Exiting the Void
Many Christmases ago, I received an annontated edition of Archy and Mehitabel. I was grateful since my original copy had since come unbound from both sides of its cover, a problem that I will remedy at some point in my life. For those of you unfamiliar with Archy and the other characters populating Don Marquis’ wonderful world, Archy is a cockroach. Well, more correctly, Archy is the soul of a frustrated vers-libre poet that has transmigrated into the body of a cockroach living in New York starting in the 1910s.
Although hampered by his diminished stature, Archy’s nature demands that he produce poetry. In order to accomplish this compulsory act, he takes up residence in a newspaperman’s office, getting by on the crumbs of leftover lunches. At night, after everyone returns home for the day, Archy begins to clack out pages of vers-libre poetry, painstakingly crawling to the top of the the typewriter and launching himself, headfirst, down upon the keys. Given the era and typewriter technology, he is limited in the respect that he cannot use the shift key, and his poetry lacks capital letters and punctuation.
After the newspaperman discovers the source of the mysterious poetry, he begins to publish Archy’s works as a column in the newspaper. Archy wrote on many subjects including Prohibition, the Great Depression, all the way through WWII and beyond, promoting war bonds and chiding folk swept away by the fear of communism.
Despite our age gap, I resonate strongly with many of Archy’s observations and witticisms. But there are times when the ‘roach and I part company. Specifically, in one of his columns Archy recounts his conversation with an overly confident flea. The flea is so proud that he can hop about and bite whatever large, feared animal he wishes, while the terrible beasties helplessly submit to his shenanigans. Archy chides the flea (his “little bolshevik”), cautioning that there will always be something out there that is greater than him, though it may be smaller:
“…there is always some
little thing that is too
big for us every
goliath has his david and so on ad finitum
but what said the flea is the terror
of the smallest microbe of all
he i said is afraid of a vacuum what is
there in a vacuum to make one afraid
said the flea there is nothing in it
i said and that is what makes one
afraid to contemplate it…
…you are
too subtle for me said the
flea i never took much stock in being
scared of hypodermic propositions or
hypothetical injections i am
going to have dinner off a
man eating tiger if a vacuum gets
me i will try and send you word
before the worst comes to
the worst some people i told him inhabit
a vacuum all their lives and
never know it then he said it don t
hurt them any no i said it don t but it
hurts people who have to associate
with them and with these words
we parted each feeling
superior to the other and is not that
feeling after all one of the great
desiderata of social intercourse”
I certainly agree that the most fearsome thing on Earth is the vacuum. Quite literally a place of nothing-ness, one step beyond stagnancy, where at least there may have been something at some time. And, there are people that live in vacuums their entire lives. They can even be successful people, but they are still trapped, unconsciously, sometimes, sucking others in with them into nothingness. But, Archy’s last flip statement regarding that oh-so-human desire to feel superior has such a finality that it seems like his discussion of “vacuum people” has been opened, discussed, and closed. There are vacuum people, they will always be vacuum people, and there is nothing they can do to become un-vacuum people. Archy writes:
“…a person
can t think of a place with nothing at
all in it without going nutty and if he
tries to think that nothing is
something after all he gets nuttier…”
Here, the scatter-footed scarab and I part company. I do expect that it would be truly disturbing for a person to wake up one morning and realize they had somewhere, somehow slipped into a vacuum. It would be appalling to realize, despite being able to check off many attributes commonly related to personal success, that someone had become a nothing. But I am not so sure that is the end of the story.
I will not accept that a person must continue being a nothing. I cannot imagine it would be an easy process to become un-nothing. But despite the pain and difficulty, at least initially, escape could be possible. This is the premise for the movie “Born Yesterday” (The Judy Holiday 1950 version, NOT the Melanie Griffith version).
Billie Dawn, the main character, is a nothing. She walks, she speaks, she eats, just like anyone else, but she is stuck in a vacuum. She does not question, she does not learn. Or, at least she learns little of any real, deep value. She has little actual interest in the world around her, aside from mink coats. She is distinctly disengaged. She moves through life intently snicking life’s cards down on the table, methodically working through the deck, winning, the whole time. But to what end?
After Billie and her long-term boyfriend, Harry, move to Washington D.C., it becomes necessary for Billie to “smarten up.” Harry is attempting, with moderate success, to buy off Congress and Billie’s transparent nothing-ness is distinctly distracting in DC’s world of distinguished power couples. But, Harry makes a personal blunder when he hires a tutor for Billie. Unexpectedly, Billie’s world becomes a great deal larger than it had been and she begins to learn about what life could be. Or, better put, what her life, as it stands, is not. She breaks away from her vacuum. And she does not seem to go “nutty” in the process either. There are moments of frustration, but she perseveres over the vacuum.
Despite her escape, though, at the end of the movie, Billie is still the blond bombshell with the high, squeaky voice. Her escape from the nothing-ness is not heralded by a fairy-tale transformation. She does not suddenly become an intellectual. There is no indication that she will now move forward in her life to contribute great inventions or insights to the world. She never becomes someone else, she is never untrue to herself, but she becomes a better self. She obtains her own much-ness. And, while she does fall madly in love with her tutor, he has not “made” her, either, as with more classic Pygmalion-esque stories.
Despite Archy’s entertaining pessimism, people, as with Billie, are always capable of becoming more, even if we might begin as a vacuum person. The escape may not be obvious in the world of a vacuum, but it is the only thing that exists in a world that is devoid of anything else.
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