// creative //
Spring 2014
Lucy in the Smog with Diamonds
by Isidore Seville
Self-undermining in a good way. I think that’s what’s en vogue these days, and it feels natural, even necessary. Certainty is as outmoded and painfully boring as internet dial-up. What’s considered clever and funny is so steeped in irony and self-deprecation that you can never really know who the fuck means what they say—and people actually like it that way. And maybe I do, too. But a new type of problem has arisen in light of that reality, a modern problem for the modern man or woman, when nobody knows the destination of an endlessly corkscrewing meta-commentary, when nobody can find the string to pull that’ll unravel all the countless loops and tangles of self-awareness that stuff up your head. Thinking has become like a game of Jenga: what looks like it’s changing and growing is really only destabilizing, pushing out its integral structural supports and stacking them until the whole thing inevitably crumbles down.
But part of me can’t help but feel like maybe it’s more fun when bridges are rickety, when people just throw up their hands and decide to wade through the muck of “gray areas” rather than trying to neatly apportion blacks and whites. Like when I used to go to Riverside Park where the monkey bars never had those weird ersatz woodchip things underneath, which meant that if you slipped off you could get a good old-fashioned skinned knee and wear it like a badge of courage. And if you made it across, you were just as happy because you knew that what could have happened didn’t—win-win.
So a moment of certainty, if it can exist, is terrifying in a lot of ways. You don’t know, when you’re in it, whether it’ll last for more than a fleeting moment; whether your point of view is and has always been intrinsically stinted and incomplete, so any feeling of sureness must be a colossal mistake; whether noticing that bias is itself the realization that’s suddenly dawned upon you; whether, actually, you’ve always thought yourself right, so the clarity you’re experiencing is admitting you’ve been wrong; etc. etc., ad infinitum. It’s even more unsettling when that thing we’ll call certainty is beamed down from the eyes of a three or four story golden Buddha, when you are leagues away from understanding what the hell Buddhism is (besides awesome), in a city thousands of miles away from the place you grew up, under the profound influence of high-grade LSD you brought in your pocket from the U.S., with your dear sister, who just fifteen years ago collaborated with you on original lyrics for an adaptation of Lou Bega’s seminal Mambo No. 5 about Jewish things and Pokémon.
The 90s aside, just try and picture shafts of sunlight breaking in through the ancient wooden crossbeams of the roof, these empyrean shades of blue and bright red weaving their way through plumes of incense smoke, pilgrims from all over China coming to Beijing to do all sorts of pilgrimy things like genuflect and mutter prayers and leave garlands lying around, and then two lone, crazed looking white people shuffling nervously amidst it all, giggling like school children. This is not a moment where, with a fairytale flourish, the cynical or jaded side-character rediscovers a capacity for wonderment and true emotional resonance, it’s not an epiphany on a beach with wet and naked boys slick in the sunlight calling out to you to break the spell on your rapt face. And, although I consider myself a religious person, whatever the hell that means, and I was in a deeply spiritual place, this wasn’t a rediscovery of God or faith or the divine spark deep down in each of us. It was something altogether selfish and ergo lovely.
* * *
How I wound up in the Yong Hegong Lama Temple with pupils roughly the size of God’s asshole, my head spinning faster than any prayer wheel can go, probably confirming all stereotypes about the incredibly irreverent and shitty variety of tourists. It must be that what happened was the culmination of events that go way back along ancestral timelines, long before my sister and I entered the story, because how could something so epic exist outside of a long and storied past? The Jews and the Chinese are actually more historically intertwined and generally similar than you would think: both were on the victim side in WWII; both are adept at business and, paradoxically, communism; both are very into family; they’re obsessed with food and feeding; and we can’t forget to mention the yearly denouement of our mutual good-will and inter-cultural accord that happens every Christmas Eve when we feast together, as Jesus surely intended. Having said that, I won’t say much about religion in contemporary China, because I really have no idea where to start. China identifies as an atheistic country, they’re very strict about religious literature being peddled in public settings, but go to a Buddhist or Confucian temple and see the prayers and offerings and tell me they’re nothing more than “philosophies.” Or maybe they just worship capitalism, who knows?
But the real origin story begins when our dad started doing a lot of business in Asia, especially China and Japan—he was general-council turned international manager at a kid’s show at the time, and he would come home from these exoticized locations like Bangladesh and Shanghai and regale the family with his stranger-in-a-strange-land bewilderment. So it’s unclear how exactly it escalated—early copies of Pokémon DVD’s, Dragon Ball Z on TV right after school (both Japanese, but still), and then suddenly my older brother decided to take Mandarin his freshmen year of college, and my sister, in defiance of the trend at our Modern Orthodox Jewish day school, decided to live in Beijing for a year before college instead of going to study In Israel. The family visited and we had the good fortune to do a two-week tour of some of the major cities, with my sister, already more than proficient in Mandarin, leading the charge. It was my first exposure to a place where I felt simply and utterly foreign, different on a basal, genetic level. I was entranced, reeling my may through what seemed to be an entirely new planet, glancing off of people and wonders of the world like a pinball and loving every chaotic second of it. And with the help of my sister’s translating skills, it was also my first exposure, coming from New York, to a place where Ashkenazi Jews were a rarity, where strangers on the street would complement you on your beautiful “tall nose” and “big eyes.”
Naturally, a couple of years later I decided to spend my summer after 10th grade on a State Department-sponsored “strategic” language program in Shanghai for six weeks, while my sister continued studying Mandarin through college. She wound up back in Beijing on a post-collegiate immersion fellowship, and when she finished that, she got a job at a Chinese media company, officially the only foreigner in her office. All this meant hunkering down in an apartment in Beijing’s trendiest (and whitest) neighborhood; owning a pollution-mask she didn’t really use; having Chinese friends who did cool Chinese things like sell vintage Chinese clothing on Chinese eBay; settling on favorite restaurants and ridiculous themed bars and euro-trashy clubs with grimy bass that throbbed relentlessly.
But when I visited her in Beijing over winter break I didn’t really have any substantive conception of the life she led. We Skyped, I saw pictures, but it was all vague and shimmery. Every time I tried to imagine her life, to transpose the sister I grew up with into the bizarre theme-park world of the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, I couldn’t really get beyond images of her smiling wide, spinning, a lá Gene Kelly, underneath a torrent of lotus flowers and dumplings.
Seeing that she had carved out a very real life for herself, not just cartoon dragons and erhu music, was its own awakening. It is amazing to be separated for so long and show up on the night of a Mexican-themed Christmas party in Beijing (hosted by a Jew), and feel the months since you last saw each other vanish. It’s amazing to go on an adventure like you’re kids again, to be able to know you’re both seeing a world that is, at least in part, accessible only to you at that very instant, at that very place. And it’s amazing to let that reality diffuse into all the moments you live and all the people you meet.
* * *
As we were walking to the Tibetan lama temple, coming up on our trips, I felt like every old and grizzled Chinese person riding a bike or hocking a loogie was some sort of alien creature. I’d look to my sister and insist that we had been transplanted into Blade Runner, and just laugh incessantly. I’d taken a Romantic poetry class during the past semester, and we read Byron’s “Don Juan,” which is about travelling in a lot of ways. The narrator is incredibly irreverent—he laughs at shipwrecks and tortured lovers—but he knows he can, because as a tourist visiting new places, he’s only able to care on the most superficial levels. It doesn’t matter if you’re at a wedding or a funeral when you’re a tourist because you’re going to be indiscriminately fascinated—the language barrier and the cultural divide make it impossible for you to be responsible to anything outside of yourself and your impressions. It’s the narcissist’s dream. It’s carelessly caring, and it has all the satisfaction of intellectual effort and curiosity with none of the work. Byron knows that’s how we all operate on an internal level, that we’re all tourists inside of our fantasies. We have no responsibility outside of our imagination, and we waltz around doing whatever we want because we have the unassailable prerogative. Beautiful, but a little disturbing.
So, I pulled a Byron. I think travelling and drugs appeal to me on the same levels: shifts in perspective. Few opportunities enable you to resituate the entire context surrounding your thoughts and feelings. I decided, doing the Romantics proud, to let the boundaries between myself and my environment dissolve, to learn about what happens inside of my head by looking outwards. Somewhere between the guffaws that erupted from our mouths when some monks started throat-chanting behind us, and the time I stuck my head in a cloud of incense smoke that was certainly not meant for me, I felt that moment of certainty. It was, in a lot of ways, that certainty is okay sometimes, even in the most inappropriate of places and situations. But it should be a certainty that operates on a totally internal level: a self-trust, rather than the variety that entitles every asshole to a podium or pulpit to tell you how to live. On the way back to the U.S., I felt accomplished in a way that didn’t need explication, dissection, or validation from myself or from anyone else. I did something ridiculous and ridiculously awesome, and I may never be able to explain what it was. There are times to bemoan solipsism and there are times to celebrate it, to have enough certainty in who you are and what you’re doing to make yourself vulnerable to yourself, to lift up your shirt and expose your soft existential underbelly underneath, having the faith that your own consciousness will choose to rub it instead of delivering the slap you’ve come to expect. Mine and undermine all you want, but know that sometimes it’s fun to give it a rest, to look up at a fucking giant Buddha and wink back at him, because you know exactly what you’re doing.
// ISIDORE SEVILLE is a sophomore at Columbia College. Photo by Flickr user davelocity.
But part of me can’t help but feel like maybe it’s more fun when bridges are rickety, when people just throw up their hands and decide to wade through the muck of “gray areas” rather than trying to neatly apportion blacks and whites. Like when I used to go to Riverside Park where the monkey bars never had those weird ersatz woodchip things underneath, which meant that if you slipped off you could get a good old-fashioned skinned knee and wear it like a badge of courage. And if you made it across, you were just as happy because you knew that what could have happened didn’t—win-win.
So a moment of certainty, if it can exist, is terrifying in a lot of ways. You don’t know, when you’re in it, whether it’ll last for more than a fleeting moment; whether your point of view is and has always been intrinsically stinted and incomplete, so any feeling of sureness must be a colossal mistake; whether noticing that bias is itself the realization that’s suddenly dawned upon you; whether, actually, you’ve always thought yourself right, so the clarity you’re experiencing is admitting you’ve been wrong; etc. etc., ad infinitum. It’s even more unsettling when that thing we’ll call certainty is beamed down from the eyes of a three or four story golden Buddha, when you are leagues away from understanding what the hell Buddhism is (besides awesome), in a city thousands of miles away from the place you grew up, under the profound influence of high-grade LSD you brought in your pocket from the U.S., with your dear sister, who just fifteen years ago collaborated with you on original lyrics for an adaptation of Lou Bega’s seminal Mambo No. 5 about Jewish things and Pokémon.
The 90s aside, just try and picture shafts of sunlight breaking in through the ancient wooden crossbeams of the roof, these empyrean shades of blue and bright red weaving their way through plumes of incense smoke, pilgrims from all over China coming to Beijing to do all sorts of pilgrimy things like genuflect and mutter prayers and leave garlands lying around, and then two lone, crazed looking white people shuffling nervously amidst it all, giggling like school children. This is not a moment where, with a fairytale flourish, the cynical or jaded side-character rediscovers a capacity for wonderment and true emotional resonance, it’s not an epiphany on a beach with wet and naked boys slick in the sunlight calling out to you to break the spell on your rapt face. And, although I consider myself a religious person, whatever the hell that means, and I was in a deeply spiritual place, this wasn’t a rediscovery of God or faith or the divine spark deep down in each of us. It was something altogether selfish and ergo lovely.
* * *
How I wound up in the Yong Hegong Lama Temple with pupils roughly the size of God’s asshole, my head spinning faster than any prayer wheel can go, probably confirming all stereotypes about the incredibly irreverent and shitty variety of tourists. It must be that what happened was the culmination of events that go way back along ancestral timelines, long before my sister and I entered the story, because how could something so epic exist outside of a long and storied past? The Jews and the Chinese are actually more historically intertwined and generally similar than you would think: both were on the victim side in WWII; both are adept at business and, paradoxically, communism; both are very into family; they’re obsessed with food and feeding; and we can’t forget to mention the yearly denouement of our mutual good-will and inter-cultural accord that happens every Christmas Eve when we feast together, as Jesus surely intended. Having said that, I won’t say much about religion in contemporary China, because I really have no idea where to start. China identifies as an atheistic country, they’re very strict about religious literature being peddled in public settings, but go to a Buddhist or Confucian temple and see the prayers and offerings and tell me they’re nothing more than “philosophies.” Or maybe they just worship capitalism, who knows?
But the real origin story begins when our dad started doing a lot of business in Asia, especially China and Japan—he was general-council turned international manager at a kid’s show at the time, and he would come home from these exoticized locations like Bangladesh and Shanghai and regale the family with his stranger-in-a-strange-land bewilderment. So it’s unclear how exactly it escalated—early copies of Pokémon DVD’s, Dragon Ball Z on TV right after school (both Japanese, but still), and then suddenly my older brother decided to take Mandarin his freshmen year of college, and my sister, in defiance of the trend at our Modern Orthodox Jewish day school, decided to live in Beijing for a year before college instead of going to study In Israel. The family visited and we had the good fortune to do a two-week tour of some of the major cities, with my sister, already more than proficient in Mandarin, leading the charge. It was my first exposure to a place where I felt simply and utterly foreign, different on a basal, genetic level. I was entranced, reeling my may through what seemed to be an entirely new planet, glancing off of people and wonders of the world like a pinball and loving every chaotic second of it. And with the help of my sister’s translating skills, it was also my first exposure, coming from New York, to a place where Ashkenazi Jews were a rarity, where strangers on the street would complement you on your beautiful “tall nose” and “big eyes.”
Naturally, a couple of years later I decided to spend my summer after 10th grade on a State Department-sponsored “strategic” language program in Shanghai for six weeks, while my sister continued studying Mandarin through college. She wound up back in Beijing on a post-collegiate immersion fellowship, and when she finished that, she got a job at a Chinese media company, officially the only foreigner in her office. All this meant hunkering down in an apartment in Beijing’s trendiest (and whitest) neighborhood; owning a pollution-mask she didn’t really use; having Chinese friends who did cool Chinese things like sell vintage Chinese clothing on Chinese eBay; settling on favorite restaurants and ridiculous themed bars and euro-trashy clubs with grimy bass that throbbed relentlessly.
But when I visited her in Beijing over winter break I didn’t really have any substantive conception of the life she led. We Skyped, I saw pictures, but it was all vague and shimmery. Every time I tried to imagine her life, to transpose the sister I grew up with into the bizarre theme-park world of the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, I couldn’t really get beyond images of her smiling wide, spinning, a lá Gene Kelly, underneath a torrent of lotus flowers and dumplings.
Seeing that she had carved out a very real life for herself, not just cartoon dragons and erhu music, was its own awakening. It is amazing to be separated for so long and show up on the night of a Mexican-themed Christmas party in Beijing (hosted by a Jew), and feel the months since you last saw each other vanish. It’s amazing to go on an adventure like you’re kids again, to be able to know you’re both seeing a world that is, at least in part, accessible only to you at that very instant, at that very place. And it’s amazing to let that reality diffuse into all the moments you live and all the people you meet.
* * *
As we were walking to the Tibetan lama temple, coming up on our trips, I felt like every old and grizzled Chinese person riding a bike or hocking a loogie was some sort of alien creature. I’d look to my sister and insist that we had been transplanted into Blade Runner, and just laugh incessantly. I’d taken a Romantic poetry class during the past semester, and we read Byron’s “Don Juan,” which is about travelling in a lot of ways. The narrator is incredibly irreverent—he laughs at shipwrecks and tortured lovers—but he knows he can, because as a tourist visiting new places, he’s only able to care on the most superficial levels. It doesn’t matter if you’re at a wedding or a funeral when you’re a tourist because you’re going to be indiscriminately fascinated—the language barrier and the cultural divide make it impossible for you to be responsible to anything outside of yourself and your impressions. It’s the narcissist’s dream. It’s carelessly caring, and it has all the satisfaction of intellectual effort and curiosity with none of the work. Byron knows that’s how we all operate on an internal level, that we’re all tourists inside of our fantasies. We have no responsibility outside of our imagination, and we waltz around doing whatever we want because we have the unassailable prerogative. Beautiful, but a little disturbing.
So, I pulled a Byron. I think travelling and drugs appeal to me on the same levels: shifts in perspective. Few opportunities enable you to resituate the entire context surrounding your thoughts and feelings. I decided, doing the Romantics proud, to let the boundaries between myself and my environment dissolve, to learn about what happens inside of my head by looking outwards. Somewhere between the guffaws that erupted from our mouths when some monks started throat-chanting behind us, and the time I stuck my head in a cloud of incense smoke that was certainly not meant for me, I felt that moment of certainty. It was, in a lot of ways, that certainty is okay sometimes, even in the most inappropriate of places and situations. But it should be a certainty that operates on a totally internal level: a self-trust, rather than the variety that entitles every asshole to a podium or pulpit to tell you how to live. On the way back to the U.S., I felt accomplished in a way that didn’t need explication, dissection, or validation from myself or from anyone else. I did something ridiculous and ridiculously awesome, and I may never be able to explain what it was. There are times to bemoan solipsism and there are times to celebrate it, to have enough certainty in who you are and what you’re doing to make yourself vulnerable to yourself, to lift up your shirt and expose your soft existential underbelly underneath, having the faith that your own consciousness will choose to rub it instead of delivering the slap you’ve come to expect. Mine and undermine all you want, but know that sometimes it’s fun to give it a rest, to look up at a fucking giant Buddha and wink back at him, because you know exactly what you’re doing.
// ISIDORE SEVILLE is a sophomore at Columbia College. Photo by Flickr user davelocity.