Enlightenment?

Ian Maass

In the early morning light, one could see the way the house sucked up the dim
light. Like a suburban black hole, it seized any light that may have it its poorly
whitewashed walls and rendered it into a dull gray. Not even the early morning birds
would sit at the branches of one of two willows that swayed in the front yard. Crunching
across the masses of dead leaves in the yard, one came to the heavy front door. It had an
oak frame thick with youth, but bleached into an unbearable dimness. It never shined, even
on the sunniest days of the year.
Just on the other side of the door was a brick walkway. High heels click-clacked
on its service. Immediately forward was staircase the led straight up. Several weary souls
had fell down it over the years. It remained the unforgiving cliff of the house with its
unusual steepness. Stained white carpeting the color of old socks covered the steps,
rendering each step into an eerie softness that betrayed the staircases’ reputation.
Up the stairs was a landing, the railing shot shadows across the walls at almost
every hour. Of all the places in the cold, spooky house, this was the place to tell horror
stories. At any hour, the shadows of the rallying columns would hit the walls like thick
sentinels. Thoughts of Alfred Hitchcock films and Poe tales danced in everyone’s thoughts
as they made their way across the landing to the first room.
The door of the first bedroom did nothing to illuminate the rest of the house. No
matter was teen idol was hung, no matter what insolent phrase was painted, the door
remained more like a long tombstone than a door. The knob was a creaking viewless hole,
a flaw in the white tombstone’s coat.
Just beyond the door, the dull carpeting continued along the floor until it flowed
under a great bookshelf at the far wall. Papers and books were scattered along the floor
with a frustration that had long since died and been given proper burial. A lone figure sat
on the cot along the right wall.

Get a job they all said, but was he just that? Was that what he was worth? A job
and nothing else? Somehow he hoped for more, to be considered more than just another
breadwinner. Surely he deserved more than this! The days of dreaming and assuming were
over. He was to choose his path now. The paths of life were more visible to him than ever
now.
And what of these paths? Was it even a matter of what he deserved? The choices
that lay before him were the only things clear to him at all. In one path, he saw himself
taking what everyone else was taking: finding the right career, attending the right classes.
It was up to him to perform the ritual of life to support himself, to live up to the
expectations put to him, to fulfill all the needs of his body: to satisfy hunger and thirst.
Yet, he felt that there was something more to life than that. His mind told him to come to
grips with reality, to take his place in line and shut his mouth. At the other end, his heart
told him to think before choosing his place in line, to find the right one and work for it, to
take his place and speak with all he could.
To live.
All about that horrible house he had wandered those last few days, unyielding to
anything. The faces of his family were just empty spaces among poor word usage. Their
seemingly petty lives becoming everyday more and more distant from him. The path he
traveled was for him alone, no other soul could follow the path the fates had left him; no
one could possibly know how he felt. In the midst of his sentences, his family was the
grammar, the empty spaces the writer complies with in order to be accepted, to be
understood, to be considered normal or even human.
The basic conflicts rang through his head, suddenly appearing there as if on some
kind of cue.
Man against nature
Man against Man
Man against himself
The last rang through his mind again.
Man against himself.
When he wasn’t comparing his life to movies, he was comparing it to books. It
was as if he were recording his thoughts in a book, or acting out a character in some
Suncoast art film. Many years of pretending to be movie stars with his friends came back
to him. At times he was playing the machine, The Terminator. When he drove his car, with
his music playing on the radio, he envisioned himself in a music video. Not in one of those
bubblegum videos with flashy girls and big stars, but one of those music videos with what
he envisioned to be “quality” filmmaking. Other times, he knew himself to be Dicaprio’s
character in Titanic, wooing girls with his artistic aspirations, dragging his friends to the
mall to chase a whichever girl caught his eye.
To him, the art of storytelling wasn’t lost in the cinema. To read was to feel and
think, to watch was to see and feel. The cinema was art that screamed for more attention
to be paid to it. Hundreds of students yearly are exposed to great literature, but few are
shown good filmmaking and are able to appreciate it, not so much as the story and the
acting, but the simple visual art that came with film that so few seemed to recognize. A
film was indeed, a painting in motion, the motion picture. Instead of brush curves, there
were lines to be recited, unlike the theatre; cinema wasn’t limited in setting or effect.
Lately, he’d immersed himself with Stanley Kubrick, one of the few film directors whom
he truly considered brilliant. Kubrick’s movies he just got, as if that was all there was.
There was nothing else, he just got it. He’d talked with many a movie lover who’d simply
not got it. They could read the sentences all they wanted, but they couldn’t quite get the
meaning of the passage. They said only words, not sentences. These people ruled the
earth, they held industry and science at their fingertips.
This puzzled him. To find that the world thinks differently from you is always a
puzzling experience.
These movie buffs weren’t alone. The psychologists would tell him that what he
was feeling was withdraw from the “social scene” or at least a rejection, as if he were a
basketball. It upset him, the fact that people appeared to dig through him like that. It
wasn’t as if he was an orphaned poor boy taken into adoption after years of bruises and
cigarette burns at his cheek.
But then, who wasn’t? Who isn’t abused in some way or another? Everyone in this
planet was a protagonist surrounded with antagonists and a supporting cast.
There he went again, comparing his life to movies and books!
Man against nature.
Man against man.
Man against himself.
The paradox of remaining human refused to leave him, the sudden irrevocable
opening of his eyes forcing his confidence into a nosedive. Oh how so few can truly know
who and what they are in another’s sight!
Those that lived, breathed, and talked near him only came through in blurry
mental pictures that went away as quickly as they disappeared. At times he knew it was his
own fault and tried to blame no one and eventually began to turn the blame to himself, that
it was his fault that he felt, that meaningless things meant something to him. They prayed
at the sunrise and he prayed at the sunset. He pondered the isolation from the outside
world as the birth of an artist. In his heart, he knew he was an artist. The struggle was to
convince his critic of a mind of the same thing.
And what was an artist? His mind would ask him, and his heart would search for
the reply. It took all this misery to appreciate the beauty of those around him. In order to
know the light, one must know the dark. Sometimes, sometimes, illumination would burst
through the wall of burdens that surrounded him.
Several weeks ago it was the pigeons in central park. He remembered that
wretched old woman, with gnarled hands peeking out of shabby rags and greasy gray hair
to match. She’d sat at one of the park benches, just another hobo on the street, without a
home and without hope. The boy had seen her walking along the streets, her crusted lips
muttering in the language of the far-gone. That afternoon she’d sat on the bench in park
and had withdrawn loaf of sliced white bread from her filthy jacket. The loaf was still in
it’s plastic wrapper and was most likely taken from some convenient store somewhere, the
clerk not having the heart to take it back from her. The minutes flew by as he’d watched
her sit down and proceed to give away an entire loaf of bread to the birds in the park. Her
mind was sick with voices, but her own voice sometimes came through. At every sight of
the birds, her eyes had lit up. To her, they weren’t the burden that the other visitors to
park viewed them as. Don’t feed the birds unless you want your picnic raided. Don’t
encourage the birds. She’d given away her chance of ending her physical hunger for a
chance to see the birds, for a chance to have creatures who cared not of the sickness of
her mind, but simply there for the bread she held in her arms. A simple reason for simple
companions. It was then that he knew that there was more to living than what Darwin and
all the others had said. There was something, something deep inside that few could see.
Those moments of existence when the truth seeped out the seams and we showed the
world who and what we are is the very fabric that keeps the universe at bay.
When the moment had passed, he’d gone home to draw her, to draw those few
moments of hidden content, hidden pleasure, hidden love, but he’d ripped the drawing to
shreds after an hour of frustrated line drawing. The art of lines and colors had led him to a
dark highway cut off with an invisible wall of steel. He was Wiley Coyote smacking into
his own illusion.
To him, the artist saw the beauty because of his own isolation and was able to
show the others what he’d found. The Mona Lisa herself is not able to actually able to
step out of the painting and admire it to see how beautiful she really is.
The artistic mind that demanded perfection had killed so many artists, but the local
currency had ruined more, producing so many as pure as the can of Spam downstairs in
the pantry. Hoards and hoards of Campbell's soup and it took Mr. Warhol to point it out.
Even then, few of his audience understood him, just like the rock stars.
He went downstairs in a tranced walk and prepared himself a cup of tea. It was
early in the morning and not a soul was about. He sat at the kitchen table, the cup of tea at
his hands, sipping at it slowly.
Another fifty to sixty years of this? Putting bread on the table all week and then
going to the movie on the weekend?
He chuckled at what his girlfriend called it.
Quarter life crisis.
Was this it? Was this it? He hoped that it wasn’t just more years of everyone just
misunderstanding him, like they did so many others.
Fresh out of high school and already he was lost. Clueless and afraid he sat at
home, unable to face the world. More words of the psychologists came to him: Now that
he was loved and had found a stable base, he needs to find an outlet for expression,
whether that resides in children, career, or artistic creation is up to him.
He stood up.
That was it! Everyone worth mentioning was an artist. Whether they where
fathers, mothers, lawyers, or flipped hamburgers. All that is required is that you do it to
survive!
He thought of the old woman in the park.
It took an artist to recognize an artist.
Survival as an art form?
How far would that go with the “philosophers”?
He recalled talking to one of the “PhDs”. Those they called “philosophers” who
stated that no new ideas were going to unveil themselves, when that statement in itself
was a new idea. In the midst of most philosophical argument, he found that philosophy
was the art of argument and memorization. It was the mathematics of concepts. Evil
people plus good people equals divided world. David Bowie came to him:
“I don’t want knowledge, I want certainty.”
Without a word, he ran upstairs to his music collection. It was large, containing
everything from Mozart to Pantera. Time passed as he flipped through his collection until
he found the one he was looking for. Soon the player was pulsing dully with David Bowie.
“I’m afraid of Americans, I’m afraid of the world, I’m afraid I can’t help it, I’m
afraid I can’t.” The song’s melody swept through the early hours of the morning.
The words of that song hit him with a comforting edge. He was able to strangely
relate to the lyrics. After all, he was an American himself and he was afraid of them; afraid
of their “intellectuals”. Racism was colorless, to think it not was to just as ignorant as
those they call bigots. Opposition breeds hatred, whether that opposition is “justified” or
not. Now whether one nurtures that hatred is one’s choice, not all opposition leads to evil.
Yet, was it his right to say what was right or wrong? He’d found out the world was
objective, that humanity was objective. There was a line, a line between love and hate, a
line separating good and evil. Hundreds denied it, even more modified it to fit their greed.
And yet, with all this evidence, he still needed God and Man to tell him so, to say that he
was right, even though he knew he was right. He needed to matter; he needed love and
support, just like all the rest. He was a fool. The truth presents itself all around; does it
take the brilliant mind to see it? They acted all their parts out, within and without fiction,
people are people. He thought of the old woman again. Oh, how he wanted to feel, to
express, but that page of scribbled lines he’d made echoed in his mind’s eye.
In the midst of this reverie, the back of his mind kept repeating Get a job.
Get a job.
Taco Bell.
Get a job.
Jack in the Box.
Get a job.
Macdonald’s.
Get a job.
Peasant.
Get a job.
He picked it up.
Get a job.
He placed it in his mouth, shiny and cold to the touch.
Get a job.
He pulled the trigger.
Get a.................................................................