by David Searcy
What would they think, your aunts and uncles, if they knew? You’d lie awake at night and thumb through your collection in the dark, each deed permitting you to imagine bringing one eye up from underground (“from underground” is how the Zuni say they entered the world) to see, from within your one square inch, the cold gray sky. And all the other kids, you figured, just like you, out there somewhere as cold in the ground as you, amazed monocular gazes beaming up like flashlights. Flip a card and look again: it’s all the same square inch, the time, the place, the cold gray sky, the gaze. What kind of cereal prize is this? To turn us back to the emptiness? I think it’s not recoverable. I think we probably knew, for just a moment, then forgot.
I like to use the same paper I type on—letter-sized, thirty-two-pound. It’s heavy enough to take all the erasing, bulks the stack so I feel I’ve done more than I have, and holds the crease where the wings fold out so there’s not quite so much give and flutter in a gust. You don’t want flutter in a gust. You lose your lift.
It’s strange to me that most people don’t make paper airplanes. Don’t know how. Or if they’re pressed by their kid, they’ll come up with some goofy-looking, pointy thing with these sad, vestigial tabs, these curious afterthoughts, for wings. You don’t want afterthoughts for wings. The kid goes off and tries to fly this thing. Like trying to throw a potato chip. There’s nothing to be gained. There’s only sorrow. It should be like Greek and Latin used to be: you need to know this if you want to be a proper, thinking person in the world. If you would sense the subtle, fluctuating buoyancy of history and knowledge. Gain the pleasure and the insight that derives from watching falling leaves for more than that hypnotic resignation that descends on us each fall—for that, for sure, but then within that to appreciate those unforeseen stabilities, departures from the tumble when a leaf of just the right configuration catches air and finds the wind and sails away. You want to know what that’s about. You want to feel it. Kind of go with it yourself.
Among my friends from childhood, no one had a better feel for buoyancy and balance than Vernon Grissom. He played oboe in the junior high school band. He had this trick he’d pull while playing—notably once in one of those big-deal annual concerts with the auditorium packed so there was nothing anyone dared try to do about it. Slowly, as he played, he’d lean his chair back, lift his feet, and simply balance there like that. On two legs. Playing. For the whole performance, I believe. The other players wouldn’t look at him. Or, I suspect, allow themselves to think about it. Had he actually floated there a little above the stage, I don’t imagine he’d have generated any more anxiety or prayer. And then of course it was the oboe—high and delicate like the sound of air escaping from a small balloon. The tension was astonishing. The gestures of the conductor, band director Mr. Fox, acquired an unaccustomed fervor in his efforts to impart, it seemed, a certain accelerando. Whispers spread among the audience. And by the end—I wish I could remember what they played; there are such glorious possibilities—there had occurred a synthesis of earnest imprecision and this clear, sustained, perfected, and transcendent risk within it. To the extent that, as the band director slumped and Vernon touched back down, the audience rose as one in acclamation. Admonitions were subdued. I’m told that once, at the Texas state fair, on the ancient wood-framed Comet roller coaster, long since vanished, Vernon stepped from his car at the top of the first big rise and waited there—I can’t imagine what there was to stand on—for the next little train of cars to come along and let him in. And this at night. The Comet had been there, at the southeast end of the Midway, since the forties. As you clanked to the top of the seventy-foot rise, to your left there was the crazy, noisy dazzle of the fair, and to your right just darkness mostly—just a parking lot and then the sad, faint lights of blighted neighborhoods continuing, it seemed, on out forever that direction. And the Comet in between. It was a terrifying structure. You could see how old it was. How oft repaired. And oft repainted—cracking layer on layer of white. Like milk or ghee, in certain Jain and Hindu rituals, poured over saints or snakes in veneration or placation—but in any case to preserve us all and keep the rickety framework from collapsing. Which, when standing near it, seemed a possibility. Right under it was grass and, strangely, sheep. I guess they were there to go where a lawn mower couldn’t—in among the forest of supports. And yet it seemed so odd, to have those sheep down there as if to introduce a note of calm. As if to let you know no matter how afraid you were, how bad it got among the clatter and the screaming, there were sheep. I like to think that Vernon stood there facing out across the parking lot, away from all the noise, into the dark. Old photos show a sort of rail, so maybe that was there to lean against. A flimsy length of two-by-four to feel the shake of everything, his gaping friends and everything, receding. Screams like real screams. Dark like real dark. And the sheep down there, attending to their business. Oh my goodness, here was buoyancy and risk to beat the band.
Sometimes on Saturdays we’d meet downtown. I’d take the bus. His mom would drop him off. We’d start at the library, find a table on the mezzanine, and spread things out—whatever he had brought in his briefcase, usually. Books and articles pertaining to astronomy, aviation. Paper airplanes if he’d thought up new designs, as well as paper to make more. Lunch at the Copper Cow, then on to the Southland Life building—Dallas’s tallest at the time at forty-two stories, with an observation deck from which we’d fling our paper airplanes one by one into such powerful, unpredictable currents swirling around up there most got flung back or sucked straight down the side of the building. It could take a number of tries to get one out into clear air, into an updraft or a thermal where your heart would sort of hang to see it dip and flutter, stabilize and curl into the upward circulation, rise and rise so high that, were you on the ground, you would have lost it, would have squinted at the sky awhile then turned to go back in to make another. Or just sit and think about it. Have a glass of milk and a Hostess CupCake maybe, in the kitchen by the screen door where the air comes through in summer with the sounds and smells it’s always had, and will for your whole life, don’t you imagine, just like this, the air like breathing in and out the same breath, always and forever.
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AT SOME POINT WE ARRIVED at what we felt was the best all-round design. The “standard model,” as I’ve come to refer to it—as if what we are dealing with is a theoretical matter, a hypothesis. And maybe it is in a way, as long as it’s topologically pure—no cuts, no tape, no added parts—which is to say it should be foldable back into a sheet of typing paper. Which is to say (in a mathematical sense, I think) identical to it. Thus, not only emerging from but entirely consisting in that flatness it escapes. From which it ascends. A model of consciousness, perhaps, in this regard—or, if you like, the soul—so long as basic aerodynamic principles are observed. What we arrived at was a simple modification of the traditional blunt-nosed type—as distinct from the even more traditional pointy delta that most readily comes to mind when people think of paper airplanes. Pointy deltas look like darts. They are for distance, not duration. They will generally go where thrown. They’re not expected to escape, to sail away, except in a gale or maybe a television commercial. In the classic delta all the folds converge along the longitudinal center, all concerns directed forward. Air is passive, to be penetrated. Not to be engaged except as bare, essential lift. The pointy delta is not borne aloft. Aloft is just an ancillary consequence of purpose. When you throw it, you don’t follow it. Not closely, sympathetically, reflectively. The pointy delta flies into a future that is imminent, direct, and nonrecursive. One moves on to other things.
The standard model, like its blunt-nosed predecessor, starts with a big diagonal fold across the centerline, then back the other way—it looks, at first, as if you’re going to make a boat or a little hat. It’s indirect. A sort of embryonic recapitulation of the airplane’s evolution from these earlier, simpler forms. From boats and hats. Our modification, though, eliminates the asymme
trical structure of the wing (one side untidy with its double leading edge) by gathering both diagonal moves into a single double accordion fold that’s hard to execute at first but gratifying. You think, Ah, here is a physical expression of a quality of air we didn’t know about, as each hand undertakes its several, simultaneous duties to encourage inward curves converging gently toward the nose and toward controlled collapse and finally, slowly creasing into place. What have we captured here? A principle, an accident, of buoyancy implicit in the paper, in the flatness all this time? And self-confirming in the foldings now permitted—unavailable before—to concentrate more weight up front where you want it. You fold the wings (to get a wingspread somewhat greater than the length, unlike the delta), and that gathering of paper at the nose is like a knot—a kind of inertial knot to tie onto the air with no more purpose than just that—to find the empty air and hold it. It’s recursive in that way. You tend to circle.
Vernon added a gentle airfoil—which the blunt nose (folded back upon itself) allows by freeing up the leading edges. He would take the front part of each wing and roll it over the edge of a table, back and forth until it took the curve, and then he’d smooth it out and let it relax a little. Curl the trailing corners up to act as elevators—just the slightest flip. And there you go. What happens now? Well, it depends on the conditions. Something’s represented here—some greater accidental thing. About the time I managed to luck out of the draft and get myself back into college, Vernon left for California, where he found a job as an airframe mechanic and died in a motorcycle crash not long thereafter. You can see what’s going on here, right? The unforeseen stabilities. The buoyancy. The darkness and the sheep.
What is that weird high desert Krazy Kat inhabits? Monument Valley, of course, in a sense. That’s what we understand inspires it, or permits it. But that’s not exactly it. It has to do, I think, with the idea of the empty page laid flat. The simplest possible description of illusory space, illusory ground upon which and above which the primordial facts—your geological marvels, heavenly bodies, trees and rocks and bricks and fundamental passions—all present themselves in marvelous instability, moving about and shifting shape one frame to the next. It’s like the world before the moment of creation settled down. With everything a mere enclosure for its animating spirit. Everything a sort of joke, a sort of costume with a sort of god inside.
When archaeologists in 1904 discovered, in the ruins of a temple at Palaikastro on the eastern coast of Crete, a fragmentary hymn to Zeus inscribed on a broken slab of stone, it gave a glimpse into an earlier understanding of the god, and gods in general, than had any ritual text before. It took a while to get the implications, drag the meaning out from under the weight of well-established notions. Jane Harrison’s Themis, her famous study of religion, starts with it—shows how, though the stone itself is not so old, third century maybe, the inscription revives something much more ancient even than the already ancient text: beneath the mountain, or as if beneath the mountain, where the oldest stories place his birth, a pre-Olympian god not importuned but summoned, brought into the dance to leap—that word is used again and again—to leap, to overcome the weight of earth and death and animate the vital possibilities. What must the world have seemed like then—unsettled. In all aspects clearly, vastly, starkly animate.
Krazy Kat, full page, December 18, 1918
Here sits Ignatz Mouse upon a log, his head in hand in thoughtful, vocal confirmation of his disbelief in Santa Claus, as Krazy, from behind a nearby tree, observes and listens. “Oh-ho,” Krazy says, “so ‘Ignatz Mice’ you is a li’l infiddle, heh?” Then off he scampers catlike on all fours—a capability he will lose as the years go by but here he’s captured in mid-bound, clear space between him and his exclamation mark–shaped shadow, dashing over the hill so fast, so urgently he overshoots a bit into the following unruled moment, streaks between the discontinuous frames of reference straight into a costume shop (Have we seen this before?) that’s built like a keep, a mausoleum. Stone-walled. Dark. What sort of costumes, what sort of whimsy do they hold in storage here? Then out he steps, as slow and ponderous in his Santa suit, as mythic and inevitable as before he was mercurial—nothing more than chance and impulse. “Gollix,” he exclaims, “you got no ida how this outfit makes me feel Yule-tidish….” And there is a massive authenticity about him that suggests, perhaps, a deeper iconography: the heavy lace-up boots, the stiff white bell-shaped Sufic cap. An unaccommodating Santa like the golem treading forth out of the ages. Meanwhile Ignatz ponders, “Yezza, it’s the bunk…I’d just as soon believe the moon is made of cheese.”
It’s noon. That cartoon default noon that seems to carry equal clarity and risk. One thinks of the heated noontime visions of the early Desert Fathers so monastically exposed like Ignatz out there in the flatlands on his log. The doubt that summons what it fears. Perverted longing. Why would he say these things out loud and then just sit there? Do you think he knows what’s coming? We can imagine, between the frames, the way it happens. Ignatz silent, turned to squint way down the road at something coming in the distance, just a fluctuating smudge at first like that famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia, the terrible, slow mirage of Omar Sharif, like death, approaching on his camel across the sand. It’s Santa coming down the road. Can he believe it? In broad daylight? Does the realization gradually coil about him till at last released to spring his eyes wide open, as we see, and shoot him straight up into the air at the epiphany, its finger lifted: “Ignatz Mice!! Behold!!! I am Senta Klaws.” Whereupon poor Ignatz falls to the ground, repentant, face in the dust before the apparition, which forgives him, bids him rise and turns to go. And that would be that—Ignatz admonished and enlightened, Santa returned to that dark costume shop—were it not for Krazy’s tail zigzagging out from under his coat and trailing behind. A brick’s to hand and Ignatz flings it. “Pow.” And Santa bursts into constituent particles—boots and beard and cap—the whole constructed Santa flies apart as Krazy, simple once again, protonic, floating at the center of disintegrated myth, receives the gesture in the usual positive way. The final scene repeats the first. “I don’t believe in Santa Claus, I’m too broad-minded, and advanced for such nonsense,” Ignatz for the second time declares. Yet from his brow a single drop of consternation falls. The scenery has shifted, lighting changed. The mood is not what it was. The tree behind him now looks blasted, branches curling like burnt matchsticks. From the east (whence Santa came—let’s call it east) the sky is darkening. Dark and ragged clouds move in. A storm is coming. What has he done? What’s happened here?
Koko’s Earth Control, animated, 1928
On a global walking tour, while passing through deserted regions, Koko the Clown and his dog come upon the control room of the world. It’s simply there at the ends of the earth, a neoclassical funhouse. Standing open. It’s amazing. Koko’s hat flies off. The little dog’s ears shoot up. They walk right in. The dog goes wandering off as Koko stops to contemplate an array of rotary switches by a window. There’s an irising-in on Koko’s hand about to pull a lever labeled “RAIN” and then he’s looking out the window (which is blank until phenomena are summoned) at the shower. He’s delighted and he turns to us and gestures with his thumb at what he’s done. Now it’s the lever labeled “DAY AND NIGHT” and the spangled dark descends beyond the window like a shade; night comes down and goes back up. But even stranger is this ordinary window in this place—and look how carefully it’s drawn, unlike the zany and perfunctory controls, to be an ordinary window. Simple double-sashed and properly framed and silled, the raisable lower sash with a thumb latch where it should be there on top. This is the window that we look out every day. And maybe that’s why it’s left blank. What can it mean? Well, while all this is going on the little dog, whose name is Fitz I think, has found the master lever. It emerges huge and phallic from the wall like the erection on a herm. And why not? Kept like that, upthrusting, it maintains the vital principle. But throw it, pull it down…don’t even think ab
out it. Read the sign. And here’s the really crazy part: Fitz does. He reads the sign. And not only reads it, fastens on it with another of those irislike vignettes where all you see is what he sees, and that’s the sign. And as if that were not enough he climbs his own little dotted line of sight to get a closer look: “DANGER BEWARE. DO NOT TOUCH EARTH CONTROL. IF THIS HANDLE IS PULLED THE WORLD WILL COME TO AN END.” How to explain what happens next? He’s going to pull it. And it’s not some mindless reflex. He is straining for the handle on the lever, just a little out of reach, that ends the world. As if at long last here it is—what he’s been waiting for. There’s no internal conflict. There’s no pause to let the diabolical impulse rise within him, overcome his better nature. This is it—the very thing he most completely wants to do. When Koko shows up Fitz is dangling from the handle, and there ensues a terrible struggle. Even Koko—small of head and vast of feet—knows better than that. He comprehends, at once, the consequences. Reels before the prospect. Snatches Fitz from the handle, flings him down, admonishes, then gives him a paddling with a suddenly huge and phallic admonishing finger (I’ll show you the end of the world. Right here’s the end of the world) and finally tries to restrain him but it’s no use. It’s beyond all that. What part do you think Fitz fails to understand? Is it the part about the world or about the end? Are those two things, in him, so far apart, those two ideas, they cannot be syntactically related? What do you think has been communicated then? We see his actions are as purposeful, as happy, wide-eyed, frantic as had the sign above the lever promised pork chops. Can it be that everything he’s ever wanted is confused somehow with its annihilation? Is it because, as anthropomorphic as he is, he’s just a dog? He’s just an animal? And at last it’s inescapable. Fitz slips from Koko’s grasp and sort of vanishes under his shadow. Under that permanent pool of black at Koko’s feet. How perfect is that? He disappears beneath the shadow of the clown to emerge behind him, shove him away, and pull the lever. There’s a little puff of steam or smoke, a valve released. An ancient piston moving. Fitz just stands there, paws to his face. He’s done it now. And there’s no format to what happens. There’s no theme, no clear idea about the end. One’s fears come tumbling out like multiple mistranslations of apocalyptic texts. The air is rent with lightning flashes, positive-negative, white then black, the whole world flickering like that, night and day confused. The heavenly bodies, loosed from their circuits, all go crazy and mean-spirited in a self-destructive frenzy. We see Koko on his knees in prayer, eyes heavenward, in the middle of a vast plain ringed with lunar-looking mountains. It is night but the light is shining on him. Where in the world is this? It is the circus at the end of the world, I guess. Back where he started in the spotlight in the center ring but oh how bleak, how ruined it is now. What gags are left? A couple maybe but not good ones—strange ones, ones to make the children want to leave. He scoops a hole and plunges his head in the ground like an ostrich but it’s just as bad down there. Up pop two heads—his own (from a new hole, stretch-necked, terrified) and another one, a monstrous one with horns and fangs. The infernal regions—what a terrible thought—just under the surface. But the big joke’s still to come. An incredible mix-up. Koko loses his head in the sand and, in attempting to retrieve it, grabs the wrong one. Look at him now. He is a monster. For a second he just stands there with the wrong head, with the monster’s head, his white-gloved fingers spread like claws and question marks arranged in the air around him. Who is this, then? Kali? Gorgon? The Devil himself? It’s the sort of formulaic pose you see on ancient coins—a running gorgon turns at the waist to face us just like this on a silver coin of Etruria. Very much the same schematic horror. Just for a second he’s this monster. We couldn’t stand it any longer. Then he tosses away the horrible head, regains his own, and wanders out of the scene.
