Stories – Page 6 – Via Negativa

September 7, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Migration

Quarter till six. I’m sitting outside with my coffee and a brand new pocket notebook, in which I am writing the following words: A jet crosses the chest of Orion, dragging its roar half a sky behind it. Fog forms around me as I write, guessing at the lines, unsure of whether I have started this notebook with black or blue ink. Trucks are loud in the valley — I try to determine from the quality of the sound whether or not they are driving through thick fog.

Last night, I dreamed about finding my missing set of keys — they had been right where I usually keep them, and had simply been hiding from me each time I looked there before. Now, they were ready to be found. But other things remain lost. It seems that I am part of a group of pilgrims about to set off for New Orleans on foot, but I want to bow out and go by car instead because my glasses are in such bad shape. One of the lenses keeps popping out, and I’m afraid that if the frame breaks I won’t be able to get it repaired on the road. Even in the dream, I realize the foolishness of this anxiety. But I am quite nearsighted, and always feel terribly vulnerable without glasses.

We’re following one of New Orleans’ cemetery angels come to life, who is searching for her missing thumb and thinks that it might have been ‘borrowed’ by a hitchhiker desperate to get out of the city. Our plan: to comb the shoulders of every major road and highway between here and there. When we find the thumb, the angel will turn back to stone and will return to her station, directing traffic at the center of a vast necropolis. For now, she seems human enough — in fact, she has a bit of a pout. I want to find out if her wings smell of mildew, but she keeps her distance.

As the light strengthens, my handwritten words get smaller and straighter, falling into line. The stars fade. I hear the “wick wick wick” of migrating wood thrushes dropping down into the trees to rest and forage. They have thousands of miles yet to go. It makes me sad to think I won’t hear them sing again until next May.

September 5, 2005September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

Four nights of dream

I dream of beaten fields, whole landscapes cleansed of desire & pressed flat by an enormous iron. I start awake, not as if from a nightmare but from the ingestion of something too heavy, too incompatible with dreaming. I stumble downstairs & scan the latest headlines: people cutting holes in their attics, standing in water up to their necks. Whole towns smashed to rubble. There are rumors of bodies floating through the streets.

The next night, I dream of meeting my fetch, who resembles me in every way except that he seems to be a bit of a pedant & is not at all good-looking. We join forces to beat up my older brother, who is greatly offended. I wake to stories of gunfire & looting & the president surveying the damage from 20,000 feet.

In the following night’s dream, my nine-year-old niece gets a visit from herself as a five-year-old. They exchange spiteful words & withdraw to a safe distance, glaring. I wake & read about rapes and near-riots in the Superdome, mothers carrying dead children, children standing watch over dead grandparents, helpless to stop the bloating & the grim ministrations of rats.

Early the next morning, I find myself kneeling in my parent’s dining room beside the ghost of a young girl who grows steadily more visible as we talk. I casually touch the black skin of her arm. She feels solid, alive, she giggles & chatters like any five-year-old. “What is your name?” I ask softly. She pretends to mishear. “Her name is Lucy,” she says, holding up her blond doll. “I’m going to go stay in her house now. She lives in a big ol’ mansion on a hill with columns out front.”

My mother watches anxiously from the sofa. “Were those your parents we saw disappearing in the middle of the field?” she wonders. A look of panic crosses the girl’s face. She grips my hand tightly, & I wake. I get a shower & sit outside in a folding canvas chair under the stars, taking small sips of black coffee, then tilting my head all the way back. The Pleiades stand high overhead; Mars glimmers to their right, a bloodshot eye. Meteors flare one after the other & quickly gutter in the dark waters, whichever route they take toward the horizon. I sit breathing in the honeysuckle fragrance of wild tobacco – also called white shooting-star, after the shape of the blossoms – & listen to the crickets stuttering toward dawn.
__________

My Paul Zweig reading project is, I hope, only temporarily stalled. I have been following the news closely, for once, and busying myself with many distractions. The title here plagiarizes Natsume Soseki’s 1908 collection of linked stories translated as Ten Nights of Dream. I’d love to hear from readers who may have had similarly disturbing dreams over the past week.

May 23, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Promise

He sits solemnly across from her on the floor as she plays dress-up with her dolls, laying them out in a row, apportioning the outfits, smiling and talking to them, to him, to nobody in particular. He struggles to hide his lack of comprehension. He is eight years old, and imagines that he will be in love with her forever: not the slow grinding forever of school but the forever of summer vacation, which smells like pine trees and is always so full of promise.

Weeza weeza weeza weeza weeza. The black-and-white warbler’s song is as colorless as its name. If you listen long enough, you begin to think that it might be all the news you really need, a monotonous summary scrolling across the bottom of the screen, chanted under the breath, whistled through the teeth. It persists not so much beneath the other, more colorful calls but through them, until all songs seem mere improvisations on these two basic syllables, black and white.

To reach the ballot box, you have to cross through the line of people waiting to vote. You’ve followed the instructions and tucked the punched card back in its folder. The woman behind the box takes your ballot from you, folds and tears off the stub, and hands both back to you, one in each hand. “Keep this,” she says, “and put this in the box.” A little awkwardly then you drop your ballot through the slot, as if for a raffle. “Pick me!” you find yourself wishing as you walk away, tucking the stub carefully into the same coat pocket where you always slip the stubs from tickets to concerts, movies, ball games. Outside the polling station – a small Methodist church – the people lined up with handouts show no further interest in you. In the yard across the street, three men sit in lawn chairs drinking beer and watching the parade of voters. You’re close enough to read the brand name on the beer cans: Miller Lite. Unlike in the TV ad, the men don’t seem to harbor any strong disagreements about whether it tastes great, or is merely less filling.

Five minutes after the feral black-and-white cat trotted down the driveway, the gray squirrel still wants to talk about it. “You could always be wrong,” I mutter to no one in particular. It’s 4:00 in the afternoon. Under an overcast sky, the scent of lilac. Male and female cardinals forage quietly in the elm tree while wood thrush and rose-breasted grosbeak carry on about sex and usufruct. The sudden yank-yank of a nuthatch sounds like a stray memory from last November, when the grayness seemed as if it would go on forever.

May 4, 2005June 1, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Of dragons and princesses

My five-year-old cousin Morgan has wanted to be a princess ever since she was old enough to talk. At the wedding reception, she’s agog: the bride was right there in the bathroom! Morgan circulates among the tables telling everyone she knows in what is presumably intended to be a hushed whisper.

The princess may seem capricious, but her whims are predictable: If it moves, make it stop. If it doesn’t move, poke at it with a stick. Try stepping on it. Not enough to really kill it – just so it stops moving. Then give it a new identity, complete with a sanitized version of events. “You shouldn’t be trying to sting people, Mr. Wasp!”

At Clyde Peeling’s Reptiland we get to watch the mangrove viper eat. The keeper removes the back wall of its small green world and dangles a white corpse – a pre-killed mouse – in front of its nose. The trick rope comes alive as quick as lightning. It tries in vain to swallow the mouse tail-first, works it around in its mouth for five minutes until it ends up pointing in the right direction. Then with a sudden gulp, the mouse turns into a lump that makes the blue-black and yellow scales ripple as it moves rapidly toward the stomach. Now the viper can’t stay still: even without legs it paces, impatient for Food #2. When the keeper opens the wall this time, the snake seems ready for larger prey. The mouse does a frantic dance of death at the end of the three-foot tongs.

After the viper feeding, Morgan tugs on her mother’s sweatshirt. “Can I have a mouse, too?” Who’d have thought that mealtimes could ever be anything but a dull game played with fork and spoon? They go into the gift shop, and she picks out a plush purple frog with legs as long and bendable as snakes.

No tawdry roadside menagerie, the zoo turns out to be a real class act, dedicated to endangered species conservation and environmental education. I can’t decide whether to be pleased or disappointed. No one will ever wrestle with these alligators. We’ll never get to place bets on a match-up between the eyelash viper and the poison arrow frog. I crouch in front of the chameleon exhibit, watching crickets trying to burrow into the bark chips. The chameleon rolls its gun-turret eyes – one at me, the other at a doomed cricket.

Adults don’t come to Reptiland, it seems, unless accompanied by children. School groups thunder through like wildebeests. So important to set a good example for the children, we tell ourselves as the handler holds the boa constrictor for everyone to pet. Morgan is delighted. Only one child refuses to touch, mute with terror or intransigence. While everyone around her admires the silky-smooth scales, she stares at the hand clamped over its mouth and keeps her fingers coiled tight against her chest.

An outdoor pen contains the only token birds at Reptiland: five emus, to illustrate the link with the dinosaurs. Victorian feather dusters never looked quite so vengeful, but still… “We are not emus!” I say severely as they eye us up.

That evening we watch two cartoon movies, the world twice saved from certain cataclysm. Morgan seems bored, starts to wander off. “Sit down, watch the movie, and be good!” her father commands. During the intermission, she finds a dead ladybug in the corner of the living room, sets it on top of a block of wood and pushes it back and forth with her index finger. “Be good, ladybug!” I hear her whispering.

April 26, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Annabel Lee

“Let me trip on your face,” she said, turning the searchlights of her eyes full on me. We had each taken four tabs of acid a half-hour before.

“Talk to me. I want to watch . . . you . . . talk.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Anything . . . anything. It matters . . . not.”

“I could recite poems, I suppose. They would come to mind now, I think, if I called them.”

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

The words came back with an ease that caught me off-guard. My lips & tongue felt almost possessed.

We sat cross-legged on the floor, touching only at the knees, & as I recited she brought her face to within a foot of mine. Even with my beard, I knew that the movement of muscles in my face were giving her that dripping-candle experience she so craved. If my cheeks are the wax, where’s the flame?

She joined in on the second verse, & somehow managed to match my cadence so that we chanted in perfect synchronicity. It was beautiful, & a little frightening. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who’d had a grammar school teacher with a thing for Poe & poetry by rote.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the wingí¨d seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

Her face was changing by the second like a time-lapsed bloom. Wind scattered the petals & left the bare nib.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The poem was a mirror. Her face had turned into mine – & vice versa, I think. She reached out a hand to touch my beard, then up past my ear to my unplucked unibrow. I focused on our mouth & nostrils & eyes, that wetness, that shine. Like the sheen of oil on sand. It flashed into my mind like a news bulletin interrupting the broadcast: a tanker split up on the reef. Seabirds & sea lions black with crude in the kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me;
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

We smiled conspiratorially as we chanted these lines. Our Blakean heaven was empty except for the two of us; the sexless angels circled their hive, sure we meant to raid it – the source of all sweetness. When we got to the words chilling and killing, our lips tingled with thaumaturgic power. To have said is to have done: the night-tripper’s incommunicable discovery. You have to have been there. In fact, you have to have been us.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we,
Of many far wiser than we;
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

Which one of us was the first to weep, I wonder? Perhaps there, too, we were synchronized swimmers. I saw wave after wave washing oil-slicked bodies up on shore as seagulls wheeled overhead, calling & calling. Poe’s necromance conjured up a rocky headland with a stone tower where one light burned, & not merely to ward off ships. I heard Robinson Jeffers, too, above the surf: Humanity is needless. The waters coursed down the cliffs of her face, my face. Her mouth was a cave full of tidal surge, a sea anemone with drowned hair, beseeching arms. Annabel Lee. Lorelei. We had become like the angels, now – unsexed. The whole moist & messy business of life seemed increasingly abstract.

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling–my darling–my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

We were breathing, I suddenly realized, in waltz time now. Slow as sleepwalkers came the last four lines, all in a whisper. We lay down as they commanded, hungry only for visions, eye to eye. The body is almost all audience, I thought, in this thing called worship.

April 25, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Etiologies

Sharp-lobed hepatica

A small fear sprouted in my gut right before bed. A misgiving, really.

I argued with it. Tried to shout it down.

I read to it – dull stories set in distant lands.

Go to sleep, I crooned. Daddy needs to rest.

It made a nest for itself & curled up, with evident contentment.

But six hours later it jostled me awake, hungry, restless. I stumbled out of bed.

Showered & caffeinated, I decided to look into the origins of this fear: utterly groundless.

But in its place a new & larger fear rose up.

That’s just the way I am, she says, pouring another drink.

I was always afraid of clocks. Something so constant & tireless has no business measuring time, I thought.

Sometime around the age of five or six I decided to have a staring contest with the old-fashioned wind-up clock in the living room. I wanted to see just how long an hour really was, what it felt like to live each one of those sixty minutes in turn.

Because, on the one hand, a minute wasn’t very long, and sixty wasn’t very many.

On the other hand, an hour did still seem to possess considerable length and heft. A day, with sixteen waking hours in it, could last almost forever.

On the third hand – which is really the second hand – a minute might last as long as an hour, since it too had sixty parts. And what would happen if one further subdivided the second?

But that clock didn’t measure seconds. I watched its large, round, brass pendulum swing back and forth, focusing on each tick and tock.

Twenty-some minutes into the hour, the pendulum stopped.

I’ve been inhabiting that same hour ever since.

Whenever my sister & I acted up, she says, Father would tell us to go play in traffic. Sometimes we did.

My mother was horrified. She’d come running out to get us.

Fortunately, it was a small, country road. There weren’t very many cars.

We both got our drivers’ licenses as soon as we could.

Sometimes on rainy days my mother would tell us boys to pretend we were going swimming at the park.

“I don’t hear any thunder,” she’d say. “Why don’t you put on your swimming trunks & run around outside?”

And we would. “Look mommy, I’m swimming!” We were easily amused.

The front lawn turned into the bottom of a lake. We tilted our heads back, drank from the sky.

Dry towels waited on the verandah, now a beach.

In this way I learned about immersion, that it doesn’t necessarily require leaving home.

The first time I ever had sex, she says, I was with one of my brother’s friends, on the back of his Harley. I was thirteen. My breasts never did grow any bigger than they were then.

American beeches

I remember my pre-pubescent years as a time of less focused sexuality.

Erections would come & go for no discernable reason.

The so-called facts of life I learned at the tender age of seven – I was a farm kid, remember – but they made little impression.

I developed innocent crushes on boys as well as girls, which were no less passionate for not having any apparent goal.

In Second Grade, I liked a pair of twin girls. They were fraternal twins, but looked similar enough that I couldn’t tell them apart: short, lively, dark-haired, with adorable dimples whenever they laughed, which was often.

I made the mistake of confiding in one of my closest friends, who immediately ran to tell the twins. I was mortified.

One of them came over. “Which one of us do you like?” she asked.

“He was lying,” I said, staring at my feet.

“Are you sure?”

“YES!”

After that, I learned not to confide in anyone.

Sometimes, I don’t even tell myself.

The day we moved into our new place in South Carolina, I went out into the back yard & walked right into a spider web.

It was enormous.

The sticky silk got all over my arms & in my hair, & as I was trying to get it off me, this huge, hairy spider ran right down under my blouse.

I screamed.

But for some reason I can’t recall, no else was around. I went into hysterics.

It probably only lasted a few seconds, but it seemed like forever.

I still clutch up whenever I think of anything hairy & soft against my skin.

Somehow the deep, clear lakes we once knew have grown shallow & murky with silt.

Did this start with puberty? I can’t remember.

Whenever I’m around children, I try to mind my tongue & remember how far out the ripples can travel.

But sometimes, God help me, I do forget.

Once, during the worst time, when we were going though family counseling, my father took us to a lake up in the mountains.

It was nothing planned. We grabbed the picnic basket & some towels & hit the road.

My parents liked to think of themselves as being spontaneous – they were hippies, after all – but in fact we almost never did anything just for fun.

My father & I were just learning how to talk to each other again. We walked a little ways down the shore, just the two of us, to where there were a lot of flat stones.

He picked one up, weighed it in his hand for a second, then sent it skipping out across the water.

I was entranced. I’d never seen anyone skip a stone before.

He picked up another one. This time, he counted the skips: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight!

I joined in halfway through the counting.

“One for every year of your life,” he said.

I let him hold my hand to show me the proper angle & motion of wrist & finger, that little flick.

I held my breath and jerked my hand forward. The stone spun off my index finger.

One, two, three, four, five on my very first try!

“Look out for the lilies!” he laughed.

I felt my mother’s gaze on us from the beach.

She was my Tara, he was my Dharmapala. Is it any wonder I grew up to be a Buddhist?

Logging slash (probably red maple) at the edge of a forest road

April 21, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

City of joy

[S]he sold beer by the single bottle alone. She gave you a bottle, you gave her a shilling. She gave you another bottle, you gave her another shilling.
Abdul-Walid

“What am I?” Only asking this question and letting go of the cycle of chasing after outside things means to cut off all our craving. When we do that, what happens?
Ditch the Raft

It was not immediately obvious – least of all to me – that I was a student. My immediate memories were of a bridge over a raging flood and the mountain beyond, which was and was not the mountain I return to every evening. The cliff face had turned to water; how would I get past it? And the man who walked beside me, whom I kept addressing as my friend – imagine my surprise when there in the middle of the bridge he asked for my money at knifepoint. Even as I refused, I felt the sadness and futility of it. Why couldn’t I just hand everything over – my wallet, the shirt off my back – down to my shoes and wristwatch? We tangled; it was no contest. But imagine, I thought, if I could just let the knife pierce and sever as it wished.

He seemed ready for another round, so I fled into the waterfall of glass. Ladders and catwalks, trapdoors and trapezes: up I went. It’s not that my fear of heights ever left me, but that, having escaped from a friend with a knife, it suddenly didn’t matter any more. If I fall, I thought, my bones will break – but wouldn’t that be interesting? There was a view from the top, about which I remember nothing. It was getting late. I should go back, or I’d miss the last bus of the evening.

The P.A. system crackled with my name, repeated once, as is the style with in-store announcements. I heard “Go to -” and the rest was unintelligible. Maybe over here?

I entered a small theater where ashen-faced young men sweated and groaned: a place, I quickly realized, where varying kinds of bodily pain were administered to the occupants of every seat, increasing in intensity as one gravitated toward the empty stage. It seemed odd that there weren’t any women; the room had the ambiance of a video arcade in hell.

I tried one seat after another, watching my limbs twitch with a detachment that surprised me. In one seat I felt myself frozen; in another I was scalded; in a third, currents of electricity made me seize up like an engine with sugar in its crankcase. I remembered how I used to enjoy the electric shock tank in the Japanese public baths, how I would move closer and closer to the metal panel in the side of the tub until, at six inches away, my body refused to obey the commands of my brain any longer. Now I had eliminated that last six inches. It wasn’t so bad, really.

But at length I realized this wasn’t getting me any closer to home. I wandered out into the street and someone wearing a police or military uniform immediately began speaking into his walkie-talkie. “Why did you go in there?” he accosted me. “You weren’t supposed to take that course!” I explained how I hadn’t understood the announcement, and besides, I really just wanted to catch a bus. “No time for that now,” he said.

As I started up a gentle flight of stairs, a strange creature sprouted from the ground behind me. It was humanoid, maybe eighteen inches tall, with bulging eyes and many sharp teeth. Without thinking, I grabbed a halberd from the wall and split it down the middle, then severed it at the waist for good measure. But as I watched, its severed parts rejoined each other and it stuck out its tongue. I stared in awe. Don’t you want to learn how to do this, it seemed to be saying. Well, yes, I did. Then keep moving.

I opened another door – or rather, it grew thin and disappeared as I drew near. Inside, it looked like a literal body shop, or a spare parts warehouse. Animated heads floated in space, legs danced, arms reached out to shake my hand. Over there was the Cheshire cat’s grin. A voice spoke, and for a moment I puzzled over which body or body part it belonged to, before realizing that all questions of belonging and identity were moot. “We’ve never had a student here who also passed the endurance course,” it said. “We had always thought that the two were mutually exclusive.”

“So I guess I get to be the guinea pig,” I heard myself say, realizing all of a sudden just what lay behind that common and innocent-sounding cliché. It would be a relief not to feel tied to one body any longer, I thought. I took a deep breath. The air still smelled of rain.

March 21, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Stars and stripes

1. Burn, baby, burn

I remember the one and only time I participated in a flag burning. It was in the early 1990s, shortly after the Supreme Court struck down the Flag Protection Act of 1989. I was living in State College at the time. A fellow line cook at the diner where I worked – we’ll call him Rob – told me he needed some extras for his senior film project, and with my stereotypical hippie appearance at the time (long hair, beard, ratty clothes), I guess I fit the bill. He and his crew were making some sort of documentary that included recording people’s reactions to the public incineration of an American flag. The first time they tried it, he said, the mock demonstration was abruptly terminated when someone stomped out the flames and ran off with the flag.

My role was to act like an interested bystander. We gathered at the time specified – early in the afternoon, I think – right in front of the Allen Street entrance to Penn State’s University Park campus. There were plenty of people on the streets and on campus; it was between classes. Rob showed up with a three-foot-long flag and a can of gasoline. The cameraman and soundman took up their positions, and with very little ceremony, Rob stuck the flag in a little tripod stand, dribbled some gasoline on it, and struck a match. It caught immediately.

In just a few seconds, a hostile crowd formed on the other side of the street and began to make threatening noises. A huge man dressed in camouflage fatigues – an ROTC student, I guess – came racing down Old Main lawn, leaped the wall, kicked over the flag, stomped out the fire, and ran off with flag and stand before anyone had time to react. The crowd cheered. Then suddenly another big guy was looming over me, bellowing something along the lines of, “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING BURNING OUR COUNTRY’S FLAG?” He was nearly incoherent with rage, but it was hard not to catch his drift. I reacted with great courage and aplomb. “I didn’t burn it!” I said. “WELL, WHO DID?”

Fortunately, a genuine radical, with genuine guts, had showed up on his mountain bike just as the flag burning started. “I helped!” he lied. Much to my relief, the big guy turned his ire on this other longhair, who did his best to engage him in a debate about the First Amendment without getting creamed. Rob was happy. Not only did they get some better footage this time, he said, but it made the results of their first experiment seem like less of a fluke. “People will actually break the law and steal a flag to prevent its owner from burning it,” he marveled.

A better way to put it, I think, is that once aflame, a flag ceases to be someone’s private property and becomes pure symbol. As anthropologist Victor Turner once pointed out (The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, Cornell University Press, 1967), symbols are both highly charged emotionally and deeply ambiguous. Unlike a sign, which stands for a known thing, a symbol escapes complete comprehension by those who employ it. In a ritual context, Turner maintained, symbols mediate between two poles of meaning: one social and normative, the other sensory and affective. Symbols allow “norms and values… [to] become saturated with emotion, while the gross and basic emotions become ennobled through contact with social values. The irksomeness of moral constraint is transformed into a ‘love of virtue.'”

In the case of flag burning, ambiguity characterizes the ritual as well as the symbol. The U.S. flag code prescribes incineration as the best way to dispose of a flag. (U.S. Code Title 36, Chapter 10, Section 176 (k): “The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.”) Thus, intention is everything; to criminalize flag burning would be tantamount to punishing people for thinking the wrong thoughts. The paradox becomes two-fold, because freedom of expression is so central to our sense of who we are as Americans. This is probably just about the only area where flag burning patriots and flag stealing patriots can find common ground: both would agree on the centrality of freedom.

Regardless of one’s intentions, consigning a flag to flames betrays a passionate engagement with both of Turner’s poles of symbolic meaning. Those of us who are prone to second-guessing – wondering, Pilate-like, “What is freedom?” – have a hard time siding with either brand of patriot. Why do they have to take themselves so damn seriously, anyway? I don’t deny the value of symbols and rituals, but I think it’s essential to keep them in perspective. In a less regulated, more festive context, symbol-laden ritual tends to alternate with bouts of unrestrained laughter. Religion has gone downhill ever since they wrote the clowns out of the myths and out of the ceremonies.

2. Magic carpet

Last Sunday morning my buddy L. and I found ourselves sitting in a parking lot in front of a dollar store somewhere south of Orbisonia, Pennsylvania watching an immense flag rippling in the breeze, backlit by the sun. Neither of us is particularly prone to nationalistic sentiments, and if I had been alone, I’m sure I never would have succumbed to the temptation to pull off the road for the sole purpose of admiring an American flag. But L. had insisted, and since she was driving, that’s what we did – and it was wonderful.

I’ve seen bigger flags, but rarely on short enough flagpoles for one to fully appreciate them. As we watched – completely straight and sober, but feeling more stoned by the minute – the flag seemed intent on demonstrating some elemental principle of travel. It became a country unto itself, complete with its own square of sky. Slow waves of wind beginning out among the stars found endless inventive ways to pass through the striped field, the alternating strips of crop and fallow following the contours of a land continually in flux, like a plowman’s dream of dancing deep in the soil.

Travelers pursue similar fantasies, I think, in regard to the road: that we can dispense with an intermediary and ride it like a magic carpet. Unlike rivers, roads can take us anywhere and everywhere. When we think about individual freedom, we think most often about freedom of movement; riding the parallel highways scored across the American heartland, we dream of blasting off into the stars. It is this fantasy, I think, that has spawned our American love affair with the automobile, with such disastrous consequences for air and weather and unfragmented wildlands.

And as a matter of fact, the flag my friend and I were ogling last Sunday was the mascot of an automobile dealership. The sign said Patriotic Chevrolet. Of course, one can argue about how patriotic the car cult really is. But if Turner is right, that a symbol derives much of its power from hidden or unknown meanings, then presumably all sorts of fantasies contribute to the flag’s powerful hold on our imaginations.

But none of this crossed my mind at the time. I was simply enjoying watching the wind play with a large piece of brightly patterned, translucent fabric. A flag, like any beautiful thing, is always more than mere sign or symbol. Even before it becomes something in which we can invest meaning and emotion, it entrances us by giving shape to moving air – the original and nearly universal template for what we call spirit. A kite can do the same, of course, or a poplar tree, or a field full of swaying grass. They return us to the waters of our birth. We long for immersion in the medium far more than in the message.

3. Going with the flow

Little has been written about the sheer sensuality of a flag in flames. The appeal of a campfire is nearly universal, and what can be more mesmerizing than staring into a fireplace? For any flag with as much red on it as the Stars and Stripes has, “fire” must already be numbered among its covert meanings. Our bellicose national anthem’s central image is of a tattered American flag lit up by a nighttime battle – “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” and so forth.

If a flag first attracts and holds our attention because of the way it gives shape to the invisible, all-pervasive flow, setting fire to it makes the connection literal. When the smoke and flames disappear, the flag disappears with them. But has it really been destroyed – or simply translated into the realm of the invisible and the eternal?

Symbols may not permit outright destruction, but they can die from neglect, or suffer slow perversion. The U.S. Code attempts to forestall the latter by, for example, prohibiting the flag’s use in advertising. I wonder what the reaction of that “Patriotic Chevrolet” dealer would’ve been if we had stopped in and informed him that his use of a flag, far from demonstrating patriotism, put him in direct violation of the flag code?

My (in)actions at that mock flag burning years ago were not among my proudest moments, and I did my best to forget the whole incident. But a few months later, I found out from a film-buff friend that I had been the star of Penn State’s annual airing of student films, the Can Film Festival. “That was the funniest thing in the whole festival!” he enthused. “A bunch of us recognized you right away, just standing there off to the side. I was like, ‘Hey, it’s Bonta!’ Then that fuckin’ Nazi got right in your face. I didn’t burn it!” he mimicked. “Everyone just about shit themselves! It was awesome.”

March 16, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

A likely story

A light rain is falling outside the offices of the National Chamber of Converse, where the current occupant of the position known only to the Secret Service as POTUS has convened a special meeting with his cabinet of curiosities. A pair of common or English sparrows is busy mating on a high ledge. The male hops on and off at three-second intervals, unseen by anybody but the omniscient narrator.

I know you won’t be surprised to hear that the streets below host an obstreperation of demonstrators. They wave signs printed in yesterday’s newspapers’ Franklin Gothic, sable, with exclamation points rampant dexter. “NO DEPOSIT, NO RETURN!” they trumpet, and “NO REST FOR THE WEARY!” The briefer messages seem to be the most popular: “NO OUTLET!” “NO SHIT!” And of course, “NO WAY!”

A flat-chested man in a suit of clothes is trying to push his way through to the entrance, without success. It’s as if he isn’t even there.

The usual small knot of counter-demonstrators tries to make up for its lack of numbers with an unconvincing show of outrage. Their problem is, they don’t actually believe in outrage. Let your hypothetical camera zoom in for a close-up of a telegenically tall, clean-shaven woman chanting into a megaphone, “Chill. Chill. Chill. Chill. Chill,” as her comrades brandish their crudely lettered signs: “Hold Everything.” “Beg to Differ.” “Word.” “Consider the Source.”

“Consider the lilies of the field,” says an argumentative cop. He’s been spending the past week investigating a pedophilia case, and frankly, he’s feeling a little testy. What’s the use of all their new high-tech, non-lethal riot-control gear if they never get a chance to use it? Homeland Security is more interested in radical sheiks than radical chic. “What is it with you people, anyway?” he wants to know.

For her part, the female sparrow is beginning to think she wouldn’t mind a quiet life out in the country somewhere – or failing that, at least a crumb from a crumpet. Unbeknownst to her, her erstwhile paramour has just managed to fly straight into a window, and is lying dazed on the sidewalk. The clean-shaven woman notices him and stops her chant, bending down for a closer look.

“What is it?” “What’s wrong?” The other counter-demonstrators stop brandishing for a moment and crowd in. She lifts the sparrow in cupped hands and, seeing its nictitating membranes raise their curtains, begins to sing to it. She has a classically trained soprano voice; it carries clear across the street to where the flat-chested man stands stock-still, listening to a lullaby he hasn’t heard in thirty years, ever since his youngest sibling graduated from the high chair with flying colors.

The moon’s the north wind’s cookie, the babe is in the forest green and all that. In a few minutes, the sparrow will recover well enough to fly away, fly away, oh glory! – even mate with a few more partners before the blood clot in his brain finally finishes him off. No one will be around when that happens, but fortunately his heavenly father keeps an eye out for just that sort of thing. Or so they say.

The cops will receive contradictory orders on whether to try out their new, fresh-ground black pepper spray. The demonstration will turn ugly and begin looking for someplace to take a leak. A man holding his pants up with a strip of cured hide from a large herbivore will take a turn at the megaphone while the clean-shaven woman lets the flat-chested man buy her a double latté at a nearby coffee shop. They will sit at the counter, where she will use several napkins and a black felt marker to outline her theory about how negative growth is the engine of the gift economy.

She is, after all, a counter-demonstrator.
__________

Tomorrow: Her outline.

February 28, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

The bait

The working class couple at their first symphonic concert did not realize that they were paying to see a man dressed like a penguin dance with the upper half of his body. The woman likes it; the man isn’t so sure. “The music is always a half-second too slow,” he will complain during the intermission. What neither of them needs to say is that dancing is a thing for couples. During the slow movements, he puts an arm around her shoulders. When the tempo picks up, he folds his arms across his chest.

No talking or even whispering is allowed, and who the hell can tell when you’re supposed to clap? This is like being in an art museum – you don’t know how to act and everyone can tell that you don’t belong. If it’s not about feeling good and having fun, what’s the point, then? This whole thing is obviously enormously complex and requires something beyond a 12th-grade education to understand, he thinks. But the woman is impressed by the sense of something handed down essentially intact from the days when men dressed up for an ordinary night out on the town and women piled their hair on top of their heads and wore fancy gowns and all theaters looked just like this – dark green walls and gold leaf gleaming like an endless summer. She likes the quiet parts, the silences where no one claps, the lack of amplification. She is used to listening for what’s down deep, rather than simply paying attention to the ripples on the surface.

It’s like the way church used to be when she was a kid. She understands that the conductor is not performing for them; he is a servant to the music, which he merely shapes and draws out of the orchestra, out of the score in front of him the same way the priest used to pull meaning out of the Bible when it was all still in Latin. Every movement of his hand means something different. Watching him, she feels as if she can see a little ways into the future – a timeless place where nothing happens until we arrive, which we never quite manage to do this side of the grave. Something holy and even magical is taking place, like with the wine and the wafers.

When the on-stage lights go out three minutes into the third movement of the first piece on the program, no one seems especially upset. The conductor lowers his arms and the music stops almost immediately. He bows his head. The audience is absolutely silent with the surprise of it, staring into the darkness where the black-suited musicians have virtually disappeared. The light from the exits catches the polished wood of violins and violas dropping from chins to laps, like fish glimpsed at the bottom of a pond moments after you realize that something has taken the bait cleanly off the hook.