Recently, I’ve been in a pretty good mood. One could almost describe my disposition as “sunny” – but if I hear anyone say that, I’ll probably rip their throat out with my hands, which I’ll then have to wash compulsively until my hands dry out and crack. So for both our sakes, let’s just stick with “I’m in a good mood.”
Happiness in the middle of winter is kind of a big deal. I doubt I could be diagnosed with SAD, but I’m still generally much more depressed during winter than any other time of year – especially post-Christmas. Shoot, I’ll go ahead and say even during December, but I pretend to be jovial out of fear that, if I’m cranky, Santa’s reindeer will crawl in through my bedroom window and gore me with their merry antlers. Fa-la-la, indeed.
During my most recent battle with the mid-winter blues, I tried to fight them off by watching a few episodes of Pushing Daisies that I borrowed from the library. For those of you that haven’t seen Pushing Daisies… well, I won’t try to explain it all here, but if Roald Dahl and Lorelai from The Gilmore Girls had a daughter, and if that daughter went on to have a son with Tim Burton, and THAT child grew up to be a pie-maker with the ability to raise the dead, then the Hallmark channel would probably make a movie about him called Pushing Daisies: The Ned Piemaker Story, and then Bryan Fuller’s delightful television series would never have been made. So I guess it’s a good thing that Roald Dahl died in 1990 and Lorelai Gilmore is fictional.
Anyway, so I watched Pushing Daisies one Sunday morning, and, for some reason, I could NOT stop laughing. I laughed and laughed and laughed until the characters on the screen stared out from the TV and said, “Seriously, dude, we appreciate the support, but it really wasn’t THAT funny.” I felt pretty foolish after that, but the laughter already had the appropriate effect: I felt much better.
Now that you’ve stuck around now for four paragraphs, it’s time I rewarded you with THE POINT: I used to think that, to be of merit, a work of fiction or art in general had to be weighty, cerebral, and, in some way, “literary.” In case you’ve forgotten, here are the characteristics of “literature”:
1 – The good guys don’t always win.
2 – Good storytelling is less important that making a point.
3 – Everyone has sex all the time, and no one likes it.
Don’t get me wrong – I definitely consider Pushing Daisies artistic. In fact, it’s one of the best television series I’ve ever seen, and I collect The Muppet Show. But it’s not what I’ve always considered to be “high” art. And yet, it made me feel better than most of the “high” art I’ve read.
“High” art – say, a book like 1984 – may change the world, but read too much of it and you’ll start downing Zoloft tablets like they’re Smarties. I mean, there’s probably a reason why so many of the great writers committed suicide – look at Ernest Hemingway, Anne Sexton, and, of course, Sylvia Plath. “High” literature, the kind most often canonized in the Norton Anthologies, tends to be depressing.
But real “art” doesn’t have to be. There’s a lot of good to be said for that which merely entertains. For some, that entertainment, that little fanciful bit of laughter, can heal – an emotional salve. Pushing Daisies didn’t exactly change my life, but it provided me with exactly the kind of release I needed at that moment.
So with that, I thought I’d share with you a poem that actually HAS changed my life: “Special Glasses,” by Billy Collins. Let me give you a bit of back – story first. When I go to buy a new book of poetry, I generally don’t have a specific poet in mind. I browse the titles for something that catches my attention. I flip that book open to a random page in the middle, and I read the poem there. Sometimes I’ll look at a few more, but, generally, if that first poem I read doesn’t engage me on some level, I don’t buy the book. The first time I tried this technique, I found Collins’s The Trouble with Poetry. Now, it wasn’t the title that caught my attention so much as the book itself – my copy is cut like a rhombus, not an actual rectangle. But the quirkiness of a publisher’s error was enough to get me to open the book and read.
The way I was feeling that day I picked up the lopsided book with the bear on the cover, “Special Glasses” was exactly the type of poem I needed to read. At the time, I was going through a break-up (of course, I’d been going through that break-up for over a year by this point. My therapist says I’m getting better). I was also finishing up my final year at Utah State, where I’d immersed myself for years in the idea that “art must be deep.” Then I read Billy Collins. For the first time in a long time, I felt that release, that catharsis that comes from “light” entertainment
So, without further ado, “Special Glasses.” I hope you enjoy it.
I had to send away for them
because they are not available in any store.
They look the same as any sunglasses
with a light tint and silvery frames,
but instead of filtering out the harmful
rays of the sun,
they filter out the harmful sight of you --
you on the approach,
you waiting at my bus stop,
you, face in the evening window.
Every morning I put them on
and step out the side door
whistling a melody of thanks to my nose
and my ears for holding them in place, just so,
singing a song of gratitude
to the lens grinder at his heavy bench
and to the very lenses themselves
because they allow it all to come in, all but you.
How they know the difference
between the green hedges, the stone walls,
and you is beyond me,
yet the schoolbuses flashing in the rain
do come in, as well as the postman waving
and the mother and daughter dogs next door,
and then there is the tea kettle
about to play its chord—
everything sailing right in but you, girl.
Yes, just as the night air passes through the screen,
but not the mosquito,
and as water swirls down the drain,
but not the eggshell,
so the flowering trellis and the moon
pass through my special glasses, but not you.
Let us keep it this way, I say to myself,
as I lay my special glasses on the night table,
pull the chain on the lamp,
and say a prayer—unlike the song—
that I will not see you in my dreams.
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6 comments:
That Ned the Piemaker sure has an impressive parentage for entertaiment!
I like the jist of this post. It reminds me of a similiar understanding I developed about philosophy after reading some of Nietzsche. He criticized Plato for turning "reason into a tyrant," thereby making our passions, and a large part of our humanity, slaves to our intellect. I thought it was a good point, and a novel spin on philosophy.
Likewise, I think that the "deep" literature we are disproportionally bombarded with in school can have the same effect, if we don't find our own Billy Collins to end the tyranny :)
That poem is supposed to be representation of how "not deep" good art can be? It has plenty of depth to it imo. You can take it anywhere from "Oh cool. Magic Sungallses!" to "How sad. He's personifying the sunglasses and making them into the reason he no longer sees his woman, rather than the fact that she left and took that dang dog with her."
I think, maybe what you're getting at is that the best art, has some form of inanity to it, that any person could read and say "I understood that". Rather than requiring those of us who do down 4 Zoloft a day and STILL recite Nieztsche as the happiest thing in our musings to analyze and comment on the existentialist poetry for hours on end.
And I'm pretty sure I'm spelling Nietzsche wrong again. But I'm too lazy to look it up.
I see it more as an example of how good art needn't be "weighty" - while good art CAN be "weighty," too often it becomes burdensome. To me, Billy Collins is pretty light-hearted, and, overall, very optimistic. I'll never say the man lacks depth, though.
"But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."--Ratatouille
I have to say, I have never been a fan of a lot of "high art" because I don't want to be downing zoloft. It is for this reason that I mostly read YA lit. It tends to not be as depressing or at least not as despairing of hope.
I think sometimes though that we English major people put too much stock into high falutin' mumbo jumbo and forget that there are other things which are good too, not just the "classics" or the "high art" we generally read in our classes.
I laughed!!
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