American Watermelon

In Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray, Love, during the protagonist's first overseas stop in Italy, she mentions a friend, an Italian, whose American wife had apparently written on the walls of their apartment some angry profanity and accusations in Italian, once during a fight. Julio says that, had his wife truly been free and expressive, she would have written in her native language, in English, following the passion of her rage. Writing in Italian would have given her pause - time for translation. All Americans are like this, diagnoses Julio in Gilbert's words: "A savage people." Buttoned up and repressed at all times except when truly uncorked, and therefore, in the latter moments, unsafe and potentially lethal.

There is something lasting about the repressed-American story in Gilbert's memoir. While still in Italy, her narrator reports on many other Italian tendencies that clash with the ways overworked, guild-ridden Americans would respond to life.

Something of the latent feeling of these narratives pinned itself on me the afternoon I read about them, when I returned from the grocery store carrying a 20-lb watermelon.

The watermelon was mushy, and I had been so eager to bite into its crispiness that I was disappointed and, given that I am a little bit of an American, thought for a brief second that   I could return it.  Maybe should return it. I had the receipt.

Returning food to the grocery store is organically foreign to me. I think I have done it once, under pressure of people who'd urged me to exercise my American right to perfect food, but I have only done it once, and the fact that I even had the thought with this watermelon felt contrived. As if the thought had been produced in a far off place and only delivered to me superficially, landing on the top of my head, on top of my hair, like an oversized cloth stamp, and just sitting there, tottering.

As it was, I was not going to take the watermelon back. I wrapped up what I had not eaten (or spit out) and put it in the refrigerator, as if I were putting a baby in its crib, thinking about how much more energy there would be in returning a food like this than in eating and enjoying whatever parts of it were healthy. It isn't anybody's fault, after all, that the watermelon was mushy. If I had picked it out from the field in which it had grown and it was overripe, would I return it back to the soil? "I would like my money back, soil."

And yet our economy endorses this odd sense of entitlement on the part of the consumer. Of course with certain commercial items, return is reasonable and necessary: clothing that is damaged, a car that does not work. But to return a watermelon and get your five dollars back actually probably costs sixty dollars to the system that supports it. There is the time you spent buying the watermelon that you will never get back. There is the fact that you wanted a watermelon two hours ago and now have not had one yet still and have spent additional time thinking about how you are entitled to perfect watermelons and have somehow been swindled. There is the time of all the store employees and of the store itself: the cost of the watermelon, its transport, storage and display. And there is the sheer fact that you will be throwing away something on which, even as you toss it, you are expending additional needless energy.

All because, as Julio might put it, you were too overworked and emotionally undernourished to take from the earth what it happened to have given you. In our demand for perfection - in watermelon, in customer service, in ourselves - we deplete the soil of our life and culture. That patch of earth where the bad watermelon came from has now cost several patches. You have taken an overripe watermelon, which may have had half the value of a perfectly ripe one, and have expounded its liability. Your demand on its perfection, your disposal of it, return of it to the store, time spent dealing with and transporting it, has now built a small credit on the soil that it came from.

And it is because of this blindness that American life is expensive, that Americans are in debt. If every patch of soil that has a small foible on it costs ten healthy patches, this is life on credit. Life on profligacy.

I cannot say why this idea of American attitudes takes me so directly to Julio's repressed-American portrait. I only know that there is some deep connection between the tendency to repress anger and other feelings and the tendency to expound entitlement. Because I cannot tell my wife how I really feel, you, my real-estate agent, have to pamper me today. Because my child gets Cs and I can't say anything negative about it, you, my shoe salesman, will put up with every caprice about how the color black is just not the right shade on this one either. Because I am hurting, a watermelon will go back. Back and not back, for it is lost forever in the costs absorbed by my diminishing ego.

On the Bus

I once heard a man say that he'd fallen in love with a woman on a bus. A woman he'd never talked to and maybe not seen completely. But something about her pose and her clothing made him fantasize about her. And, he added, it was these little love affairs, the ones that were purely ephemeral, that were the most poignant in his life.

This makes sense, and I think many of us understand it intuitively. Who hasn't fantasized about Mr. Darcy?

Women in suits on buses I think is also the reason many visual and storytelling artists go into their trade. I for instance, though only on the cusp of artistry in my video work, am drawn to documenting and talking and pointing cameras at people, because I want all their stories. I want the woman on the bus and the guy behind her and the mom with the little kid that's going to get whooped pretty soon, each in a little tiny book with hard covers, captured and put away on a shelf for posterity.

There is such an activity, of course. It's called fiction writing.

Writers generalize forms just as the man I heard tell the bus story did. But they generalize expansively and imaginatively. And correctly. They take the woman prototype AND the reasons random men on buses might be attracted to her AND the reasons some particular man might be - and they qualify her. They make her into a person but also into a generality. Just in the way my little hard-cover book would. Then writers put bunches of these prototypical but individualistic characters together in a collection and put life around them, just as a painting blocks its main subjects and then builds around. Then writers fill in blank after blank. They begin with a focus: someone sitting at a table telling someone else they don't know where their daughter has gone to - and then build detail upon detail. Until the blocking becomes clear. And the scenery. And, just as they seem to really get going and begin refining, the last clarifying step just snaps together. Like those awkward children's puzzles that are all strings and wobblies until you press something just right and the whole thing locks together into a cube or a ladder or something else blocky.

Then the story is done and it is over. You, the reader, were shown, bit by bit by bit, the whole picture. And as you were waiting for a similarly progressive process to go over the bits and now put bows on them, bows and all are slapped on top of the picture, finishing it in one fell swoop and pulling the curtain besides.

I like to think that, in its own way, video production can have a similar effect.

Of course, it has the advantage - and the challenge - of real people to contend with and, while a single look on a person's face can tell as much as would take special care by a writer to convey, yet the producer is at the mercy of greater uncertainty and much less control.

Music goes a long way in sculpting video projects to a focused point, and certainly the music removes video and its offshoots from the written word. Cameras and looks on faces is one thing, but add music and now you really cannot compare the media. You have to separate them and not attempt an overlap, no matter how many movies are produced from books. Perhaps the Hollywood producers who work on book-to-movie projects will have something to say about whether a movie is anything like a book or whether it is only, as its credits say, "based on" one and nothing else.

Still, auteurs of all sorts draw to the women on the buses and the men in the deserts and the people in kitchens like moths to a lantern. These are the focal points of our attraction. Around their potential we see the house of cards that our vision spins. I will start with music under and fade up from black. And then she will look up and she won't say anything. Then we will cut to a wide shot of a building with a car in front. Not that car. A white, long, skinny one. And then the music will change.

The music will change and grow and end. And I will wrap up and put the whole thing in a little book and shelve it.