As the Broadway stagehand strike closed and I rushed the box office for a ticket to “Cyrano de Bergerac” last weekend (and will do the same for “Rock ‘n’ Roll” before too long), I was reminded—as I was more consistently my last weekend in California than even I have recently allowed my introspection to persist—the extent to which my life is a bento box. Fine company discussed why it’s been so long since I’ve cooked for more than myself in Washington, why I don’t share this meticulous presentation of delicious mundaneness, and what (or precisely who) could inspire me to set a table for two; because the answer to my lousy luck with single women (and predilection for dead-end romances) no longer seems to be a factor of BMI or psychiatric distress, or even my stultifying good taste.
Why should it matter that I’m borne on a crest of denial, was my frequent reply. In my grown-up shoes and somber coat, I have sufficient cover to effect my desired changes to political infrastructure, inconspicuous to eyes that falsely discern my appearance as agreement to a status quo. And I think those effects, though lesser than curing epidemics and famine, to improve others’ lives are worth pursuing despite the New Year’s Eves spent jilted.
Nevertheless, it seems an especially appropriate discussion now in the afterglow of “Cyrano,” where in the last act the troublesome loneliness has soured the titular character’s idealistic mischief into proselytizing bile, and in anticipation of the final season of The Wire, a narrative that more than any other I’ve encountered addresses quixotic workaholics on the fringe of the clusterfuck of American politics (myself among them) with the notice the job will not save you.
And maybe we’ll have this conversation again, perhaps after a road trip to Arcosanti, St. Vincent at the Rock and Roll Hotel, Charmaine Clamor at the Brooklyn Public Library (she actually performed at Roscoe’s in Long Beach, of all places, last week), visits to theatres showing Persepolis, There Will Be Blood, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the purchase of the perfect slouchy chair, and every single-serving of acculturation sequestered in lacquered walls, another lonely lurch into evening. And perhaps I’ll think differently of my social austerity, perhaps I’ll reconsider the merits of my lonely pursuits, though I somehow doubt that my presence will intersect with what (or precisely who) I might find equally compelling.
I spent parts of last weekend visiting with former professors in galleries, with Heather at her studio, partaking in the lives of artists in Los Angeles, confronting my talents for discourse and composition, in diminished though ample effect, on a now dusty mental periphery, a few hours’ intersection with a road less travelled. And though I now find myself approaching drawing and bookmaking less as a compulsion than a personal restoration, it, like the unrequited-love flip-side of the workaholic cycle, exists in a state of disrepair proportional to my increasingly cynical intellectual trajectory and, however coldly, given to the past. To restore that disposition to unrequited love—I don’t know.
Rushing box offices of Broadway theatres in snowy weather after The Rings of Saturn and a Five Guys bacon cheeseburger on the Chinatown bus to New York is the kind of activity enjoyed regularly and solitarily, because although I know some who would hypothetically (and only occasionally) accept the invitation, no one ever does by dint of geography or financial or physical restraint. And though it is ostensibly a whimsical weekend, it is wholly representative of what I demand of a prospective romantic partner, and not simply to tolerate it or to even partake in the itinerary enthusiastically, but to augment it (I don’t mean simply an order of fries) and bind the experience as much to her self as I have to mine.
The job will not save me. And art may not save me. And graduate school may not save me (I, coincidentally, am satisfied with my surprisingly above-average GRE score and have shifted my attention to the qualitative components of my applications). Travel, literature, films, and music may hardly pose an obstacle to labor-borne damnation, however noble its effects. And for as much as they/you worry, I sometimes wonder if even my closest friends are up to the task.
One topic I’d considered for my thesis is the relationship between savior culture and nocturnalism, or how the latter allows a critical detachment from the former, and specifically, how an increasingly globalized workforce acting on behalf of disparate time zones will affect the practices of monotheistic religion and executive political power. It strikes me that the ability to believe in a savior, and consequently, in the concept of monogamous love, is subliminally reinforced by the association of consciousness and animation with the single, blinding illumination of a medium-sized star. For nocturnals, however, light is artificial and distributed, its position—overhead on planes and buses to guide one’s reading or a single spot to illuminate an actor on a dark stage—directed by purpose. Or it is reflected in the moon, which itself guides the tides, or conveyed over exponentially notated distances by gas giants.
This is hardly a tidy argument, but I feel that my nocturnal experience constantly reminds me that life is as much due to that overriding source of illumination as a series of functional relationships, and I burn my candle at both ends not as much for my benefit but to be a beacon to those arriving at the same understanding. “Is life just a miserable series of let downs or what,” Mani texted as I was leaving Los Angeles. Single servings in lacquered walls, it would seem. My reply: And I could hardly ask for better friends to share them.
