You couldn't pay me to go back to middle school. Oh God it was the
WORST, a viper pit, a gladiatoral ring, the absolute nadir of my
existence, the Eleventh Circle of Hell-- yes, thanks to middle school,
Dante's levels of hell now go UP TO ELEVEN! It all got better, of
course, as they (the grownups) promised. Each passing year applied a
little more aloe vera to my wounded psyche, drew out the angst and
replaced it with perspective; I came to understand that during the Dark
Days my peers had all been undergoing just as much of a rocky internal
shift as I and that their horribleness was mostly a side effect of
crippling insecurity, invisible circumstances, unnavigable new bodily
dimensions and crazy-making hormones. Eventually I turned into a
luminous font of beatitude and forgave them all (of course never
pausing to reflect, with a glimmer of superiority, on those erstwhile
cool-kid little shits who flamed out early and never amounted to much
while I, perpetual late bloomer but BLOOMER, goddammit, bloomed
lately and attained something that, at least on paper, resembled
success). I accepted that prepubescence was a universal hazing ritual,
one that we ultimately transcended en route to becoming more thoughtful
and compassionate adults. We were better for having passed through the
crucible.
Still, I repeat that you could not pay me to
go back there. I am content these days to maintain healthy and
supportive friendships, to care about what I do and not fear ridicule,
to wear whatever I want and feel okay about it (and what I want to wear
these days does NOT include such sartorial missteps as platform
flip-flops or saggy khaki cargo pants or blue eyeshadow or metallic
rainbow butterfly hair clips by the dozen: good god, the lowest point in
my personal life really coincided with the lowest point in all of
fashion history, didn't it?) So you might be confused to hear that I
recently paid someone else for the pleasure of going back to middle
school, and that "someone else" was, um, James Cameron.
Yes, readers, you don't misunderstand: I ponied up seventeen dollars to see Titanic in 3D.
And
why would I freely admit to this on the internet? Have I no shame?
(Rhetorical question!) Well, given the name of my internet venture here,
this space is actually a rather appropriate forum for discussing the
towering, definitive Schlockbuster of my youth, because schlock is
supposed to be, you know, my recurring blogmotif or something! ...
although in retrospect I think that I just found this Yiddishism to be
pun-susceptible and phonetically funny, and that the real pervasive
theme of Writer's Schlock is, "I have a lot of work that I'm avoiding,"
or, possibly, "I wish I had literary talent." But no matter. If my blog
is to live up to its titular schlockdom, then I am pretty much
contractually obligated to write about Titanic. Also, the PG-13
rating of Mr. Cameron's schlocksterpiece is in line with the unofficial
PG-13 rating that I have accorded to this site (see: judicious use of
four-letter words, naughty situations implied rather than overtly
described, and I'm still figuring out how to handle nudity but I DID
just use the word "titular," so we're getting there).
A
bit of background: I, like most every screwed-up pre-adolescent female
in 1997 (and probably some reticent preteen boys as well), was
unhealthily taken with Titanic. I saw it thrice on the big screen;
I read every behind-the-movie publication or historical study of the
wreck that I could get my hands on; I begged my parents for the VHS and
watched it incessantly after they had finally acquiesced and given me
the two-volume tape for my twelfth birthday (ohhh, they rued the day).
And my behavior was the norm, not the exception! We were all universally
mad about this stuff-- finally the popular girls and I had some common
ground, because the movie tapped into some essential truth about us all.
Many things, actually-- our fear of death, our nascent awareness of the
transience and arbitrariness of life (an awareness that would shortly blossom into full-fledged sullen teenaged existentialism).
And then there were Leo and Kate, of course. Who didn't identify with
Rose? She was all, "I'm a free spirit and nobody understands me and
everyone around me is so boring and superficial and my mom is a total
raging bitch WAH." Such a fitting allegory for the middle-schooler, and
Leo/ Jack was the perfect imaginary counterbalance. We all dreamed of
some artsy, footloose-and-fancy-free love interest who would swoop in
and see us as we really were, rescue us from the oppressive inanity of
school/ family life and put us on a path to vibrant self-realization,
and possibly also touch us in a special sensual way in the back seat of a car because oh yes, around that age those kinds of things were suddenly starting to seem enticing rather than icky. We were a demographic obsessed.
So when the film returned to theatres fifteen years later
all pimped out in 3D, I couldn't resist. (I did not go alone, but to
protect the reputations of those who might possess a gram of
self-respect, I shall not disclose the identities of my companions). It
had technically not been that long since I had seen the movie-- a few years ago during the Bleep U grad school phase, it came to my attention that my then-roommate had missed the boat, so to speak, and had never seen Titanic, so I sought to rectify this unfortunate situation by inviting my Masters' cohort over for an emergency showing
on my ancient clunker of a TV set with its pithy, laptop-like screen
dimensions. We ordered Chinese takeout, talked over most of the movie,
mocked the easy sitting-duck groaner terrible dialog moments, belted
along to Celine with deliberately terrible intonation. It was not a
sacred moment. I didn't count it among my multiple reverential middle
school viewings. But now, in the year 2012, I was going to do this thing
and do it right, i.e. make my pilgrimage and also fully apply my
sophisticated, PhD-level critical judgment to this cinematic work. So I
went, and winced at the appropriate moments because wow, there is
some undeniably wretched dialog in that script, and I thought of 9/11
and all of the obvious parallels, and I made the very clever and topical
observation that the class distinctions depicted on board the ship
rather resemble our current social hierarchy, and then suddenly my
critical faculties struck an iceberg and suffered a system failure
because I was stupidly, predictably swept up in the visual grandeur and
the drama! and the passion! and the core human values! and it was as
though my impressionable, deeply-feeling preteen self had jumped across a
chasm of nearly fifteen years to possess my twenty-something body. I
had been hoodwinked, taken in, manipulated by the same old schlock, and
thank God for the 3D glasses which concealed a certain puffiness around
the eyes, a certain evidence of crocodile tears. Oof.
I stewed for days after, sifting through these familiarities. Imagery
and dialog had been re-seared into my mind's eye; snippets of synth-y
score, having once been lovingly encoded into my musical memory, now
played on infinite loop in my head, reactivated. And accompanying this was a sense of
loss that was hard to articulate: it did not have so much to do with
the actual subject matter, the great loss of life (fictional and
nonfictional alike) which was certainly sad to behold, but... no, it was
more self-specific (self-involved?) than that. Here is the thing. My
feelings weren't real and I knew it: they were feelings about feelings,
echo-feelings, resurrections of past emotional states that were more
intense than anything that I seem capable of experiencing these days.
I was mourning nothing more, nothing less than the gradual loss of my ability to feel that strongly. There I had been, young, poised for life-- confused and miserable, of
course, but also fervent, fresh, and obsessive. And then the years
accumulated and with them the settling of the dust, the necessary
equanimity.
But didn't you fight hard for that stability? Isn't that what you wanted?
Extreme polarity is exhausting. It is not conducive to functionality, to
meeting deadlines or paying bills. And so tepidity becomes the name of
the game, and it seeps into everything. You shrug a lot. Somebody breaks
up with you via text message and you snort in derision and joke about
making a voodoo doll and then you shrug. You go to your graduate
seminars and you shrug, too, because it seems like you can say anything,
any empty thing, and it might provoke a minor reaction but soon all is
forgotten because the stakes are so, so low and everybody just wants to escape the stuffy little Skinner Box room and return to creature comforts and watch HBO. Nothing really makes a dent. Not even the tearjerker Schlockbuster of your youth can jolt you into wakefulness: it comes close, it tempts you, but you know better.
Then, about a week ago, there was something different. I decided,
in preparation for a performance, to play piano for a friend, a
brilliant and dedicated musician. I was so, so nervous because my
inhibitions don't lie in the usual places-- I will speak publicly, blog
ad nauseam, spill out whatever is on my mind, my childhood traumas or
whatever, I will undress, it's nothing, easy-- but to play is to truly give away secrets. It is to expose your throat and the undersides of your wrists as an offering to your receiver. So I played for him, for my friend, and the performances were guarded, a little tepid.
Especially the Schubert. Sorry to come back to Schubert again and
again; I do play other music, I promise, but you must bear with my
fixation for now. So we worked on the Schubert (the big A major sonata)
and he pushed me off the piano bench and started tinkering around with
the piece himself, and he came to this place in the second theme that I
might attempt to explain as such: you have wandered, strayed very far
away from your center and you don't even know it, you are remote,
room-temperature, and you keep repeating the same perfunctory things to
yourself but then, for reasons unknown, one repetition becomes imbued
with deepest significance and it unlocks your return-- you are restored,
full-blooded and tingling. My friend played the section, shouting out,
"And here, rapturous!" and then he just stopped, staring into space, and
said, "God. It's extraordinary." Lucky that I was standing behind him
and could hide my sudden tears, because in that moment something like
love rippled through the both of us. Not between us-- no, NO! not like that-- but through us, straight from the thing that was spoken in the music, and we both loved the thing
back in the same way, three poles, a dynamic triangulation. And I had
been working on this piece for months, and desiring to play it for years, and at the outset I had been so
smitten with this particular passage-- melting, opening, wondrous-- but after a certain saturation point of repeated exposure and careless handling, the music no longer retained its meaning. Now, in my friend's apartment on a lazy Friday morning, I sobbed a little with joy and fullness and I thought, "How could I have forgotten, how could I have just stopped noticing?"
... and alas, I'm far afield from where I started-- like the second theme of a Schubert sonata! bam! wandering rhapsodic vistas-- and I fear that I don't have the skill to bring it all around again in some ingenious way to middle school, or James Cameron, or neon blue eyeshadow but I'm just not there yet; I can see it, I know to where I must return, but I can't always find my way back exactly when I want to.
