by Jay Fox
The lab mice upon whom the initial trials were run did not seem to build up a tolerance to the drug, nor did they appear to become addicted to it. Their behavior changed as the scientists predicated it would: the mice exercised more frequently than they had in the past in order to obtain the dopamine high they craved, they did not seek ulterior ways to get their fix, and they even became increasingly gregarious (possibly because of the increased oxytocin levels, though it must be said that neither Trixi nor I know if oxytocin naturally exists in the rodent brain). Some of the mice developed ulcers, but this was the most pernicious side effect the scientists observed. “Somebody told her that one mouse developed a condition called pterolabia, but they didn't explain what that is. They just said that it was reversible.”
“What the hell does that even mean?” Tomas asks.
“Think Pterodactyl,” I respond. He smiles.
Another thing the developers of the drug failed to mention was that the mice were in solitary confinement for the initial stages of the testing; and, like Pavlov's dog, these mice learned that exercise sufficed for more dopamine. Nixi, however, was free to roam wherever she wished. Consequently, she learned that other activities produced far more dopamine than any run on a treadmill ever could. Furthermore, while she was supposed to be just beginning her month on the five milligram pills, it turns out that humans, while not always murine in their physical features, do share at least one behavioral trait with any rodent, mouse or otherwise: that of being able to obtain things others believe they should not have. For these reasons (and probably a whole lot more), Nixi found herself still on the twenty-five milligram pills, dripping with sweat, dry-humping the legs of passing strangers, and massaging various parts of her body in front of the bathroom door.
“Side-effects vary,” Trixi continues, her tone now one with the small print, “but the weirdest one I saw was the…what'd they call it?”
“Palindromes,” Jane replies. “There was also complete retroluction.”
“Retro-what?”
“-Locution.”
“Yeah, she spoke backwards for, like, three days.”
“Like the midget from Twin Peaks?”
“Sure,” Trixi nods cautiously. She's young [as is our narrator, but apparently the infamous Connie had a thing for Lynch during their relationship]. “But, like, she actually spoke backwards. And she didn't know she was doing it, either. She didn't believe me until I recorded a conversation, and then played the tape back.”
“That's pretty weird.”
“She also spoke in palindromes,” Jane reiterates. “She'd say a phrase, and then utter the same phrase in reverse. It was like an echo.”
“Yeah, and she didn't know she was doing that, either.”
“Did she get any ulcers?”
“Or pterolabia?”
“No. For her, I think the biggest concern is the anal leakage. This is the first time Nixi has worn a skirt in a month,” she says as she notices that just about every man in the bar, including the twink brigade by the bar and the bear couple on a nearby couch, cannot help but stare to the wall-less psyche-ward. Likewise, we all glance over to see her busy boogying away in pink sequined glory with little to no regard for rhythm, public opinion, or the second law of thermodynamics. “Anal leakage, guys,” Trixi adds. We all turn away.
“No one wants to hear that,” Aberdeen chimes in as his hand falls on Trixi's thigh. She looks to him with daggers.
Dialog deteriorates. Jane, however, takes it upon herself to strike up a conversation with me. Aberdeen and Tomas, meanwhile, begin spouting out observations about the various people in the bar with derogatory and occasionally clever cynicism. Trixi and Mixi laugh to themselves and look eager to bring up subjects that don't involve the fashion statements made by those who fail to speak with Shakespearean eloquence. “So you're the Coprolalia guy, huh?” she asks glacially.
“That I am.”
“So you're just going to bars in the city looking for him?”
“Yeah.”
“That doesn't seem particularly productive.”
“You'd be surprised. I meet a lot of characters—some helpful, some not.”
“How close are you to finding him?” warmer now. “James and Tomas seem to think that you're on to something you're not telling them.” Wait, nope, that's condescension.
“Not really. I just think that he's not what most people would consider the artistic type.” She looks to me in bewilderment, probably because my response anticipates her next question. “I mean, I'm fairly sure he's just a normal guy who—”
“What do you mean by normal?” she asks as she tries to push her eyebrows together without using her hands.
“I don't mean 'normal', like, you know, there is a sense of normal.” Her brows touch. “I guess I just feel like he's a working-class guy, who probably has a job that he doesn't really like all that much—you know, like a character in a bad existentialist novel. Somebody once called him an artiste manqué, but I feel like this misses the point. People nowadays believe that artists have to be successful in order to qualify as such, but I don't agree. In fact, I believe that Mann articulated this point better than anyone else, especially in Tonio Kröger. And Coprolalia certainly resembles that character, even if he is a member of the working class. He's both, you know. And that's the draw.”
“Do you feel you know what he looks like? Do you feel like you know him?”
“No, but I can guess that he's probably in his late-thirties, maybe even early-forties. He's white, Jewish, with big ears, apparently. I feel like he's the type of guy you pass on the street without noticing. And that's the point I'm trying to get at: He doesn't want to be famous or anything because he's afraid that that will mean he has to live up to something that he's not.”
“He's the absurd creator!” Tomas shouts.
“Sure.”
“What does that mean?”
“Have you ever read Camus' Myth of Sisyphus?”
“No.”
“Well, it, Sisyphus, is analogous to The Stranger. He's referencing something from the former—I think.” Tomas nods enthusiastically, and even pulls the book out of the bag he has with him. I smile in return. “I would recommend you read The Rebel before it—it's way better.” She smiles. “As I was saying, he just has these moments of brilliance that he wants to convey to the world, even though the medium he's chosen makes everything he does completely ephemeral. And, yes, I know ephemeral is a relative term—ephemeral can be measured in minutes, days, months, years, eons: a second in the life of a person is capable of filling up a library and the Earth's history is a molecule of ink that is but a fraction of a letter in a sentence within a footnote in the trillion volume history of the universe. But he seems to really, sincerely not care. He just creates. And that's all he does—create and express something that just dwells inside of him. In a sense, that's all art is: a prolonged epiphany that captures something that's kind of rational and kind of irrational and beyond the typical capacity of language. You know, a-and maybe some of his stuff is convoluted because he tends to have these epiphanies when he's half in the bag; but, I mean, he's not there to expound—or elucidate, rather—on every line that he writes. He just wants to express himself. There's something very pure in that. I mean, people have these silly ideas, and suddenly they end up producing great works around them. DeLillo wrote White Noise because he thought it'd be funny to have a college that offered Hitler Studies. D.H. Lawrence wrote a novella based on the idea of Jesus getting a boner.” She squints. “The whole book leads up to one line: 'Christ has risen.'” She gives a begrudging smile. “I'm rambling, aren't I?”
“Kind of.”
“But isn't that so great—that he's just a normal guy doing all of this?”
“And, by normal, you mean working as a drone and finding escape in alcohol?”
“No, I think normal means not being a celebrity,” I counter with a slightly ornery tone. “He lives the way most of the people in this city
live. You know, as students we sometimes forget that New York isn't just populated by Suits and Radicals; there's this huge middle ground of people, who are hard-working, middle-class, and, typically, pretty intelligent.”
“You honestly think that the majority of the people in this city are intelligent? Just who have you been talking to?”
“They're intelligent; they're just not that insightful. You know, they can understand a lot if you give them a chance; they're just not that good at coming up with it on their own.” I pause. “I think it has something to do with the way religion is taught now days, to be honest; then again, this could just be a side-effect of some larger problem plaguing our society.”
“Like religion.”
“Look: People are told that it's wrong to interpret the Bible, that it's the Word of God, and that it should be read as one reads the newspaper. But if you ask any religious scholar—who's not of the Evangelical persuasion, of course—they'll tell you that there are three levels to scripture: the literal, the allegorical, and the spiritual. You can't read it all literally, otherwise you end up with a myriad of contradictions; and, if you have contradictions, as well as the premises that the Bible is the Word of God and that the Word of God is always true, then you have an invalid argument on your hands. So it can't all be read literally—unless you believe that God can contradict Himself, which, of course begs the far more important question: why should one care what the Bible says at all if no one can tell which passage, if any, can be trusted. And that's where the beauty of religious study comes in. Just look at Gersonides—he concluded that Song of Songs isn't just a poem about love; it's a manual that outlines the proper way to approach the study of God's Word, which, oddly enough, parallels what Plato said in his Republic.”
“What are you, a former Hassid?”
“No, I just think it's fascinating to see that people continue to be able to get so much out of a book that's several thousand years old. And so much of it is original and new, too. That's what I'm trying to say, you know: that the truly wise are able to see things to which the dunces of the world are blind. And you don't get that from as many people as you used to. Over-zealous Christians don't bring anything new to the table—they just quote Romans thirteen to explain why the Bush administration is infallible, but ignore things that they don't agree with or practice: like Deuteronomy twenty: thirteen, which says that, in war, every man in a captured town ought to be put to the sword; or, also in Deuteronomy, that a man is exempt from military service for a year after his wedding. Are we to infer from this not only that the government is infallible, but that the commandments of Deuteronomy can be abrogated by the commandments of the state? I hardly think this is the case, especially when a God-fearing administration controls the country. And that's what bothers me. The dunces of the world just shrug and accept the contradiction. And the Jobs of the world may be able to both recognize the severity of this dilemma and maintain a steadfast faith, but personally I find myself in agreement with Kierkegaard: true faith is not common, and the Jobs—though Kierkegaard, at least in the context of which I am thinking, would say the Isaacs—of this world can be counted on one hand.
“Look, all I'm saying is that the Christian community—especially the Evangelicals—have fought against intellectualism for so long that there are no longer many insightful Christians. And that's what worries me. Religion without wisdom is like nonalcoholic beer—it's manufactured for people in AA, teenagers, and rubes. But if you hear someone imbued with real wisdom and even partial faith, they are able to see beyond jejune superstition and nihilism. And they are the ones deeply encumbered by these incongruities, the individuals for whom such problems foment into works of genius. An individual suffering from forlorn as a result of the absence of God's total beneficence will always be able to produce a work that is superior to an adamant atheist, for whom the lack of a God, as well as an a priori ethics, is of no concern. Then again, there are those who dedicate their time to establishing some form a cadence between the ostensible contradictions of their respective religions. And this is where religious study itself becomes a form of art—it engenders the human condition, and ceases to be a simple practice in acquiescence. I mean, I don't think it would be possible for there to be a Renaissance without the philosophical movements of the High Middle Ages. For all the rigidity of someone like Aquinas, there is also a great deal of ingenuity and interpretation in his work, too. And isn't that what so much of art is about?
“A lot of contemporary art, you know, especially the really out-there stuff, relies more on eliciting a response out of people by using unconventional means as opposed to raw talent. They are asking you to use your own interpretive skills to think, sometimes simply to feel. But because of the way people are brought up now, they can't deal with it. They can appreciate a Van Gogh or a Vermeer, but they can't sit there and seriously concentrate on the work of a contemporary artist, poet, or composer. But these people would see it as valuable, they would see so much of the art today as brilliant, if the education in this country were less bulimic—as in, you take in information, regurgitate it onto paper come exam time, and then forget what it was you learned. See what I mean: because of the way they've been brought up, they end up being unable to appreciate complexity. They just see a can of soup or a flower.” She's almost laughing. “I'm sorry. I've been drinking all night, and I know I'm rambling.”
“What do you think Coprolalia's trying to say?”
“There's no one message. He's simply trying to understand the world in which he lives, and to express his perspective.” She looks to me suspiciously. “I also believe his popularity, especially among those outside of the artistic community, derives from his disdain for those unable to see beauty in labor, even creative labor. You know, you meet so many people who want to be writers, but they don't write. You don't know how crazy it makes me when I hear people say they want to be a writer. What's stopping you? Is your arm broken?” She laughs. “And then you meet artists, and sometimes they have great eyes, but their ideas never materialize because they're lazy. You meet poets, but they don't really write poetry; they just write esoteric and laconic observations in stanzas because they haven't really worked on their metric or their style. They want to live as Nietzsche dictated, as artists, but they don't want to be burdened by the process of creating. I once heard the story of a man who said that he refused to paint because the painting he had constructed in his head was so perfect that it couldn't be reconstructed on a canvas. That's bullshit. Obviously. If he attempted to produce it, saw the finished result as imperfect, and began anew, then I would give him a bit more lenience. Perhaps I might even call him a genius if he did it for his entire life without ever getting it right. But he refused to do anything, and this tells me that he's just a fucking lazy dipshit with a mildly artistic compulsion.
“But this is all besides the point. The point is that Coprolalia really seems to see something beautiful in the ordinary. You know, it's like Dubliners. A lot of people see the world that Joyce created as dreadful, depressing; but that was the typical life there—in Dublin—and he made it beautiful because he really captured it in a unique way. Or you could look at Saramago's Gospel According to Jesus Christ. He spends so much time on the realities of first century life that you apprehend just how wretched existence was back then. And it really was, too. For just about everybody in the early Roman Empire, except for the ruling classes, life consisted of that famous Hobbesian quintet: 'Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' Coprolalia's work embodies the typical life here as seen through the eyes of a normal person. People aren't looking for their place in the sun; they just want someone to listen to them, they just want to feel…I don't know, maybe grounded, connected.”
She smiles. Is this a test? “I feel like you really understand him,” she nods. “I thought you were only in it for the money.”
Aberdeen and Tomas have apparently let the secret out. It is not that I am ashamed of the fact that finding Coprolalia will res
ult in a substantial monetary reward; it's more that I feel as though the knowledge of this prospective boon will make people less inclined to take my ambition seriously. With the cat out of the bag, it seems as though it is now my duty to disclose the details of how I came to find an interest in Coprolalia.
In late-1999, a fairly prominent monthly based in New York decided to offer a hundred thousand dollar reward to anyone who could find and interview Coprolalia. Thousands of people responded to the magazine's offer, and the editors soon found themselves drowning in pages claiming to contain interviews with the reclusive artist. The publication reviewed all of the entries, tossed the obvious frauds, and sent the potentially genuine manuscripts on to Sean Winchester, who proceeded to reject everything he received.
Most forgot about the offer after a couple of months, though, according to Sean, the publication still gets about ten or twenty of these manuscripts a year. Sean has said that the majority of the entries are either confessionals or pseudo-confessionals in which the interviewer turns out to be interviewing his alter ego, who is (big surprise) Coprolalia. “It was far more common when the contest…well, it's not really a contest, but you know what I mean. It was really common back when the offer was first made—probably due to the popularity of Fight Club,” he explained. “Of course, now the whole idea has become so overdone that it's too banal even for Hollywood; but people still try to pull it off. Regardless, it's one of those tricks that needs to be put to bed.”
The magazine doesn't publicize the offer any longer, though Sean has assured me that the editor is still accepting submissions. I had never heard anything about it until the early May of 2007. I had just turned in my final paper to Professor Winchester.
“So what do you have planned now,” he asked after I handed him the thirty page paper that already seems too esoteric and silly to even bother describing. “You're graduating with a major in Art History—”