Kinko’s is one of America’s
great levelers. You can be waiting with a set of documents
papering a multi-million dollar aquisition, but
if the mom from the bake sale is there before you, her
menus take precedence. If you’re the voyeuristic
type, which I am, you can usually peep over
people’s shoulders to get glimpses of worlds
you’d otherwise never: catalogs of paper gloss,
invitations to golfing parties, resumes of former
nonprofit marketing directors. And every one
has to be just so.
What’s most delightful about
Kinko’s, though, is how it puts everyone’s work in
perspective. Never having worked in a copy
shop myself, I don’t have firsthand experience with
this. But it seems from the times I’ve
gone to Kinko’s that process must take priority over
substance. Even if the Kinko’s employees
cared, they couldn’t possibly be interested in the
reams of Documents that pass through their hands
for collating every day. Solo lawyers
assemble binders for litigation, I assemble teaching
tools for high school kids – it’s all arbitrary,
all reduced to paper, zoom factors, brightness,
contrast, toner.
Which, from 30000 feet
up, seems a more accurate picture of what we humans in New
York are doing than the localized, stress-filled
agendas that occupy our individual time. From
the Kinko’s perspective, we are creatures that
shuffle paper. Words are written on the paper, or
pictures depicted on it, and for us these signs
and images have importance. Indeed, at Kinko’s,
the minute details of how the signs and images
are presented are what generate revenue. But
what does it matter what the words say?
The point seems to be only that we are ‘Saying.’
Or ‘saying persuasively,’
which a discerning reader can glean from the way the type is
aligned, the image is integrated, etc.
Or ‘saying in a funny way’ or ‘showing off’ – all of these
performative acts seem far more important than
the content of the words and the context of the
utterance.
Of course, the words
themselves can often be performative – angry memos which make
the office shake (and that’s why they’re copied
at Kinko’s), proposals that cause money to
change hands, banners that cause delight.
But at Kinko’s, even these complex performative acts
seem somehow tribal; when it’s all a matter of
toner and paper, they seem reduced to arguments
over territory or preening or nesting.
When they’re my performative acts or yours, every choice
of word, each sentiment expressed or repressed
communicates something of ourselves. But when
they’re the acts of the person ahead of me in
line, the arbitrariness is primary.
Who, then, has it right?
The all-knowing Kinko’s employee, who shuffles the paper
through with wise disregard, or the intensely
emotional customer, who’s so wrapped up in the
particulars of her project that everything beyond
it has faded to gray?
This is not a new problem,
this little subheading under the 'meaning of life.' For my part,
I first learned it in a college lit class, in
conjunction with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and I
think of it to this day as the Our Town problem.
In that play, depending on how the role of the Stage
Manager is played, the travails of the residents
of Grover’s Corners are either worthy of notice or of
detached bemusement. In some productions,
the Stage Manager is omniscient, wisely contemplating
the scurryings-about of the characters in the
play like a scientist watching an anthill. In so doing, I
was taught, the Stage Manager is little different
from the dead people in the last part of the play, who
see all of the actions of the living as does
Kohelet, the preacher in Ecclesiastes: vanity, futility,
emptiness. But, I also learned, the Stage
Manager can be read a different way: as actively
engaged with the townspeople, genuinely surprised
by what happens to them, interested in the
results. The Stage Manager has a perspective
that the townspeople lack, and that perspective
allows him a wider understanding than they possess.
But a nuanced portrayal of the Stage
Manager role leaves detachment to the dead and
omniscience to God.
In short, neither total
absorption nor total alienation seems to get it right. The ideal
Stage
Manager is not the Kinko’s employee but is he
or she who can authentically care about what goes
on inside the walls of the stage, and yet who
can also extract himself from that drama and gain a
deeper understanding of it. ‘Complex seeing’
is what Brecht called this ability to simultaneously
care and critique. Too much bathos in a
play (or in a perspective on daily life) and our capacity
for sympathy blots out our capacity for rational
understanding. Too much rationalization and we
lose our humanity. The solution for Brecht,
and for Wilder, is not some illusory ‘golden mean’
which supposedly splits the difference.
It’s more difficult. It’s both feeling and thinking,
shifting in and out of desire, from Kinko’s to
Buddha, and back.
Is this tenable in the
long term? I’m not sure it even works in the day to day – desire
is
the root of suffering, but sucking the marrow
out of life is what we are here on Earth to do.
Caring too much, sweating the small stuff, it
leads to ulcers and early death – but who wants to
be alive a few more years but living fewer?
Meditating on a mountaintop versus riding the
rollercoaster of emotions that comes with leaving
the mountains and living in the city. Once
again, a ‘golden mean’ is a copout. If
you only care a little about chasing your dreams, you’ll
chase them on evening and weekends, and never
too dangerously, and you will have made a
decision without deciding that, before you know
it, is irreversible. That new Jaguar won’t bring
back your twenties. And if you only meditate
when the spirit moves you, or when you’re on an
inspiring retreat in the wilderness, you’re a
dilettante. Maybe it’s possible to care about the
words on the page and also recognize them to
just be part of another performative document –
maybe, but I’m not sure exactly how it works
yet.
One of humanity’s great
strengths and weaknesses is our ability to forget and later
remember. We know that we shouldn’t eat
so much, but we forget – really forget, not just fool
ourselves into forgetting – and so we have the
cheesecake and get the extra beer. We regret it
later, perhaps, but that same forgetting gives
us permission to live in contradiction, to care about
what we know we shouldn’t care about, to indulge.
We can lose ourselves in the moment, forget
for an hour that rock and roll is for kids, and
dance; or, conversely, forget that we don’t believe in
what the Bible tells us, and listen to the divinity
in the wind. This capacity to forget is dangerous
– just as easily, we can forget our moral commitments
and ‘indulge’ our primal fantasies of
territorialism, ethnocentrism, and conquest.
But maybe some selective contradiction, Walt
Whitman style, is a path to having it both ways
– to care about Emily and George, or more
importantly to feel the love that they feel when
we can be one lover or the other, and yet also, to
know in some deep recess of the soul that this
love is part of the cycle of desire, and suffering is
inevitable, and the river flows to the sea, and
change is the essence of the Tao. This ‘complex
seeing’ is not embracing the path of the Bodhisattva,
and it is not seizing every moment. Maybe
it, too, is a copout. But it seems that
through creative contradiction we might learn from Kinko’s
that our words both matter and do not matter.
The small, cosmically insignificant sandcastles we
build around ourselves are small and cosmically
insignificant, yes, but they are also all we have
between ourselves and the tides.
August 9, 2001
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