This Week's Laughter #42

An archive in asking Google "Do birds laugh?"

A small barge on the Erie canal.

Cardinals or Symbology

Three weeks ago, I played in a recreational soccer tournament where I captained a team of six players. The only symbolic indicator of our team was the professed color of our jerseys, cardinal. We named ourselves the cardinal pope cats.

Five years ago, my family was rapidly trying to identify motifs in grief. We had suddenly and unexpectedly lost my mother and in loss one finds the brave and necessary talent of the mind to make meaning. I believe I remember a conversation with my Dad and Sister about types of designs that might be good for mom’s tombstone - creatures or images that she particularly loved aside from the cult-like worship of the Buffalo Bills (which despite being such a lion’s share of life as a citizen of Western New York, as I walk around the Gowanda cemetery where three generations of my family are buried, there is not a trace of Buffalo Bills regalia). We stumbled into the cardinal: I can’t remember who suggested it or who mentioned it: I’m not even confident in the accuracy of my memory here: grief obfuscates memory, alters it, makes fake memories to preserve one’s emotional integrity in the face of great traumas.

Is it odd to see an incomplete tombstone?

Several months ago, my fiancé and I settle on a color scheme for our wedding, notably including a burgundy in the palette.

The majestic red so many know of the cardinal is representative of only one gender of the bird, female cardinals have a reddish-brown head but largely a brown body. It has become something of a joke to myself whenever someone intimate to me offers the traditional divine representation of the cardinal, gloriously red and radiant, in memorial to my mother that, of course, stubborn and stigmatized woman that she was, even in death would be celebrated by a louder or more attention-drawing man.

In memorial of my mother, I lied to my family. I offered five unique pieces of art of a cardinal. Two are illustrations of the round body perched on the ground, wings tucked. Three are watercolor paintings, each more in submission to the cardinal red than the last. The paintings each are of the bird in flight with the final, most articulate painting, with wings spread and chest facing the viewer. These paintings were done by a friend from my parkour years - Sheep - and given to me in a memorial box alongside stickers and other cardinal-themed memorabilia. As I presented them to my family, I explained I had made one each year of her passing and that this set of five seemed to be complete, in a way, that I would do no more, but that I wanted to show the set I had produced as memorial artifact. In truth, I do very little on the memorial of my mother, June 1st. I think of her often, mostly in the framework of asking some specter if she is proud of me. It is not a particularly healthy frame of reference, I admit, but nevertheless when I have an accomplishment of which I do not find myself being visibly celebrated for to my desire, I ask her with an internal voice that is not abashed over the childish need for approval. But nevertheless, I do very little for the anniversary of her death, justifying to myself that I am living a life as a good individual, and that should please her.

As I write this, I am listening to the song by band Foxing, “Secret History,” which has a conceit of a lyric, “Make your mother proud.”

In truth, my mother understood very little about me, my living, my life. Didn’t understand queerness, nor why I moved across the country. Was proud of me and would advocate for my work as a writer even if she wasn’t a poetry reader herself. So when the poetry reading series I co-host receives grant funding in a landscape where national arts funding is facing its most dire state in a century, I tell myself my mother would be proud of me.

Symbols are lies we tell ourselves. Language’s lush misfire. A ritual of friction. The texture of touching the idea without touching the thing.

A symbol is a lover you never quite get to kiss—tongue almost meeting tongue in a syntax of velvet interference.

As I write this reflection, I confess I do not know much, if any, times where my mother was tremendously affected by cardinals anymore than the happy acknowledgement of red outside by her bird feeder.

I do not think it is the parent’s job to understand their child. If that were an expectation of parenthood I think parents unilaterally would fail for time is an unflinching and aggressive purveyor of change and parents by definition exist in a separate time to their children. Still, I mourn my lack of visibility and connection with my Dad in the years since her passing. What does it mean to hypocritically crave this visibility and acknowledge its impossibility?

My grandparents, the flowers.

I have worn glasses since the second grade and as such have always interpreted the world through a lens. Without them, I can barely see outlines of shapes these days. This perspective has reared me to accept the posturing capacity to externalize oneself. That without my glassware, I am, functionally, a different person and that the world I interpret behind my lenses is significantly different from the world I interpret without them. Which world is the lie I tell myself? The world which exists in clarity, where I can prepare myself for oncomingness and appreciate the vast and grandiose potential of everything with cells? Or the world which exists as fuzz and static where my eyes can finally relax for there is no need to tax vision when sight provides no answer.

The symbolic representation of visibility is a lie I tell myself. “Cardinal,” I said. As in orientation. As in the most essential directionality. But also: the color. That blood-rich hue of opening, the saturate swoon of the petal unfurling just before pollination.

The symbol is that exact petal. Not the flower. Not the scent. Not the name.
Just the impossible texture of its turning.

I’ve never looked up quite why cardinals are a religious status, what the history and connection is between cardinal (spiritual leader) and cardinal (bird). I think to know this answer would be a betrayal of my mom who forsook the presbyterian church we attended for a few years when I was toddler when their community shamed her for her lack of attendance and lived the rest of her life without returning. Nevertheless, we chose among the most spiritually connected birds possible as the symbolic representation of our everlasting grief. In this way I find parallel: my inability to be represented adequately to my family finds purchase with the inability for my mother to have a symbol-of-grief that adequately represents her.

I offered the art pieces of cardinals to my father as a gift and he rather gingerly responded ‘maybe a copy of them but I wouldn’t want these originally bud.’ Something to that effect. It was late, maybe 11:30pm when I was able to show him, and we’d just returned from a ceremony at the high school she graduated from where her coworkers and our family put together a scholarship in her memory for women going into medical or STEM careers. This was two and a half hours away from a house I can not call home but is where my Dad sleeps each night. The ceremony itself was two hours long, and while the majority of the awards are going to expected pedestals - things like valedictorians, athletic legends who won championships, the singular award to the artist chosen to make a piece for the school itself - there are a spare maybe ten family awards - people like us who lost loved ones unexpectedly and found themselves not knowing what to do to honor their memory. I never once heard my mother speak about her days in high school, but the school system is in one of the poorest areas of New York, and it was an easy overlap of memorial and altruistic impact. My sister and Dad did not know what the requirements for the scholarship should be so I offered write a 250-word essay on what dreams of doing good you have. Each year since I read some one-to-five 18-year old’s 250-word vision on how they are going to be a hero. It makes the process of choosing somewhat more tolerable for I really don’t enjoy arguing between my family about whether GPA or athletic excellence is more justifiable for a scholarship. I was a bit insulted that Dad did not accept, readily and quickly, the gift. I could not tell you why.

Somehow, somehow.

Sometimes, the symbols we find attached to prominent stakes in our interpsychic landscapes are not, entirely, sensical. There is not a logic of attachment to belief. Well, there probably is depending on your particular avenues of logic-finding, but trust me, there isn’t.

The moment language betrays its logic, when the symbol no longer refers but radiates and becomes more event than unit, more pressure than meaning. Rupture here is not trauma but the excess of arrival, the joy that exceeds its vessel. The symbol is a hinge, a threshold in motion refusing the stillness of resolution. This recursive act of failing beautifully to mean. Weather the symbol. Cardinalize the breath. Let the mouth remain open.

A cardinal is a bird. A rather useless bird ecologically speaking, but vibrantly colorful in a landscape otherwise full with the greens of a vegetative agragrianism and the dulled color of wildflower attempting to defy their verdant wash. A cardinal is a soccer team full of people who really don’t care to bust their asses against late-twenties, early-thirty-somethings who desperately need to prove their athletic competence despite their inevitable aging. Cardinal is a color that I think fits my aesthetic and matches my skin-tone well. A cardinal is a marvelous lie.

A poetics of symbols  
        the symbol has already

        trembled  
        cardinal