Drawing the Constellations
[2004]
The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell. We come to see the stars arranged as constellations, and as constellations they orient us, they give us something to navigate by, both for traveling across the earth and for telling stories, these bears and scorpions and centaurs and seated queens with their appointed places and seasons. Imagine the lines drawn between stars as roads themselves, as routes for the imagination to travel.
A metaphor is in another way a line drawn between two things, a mapping of the world by affinities and patterns, which is to say that a constellation is a metaphor for a metaphor. And the word metaphor in the original Greek means to transport something. So metaphors are, like constellations, navigational tools to travel by. They let us enter a world of resemblances and kinships, in which we can approach the unknown through the known, the abstract through the concrete, the remote through what comes to hand. They measure the route from here to there. The body of the beloved is a landscape, but landscape is also a body; each is traveled in terms of the other, and thus the world is knit together, with those constellating lines of imagination. Aristotle observed, “A good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.” So metaphors are an erotic force binding together the disparate things of this earth, the language of love, the mapping of relationship, though they do not need to be literal language: “shoulder of a road” is a phrase, but a photograph of a road and of a shoulder can convey the same resemblance, make the same relationship.
The Western Apache, writes anthropologist Keith Basso, understand automobiles in terms of the human body. When cars arrived in their culture, there were no words for the inner workings, and so the mechanically inclined men called the various working parts hearts, lungs, and other things, bringing the car to life not just through language but through the resemblances that language maps. A battery is a heart, and when headlights become eyes, the possibility of a blind car arises (and we forget the metaphor built into the head of headlights, for our own language not only coins but buries in familiarity this imagistic language of constellations: think of the trove of buried coins in this sentence).
An engine does not become biological in this constellating, nor does a heart become mechanical, but a route has been traced that connects the machine and the body. They are still themselves, but the world has been knit a little more tightly together, a path has been trod. A lowrider brings a car to life another way, by making it into a shrine, a coffin, a chapel, a social arena, and a canvas, turning a corporate product into personal and communal expression, connecting a new technology to old cultural practices, and linking together many things. We are constantly drawing the world together in terms of resemblances and recastings, and the job of artists is to draw the lines anew to startle us, wake us up, see the secret route there or where we’ve always been. Same stars, different constellations.
This is different from definition, for a definition endeavors to draw things apart, to draw lines that divide one from another: an insect is not an arachnid, a star is not a heart. But metaphor, this art of drawing constellations, draws them together. A battery is a heart. A lowrider car is a chapel with the sacred heart painted on it. A bed is a labyrinth in which you must find your way to the dark center. They are themselves and lovers, and perhaps like love this metaphorization lets them become more deeply themselves. A labyrinth has at its center the Minotaur that came of the Cretan queen’s copulation with a sacred bull. The Minotaur was the Greek mind/body problem—we have the urges of animals and yet have intellects—but this might not be a problem for an imagination that accepts the lines drawn to constellate things rather than to divide them.
The Cretan labyrinth was made to lose things in, notably the monster offspring of that union; but the Christian labyrinth was made to find things in, notably the route to salvation. Thus the former has many paths, the latter only one, going, with meanders, delays, and turnarounds, to the center. The labyrinth in which the lines we draw between things become tangled, become a network of connections to get lost in. Getting lost, a necessary mode of finding things, the journey into the unknown known as questing. And perhaps, with the arrival at the center, the discovery of not the right answers but the right questions. Childbed, deathbed, marriage bed, dreamspace, cave, camera, cavern, chambered heart. Daedalus builds the Cretan labyrinth like an elaborate riddle in which to hide the Minotaur; when he is stuck in it himself, he escapes on wings of wax and fallen feathers, a route out that is not an answer to the intricacies of the labyrinth but a simple question about larger forces.
The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
In Meridel Rubenstein’s photographic image “Home,” four disparate things are stacked and ordered by their visual resemblance, a concavity that cups and gathers and cherishes and invites in. Or perhaps not disparate things, but things whose definitions would not automatically connect them in this four-starred constellation about yearning and destination, which travels from the cosmos to the lover’s loins, which refuses to let the distinctions between the advanced technology of the Very Large Array satellite dish, the animal craft of the swallow’s nest on the porch, the natural forces behind the sacred salt lake of the Zuni mean more than the affinities, to let the stars signify more than the constellation drawn by the artist. More than a metaphor, which links two things, this links four, and thereby implies that more could be linked, that the world could be navigated by this finding of patterns of form and desire. That refuses the distinction between landscape and body, between animal and human, traditional and technological, to find the affinities between them, as the center of the labyrinth is the point at which all the paths arrive.
Hugging the Shadows
[2004]
For the longest time, my friend Val has had a passage from Martin Luther King Jr. tacked to her e-mails: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.” I agree with the meaning, but the metaphor bothers me every time, because why should a man who was called Negro and then black, who was wringing justice from a society dominated by people called white, endorse the old metaphorical Manichaeism of light and darkness? Yet this denigration of darkness is a common phenomenon.
Bill Clinton, whom Toni Morrison famously called our first black president, wrote in his autobiography about the scales of our psyche, saying, “If they go too far toward hopefulness, we can become naive and unrealistic. If the scales tilt too far the other way, we can get consumed by paranoia and hatred. In the South, the dark side of the scales has always been the bigger problem.” Clinton returned to the metaphor when he preached against the second President Bush with the New Testament line about “seeing through a glass, darkly.” Has anyone ever made a metaphor out of snow blindness, an experience admittedly not much available to the writers of the New Testament?
Another e-mail yielded a Jungian analysis of Bush, arguing instead that he is out of touch with his shadow, “those parts of the personality rejected by the ego,” and adds, “Until one is conscious of the shadow, one continues to project this rejected self onto others.” Thus it is that the war on terror, which sought “to eliminate evil from the world,” claims the simple binaries that begin with “you’re either with us or against us.” Such simple oppositions disguise what Christian and Muslim fundamentalists have in common and that viole
nce bears a compelling resemblance to violence, whether it is termed terrorism or the war on terrorism. Differences are not necessarily opposites, and manufactured oppositions are often disguises for interdependences and affinities.
Metaphors matter. They make tangible the abstractions with which we must wrestle. They describe the resemblances and differences by which we navigate our lives and thoughts. I published a book recently called Hope in the Dark, which the inattentive routinely call “Hope in Dark Times.” Dark times, like dark ages, are gloomy, harsh, dangerous, depressing, when the good stuff has fled. But the darkness I was after was another thing entirely. This wasn’t hope despite the dark; darkness was the ground and condition of that hope, drawn from a line of Virginia Woolf’s: “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.” For Woolf, the future was dark because it was unknowable. Hope in the dark is hope in the future, in its constant ability to surprise you, its expansiveness beyond the bounds of the imaginable. That dark has the richness of night, of dreams, of passion, of surrender to boundless mystery and possibility that shrink out of reach in the light, as do the stars. Other writers have found complexity in the dark. John Berger wrote recently, “In war the dark is on nobody’s side, in love the dark confirms that we are together.”
Another writer, Joseph Conrad, called his most famous novella Heart of Darkness, but in it he plays with light and dark like a master of shadow-puppets, sometimes inverting his own ingrained Victorian racism. Early in the novella, the narrator, Marlow, famously describes his childhood passion for the blank spots on maps, which still existed then. “I would put my finger on it, and say, When I grow up I will go there.” And so he went to the Congo. “True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.” Here the white spaces are, like Woolf’s darkness, the spaces of potentiality, but Conrad’s African darkness is a complicated thing. Marlow has already said of England, “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.” The Congo he goes to is “the heart of darkness,” but that is because imperialism has indulged the savagest urges of the imperialists come to carry out the ivory trade (and, of course, “exterminate the brutes”). The white bones of elephants and skulls of native victims are the key emblems at the heart of white men’s darkness.
Conrad’s era had imperial maps, cartographers filling in what colonialism claimed, but our own time has its maps too, including the spectacular satellite images of the world at night, the ones where the electrical light of western Europe, the eastern United States, Japan, and the crest of Brazil glare white in a beautiful nocturne of deep blue land and black sea, letting us see literally the dark places of the earth and the light ones. Africa is once again a dark continent, with little energy consumption, and one’s eyes can bathe in the beautiful darkness too of the Andes and Amazon, Siberia, Greenland, Canada’s far north, and much of interior Australia—which is to say, the lightly inhabited and often still-indigenous places of the earth, the ones that have thus far escaped dense populations and industrialization (though the darkness in North Korea is about poverty). The map tells us directly about the amount of light emitted at night, the glare that eliminates the stars from view, and about the dusky blue velvet places beyond. It gives us a less direct sense of where energy consumption and population clusters are greatest, and it’s in the white places of the earth, where many people together light up the night, that some of our largest catastrophes are being prepared, including the ozone thinning that has made the sun more pernicious than before to the pale-skinned.
New Mexico has banned excess light pollution. The state passed a bill in 1999 banning powerful and sky-directed night lights, counting the darkness of night as one of its natural resources. There, unless you’re in one of the few real metropolises, you can see the Milky Way, which showed up in San Francisco only during the velvety darkness of the blackout brought on by the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. And the 2003 blackout across the Northeast revised that unnerving night map; the area from New York to Toronto fell off the nocturnal map, returned to the darkness of untrammeled night. I don’t know what happened in the sky that night, but I know that in the great blackout of 1977, the Milky Way presided over Manhattan for the first time in perhaps a century.
Ursula K. LeGuin once noted, “To light a candle is to cast a shadow.” Conversely, it’s in the dark that faint light shines, starlight, candlelight, fireflies, the bioluminescence of the sea. I don’t want to reverse the binaries, to make darkness good and light problematic. I want a language and an imagination where they are not enemies but perhaps dance partners, whirling each other around this globe that spends half its time away from the sun in night. I want people to remember how photography works, the medium that depends on perfect darkness within the camera to capture the image, for an image of boundless light would be purely black, an exposure in perfect darkness would show just the white of unexposed paper. The visible world depends on both.
Justice by Moonlight
[2003]
There might have been as many as four hundred activists, marching toward the ChevronTexaco refinery in Richmond, California, on September 9, 2003. When we got there, the Richmond police had arrived ahead of us and had done what we had planned to do: blockade the refinery gate through which Iraqi crude was brought in by gasoline trucks. Those of us who were willing to be arrested linked arms and sat down anyway in a single line across the wide street, twenty-two people in front of that gate choosing civil disobedience as a way to state our outrage. Outrage about the arrival of Iraqi oil in the United States, about the role of ChevronTexaco in profiting from this war, about the environmental impact of a fossil fuel economy, about the war itself, about the transnational corporations whose profits seemed to have much to do with the motives for that war, about a world run by and for those corporations.
We were acting both globally, as one of hundreds of actions around the world in solidarity with activists who had gone to Cancun to oppose the World Trade Organization’s fifth ministerial meeting, and locally, in solidarity with the people of Richmond. Richmond isn’t how most people picture the San Francisco Bay Area: ChevronTexaco’s pipelines, smokestacks, and storage tanks dominate the city, whose poor, mostly nonwhite citizens are periodically confined to their houses or sent to the hospital by leaked fumes from the huge refinery. The march included community members and community activists, three Catholic priests, white-haired peace activists, environmentalists, and a lot of young radicals connected to the organization that had called the action, Direct Action to Stop the War, which had also orchestrated the twenty-thousand-person shutdown of San Francisco’s Financial District when the bombing began in Iraq the previous March.
Because ChevronTexaco refines stolen Iraqi oil, we were able to address the linkages between local environmental justice issues, global corporate pillage, and the ongoing war in Iraq. The profits from Iraqi oil go to the “rebuilding of Iraq”—aka Halliburton and Bechtel. It’s all connected in the ugliest possible way, long chains of profit and violence and pollutants stretching around the globe, from the toxic fumes in Richmond to the ruins of Iraq. So we sat down in solidarity with the rest of the world, the organic world, the small world, the local world, the rural world, the indigenous world, the diverse world, the democratic world facing off against the WTO. Ahead of us in the east, as day turned into night, the full moon rose from a bank of glowing clouds into a clear sky. Mars shone.
I had spent the summer traveling around the West, a journey made out of beautiful summer evenings sitting with friends watching day turn to night. Sitting still at ChevronTexaco for two hours was the culmination of that summer. Sometimes you go to an action to demand peace, to speak up for the connectedness of all things. Sometimes peace is not a demand but a realization, and it felt like a strange triumph to sit there with
the priests, the punk kids, the locals, as sunlight behind us became moonlight ahead. It was as beautiful as any evening in the Rockies or the Eastern Sierra, and in that stark industrial space the sky was just as wide.
Whenever I turned around, I saw that the ranks of cops were growing—eventually there were a hundred of them at our backs, the first solid row only a few steps behind us, shifting weight from armored leg to armored leg, explosives strapped to their bodies, holding clubs, holding canister rifles that could shoot tear gas, rubber bullets, beanbags, and various other “sublethal” projectiles that can cause blindness, broken bones, severe wounds—and death. When the war broke out, the Oakland police had used these weapons to injure more than sixty activists, longshore workers, and journalists at a peaceful picket to protest weapons shipments from the docks. But the Richmond police never budged that September day. And we held our line too. Kids with faces masked in bandannas—a group known as the “black bloc,” who’ve gotten an outrageous reputation for property destruction—walked down the line, tenderly kneeling and offering to feed us blockaders from plates of rice and beans.
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 19
