some major life issue. And suddenly, the older i get, the less confident, less secure, and less knowledgeable about the world adults seem to be.

And you know what? Somehow, i find some comfort in this.

Taking out the garbage

This entry was originally posted on 11 March 2004 at 2:23 p.m.

During my junior and senior years of college, i worked the late shift at the convenience store over on Busch Campus. We went through a series of managers while i was there. There was Peter, who was kind of a dreamer and wanted to go to graduate school for philosophy; Rey, who had been in the Navy or Marines (i forget which, but he'd been stationed on a ship) and was methodical, organized, and very strict; one guy, an out gay man whose name i can't remember but whose face is burned into my memory; and a girl about my age, whose name i also forget, who was bipolar and applying to Cooper Union during a sort of weird hypomanic state that was slowly creeping into full-blown mania.

One of the tasks i enjoyed the most at that job was taking out the trash. There was a gigantic (think eighteen-wheeler-sized) trash compactor outside the store; we'd fill one of those big, wheeled US Postal Service mail bins with all the trash bags from the shop and office, push the bin outside, toss all of the bags into the trash compactor, and run the machine. I loved it. I was in a pretty bad state psychologically back then, and taking out the trash afforded me respite from having to deal with customers under the shop's harsh lights, from all of the inadequacies and shortcomings and horrible things that were lurking in me.

It also gave me the chance to do a little daydreaming. I've always had an overactive imagination; for me, a walk down the street is usually much more. There's almost always some fantasy lying beneath my actions, some little daydream that i'm walking through while i carry out my tasks, something to keep me interested in what i'm doing. If i'm riding public transit, it's in some other world, where the subway trains are really giant worms with carriages strapped to their backs; if i'm driving to New Jersey, in my fantasy i'm piloting a little scout craft over an alien world; if i'm writing SPSS code on our UNIX system, i'm really typing in commands that control robots on some clandestine pirate mission. I'm just weird that way. Always have been, always will be, and i wouldn't have it any other way.

When i took out the trash, it was usually cold and dark outside, the sky full of stars, and the landscape Maritan-bleak. In my mind, when i took out the trash, it was on a little colony on some cold, dark, barren planetoid, where the few hardy survivors had already gone to sleep for the night. Maybe this says something about how i was feeling in general back then, but i look back on that little daydream with some fondness.

One night after i'd taken out the trash, the manager on duty--the artist (who eventually borrowed my copy of A Buddhist Bible and never returned it despite the fact that she'd had to stop reading it because she'd begun to believe she was the Buddha...) stopped me. "I know why you like taking out the trash," she said with a conspiratorial edge to her voice.

I tried not to furrow my brow. "And why is that," i asked.

"You like it for the same reason that I do: you like the smell, the reek of all that creation." She went on for a moment about how the smell of the garbage was symbolic of humanity, of all its virtues and failures. I wish i could remember exactly how she had phrased it, but there was a sense of completeness to her words, a sense that she was talking not about refuse, but about gold.

I listened to her words and understood that she was talking about something in herself, not something in me. And although she was wrong, i didn't correct her. I couldn't bear to tell her the truth; it felt too private, too vulnerable.

I wonder whatever happened to her.

More on literary theory

This entry was originally posted on 6 February 2004 at 4:20 p.m.

Okay, so maybe literary theory can be useful.

I say this only because i think it can be useful to use different lenses (Marxist, feminist, capitalist, structuralist, whatever) as a means of interpreting literature. That aspect of it speaks to the relativist in me: it's interesting to look at a text as a certain group would interpret it.

However.

The relativist in me also thinks that none of the schools of literary theory is superior--in terms of "correctness"--to any other. And herein lies the problem: as with other academic disciplines, the people who teach theory are bound to become specialized. This happens quite a bit--in archaeology, people often become so specialized that they can only talk about one aspect of a small set of geographically limited cultures within a single, short time period. Same goes for philosophy or psychology or criminology: people specialize in history/metaphysics/epistemology/whatever or they specialize in behaviorism/clinical/neuropsych/whatever or they specialize in policing/corrections/theory/juvenile justice/whatever.

The problem is, once you become that specialized, your specialty becomes your entire frame of reference. Everything you say, every interpretation you make, is based on that one perspective. I've known many people (academics and enthusiasts alike) who have fallen prey to that kind of tunnel vision.

If literary theory is to be taught, it needs to be taught within a context that it is sometimes useful to interpret a text through a certain perspective, but it is always important to experience literature directly as a reader first and apply whatever theoretical framework second. Furthermore, no one theoretical framework is going to provide all of the answers for any given text. If one is going to apply theory to texts, he must be willing to concede that other perspectives will have equally valid and interesting things to say about a text.

And finally, relativism aside, the notion that there is no such thing as a "good book" or a "bad book" is absurd. Writers write with different levels of skill. Some writers are excellent storytellers who write very clunky prose. Others write musical prose but can't tell a story. The rare breed can pull off both telling a story and telling it well. It is silly to assume that a reader will be nonjudgmental when it comes to basics like plot, style, theme, imagery, and technique. Just as there are excellent musicians or athletes, there are writers who excel at their craft (though they're few and far between, IMHO); likewise, just as there are musicians who aren't technically capable of performing complicated pieces, or athletes who who don't have the physical capacity to run a marathon, there are writers who have yet to fully hone their abilities.

Are all stories valid? That's another question. I lean toward "yes" on this one. A story might be utter crap, but that doesn't make it any less real or any less a story or any less valid than a masterpiece by some other author.

So this is where i stand on literary theory: it's not the be-all, end-all of literature. It's a tool, a set of filters to be applied in order to gain a new perspective on a text--but only after the text has been viewed with clear eyes.