different species and/or things about which I know nothing

Recently, I was talking to a friend about other friends who are not voracious, inveterate readers.

(I keep books in my bags, in my car, under my bed. I can't imagine a day without a book. I can't imagine the world without all the stories I've read stacked up against it. I imagine my friend is much the same.)

He asked me if knowing these people had expanded my horizons. Or something like that. He was joking, I think, but the answer is a serious shout of YES. Most of my friends speak the same languages as me. We speak fluent dance to each other. We speak books and writing. We talk about other things, of course, poaching the whole entire world for our conversation, but we're the same species and we understand each other. This is wonderful.

But sometimes I meet someone who is intelligent and articulate in a language that I've never bothered to try. Or didn't know existed. The conversation is awkward at first (sometimes it even dies and all is lost) because we don't have any common crutches to lean on. We don't understand each other, and this thrills me because I'm suddenly standing on the very edge of a different country where everything comes in different colors and smells are shifted ninety degrees... and the best part is when I start to see that this exotic, glorious wilderness is actually my own, ordinary world, just beneath an unfamiliar light.

The lovely Heather W., once told me that cyclists suffer more flats in the rain. I asked her why, and she said it was probably because the rain dislodged debris from the cracks in the road and lifted it up to attack the tires. I had never considered that. It was like bursting a piece of caviar in my mind.

Eric once showed me a particular kind of tree whose bark is smooth and red and astonishingly, strangely cold. For him, it was obvious and recognizable. For me, it was a miniature explosion. The world is suddenly not what I expected, and it's absolutely fantastic.

This is not to say that I don't love my friends who are cut from the same cloth as me (or at least similar: velvet/velveteen, dupioni/charmeuse, linen/poplin). They surprise, delight, warm, and challenge me. They are some of the most important people in my world and I love them. It's just that, sometimes, it's nice to get to know someone about whose world I know absolutely nothing.

safety in the cinema

A little while ago, we had David Thomson visit the bookstore to talk about his new book, The Moment of Psycho (complete with unsettling subtitle: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder). I didn't actually hear very much of his talk because I was busy with various bookstore things, but I heard him begin by presenting the idea of "safety in the cinema."

Are we safe when we go to the cinema? Are we safe when we settle down into those plush folding seats and lean back in climate-controlled darkness? Are we safe when the screen lights up and the music begins and we are transported to somewhere definitively not where we started out?

No, David Thomson says.

No! I say.

And then several days went by and several things happened and I was very sad. I kept thinking, am I safe? And then I thought about it some more, and I had to ask myself, would I want to be? When I am sad, do I want to see things, hear things, read things, think things that only comfort me? Will having my world flattened out, simplified, and filtered make me feel any better? No, it won't. I tried it recently. It makes me feel like I'm playing with paper dolls, or a garden made out of spun sugar. None of it lasts, and if it rains, everything is going to collapse into mush and melt away, leaving you with nothing but pale and dirty water.

The thing about art (and when I say art, I mean it as a clumsy stand in for telling stories, listening to music, dancing in the rain, looking at a painting in a museum, taking photographs, going to the cinema... all of that, on both sides) is that it puts extra folds into my life. When I was very young, I read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. There's an illustration in there that tries to explain how you could fold together space and time to travel long distances through both in a moment. An ant crawls along a length of fabric stretched between two hands. The hands fold the fabric together and the ant steps from one finger to the next, skipping all the fabric in between.

Art does the opposite. It makes folds and pleats in my life, but they aren't shortcuts. They're richly textured, absurdly embroidered, swags of knotted and tangled and snarled and dirty things. They give me the luxury of time outside of my mundane routine to examine things I don't quite understand. They rip off the confines of all those silly excuses I make up for myself to stay inside where everything is safe.

I don't want everything to be safe, not in art at least. Otherwise there's no point to it. Otherwise it's just stuff, this comforting, safe stuff that says nothing, that gives nothing, that has absolutely nothing in it at all.