Clown Class: How to Live in the Imperfect Rooms

Felix Vallotton, The Gust of Wind

Dear Tina,

If there were an Irritation Olympics, I would be a gold medalist.  But I believe my extreme response to tiny stimuli is the source of my greatest joy as well as my near-constant vexation.  Yes, I respond with extraordinary vehemence to the rubble of snippings and trimmings in the drain, but I also respond with untrammeled pleasure to the sight, and the feel, of the freshly washed sink, the shininess of the corners, the smoothness of the sides, the delightful gush of water flowing away.  Other people don’t enjoy those things; other people aren’t bothered by impediments to them.  Can I quell my exasperation without losing my sensitivity?  How?

Irked

Dear Irked,

Quelling. To quell. I love the word and I’m happy you’ve given me the opportunity to use it. I do wonder about quelling as anything other than a short-term strategy. When I think about trying to quell anything, I see a jam sandwich wherein someone’s gone for broke with the jam. Thick layer of slippery jam. Big jam fan on the job. There are limits to how much jam a sandwich can hold and this sandwich maker has blown past them all. I feel sure you know where I’m going here. The minute this sandwich gets gripped

THE JAM IS GOING TO SQUEEZE OUT THE SIDES

A person can quell a response if they’re meeting the stimulus on a short-term basis, is my thinking. If you’re spending time with one annoying-but-otherwise-okay person at one party, say, you can quell your irritation if you want to preserve a genial vibe and let the jam come out the sides in the car on the way home. 

Quelling works well for a one-off, acute irritation flareup but the snippings and trimmings in the drains, these are chronic conditions. They introduce themselves to your face every day, the snippings and their analogous friends, maddening and wrong. This is an existential problem. An existential problem can’t be quelled into inexistence. 

Extraordinary sensitivity may have a dial somewhere we can work but I don’t think I’ve ever found that, either.  

I think we have to go another route. I think we have to zoom in, pan around, magnify things. Instead of trying to exclude sensations and responses, I think we have to get inclusive—adoringly inclusive, even, comically inclusive—with no bouncer at the door. 

There’s a way to have fun with the hideous snippings and other crass indignities of shared existence which involves both heightened awareness and the will to love, which is different than the will to quell. 

Let’s stay with the sink rubble for our lab work here. Let’s be fully irritated at the sight of the tainted sink which could have been so beautiful today if only someone had thought about you, and about Beauty Itself. 

Angle One

The first thing you can begin experimenting with is enjoying what a problem these trimmings are for you. Zoom in on this. Zoom in on the emotions and thoughts you’re experiencing. 

Is there a voice somewhere, however tiny, that’s saying, “I, a person of fine taste, should not be subject to messes in my visual field. I—a regal, princely sort of being—am not accustomed to such poor treatment. Do these people not know who I am? I, an artist, who knows Beauty, who makes Beauty, who appreciates Beauty, am under assault.”  

Don’t quell! No quelling. Find some repressed voice playing inside you and crank it up. Let whatever part of you that’s saying the unacceptable thing run amok. Become anything you fear you are. Take a moment and allow yourself to be exquisitely, furiously regal, tragically blighted, whatever suits the more operatic emotion your irritation is standing in for. (Irritation is not a full-strength emotion. It’s already a squashed one. We work fast! We know what we can’t get away with in this world.) Rail into the air! Go very King Lear. Collapse against the counter, grimace, weep.

You can’t help being like this! It’s adorable to be like this. Please let yourself be like this. It’s wonderful. 

Angle Two

You know who else can’t help being like this? The sink culprit. No, no, they cannot. You think they can but no, they cannot. You must never believe they can, not during this experiment, not if you want the sensitivity-embracing experiment to succeed. This pitiful sink problem is fixed into the world, glued there by fate into the sink culprit’s nature.

The poor wretch knows no better. The poor wretch has never known Beauty. Born in filth, moving in tatters, developing no self-esteem along the way, the sort of self-esteem that demands a sink that mirrors one’s own goodness. It’s sad. It’s awful. What happened to the sink culprit? Who failed them? Who let them into the world this way? Frailty. Frailty everywhere. The wretch has no idea of a better world. 

And yet the wretch rises each day and faces the hopeless world with their meager little toolkit. Many a time you’ve seen the wretch be kind to this or that fellow traveler. How did the wretch discover kindness? 

Et cetera. 

If your irritation involves thinking well of yourself and poorly of another, try going all the way, allllll the way, until something shifts and pleasure or tenderness kicks in. Love being the rightest right person in juxtaposition with the wrongest wrong one. Rejoice at your fine senses! You’re allowed! Pity the wrong person so wholeheartedly that the pity transforms into something finer and more generous. Make the pendulum go all the way around until you’re thinking of the sink culprit with respect for all they’ve faced.

See if you can expand your keen sense of beauty and fold in some acquired tastes. Think of the French concept of the jolie-laide, the ugly one who’s so interesting-looking that they’ve crossed into beautiful. Human fallibility is an acquired taste. Mess, marred things, these are acquired tastes. 

Also time is running out, always. (This reminder seems to be trending with this advice column.) All phenomena that have this particular life-signature attached to them—the trimmings from this person, who is maybe your person, or the stupid words of someone you keep meeting here in your lifespan, your real lifespan, the only one where you’re you in the way that you are and they’re them in the way that they are, this limited lifespan in these real, messed-up rooms—all these phenomena are disappearing. You have no idea what you’ll miss. This panorama, these details, the changing still life in your line of vision with the hairs and crumbs: they’re all yours. It’s wonderful that you notice everything so powerfully, that you’re affected by all these details. You’re really here. You’ll always be able to say you were really here. You can say so proudly when you’re done. You were in the imperfect room and you saw and felt everything. 

Postscript!

Irked wrote back with this fantastic response and I was granted permission to share. Their solution is a triumph of art and science.

“I have been practicing what I’m calling the Rauschenberg response, after Robert Rauschenberg, who was himself intimately acquainted with messiness and detritus. I’ve stopped cleaning the sink, not just after anybody else, even after myself. I notice how the two kinds of rubble, mine and anyone else’s, blend and combine and complement each other. I notice that there’s a considerable difference between the patterns the mess makes when I turn on the cold water and the ones that result from the hot. It’s a whole new world to enjoy, one I didn’t even know existed.

And when I get tired of it, I can just wash the damned sink.”