Death Cartography
Here is an admission offered in welcome:
I would not and have not kept a promise to the dead, my principal (but not sole) argument being that he-or-she is dead, no longer breathing and willing to cause shame at the abandonment of the original promise. This has always run the gamut, theoretically, from-I will pay you back the five dollars you let me borrow in 1983, to-I will avenge you and guard your wife’s chastity for as long as I live. This is, in my more glowing visions of philosophical aptitude, like everything else, negotiable, cosmically or not, depending on your own received tradition and/or mental backlash from received tradition. Negotiability, in turn, or at least my reliance on it, is that thing that makes me feel American.
And so there’s that.
I can remember this one time I held a button. This tiny blue shirt button, with the four holes and high indent around the edges-pacer rims, I think we called them, though we may not have called them that at all; truth be told, it’s possible we never even acknowledged the seemingly incomprehensible pizza crust edges of shirt buttons (though, it strikes me now that the possibility of those rims being in some way conducive to the button/buttonhole bond ranges anywhere from fair to high). I would pull them. Or, perhaps, we would pull them, my brother and my sister and I, from a mason jar on a porch that was two long doors down from my grandmother; from our collective grandmother. We would hold them up to the sunshine or to the pecan trees looming over her poorly shingled roof and see different pecans and different shafts of light as we shifted those blue buttons from hole to hole to hole to hole. For each blue button, there were four more ways to look at the sky or the trees or the world, and we would place our football game or our Chutes and Ladders or our spin-the-bottle carefully under the table, trading them in for perspective games in the shining sun. [This, I can now say with relative ease, was before we were each knocked flat by the information that the part was not less than the whole-that there were just as many odd numbers on the infinite planet earth as there were numbers themselves. Such as the infinite sunshine or pecans that came dripping off those trees two doors down from our collective grandmother. (And, while I’m at it, I should mention that grandmothers, too, drift on to infinity, as do porches and the memories of former children who are now adults who’ve had all their expectations amputated.)] For some reason, a reason that I couldn’t begin to explain without a substantial field trip to Jung’s house, or maybe a trip to the zoo with the aforementioned thinker, me listening out of one ear as I watched the monkeys and he waxed on about the relationship between dream and memory, I always preferred the top left. The top left! Can you imagine? And I suppose you are wondering where in the hell is he going with the blue buttonholes and the dinner date with a noted Swiss psychologist?
Three things:
(1) Right you are for asking. (2) Your patience is overwhelming. (3) As I turned around. Or, as I and my brother and my sister turned around from finding interesting parts in the great and interesting whole, we placed those blue buttons back into a jar that was full of blue buttons. Blue buttons! Which, I’m sure you can now imagine, raises some profound questions about the nature of leisure time and the nature of perspective, which in turn raise some pretty rip-roaring questions about all those breeding, featherless bipeds known to the scientifically minded among us as homo sapiens.
Let’s start with color. No, never mind. Let’s start with the nature of collecting: What sort of person becomes so narrowly defined in his or her collecting habits as to find blue buttons and only blue buttons worthy of grouping together in a porch-bound Mason jar? And, let me admit, there were shades of blue. Shades, however, we’re just going to define out of our paradigm from point-flipping-A. When one goes to work, or goes to the supermarket, or goes around the house organizing and cleaning and doing the various etcetera of daily life, one arrives at a point in the day when one says, "Time for a break. Time for a release from this drudgery we call life. I think I’ll do that thing that gives me a perceived reason for being, even though my perception is probably off and I have absolutely no reason for being." You would suppose, or, my brother and I would suppose-against the theory of my sister, which will be presented in due time-that one would engage in some creative act. Even collecting can be creative, in the pieces chosen worthy of collection, in the themes and nuance of linear attributes, and in methods of display and presentation. So, narrowing the creative act to collecting (eliminating such wonderful others as art or literature or exercise or competitive eating, et al.), there is ample range for offering your private world something substantial. The porch two doors down from our collective grandmother displayed one of three things, only left for us now, twenty-eight short years later, to speculate as to the validity of interpretation: (1) a strict reductionist theorist obviously attempted, in those moments in between moments, to distill collecting to its essence-essentially arguing that the endgame of collecting was the distillation of an idea to the contents of a display case, and that the endgame of display cases was a container for the product of the distillation of corn whiskey. In this, if in fact this was the case, said reductionist was wholly effective. (2) That the collector was so existentially broken by the aforementioned chores (i.e., work, supermarket, cleaning) that collecting had become a chore in itself-that it had somehow made its way into the same synapse-fire as work and the ever-loving supermarket, and was thus given all the care and concern of a bowl of jelly beans or a used tissue.
I perform the familiar paragraph stop after the second possible collecting cause, because the third, at the time, was roundly rejected by both my brother and myself. My sister, however, clung to it like grim death, which, in turn, clung to her just one year later. She succumbed, buttonless, to that great ominous thing that poets irresponsibly refer to as romantic, and so her theory, regardless of its condition of absurdity, I will mention now as a memorial-an inky belated tombstone ribboned with blue buttons and the thrill and weight of childhood regret. So, (3) The sparseness of the collection indicated not sorrow with life, but such an all-consuming presence in each received moment that collecting, or a release of any sort, was and could only be secondary to the liquid joy that surrounded the collector-a liquid joy my brother and I found to be anathema and, in childhood parlance, "stupid." My brother, in what my fourth grade mind assumed at the time to be a faultless rebuttal, responded thusly: "To say that, Katie, is to take away from my baseball cards and army figurines. It’s to take away from your pinwheels and rocks, each named, painted, and displayed so nicely on your bedroom shelf. We are awash in youthful exuberance, unfettered from the concerns of office drudgery or untenable shopping lists, and yet we collect." This, you’ll allow, is a paraphrase. But his concise closing remarks are not: "That’s just stupid, Katie." And so the argument against Kate was essentially one of agency. Were we, in fact, the actors or the acted upon? (And, parenthetically, I should briefly explain my removal of the ‘i’ from the name "Katie" in the unquoted passage. We called Katie Katie because we knew her as such, but I assume, as does my brother, that if Katie had in fact reached maturity-had in fact grown, gone out into the world to find her own office drudgery, adorned most likely in a business suit festooned with blue buttons-she would have preferred the more terse variant of her given name, Katherine. As evidence, I offer this anecdote: Whenever Kate was asked by an ignorant inquisitor if she was, "Katherine with a K or Catherine with a C," her response was invariably, "Katherine as in Katherine Hepburn." And, as anyone knows, the stentorian screen goddess would have gone into nervous fits had anyone had the gall to call her Katie.) So, were we the actors or the acted upon? This is a debate that, now that I think about it, I will leave open, in deference to my dead sister. But I will say this: One year later, Kate was acted upon. Or, perhaps, Katie was acted upon, thus stopping any chance that she would ever become Kate.