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Still
Life
The room looks like no specific painting I’ve ever seen, but
it’s still somehow idealized. If viewed from the street through
the high arched windows, I suppose, the small pool of light
from the single lamp might lend a Hopperish tone to the scene.
But the blinds are drawn; no one’s looking in. It’s just me,
sitting in that limited light, taking in the room, as if it
were an installation titled Room With Two Chairs, Table,
Lamp and Fan. It feels both perfect and unreal.
This is my new, freshly painted living room. I’ve just moved—or,
rather, I am in the process of moving. Now that the paint
is dry, I’ve started making weeknight runs of furniture—without
much strategy, I confess—over to the new place. The first
things in were basics: two matching leopard-print chairs (donated
to me by my aunt and uncle, who reupholstered them after salvaging
them from a mental institution that was closing its doors),
a knock-off Eames coffee table/bench thing, a GE desk fan
from the ’40s (my Dashiell Hammett fan), and a $20 Target
lamp with a shade that looks like corrugated cardboard. There’s
nothing at all else in the room—well, except me, a paint palette
from Behr and a Budweiser tall boy. No magazines or newspapers,
no shelves of books or CDs, no TV or related accessories,
no computer, none of my daughter’s squeaking or digitally
musical toys. Even the walls are bare, the semi-gloss shining
like a still liquid in the low light. It’s peaceful and contemplative,
and I’m almost dreading the impending, inevitable clutter
of my real life.
I think of the space I’m vacating. The bedroom alone so packed
with things—things that in a photograph would appear to anyone
else just mundane and undifferentiated stuff, but to me represent
Things I Should Be Doing—that it is at times overwhelming:
an alarm clock, that miserable device; the crib, with all
its wonderful and daunting connotations; the laundry spilling
over the aromatic cedar-framed hamper; my laptop computer
and its implicit reminder that I could always be writing more,
that there are plays and movies and poems and novels—and what
about a children’s book? or features on spec for national
glossies?—waiting to be written; the two now-dusty guitars
that point out tacitly that I never did finish, or even really
begin, the satirical rock-opera set in a Mexican restaurant
I joked about so long ago; there’s all the loose change that
needs rolling, now stashed in the ceramic monk-shaped cookie
jar emblazoned with the slogan “Thou Shalt Not Steal”; the
digital camera, which I should have had with me the other
night when the sunset over the city, viewed from a rise in
the road across the river, was as vividly pink as a Callner
landscape—a moment not to be recaptured, damn my lack of planning;
and all those books, any one of which might contain the fact
or observation or analysis that makes it all just suddenly
click.
How can I not yet have finished The People’s History of
the United States? Why haven’t I formed a comprehensive
grasp of the information in The Oxford History of Western
Art? I was convinced for a short time, I don’t remember
why, that by understanding the presidency of Richard Nixon
I would understand thoroughly America in the second half of
the 20th century, but I haven’t read more than two chapters
of Reeves’ doorstop President Nixon; please don’t even
mention its shelfmates No Peace, No Honor and Reaching
for Glory—and now there’s a whole new century to wrestle
with. God, I’m such a slug.
And what about the fiction? What about the Nelson Algren,
wouldn’t that help me become grittier—couldn’t I stand a little
more grit? Or the Tobias Smollet? I was certain for a brief
time that the picaresque novel was not only an informative
antecedent of all those sprawling, critically acclaimed pomo
tomes of the late ’90s, but had a compelling philosophical
aspect in its amorality, its antipedagogical unwillingness
to build toward a lesson. But I haven’t made it past the third
chapter of The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker! It’s
been on the shelf for a year! What the hell is wrong with
me? And you know how much Fielding I’ve read? None. None at
all! And Tom Jones is sitting right there, taunting
me, next to The Goldbug Variations, which I’ve started
three different times and never finished!
Off in one corner of the room, on a shelf, there’s a shrine
of sorts. It’s a fat teak Buddha—arms upraised, laughing—a
couple of those grocery store voodoo candles, and a weird
framed and illustrated mantra: It depicts a stylized Asian
youth (in Coolie attire, complete with pigtail) sitting on
a hill. Above his head, in a incongruous Gothic font, it says,
“I wish I was a little rock, a-sittin’ on a hill. Doin’ nothin’
all the day, just a-sittin’ still. I wouldn’t eat, I wouldn’t
sleep, I wouldn’t even wash. I’d just sit still a thousand
years, and rest myself, b’gosh.”
It’s an—admittedly confusing, really almost addled—invocation
toward restfulness, meditative inactivity and peace (the spirit
of which I myself have screwed up with the superstitious addition
of a small, red lacquer box containing a fortune-cookie call
to action that reads, “You are a great lover of words. Some
day you will write a book.”). It’s a futile, though hopeful,
gesture. It’s spitting in the wind. And, soon, all this mess
will pour in from beyond the freshly painted boundaries of
Room With Two Chairs, Table, Lamp and Fan, and it’ll
be real life again.
But for now, for this moment, I’m thinking of cracking another
tall boy, tacking up the palette on the wall like a mandala,
and gazing at it across the grain of the bare hardwood floor,
staring into it as a representation of a job completed, of
a tidy, satisfying end to an action. Rolling the names of
the paints around like a new mantra: Summer Tan, Green Tea,
Bliss.
—John
Rodat
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