mothlands-blog

[mothlands-blog]

The Art of Discomfort

I’m watching a woman wade into something beyond her depth. She’s flirting with a couple she met via a dating app and struggling. She persists and, after powering through one stilted conversation after another, the discomfort of the situation is shifts.

It’s difficult to watch but I love it. Annie is a “unicorn” venturing into the drama-fraught sex lives of coupled-folk. I’m no a unicorn, but I am an independent actor, like her, and our perspectives aren’t so dissimilar. You’d think that connection would make “Unicornland” unwatchable, but no, it’s just the opposite. I cringe because I understand. I feel comforted because the director and the writer get me.

Despite the connotations, displays of discomfort often delight me. Seeing them celebrated on screen, or in life, can be a beautiful  juxtaposition. These feelings of embarrassment and pain aren’t meant to be seen. Bringing them in view of the camera is a voyeuristic privilege. As much so as a camera in the bedroom or a recording of a confession.

For those of us living with anxiety, intrusive thoughts, tics, or disability discomfort is something we learn to live with. It may not be welcome but it does describe a significant amount of our lives. Learning to accept, or cope with, those painful feelings is a matter of survival and self mastery.

We’re all pretty familiar with these notions through the lens of comedy. Awkwardness is funny. In the hands of the ignorant clown, it can be ridiculously pathetic. Prat falls and upturned rakes aren’t particularly clever but they do get laughs. Seeing someone screw up a hot date with their arrogance or stupidity or bull-headedness is safe to laugh at because it’s a kind of justice. The idiot gets theirs.

Some artists take another tact. They pen characters who are intensely aware of their own discomfort. Overcoming their awkwardness, their fears, their pain might be the entire point of the story. We can laugh at them, too, but the more desired reaction is empathetic. More than courage or compassion, discomfort is humanizing.

I’m walking through a room the size of a small gymnasium. All around me are the bodies of dead animals, photocopied, and printed out on newspaper stock. They look as if someone had stuffed them in a photocopier, completely limp, their feathers and fur and scales squashed against the glass like a child’s face against a window.

This is an art show by Ann Hamilton, an artist with a strong sense of space. Her works tend to lack the grace of color and instead focus on texture, shape, and dimension. Many of the creatures displayed here are spread out among two, three, or four pieces of thickly bordered paper, giving them a disjointed look that exacerbates their milky eyes and oily exterior.

Upon leaving this exhibit, guests are invited to step into a photo-booth that looks as though it is constructed of semi-transparent glass. My partner and I step in and do our best to impersonate roadkill. Frankly, I make an awful specimen. I’m trying too hard. I look self-conscious and a bit too alive. To truly pull off the whole dead thing you’ve got to let go of your ego and I’m not succeeding.

Dead is an awkward way to be. Not so much for the corpse as for the living. Perhaps because of this I increasingly find myself attracted to the aesthetic of death.

This isn’t so uncommon. There are entire subcultures centered around celebrating the macabre. While I’ve never identified as a goth, myself, I grew up with an appreciation for some of the same music and media. True, my parents were more into Pink Floyd and The Police than Morrissey or Joy Division, but like a lot of laid back hippy parents they weren’t particularly concerned with incidental exposure to media. I’m fairly certain one of my earliest memories is pieced together images from the film “Re-Animator 2.” The dead come back to life and are not down with it.

Like a significant number of young white folks, Dia de Los Muertos is the favorite holiday I’ve never had. Personally, I’d never dress as a sugar skull or throw a culturally appropriative drinking party or anything of that sort, but I do love the idea of celebrating the inevitable. Black may be the color of death, (in Western society, anyway), but that doesn’t mean we have to look so damn sad wearing it. And why should your death be about your death as opposed to what you accomplished in life.

The skull pins I wear, the short horror stories I write, they’re about being a living cynic, not a dead corpse; they’re little reminders that life can suck, sometimes, and that this fact shouldn’t be glossed over. Happiness isn’t the only state-of-being worth acknowledging. So much more of what we feel is a result of the little interruptions in our joy, the discomfort of living, and half the time, happiness is uncomfortable, too.

I’m on a date with someone new. We’ve only ever talked online before this and, beyond their pleasant exterior, I only know as much about them as they want me too. I’ve chosen familiar ground to meet on, a popular cafe where nerds like me meet to play board games.

The theory is that if conversation stalls or things get weird, we’ll have something structured to focus our attention on. I’ve taken half a dozen first dates here before this one and it’s worked out pretty well. Sometimes we’ll pick out a game and ignore it completely. Others we’ll finish our match of Guillotine or Jaipur and the date will start to fizzle.

There was a time a near blind-date like this was unthinkable for me: too much potential discomfort, too much stilted conversation, too much opportunity for judgement. Something changed when I committed to the idea of owning that awkwardness. Just another quirk of being me.

I’m doing that now. My date and I walk side by side down Ballard Ave, our hands almost touching, our eyes skirting towards one another but never quite connecting. This is good. We’re feeling the same thing; we’re both interested but wary. Recognizing this, I ask if I can hold her hand in mine as we walk. She gasps a yes and the tension is released. The shift feels incredible. We hold each-others’ hands till our palms sweat.