A Meditation on a Bathroom Graffiti at the Boston Public Library

"If you are reading this, either you are enquisitive (sp) or short"
- bathroom graffiti in the Boston Public Library, written in Sharpie under the tiles that jut out roughly 4 feet from the ground, at an angle hard to notice unless you are moving your bowels

First response: well, I'm both of those adjectives.  Second response: and maybe that's correlated.

Imagine.  You are a red circle.  Every other person you have ever come across has been a red circle.  You have no reason to believe there are other colors or shapes as there has been no evidence to ever suggest the contrary.  Then a family of blue triangles enters your society.  Since all you have known is red circles, you have reason to believe that the blue triangle is an anomaly or in simpler terms, wrong or bad, as people have only been shown to you as existing as red circles.

Now imagine you are a child in the blue triangle family.  You know you are part of a lineage and tradition of blue triangles and that your world view is valid.  While you accept that you are living in a majority red circle society, you learn to grasp that just as your experience as a blue triangle is valid and one of many possible experiences, so is the experience of the red circles.  Since you know that your existence is a possibility from your society's norm, it becomes plausible that there exist shapes and colors outside of what you imagined too and you are curious to see what they might be like.

You seek out other realities.  You join the wrestling team and in doing so are set farther apart from the practices of the majority of the red circles, while existing in a sub society where all that makes you a blue triangle sets you even further apart.  You spend time with yellow squares and the occasional green heart during high school by getting involved in the nearby city's poetry scene.  You then go to a university where as a blue triangle you are now part of the majority for a first time ever, so that denotation no longer defines you and you seek a fuller, more personal identity while exploring the world of other shapes and colors.* 
 
Because you are short, Jewish, vegetarian, American-standard-poor in a middle class town, the child of activists, etc...you find the often red circle only experiences of your initial town limited and you want to see other possibilities.^  Because you experienced life and existence repeatedly veering from your society's norms, whether you intend to or not, you become inclined not only to explore other possibilities, but as your inquisitiveness and worldview grows, you are interested heavily in just the prospect of exploring.

Now think of some of the most creative people you know of.  The groundbreaking scientists, the artists, the teachers.  Now how many could relate to the experience of the blue triangle?  For example, two thirds of the comedy industry is Jews, Black Americans have had the hugest effects on "American" music, and a disproportionate percentage of the theatre world falls into the queer spectrum.

So in response to the bathroom graffiti artist, I am not "enquistive or short."  I am inquisitive because I am short.

Yours,
Jason the Not So Subtle Blue Triangle



* For those keeping track at home, yes, this meditation has shifted from philosophical to more autobiographical.  Whatever.

^ Yep.  Now blatantly, blatantly autobiographical while tying the themes back together.


(And on a note of random life correlations, in a poetry workshop Monday night a recurring motif came up about how for young children, the bathroom provides a solace where they can just be with themselves and their thoughts and no one bothers them.  Interesting the childhood traits that continue.)



(swiped from http://legionofhonor.famsf.org/files/imagecache/exhibition_preview_large/THINKER_side_columns.jpg )