life outside of a snowglobe
This Week in Reading
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Officially, The Idiot is about Selin, Turkish American girl attending her freshman year at Harvard in the nineties—but it is also about how bizarre and poignant every moment of life is when decontextualized from life as a whole; it is about how love is a tiny nightmare contained within a snowglobe, but your nose is pressed up so close to the glass that you feel like you have been left for dead in a blizzard; it is about the way college feels both incredibly important and incredibly unimportant, simultaneously.
I did not go to an Ivy League school, but I was enrolled in an Elementary Advanced Placement program during fifth and sixth grade. The curriculum for this class of ostensibly gifted children remains one of the most random selections of topics I have ever seen grouped together. We learned German from a cartoon monster that ate clocks and enacted plays about Lizzie Borden, the axe-murderer who infamously killed her family while wearing a raincoat. We built detailed models of ancient castles and spent a lot of time talking about the stock market. At one point I was required to write a book report on Heidi in the format of a seven page epic poem. We were taught algebra and typing and Hindi and perhaps most inexplicably, calligraphy. Because every precocious child should have beautiful, antiquated handwriting.
I had a great time, but that is not the point. The point is that even our formal education, the area of life that is supposed to be the most thoughtfully structured, is just as arbitrary and useless as everything else that happens to us. Trying to pick a literature class Selin bemoans, “Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that nineteenth-century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really part of Europe.”
In the third act of the novel, Selin spends her summer vacation teaching English in a rural Hungarian village. All alone in a foreign country, each moment seems inexplicable and completely contextless from everything that came before it. It is type of detachment many people experience abroad; while traveling, they take on the role of an outside observer-- examining, analyzing, and ultimately failing to comprehend.
But this feeling is not unique to Selin’s experience in Hungary. She is a detached observer at Harvard, in her own daily life. At one point Batuman writes, “Of course he couldn’t love me, not when I lived through so many layers, when I was spooked by Montmartre, and wore a seatbelt in order to steer a car out of a ditch.” Numerous friends have told me that I appear emotionally unavailable, or closed off, or that the way I talk about my feelings is “disarming.” Personally, I think I am pathetic bleeding heart, but it is true that I experience my life with a good amount of distance. I “experience the feelings of” frustration and distress and joy more often than I feel them directly. I turn my emotions into thoughts so that they are easier to process. I often feel like I am floating slightly above my life, synthesizing the present as it unfolds below me. When people talk about “living in the moment,” it sounds fake. I am constantly jumping between the recent past and the immediate future, trying to determine what everything means within the grander narrative of my life, while simultaneously trying to prod that narrative in the right direction. It is exhausting to want everything to mean something. I sternly remind myself that the universe does not exist to teach me great moral lessons, but it is difficult to resist the drama of metaphor. After all, history is just a story we tell ourselves. It can drive us insane to try to construct order out of the randomness of the universe, but maybe that is an easier insanity than floating in chaos.
Like Selin, I have a very rich inner world. Life feels small, but also incredibly overwhelming. Psychologists conducted a study where researchers hung a brightly colored mobile over infants’ heads and recorded their reactions. The babies that reacted to the mobile, either cried or laughed or smiled, turned out to be introverts, while the extroverted babies stared at it passively. On the surface, the results seem surprising, but the researchers hypothesized that the introverted babies were easily over stimulated, while the extroverted babies needed a good deal more engagement to provoke a reaction. That is how I feel as an introvert (albeit a very loud, very social introvert). I could live inside of my brain forever. I don’t feel particularly guilty about my failure to live in the moment. This is how I enjoy my life best: zooming out and prescribing meaning, zooming back in and stripping it away.
The Idiot feels like a string of beads, each a perfect self-contained moment, funny and strange and full of potential significance. But Elif Batuman draws short of declaring meaning. Each paragraph is poignant and sharp, but it undetermined whether the scenes she describes are actually important, or if they are just another piece of random life detritus. Maybe it is both. It means nothing, except for what we decide it means, by which I mean, it means everything.
It cannot be overstated how funny this book is. I would conservatively estimate that I laughed out loud every five pages, but I have a pretty specific sense of humor. Actually, that is a lie— I have a very vague sense of humor and find many things to be amusing and have never in my life been able to specify what in particular I find funny. My one line artist statement is something like: isn’t it funny how sad life is/isn’t is sad how funny life is? Humor and mourning ad nauseam. So of course I loved this book, how could I not?
Studio-ing
My solo show is coming up in just a few weeks! You should absolutely come! It is at a gallery called Junior High in East Hollywood. The opening is May 11th, but the show will be up for a whole month, so if you are in town you can stop by whenever. More details to come!
Most of my studio time has been dedicated to show prep—making frames, binding more copies of my books (yes, yes, I will have extra copies of Advice for Crying for sale soon, I promise.) I spent the last month building a sixteen-legged coffee table out of cherry for my show (and my living room tbh). I'm going to display all of my art books on it with a bunch of cushions for leisurely perusing. It was my first time working with hardwood and I spent weeks biscuit joining the planks together, sanding it down, oiling the surface. Trust me, I know about every single flaw on this thing, please don’t point them out when you see it in person-- I am accepting praise exclusively.
Further Reading
Another book that I feel like mirrored the inside of my brain: The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit, my all time favorite writer and number one historian crush.
Also this essay has been saved in my bookmarks bar for five years now, I love it.