Biggest Hater: Stairs Edition
The most disturbingly relatable thing I read in 2024.
My personal literacy rate plummeted in 2024. I read a lot of essays, articles, and online what-have-yous, but I did not read many books. I started saying one word when I meant to say another at a troubling rate: it seemed like every day, I’d turn to my husband and say “Cozy?” when I meant to say his name, Cody. I spent a lot of time on Reddit searching for answers about my various ailments — some were entirely imagined (see previous sentence) and others were increasingly distressing (debilitating joint pain in my knees).
I experience the pain in my knees most sharply when I am ascending or descending stairs. Annoyingly, house has two sets of pretty steep stairs (oh, how the charming brick row home life quickly loses its charm in the face of this dynamic!) If you live in a fifth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn, don’t be nasty to me, okay? My heart goes out to you, you are stronger than the troops, etc.
And so we arrive at something I cannot stop thinking about: Kanye West’s desire to outlaw stairs. Yes, outlaw. Kanye’s been powerfully wrong about many things in the last five-to-twenty years…but the stair ban sort of sends me. Arguably the most intellectually challenging text I read in my year of rest and resignation, Ian Parker’s New Yorker piece on Kanye’s destruction of a one-of-a-kind Tadao Ando home offers us a truly stunning look at the consequences of this anti-stair crusade. Here, Parker lays out the case of West v. Stairs:
He had bought a house designed by an architect with a history of staircase panache. The Big Ando has a dazzling, thirty-six-foot-wide outdoor staircase on which you could reënact “Battleship Potemkin.” But, in 2023, a lawsuit brought by former teachers at the Donda Academy, which shut down soon after it opened, claimed that Ye had discouraged the use of the second floor—because he was “afraid of stairs.” That may not be true, but he certainly had no regard for stairs. On what may be the only occasion when Ye has publicly mentioned events at Malibu Road, he told a pair of podcasters that he was “really big on outlawing stairs,” adding, “Everything should be designed like an old folks’ home.”
“Afraid of stairs.” “No regard for stairs.” “Really big on outlawing stairs.”
These phrases run through my mind all day. Occassionally, “everything should be designed like an old folks’ home” joins the endless loop. My god, what sentences! They bring to mind many questions such as: “what?” and “wait, what?” and most importantly “what do you MEAN?!”
I should amend the previous sentence to say that they may bring many questions to your mind. On the contrary, the above passage — and the many beautiful phrases with which it left me — does not leave me with any inquiries. I’m afraid that it only leaves me feeling seen. It leaves me peaceful. In it I find myself tremendously understood.
This is an unfortunate truth, but it is nonetheless my truth: I have no regard for stairs because I am quite afraid of stairs, and I am indeed…really big on outlawing stairs.
My fear of stairs is not a phobia. I do not cower at the sight of stairs. I bravely ascend and descend stairs every day. But I would be lying to you, dear reader, if I said that stairs do not provoke in me a thrumming anxiety. Every morning before I descend my first stairs of the day, I prepare like an Olympic diver about to throttle themselves into the air: I shake out my limbs, I take deep breaths, and I attempt in vain to clear my mind. I then step onto the stairs and enjoy a symphony of crunching sounds created by my cartilage-deficient knees (‘crepitus’ is the term for that, which is a fun word, and it can be totally harmless except when it’s not).
There’s a mountain of research about chronic pain that pretty much amounts to “even when the source of your pain is real, the anxiety that you develop around things that trigger your pain….yeah, that causes pain too.” I’m not going to link to studies that prove my point — you heard me when I said I was illiterate, right? — but just trust me. And so sometimes I meditate on stairs. I look at great works of art that contain stairs. I think about staircases that I love. I imagine myself as that cunty little nude descending Duchamp’s staircase, or as Monica Vitti being oggled by a town full of Luigi Mangione’s in L’Avventura. I try to develop warm feelings towards stairs, or at least I try to cultivate neutrality.
But on my worst days, I wake up in pain and I worry about my body’s future and I cry. And then I think of turning all of the stairs in the world into…ramps? Slides? Beginner rock climbing gym walls? And I suppose it’s then that I am able to smile in the face of senseless destruction, able to dream in spite of it all.
laughing, loving, and living for your art