Kitchen Sink Essays

I’ve started a new series of essays called “kitchen sink” essays. As the old saying goes, when someone wants to describe how many things robbers took from their house, they may say, “they took everything–including the kitchen sink!” Likewise, these essays mean to borrow, beg, and steal all kinds of different sources, bringing them together in one essay, to show how seemingly disparate sources of a wide variety, i.e. popular, academic, musical, artistic, esoteric, obscure, etc. can all sit at the same rhetorical table in my essays.

Below is the first essay in the series: “I am nobody…Yet.”

I am nobody. It’s a fact. I am not famous. I am not a star. People in my field do not know who I am. I have only published two things in my life. My dissertation’s been cited once. Most semesters my writing students love my class, and they seem to like me. My wife and kids love me. Many people who have wives and kids are also loved. Yet I am nobody.

Though I’m somebody to the people who know me, though I matter, I am as small as a grain of sand in any given Earth desert, beach, abandoned baseball field, or behind a desolate Burger King. Despite this fact, the truth that I am but one small object versus the number of objects in the known universe (aka Graham’s number), I still feel like I am someone. I am that someone that feels it when I hold my kids in my arms, read them stories, tell them to knock off whatever they are doing that is clearly out of line. I am that someone who holds my Anna, as we watch TV, fall asleep, console each other, or simply need to feel the closeness. Even when I visit and talk to my parents, my somebody-ness feels so real. Yet I am nobody otherwise.

How am I to not matter to so many, yet feel such multitudes of love? These multitudes go beyond consolation prizes. Go beyond the reach of creature comforts. A star’s whim and existence illuminate Earth. It illuminates me, too. But yet, it does not know me. It has no eyes or sense organs or sentience to witness these multitudes. It just keeps me warm when love happens like rays–like bolts of primordial lightning that scientists and the Bible describe. Then, I’m un-reminded that I’m on a water-laden rock marble floating in cold space. Yet, I am nobody, as the universe sees all the rest of us, both somebodys and nobodys.

There’s another place and time when I feel like somebody. You are reading it now. When I write, something else happens. As The Smithereens sang back in 1988, “Now it don’t / matter to me / if the sun / doesn’t shine.” Oh, like you, reader, I need the sun. I need the warmth it brings, the food it creates for plants, being food for me and the other animals in return. But writing somehow feels like a superpower compared to the futile control I attempt in my career, in my marriage, in my parentage, in my citizenship. Those things flank me as available means, the same available means that Aristotle explains in his Rhetoric. When I write, the metaphorical heart and mind move my fingers to find those available means, the things that time, aging memory, and trauma erase. Morrissey (back when we thought his sarcasm was performative) commands his listeners to sing their life. I can sing, and I have done so in my musical work. But I’ve stole the notion from Morrisey and moved into writing. I am nobody but I stole something from two somebodys. Joke’s on them, since they don’t know me. Thanks for the ideas, laddies.

How absurd that this human act feels good to me. I’ve had my writing rejected, corrected, protected, interjected, and deflected in so many different ways, in so many different times. I should have quit it by now. I should have stopped. In “Absurd Creation,” Camus asks a question about narration in fiction: “In the creation in which the temptation to explain is the strongest, can one overcome that temptation” (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955, p. 76). I am nobody, but I say that whether the writing is fiction, fact, somewhere-in-between, or something-else-all-together, I think writing as an explanation presents a way to both create the temptation while it also resolves the temptation up to the point of some imagined sin. To put it another way, I am no-body, just a writer creating a piece of writing that no one asked for but my own muses, my own pain, my need to put sentences on a page. I am no-body on the page.

Speaking of somebodys, I first really heard David Bowie’s music when I was 18. I had listened to his 80s pop stuff, but I had no idea of how powerful, insightful, and freakish his lyrics are. When my friend Tate Seimer introduced me to Mike Tittel back in the fall of 1991, Tittel introduced me to Bowie’s collaborations with Brian Eno, known as the Berlin Trilogy, I had no idea what I was in for. I had dubbed the albums (for you youngins, that means I “dubbed” the CDs with a cassette tape. I’ll explain it later).

The first album I listened to was “Heroes.” The first song I heard was “Beauty and the Beast.” Bowie’s theme of inner conflict, between a human’s beautiful and good side versus the beast, or bad side has a moment of nuance any experienced Bowie listener would expect: “Nothing will corrupt us / nothing will compete / thank God Heaven left us / standing on our feet.” At this essay’s end, I see those lyrics in three ways. “Nothing” can refer to the nothingness as existentialists, thinkers, and writers like Camus, William Barrett, Sartre, and even Nietzsche meant: An abyss-like state, a void of existence, a space of unimaginable absence. I also take the same “nothing” into a different direction. “Nothing will corrupt / nothing will compete” means that we won before we even entered the contest. There is no contest. We somehow stuck the dismount without ever practicing in the gym. The “us” is the whole world. But I also take the “nothing” into yet another direction. What if it’s “no-thing?” No-thing will corrupt us / no-thing will compete. Given that Bowie wrote “Beauty and the Beast” in 1977, I hardly think Bowie’s vaguewriting about a possible robot takeover, or takeover of the objects of the world. I think it means that those objects of dissuasion, like obstacles in the path, loss of security, or reversals of fortune prove any match for “us”–all of us, the somebodys, the nobodys, and the somewhere-in-betweens.

I am nobody. Yet…