At Wednesday’s meeting in Synergy, members of the Arts Review wrote for ten minutes about some object in the room. Here is what they came up with.
* * *
Among the artifacts to survive the Synergy remodel are a series of plaster reliefs above the fireplaces on the first floor. They are white, neoclassical, and dirty; I know from experience that they aren’t part of the weekly house-clean. In two of them, a group of male figures sing or chant around a common choirbook. In another, a group of women and two simian-looking children strum lyres against their chests. The men have curly hair; everyone is wearing robes.
Over the summer, Housing took down the front and back fire-escapes, and dismantled the second-floor porch. They rearranged the parking lot. They added a barbecue. I can remember nights when travelling musicians would stay at Synergy and pay their way by playing. We would sit out on the fire escape and listen to music and drink from a common bottle as the sun set over campus and the stars came out over the bay.
I wonder, now, why Stanford found the silent reliefs worth keeping, and why they felt that the fire escapes had to go.
* * *
There’s a little porcelain lamp on the wall and it leans. That’s not bullshitty, freshman poetry-ish/-esque/-like personification: it leans. It’s like 17 degrees CCW off-center for God knows why, but here’s a guess that it ain’t for traditional wear-and-tear. It’s mounted on a wall of brown wood(-ish stuff[?]) and the mounting appliance is a little bit darker (bronze if you bought it yesterday at Home Depot) and there’s a brown streak down its stage left. Said aesthetic anomaly probably looks like a conscious design choice from 15 feet but here—we’re talking 8 feet—it looks more like petrified excrement. Likely human-originated.
All of this seems rather unflattering for our poor little unpersonified ceramic that, when it eludes this sort of underlying essence of inanimate pedophilia, might be something almost on the right trail to being noble. Remember: not personified. A lamp. A fairly ordinary, non-transcendent, a little interesting but mostly unremarkably consumer-grade lamp.
* * *
The Stanford Arts Review met, in the case fo tonight, at 8pm at Synergy, a co op house on the edge of Stanford’s faculty housing. I arrived at 8, wandered around, and eventually met up with Tyler Doyle, the meeting’s leader. Tyler was running late. Not so late as to provoke people to leave, only mildly late.
Like any collegiate organization, the Stanford Arts Review is decently funded, short staffed, and largely ignored by most students. Fittingly, many member’s of this Wednesday night’s meeting were attending their first of these meetings. Introductions around the table were necessary and so, for the first ten minutes, seven of us spoke briefly of ourselves. Tyler covered a few logistics, and that pretty much brings us up to right now, to where I sit, yellow legal pad before me, pencil in hand, with, in Tyler’s words ’bout a minute’ left to kill in this exercise.
* * *
Why is a stack of Christmas presents lurking above the fireplace at Synergy? Look at them, begging the flames to lick their chrome-red wrapping paper and burn this hilltop house down.
I needn’t choose the presents, though—if Synergy is anything, it is a string of unanswerable questions to the outsider. Freshman year, I heard tell of a girl who slept on a mattress in a tree. Naked. You can guess which house she did it next to. And Synergy, though it might not be the only place that you can score a hit of acid off the DJ, is the only place you can do it at 3am during a celebration of Bel Tine.
I want to suggest that the kind of horrible decision-making illustrated by the above sentence is facilitated by the house—its residents, its décor, and its location. Because really, when confronted with a seemingly random assortment of overly-hip decoration, the only question you can ask yourself is, Why not?
* * *
We might have been eating pears, or possibly apples, probably protesting the Keystone XL pipeline by drinking fifteen cases of Keystone or hosting a witch-like seance of trance music until dawn and slapping each other with undercooked beets.
It could have been at the end of the night when the lanky DJ started playing Thrift Shop on repeat as his way of telling outsiders to get the fuck out. The lights would have been soft and moonlike through the boorish fuzz of weed and pinkeye you think you got from foolishly touching your face after using one of the shared hand towels in the bathroom. A hungry Synner might have dragged the box of produce to the dining room, and revealed the treasure to the semi-conscious mass. Perhaps they swayed towards the box, all hands tearing at the soft flesh of fruit a week past its peak, juice spraying on flesh and pulp splattering on the floor where it would encrust itself after not being cleaned for a week.
Satisfied, the coven might have laid on its back and heaved a collective sigh. An arm could have emerged from the group, struck by a bolt of inspiration, pulled the plastic shell that held the now digesting fruit and tagged it to the ceiling with a stray bit of brown tape from the box.
As it turns, it looks me in the eye and its message is clear: This is Synergy, and we hang our garbage from the ceiling with the overly sticky type of brown tape punished by a $200 infraction by the lesser demons of Stanford housing.
* * *
What’s it like to exist for the sole purpose of extinguishing? To be told that your place in the world is along the noisy corridors of a house, to be perched awkwardly on the wooden walls beholding all the idiosyncratic synergy: the topless man who wears the bunny hat; the broken piano buried amidst an avalanche of pillows and old zines, wine bottles and just stuff, stuff, stuff; the couple who kisses under the mistletoe even when it isn’t Christmas day. To be a fire extinguisher.
And amidst all the overflowing energy it sits awkwardly stuck to the wall, not knowing when it will live out its purpose. Maybe having a purposeful existence is overrated; who cares about the purpose of your existence? You don’t even need to think to be; I exist, therefore I am. More precisely, it says to itself: I exist, therefore I extinguish. One day it will do the only thing it’s ever meant to do: fight fire with pressure, with a grand spew of three gallons of pearl ash (what do those chemistry majors call him that one time they were talking about him in drunken lisps? Oh yes, potassium carbonate: the stuff that goes into german gingerbread and wine.) It will go swoosh, swoosh, and the flames shall be no more.
It waits silently: for an accident, for an arsonist, for the careless smoker who forgets to put out his cigarette, for the cake in the oven to burst into flames, for the pyromaniac who decides to start a bonfire with germ-ex, for a synergy dude too drunk to realize wine and fire together makes for a pretty deadly mix.
In the shadow of the stairway, it waits.
