by Steven Snell
Cynthia lets go of my arm and pulls open the door. I step through holding it open for her and together we join the line. After three $5 drinks are ordered we ask for a coffee for me and Cynthia a latte. She used to drink Americanos, but she recently heard that Janet Jackson gives herself coffee enemas. She concluded that adding milk to her coffee was very un-Janet Jackson and therefore right. Milk is cow mucus and thus slows down the bowels and slow bowels are un-Janet Jackson. Rhythm Nation was cool. It meant something, stood for something. Now it’s all shit. Janet Jackson’s loose caffeine stools are affecting her ability to create good music. That’s what she said. It’s as though there’s a direct correlation between stool firmness and creativity. If one experiences a decently firm stool, and thus requiring a bit of focus to push it out, it stimulates neurological matter, which spurs creativity. Loose stools just fall out of you. No concentration. No creativity. That’s what Cynthia said. She drinks lattes, extra milk. It bungs her up a little, makes her a bit more creative. It’s worth the four bucks she says. A university degree cost her thousands of dollars, numerous all-nighters and a series of boring lectures she had to fake her way through to graduate. One $4 blocked stool latte and you can change the world. That’s what she said.
Cynthia shakes cinnamon over her drink. “What else?” she asks.
“What what else?”
“What else can we play with? Theories are fun to play with. What’s another one?”
“I’ll let you run with the ball. I’m happy cheering from the sidelines.”
“Oooh, I know! Bad sex is très existential.”
“Existentialism?”
“Oui oui! Sex can remind one of the absurdity of human existence and the impossibility of achieving certitude.”
“Isn’t that the role of foreplay?” I ask pouring sugar into my coffee.
“There’s no final knowledge in the outcome – no certitude – until essentially the cock has entered my vagina.”
I give Cynthia a smile and we walk past the lineup of people, a girl holds the door open for us and Cynthia says “cheers” and I say “thank-you” and we step outside.
“Okay, existentialism –”
“Yes,” I say.
“Albert Camus knew what he was talking about.”
“Wasn’t he against rational thinking or something?”
“Well, the rejection of the rational actor. Western society was decadent and lacked creativity at the expense of reason.”
“Ah.”
“JP Sartre said individuals must struggle in isolation and make decisions without absolutes and traditional values.”
“That man had a firm stool.”
“Try constipation,” she says and takes a sip of her latte. “It can be entertaining getting lost in literature.”
Cynthia takes out her camera and snaps a picture of me sipping my coffee. In the background is a dog peeing on the trunk of a tree. “Territorial pissing!” she exclaims as she clicks the shutter again.
“Really?”
“What?”
“That’s not going on your wall.”
“It’s my wall!”
I shake my head. “What about religion?”
“Ooh, I love talking story time.”
“It serves a unifying purpose for some.”
“Oh indeed! But recognizing, of course, that it’s ultimately exclusionary.”
“Religion can provide explanation for puzzling things and events.”
“Meh, religion is its text. When it was written and later first adhered to, it was meant to be taken literally – it was taken literally. All of it. Now some of it doesn’t work so good so adherents use parts of it. But logically, if you don’t believe what the text says, all of it, you don’t believe in the god or gods or the events being depicted in it, being transcribed in it –”
“Through how many translations?”
“Exactly. Which parts were right? And here’s the kicker, if it’s not all true – it’s supposed to be taken as metaphors or parables, as contemporaries say, then what remains is little more than a story.”
“Yah. Well said.”
“Can you imagine if some guy showed up and said he was the Second Coming? Unless he could pull off a few miracles, but no one bows before David Blaine.”
“Levitating, that was impressive.”
“Or feeding the starving with one single serving processed pre-packaged dinner, like a Lean Cuisine crab pollock and vegetables or something.” She starts laughing and takes a picture of a boy doubling a girl on his handle bars cycling towards us. The girl gives us a peace sign and Cynthia snaps again. “Shit! I’m laughing too hard to hold the camera steady.”
“Pull it together, Cynthia!”
“I know I know.”
“Maybe all god is, is humankind’s inherent need to label things a thing. There’s something out there, something mysterious and we feel a need to proscribe a feeling onto it.”
“That sounds like a belief system of some sort – the need to label it – and people will likely body that labeled thing with the image of god that is standardizable – is that a word?
I shrug. “It works.”
“Standardizable in the society they were raised in – like a white guy with white hair and white beard up in the sky wearing a loin cloth draped over his holy crotch.”
“That should go on your wall.”
“Nah, I like my penises pedestrian and fallible.”
“Mine is proletariat.”
“My favourite kind,” she says with a smile.
I continue, “The emotional satisfaction people derive from religion serves a purpose.”
“As long as it remains individualistic or personal, I see little problem with it. Not cultish. It’s when a coercive group takes over a belief system’s subtleties and embeds it in fascist ideology that it becomes socially or morally disturbing.”
“Christopher Hitchens articulated that well through the power structures prescribed by Nazism.”
“I see little good in the mass worshipping of anything,” Cynthia says taking my coffee.
“Exactly. Care for another sip?”
She smiles. “No thank-you, I’m good.”
“Religion can also help maintain institutions for instilling common values and solidarity – with tonnes of historical baggage, of course. Like church and community.”
“Community? Pfft! That died circa 1999.”
“You and me, we’re screwed aren’t we?”
“Probably.”
“Oh well.”
“Exactly times two,” she says.
I take her hand pointing it down the street. “Shall we?”
“Head to the river? Yes.”
She passes me the camera and I take a picture angled up at her chest and shoulders with a brick façade in the distance. She follows the lens up and blinks, stretching her neck to the sun, pushing out her chest, “Better?”
“Keep pushing, I can almost make them out!”
“Asshole!”
“Ha!”
The sky hasn’t changed but the streets are becoming populated. Cars, a moving truck, a couple both wearing headphones, a group of teenagers on skateboards, a woman pushing a stroller. Cynthia is smiling like she’s helped an elder cross the street. “Mmm, I love everyday life.”
I nod.
“Today, right now, this is why everything should be reduced down to the everyday realm. Come down to the daily, real life. … Now for the how … hmm,” she takes a sip of her latte. “The best way to destroy an institution is to kitsch it – popularize it and commoditize it. It takes the essence out of anything and reveals how vacuous it is at its core. … Like when Warhol said that nothing is more bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois. Subversion can destroy just about anything.”
I take her latte and take a sip and pass her my coffee. We have a drink together. “Good,” we say.
We pass our drinks back to each other.
I remove the lid and poi
nt the camera at the inside of my half-empty paper cup.
Click.
“If we paste this on your wall, what do you think it’ll be?”
“Depends on our mood, or weather – if tomorrow’s forecast is accurate – half empty.”
I pass her back the camera and she takes it and zooms in on a store window with a girl in the display changing the clothes on a mannequin. There’s a naked female bust with a box over her head. The girl is spraying and wiping in large circles the opposite side of the glass as though she herself has been on display so much that she’s become indifferent to it.
Click.
“The sexual revolution.”
“Hit me,” I say.
“The rejection of Western university curricula and the birth of Counter Culture. People wanted to strip away the bustier holding in society.”
“Hello civil and women’s rights.”
Click.
She continues, “Yes! Women’s rights logically led to minority group rights, like ethnic and gay, who also challenged discriminatory policies and attitudes.”
Click.
“The pessimistic attitude that had been waged on society during the Vietnam War, well fuck it. Let’s flaunt it.”
Click.
“And all this pessimism lead to the brutality and roughness that was iconic in that period’s artistic movement.”
Click.
“Like the cognitive effects of this period’s drug culture on popular culture.”
Click.
She hangs the camera around her neck and adjusts her cardigan to accord with it. “Some artists were doing the modern thing. Formalism. Emphasis on visual elements rather than on subject matter. Squares, raw colour, geometrical sort of elements. Art for art, yes?”
“Yah.”
“Atheism gained some ground in this period. It’s hard placing god within a systematic philosophy when one group’s god is plotting war killing off a group of heathens.” She crosses her chest.
“Ha! You’re too much.”
“Another art form was also making an emergence – art as an act.” She gesticulates as if to throw paint on a canvas. “What was on the canvas was not a picture but an event. Whoosh! War is an event, not a picture! Or dribbles, if you’re Pollack”
She sticks out her bum and bumps it against my hip. She passes me the camera and we continue along the river. A park, benches, trees, a dog chasing Canada Geese. We turn the block and head south following the origin of shadows laying over us. In and out of penumbrae and cracks on the side walk and the travel lines of others. We walk close, then apart, giving space to passer-byers and dogs on leashes, and then close. She holds my arm and we pass the camera back and forth taking pictures. Textures. Objects. A jet plane overhead. A man beside his shopping cart full of bottles and blankets, beside a dumpster in an alley urinating on something out of view. She reviews it in the view finder display and shows me and I laugh and shake my head and say something about her being wrong and she says I know and you are too and I agree and she deletes the picture. Then we’re silent, enjoying the late morning and letting it pass under foot. It smells like rain is in the air.
We stop. “This is me,” she says.
“It is.”
She kisses my cheek.
“Salute. Keep the camera. Capture something for me.”
“I will. See you soon.”
We hug and I watch her walk up the walkway towards the entrance into her apartment building.
It’s not spontaneous. It’s not gestural. The colours are vibrant. They’re brush strokes, long ones and short ones. They draw the viewer in. There is no way to measure the expansive quality of the work. A muted background. A vibrant foreground. A viewer’s gaze back and forth, without focus. The painting does not encourage focus.
A painting by Rothko, Untitled. It is spatial, abstract, expressive, sublime. It is human.
You look at it looking at yourself. It is inward focusing. Unconscious. We cannot know. There is only tangential knowledge, the knowledge you want to make. Your interpretation.
Catch a fleeing moment.
A postmodernist moment.
A sense of anxiety. Sparseness. A simplification of the environment.
We’re the painting.
She pulls open the door and looks back at me. Smiles. I smile back. I like our moments.
19.
I get up and brush my teeth. My gums bleed. I spit and rinse. I spit again. More blood. I rinse longer and try to forget about it. I wash my face and get ready for work. I eat cereal tasting blood in my mouth. I pack my bag. I look outside and it’s bright. I check the weather and it’s supposed to be a cool but sunny day. I decide to cycle to work. I finish my cereal and change my pants to slimmer ones. I put on a thick sweater and roll my bike to the front door. I grin in the mirror to see if there’s any blood. I don’t see any. I swallow. I don’t taste any. I wrap my neck with a scarf and put on mitts and walk my bike down the three flights of stairs. I step on the peddle and swing my leg over and start peddling. The morning air is cold on my face. I cycle between the curb and driving lane, beside cars and trucks and vans on their way to work. My feet are cold and my hands are cold and my face is cold. My core starts to warm. My nose runs. I wipe it with my mitt. I hear an engine suddenly accelerate and tires screeching and I’m hit. I’m lifted up and smash into a windscreen and I hear something crack and someone screaming a horrifying scream and I’m sliding down the hood of a car and falling towards the pavement.
And then I wake up.
I stare at the ceiling and scan in my head analyzing how my body feels. I feel that I’m intact. I’m all here. Nothing broken. I get out of bed and brush my teeth and spit. No blood. Fuck too realistic dreams.
I get ready for work feeling already exhausted and leave for work.
I take the train in.
I walk past colleagues. We nod.
I take phone calls. I enter new tickets. I take a tea break and sit in the lounge and flip through the paper. I finish flipping and return to work to finish that too.
I’m having dinner, a sushi restaurant at the base of an office tower down the street from my work. Concrete floors and arm rolled couches and wicker chairs and cacti and Scottish bag pipes on the radio. Girls in kimonos and honest smiles serve drinks and food. Wood chopsticks and menus without pictures and a big screen TV and toro that melts on your palate.
It’s busy tonight.
A kimono girl smiled at me and said in a distinct accent, “Are you waiting for another?”
“Just me.”
She bowed her head, “This way, please.”
I followed her to the bar to be sat in front of the sushi chefs. She pointed to a chair and smiled that genuine smile and I returned it with a nod and thank-you and sat down and pulled the chair in and took out the Travel section of yesterday’s newspaper.
These moments outside of social interaction, solitude for the currency of thought, the generation of new states, new understandings.
And here I sit, alone.
The waitress places my sushi on the bar before me, smiles politely and walks to greet an older couple who have just walked through the double set of doors.
I crack apart a set of chopsticks.
That sound, it reminds me of Fiona and the sushi we ate and our paper airplanes and the time we spent together in Montreal. I remember the warmth of her hand holding mine as we walked along cold autumn streets arm-in-arm or sat on park benches sitting shoulder-to-shoulder her head tilted to mine nothing but us and Mont Royal. I feel her breath on the back of my neck as we tucked in together under starched hotel bedding between the walls we made of pillows and sofa cushions. She smelled of lemons. She said it was just her laundry detergent, nothing special at all, “The brand was on sale.” I place my hand on the back of my neck smiling and feel her there.
I take out Cynthia’s camera from my bag. I snap a picture of the unagi arranged into a triad of silver and green and pink. The fish, the plasti
c grass, the pickled ginger laid out on the tiny bamboo boat. Two more pictures until the card is full. Two more pictures to offload to printing to the utopian retreat in the room Cynthia and I continue to recreate, a state of life only as static as the speed at which we observe and print our photographs. I slip the camera back into my bag.
I once read that, “Boredom is not far from ecstasy; it’s ecstasy viewed from the shores of pleasure.” I still don’t know what it means but there’s something in it that appeals to me, something about emotion and its connection to geography. This shore my sanctuary from boredom or ecstasy but I’m back and forth like an Olympic athlete, or a weekend warrior flirting with a suntanned lifeguard leaning back against the ladder up to her chair. I’m learning how to swim backstroking the English Channel, whip kicking with a flutter board in the retreating Red Sea. I’m a voyager, an explorer, a tourist, resident, traveller, wallpaper. I’m just safe swimming, if a boat trails my wake, as I seek ecstasy away from shores.
I chew and swallow another piece of sushi and take a sip of green tea.
On the television above the sushi chefs is a news clip of a terrorist bombing. Estimates on the number dead. A 1500-page manifesto from the killer found online proclaiming his beliefs and a diatribe against his perceived social injustice and ills placed upon society. Mourners weeping, laying flowers and wreathes and teddy bears at the site. People holding hands and hugging and crying into their hands held to their faces, sobbing uncontrollably. I put my chopsticks down. I lean back and cross my arms on my chest. I watch the news feed. I watch the news feed and slowly shake my head. I take a deep breath and let it out over and beyond my lips. I shake my head again. I pull my hand down my face. I take a sip of tea and hold the empty cup with both hands in my lap. Minutes pass.