The Superior Group
A Zoomer reflects
I once knew a woman who believed that artists were the best of all people. She believed we were prettier, smarter, funnier, more intuitive, more receptive to great truths. At times she would let slip that we were more human. “I hope you’ll visit me,” she’d say, “in the old artists’ home.”
The artists she worked with did not like her telling them this, despite the fact that it was obviously meant to be endearing. She gained a reputation as someone who knew what she wanted. Oftentimes it was not you, but you-a-little-to-the-left, or you-prime, or you-if-you-got-out-of-your-own-way, gosh darn it. Our gift was that we were protean. Mythical creatures with SKU numbers. We could be anybody; why not be the most legible versions of ourselves?
The majority of people left her with the damage they started with and a little bit more. Some left in active revolt. Some absorbed her framework as one of many, then passed on to other projects stronger for having worked with her. These people were typically on upward trajectories to begin with.
Her approach worked, but it felt like treating someone as a set of teeth to be flossed. I’m ambivalent, but I get it. The pool of superior people is massive and saturated with delusion. You have to want to be changed.
If you expect to be photographed, it helps to have shiny teeth.
The place where I am writing has a bay window. Its curtains conceal a telescope left behind by the previous resident. Looking down on it are two twentieth-century guardians: female faces sculpted in plaster and smothered in white paint. Beneath each is a butterfly.
I am glad that they are there. Spaces without decoration, or with ornaments that feel anonymously chosen, make me nervous. When I got here I immediately bought a yellow vase and a bouquet of tulips. My whole body relaxes when I see someone has dragged home some awful painting from the thrift store.
The first day of theater history class took me into the Chauvet caves, where the earliest humans made art that moved with firelight. I was gratified. Two years later I was dragging up props from the basement and failed to clean off an ancient hairbrush resting on a vanity tray. The actress had an allergic reaction. I don’t remember if we struck the tray.
I once knew a genius. I called him Freddie Three-Unions because he paid dues to each. “When are we?” he’d ask in the booth. “Twilight,” I’d say. In three seconds he would press some keys and the whole sky would turn gold and lavender. Freddie busked around Europe as a young man, then got a finance degree because he got cheated out of his pay on a big project.
I seem to keep meeting these kinds of people.
Sometimes I wish there was a pill I could take to wise up. The blockiness of a window line, the animal-shapes of the loping clouds, wouldn’t feel like the only reasons to keep pushing. I could find comfort in rigor for its own sake. In steadfastness. In math. Instead my genes and the environment decreed I would be very open, very neurotic, and as agreeable as a small-town diner waitress on a good day.
Life is long. And it’s longer if you don’t keep making the same mistakes.