One of the places I like to hide in the city is this quirky coffee house in Belltown where, today, a guy named Ryan gave me the Best! Venti! Soy! Caffe Viennese! Ever! (I didn’t sleep well last night, so I’m a little punchy). This coffee house, Uptown Espresso, is known as the “Home of the Velvet Foam” but this morning it seems ever so much more velvety, like a pillow I could lay my head upon and fall into deep and blissful sleep.
For some odd reason, I feel disconnected from the rest of the world, like an alien observer of human habits. I hate it when my chi is all squiggly. I think it is because last night I was up trying to finish Anything for Jane. At approximately 1 AM, I screamed at page 158, “No, Andrés, don’t do it!” Then realized I was screaming at a book. (Well, he was about to turn down a full scholarship to the University of Chicago. I didn’t want him to ruin his life. What would you have said?) Sheepishly, I quieted down and tried to behave.
This morning, inside my coffee haunt, sipping my Caffe Viennese, I started thinking about this mirror they have there with a painting of a 17th century lady painted on the top. This, for some reason, got me thinking of the artist Kara Walker, and how she took something so perfectly ordinary (and such a
respectable craft for accomplished and fine young ladies–the art of the silhouette) and turned it into something so rich, complex, layered with meaning, full of woe and intrigue, mysterious, caustic, shocking, beautiful and somewhat offensive. The sheer brilliance of the simplicity and elegance of it all floods the mind with a still wonder.
The awe-inspiring Walker silhouettes stake a claim in my memory just like a great turn of phrase, which writers are apt to do. Like Mendelson, who on page 35 of Anything for Jane, speaks of “the dangerous plasticity of reason in politics and philosophy” (italics added), and more interestingly, she posits through the character Dr. Michael Garrard the futility of political debate because “once people start forming personal commitments to theories like libertarianism and neoconservatism and Rawlsian liberalism and socialism and all the others…[they have] no more interest in reality–only in being on the winning team, or among academics, in gaining professional status”. This is a position I hold deeply, but have never been able to express so well. Surely political fervor is the religion of the Aughts and it has its scary True Believers.
And yet, this morning, full of faith in the American democratic system, I mailed my Washington State 2008 ballot for the Presidential Primary on February 19.
