The Eddie Finch paradox.

Have you heard of Mr. Finch? 

Nobody actually calls him like that, of course. He's Eddie for most students and professors. For the lucky enough to earn his disdain, he's just Finch. Just as his name suggests, his appearance is much like the small bird. Bulging eyes, square glasses, a hunch on his back, a mop of blond hair. According to the school program, he was supposed to teach us literature, but even now I'm still not quite sure what the class was about. Some days it was hour-long monologues about the way cameras moved behind actors, others it was about simmering in frustration over a government no one wishes to touch. He might not have been a patient tutor or a tutor at all. He might not have even liked us (I know for a fact he didn't, we were huge brats at the time and he was never afraid to voice his opinion). But the man was a whirlwind, a pileus. In words of the immortal John Mulaney, "He was the weirdest goddamn person I ever saw in my entire life".

Full of oddly specific opinions and idiosyncrasies, Finch paraded around a classroom full of entitled 15-year-olds and showered us with the wisdom you'd find inside a drunkard's mouth or a fortune cookie. His moods were as eccentric as his shirts. He was prone to melancholy and more than once left the classroom in a fit of rage. But on the days he felt like life was worth a dime. Oh, you'd want to see him then. The man sizzled with passion, exploded into a million sparks of something akin to, but that wasn't quite, hope. He was a monster put together with mismatched freedom speeches, protest songs, surrealist 80's movies. Finch breathed and moved like art in its purest, most pointless form. Void of any real purpose, enthralled by the mundane and the extravagant, speaking in tongues we were too afraid to listen to. In those moments he was the orchestra, and Leonard Bernstein raising the baton. He was the original sin, as well as the disgraced soul who in the process of biting an apple, created the first fuck-up in history. Both art and artist, and the irony born from trying to separate them. He was exclamation point, he was neon light, he was little town revolutionary. 

Finch was inspiring as an amalgamation of every hurting, disappointed, and perhaps misunderstood artist I've been taught (I know, I know. Happy artists exist. But this one is not about them, so don't get worked up over it). In the movement of his hands, in his long monologues, I found big names (Bob Dylan, Whitman, Buñuel). But the smaller names, those intrigued me far more. Names that won't go down in history, will burn as quick as they were lit up. Those stuck inside alleys in conventions, inside notebooks that will be thrown away or inside a first fanfiction. Names that are cinder as much as they're gunpowder. Names that I'll never know and neither will the world. 

And perhaps on a more important note (the cynic lenses of art are silently pried away, the show lights are shut down. It's all quieter once you look past the mask, isn't it?), Finch was much more than what fits inside me. He was wonderfully, shamelessly, painfully human.

"Well, I'm just one of those assholes that only complain but do nothing to change the situation," he confessed between laughs once. 

"I wasn't any good at school at your age. And now? Now I haven't got the brains to learn anything anymore,"

"Please don't handle any legal businesses in my class, it gives me a headache to see people your age speak like congressmen," 

And my favourite one, "I hoped for more, from all of you... I'll see you next year, then" And it was neither caring nor funny, but even then there was a flicker of naivety. Not quite hope, but close. I couldn't help but make a face and laugh. Not many people believed in us those days. Not that we gave them much to believe in. Bunch of stuck-up cherubs. Bunch of bottled-up devils. A joke on everyone before or after us.

And yet, as lost and helpless as everyone seemed to be in the classroom, as much of a sleep paralysis of a year that was, Eddie Finch always rose up with the right words to inspire something, somewhere inside me (and once the play is over and I'm alone behind closed curtains, I dare to call it hope).