can't escape me

It happened sometime last week, I'm not exactly sure when, but I looked around my room and I thought, "This is my room." Somehow the steady force of time has finally leant my new bedroom a "lived-in" quality. It's not complete yet (there are still too many bare walls and I need a couple of lamps) but it's finally a place where I feel comfortable. It's gone from being a random assortment of boxes and junk to being a reflection of... me. And that's the really weird part.

You see, this room has been set up in a way that no place I've ever lived in has been set up. As chronicled on the pages of this blog, I have spared no expense to outfit this place with attractive, quality furnishings. I've shopped at stores the likes of which I would never even have gone into two years ago and have spent more on certain items than I ever would have considered appropriate. In general, I've put a lot more thought into this room of mine: I've strategized and planned over the course of weeks, I've shopped in countless stores in search of the perfect bedspread, the perfect desk. I've paid extra to have my pictures framed (no more thumbtacks for me!). Walking around on my way to work or during my lunchbreak has become an endless quest for housewares and I haven't settled for the first or cheapest things that I've happened upon. Everything has been done in a highly deliberate, highly self-conscious fashion.

So how come it turned out the same?

Anyone who's seen a room I've lived in over the past several years will not be surprised upon walking into my new bedroom. Like my rooms at Menno House or at Oxford or at 337 Crown Street in New Haven it is spare, it is compact. There's nothing gaudy or particularly "funky" about the decorating scheme. Everything looks pretty functional, unostentatious. I've got my shelves full of journals and playscripts. As with many of the other places I've lived, it looks quite a bit like a monk's cell. It's an insulated enviornment, a space that cries out for solitude. If my life were a play, you would fault the production designer for making the set look so similar from one act to another.

How did this happen? How can I have set out to do something with a totally different mandate and ended up with the same result? It's enough to make you believe in a kind of ineluctable "me-ness" guiding each individual choice I make and ultimately ensuring that all of these distinct individual choices (to buy a bedspread from an Indian import store, to assemble an attractive wooden file cabinet), uncharacteristic as they may have seemed, add up in aggregate to more of the same. I'm not upset at all -- I love my room. I ought to since it clearly emerged out of some deeply held, subconscious predisposition of mine.

For the past month, I've trawled through dozens of Chelsea furniture galleries like a zombie, ogling sleek modernist furnishings with with their geometric lines and decorative patterns. The experience has actually given me a real appreciation for the beauty of interior design. I feel as if I've become a character out of Proust, embarking on a flea market hunt as if it offered the possiblity of communing with aesthetic perfection, having an orgasm over an elegant teacup. And I've said to myself more than once, "Gosh, if I had the money I would get that one" or that one or that one. But experience seems to prove otherwise.

I've spent a considerable amount of money on this place (more than I've ever spent before) and I've ended up with basically the same aesthetic, just a little more "put together." A slightly more modernist monk. It leads me to believe that, even if I had unlimited funds, I wouldn't ever choose to outfit my environment in furniture from West Elm or ABC Carpet & Home. I can't imagine myself actually living in a place that was so ravishingly stylish and coordinated.

There's something frighteningly conservative about this realization. Not very post-modern. It seems to indicate that I have an intrinsic "self" that I can't escape. That even in trying to transform my self-expression, the "real me" will always rise to the surface. This experience seems to contradict everything I preach about the doctrine of self-recreation and the limitless transformative powers of performance.

Obviously, if I really wanted to, I could be living in Bauhaus splendor right now. I can choose to furnish my habitat in any kind of aesthetic that I want to. When it comes down to it, my long and drawn-out furnishing ordeal may have proved that I like being me; while I appreciate the way that other people have set up their lives and their homes, and while I might fantasize about being them for a while, I wouldn't really want to be them forever. In the same way that I might enjoy reading a Bret Easton Ellis book, but I don't end up writing like him. Or the way that I might enjoy watching a movie by Brian de Palma but don't really share his same artistic concerns. I can flirt with different lifestyles as much as I flirt with different people -- I can sample them and gain some insight -- but there are reasons why I always come back to me.

Those reasons have to do with culture and upbringing (it's no coincidence that a boy raised by a nun would end up living like a monk) but at this point in my life I have enough self-awareness to assess the values I inherited and to choose which of them I still value. Superficially, I've broken faith with a lot of my past recently -- a process that was in many ways initiated by the catalyst of my more open sexuality -- but that only seems to have made what's leftover, what's stuck, more firmly rooted. I've been left with the core, the essential.

There's an image that I will always remember from Thoreau, of a man walking around burdened by his house and all his belongings, dragging it with him on the journey of life:

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to haveinherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for theseare more easily acquired than got rid of... They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land,tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, whostruggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

That passage stuck with me more than anything else in Walden and it had a huge impact on me when I was starting out my new life in New York City. I wanted to divest myself of all those unnecessary burdens of property in order to walk unencumbered. I must admit that over the past month, in buying so much furniture and so many housewares, I'd felt a bit like I was betraying those values, as though I'd regressed a bit or was succumbing to the inevitable bourgeoisification that comes with approaching middle age (and to a certain degree there's a lot of truth in that). Who but a true saint, a holy fool, can walk unencumbered, truly naked, through this world? That's an extreme I can admire, can truly stand in awe of, while at the same time admitting that that path is (at least for now) too extreme for me. And that acknowledgement is another aspect of true freedom.

Every one of us carries a satchel along life's journey and we keep in it the things that mean the most to us. All that we can't leave behind (my apologies to Bono). If you were stranded on a desert island and you could only bring three items... They ask questions like that on internet dating profiles and on celebrity interview shows; the answers are supposed to offer a window into someone's real self. But the real answers to those sorts of questions are arrived at through experience, after the fact. They're not stated, they're lived.