Kiva Han was out of the fruit they use in the granola bowl I usually order–all of it, apparently–and six dollars is too much to pay for milk and cereal so I just got a muffin. It was stale and made the pads of my fingers sticky. I drank my coffee with the lid off, so it was cold before I could finish it. Skim milk swirling, the surface looked like that day’s sky, which possessed the same dull, gray flatness as an old road. They had given me a large cup in apology for the granola, though I had paid for a small. Even though I had said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
I found myself across the street at the Carnegie Museum. My half-full cup found itself in a trashcan on Forbes. Into a black room, small, three short films projected onto a wall each, like the allegory of the cave. They were silent, the only noises were the clicking and whirring of projectors. There was only one film with a bench in front of it, so I sat and watched that one first. Its title was “Punctured.” It was almost cinematic in its presentation, with the projector hidden and the bench a certain distance in front of it, the projection sort of larger-than-life, totally occupying my field of vision. The shot begins as a close-up of a black hole, a dark, blotted imperfection on an old photograph. 1930s, America, Depression-era. Always something so stagey about images from that time, as if they were taken to conform to our nostalgic, non-experienced conception of it. The grayscale tones only enhance that feeling. Of course, how can an era be aware of its condition as an era? It’s not one until it is remembered as such. Nostalgia cannot be lived, but only applied secondhand. Therefore nothing about the floral frocks, long felt coats with collars upturned, fedoras, and general stores with their hand-painted signs advertising malted milk for a nickel would have seemed to the subjects of those photographs quaint, simple, adorable…nostalgic. The effect of the black spot and the zooming out from the center of it is that the content sort of materializes around it, quickly building up from Nothing–emptiness, darkness–to pieces, parts, then a recognizable tableaux, and once a discernible scene is visible, the camera’s lens has reached the boundaries of the photograph and you realize the knowability of that image is absolutely finite and limited. The black splotch, rather than seeming an elimination of form and content as it would in a normal slide show, is now something spatially positive–a palpable nothingness. Everything physical that appears around it is a chipping away of that blankness, the image itself is a negation of nothingness. The absence of form becomes more significant than the forms themselves, proven by the fact that those “imperfections” were why these particular photographs were selected for the film. The blot is now the primary accepted element of each image, rather than that which renders it rejectable. In fact it is the singular element that threads together all the images. The viewer can only witness the whole image because of its glaring imperfection, the black void near its center. There is something deeply existential there. At the same time, it is not a slide show. It would have been an entirely different art work as a set of slides, blanking in and out of existence instead of scoping. The rapid, outward movement is crucial. Each photograph, from the center of its black dot to the outer edges of the shot, is visible for about two seconds.
There seem to be a lot of blind people in this city. Every time I’m on a bus, someone is sitting on one of the front benches with a dog or a cane and looks as though they are asleep and surprised at the same time. Extra alert to compensate for their blindness. I always wonder what they see exactly, if it’s a blurry, smudged version of the visible world, or if it’s just blackness. Or something else I haven’t been able to conceive of yet. Montaigne says we cannot trust our senses to present reality to us in its complete form, if reality is even capable of manifesting itself in a form that can be described as complete. Sight is subjective, dependent on light and nerves and no two sets of eyes see precisely the same way. Even if everyone saw perfectly, there is no way to know what other senses might exist that could take in all the information the universe has to offer. We can’t imagine them because we can only know what is familiar to us, what pertains to our experience as humans with limitations. When I see these blind people on buses, I always think about how limited they are as humans. But in fact they are only marginally less capable than everyone else. People are all limited and crippled in some way. They always seem to know when their stop is approaching and shrug off assistance from the presumptuous and sighted. And I wonder if any of their other senses have sharpened to compensate for the loss of one. Do they hear more, or better? Is their sense of smell more acute? I remember something I noticed as a child, that the scent of flowers is stronger in the dark.
This week is different from any other week for me because it is prefaced with the strongest heartbreak of my life, from what was incidentally also the shortest relationship of my life. It’s funny in a stupid way because this time I was the one who was ready to be with someone, ready to commit to another person, ready to not be alone again. I was completely invested in the idyllic visions of our future together that I couldn’t help but conjuring. I always thought I was beyond the youthful idealism of my peers, but it’s simultaneously necessary and hurtful to be reminded so forcefully that I am exactly twenty-two years old. You think you’re wise beyond your years and then you do something so embarrassingly cliché that will make you never forget again that you are living the same life that billions of humans have lived before you and will continue to live after you. Furthermore, the feeling of smallness, of vulnerability, and of general susceptibility to the world at large is something you don’t mature past or learn how to conquer. That child is ever lingering in the eaves and darkened wings of your heart, stepping forth in your worst moments to make you remember what you are. You feel totally isolated from the uncaring, unburdened masses all around you. But everyone has felt this. If they haven’t, they will. I have to assume that either I am the only one feeling as though I’m always trying to Get Over, or everyone is. I’m not sure which is a more consoling thought.
(I always slip into the second person when talking about my feelings, somehow. Always trying to put distance between my head and my heart. At times it sounds more accusatory than anything. That you. And I feel I should apologize for the artless, unpoetic prose of the last paragraph.)
I ride the 64 bus home from work. At night the buses are long, transparent prisms of light gliding through darkness. The yellow pools spilling from streetlamps are like buoys, reassuring you every second or so of your precise boundaries. If I focus my eyes right, I don’t see the reflection of the bus’s interior when I look at the window. It is just blackness, a void. Why is that emptiness so attractive to me? It never lasts long before variegated heads and steel poles filter into my view, chipping away at the infinite exterior from within. The bus’s electronic marquee is reflected in the window at which I’m staring, scrolling the names of neighborhoods backwards, looping endlessly. The letters are square and chunky from the individual round lights that compose each one like huge pixels. They remind me of the Lite-Brite toy from my childhood, and suddenly the faint smell of molded plastic being warmed by electricity wafts by me only, a figment. What did I design with those colored pegs? The same things I doodle on notebook paper today. Flowers, spirals. Cartoonish things. Illuminated from behind.
There are no blind people on this bus tonight. Just me, ever facing a transient darkness, and these other people and things that intrude on it. All of us looking, seeing, never learning anything about the world or each other. There’s no comfort in all of that. Leave me to my nothingness.
