Found Parable

In the men’s room at the office today some wag has labelled the two stalls the Erotic and the Political. The second seems suitable for the results of my business, not for what thinking ordinarily accompanies it. So I’ve locked myself into the first because, though farther from the lightbulb overhead, it remains the more conventional and thereby illuminating choice. The wit on its walls is more desperate. As if I had written them there myself, but only because by now I have seen them day after day, I know each boast, each plea, the runty widower’s resentments, the phone number for good head. Today’s fresh drawing: a woman’s torso, neck to outflung knees, with breasts like targets and at her crotch red felt-tip “hair” to guard a treasure half wound, half wisecrack. The first critic of the flesh is always the self-possessed sensualist. With all that wall as his margin, he had sniffed in smug ballpoint OBVIOUSLY DONE BY SOMEONE WHO HAS NEVER SEEN THE REAL THING. Under that, in a later hand, the local pinstripe aesthete had dismissed the daydreamer’s crudity and its critic’s edgy literalism. His block letters had squared, not sloping shoulders: NO, BY SOMEONE WHO JUST CAN’T DRAW. Were the two opinions converging on the same moral point? That a good drawing is the real thing? Or that the real thing can be truly seen only through another’s eyes? But now that I trace it through other jokes and members, the bottom line leads to a higher inch of free space on the partition— a perch above the loose remarks, like the pimp’s doorway or the Zen master’s cliff-face ledge. THERE ARE NO REAL THINGS writes the philosopher. But he too has been misled by everything the mind makes of a body. When the torso is fleshed out and turns over in the artist’s bed, when the sensualist sobs over her, when the critic buttons his pants, when the philosopher’s scorn sinks back from a gratified ecstasy, then it will be clear to each in his own way. There is nothing we cannot possibly not know.