sterling was here
disrespect, history, and people always being people
Last week, I walked home in the rain. I had forgotten my umbrella and wore a gray peacoat. Nausea flooded my senses on the train, and plagued the icy walk down my street. There is something mystifyingly beautiful about having an epic, tragic day. Where you make every conceivable mistake, you step into too deep of a puddle that soaks the front of your socks, watch your train slowly chug away, or scrape your knees on the cement while leaving a Chinatown restaurant.
When I have days like this, where I walk aimlessly in the night, crying and shivering down my block, a small jovial light shines within me. It reminds me that everyone has been sad. That the despair, pain, and heartbreak I feel is just an unoriginal part of the human experience.
There are no new emotions to be felt. No new feelings of lust or uncertainty or anxiety or joy. No new betrayals to attempt. Isn’t there something so exciting about the fact that we’ve all felt a sweeping, compelling need to sob without refrain into a pillow? Or even the idea that the most humiliating moment of your life isn’t an isolated event, but that the gut-wrenching embarrassment you felt for throwing up on the girl in front of you at a choir concert is the same feeling someone else had when their friends matzoh ball soup gave them stomach issues that needed to be urgently addressed. Even though I am the subject of both these instances, I find it comforting to know that everyone has their own tales of humiliation, heartbreak, and indigestion. Everything has happened before. Maybe I’m just experiencing it for the first time, and that’s amazing.
Now, please bear with me while we pivot to my next topic. Disobedience. It’s not that these are necessarily connected, but there is something so incredible about the idea that the feeling or emotion attached to rebellion, anger or just plain old annoyance, are just as ancient as humanity itself. Whenever I visit the MET, I love checking my hair and makeup in the grandiose mirrors of the room recreations. Is that not what their original use was? My own vanity cuts through history and connects me to the self-obsessed seventeenth century women and aristocrats who haunt the furniture on the other side of the oak hand-railing.
I’m often bothered by films or historical depictions that describe the people of our past as regal and astute individuals. Women are dainty, well-read, graceful, properly trained in etiquette and the dusting of antiques. Men are charming, polite, honorable, and somehow boundlessly knowledgeable about politics and war. The idea of prissy, high society is sooooooo boring. Of course, it’s all connected to the public image that the royal families have worked tirelessly to portray. But, not only is it boring, it’s inaccurate. Creative projects like The Favourite are so exciting, because they finally show the people of antiquity as raunchy, dirty, smelly, messy humans just like us. Emma Stone’s character is just a plain old sneaky bitch. Olivia Colman’s queen sucks. These people are just as hate-able as your snobby coworkers or the creepy guys outside of the bar. There’s something remarkable about the fact that children will always be bratty, snotty-nosed gremlins. Perhaps my girl scout troop won’t be the last group of rowdy politically unaware pre-teens to swim in the World War II memorial fountain on a scorchingly hot summer day.
In lieu of convincing you myself that people have always broken the rules, I’ll let history do it for me. One of the first dateable pieces of graffiti we’ve found is from Pompeii. Historians have dated it to October 3, 78 B.C. It reads:
Gaius Pumidius Diphilus was here.
This note was found on the walls preserved by volcanic ash in the city of Pompeii. How remarkable that the chosen phrase is what middle schoolers carve into their desks and poke into wet cement. That we’ve always had this undying desire to be known and remembered, through the crime of documenting it publicly. There’s a collection of graffiti to be found and translated from both here and Herculaneum that I highly recommend perusing if you’d like to see some antiquated courting techniques or scathing insults: kashgar.com.au/
Graffiti is a crime “punishable by a jail term, monetary fine and/or community service…any person caught defacing property without the express permission of the owner will be arrested.” (combating graffiti) Yet, it is one of the few things that we have to link us to past generations. People will always want to leave their mark on the world in some way. When I was younger, I wanted to be an architect. I later learned you must possess the ability to draw to pursue a career on that path. However, I remember imagining these grandiose and structurally nightmarish buildings that I would have engraved with my name: Sterling built this. How fantastic that at such a young age I was wholly determined to leave my mark on the world in a tangible, physical way. The paleolithic era is almost exclusively depicted through cave drawings. Think of the Berlin Wall, the graffiti that defined half of a city’s perspective on corruption through art. Or even Keith Haring, arrested for his doodles in the subway tunnels highlighting the gay community and the AIDS epidemic, whose art is now printed on $90 sweatshirts from Urban Outfitters.
My favorite thing about people is that we’ve always been awful. I hate the narrative that young people have invented some kind of wretched, radical new version of disrespect. I think as we get older, people fail to realize that whatever possessed them to become delinquents in their youth is the same force that’s been around since the beginning of time. And while their delinquency was maybe slightly tamer, due to the Reagan administration or lack of technology or other outside forces, society has evolved, and our tomfoolery has too.
It can be difficult to reflect on the way you behaved in your teens or early twenties when those years are far behind you. But, it’s the same people in older generations that claim Bad Bunny’s music is too vulgar when Prince Royce or Enrique Iglesias say the exact same things (or far worse) in their songs. Access to the internet has made explicit content more accessible, and maybe we’re not just saying crude things at a younger age than our ancestors, but we’re saying them louder, more often and more publicly. Or maybe, we’re just not interested in hiding it anymore. Weren’t the generations before us the ones notorious for smoking cigarettes in the bathroom stalls in their high school, getting married at 18, or just unknowingly consuming lead all the time (totally not their fault)?
In Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, I am often astounded by the small morsels of truth the characters speak regarding the learning of languages or lapses in communication between friends, despite it being a fictional novel. The protagonist, Selin, is plagued by the boundaries of her native language and the idea that some words don’t exist in others, causing her to miss social cues or misunderstand obvious gestures. Much of the book exists in overlapping conversations of Russian, Hungarian, and Turkish miscommunication, as the story centers around a group of acquaintances all studying linguistics at Harvard in the early 90s. Through the newly invented email, two of the main characters form a digital-based relationship over several weeks, where they embark on a tepid semi-romantic journey via sequences of encrypted emails. But, this conversation in particular, is what stuck with me most from the book.
“If I had it my way, we would all just grunt.”
“If we all did that, the grunting would become a language.”
“Not the way I would do it.”
“Really,” I said.
In reply, he made some kind of noise.
The creation of language is unavoidable. We all want to communicate. Even when it upsets us. Cavemen drew pictures, society began and language split into dialects, I read tweets on the subway and get cyberbullied in the chat window playing adolescent boys in online chess.
In the same way our actions and feelings are unoriginal, so are most of our words. While Descartes can argue that “I think therefore, I am” is the defining factor to assure us of our existence, is the argument valid without the idea of original strings of thought, something nearly impossible to have? With the expansion of language through technology, there is potentially more opportunity for us to create our own original thoughts and sentences out of gibberish or pure obscurity, with more likelihood of them being original than ever before. It feels like the right moment to introduce the concept of “original thought” as coined by my roommates and I. Whenever there is a string of obscure words thrown together, or we dub something with a moniker that possibly no one else has used, it’s an “original thought.” I’ve even grown a fondness towards calling just regular thoughts “brain notifications,” and I believe myself to be the first person to ever suggest “submitting the Lisa Rinna M&M into the Clow Egg Makeup Registrar.” Now, I encourage you, my dear readers, to attempt to compose your original thought or sentence or insane combination of syllables and grunting every day (it’s a highly unlikely, but very enriching task).
While I know that reading this may not make a lot of sense, or some of the things I’ve published have been mean (I’m sorry I told Enneagram supporters to eat glass), my writings here mean a lot to me, regardless of how indecipherable they may often seem. In many ways, this blog will serve as my proverbial graffiti; existing on some remote corner of the internet forever. I was here. You are all here. This is something we did together. Thank you x