Tough Crowd

Go away. I don’t want you here today. Instead, why don’t you check out the adult insert? Or watch TV like everyone else for a change—isn’t it almost time for Who Wants to Watch a Millionaire Eat a Bug? Honestly, there’ve got to be 15 different things you’re putting off right now; go do three of them. Seriously, beat it. Come back in a couple of weeks.

I want to be left alone.

It’s nothing personal. I mean, it’s nothing you’ve done, specifically. I don’t even know who most of you are, so don’t feel singled out for criticism. It isn’t any one of you, it’s all of you collectively—it’s you as audience. It’s you as the Imagined Readership. I don’t want to have to consider you today.

Well, then, take the week off, you suggest. It’s not like we broke in and held you at knife point, demanding another installment on threat of grievous bodily harm. Do what you want, you self-aggrandizing, solipsistic twerp. Write the thing, don’t write the thing—it’s no skin off our backs. This ain’t Misery. We’re not going to hobble you if you write something that displeases us. And what makes you think that you haven’t already displeased us? If you want to know the brutal truth, we’ve always thought you a bit of a flake anyway. So, write it as haiku, write it in Arabic or pig Latin, holler it out the window, pull a Tristram Shandy and publish a handful of squiggly lines meant to illustrate the passing motions of your typing fingers—whatever you do, it’s not gonna change our order at the drive-thru window, if you get our point.

Yeah, I get your point. I know you don’t hang on these words. I know it’s not that important to you. I know that it’s a provocative diversion, at its best; and an impertinent trifle, an annoying open-ended question, when not quite up to that level. And, in some ways, I’m glad for that insignificance. Really, this isn’t brain surgery—and, thank god. At even my most delusional, I aspire to tinker with your inner workings in a mostly metaphorical way, using an indirect approach via your emotions. I suspect that’s true of most—to use an only convenient descriptor—creative types. That’s why we pick up the pen (or the palette or the Gibson Flying V, or whatever) as opposed to, say, the rib-spreader.

To steal a line, I am trying to break your heart. I mean, I—in league with all the other writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, et al.—am trying to seduce you, the imagined audience, the way someone once (more than that, actually, many more times) seduced me: the way Somerset Maugham, Frida Kahlo, Herman Melville, Wim Wenders, Rosser Reeves, Richard Buckner, Emily Dickenson, Egon Schiele, Vic Chesnutt, Milan Kundera, Lisa Germano, Jean-Michel Basquiat, both Fitzgeralds, Alice Neel, Harold Brodky, François Truffaut, William Irwin, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Anne Sexton, Chris Ware, Frederic Tuten, Jan Vermeer, Zadie Smith, Aristide Maillol and a thousand others seduced me.

And, frankly, sometimes its gets to be a bit of a bore.

Sometimes, I don’t care if you’re coming over, I want to leave the dishes in the sink and greet you in my underpants. You’ve got a problem with that? Well, where do you think I keep the dishwashing liquid, brainiac? What are you standing there staring at me for? Check under the sink; you can see I don’t have it on me—I’m not wearing any damn pants. And skip the oh-so-clever witticism, because I’ve already told you that it’s under the sink and, as it happens, I’m not all that happy to see you.

Yeah, sometimes courting you seems a chore.

Because I imagine you as similar to me—only better. You’re smarter, better-read than I, and more worldly. You’re a deeper thinker and more logical. You’re both imaginative and disciplined. You’re probably multilingual. You never had any problem understanding the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning, and you only had to look up ontological and teleological once each, then never again. You’re conversant in the foundational myths of half-a-dozen cultures, and you take pleasure discussing theoretical innovations in the field of pure mathematics. You really understand the workings of the Federal Reserve and you are familiar with the details of the Teapot Dome Scandal. You speak confidently about the work of both Terry Riley and Terry Gilliam. You’re a graceful dance partner and a better-than-average dart player. You have a pleasant singing voice and absolutely no interest in public recognition.

The imagined you is, therefore, difficult to impress—much less seduce. And yet I feel obliged, driven, to attempt it nonetheless, to try to win over, to woo, this vague amalgam of all the best qualities of my even-possible readership. Because I have imagined it as the audience—the ur-audience—that has conferred greatness on all the successful seducers of the past, and I want deeply to join their ranks.

Today, though, my cravenly needy artistic Don Juanism annoys me. Today, I want to be ugly and uncouth. Today, I want to tell the imagined you—the imagined you whom I could never fool myself into thinking too stupid or unsophisticated to “get” me, the imagined you on whom I can’t turn the tables and dismiss, the imagined you who is so frustratingly authoritative—to go to hell.

Today, I want to drive you away. Today, I want to slurp the soup straight from the tureen, and wipe my mouth on the tablecloth. Today, I want to goose the maid, and play footsie with your dour aunt. Today, in the words of another great seducer, I want to be “wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear.”

But if you do stick around and you find that you enjoy it, feel free to applaud. I won’t bow, I’m too proud. But backstage, despite myself, I’ll probably smile.

—John Rodat

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