Drifting (part 2)

Wandering through the Woodstock neighborhood, moving between the lush lawns and gardens of Portland’s private houses,it seemed that each home was the same as the next.  These atomized spaces were alike if in no other way than in their very individuality.  There were a great many trees around me, meant to create a sense of continuity and identity in a place where no real identity could be found.  The poplars and sequoias, the urban forest, obscured what was a material alienation.  Driving by rather than walking a person might be taken in by the greenery and imagine they were in the natural world.

I was meant to be grateful for all the trees, for the stalks of corn that peeked over tall privacy fences.  I was meant to be glad for the plums and apples I found rotting on the sidewalks and in the gutters.

In 1991 when I worked as a canvasser going door to door to save the environment I would frequently sit with my clipboard in my lap and ponder the street signs and painted lines. I recall a specific moment when I wrote my first note to the world while sitting on a curb outside a purple Arts and Crafts bungalow on Hawthorne.  I turned my back to the windsock and chimes, all that good liberal Karma, and started writing.

I turned over a toxic toy factsheet printed on yellow recycled paper and wrote on the back with a Bic round stic pen with medium blue ink. I lit a hand rolled cigarette that was a mix of tobacco and marijuana, took a drag, and tried to put down my thoughts about how the world, the houses and streets, the sprinkler system and perfect lawns, was communicating with me.

I surveyed the progressive tranquility around me, the late 20th century update on a Norman Rockwell painting of an America with perfectly unkempt lawns and sunlit fuel efficient station wagons in the drive.  I smoked my half joint and thought about it all.  I smoked until I was evaporated and all that was left was a flow of information.  A disjointed critique.

Everything was meaningful.  The way the my pen felt in my hand, my awkward handwriting, the way the cool summer afternoon air felt in my lungs. I drew a coughing spiral of a flower petaled apocalypse on the back of the toxic toy factsheet.

That first note went something like this:

“Hello, world.  I am nobody until I get my prozac.  Nothing except for a brand new mist green Ford Taurus.  I am nobody until I get my paycheck or until the girl in the street cafe smiles at me.”

I took another hit and then realized I didn’t know how I was going to distribute my work.  It had to be put out there immediately.  Maybe I’d leave it in somebody’s mailbox or slip it under somebody’s door?  Or maybe I’d leave it under the windshield wiper of somebody’s orange VW van.  In the end I searched out a convenience store that was on my route and purchased a roll of masking tape.  I pulled out a long strip of tape quickly, enjoying the sound of the quick separation, and made a frame for my first message.  I stuck my note to the world to a telephone pole.

Later that summer I attended a film festival in Telluride, Colorado.  The town had functioned under the festival’s banner since 1974, and in September of 1991 every path, shop, hotel, and grocery was just one component of a what was no longer a community but a theater lobby.  We the tourists, the attendees, had but one goal.  We were there to watch.  Every spectator was to take in as many films as possible.  And if one could figure out a way to watch two or more films at the same time (maybe catching the first ten minutes of River Phoenix in Dog Fight, then sneaking off to watch the Rapture for thirty minutes, and then finally ending up watching Irene Jacob be beautiful and confusing in something called The Double Life of Veronique) then one was implicitly encouraged to do so.  The only caveat was that you could not admit to having cheated.

I was still writing notes to the the world and taping them up in public space.  I wrote my 200th note outside a cafe at this festival, after having read the summaries of the three films while waiting for my Latte and thereby saving myself the trouble of seeing them.  Outside the coffee shop I  taped this note to the underside of an abstract sculpture constructed from a bicycle wheel and a trumpet. The sculpture resembled either a satellite dish or a UFO but was neither of these objects.

From my 100th note I wrote:

“Evidence for the Festival’s complicity in the take over of humanity by aliens is everywhere.  Every film, every artwork, every paper toilet seat cover left behind in every hotel or theater bathroom is a coded message from our new masters.  We only need eyes to see the obvious when it is right in front of us.”

19 years later I did not have any masking tape or factsheets, but stood outside an orange and red Raised Ranch style house and considered how time seemed to stand still.

“The Bourgeoisie unveiled irreversible time and imposed it on society only to deprive society of its use.  Once there was history, but there is no longer any history because the class of owners of the economy, who cannot break with economic history, must repress any other use of irreversible time as representing an immediate threat to itself.”  -Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle.

In 2010 I put my Mp3 recorder up to my face, held it up to my ear as if it’s a cellphone.  This subterfuge allowed me to speak aloud without feeling awkward or odd.  I could record my reactions to the built environment around me, but no words came.

I spotted a sign, a real sign, as I turned the corner onto SE 28th.  The sign read “Refresh: Coca-Cola,” and I felt relieved.  Up to that point I’d only found private spaces.  There had been no place to stop, or to stretch out.  There had been nowhere to rest, but under the sign of Coca-Cola I could find a moment of respite.

I went into what turned out to be a cocktail lounge and asked for the cola, and the bartender told me that I didn’t have to pay.  Coca-Cola without booze was so inexpensive it didn’t make sense to ask for money at all. The time it would save if I didn’t pay was worth more than the money.

The bar was minimalist.  The windows inside were high, well above eye level, and I could not see street but only where the light came in.  The walls were curved concrete, and the track lighting and tall aluminum chairs communicated a graceful and utilitarian aesthetic.  It was a place where one was meant to be seen, and not an appropriate pit stop for a sweating middle aged Slacker toting a knapsack.

I sat at a table outside the bar regardless and flipped through Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.  I’m tried to ferret out just what a situation was.  Was a situation something real, or just something willed?  Was it enough to be free of manipulation, to take hold of your own strings?

Of all the films at Telluride I recall the movie the Double Life of Veronique the most clearly. Veronique was not one person, but two.  Her lives were variations on the same theme, and the viewer, the spectactor, was led to wonder as he watched each event and its mirror image whether Veronique or her Polish doppleganger Weronika was really living at all.  Was she just a flow of related events?  To what extent is anyone free to act out his or her life, and to what extent is that life determined or overdetermined.

In 1991 I attended the Telluride film festival with my parents, and the three of us decided to view this picture about Veronica as a family.  Afterwards we stopped off at a cafe and I ordered another Latte.  My mother chastised me for drinking a caffeinated coffee in the evening while my father suggested that I might have asked for skim milk.  I moved away from them, chose to sit at the counter next to a pretty girl who, in my memory, very much resembled the actress from the movie.  She had dark wavy hair and wore fine clothing.  She seemed to have good prospects.  She had the aura of having recently been accepted into a ivy league college about her.  In my memory she was as graceful,  just as consciously inscribed with gracefulness, as the Coca-Cola cocktail lounge would be nearly twenty years later.   I sat down next to her, feeling a bit overwhelmed and a bit greasy as I sat there with her, and was surprised when she struck up a conversation with me.

“Did you see the Kieslowski picture?” she asked.

I confirmed that I had, and then offered that I was interested in the synchronicities in the movie.

According to wikipedia the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s objet petit a (object little-a) stands for the unattainable object of desire. It is sometimes called the object cause of desire. Lacan always insisted for it to remain untranslated “thus acquiring the status of an algebraic sign.”

The girl at the Telluride film festival cafe was my object petit a.  If I could gain her attention then I would be closer to the real me as I saw myself and further away from the me as I felt myself to be.  But as she told me that she felt personally connected to Kieslowski’s film, when she explained that perhaps she herself had another self, another version of her that she could sense or that was perhaps always sensing her, I started to panic.

“I think I should probably go,” I told her.

Twenty years later while rereading the Society of the Spectacle I stumbled upon the notion of a constructed situation.  They wanted to make moments and not find them.  The situationists were not trying to escape from language, but to speak.  They didn’t seek uninterpreted reality, but wanted to seize and transform the built environment, to make it real.  They would make situations exactly through their own subjective experience of the built environment, and their opposition to it.

When my parents and I reached the sidewalk outside the cafe my father took me by my arm in order to get my attention.  He asked me why I had turned away from the girl in the cafe.  Did I not understand that she apparently liked me?  That she was attempting to have a conversation with me?

I told him that the people in the back, the dishwashers and waiters, were clearly closing up shop.  That they were clattering back there in such a way as to communicate.  I told him that I’d cut the conversation short due to circumstances beyond my control.

He thought for a moment and the lights in then the lights inside the cafe went dark, confirming what had really only been an suspicion on my part.  More to the point, it didn’t really matter whether or not the cafe was closing down.  There could be a hundred more reasons or none at all, but I would never really know what was behind my retreat that night.  Was my life, my reactions, determined or my own?

“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.” -Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Drinking my Coca-Cola and reconsidering my journey I realized that, while I’d been drifting, I had not moved the cobblestones aside. I had yet to find the beach.