Musings

Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." This thought was also expresed in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: a modern man who travels back in time to the middle ages and awes the primitive locals with his "magic" modern technology. I think it is not too much of a stretch to say that most of our current technology would indeed appear magical to the people of the 19th century - what with iPhones, the internet, MRI scans, and so forth.

But I don't think that will be true any longer. Take a moment and think what the future could bring: immersive VR multiplayer games, anti-aging drugs, space travel, even hand-held laser weaponry... none of it sounds like "magic." It just sounds like very advanced science. If someone walked up to me with an alien teleporter from 2200, I'd just start asking them how it worked. I wouldn't think: "Oh noes! Magic!"

This reflects a two-part change in modern society, I believe. Firstly, because of the rapid advances in technology and their saturation of our daily life, we have come to accept that scientific mystery is not magic. We are surrounded every day by complex and amazing devices whose inner functions we couldn't ever hope to understand. Most of our gadgets were designed and built by whole companies of people with individual specializations. We are the product of Ford's assembly line, each doing our own little part as best we can and trusting that everyone else is doing the same. Mysteries are easier to attribute to the intellectual genius of another person than to mystical forces. Even in the most artfully executed staged displays, we look for wires and sleight-of-hand, not telekinesis.

The second part is that the idea of magic has become so very popular in the Oughts. Which probably hasn't been true for nigh on a thousand years, once the Christians started burning people at the stake for suspicion of it and all (actually, the Romans had some similar laws on that matter too, come to think of it). As near as the 1970s Dungeons and Dragons was linked with Satan-worshipping child-murderers in most people's minds. But now pretty much everyone can read Harry Potter and say they're a Wiccan without being tossed willy-nilly into prison on false-memory child abuse charges. Magic is a nice dream - an adult fairy tale to make life seem a little less cruel.

And I think these two changes have necessitated a shift in what we perceive as magic. Before, magic was just the unexplained. But now the unexplained can be very boring (advanced technology). Magic has needed to move into new ground - the unexplainable. Not just advanced science, but the anti-science. It exists outside of the laws of physics. Whereas wizards of the past were the most educated of their day, utilizing the forces of the universe in grand and unbelievable ways, now most fantasy stories internalize it into their characters as a talent, an innate ability that is powered by emotion or spirit. Magic is like perfect pitch - a special gift that only a few people have at which the rest of us can only wonder from afar.

There's something a little sad about that change. It's the difference between believing a great artist is made by working hard for years and years and becoming a master of his craft, versus believing that a great artist is born that way and produces his greatest work in his 20s and then drifts on into obscurity or monotony. It makes it easier for us to dream that we could be special, but a lot harder for us to achieve it once we have recognized that we are not.

I'm an old-timer on the Internet - not so ancient as the Bulletin Board posters of the early 90s, but old enough to remember when AOL was a walled garden and all the links fit on one page. The internet was so big then: full to the brim with tiny sites featuring fun games and comedic rants. For the lonely and isolated (like me), it was a way of reaching out and finding new families - best friends we would never have met, constrained as we were by physical location and social habits. When the late 90s rolled around and commercialism seized the internet, we complained that the fun places were being drowned out by the big brands. You couldn't find Barbie parodies anymore, or teasing twists of trademarked phrases like "Ham, the Other White Meat," because those companies were sending out lawsuits left and right. But then things turned around a bit with blogs and MySpace and the connections people started making in the Oughts. Web 2.0 was all about bringing people together, about making collaborations and virtual families. The internet became a world where we could socialize even better than the local coffee shop.

But I think something's gone very wrong. And - admittedly - this may just be me being old and missing the point, but it seems to me that instead of becoming a place where people who don't fit in can find a niche where they belong, the internet has ballooned into a giant clique where the nonconformists are more scorned and isolated than ever. Blogging is a popularity contest and - for all I love to read Dooce and the like - as a consequence, the less popular are dropping off the map, drowned out and never seen. Instead of connecting by setting up a little home on LiveJournal or Flickr, you just get told every day how incredibly worthless and undeserving of companionship you are, staring at that zero counter month after month.

And the senior clique? They are more confident than ever that they are all the world needs to hear. The way the internet en masse attacks movies like The Crystal Skull, while blithely ignoring the other monumental failures of the genre. The way everyone reads the same books (from Harry Potter to Y: The Last Man). The way everyone knows the same celebrity gossip and CuteOverload vocabulary. You are either in, or you are out (and yes, they all watch Project Runway and blog their reality TV picks with zest).

And I've always been an outsider.

I wander the internet now and it's entertaining enough in a sugary sort of way, like green Jell-o for my morning doldrums. But it's all so same-y and predictable. Occasionally I find a new site that makes me laugh, but it wears off after a few months. I read odd books and wish I had someone to talk to about them. Someone who doesn't like Star Trek or SG-1 or Harry Potter. I wish I had a smaller community of artists where I could feel like I wasn't at the losing end of insignificant.

And I guess that's the real problem there. There are over 6 billion people on the planet, and more of them get on the internet everyday. And - as in real life - there are more desperate-to-fit-in sheep joining up than lonely outsiders. Maybe it was different once, maybe it was smaller and more selective. But it's not. The world's not. And we can't be special anymore. Even the statistical uniqueness of our fingerprints is about to disappear up against that huge number of people. And I don't know how to accept that.

I'm looking at the piece of fairy cake and I just can't grasp how very small I am.

When I was eleven I got a cat named Caesar. He was a tiny kitten when he came into my life, but he quickly grew into a giant, fluffy gray tabby. He was an accidental addition to my life: I had been begging my mother for a cat for years, and when she finally said yes, I immediately came home with a little spotted female kitten from a friend's house. And my mom took in Caesar the same day from my older brother and his wife. It was an awkward moment. She wanted me to pick one, but they were kittens and I couldn't reject one. So they both stayed. And the female cat hated me almost immediately. But Caesar became the love of my life. At night, I would sneak him inside - even though it was forbidden - and let him sleep on my bed. I would clean up his kitten messes, and brush his tangled fur when he became a quarrelsome tom. I snuck him tuna and old clothes to sleep on out in the garage. He adored me and would rub against me with his whole body, just begging to be patted on the head or scratched under the chin.

Eventually the female cat had a tiny litter of her own. And a few months after that, she and her kittens disappeared. My mother told me they ran away. My sisters told me they went to the pound. I believed my sisters. But secretly I didn't care. As long as I had my fluffy Caesar I was happy.

As he got older, Caesar got pretty dirty. He lost a good chunk of one ear. Then his eye got pretty infected. I cried a lot and petted him more. He drooled on me and purred his heart out. Then one day he, too, disappeared. He was only a year old. My mother told me he ran away. My sisters told me he went to the pound. I didn't believe any of them. I knew he had died somewhere, all alone, fighting out his little half-feral tom life.

I never asked for another cat. My parents were relieved. They decided it was just a phase. My mother had never really understood the whole pet idea in the first place. Animals were more of a functional contribution to the farm in her mind. She hugged me and told me I was allergic to cats anyway. I didn't believe her. I was heartbroken without my Caesar. My high school years were lonely and bereft of his furry company. I kept the few pictures I had. For a long time I secretly kept his name tag in a little jewelry box. I would take it out and remember how much I loved him and how dirty and sick he had been at the end. And I hated myself because I hadn't taken better care of him. He was my best friend and the thing I loved most in the world, and I had let him slowly be eaten away by the cruelties of animal life because I was too young and stupid to know how to protect him.

Twelve years later I finally gave in and got another little kitten. His name was Orpheus, and he was an accidental addition too. I went to the Humane Society with my Significant Other and we came home with a little black female. And she hated me immediately. But the next day I found little Orpheus, the size of my hand, abandoned, crippled from hunger, and near death. And I couldn't say no, so home he came. He was a little wobbly at first, and jumped around the house like a bunny as he struggled to make his legs work again. But soon he could jump and snuggle and climb under the blankets and purr against my chest. And he was the love of my life. He adored me and would rub against me with his whole body, just begging to be picked up and held.

Orpheus grew up big and strong and I got him all his shots and the best food I could find, even though I couldn't afford it. I got him fixed when he was old enough and then I took him in for antibiotics after all the fights he got into anyway. I took him into the Kitty E.R. when his liver failed and paid $600 from my last credit card to keep him alive. I smuggled him his favorite blanket and fed him his favorite treats. And I thought, when he dies I don't think I'll ever ask for another cat. Because I'll be heartbroken.

But he got better. And he sleeps on my bed every night, even though I am allergic to cats after all. And I drool a little on him (because of the allergies) and he purrs his heart out. And even my little female cat comes around, snuggling up in the end and deciding she might like me too. And I look down at them and think, "I love you, Caesar."

Maybe I can never change the short, wretched life I gave my beloved friend, but I am making it up to him the only way I know how. By doing all the things for Orpheus that I should have done for him. And all the love that I give my little cats is the love that I owe my childhood cat. I miss him.

Were I more clever I would be the clown, were I more stupid I would be the fool, were I less light-hearted I would be the tragic victim, were I more sociable, I would be the lady faire. Alas, fighting against stereotypes while simultaneously trying to define myself with shallow paradigms, I don't think I am anything easily stated, except, perhaps, too much like everybody else.

My life is fairly ordinary, the average nine-to-five job that drives people to load up a pair of shotguns in the trunk, just to bring a little variety back into their world. But I don't, in fact, hate my job. And I know my own character well enough that I can't see myself creating Michaelangelo's David during a six-month artistic leave of absence. I'd just sit on my ass watching TV like everybody else does. So I haven't run out to buy that gun permit yet. And I don't think a 10-foot slab of marble would really fit in the trunk of my teeny little Toyota, provided it had the horsepower to lug such a thing home.

People still tell me that I am exceptional and talented and all those fancy other words you use when you meet someone whose minor daily achievements you envy simply because you're feeling suddenly guilty that you spent the last month on your ass watching TV. I hear it a lot less than I did when I was a straight-A high school student with red hair and glasses and an inferiority complex the size of Pocatello. It could be that I've shed the glasses, and my hair is now blue, but I suspect rather the general apathy that descends on your average artistically-minded teenager forced to abandon creative pursuits and instead excel in math, science, and literature in the vain pursuit of identity, approval, and an easily stated path in a decidedly complex world. Then again, perhaps the very fact that I could construct that sentence (and recite it theatrically to anyone who asks) is enough to alter previously genial public opinion from genius to simple psycho.

Like most people, I tend to blame my past for my present failures. It's not really fair: after all, it's not like anyone made me join the cheerleading squad or the drama club. In fact, I was basically raised *in absentia*, so if I took up the misguided notion that getting an A in chemistry would make my father notice I existed, well, that was my own stupidity. Hence the opening, and why I'm not the clown, although I do still dream occasionally of becoming a stand-up comedian. I have a routine: but since I never joined the drama club, I don't think I could overcome the stage-fright.

But let's not forget the conclusion of my key sentence. The easy path. I never fought enough for what I wanted. I still don't. I still sit on my ass watching TV week after week, dreaming of painting while groggily absorbing another rerun of ER. Like imagining the emptiness that lies beyond the edge of our universe and trying to conceive of how far it does or does not stretch, life can seem an intimidating void. Any marker in that void, any approved path or witnessed career, is a hard lure to ignore, especially when up against the uncertainty of personal vision, the ties that must be cut to follow one's dreams, and the bickering back-seat driver that is my own low self esteem.

Besides, a person can find a lot of company on that easy path. A wealth of salesmen and business executives cross my path, their careers made by two years of selling Mormon religion. Young mothers with prematurely large families conceived with the same in-depth planning that attends a customer big-sizing their fast food meal. People whose lives were made by indecision, and when it occurs to them finally to be dissatisfied where they end up, they drift on as lottery junkies and mystical dreamers, patiently waiting for some cosmic hand to capriciously pluck them from their dull, directionless lives and set them in their proper paradise. I sometimes feel like the prankster yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theatre, watching the crowds pour past me, running from that moment of deciding their life's future course. But it must have been someone else, because when graduation day came, I ran with all the rest of them.

And there must be a million different moments behind me when I had the chance to follow my heart, from selecting my college major to how I spent the 15 minutes this morning between showering and breakfast. There will likely be a million more. Myself, I'd like to think that somewhere down this road I will select one, finally. That I will look down into that void and back at the road, and maybe--just that once--think that uncertainty could be more satisfying than another hour of network television. It does help that the quality of the latter deteriorates year after year. Maybe I could graph that: the decline in interesting programming versus the effort it takes to do something which requires the use of my limbs. There might be a point in there where they equalize. It would be nice to know when, especially since that would help me plan my La-Z Boy payment plan.

I do have some genuinely brilliant friends: PhDs in music and history, top-notch lawyers, mathematicians, doctors, VPs. I think I must be that fat girl in our group, the one the cheerleaders always kept around in high school. But however closely I study them, my little troop of Bright Eyes have yet to reveal their secret key to breaking the couch potato cycle. And they aren't exactly the disciplined type, forgoing television or eating extra bran. The things they go without are fairly universal: love, cleanliness, a healthy diet, physical activity of any sort. The ways they piss away their days are not so different from my own: beer, pizza, computer games, hypochondrism. Yet at the end of the year, my friends show up with photography awards, new degrees, and job offers from all over the world. And I was rejected by McDonald's.

I wonder sometimes what opportunites they hate themselves for missing, what dreams fill their rosy-colored futures. Is there a level up there I can't see, stuck all the way down in my dead-end lower middle class world as I am? The material one of mansions and antique cars which lures the lottery junkies is one I think none of my crowd is really drawn to, but perhaps there is some other life intertwined, good food, fine wine, gallery shows, witty conversation, a chance meeting with Steve Martin or Geena Davis at the annual MENSA gathering (and finding your IQ is higher--oh, one can dream). Because somewhere in my bitter soul I think no one is ever quite ready to sit down and say, "Yup, my life is perfect, just the way it is."

It's supposed to drive us to achieve, that shrewish dissatisfaction with our lives. Maybe it works for other people: suburbanities desperately laboring for a bigger car and smaller ass than the other lemmings of the herd. I'm not much of a herd creature, unfortunately. However long I agonizingly relive my past and rescript every line like a bitter and talentless old film critic, I'm still living a life so lacking in worth that it would fall somewhere below Strom Thurmond: The Prenatal Years.

I find myself hating middle-aged housewives searching for importance at the art stores I mournfully frequent. I watch them tensely from the corner of my eye as I wander those narrow aisles, hand stretched out to brush over each color without ever quite touching. I'm afraid to buy anything, afraid of committing my meager income to a frivolity I may never summon the courage to actually use. But these greying women blissfully fill carts with second-rate pastels and teach-yourself kits, already dreaming of their first gallery showing.

Outside, men in dark suits stride purposefully down the streets like emergency room doctors to their inconsequential lunches, immaculate gangs of future corporate businessmen, in training to rob pensions and crush blue-collar lives. The tidily dressed maids of the expensive hotels follow with less pomp, but they match so well it's hard to separate the two, like dancers at some grand waltz in fancy dress. I haven't decided if I am just the little girl left outside, or perhaps the main course, stewing quietly in the corner.

I'm not fooled by the lower class, wondering about their wasted potential and unnoticed misfortunes. It's a frivolity for well-off college kids looking for griefs in others because they don't have enough of their own yet. There are no Shakespeares out there, no Berninis-in-disguise, bumming cigarettes on the street corner. I imagine we could all be Mozarts, set on the right path and pushed along until we can't turn back. But how many of us can make it there on our own? I don't know if anyone can or ever did achieve *that* act of genius. We all have our little fortunes that others envy, the little presents from fate that often go unnoticed, but carry us through hurdles others can never surmount. In the end, any artist is rated on his life's work, not his potential. Wasn't that Solon's axiom, after all?

In fact, a lack of opportunity is at times the gift from fate that creates the genius which I seem to lack. I don't mean to be fickle, rejecting my own talents because they weren't the ones I wanted, like some pouty birthday girl wishing for one Barbie over another. But I can't help but wonder that if I had been less skilled at writing, if I had shown less interest in math, less passion for music, if I had perhaps shown a general failing in all other categories, if that might not have been the gift I needed to make me pursue art with more determination. If maybe all those other artists out there, working and selling and drinking martinis with self-deprecating wit at their first big exhibition, are simply so much better than me because they are, in fact, not better than me, but simply not good enough at anything else to be distracted. I do what I must to pay the bills, and if I had been unable to make the money so much more easily by playing at a computer, perhaps I might have had to work a little harder, eaten a little less, lived a little more squalidly, as the desperate, hungry artist that I still have the outright middle-class gall to envy while I drink my moderately priced French wine and watch my latest DVD.

And it always comes back to the television, doesn't it? That time-waster, that mind-sucking, creativity-destroying, social-skills-eroding void of cheap entertainment. Everyone likes to blame the TV for our modern apathy. And in a sense it does shut off the mind, presenting us with a ready-made story which we only have to sit back and passively enjoy. Kind of like reading. Like music. Like art. It seems humanity has filled the world with media to distract us from the much-less enjoyable real world we only stay in long enough to bring home a paycheck.

Like Dorothy, we live in a world of grays, depressing, boring, where we are nothing more than one of six billion: easily replaced, completely common. But I think we desperately want that world of color, that perfect fairy tale, where we are the main character and whatever happens, good or bad, happens because we wanted it so. In the real world, all of our choices seem to have bad endings, and most of what happens is outside our control anyway. We face downsizing, divorce, financial ruin, unwanted families, bickering and demanding relatives, finger-pointing coworkers, a wildly careening economy and an electoral college which simply validates our insignificance on the planet. I don't think I need to be Cinderella to be happy, with my own personal fairy concierge, but even the Wicked Stepsisters had a choice in how their story ended.

So we invent Santa Clause and aliens and tarot cards and the whims of God, just to bring some sense, some magic back into our lives. Just so we can close our eyes and imagine that we will be OK, that the world will stop spinning around us and we won't grow old and die, we won't be homeless tomorrow so our CEO can go to Hawaii for Christmas, we won't be alone and scared as we stare down that dark and uncertain future, which we may share with six billion other humans, but which we still have to trod all by ourselves. The middle-class housewife closes her eyes and dreams of a world where she is the center of attention, talented and beautiful and beloved. The businessman dreams of the corner office where he directs the company, and instead of being the victim of layoffs, he goes to Hawaii and drives the luxury car in his Armani suits. The maid dreams of saving enough money to send her daughter to college, of spoiling her grandchildren and retiring comfortably to Florida. The perfect fairy tales, and perhaps I was too harsh in condemning them. At least they are dreaming.

Art was my dreaming. My own little bit of magic, captured on paper to be held as close as a cyncial atheist, a girl who loathes society and often herself, as close as I could ever get to those dreams. And yet I walk my dreamless path instead, afraid, I guess, to let my own magic be exposed to the gray light of day, to be unmasked and declared a fraud. As long as I hide it, it will be my own fairy tale, the dream of my dreams. And every moment is a little more gray, and a little more hopeful at once, as I walk that line between grasping it and losing it. One morning the suspense will be too much for me, one morning I'll have to give in, have to give it a try, just to see if the reality might be as wonderful as the dream.

But right now, I think I'll go watch TV.

copyright 2003 mleiv, any reproduction or distribution expressly prohibited

What black mark was inscribed on my forehead at birth, what sign of evil scratched on my door? While all the other children played their simple-minded games, who told them what I was and why I must be feared? An aura of darkness permeates all my social contacts, a curse impedes my very existence--an existence which can only be a blight upon the universe which the earth and all its inhabitants strive daily to exterminate.

Standing in the shadows, hiding from the baleful eye of God, my steps pass isolation on one side and grief on the other. The clock marks each destructive event, counting away the pain without a pause, and the only end in sight the very end of ME. My body broken over the knee of Fate, after it was beaten day in and day out for no known reason.

Is it merely that defiant gaze, a refusal to submit, to admit to any wrong? An angry child glowering at the unfair world, dark eyes holding in their depths a checklist of capriciously inflicted wounds, threatening only in that knowledge of hurts which can never be acknowledged and so must be destroyed. Does the universe cover up its crimes like an abusive mother, burying the evidence, leaving only the eyes to tell the story? But who would see? A multitude of accomplices instead crowd me in, hostile and cruel.

I have no higher power to which to plead for rescue, no refuge to hide within. Everything and everywhere is the hand of that punishing force. My only defence is my very insignificance, on which pain casts doubt as each insubstantial blow hits flesh. And if I fight back, I become the monster I see in every eye, and so must face the monster's fate: a typecast villain inescapeably defeated by the Good, never knowing who drew those lines in the sand and why I ended up on one side and my enemies on the other.

Why must I always be wrong? Why am I the Evil and they the Good? There is no impartial scale on which were weighed my transgressions, but an arbitrary assessment conducted, overlooking the crimes of others while tallying my every virtue against me as a vice. Am I to take from this incomprehensible prejudice my own illegitimacy in the world? The child of some absent universe, a changeling soul adrift in a foreign land? But am I ever to be retrieved or merely to be destroyed, left to cry on the doorstep until I am worn down by weather and die of sorrow.

And that hypothetical Absolute Good which I seem to have violated? Is it not a simply some intangible value we were taught to seek? Like a culture taught which skin is better, which weight, which color of eye... How can creatures always presented with a blue sky measure the comparative attractive qualities of red, or green, or yellow? We only see beauty in what is, at essence, a part of ourselves: the ultimate narcissistic evaluation of our universe. Am I not beautiful? Are not the shadows of evening, painted in blues and purples and black, a beauty of contrast and haunting threat? A building burning, a figure dying in splendid, absolute abandon: how can we not accept these images as well? Or are we looking through the eye of a beholder raised on simple cartoons, simple plots, where only the daisies in the field can touch our hearts?

My crime, my ultimate failing, must be rooted in that misunderstanding. I am missing that one part of humanity that allows me to judge the world around me in an arbitrary and unthinking manner, without ever questioning my conclusions or imagining the view beyond my own narrow circle of companions. I drink it all in--shadow and light, right and wrong, clear and clouded--without ever filtering it through that necessary colander of Moral Code. I want to hold everything in my mind, I want to defy my own preconceptions. I want to see in the dark like a predatory cat, moving outside the edges of civilisation, abandoned and dangerous. But there is a power in that solitude, a brilliance that exists only in its violation of boundaries.

And so I find myself twisting pain into art, using my misery for inspiration, like so many before me. For Disney does not create Goethe. And perhaps this is the most amusing irony of all: that the very things which the universe is maliciously destroying are its most intriguing and stunning creations. Worn by ice and wind and floods and time, I can stand by the Grand Canyon and smile. That insubstantial force can beat me down, but it can never win. I will always be something more than its billions of obedient lackeys. Whatever grief and misery I face, that is my comfort. No matter my end, my life was such that I have already said my peace, I have already spit in the eye of God.

copyright 2002 mleiv, any reproduction or distribution expressly prohibited