Return to Mercer Street 2003 Table of Contents

by Lauren Covello

“Some are transformed just once / And live their whole lives after in that shape. / Others have a facility for changing themselves as they please.”
                                                                                    -Ovid

It finds its way into my hands—the small kaleidoscope—a trinket my grandfather passes along to me after finding it at the bottom of his toolbox one afternoon. “Hold it up to the light, Lauren,” he advises me, upon witnessing my attempts to unlock the kaleidoscope’s magic by aiming it towards the shadowy pavement. With hands clasped, eyes squinted, and head cocked, I finally spot the colored chips, a glittering lattice of blue, green, and yellow, stagnantly arranged and defined. “Turn it, now,” my grandfather orders, smiling. Suddenly, the clear composition unravels. It becomes a moving color war, triangles and rectangles interacting, skirting around one another to form patterns that linger only fleetingly before changing again. I gasp, intrigued. “That’s the beautiful part,” my grandfather observes. “It’s beautiful when it’s turning.”

The challenge of cleaning out my desk drawers in preparation for the move to New York results in my stumbling across an old coloring book. I leaf through the pages, startled by the number of pictures I’d left only partially colored. With quick, shaky movements, it seems as if I had simply jumped from shading one image to the next, as if there were something complete about leaving the figures incomplete. Sitting at my desk, fourteen years older, I laugh at my rendition of Big Bird, whose characteristically yellow feathers I had made blue and whose feet (I suppose I had decided) were altogether undeserving of color. And yet I get a sense that this is the way the picture should be; after all, the three-year old artist is not the girl now ridding her drawers of quirky love notes and dilapidated calculus notebooks. She’s left me room for movement, granting me the ability to change, refine, and work towards the completion of an identity she’s begun to put together—an identity that, perhaps, may never meet its end.

I cannot help but call to mind Pablo Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror every time I enter the smoky girls’ bathroom at my high school. The girl in the painting stands with arms outstretched at either side of an elliptical mirror, gazing into a reflection that barely resembles her physical form. She is a painted patchwork of curves and colors, an irrationally configured character whose mirror image is even more mystifying in its peculiar portrayal of the girl gazing into it.

The mirror in the girls’ bathroom is a simple oblong slab of slightly reflective metal, complete with pings, dents, grime, and scratches. Because of these imperfections, the position you stand at when you look in the mirror is crucial to the way your image appears. Certain areas make your neck long and your head huge while other areas shorten your torso and completely compress your facial features. As I stand there in line, I watch the cult of so-called “beauty queens” before me gawk and gaze at their reflections in the dingy looking glass. Standing there, it becomes clear that these girls are not at all concerned about what they see in front of them; they are not aware that, behind their perfectly coiffed hair and flawlessly painted faces, there lies a perpetually changing field of color, an identity that cannot be substantiated merely by the procurement of brand name purses and expensive boots. These girls suppress and ignore the spiraling nature of their kaleidoscopic identities, focusing only on ascending the rungs of materialism and vanity to reach a peak, an end. They primp their bangs and reapply their foundation fifteen times a day, but I wonder as I watch whether the mirror they consult so regularly really reflects who they are—or who they want to be, even?

There seems to be a deviation, a barrier, between the girls before the mirror and their images, between their “finished” appearance and their utterly “unfinished” identities. I envision the Picasso piece, recalling the incongruity and vast distortion of the subject’s reflection in comparison with what I imagine her physical image to be. But why is her image so utterly distorted and irrational? Why such wild use of color? What does it all mean? The painting never fails to mystify me. I know that the answers lie well beyond the ignorant observation that translates into, “It’s Picasso—what do you expect?” The disfigurations so notoriously ‘Picasso’ exist for some purpose; whether we understand the passions behind them depends on how well we are able to communicate with those ideas. I doubt the girls in the bathroom have any idea how incredibly unfinished they are, doubt their willingness to recognize the passions capable of defining their individual paths.

A rosebush that produces only gray flowers suddenly blooms one that is pink. It is the first official sign of change that transpires in the movie Pleasantville, which is being shown in our Western Civilization class. The main characters Bud and Mary-Sue, as well as all the other black-and-white citizens of Pleasantville, imbue with color only after they recognize the potential they hold as individuals, uncovering those passions that had dwelled within. Although their “perfect” lives are permanently skewed by the raging Technicolor epidemic, the end result surpasses perfection; the citizens of Pleasantville have awakened their spirit for life and possess the will to make decisions with a new understanding of themselves.

I am a citizen of Pleasantville. The identity I seemed to adhere to in high school does not carry over into college, and I’ve begun to reconfigure the layers of my personality in order to achieve one more suited for my new, more independent lifestyle. It appears, however, that I have yet to be swept over by the vivacious color of potential. My identity lacks true definition. The only hint of color that has emerged is the single color of potential waiting to be explored. And, because the thought of settling into a monochromatic identity offers me little appeal, I’m willing to explore.

Ambition—Apathy—Happiness—Misfortune… Putting the pieces together is not a science; there are no “base-pairing rules,” no equations, no certainties. The variables of personality lie on different planes, connected solely by the fact that they exist. The solution itself is never complete or rational. Like a child who suddenly realizes his three thousand-piece puzzle set cannot be finished without that one last fragment he dropped behind the sofa, a person on the search for self will never reach the final all-encompassing assertion of an identity. Self is a variable that can be substantiated only fleetingly before a new emotion inspires it to change; the process of finding an identity possesses more value than the actual outcome.

The puzzle, for example, does not immediately accrue in value once its final chip is in place; an image of the red puppy on the right begins to emerge although its bottom half is absent, while a little wooden wagon in the corner develops with each new click of a correctly placed piece within the assembly. It is that gradual layering effect which, on many levels, figures into the puzzle of self-realization. As human beings, we have the ability to select which aspects of ourselves we express as a function of the image we wish to display—and if we don’t choose our image for ourselves, then we forfeit, handing over the brush for someone else to determine the outcome of our perpetual color war.

My grandfather could quite possibly be viewed as a failure of the self-realization process. I watch from across the dining room table as he shakes his head and mutters in disgust at my grandma’s garbled account of her Tuesday night Bingo experience: “So then Marie stood up and said—or I mean Olga stood up and said, ‘Bingo!’—and she won three hundred and fifty dollars! But then Evelyn—you know, Evelyn who lives down on Santiago and has the son in the army—turned around and gave Olga this evil look. She’s so bitter, that Evelyn, and that’s because of Olga’s sister Dora, who didn’t invite Evelyn to her husband Bill’s retirement party…” My grandma can talk for hours yet still somehow manage to end up at the beginning of her story. As she rambles on and on, my grandfather stands off to the side, mocking her with hand gestures and empty mouth movements as if saying, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…” I chuckle, having grown accustomed to my grandpa’s attempts at getting a laugh. We share a brief smile as he brushes past my chair. But as he passes, I see the reassembling of a disturbed countenance as he prepares to pester my aunt about trimming the birch in her front yard. I pity him.

On the surface, my grandfather comes off as having an ever-present chip on his shoulder, but it is under that abrasive shell that generosity, kindness, and a genuine desire to help thrive. The way I see it, he hates the fact that he’s closer to ninety than nineteen, and it is this notion that spawns his bitterness towards retired neighbors and those of “older stock” in general. I believe that his reputation precedes, and tragically overrides, many of his good intentions. Like the young smokers in the girls’ bathroom, my seventy-three year old grandfather is unable to decipher his own reflection with ease. He’s already become too comfortable with the acrimonious reputation handed to him to even consider reconciling other aspects of his identity. He is unwilling to continue his journey towards selfhood, a man compelled to look away from the turning kaleidoscope without the desire for a second glance.

It is this crossing towards the understanding of self that American poet and monk Thomas Merton strongly advocates. He asks, “What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?  This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.” Merton stresses the importance of tearing down the barriers that separate image from inner self, realities from aspirations. For the girls in the bathroom, it’s a combination of vanity, insecurity, and disinclination that barricade their expression of self; for the citizens of Pleasantville, it’s their inability to stray from the norm. Merton’s ascetic existence as a monk bridges the various colors of his identity, however contrasting those colors may be, granting him the ability to work with a full palette. He becomes the aspiring artist of his identity, achieving a sense of wholeness through the constant realignment of his various layers. Merton has not, however, reached an end. He’s reached a means of accessing the end and is confident that the path will offer him something worthwhile—that it is, perhaps, more revealing than would be any grand finale.

Biblical figures are often described as emanating white light, the kind of prodigious light that is most often taken to represent a residing spirituality and holiness. I take a slightly different view. White light is formed in the presence of all colors, and, furthering the idea that different “colors” and “layers” comprise an identity, it seems that this fantastic light is a symbol of completeness. I know for a fact that I don’t radiate light when I enter a smoky bathroom, or watch a film, or observe my grandfather…and yet, in some strange dimension, I feel whole. Maybe “identity” itself is just an idea concocted by humans, a kind of confining structure that we hope will direct us to the attainment of our highest aspirations. Perhaps it’s not the attainment of wholeness, but the acceptance that I’ll always be a work-in-progress that creates the satisfying illusion of completeness.

Although ignorant of his own words, my grandfather has gotten it right: It is beautiful when it’s turning. We, as human beings, are not able to ossify what we perceive to be our “identity”; it will be forever changing—a kind of surreal, confounding, and complex reflection of our human experience. We possess innumerable facets, like little tubes of color that remain separate until some creative force removes all the caps and mixes them together. It is that mélange that initiates a masterpiece of identity—a masterpiece that is ever changing and never quite finished, but fulfilling in its progression. And it is precisely this understanding that makes the next stroke of the brush a little bit clearer, the portrait itself a bit more revealing.

Return to Mercer Street 2003 Table of Contents