Through a quick series of links, I just ended up at a Web page of an artist who examines transitions. Her subject was tooth brushing; she had painted herself in the process of scraping bacteria from her teeth. Brushing her teeth marks a time of transition between home/work, waking/sleeping, etc. Part of me was repulsed, almost nauseated by this extraordinary exercise in bellybutton gazing; I felt disgusted that someone has enough leisure time to study herself as such an object of fascination. To me it seems like a quintessential American activity, with America being the stand-in for any civilization bloated with wealth, made complacent and arrogant by security, driven by nothing so much as by the pursuit of comfort, convenience, prestige, and sanitation.
Of course, this blog that I'm writing (along virtually all personal blogs out there) does the same thing: it publishes to the world bits of my experiences, of my fascinating mind. These words are textual snapshots of my bellybutton lint, offered up for all other people to gaze at, as if they cared. But viewing oneself as the subject of study doesn't seem to be a total waste of time, even though the cynical side of me right now would like to view its products simply as bourgeois vomit.
I don't think I'll go into my ideas about why humans are compelled to communicate, to share, but this communicative compulsion is part of it. Even more important, and more exigent, is the drive to understand. We want to know why we respond a certain way to a certain thing, why we are attracted to this person but not that one, how our childhoods affect our expectations as adults, why we fight, why we kill, why we love. To seek to understand these things, we have at our complete disposal exactly one human being: one's self. And so we gaze, observe, and share. In the process, we might discover something worth knowing about a human, about humans.
The sheer amount of waste represented in the idea of painting a series of toothbrushing portraits still troubles me some, and I'm glad it does because my negative response suggests to me that I am not as complacent, as tamed by the pursuit of ease, as I could be. But at the same time, I recognize that the poetry of a transcendental moment, even if that moment involves a mouthful of warm, minty suds, is of some value. And if viewed in the right light, this moment might even be revolutionary. But I'm not in the right light, and I guess I'm okay with that.
