My date with the disappointment artist

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines - Catherine Tan is a freshman at the University of the Philippines Manila, taking up a pre-med course in hopes of becoming a “writing doctor.” She sees life through the lenses of art, film, music, literature, and very recently, science, “which is why when I’m not reading Chuck Palahniuk and Margaret Atwood, I can be found burning the midnight candle with Campbell’s Biology book.” She is a Palanca 2010 awardee.

What can you do to express your love for a book when reading it a dozen times over will not suffice? When framing it or other physical manifestations will be useless? When ingraining into memory its interesting sound bites isn’t enough?

How do you tell it “I love you”?

I found myself asking these questions one sunny day in a coffee shop. As I mentally revisit my dalliance with Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist, I now reckon I have my means for professing my love for it: writing this essay and sending it to the Philippine STAR.

Like most stories of love at first sight (or at first reading), the book and I met in a chance encounter. Obscure because of its slimness and size and wedged in between two thicker books, I wouldn’t have met it if it weren’t for the intriguing title and the word “Essays” on the spine – the latter having impinged a stirring in my spine, given my penchant for essays.

Our fate was sealed when I looked at the back cover and saw the words “autobiographical pieces,” “voyages out of himself”, and “art, landscape, and personal history.” Self-portrait was the word that came to mind, and I was always a sucker for writers who knew how to paint with words instead of brushwork.

Fast-forward a little bit: Me, swooning over his skill; the courtship stage, ending. Before I knew it, the book and its various emotional spindles reeled me in. Mouth agape, eyes dilated, I was not only a reader straddling levity and contemplation upon reading his essays; I was also a writer learning lessons from this man. Moreover, upon painting a picture of his life so vividly I perceived that he was just sitting in that coffee shop with me, telling me his stories in a casual fashion. It was a mirage, but it was real. It was then that I realized that I wasn’t just in love with the book – I was in love with the disappointment artist himself, Jonathan Lethem.

What follows is a phantasmagoria that existed only within the bounds of that coffee shop: him telling me about how as a kid he chose the rather clean-cut artistic styles of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in order to spite his painter-father’s drip-droppy artistic vision; how he “developed a preference for art that required endurance, that mimicked a galactic endlessness and wore out the nonbelievers,” which made me consider my cultural preferences (“Do David Fincher and Christopher Nolan fit that galactic endlessness?” I found myself asking the imaginary him, wondering if he’d seen Fight Club and Inception.); how I shouldn’t expect to be swept off my feet by a big writing break at this age because he too dreamt big when he was a kid but “an ape may grope a monolith, or a cat look at a king, but a child was not yet an artist”; how creator of comics superheroes Jack Kirby was his hero throughout his adolescent years, while I thought about how as a child I often scanned the faces of people in my life to look for a hero, only to find none.

In real-time, doors swivelled open and close, baristas called out and served, coffee cups changed hands, and the sun that rose eventually sank. But those weren’t enough to kill my conversation with Jonathan. His last few monologues, he called the Coda.

The Coda was a series of mini-essays that contained events that took place right before, during and after his mother’s death. How those events congealed into one mass and shaped up the man he was to become, he told me. One tear-jerking monologue at it, too.

An instance: he recounted a profound connection he made with Pink Floyd’s song “Shine on You Crazy Diamond”. He likened the “fall” of Pink Floyd’s star Syd Barrett with the death of his mother: “They were a group that had lost their genius, their spiritual center, and had had to carry on. And, paradoxically, their masterpiece was achieved without his help, but in his honor.”

I wanted to know more. He paused; I was made aware of the gravity of the next statement: “It suggested that my own wish for a large life — my attempts, even, at greatness — might be compatible with the loss of my mother. I didn’t have to fall into ruin to exemplify the cost of losing someone as enormous as Judith Lethem, since Pink Floyd had flourished in Barrett’s wake. My surviving her death would be in no way Judith’s dishonor. I’d only owe her a great song.”

What came next was silence, born out of emotional rupture on my part, and rumination on his.

Meanwhile, as Jonathan Lethem projected his feelings of loneliness onto music, art, and an imaginary life with his mother, I realized that I was projecting, too. Margaret Atwood once said that “the impression a book makes on you is often tied to your age and circumstances at the time you read it”, which I believe applies to my reading of The Disappointment Artist. I read it at a time when I got reconciled with the idea that people are naturally alone, which was a thought that made me lonely. I told imaginary Jonathan: “We dream our own dreams, we think our own thoughts, and we venture out into the world as a singular person. We have our own bubbles, and we carry them alone. Physical manifestations such as holding hands or hugging do not prove that we are not. Even love for another person does not. In my case, I’m compensating for that feeling of aloneness by projecting your existence in this coffee shop. Because I can relate to you.” I could also have said: On a more dramatic note, it seems that I’ve been searching for my hero all my life, and you are that hero. But I restrained my tongue, in fear that he would sneer at the statement’s mawkishness.

“But aloneness doesn’t mean that we can’t be influenced by another person,” I added.

I believe he agreed, because his life was cultivated out of influence, too. Especially influence from his mother. By dying, Judith Lethem helped her son build a life — a life from which his art, writing, branched out and blossomed. Jonathan Lethem found himself turning his back on all the books, movies, and music that “disappointed” him, but none of that matters because his mother’s influence sufficed. That thought moved me, and whenever I revisited the memory (fantasy, really) of that instance in the coffee shop, I let the feeling simmer, ecstatic at having been able to meet Jonathan.

Before we left, he said: “Perhaps everyone’s writing is ultimately bricolage, a welter of borrowings.” I took this as a suggestion that reading more books could improve my writing, and that a little picking here and there would help me find my voice. I wanted to tell him that should one day I would be able to publish my own essays in an anthology, it’d be easy to say that his influence would be part of my bricolage, my welter of borrowings. By assuaging my fears of being alone — by being my antidote to loneliness – he would be my Syd Barrett as I’d prepare for my Judith Lethem, whoever that may be.

But I couldn’t tell him that, because just as easily as he came did he leave, with me holding the book in a dim-lit coffee shop at sundown.