The Vain Pursuit of Origins

I tried to draw roots, once. Intertwining and coiling down and tangling around each other. I couldn’t do it; couldn’t hold in my mind the complexity of just one section long enough to transfer it to paper.
God wove the roots. The sections that curl and push and squirm down under the earth. The loam on top of the ground—that alone is an advanced multimedia art piece. But beneath the ground, the roots go—the tendons, veins and nervous system of the planet. They web out while growing in the dirt, some silken and delicate, some giant, twisted pillars of strength.
A pencil can’t conquer that. Not mine, anyway. My pencil can’t truly conquer anything. It compromises. Sometimes I so dread the inevitable compromise that I’m actually afraid to begin a drawing. I procrastinate. Maybe I write instead sometimes.

I want to go walking at night, in the city. On one of those desperate nights, you know? Not when you’re desperate for anything in particular; just when you feel like crying for no new reason and it’s cold out but you leave your coat behind anyway, just because it’s satisfying to do stupid things when you feel like that.
I want to walk until my feet blister, until my hair is stringy, then stumble into a stranger I can trust. One who needs help; maybe an old lady with a cane and a big box to carry.

I’d help her carry it up the stairs to her little apartment, where she’s lived all alone since her husband died in 1975. She’d show me pictures of him, and he’d be handsome, but in that old-fashioned way that isn’t really considered attractive anymore. She’d have a cat, and it would rub up against my legs. “Oh, he likes you.” She’d say as he purrs and I reach down to pet him. He’s an orange tabby, maybe, with long legs and a high, keening meow like my cat Milo who passed away last fall.

I’d say I have to go; it was nice to meet you but I have to go. Then maybe my stomach would growl and she’d insist that I have some toast or something, and a glass of milk. I would stay, and I would drink the milk even though I hate milk. She’d tell me all sorts of stories from her childhood years, before her family came over from England to America.

She would ask me why I was out alone at this time of night, and in this weather, and I don’t know her at all so I’d just tell her the truth. I’d just tell her that I was troubled and restless and lonely and sad. She would ask why and I’d tell her I really don’t know. She’d say it’s alright; she’d say I’d feel better once I had some tea.

It is cold outside, and empty, but the apartment is warmly lit and full of soft, faded old-lady things, in including the old lady herself—a stranger. So I’d stay for tea and we’d talk more about why I’m feeling this way, and she’d tell me it’s going to be alright and I’d believe her.

Because sometimes I can feel alone in a group of wonderful friends, but feel cozy and connected in the presence of a stranger. Sometimes I feel homesick even when I’m at home.

That mostly happens when I’m over-analyzing things, as I tend to do the vast majority of the time. Even during the last Chiefs game. I don’t even really care about football, and that simple fact got me thinking. Watching all the Chiefs fans on TV, the sea of red and the painted faces, I admit I thought, “Don’t these people have anything better to care about?” And as soon as I thought that, I realized: yes; yes, they do. Maybe the reason I pour myself into art no one sees and writing no one reads and songs no one hears is the very same reason why they pour themselves into the red and yellow and freezing cold stadium.

They are hiding from the nothingness that threatens to consume them if they don’t care—passionately—about something. Anything. The threat of a great void if they don’t chase some kind of faux-fulfillment. They are filling their lives with pleasurable distractions to avoid being left alone in the emptiness with all of life’s inevitable monsters.

Or maybe some people just really like football. I don’t know; who am I to say?

Why do I have to assign a deeper meaning to everything? Can anything ever just be? Freud, when was a cigar just a cigar? Was it ever, really? I don’t believe you. Maybe that sounds arrogant; after all, what do I know? But if I can’t wear a certain pair of socks without analyzing all the possible reasons why I might have picked it on this particular day, how could you, with your famous fixation theories and revolutionary notions regarding the subconscious, possibly believe that anything is ever “just” what it is?

Even the seemingly innocent things of childhood were never really simple; we were just too young to question them. Why did we all assume that Humpty Dumpty was an egg? The rhyme never specifies. I read somewhere that the rhyme came from an incident in which a massive cannon that was supposed to revolutionize European weaponry—nicknamed “Humpty Dumpty”—fell from a tower and was demolished before true progress could be made. I also read that it could be about King Richard III, who fell from his high horse and was hacked to pieces.

But who knows if any of that is true? It is nothing more than speculation. All the false information—the unanticipated complexity of every little thing—makes me feel as if everything is wearing a disguise and I can’t even trust myself anymore, with how distorted everything seems. Every unidentifiable emotion feels inexplicably fraudulent.

But of all the vague speculation, this is fact, not fiction: for the first time in years, I think I may throw myself to the wind.