Christina Bawuah

Writing About the Extraordinary

I've been reading a lot of blogs lately and what I've noticed is that people write about their everyday life. I have attempted, as a writing exercise of sorts, to just write about ordinary life occurrences for the past few days, to see what happens. Nothing has come out. I cannot produce that. I think I have always wanted, desired, yearned for the extraordinary.

I'm not sure what the purpose of a blog is, but why would you want to write about the ordinary? Why not write about the extraordinary?

The extraordinary - the thoughts, desires, feelings, bumps, bruises, emotions, gifts, and ideas that define us uniquely as who we are separate from each person who walks around with the same anatomy and physiology as we possess. It's hard to identify with everyone else all the time since my mind and heart think and beat differently from moment to moment; I want to exemplify all that could exist within the realm of individuality and personhood.

From this melody of my personhood comes this mood of writing. These essays that I compose are really my gifts to the world - they are my observations of what I think, hear, sense and feel. They are important things to me and if I don't have something of substance to say, I just don't write. I leave it alone. I'm not sure what other bloggers do, but for me, I just can't sign on every day and write about leftovers in the refrigerator, or current events, or why there still is ice on my road.

I find that there is extraordinary in a lot of things. If it is meant to be, I will see it. A beautiful portrait of extraordinary can be crafted, when the time is right.

I sense that there is an overall dislike for the creative souls of the universe. I believe this to be true because there is an intolerance of their unusual tendencies. They are normally dismissed as being either quirky, peculiar, eccentric, odd, or worse - downright nuts, crazy or psycho. This is unfair!

To craft something out of nothing, you have to be able to think odd thoughts. You have to be able to think like no one else. How else are you going to come up with something that everyone else has never thought of? Do you think that Rubik could have come up with his flippin' Cube if he was normal? Hell no! I bet he bothered his friends constantly trying to get them to play with this insane little thing-a-ma-jig that would rotate in three different directions at the same time.

A little bit of insanity is necessary to be a force that is uniquely innovative.

So what if the methods that one uses to express this unusually strong and powerful energy is a little off? Who cares? As long as the person isn't cocking a gun and putting it in your face, why does that bother you?

Why do you appear taken aback by the individuality and self-expression of an artist?

Okay, so the slight obsession and atypical candor of the perpetuator cannot always be seen by the naked eye of the public as self-expression or individuality. So what? Who made you the estimator of what is standard?

I say that it is time for the cultural models of our society to change. I'm sick and tired of the repressions of the culturally inept challenging those who entertain the majority of society with their talent and then dictating how that ability should be inured and cultivated.

Creativity should not be a dirty word. The ticks and bumps associated with it are just a part of the process. If one has never suffered through the endless barrages of overbearing silence that accompanies artistic block, then one cannot truly understand the possibilities that a paperclip has in taking the shape of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Buoyancy

They are both what you might call bottom of the barrel people. Spit out. Chewed and used. Sunk and sunk until they disappeared in black water, vague forms occupying space with no light to define them. It hadn't always been this way. They must have once been fresh, buoyant. A trick to mollify hatred or disgust for someone is to think of them as a child, learning to play chopsticks on the piano, or digging in a sandbox, or blowing soap bubbles through a wand held by chubby, sticky hands. People have not always been in the place they've come to rest in.

The way they are now is this: two (roughly) fifty-year-olds who both look seventy. They wear flared, polyester clothing that hangs on their near-emaciated bodies and makes them look like poor, walking billboards for the Salvation Army. Neither of them have all their teeth; this jack-o-lantern effect mixed with strings of white hair that resemble the white yarn protruding from a Halloween witch hat makes you wonder if anyone could love either if not for the other. Like two enormously fat people. Like two midgets. They've both been addicted for so long that it has ceased to matter. Their drug has become like insulin for the diabetes-ridden, a necessity of the body, not an excuse to interact socially, or a crutch that makes life more bearable. While neither of them was born this way, both are now crazy in exactly the same manner. They talk out loud to invisible audiences, occasionally addressing Jesus, who seems to have recently found their wasting spirits and saved them. When they scream at each other from a distance of ten feet, it is watching someone scream to their reflection. They smile at the same time; identical, half-toothless grins. If you don't look closely, you can imagine the empty gaps in the same exact spots.

He was injured to near-death in the war. His right hand (which was crushed) cannot close fully to this day. He collects disability checks from the government. They live in a hovel, a hole, one compact room. This is all they have. I say this again because it is important to understand: they have nothing anyone could envy or desire. That they have found each other is a miracle in and of itself.

They did not meet at a dealer's house, as would seem likely. He was pissing in the urinal of a men's bathroom when she walked through the door by mistake. She did not leave. Maybe it was because he saw himself reflected so perfectly that he immediately thought of her as his. They began talking, right there while the stream of his urine flowed down the drain. The only other man in the bathroom was in a stall, and he did not come out until the white-haired, no-toothed Bobsey Twins left together.

She had been living on the streets or in shelters, or occasionally passing out on apartment floors. Her life had seemed an abstraction of a real one, an indistinct picture of barely discernable faces and images, in which all objects seemed changed subtly and profoundly. For him, it had been so long since his life had been normal that something authentic might never have happened. It could well have been a dream he had one night when he nodded off. That he had once been young and married and untouched. They met, and embraced in the mutual state in which they had come to rest.

To be able to look at someone you hate and see that they must not have always been as they are is important. It is equally important to disregard the transgressions from the past of the person you care for. This is how you love.

From the bathroom, they went to his hovel. Can you imagine his wrinkled lips on her prunish breasts? Her skinny legs outspread on either side of his emaciated ones? Their almost non-existent bodies holding each other in sleep with gruesomely track-marked arms? The raving gibberish love-words spoken after? You have to imagine this to understand how no one could have loved them but each other; to understand how this love was a horridly stunning thing; breath-taking.

So this is where she stayed, in their fairy-tale existence. And since, if either of them were to appear magically in the world of fairy tale, they would undoubtedly be cast as ogre, witch, or evil sorcerer, we'll give them the ending most inappropriate for them, the one the prince and the princess are more comfortably crowned by: the lived happily ever after.

The lived happily ever after…

Now we'll take that ending away. We'll assume everything else as fact, and take back just those few words. We'll introduce a second man to the story. He does not love anyone, really. He sells this man and woman their drugs, and he and his friends laugh about them when they leave. They laugh about their terrible naked bodies twined together. They laugh at the way she runs her claw fingers through his witch hat yarn hair like it is silky and flaxen. They laugh when they kiss with petrified lips. They do this when the man and woman are gone.

One day, after they leave, the second man tells his friends how funny it would be to tell the first man that the woman is screwing around behind his back. Who besides him would ever touch her? Was he crazy enough to believe it? So he tells him, the next time she is not around.

We digress to the play Othello, when the villain Iago supposedly destroys Othello and Desdemona's union for no reason. This is what he says, that evil serves itself, and no other purpose. Yet Othello was powerful, and Desdemona beautiful. It does not matter what he said; Iago may have lain awake many nights imagining such power in him, or such beauty next to him. Even in those of us who would never act against it, the amalgamation of a coarse, powerful man, and a young, beautiful woman breeds envy, disgust, hatred, bitterness. This is understandable. But who would lie awake dreaming of the crazy junky man or the dirty, toothless woman? Iago said he was passionless in his crime, but it would be easy to imagine otherwise. He may have just wanted Desdemona so compellingly that to see her murdered and her husband responsible for her death would be better than watching them together. This reasoning seems horrifying, the basest desire of any man, but it would stand noble next to the reasoning of the second man in our story, who has no reasoning at all. Who would want an ugly mummy?

The first man believes every word. He yells at her and she yells back. They don't look like mirror images anymore. The spots where their teeth are missing glare out as vacuous differences. She loves him, she loves him, she will not leave, she screams, she screams. He shouts at her to get out. When she moves to the left while facing him, he moves to his own left, turning away. When she finally backs out the door, his back is already to her.

The second man and his friends tell this afterwards as a funny story, like recounting lighting fire to a bag of dog shit placed on someone's porch, and ringing the bell to watch them come out and stomp on it.

So now we make a decision about which is the honest and real world we live in: the one where dimness and the vileness of living are illuminated in a light that shines through cut glass or the one where the sun gets blocked just for the hell of it. If you were to ask the man and woman, they would say that second world has to be real. It is possible to be screwed and broken by anyone for any reason, or for no reason, or for every reason. People can sink you. People can shit on your face for fun.

That is not to say all is absolutely hopeless. For the second story to reflect the true and honest and real world, the first story, in which filthy, disease-ridden wrinkled bodies and festering, rambling minds become things of great splendor, had to have happened, too. The seed of destruction lies in the crystallization of joy. The phoenix of joy rises from the ashes of destruction.