“I had a dream I died at this meal once, counting out chicken wings.”
What a way to go, dad! One of those deja vu prophecies.
In Merleau Ponty’s retelling of Freud’s retelling of Leonardo da Vinci’s infant memory, he quotes the artist:
“I seem to have been destined to be especially concerned with the vulture, for one of the first things I remember about my childhood is how a vulture came to me when I was still in the cradle, forced open my lips with its tail, and struck me several times between the lips with it.”
The feathers stuck for a number of days against the window before the wind came. Like two eyelashes stuck to a cheek, awaiting a finger. My dad raked the bird’s body off the roof and buried t in a small hole beneath the magnolia tree. Our footprints melted holes in the snow. My dad hummed Taps in the pitch of a kazoo. Later he reminded me, if only I closed the blinds, birds wouldn’t die flying.
He watches the birds from the window. Today: “Should I join the national ornithology club?” Tomorrow: “I joined the national ornithology club.” There is one less Junko flying, but still four hummingbirds, a handful of chickadees, starlings, and some bald eagles in view from his perch in the kitchen. His commitment to the club is to stand outside once a week and count the birds. So far he has counted only those same few who eat suet from his feeders and suck sugar water. He wonders if his friend, a Rufus hummingbird, will return this summer to lay eggs in his tree again. Last year, he read Jose Luis Borges’ book of sonnets, which includes compositions about hummingbirds, but didn’t really like it.
Freud thinks Leonardo’s memory of the bird’s tail implied a desire for a phallus in the mouth. For Freud, anything substantial is phallic, and anything vacuous is feminine. The realm of the unconscious can be deeply troubling for those of us who accept life as it is; it implies that what is visible might not be all, that our self-hood is made up of more than our known memories. The symbolic register is of great concern to Merleau Ponty who believes that there is no life beyond the life we experience and perceive on the level of consciousness. Our being is the process of existence, and nothing more. History is our memory. Then what of the vulture’s tail if we do not count on the symbolic register? Maybe just a childhood dream.
New York, New York
David Berman
A second New York is being built
a little west of the old one.
Why another, no one asks,
just build it, and they do.
The city is still closed off
to all but the work crews
who claim it’s a perfect mirror image.
Truthfully, each man works on the replica
of the apartment building he lives in,
adding new touches,
like cologne dispensers, rock gardens,
and doorknobs marked for the grand hotels.
Improvements here and there, done secretly
and off the books. None of the supervisors
notice or mind. Everyone’s in a wonderful mood,
joking, taking walks through the side streets
that the single reporter allowed inside has described as
“unleavened with reminders of the old city’s complicated past,
but giving off some blue perfume from the early years of earth.”
The men grow to love the peaceful town.
It becomes more difficult to return home at night,
which sets the wives to worrying.
The yellow soups are cold, the sunsets quick.
The men take long breaks on the fire escapes,
waving across the quiet spaces to other workers
meditating on their perches.
Until one day…
The sky fills with charred clouds.
Toolbelts rattle in the rising wind.
Something is wrong.
A foreman stands in the avenue
pointing binoculars at a massive gray mark
moving towards us in the eastern sky.
Several voices, What, What is it?
Pigeons, he yells through the wind.
At the dinner table my dad mentions he is glad my brother has gone back to school, because being around him is stressful.
Why is that, I said.
Well he struggles.
There was a long pause before my dad admitted that it wasn’t chicken wings he was counting in the dream, but spot prawns on a plate of steak.
Mary Oliver, Wild Geese, 2004
Would you like to contribute to M Newsletter? Respond to this email to inquire!