11:19 p.m. - 2009-10-04
for my drama class (describe something you think is beautiful and why)
I think graffiti is beautiful. All types of graffiti, from the scrawls of people's tags to giant murals to little messages on bathroom stalls. I think it's beautiful because it's startling. It's real. I'm walking along and almost every image I see and word I read has been produced by a company to try to coax money from me. Everything is advertising. Graffiti is beautiful because it isn't advertising. It is beautiful because it is something real, from a real person. It's saying "I was here, I do exist" and I guess I think it's really beautiful because it shows people's humanity. It shows that we really are real people, with real thoughts, real feelings, real dreams. Important enough to write on a wall, to leave for someone else to discover. Important enough to break the law, to interrupt the flow of normal events and spill forth something human. Even if I don't really understand what the person is saying, or even if I don't agree with it, I still think it's beautiful. Someone let their creativity spill over into the world, there was some urgency that caused them to do it, some desire to express. Sometimes it's rage. It's frustration. Like people pounding at the walls of this city, where we are all rushing past, wrapped up in this and that, so many struggles in this city that go unnamed. People write it on the wall. Or love, crushes and infatuations, hopeless or hopeful find their way on to the walls of women's bathroom all the time. Confessions, that pent up feeling that someone just needed to spill out, a secret. Someone goes around Toronto writing "I love you" and I'm not sure who they are writing it to but I think it's beautiful. It reminds me that there is love out there. That people are loving each other. Sometimes it's sadness, grief and unspeakable things. It's Rest In Peace to loved ones, writing it on the wall because what you really wanted to say would never make it on the tombstone or into the obituary. Walls around this city have been turned into memorial for people, loved and lost, who I never knew but who I am moved to remember. Or the sadness of some horrible crime or loss one has endured: I've seen cries like "Where is my sister?" and "I was sexually assaulted tonight." It makes me cry, but it's beautiful because I am glad to be a witness, I'm glad that the wall will listen and strangers will see even when there is no one to say it to. Sometimes it's simply the strange and absurd, images and words out of place, in a context you're not used to. A break in the familiar pattern. A break in the monotony. For example there are people with motocycles for heads. Strange little creatures painted or plastered on the wall. Some vision or dream that came to someone else, but that I get to experience too, without the input or interruption of editors and a profit-driven media. Graffitti is beautiful because there is something so primal about it, something about the artist in all of us, the humanity in all of us that longs to be expressed. We are taught to suppress it, to hold it down and back. We are taught that only certain people are creative. Only some people are artists. Graffiti says everyone is creative, everyone is an artist and this space belongs to all of us, this city is ours. It doesn't belong just to the companies, the government, the cops or the rich. And no matter how much these group try to suppress the graffiti in this city, the graffiti has a life of it's own. It's the pulse, breath and secret thoughts of the city manifested into physical form. And I think that is beautiful.