Marcus’ Blog – re: lit, life II

In 1556 a Frenchman by the name of Arnaud Du Tilh entered the town of Artigat claiming to be Martin Guerre, who had absented himself from the region eight years earlier to escape an accusation of theft. The impostor Du Tilh spent many months researching the town and its inhabitants before announcing his presence in the area, and was able not only to greet Martin Guerre’s neighbors and acquaintances by name, but also to recall accurately specific moments in their shared past. Du Tihl successfully ingratiated himself with Guerre’s wife, living in her home and having two children by her (“Here’s the lil’uns, look just like their dear old dad don’t they?”), and he also claimed the inheritance of the fled man’s father. It took almost three years before incriminating evidence, along with a growing sense of animosity between Du Tilh and Guerre’s uncle, led to a hearing on the veracity of the newcomer’s identity. The votes at this hearing nearly came to a straight stalemate, with forty-five saying that Du Tilh was an impostor and thirty to forty asserting that he really was the oh-so fondly remembered Martin Guerre. This uncertainty as to the impostor’s identity can in part be attributed to the similarities in Du Tihl and Guerre’s appearances, and also to the commonsensical peasant’s penchant for a world in which the identity of a thing is only defined by its function. You can imagine a baffled farmer at the trial saying: “Well, Marty boy pinched a liter of milk right off my porch afore he left, so whoever this connard really is he should be made to pay up: four francs or the services of a cow.” If Du Tihl performed the same role as Guerre, why not call him that and get back to the spine-bending labor that we know and love? The eccentricity of a doppelgänger would seem utterly gratuitous to a being whose personality is more informed by place than any sense of interiority.

But you also can’t discount how infinitely available we are as humans for the multiplicity of new performative roles. Eight years is a long time and, just speaking to my own experience, the person I was nearly a decade ago seems more like a wrestler, who duked it out in the ring before I mercifully tagged him out, than any kind of legitimate precursor. I get the sense that my double un-shellacked his ninth-round bruiser’s busted lip and pretzelled limbs off the ropes, tailed by a cherubic Danny DeVito-esque coach with a stubby thumb-sized cigar, saying soothingly: “You wanna’ go to McDonalds, buddy? Huh? Let’s go to McDonalds, buddy. Buy ya’ a shake, how bout it?”, while I strapped on the gloves and steadied the rolling dice of clacking knees to stare up at my lurching and unfazed opponent, the luchador: El Vida Loco.

Y’know, eight years ago I ran with a group of boys, because you couldn’t yet call them men (and probably still can’t), through the cool nights of the East Coast’s suburban summers. Pounding prophesies of our future selves out of the pavement with over-stylized sneakers. Skirting under street lamps in the early hours, like demons dodging holy water, clutching onto the desperate idea that this feeling might last. That the others would always be asleep while we ran: vibrant and alive down the corridors of a seemingly abandoned world. Those night streets echoed back to us our conviction that this environment, with it’s closely planned neighborhoods and trim, delineating hedgerows, was only a trap to those who couldn’t see it as such. That any member of the community willing to crouch, waiting for midnight, would see an archeology of the making and understand that the blueprint of the suburbs was all too obvious. It was a maze. And while other citizens of the labyrinth had long ago given up, and were now content to inhabit the confining passageways that they knew, the well-trodden paths that promised no surprises, we close-knit cosmonauts hit out upon a dreamy landscape, searching for that final corner, which when turned, leads out.

Having no time for water, two thirds of our bodies were made up of undiluted hope.

But like most people, by the time I reached Carleton that hope had transformed into something else. Your first year of university is so well advertised as a moment of radical change, as the first step towards an impending adulthood that parses through the weak and the strong with almost equal disdain. And the only real response you can offer is to parrot the world’s hardness back at itself. And so I, like many others before me, became calcified into a very specific idea of exactly what kind of person I was going to be when I entered these hallowed halls. And this sense of having been elevated, to a playing field on which there were shiny new rules of seriousness, was gratified when I met Gill, who came at me like the cryptically beautiful third numeral in a binary world. Waltzing out of a matrix-rain of zeros and ones, parting the waves of all the garbage I would claim to have outgrown, her political convictions and commitment to social justice, although of a completely different breed to my hardline on the value of art to radically transform individual experience, was equally unstinting and immediately recognizable as the exact kind of survival mechanism that I was engaged in. I might be painting the scene with too broad a brush stroke though. I wasn’t exactly a beret-wearing bohemian who’d toss his drunk-dry wine bottles off to Gill while she donned a balaclava and made Molotov cocktails out of the empty reds. But I think that we gravitated towards one another for the reason that we recognized that the roles we had picked up were, on a certain level, parodies of the way we thought the world was supposed to work. Which didn’t stop us from being completely dedicated to our ideals. We both had one foot permanently glued to the soap-box, ready to give a table-flipping speech at a moment’s notice, as well as a hairline trigger for argumentative cross-talk.

But, for me at least, seeing my neuroses played out in another person’s personality was absolutely crucial. Gill and I both had a tendency to be unforgiving with people that disagreed with us. But whereas I would take a more tough-luck attitude, she changed almost imperceptibly at the moment when she recognized that she’d gone too far. If Gill noticed that she’d hurt you, a new tone, completely unpracticed and flower-bloom fragile, would enter into her voice. Like when you hear on a summers day, when each and all are lazily unguarded, through a screen door that won’t ever shut up, the plinky notes of a piano played poorly. Her voice: nothing more than an aleatory flutter, became a raw, trembling desire to rearrange the broken pieces at her feet.

And from that — and only that — touch of sympathy, as if by awful movie flashback, you knew the whole tragic tale: of how you lost yourself to a fully outfitted memory of marvels. It instantly became clear that in all her moments unseen, stretching backwards and forwards she’s probably never done a damn thing that wouldn’t please you. Panning over her history you intuit a wild glitterati of quiet unseen acts of absolute beauty. Even her grief at the pain she’s caused suggests a higher standard. Even that thrill of misbehavior trills with her sense of universal harmony. And as I begin to realize how hokey this sounds, I still don’t think it’s so odd that a tone of voice should travel me through time. ‘Cause if we’re all made of the same atomic brick-and-mortar why shouldn’t each individual moment be superscripted with all the madness and wonder of the known world, in every clock-speech: past, present and future.

I learned to swim at the YMCA off Main Street in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Taught by Mrs. Kreitzer, a septuagenarian in a floral one-piece suit, who’d stand waist-deep in the shallow end with a lit cigarette and absolutely no patience for splashing. “Don’t worry the current will get rid of it”, she’d promise us as she tamped her Marlboros out into the filtration system, which didn’t stop us from inhaling ashy crudlets through our noses when we started diving. After lessons we’d gather in the locker rooms scanning each other’s’ bodies for the chemical residue of her nicotine addiction. And if you caught sight of any black marks on another boy’s bicep, you were to scream: “Kreitzer-itis!” as an announcement that we were all to flail our arms in the air and go bananas like Muppets who’d heard bad news. The tail end of this tradition was that the unfortunate victim, as his last will and testament in this life, was to thank profusely the person who had found his pustule, and endow that individual with all his most precious worldly belongings. One army man (green) with attachable parachute, only kinda’ torn; one Power Rangers® band-aid, slightly used, barely any blood; one self-portrait (crayon) once featured on the fridge door. What I understand of this ritual now is the inherent wisdom of being grateful to those that can point out your weaknesses for you.

I’ve always had an almost animal fear of somehow being caught outside myself, of being observed unmediated by some nebulous outer-audience. And to counteract this nervousness I’ve developed an expert sense of how to give as little of my inner world away as possible at any given moment. To earn my sincere affection is to get an unlimited free pass to one specific pane of glass in my mirror hall of multiple selves. Each individual person that I know and love is gifted with an infinite Marcus, full of opinions and jokes and secret intimacies that could probably last a lifetime without ever being repeated to anyone else. It is this skill — to commit entirely to a miniaturized and marginal piece of myself, to become more invested in this little part of the larger penumbra than some people ever get to the entire superstructure of their personality, and then after perfecting this little clay doll of a substitute, to breathe life into it and hand it off to you, as if such a thing were so easily given — that attracts people to me. But Gill was always incredibly adept at smashing these little Mini-Marcuses, calling my bullshit, and forcing me to engage with her in a more visceral, “real” way.

And if nothing else, her big-hearted brashness forced me to question the things about myself that I had become so invested in that I no longer perceived them to be what they really were: self-created caricatures of some artificial super-I, which might just be strong enough to face the world that scared me more than I could even understand. If the thing that I loved most about Gill were the cracks in her mask though, then how could I in good conscience keep my faceplate so perfectly polished and undisturbed? The goal isn’t to be Arnaud Du Tilh, inserting yourself into the situation that most appeals to you and then playing the part until you become an integral piece.  Instead maybe our home is in the space between the ideal and the identity. We are both what we are and what we fail to be. Two sides of the same coin that can’t ever be called but which when flipped, keeps our eyes to the air and our feet just barely off the ground.