“It becomes its own Thing”: Lisa Simpson on Aesthetics Occasionally I’ll get bored enough to watch a DVD commentary. Either that or I’m just too lazy to take one DVD out, march upstairs to my library (shelf, really) and find another one. People talking over a movie isn’t all that appealing to me (aside from the Mystery Science Theater riffs). That said, I did hear something that stuck with me awhile back when listening to a commentary track for a Simpsons DVD. It was said by Yeardley Smith, the woman who plays Lisa Simpson. Like most professional voice actors, she also has a distinctive speaking voice. Adenoidal might be the best way to describe it, high-pitched but more adorable than grating, well this side of Minnie Mouse. Betty Boop might be a more apt comparison, although there isn’t that weird neotenous sexpot thing happening with Yeardley that bombshell Betty had going. In the commentary in question, Yeardley and some other Simpsons staff were watching an episode, maybe The Old Man and the Lisa (a bona fide classic). Someone asked her, “So when you watch an episode, do you see Lisa and think of her as you?” “No,” Ms. Smith replied. “Because it becomes its own thing.” I think what she meant was that her own voice, her contribution, was subsumed in the overall effort, interweaved with the craftsmanship of the animators, other voice actors, and the musical cues and stings provided by the underrated film and TV composer Alf Clausen. The work of art itself, when properly done, provides relief from the burden of ego and self-consciousness, and all the other petty vagaries that come with being a human being. Art is something made by people, but when done well, sincerely and with great effort and care, we find ourselves seeing the work alone and not the creator behind it. That is ultimately the beauty of art, relief from the burden of being in the struggle that comes with being a person “flattened by trivialities,” as Charles Bukowski once put it. When we interact with each other our guards are up, as if we are in a competition, and at the most basic level we are. For resources, for praise, for jobs, and, at the most primal level, for mates. Art allows us to filter out the extraneous and ugly things about human need and desire that mar communication (even when the work of art in question is focused on human ugliness). It allows us to establish a link with another human that is unburdened by the weight of all this normally heavy baggage. Inferior works of art remind us of all the things we can’t stand about other people and ourselves. How many bad movies have you seen in which you could sense the mercenary nature of everyone involved, the shallowness of the actors and vapidity of the director and screenwriter, buffered by and beholden to nothing greater than momentary trends? Hell may be other people, as Sartre said, but I think Bradbury was right when he suggested we could stay perma-drunk (without the hangover) on the words (and the songs and the films) of others. I think we all struggle with some fears of inferiority, fears that we’re talentless (no matter our level of success or the praise heaped on us or our works that are supposed to serve as concrete benchmarks of our accomplishments). And when we encounter something good created by someone else, the admiration carries a slight undercurrent of jealousy, the threat that our fear of being frauds is going to be exposed in the presence of the real thing. It’s best to just be honest about this. “It was good and I was jealous,” is how Bukowski put it in Ham on Rye when he wrote about his first time reading a story written by his best friend, a fellow aspiring scribe. It’s a sentence not many would be honest enough to write, and a feeling not everyone would even be eager to cop to. To be fair, maybe some of us are actually above such pettiness. Not me, at any rate. Here’s the thing, though: while encountering something good might bring these residual and myriad petty feelings to the surface, when I encounter something great I forget that it was created by a person. My disbelief is suspended and my ego goes with it. Greatness is so rare that when I encounter it, I’m relieved to find that it still exists, no matter the source (well, maybe if my younger brother wrote a great book, I might have to kick his ass). But here’s the other thing: that same egoless spirit in which I received the work was probably the one in which it was conceived. This is the reason, I think, that someone like Norman Mailer could never really craft a great novel (no matter what prize committees or critics say): he was too consciously trying to aspire to greatness to subordinate him and his talent to let something shine through him rather than trying to shine in and of himself. In his book How to write Science Fiction and Fantasy, Orson Scott Card points out that the main difference between poetry and fiction is that fiction impresses at the subconscious level, while poetry has its most striking effect in a much more manifest manner. You read a great poem and think That’s great. You read a great book and think, I believed that. Or, I was transported by that. Your admiration for the author only begins once the book is closed. The experience and not the creator is the focus. Felt everywhere and seen nowhere, as I think Zola or Flaubert said. And if you write a great book or a great poem, what do you feel then? Hell, don’t ask me. I have no idea. When I read something I wrote, and I don’t wince and feel a sense of shame, that’s victory enough for me. Maybe one day I can get to the place where Tolstoy was on his deathbed when his daughter (I think) pulled a book down from the shelves in his paneled library and proceeded to read a passage to him. “That’s beautiful,” Tolstoy supposedly said after she finished. “Who wrote that?” “You did,” his daughter replied. But he had written it so long ago that only now, on his deathbed, could see his work with fresh eyes, a Christian death absolving him not only of his sins in this world but the usual and pesky interposition of his (overly)critical faculty. Half the battle is won or lost in getting to that point where your characters, previously puppets, start to caper around like voodoo dolls, animated by something besides your fingers on the keyboard or the ego lodged in some secret chamber of your mind. Some writers claim it’s an artistic defect in control to let the characters dance too far free of the leash, while others claim that when the creation slips its tether, that’s where the fun starts. Maybe that’s the key. Forget about creating something great. Have fun, instead, amuse yourself first and then go from there.
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It’s the little things that break your heart.
I remember this one time as a kid going downstairs to the kitchen to get something to eat. I poured myself a bowl of cereal, opened the fridge, and found no milk inside. Being lazy, I didn’t bother to pour the cereal back in the box, or even to dump it in the trashcan (you know you’re lazy when you can’t even be bothered to waste something). A couple hours later I went back downstairs and saw my mom getting ready to go to the grocery store. She turned and said, “I saw where you poured yourself some cereal but couldn’t find any milk. It broke my heart.” She was exaggerating, of course, but there was still enough feeling in her words for them to contain a bit of genuine pain. Mothers are like that, cursed to feel too much, especially toward their most unfeeling children. But apparently sons can be like that, too. I had one of these moments of minor heartbreak the other night, that low threnody that plays through one’s bones and soul, and which once can’t seem to shake despite how silly it all seems. You’re overreacting, you tell yourself. But yourself tells you to go fuck yourself and to let it feel what it wants. It was Halloween and I was driving to the drugstore to pick up some candy for the trick-or-treaters. I always put it off til the last moment, mostly because I don’t get many kids knocking on my door. I joked with my neighbors that there must be a rumor out there that I’m the guy in the neighborhood hiding razor blades inside apples. Except I don’t ever hand out apples, and for the young and processed sugar-obsessed kids, an apple is a horrific enough prospect sans razorblade. Might as well be the one curmudgeonly puritan who passes out tubes of toothpaste. In order to get to the drugstore I have to drive through my old neighborhood. The section where I live now is solidly lower-middle and middle-class, two story brick and vinyl-sided houses inhabited by people who drive exterminator vans and cop cars to work, have their kids in little league and soccer. I could leave a bike in the driveway and not worry too much about it being stolen in the night. My old neighborhood is what people in real estate and those given to a euphemism call “transitional.” There are laundromats and gas stations with a desperate air, as if they’ve just been hit by armed robbers or will be getting stuck up soon. Fumes from the city bus mingle with the scent of fried food, rap music from tricked-out hoopties rattles the window panes in the apartments where kids try to do their homework. It’s a neighborhood where the humble and law-abiding live quietly in the shadow of their louder and more violent neighbors. En route to the store I hit a red light and was forced to stop. To my right was a cemetery that locks its gates early to deter vandalism. To the left was a liquor store, which apparently also sells candy. I saw a group of kids walking into the store dressed in their costumes, boys in their superhero silks and girls in their black witch finery. They were trudging inside to buy themselves some pregame sweets before the big door-to-door push to fill their pillowcases. My heart dropped in my stomach at the bravery of these kids. Despite the cynicism (and frankly danger) all around them were still trying to be kids. They’re not naïve enough to overlook how wrong everything is in the world, and how that wrongness is magnified where they live, but they are still innocent. Their braveness broke my heart. My cowardice, and the cowardice of all of us who are leaving them this world, disgusted me. But then the light turned green, and I drove on and didn’t think about it anymore. At least not consciously. Not until now. The Right to be Forgotten: Some Musings on Immortality, |