Um...

After Robert Motherwell's Elegies for the Spanish Republic

So... I should explain -- how the above work of aesthetic genius, that is, came to be on my living room floor.

Due to a recent change of residence, as you know, I have had to spend an unusual percentage of my time the last few months on tasks that I find intrinsically boring. Like cleaning. Like moving. And like decorating.

In order to feel that my life still had meaning and volition, I decided that -- to the extent I could not absolutely avoid any of these activities -- I would at least insist upon doing them in a way that fed my core underlying obsessions.

When it came to unpacking or swiffering the floor, this was relatively easy to do -- one only had to put on a podcast or audiobook to feel that one was at least not squandering the youthful plasticity of one's brain by failing to spend a few waking hours dribbling new pieces of information into it.

But when my parents began to nudge me about finding a rug to cover the expanse of hard floor in my living room, I almost despaired. How was I to find intellectual satisfaction in selecting furniture? All the other chores of household living at least are somehow goal-oriented. They satisfy one's work ethic and one's longing for a sense of inward progress -- even if it is along an infinite axis (there will always be more dust again, the next week).

But furnishings are, by their very nature, inert. They are also generally a one-time deal. You buy a chair and that is the end of it.

For people of a fundamentally obsessive nature -- such as myself and, it would seem, my older sibling and her husband -- it is dangerous to ask us to accomplish anything so simple as that. In order to take an interest in anything, I'm afraid, we have to find a way to make that interest consuming. If I am ever to clean, it will be a rare occurrence -- but when it happens, it will lead to a total and comprehensive scouring of my entire living space. And if I was going to be asked to do anything requiring so little investment of time and mental effort in itself as buying a rug, I would have to dream up some way to make it more complicated.

I gather that the way obsessive people have historically found to get around this problem is to treat the selection of furniture as an artistic project in itself -- an expression of one's glorious individuality. If interior decorating did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

"Just try to remember our apartment," says Cassandra in Dorothy Baker's Cassandra at the Wedding. "[...] It's all the things we are. We put it together piece by piece. You know what my doctor said the first time she saw it? Yes you do. She said everything about it gives evidence of an informed taste. That's a quote."

This certainly had an appeal. Perhaps I could direct the channels of my restless personality into the careful selection and acquisition of things, then, and their arrangement.

The only downside of this is that it tends to get expensive. Perhaps Cassandra's solution to the problem was -- like all of 20th century intellectual culture -- founded sociologically on the fact of relatively affordable housing. These days, by contrast, living in Berkeley as a graduate student, one doubts Cassandra would have a roof over her head.

Similarly, living in Boston, one quickly finds oneself discovering (by necessity) that an "artistic print," if you really get down to it, is all but indistinguishable from the same image downloaded from Google and printed on computer paper, and framed on one's wall. I use this merely as an example to suggest that most of us don't have money burning a hole in our pockets that we might spend on a curated selection of trinkets.

If we're going to spend money on furniture at all, therefore, we really have to make it stick. But how then, is the act of acquisition to further any of our infinite projects, if it is over in one go?

There is something known as "style," I gather, that seeks to get around this problem by turning existence itself into a kind of statement. One no longer has to worry about whether one is making full use of one's time on Earth, because the specific way in which one is becomes an aesthetic achievement. I assume that this could be deployed to excuse inert furniture, much as it has historically been used to excuse inert people. "Your life is your art," says the fictionalized Lord Byron to the fictionalized Beau Brummel in the BBC TV movie about the life of the latter, This Charming Man.

Or, to quote the incomparable Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant -- speaking of his decision to become an artist's model -- "the infinitesimally small success that I had known had been achieved inevitably in terms of being rather than of doing." (Given his capacity for mere being, Crisp also seems to have lacked for this reason the need for infinite activity that possesses the likes of the rest of us -- including infinite dusting, mentioned above. Speaking of his unwillingness to do any housework at all, Crisp notes that: "After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.")

The obvious inaccessibility of this solution to me -- who have never in all my life been accused of being fashionable -- does not diminish its appeal or fascination. Indeed, it probably accentuates it. The idea of being liberated from the necessity of writing every week by the discovery that one's charisma is sufficient artistic accomplishment in itself -- that, like Beau Brummel, one's epigrams and dress can be so sparkling as to ensure one a place in the artistic firmament without ever having to leave the vingt-et-un table  -- can only come as a breath of freedom to one who has been shackled to a blog for almost five years running.

Even if I did have this kind of personal flare, however, I'm not sure how I'd know that I had it -- and the obsessive is someone who, by virtue of being obsessive, is constantly demanding proof. I need the artistic statements of my life or my writing to inarguably mean something -- not simply to be the unnamable je ne sais quoi -- even if it is at the expense of subtlety. Simply "being" for its own sake will not suffice.

In that case, however, furniture really did pose a challenge for me. How can a table be saying anything? People will argue, of course, that color and form say all kinds of things. Edgar Allan Poe had his brief essay on "the Philosophy of Furniture." Huysmans's A rebours is an entire novel in which its sole character does nothing except decorate his house -- and it seems remarkably sinister and interesting and debauched all the time.

Both, however, have little more reasoned guidance to offer than to fall back on the concept of "taste." Both just know that certain hues go with others. How? Who told them?

Given that I apparently do not have this "taste," as I would know it if I did, my artistic sense has always gravitated toward the overtly political. Failing to understand what people are talking about when it comes to the inward aesthetic thrill, I can at least decide whether or not I agree with a work of art, if it is clearly taking sides. Picasso's Massacre in Korea, I'm all yours.

When it came time to buy a covering for my living room floor, however, this tendency too did me little good. Even I know that your can't put "Liberty Leading the People" on a rug. (Or, well... can you?) Any patterning thereon is going to have to be abstract.

And that's when the solution hit me. The only work of abstract modern art I could think of that was also nonetheless strikingly political, and which appealed to my conscience as well as to my eye: Robert Motherwell's series of Elegies for the Spanish Republic. That was it! That was the image I had to somehow find on a rug.

Through long scourings on Google, I hoped -- I prayed -- that someone had already made this rug and was selling it. And if they were, that it was not going for hundreds of thousands at Sotheby's, but was available for in-store pickup at Home Depot for approximately 25 dollars, please.

But because nothing you ever want will be easily available to you -- because the things you want are an expression of your glorious individuality and would be ruined by being readily available to you, because they would have to be readily available to everyone else as well -- I did not find the Robert Motherwell Elegies rug that I believed could and should exist.

So I despaired. I mourned. And slowly, from the depths, a resolution began to take shape within me. I would have to make that rug myself.

It couldn't be too hard. I was at a decisive advantage already from the fact that the Motherwell painting has only a single color in it. I just needed to procure some black fabric dye and a cream/beige rug, and then put the two together.

I am, you see, a DIY kind of person. Unfortunately, I am also a lazy kind of person -- about certain things -- and this is a poor combination. Some people out there -- seized with this visual idea that they now could not escape -- might have spent months learning the precise art of dying fabric. I, however, thought: "how hard can this be?"

Riding the train home yesterday, I explained to a friend from work what I intended to do. "I just need to make it somehow look like this," I said, holding up a picture of the original. I had already purchased one can of black spray-on fabric dye. I knew that Home Depot carried plain rugs. All the pieces had already fallen into place.

"Do you have a stencil?" she asked.

I stared at her blankly for an instant. "These are the right questions to ask," I eventually said. I then learned that a normal person trying to do something like this would cut out a stencil first and then spray within it, so as to get the hard sharp lines in the original image.

Okay, I thought, that's an option. But I was only really mentally prepared to spend a single Saturday morning on this project, and not much more. So at around 10:30 this morning, I decided I would just haul the rug into my tiny backyard and start spraying on what I took to be the outline of the image I wanted, which I taped to the nearest fence while I worked.

After I'd finished, I left it outside to dry.

Inevitably, the realtors chose just this moment to arrive and show the upstairs condo unit to my potential new neighbors. "Hi," they called down to me, as I stood over my leaf-strewn creation.

There's nothing like honesty when in a tight spot. "I'm just dyeing a rug," I called back. "Don't worry -- this won't be a permanent part of the décor." At least not outside.

Once the couple had left, I went back outside to drag the now-dried rug up the steps to my backdoor. It turned out, however, that the real estate agent was still there. "Were you trying to draw something on it?" she asked, leaning over the balcony upstairs.

"Well, it's a work in progress," I said. "I think I need more dye."

She finished by saying, "Well, good luck on your art project."

I have, I guess you could say, mixed feelings about how my imitation à la Motherwell turned out. It is certainly me, it must be said. As an expression of individuality, it checks out. But I guess individuality is a bit of a two-edged sword. Most of us want to be celebrated for our uniqueness while also never deviating in the slightest from what is considered normal by other people. There was no obvious point to having an Elegy to the Spanish Republic on your living room floor unless it is eventually to be seen by others. But I also discovered I didn't really want it to be seen, or have to explain it.

In the 2009 documentary Objectified -- from the people who brought you Helvetica, the movie -- design commentator Rob Walker says in one scene that everything we own is trying to tell a story -- but that it's ultimately a story to which we are the only listener. Nobody but you cares what kind of car you drive. So too, probably I was the only one who (good news) was embarrassed this morning by the presence of the mutilated rug on my back yard. I am also (bad news) probably the only one who cares about the precise way in which spray-painting a poor likeness of Robert Motherwell's Elegy for the Spanish Republic onto a rug provided the perfect intellectual solution (however imperfect the execution) to the mental conundrum created for me by my parents suggesting I find some way to cover my living room floor.

However much we may only in fact be talking to ourselves, we can only preserve a sense of self by continuing to act and think as if we were talking to other people. As Pirandello writes in his novelistic argument against the concept of the self:

In short, if on certain occasions you become barely conscious of not being to others the same individual that you are to yourselves, what do you do? (Be sincere.) You do nothing, or very little. You make up your minds, in the long run, with an admirable and utter sureness of yourselves, that others have misunderstood you, misjudged you, and that is that. If it is a matter of concern to you, you seek to correct that judgment by giving clarifying explanations; if it is not a matter of concern, you let it go and shrug your shoulders, exclaiming, 'Oh, well, my conscience is clear, and that suffices me.' [...] 
For what is it, then, that your conscience suffices you? For enabling you to feel alone? Good heavens, no. Solitude terrifies you. What do you thereupon do? You picture to yourselves any number of heads, all like your own. Any number of heads that are also your own. And these heads, at a given signal, drawn out from you as by an invisible wire, say yes and no, and no and yes, to you, as you would have them say. All of which comforts you and gives you a feeling of security.
It is a splendid game you have there, that of the self-sufficing conscience. (Putnam translation.)

Somehow, my conscience is likewise satisfied by having found a way to turn even my living room floor into a statement of left-wing political affiliation, and of intellectual pretension -- perhaps the two most pronounced traits in my presentation of myself to myself ever since Freshman year of high school.

These are not necessarily the traits I am always most anxious to present to the outside world, however -- especially not to real estate agents whom I barely know (and who may have professional reasons not to want me to leave a half-dyed rug in the back yard of a condo unit they are trying to sell). The reason being that, let's face it, these traits can be annoying.