Riddles of Wallpaper
- “Is grafitti protected by copyright law?”
Let me clarify something first - I am not referring to gang ‘tagging’ or even graffiti street art, but those enigmatic and sometimes outrageously crass messages in public spaces. At the same time, I am trying to guard my writing here from the potential to become something of an elitist, academic platform from which great meaning is made from unmeaning. Frankly put, inspiration arises in spontaneous ways and I will forever jump at the first opportunity to grasp it.
Before I read a cleverly written piece by a classmate in Advanced Creative Writing (please excuse the pretentious title), I never really thought to pay much attention to toilet door graffiti. I doubt anybody has ever mustered the courage to ring that mobile number (”Call for a good time”) and find out who it is, to meet in that cubicle at the time it professes some (”secret, illicit”) operation is supposed to occur or to speculate the potential clue of a missing person left by an unscrupulous offender (”Victim was here”).
Embedded in that raging kaleidoscope of text messily scrawled in liquid paper or etched in with the chisel point of a Stanley knife, there might just be a subtle hint of desperation or a genuine plea for help. What if you gathered enough oxygen tanks and masks to withstand the atrocious stench of public toilets, equipped yourself with a writing pad and pen and furiously scribed the messages on the walls?
I’m quite impressed that my classmate armed herself with enough impartiality to extract some coherent meaning from those sentences and ultimately arrived at a kind of narrative form - a first-person, confessional recount of those individuals who practise their message scrawling in often shrewd and clandestine ways. I must admit though that I was thoroughly convinced for the better part of the story that I was reading the unfolding of Multiple Personality Disorder or perhaps some kind of schizophreniform disorder, characterised by what clinicians love to call ‘episodes’ and ‘occurences’ as if they are some once-only phenomenological experience.
Perhaps this is all just a silly musing; after all, the weather is unseasonably warm and carries a note of nostalgia reminiscent of post-high school holidays in the long wait for university acceptance and the endless anxiety to do something constructive and meaningful beyond the drudgery of the academic sphere. Perhaps those toilet door scrawlings are a manifestation of the same anxiety and eerile sensation of utter isolation that I experience in the summer holidays where there’s nothing “planned” to do except go to work and find the motivation and energy for a place to slot in social functions.
We each of us have our ways of combatting the long-holiday blues; I just hope that the upcoming summer won’t be another long-haul of reclusiveness, composing discordant messages in my posts.
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