The danger room

It is late, I am cold, and the whole reason I stayed in tonight was to get some sleep. But let me try to get this down as best I can under the circumstances.

In the past few days two acquaintances have spoken to me about their journalism work. And I have suddenly realized that I have very little desire to write news. Though I admire the work of those writer-detectives who find all the relevant facts and then present them in shining words to the public, their particular talent is not mine, nor is their passion.

I want to write about art. Movies, albums, plays, comics, graffiti, you name it. Why do I want to write about art? Because art is the world. Scratch that. Art is the worlds.

Since I was little, since I made my bed into a spaceship at night and whispered to my stuffed animals about engaging the hyperdrive and what planets we were visiting, it has always seemed apparent to me that the point of art is to create a whole world. The comic books and fantasy novels I spent most of my time reading formalized this process: you always start a fantasy novel with a map. That map says Here, here is the world I am talking about. Sadness is in the West, in the land of Drakmoor or something. Hope is in the East, where the Emerald such-and-such awaits the touch of its proper owner, Prince so-and-so. The comic books are the same: the Fortress of Solitude, the Bat Cave, and my personal favorite place-metaphor, the X-Men's Danger Room. This is the room where you face dangers that you yourself have created, and have willed to challenge you, by entering and turning on the machine. This is where you face peril but you also "train" to be who you want to be (and to figure out which costume best suits you). This is the danger room. This is growing up.

Then I started reading Big Kids' books and the technique got more subtle, but the point was the same. Every book is the creation of a reality, a reality that has emotional, political, spiritual, and comic dimensions. Sure, some of the books are based on real life events. Some might just be about one country, or one year, or even one day. But they are still a world, because the selection itself--along with the writer's language--says what is the Earth's core, and what is its sky and stars. It has always annoyed me when people would say a painting was "about" this or "about" that--it's not "about" anything, it is the thing. The Yo La Tengo album, And then nothing turned itself inside out, is not "about" Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley's marriage. It is their marriage, in microcosm, in a world where they have decided that the slow scrape of a metal brush along the top of a drum is the sound of nervously falling in love, that the high tinkling of keyboard notes can mean a stupid misunderstanding.

Writing my thesis about Chilean writers taught me that the biggest charge I get is in traveling. Not traveling to Chile--though I did love that--but traveling through a world that has been created by art. I want to be a travel writer of fictional worlds.

I want to interrupt my own thought process that only I care about anyway to say that the best thing about R.E.M. was, and now only very occasionally is, the ways in which it is like your favorite old t-shirt: familiar, yet every time you put it on you are somehow re-surprised by its softness, its fit. It certainly lacks the exciting new-clothes smell and sheen of the shirt you just bought, the one you might wear on the first day of school. But there is a relationship between you and this old t-shirt that is not fully perceived from the outside, and thus is a deeper relationship than the one you have with the new shirt. Just as you always thought that R.E.M. lines like, "Please find my harbourcoat, I can't go outside without it" and, more recently, "I'd have done anything to hear you speak of it," had some meaning that only you could see. You knew that even your best friend, even Colin, was seeing some other vision than you when he listened to "Country Feedback." His version was valid, and important to him, and even shared some territory with your own, but of course it was not quite so true as your little understanding, the little psychic conversation you alone were having with Michael Stipe. And of course Colin felt exactly that way too.

So that's why I'm going to write about art. Because it really, really matters to me--even if to some it is far less imporant than the news--that R.E.M. is like an old t-shirt, that if you dig under the soil in any poem by Sharon Olds you find a deep and permanent sea, that every day in their writings my Chilean friends disprove torture and carry breathing bodies out from unmarked graves, and that musicians with a talent I could never understand know how to make their drum-sets sound the way a kiss feels. I hope to always continue to make my own worlds, pursue my own art. But I also love to travel. And so that is my mystery career goal, that is the answer to What I Want to Do When I Grow Up. I want to get a pair of comfortable red sneakers, grab a notepad, and walk through the many worlds that have been created for me (and the other travelers I will meet along the way).
posted by Adam at 1:40 AM [edit]