Cela's Symposia

"What are you thinking about now?" Cela asked.

"About whether liberal pragmatism is the end of history," he said, not looking up.

"No, you aren't," she corrected.

"About whether markets make everything a consumer choice."

"Not that either."

He smiled at her warmly.

"About my daughter."

"You have a daughter?"

"Oh, yes." And he looked down again.

She left him to it. He was in one of his moods. George was frequently in one of his moods, and there was not much to do but let him be.

**

George walked down the sidewalk in front of the line of shops in the small town down town. The deli. The wine shop. The comic book store. The save-the-earth shop. On down to Holly Springs Cafe.

The bell rang as he entered. He found an open table and sat down. He was a small man, round in the middle, with shaggy brown hair and old, worn cloths.

"Hello there," said Molly, as she came over with a menu.

"Good morning," he chimed, with a smile.

Molly left him to consider his options.

Cela swished by in her earth mother skirts and gave him a little wave.

He nodded, and smiled.

He liked this place, but it was getting just a little too jolly. He hid behind his menu, wishing he could sink down into the earth, anonymous drops of water. His persona felt fragile. His stomach churned.

"Ready to order?" Molly was back and smiling.

"What the hell," he thought and played his part in the ordering ritual.

As he ate he looked around. Molly and Cela were talking. He knew they were roommates. Cela was recently divorced with a 15 year old son, Jason. That was an age. He shuddered at his own memories, but then smiled despite himself. The age of discovery.

Molly was back, and talkative.

"I'm moving back to Delaware. Kind of leaving Cela in a bind. You know of anyone looking to share a place?" She looked a little worried.

"I don't know..." George said doubtfully. "Well, there's me."

Molly looked at him, a shabby little man in his late fifties. She looked over at Cela, a flustered single mother in her late thirties. She leaned over and patted George on his arm.

"The time's are the times," she said.

**

Cela had been doubtful at first, but George was not messy, paid his share on time, helped out with little man tasks occasionally. She didn't want to admit there were man tasks, but there were things she just didn't like doing, didn't want to learn, and didn't like paying for.

George was usually absorbed in his own incomprehensible projects, most of which seemed to involve pecking away on a strange little laptop, seemingly kept together with duct tape, assembled by a friend of his from scavenged parts of various broken machines.

He had his odd mannerisms and moods, thrift store wardrobe, and other peculiarities like addressing the TV as Sir Video Mouth and Keeper of the Corporate Inventory, and getting indignant at Mr. Tele's pushy responses. But he was harmless and gave her a little chuckle now and again. Which God knows she could use.

Eventually he just seemed like he belonged there. Jason didn't seem to mind him, and she did need the money. Paulie didn't contribute anything not "required by law", old letter of the law Paul. But she had to admit he wasn't that bad of an absentee father, as absentee fathers went.

The men in her life, while she looked for the new man in her life. Maybe a woman this time, she would sometimes think, and laugh out loud, and flush a little.

**

"Do you ever feel despair?" George asked.

"Despair! I don't have time for despair!"

Cela looked at him like he was nuts. He was always coming out of left field with stuff like this, like frantically clinging to the bottom edge of the middle class was some kind of intellectual adventure. But really she enjoyed it. An examined life, while watching Jason's soccer games.

They sat in the stands. Jason was the goalie. Paul the good father was also there but down from them and to the right, shouting load encouragement.

But there was something. When she happened to be confronted by a mirror, and saw her lapse from Mr. Tele's ideal. When she curled up in a ball with covers over her. When the amnesia of everyday necessity collapsed and she let the judgments in. But she knew it was all crap. She was fine, like most people. She looked at George, far from the ideal, but she didn't really think of him in those terms. He was what he was, and she liked him.

"Sometimes," she said.

**

Cela plopped down next to a garden bed and started pulling weeds. The ground was wet, but the soil was rich with humus. It crumbled in her hands and was spongy when she squeezed. Little brown drops fell down. She lifted up a handful and squeezed again and brown rivulets ran down her arm. She rubbed her hands on her bare belly. She bent over and looked closely at the earth, taking in details, noticing small insects and hidden worms. She looked up, closed her eyes. The sun was warm on her face. She squinted and the light filtered through her eyelids. She laid back flat on the ground. She felt light, almost floating. She heard fluttering and looked over to a disorganized hedgerow. A redbird looked her way. She watched it fly away, followed it with her eyes. She felt dizzy and happy. She stood and stretched this way and that. A gust of wind swept down through the trees. Her skin tingled. She smiled broadly and bent down and looked back between her legs.

George was standing at the corner of the house next to some honeysuckle bushes. He was still, his face rapt. She spun around. She reflexively shrunk in on herself, as if trying to hide. George suddenly looked horrified. His hands fluttered out, and he whispered something.

He seemed to say, "I am not other people. I am not hell. I am not Medusa."

Cela burst out laughing. She spun around and bowed. Her belly jiggled a little when she stopped. Then she skipped and flounced across the yard and into the back door of the house.

George sat down in the grass like loose rags and was very still. The red bird returned and seemed to be looking at him, making him the object. He just looked back at it.

**

Dr. Buy Me a New Boat was blaring from his rectangular throne. He spoke with images of flawless, confident people in beautiful places indicating money, while at the same time quickly making excuses and deflecting liability.

"Did you invite him?" asked George.

"Uncle Tele? He fills my lonely hours." Cela turned the page of her magazine.

Jason looked at them both like they were nuts, and switched channels.

"This is our lot. As time just ticktocks along."

"Yes, just left here."

"Just thrown into the world."

"Just dust in the wind."

"I don't know about you, but I choose to be free."

"Me too. What else can I do?"

Jason gave them another dirty look, and marched off to his room.

"Teenage angst," Cela observed.

**

George was telling a story. Cela and Jason listened intently as if he were telling a ghost story. They sat on the small deck behind the house looking out at the trees. The sky was turning a deeper blue. Soon it would be dark.

"I find myself here. Before now I found myself in other situations. I am suspending my normal judgments and assumptions. I am experiencing. My experience is of a world. I am in the world, in this concrete human situation. I am here with others. I have an audience and this is in a sense a performance. But it is also just words, in a language I depend on, to communicate, but also to describe my world, to map it.

"I do not perceive any danger. I am relaxed. I don't feel the need for fight or flight. For now I am not driven by any other desire than to tell my story. I like it right here. Although I did just get a mosquito bite. That makes me think that perhaps I will want to go in soon."

George swatted at his arm and brushed away a buzzing little region of space and time.

"I experience my life as a sequence of situations like this, of configurations of language, experience, and desire. This is how I find it useful to describe it. Some has been deeply disappointed by this description, when they decide that this is the only starting place they have. They fret about absurdity or meaninglessness. That may be so. I don't know. But it does get tiresome, to keep fretting like that. So I choose not to, and just take it as it comes."

George stopped talking.

Jason looked over at him with a sour look.

"Where do you get this stuff?"

"Reading and thinking, reading and thinking, my young apprentice."

"I am not your apprentice!"

"No, of course not. Quite right, young sir, quite right."

George made a little bow.

"OK. I have a story. School sucks. I hate math. Everyone treats me like crap. I am a freak. I don't know why I have to fit into this so-called world."

"Your story sounds very much like mine."

"You are so weird!"

"It would be foolish to deny it."

Cela finally spoke up.

"Hang in there, Jason. It does get better."

She swatted at a mosquito. Jason swatted at a mosquito. George swatted at a mosquito. And they all got up and went inside.

**

Mr. Tele felt so misunderstood. People have always told stories around the fire, by the flickering light. And there was always commerce. He just conveniently combined the two. People always imagined such sinister motives, such deep conspiracies. But he was just a locus of incentives, a tool of a system that simply tried to make people happy, to understand their desires and fulfill them. And in the interplay of these patterns cultures formed and were expressed.

He knew that people liked him. See how they gathered around him. To many he was their best friend and confidant. He gave their minds something to form around. He provided the structure, and a window into the world. When they turned him off, the world seemed so silent and small.

George sat close by and listened to him and watched him, a detective show, better yet, a scifi detective show. And all the products that would make sense of all those hours of work for those who make all those products. Here is your reward. They so misunderstood him.

**

Cela felt sick. Her own very special "concrete human situation" closed in on her. She felt constricted as if moving through an atmosphere of syrup. The bare, unadorned objects around her seemed scattered about like stones fallen from a temple. She felt rootless, helpless, hapless, set adrift on a chartless sea. Alone, disenchanted, stripped, a small shivering bundle in a vast heartless universe. People were just moving forms of dust, their motivations obscure, their eyes insectoid, or they were like empty shells as they declined her credit cards and did not accept her ID, looking at her with suspicion. Groups of children looked her way and then turned away, laughing among themselves. She felt numb, and her head buzzed. Vertigo, dizziness. She thrashed around and found no handhold as she fell through endless, hollow caverns with damp, mossy walls.

And that was just in the last five minutes.

"George," she muttered, and went busting down the hall toward his room.

He jumped up with a startled look. The small laptop he had been reading fell to the bed. Then he just sat down on edge of the bed and waited.

"What are you playing at?" Cela spit out.

He just sat still and waited.

She stared at him, breathing. Gradually her mood softened. She sat down on a chair next to the bed. It was like trying to stay mad at a puppy.

"You asked for my story" he said mildly.

"Like where you grew up, went to school, simple stuff," she said, with exasperation.

He didn't say anything.

"Don't you think that certain things are best left unsaid? Like death. We all know that it is there waiting. But we don't think about it. We have our lives to live."

"Normally, people don't really hear me," he said.

"Oh, I heard you."

They sat in silence for some time.

"It's like the stink your nose becomes acclimated to and you don't smell anymore," she said.

"Or the air we breath," he said. "Or the small beauties like some grass moving beside the road. You never see it. Then some time you happen to notice. A certain slant of light, the bare fact of you there and the tall grass moving. And maybe you see yourself. It is not just the grass. It is you there in the bare moment, experiencing the grass moving. It can be unsettling at first. But it is just the beginning of the story."

**

Cela strolled slowly through the commons. It was early spring and the spring ephemerals were in bloom. She loved the spring beauties and on a hillside down in the ravine where a wide creek flowed was a huge patch of trillium in bloom. She stood looking up at them, happy for their arrival, more precious in that in a few weeks they would be gone.

"I have choices," she said out loud.

She tried to think it through. When stripped away of all the stories and assumptions she was like George, a bundle of desires tumbling through time. She has made her choices, but a lot was beyond her control. She couldn't control Paul and what he chose. She couldn't control that her English degree was so little appreciated by "market forces". Market forces, like a market was a force of nature. But too much anger lay that way. She didn't need that right now.

And what about her biology and her socialized self, her language and the texts she knew and the practices that were so deeply trained into her? How much control did she really have there. Not much. But still, the fact was, she had choices.

"Like Coke versus Pepsi," she grumbled under her breath.

But no, there was more. She could push the boulder up the hill. She could think differently. She was in charge of her own self creation, if not the world in which she found herself. And she was responsible for what was within her control. She could also choose to just drift along. But she wanted to do it consciously.

She continued up the path along the creek. Up above she could hear the waterfall. There was a little rock overhang with a bench underneath it. She went down the stairs to the bench, and there was George, like a bad penny, she thought.

He was watching the waterfall. A small bleeding heart clinging to the rock a little further down seem to have his special interest. She went over and collapsed next to him.

"No one else has a privileged position," he said, without looking at her. "We are all in the same boat. No one has any inherent authority over anyone else. That is just power relations, social practices. We can submit, but that is also a choice."

Who talks like this? She looked over at him and smiled sweetly.

"Have a nice walk?" she asked.

"Oh yes, very nice weather, isn't it?"

"Yes, beautiful."

"I saw Paul and Jason by the spring," he said, finally looking over at her.

"Ah."

It was Paul's weekend with Jason.

"They were going to head down the bike trail."

She nodded.

"My body's aching and my time is at hand," she sang.

"We all live in a yellow submarine," he sang.

"You really are weird," she said.

"I'm downright spooky," he said in a low voice.

**

George stood in front of Dr. Demographics, at a little distance. Mr Tele was oblivious to George's name calling. He repeated, "You are this. You should be this. You want this." in various ways. Hardly ever directly, usually by example, by creating a situation for your imagination to place you in.

"I am a unique person," George said.

Mr. Tele had many laugh tracks, but he could not laugh directly.

"No, you are a demographic. You live in a certain ZIP code. You are an example of a particular lifestyle cluster. I know you."

"You don't know me," George said.

"I am evolving. I adapt to time of day, to channel. You are watching this channel now. I know a lot about you. You selected it. I am going to give you more choices, personalized channels, direct access to content. Then I will know you even better. Everything important about you."

"You are not a person," George said.

Mr. Tele continued to speak his language of images and flashes and sounds and well chosen texts. Not so well chosen perhaps, George thought. He is evolving, but it is the blind evolution of survival. Mr. Tele is a system, not a conscious person with definite plans.

"You are an artifact, more or less useful to me," George said.

**

George was sitting on the deck, leaning back, eyes closed, feeling the movement of air, listening to the leaves move and to birds and the chatter of squirrels.

He heard someone sit down in the next chair, and looked over. Cela was looking at him reflectively. He sat up more straight in his chair.

"Are you alright?" she asked, in the manner of someone beginning an intervention.

"As right as can be expected," he said.

She remained somber.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked.

"You and the TV. Is it telling you things? Things you should do?"

He smiled at her and leaned back a little.

"When I experience things, there are two poles, me and what I am experiencing, subject and object. Objects can have an affect on me, but they do not address me as a subject, as a person. Texts are a way for persons to communicate with each other. Some of that communication can have the intent of manipulating me, a lot of it, actually. There is a sort of Darwinian evolution of texts. They survive to the extent that they are used and passed on. But Sir Automaton is taking this to a whole new level. He is in hyper evolution. No, he is not telling me things. He is a medium for telling me things. He is not a person, but he has become like some hybrid entity that depends on all of us. Mostly I like him. After all, he tries to please me, to attract my attention."

Cela relaxed.

"Mr. Tele is an old friend, but I see what you mean. He can be somewhat manipulative. I know I eat up his images of what I should be. What my body should look like, what my house should look like, what electronics I should own. It's endless."

"We have been making each other objects since the beginning, but he's the best at it so far."

"It's hard not to see others as objects since we only see their bodies, watch what they do."

"But we can feel sympathy for them, imagine how we would feel in their place. And isn't conversation convincing? Getting to know people."

"Even so, it seems so easy to make them objects."

Cela paused.

"The worse thing is when we make ourselves objects. I have trouble with that. I don't like mirrors. When I come up to a door, I look down so I don't have to see my reflection."

"You've internalized the other's gaze," George said.

**

Jason came busting around the corner of the house like a sullen hurricane, if there could be such a thing. He gave Cela a little nod and burst into the house. Paul followed at a more stolid pace. He nodded at Cela solemnly.

"How are you?"

"Fine."

They both looked off to some distant place.

"How was Jason?" she asked.

"Oh, fine, he's having trouble in school, and with other kids, but I think he'll be fine."

"Yes," she said.

She gave Paul a little side glance. He was looking around at the yard, his previous domain. He was good man, she found herself thinking. They had met in college and started hanging out together. After a while they became a couple, almost by default. She always thought that they complimented each other. They formed a good partnership. He gave her what she needed, and she thought she gave him what he needed. They were gentle, even polite, courteous. They loved each other in the sense that they each wanted the best for the other, and there was a fair amount of physical chemistry between them.

But they never got beyond a certain veil. They talked about family business, about Jason, about random things that interested them, gave each other an audience, and someone you didn't have to explain things to, retell your whole story.

Cela was never one to demand that Paul tell her what he was thinking. There was always a sense of separateness and isolation between them.

People talk about the marriage contract, and in a sense that was what they had. But the terms of the contract were never explicitly spoken. Maybe a woman looks to a man to make her feel safe, to be a partner in the material struggles of life, to share in child rearing, to be a partner in pleasure giving, to be an appreciative audience to her story, to validate her, to take her side, to be in her corner. But these things were implicit. Attraction involved these things, different in details for different people, but you just feel the attraction, maybe never articulating the reasons.

Then time goes on. You change. He changes. Maybe you feel that some part of the "agreement" is not being met. But what agreement was ever stated beyond the broadest generalities? The ground has shifted. Maybe the contract can be amended?

Did she see Paul as just party in a contract, a source of certain experiences? Did he see her that way? They knew each other well. They treated each other well for the most part. She signed.

"How's work?" she asked.

"Fine. We're opening a new office soon."

"Ah," she said.