two paths for the queens lady
neil postman, ikea, robert frost
I’m at a crossroads with my personal life. There is a large question that must be answered, what to do, what to do, and I have to answer it because my life will change for the better if I answer it. And the mere fact that this question has emerged has made my summer hazily optimistic, and my feeling about the future somewhat excited. This is a strange feeling to have as the death videos online from Gaza and the increasingly hot temperature of conflicts in the outside world have only made me feel impotent and unable to do anything.
Which is maybe why I want to do something with my personal life, to figure out how to open this door that’s appeared. I don’t mean to be abstract about what’s happening. I just don’t feel like writing it all out here. But, visually, it’s started to feel like the two paths meme. You know the one, it’s one of our culture’s cornerstone memes.
I was sitting, last weekend, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, an old maritime neighborhood cut off from the rest of the borough by the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. My friends who I was supposed to meet were late, and so I was slightly immobile in the grass in a park facing the briny harbor, which was once a very busy port, one of the busiest in the whole country, which you can still see with defunct and burned-out grain elevators and barge museums that float in the water.
I was at the level of this meme pictured above, which is a blank template. The person at the crossroads doesn’t even know which option goes where. When my friends arrived.
Red Hook, what a place, they muttered. The sun had beat down on their heads during that damn walk over from the subway because no one had bothered to build a subway system closer. There were all those construction sites for new builds that blocked off whole sidewalks, and then the long and yawning food desert (I said, a really good book set in Red Hook is Deacon King Kong by James McBride).
And the Ikea, said my friend. At which point we decided, yeah, let’s get lunch at Ikea, skip the shitty pizza, the over-priced New American, that one crab restaurant that really isn’t as good as everyone says it is. On the walk over, my friend said, there’s a Bingo night at Ikea that gets in people from every part of Red Hook to join. But it’s a complicated place. They tore down a super-old ship-docking station to build the store, and a lot of people protested that the Ikea was going to change the culture of Red Hook. And then a year in or something, the city realized that they actually needed the shipping station and that it would cost $1 billion to rebuild a new one.
We carried on up the sweeping upwards-only escalator that rose above the little playpen where children under-five could play with spangled STEM objects while their parents shopped. Ikea first opened in New York on Long Island when I was a kid, I said. And at the time, I thought it was incredible. Neil Postman’s theory from The Disappearance of Childhood come alive.
Family life was partitioned neatly by literacy. Rooms for children were beautiful and educational, but within limits; the math toys only went so far, the bookshelves were important-seeming but small. If there were televisions—what Postman describes as the trojan horses of image culture, which is eating literacy, transmitting images that anyone can react to despite age or education, breaking down any concept of hard-to-understand information that must be assimilated over time—they were carefully tucked into domestic and safe settings.
Once children grew older and more literate, they moved into the adult rooms. Duskier lighting, riskier colors, the serious desks and wide marital beds. And the adult books! They were hard-bound, gold-plated. Containing all sorts of secrets that you could only access by becoming more literate, a better reader.
The romance of it all. Unfortunately, our meal ended up being sub-par. The cafeteria was un-beautiful, garishly lit, and somehow contained no aroma or whiff of food at all. The potato cheddar cod was cough-dry, and the Swedish meatballs fell apart easily. The best things were the lingonberry jam, sharp and tart with sweet crystals, and the beautiful, floor-spanning windows that looked out at the trademark blue-and-yellow Ikea sign. Outside was a cluster of tan housing projects, Brooklyn’s largest, and further behind them, spiking upwards, the Manhattan skyline; the sky was blending its blues beautifully. And the price of the meal—the whole thing cost me $9, and the cafeteria was bubbling with people.
We searched for the exit. We entered a linen section. A bedding section passed. Then, again, the linen section. The linen section, the linen section, the linen section. We followed the signs. The right path is “Exit,” the left is “Bedding.” We took a right. The same bedding section appeared.
We were lost. The sign to “Shortcut” led to the family section. Two children walked across a kitchen table like it was a beam. Suddenly, a section for children; the long snout of a strange, spotted animal that appeared to be based on an elephant hung over a bunk bed bed. And there was an old man slumped shrimp-like into one of the round, pink children’s chairs on his phone, and two kids with their feet up on a checkered loveseat watching videos on loud. It was all upside down and wrong.
Maybe those kids were making memes. In fact, when I thought about who had probably made that two paths meme so popular… Yeah.
Later on, after about twenty minutes of circling about the store and finally escaping through a clearance in the plants section, I went to catch the free, weekend Ikea-sponsored ferry back home alone. I was seated on a solo seat between tourists and people pretending to hate tourists. My face gently roasted in the sun, basted in the humid wind.
Of course, the two paths of the famous meme are not entirely unlike Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. But a poem contains much more doubt, return, multiplicity than a meme. Frost’s narrator looks down one path, “as far as I could,” and makes the choice to take the grassier, less-trodden path merely because it seems more interesting. But then he doubles back; really, that morning, he admits, the two paths actually appeared “about the same”; maybe he’ll return to the first path another day.
Well, probably not. You know how paths are. Once you go down them, you can’t return. Eventually, he admits that the two paths are both interesting, but he’s got a story he’ll tell to people who ask. He’ll tell them, “two roads diverged in a wood, and I—took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
Well now I really want to know!! Hope part two is coming soon!!
There are few places where I experience a gulf between expectation (a practical adventure) and outcome (confused and lost) as reliably as I do at Ikea.
That said, I do like the Kallax 'cube' shelving and bookshelves.