ZoeCicero

I really do love coming in here and writing journals from time to time (I don't do it nearly as often as I probably ought to), because honestly no one reads them. . . and there's some marvelous little thrill in saying what you like, semi-publically, yet knowing there is a roughly ninety per cent chance no one will ever see it or care.  And the fact that it's here stashed with my art, like some haphazard digital hope chest, makes it all the more eccentrically fulfilling.  Maybe one day I'll connect with another absurdist eccentric intellectual snob on this site who is as weird and analytical as I am, and they'll have the guts to tell me "Jesus, Zoe, you are one passive aggressive little social critic posing as a Southern Belle."

I wonder why it's so easy, even effortless, for so many people to be inauthentic. I tell myself that it's just my part of the country, and my constant discomfort with it is only indicative of my love/hate relationship with the American South.  It seems to be the default state of the human race, or at least in middle-to-upper class America where people think they have so much to lose. . . to quote one of my personal heroes, Morrissey "They're so scared to show intelligence; it might smear their lovely career."  

That's right, Sean Patrick: This world, I am afraid, is designed for crashing bores.  And I am not one. . . 

But the utterly delicious part is that no one knows this.  I always feel like Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap, when he first arrives in someone else's life and, before he even gets to a reflective surface to actually identify his new form, he learns a lot just by the way people treat him.  (There needs to be one of those darling little pseudo-spiritual books written called The Philosophy of Quantum Leap.  But that's another essay for another day, and I'll probably never write it.)

The underlying message of that show, a childhood favorite of mine, was that people react to who you LOOK like, not who you ARE.  No matter how much evidence they receive to the contrary, they will interact with what you seem to be and with what they need for you to be.  This observance may sound adolescent-- and I'll admit I never lost the Holden Caulfield worldview I embraced at 14, because it still seems pretty relevant.
This is why:

I look like a very different creature than I really am.  As I've transitioned from being a stay-at-home mom and artist back into a full time career, I've found my life dominated by the discrepancy between the authenticity of self that I cannot help but insist upon and the suppositions and inauthenticity that others seem to live with unquestioningly.  (To give some context here, I am an administrative civil servant . . .I'll leave it at that.  Part of this could be that I am utterly unsuited temperamentally to such work, but for the time being it is necessary that i make the best of this and treat it as a social experiment of sorts.)

What I appear to be to the people I meet each day is a petite caucasian female, conservatively dressed and overtly compassionate and rather self-effacing in my humor, simply because I've never had much of an ego and humility comes naturally to me.  I'm an INTJ on the Meyers Briggs inventory, which is a very rare type in general and an even rarer type for females.  As a result, I do not get along well with nor understand other women very well.  I find gossip repugnant and cruel-- I have vices of my own and do not judge others for doing this, as it seems to be something they do out of a desperate need to feel superior or in control.  

What is so strange to me is how people insist upon reacting to the woman they see and the beliefs they attach to her--  this woman they believe must be privileged and naive and weak-- rather than getting to know me.  When I present new ideas at work, as part of my job description, I'm treated like an eccentric child.  In fact, I've noticed that any behavior I present that deviates from the role I am suppose to play, that of an affluent white woman whose husband probably takes care of her, is at first laughed at and, if repeated, met with ridicule.  I'm not supposed to be smart (never mind that I have a BA in History, attended graduate school for a year and a half, taught freshman composition as a grad assistant at the University of New Orleans when I was 23, and then went back to school for a two year graphic design program later in my 20's.)  I'm not supposed to be creative-- even though I'm working on a novel and I draw and paint constantly.  

I'm just not supposed to be myself.  I don't even think I'm supposed to be particularly interesting.  No one around me is.  I almost want to stand up and say "I notice a lot of you spend your time between menial clerical tasks shopping for shoes online.  Well, maybe you could shop for a personality while you're at it.  I have one, myself.  I mean its scary at first, but really. . . They're fucking awesome!"

Hello there deviant animals:

So, I've been on hiatus, both because I took a tedious but dreadful job as a civil servant for a certain department in my little Southern home state here to pay the bills, and also because I've been focusing on my fiction.  I
ll be posting some of my little work of magical realism/fantasy on my page here in hopes of getting some feedback. Essay forthcoming as a prelude, too, since I've been reading Borges's "On Writing" and felt compelled to sort of annotate myself and get- ugh gross, but . . . . almost confessional in the exposition up front.

Z.

I think I first became an addict, if it was a choice, because I never wanted to cry again.  You see, I'm the most wretched crier-- I choke, I hyperventilate, I say desperate, sentimental and impossible things. I call out for beloved, long-dead relatives and pets and lie on the floor shaking and carrying on until my face is a monstrous site the next day. When I was young, young, ever so young- 13 or 14or 15- I was just a ubiquitous and irksome crier.  I felt too much, and they. . . you know them, if you're a True Artist. . .the unsmiling THEY who have immaculate 401K's and run America, city or small town, and (wait for it) above all, NEVER CRY.  Never make a scene.  THEY may be some of your friends and relatives, and THEY can't understand how you could dare do such a thing.

Such a wasteful, inconvenient thing.  Crying.  

So I stopped.   Like Jackson Browne in "Doctor, My Eyes".  I stopped-- "Now I want to understand:For I have done all that I could to see the evil and the good without crying. You must help me if you can."  The first time I felt NOTHING, I only knew I would do whatever it took to keep my sword and shield about me no matter what, for what is numbness, what is walking oblivion, if not a damn well-crafted suit of armor.

I've cried the last few days.  I've had to be very careful, you see, because I am no longer the Little Lost Daughter with her Deeply-Felt Loves and Battles and Long-Standing Grudges with the World at Large.
I'm the Mother, mother of a boy who does not cry with the mad insistence his mother used to do, thirty years past.  I am a Wife, wife of a man who learned the trick of not letting the heart that breaks overcome the wit that charms and perseveres.

If I believe I am anyone else, I am a liar. I deluded.  "I am no Prince Hamlet, and here's no great matter"  I am, like my ancestresses back in the Old Country, a hausfrau with some lovely skills, big brilliant eyes. . . .frown lines, these days.  

I love too rarely and so far too deeply.  My hands that draw and paint and use the machines of our age are no different than the little calloused, childlike hand's of the ancestress's, petite like me, who sewed and left their babies in little baskets in the shade of a nearby tree while they went to pick cotton for the people who REALLY owned the land.

My dreams, these visions I try so feebly to represent with some media or another known to me-- what is to become of them when I am gone?  I am 32-- time is running on, and immortality must be earned.  What pride is it in me that I cannot abide the idea of my son's children putting my life of well-known (to me) moleskines and charcoal and graphite people, along with some typed pages, a half-finished novel here and there, and boxing them up to live beside the Christmas ornaments.

The same fate came to my own tremendously talented great grandmother's lace and crochet and embroidery.

Would she, silent in the ether now, cry over what we've done?  Or would she refrain because, like me, she'd be too afraid that she'd never stop. 

At the end of the tragedy, the level-headed Horatio alone stands to bear witness.  The hysterics and indecisive fools lie dead all around him.  How I have tried to be him, embracing quiet pragmatism over outer-darkness.

Is it wisdom, this survival, or pure cowardice?

So I actually- for some insane reason, because nothing positive ever comes from these misadventures- went forth into some of the DA chat rooms last night after I got the baby to sleep.  I don't usually do a lot of socializing and "browsing" on this site, but rather as you all know I've tried to build a quiet safe haven for down-to-earth, humble, amiable folks like myself. I have been trying to find people willing to work on a group for artists who, like me, are also recovering addicts and to make such a group non-judgmental but also safe and monitored.  Needless to say, there isn't a lot of philanthropy or good will among our fellow artists.  I did not find the altruism I was looking for-- I hope this situation changes, and I will try again in another way at another time.
Something I've noticed, which is a conundrum to me, is how very seriously people take themselves.  
When I do go forth among these people, our "fellow artists" with more public exposure, I'm always faced with the same question "How is it you (Person X) acquired this outrageous amount of personal confidence and self-centered smugness? It can't just be because you feel like a big, digitally-adept fish in the pond that is this one website called deviant art, a single artistic/social media site among thousands. So were you somehow raised differently than I was? It must have started earlier with you, this bizarre, disproportionate hubris that I just can't wrap my mind around."  
But then again, maybe it's me.  I'm a Southern American Protestant.  I was raised very traditionally, believing that any talent, intellect, or physical attractiveness I have are gifts from God that I should use for the betterment of others.  They don't belong to me-- nothing actually does.  I am a servant and a steward.  
When I begin to believe I am something else, when anyone begins to believe that, I have noticed that false expectations of oneself and a disproportionate sense of entitlement quickly follow.  I say this not to judge anyone, because I believe lots of ugly behavior just comes from a sense of deeper insecurity, fear, and plain old emotional immaturity.  It is all around us, ubiquitous, and I realized last night that I only even notice how ugly it is myself because I've been sober for nearly 2 years and I had to change, to become more self-aware, humble, and spiritually focused to survive with this
Perhaps I would benefit from being more confident myself-- I often think that I err too much in the opposite direction, with the best of intentions.  But I don't think being like some of these people is a luxury I can afford, talented or not, because it's a self-destructive thing at worst and an unattractive tiresome one at the very least. I'll go so far as to be old-fashioned, because I am old-fashioned, and call this what it is-- Pride. Hubris.

 

         I despise romantic comedies.  There it is; bold and declarative.  In fact, when I meet women who rave about The Notebook or any of the dozens of other saccharine travesties Hollywood regularly spews forth to fulfill the demands of the Sex and the City demographic. . . well, the intellectual snob in me immediately recognizes that said female and I shan’t have much further to say to one another.

         If I seem contemptuous, consider that I have become this way because I know the genre could be done so much better.  It could be subtle, graceful. . .my God, even cerebral!  I know this, you see, because when I was in college, Sofia Coppola’s understated sophomore directing effort, Lost in Translation,  raised the bar for me.  It’s a repulsive cliché to say that a film “changed (your) life”, but LoT did succeed in capturing my heart and mind, and transforming me from an omnivorous young film geek to a film geek with hope that my generation of American directors could overcome the anti-intellectualism inherent in our film industry, yet never lose that spark of understated passion.  New Authenticity.  Indie Quirk.  Whatever it was, LoT exemplified it for me.

         Scarlett Johansson wasn’t a sex symbol yet.  She was believable as a thoughtful, awkward Yale graduate with an ancient soul, wandering through the city of Tokyo.  Joining her on her existential quest and cultural exile is Bill Murray, playing the protagonist Bob Harris as a self-deprecating version of himself from a parallel universe.  Only Murray could have captured the poignant nuances of this lost soul who nevertheless maintains a magnanimous sense of the absurd.

         The philosophical under-netting is clear: We are all strangers in a nonsensical society, spirits in the material world.  Murray and Johansson’s courtship resembles something from the works of Goethe or Thomas Mann perhaps more so than it does the classic American films of Billy Wilder or Ernst Lubitsch, those great masters of the thoughtful American romantic absurd. 

         As for the age difference between the lead characters, it simply never seemed an issue.  With my own naisant Electra complex, I admittedly found the Murray/Johansson combination an engaging casting choice. Yet Murray’s character rarely comes off as paternal.  Charlotte and Bob are ever equals and fellow travelers, reacting with a bemused stoicism to the city and culture of Tokyo (the film’s unofficial third lead character, with all its ubiquitous, surreal energy). 

    Thomas Mann in his novel The Magic Mountain proposed that space, like time, brings about a certain forgetfulness and freeing of the ego from all the individual “back home” ever thought important enough to define himself.  Space works its healing magic in much the same way as Time, Mann explains, only faster.  So perhaps their confused sojourn in Japan and the seeming exile from the familiarity and identities they’d created at home, are Bob and Charlotte’s personal vindication.  Salvation disguised as culture shock.        

The ideal that I took away from this film a decade ago and which I’ve kept within me most of my adult life, is that ancient souls can recognize each other in a vast sea of white noise and chaos, and it is that glorious experience of being found, of being truly seen by a kindred creature, that provides us with a sense of sublime purpose in life. Without these little spiritual jolts, these reminders of the imperfection and existential frailty in us all, then we are indeed lost.