Aporia

Here he is: the child who sees himself as a camera would, who believes that an audience of hidden observers awaits the slightest signs of wit manifest in his doodles and daydreams, an audience which will demand that he be elected to the stage, to some high-culture Star Search, to a status of celebrity still made moral by creativity: he will be a writer, a musician, an intellectual whose mountains of disorganized papers constitute a cathedral of tenderly pure, historic insights into whatever. Perhaps you’ve seen this movie.

He demands attention. He assumes his precocity, and that it will be noticed. The boy believes that he possesses some secret inner beauty which he needn’t cultivate, whose natural order is sufficient; the man must deride celebrity as he awaits the discovery of his subterranean talent or the sudden strike of transformative fame, or if nothing else: the acquisition of power.

Sitting upright in bed with the lights out, he draws shapes and lines on his girlfriend’s back and imagines that each possesses its own logic, its own inner narrative; or perhaps it is kinder to say he imbues them with this intentionality, and he favors long, deliberate designs whose symmetry or structure might be apparent to her, might please her: musical diagrams which seek to establish and resolve tensions, set and then break patterns, which even aspire to the assertion of spatial themes, traced over-thoughtfully into her prickled flesh, drawn by nervous fingers through light little hairs.

Decades before, still in school, he had drummed his fingers anxiously and intricately, hoping that whichever girl was nearest his desk might hear his dexterity, hear that his thumb produced a deeper thump than the ensnaring tap of his index finger, hear that the raucous avalanche of sounds recurred in 7/4, hear his improbable inimitability, hear him, and turn, smiling, to ask, “Are you, like, a drummer or something?”

He flushes at this gutless indolence now: waiting to be discovered as he was, parading himself without risking himself, imagining that others would attend to the noises of his character because buried within them was some secret signal. That a girl in his school might have had her own life, her own thoughts, her own secret: he didn’t consider it! And now he knows that, waiting to be discovered and never discovering, wanting to be seen and never seeing, he’s marched through a million rooms without connection or consequence, sat through shows thinking of his body’s awkward shuffling, half-stared into paintings imagining how faithfully his face reflects the profundity in them, even wandered alone in the woods wondering whether his pace is faithful to the mood whose projection remains an imperative, even among the trees.

But there is no mystery in the vanity of the insecure, and even now he clings to consolations. Fingers at the nape of her neck, he insists to himself that his pantomime is at least subtle, and better than the naked need for attention he sees all about him; if it is phonier, it is also more polite (though he is jealous of those who know what they want and pursue it). But much stranger, he thinks: how much of himself and his thought he invested in the patterns on her back determines how sweetly she feels them, as though his delusion of creativity does indeed matter, is perhaps in fact not a delusion of kind but only of degree, as though creativity is not so different from the mooning of a child, and is scarcely the worse for it.