Even if it's Hokey

Cliché, cliché, cliché. God, I love all three of them! That’s why I am writing a book in which cliché plays the leading role, a book I can’t seem to finish for a very clichéd reason: writer’s block.




Here's an excerpt:



This story is not new. And we all know how it ends. It ends. So why do we watch the same movie over and over again as if it might have a different ending? Because we love a good middle, and our only access to the middle is either by jumping back to the beginning again and starting over (again) until we hit the middle (again), or, retracing our steps backwards from the ending until we get to the middle (again). Back at the middle, we have this feeling of safety because we know what came before and we also know what happens next. But we also half hope it won’t happen, that the end will surprise us. We tether our ankles to the bedpost so we can lean out the window and pretend to fly. And it’s this mightness for which we hold our breath, in the meantime telling ourselves we are hearing this story for the first time. We want both things. We want the story to be predictable. And we want to begin again, and to change the ending.


But it’s the not-newness of a story that I find most comforting because if the story is known, it becomes like a familiar portrait I can either stand in front of, naming the person in the picture, or walk away from until the face becomes an unrecognizable speck in my mind’s eye.


I feel the same way about stories as I do about portrait paintings, and I feel the same way about stories and portrait paintings as I do about cliché. What underpins them all is basically the same thing: a grisaille over which we glaze layers of colour and shine.


To be honest, I experience an all-out erotic frisson when cliché’s deft hand scrapes back coats of subterfuge to reveal a naked structure we all share: not flesh tone. Grey scale.


Cliché is like portraiture because it is like a face; we know its structure well: eyes, nose, mouth – always the same three, yet each feature combines with each feature in a different way each time, and each assemblage delivers an unexpected gestalt of the never before seen. So while I suspect most of us share this feeling that the world is filled with limited, identifiable face types, we still only admit to resemblances, not to verisimilitude. Even in the case of twins.


Take cliché and metaphor, for instance. They are clearly related, yet beholders too often claim superior status for the latter as if metaphor possessed a more sophisticated beauty while cliché was the plain Jane of the family.


But cliché is not a one-trick pony to metaphor’s three-ring circus.


No, cliché’s hidden power shines right before our eyes.


Cliché is what bestows metaphor with her beauty. Or, put as a cliché, you can’t grow a pearl without sand in the oyster. Trite and true.

But, like a pregnant double agent, cliché’s condition is so obvious that people have stopped noticing. Sure, we can all see she’s hiding something under her skin, but since we can’t see what the hidden thing looks like, we tell ourselves we'll just deal with it when it finally emerges. But the truth is, we fear what cliché will do to our lives when it does reveal itself. And that’s because cliché is not just a shell. It is the shell that protects a kernel. And when the shell cracks – as it inevitably will – cliché’s kernel will pop out like a stripper jumping out of a cake. And those of us watching will find ourselves pulled from the sidelines, where we were safely clapping (bachelors all of us), now forced to participate in a spectacle that puts us face-to-face with our unbridled desires.


And it is because we don’t really know what cliché will become when it disrobes that we don’t really know what we will become in relation to cliché's nakeness.


That’s the real reason we fear cliché, and why we bully it into submission, calling it names as if it was a lower life form. We want our own voices to drown out the sound of the kernel popping.


But that’s how cliché gets the job done: by tricking us into thinking it’s the side show, lulling us into believing we are merely anonymous members of the peanut gallery while it matter-of-factly yanks off our cover ups to expose the main event -- us.


Take a portrait painting: the person in the picture seems like themselves, someone you might know, someone you might even love, but do we really know them? I return to the portrait like a soon-to-be-bride in an arranged marriage, scrutinizing my intended’s photograph for clues. In the absence of the person, this image is the only thing I have with which to build the story of the rest of my life. I stare and stare, even when I know that behind the photograph there is nothing but my own wall, or my coffee table, nothing but the world that frames the picture, and all my ideas about that person, but never the person actual.


With my own story, I draw upon both cliché and metaphor to get the telling done, seducing one or the other depending on my need. There’s no question about who will be loved. They both will. The only question is, when?