O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
–Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Today, over at Pith, there’s a photo of two bottles–one is an unopened bottle of “God Bless America” water and the other is a bottle full of dirt from the Arizona-Mexico border. I love this photo so much that I’m not sure words can express it. I would hang a copy in my office just to have something to ponder on slow days, if I could, because, to me, it pretty much sums up the border debate.
Here you have these two things–water and dirt–which have great symbolic weight, but the kind of symbolic weight that tends to resist easy politics. We, ourselves, are mostly water. We might say that, for most humans, water is the cradle of life and earth the cradle of death. Though, of course, we might tell stories that suggest just the opposite. What water and dirt mean varies from culture to culture, but seemingly all cultures share a deep belief that they mean something.
So, here you have these items, with deep, resonant meanings, bottled up and labeled–in order to give them meaning. It’s like seeing someone trying to put a feather boa on a peacock. Do you not see what is in your hands? Do you not feel what’s beneath you? Like Stevens asks, do you not see the blackbird about your feet?
And I’m starting to feel the exact same way about the American population. Like figuring out what water and dirt “mean,” it’s impossible to nail down what being an American “means.” But it’s also obvious that it means something to most folks. And like bottling and labeling water to make it appropriately god-fearing and patriotic, or scooping up dirt and trying to insist it represents some obvious border between Here and There, saying “Here’s a wall we built, here’s a sort we did, and now everyone on this side of the wall is safely ‘us’ and everybody outside the wall is safely not,” seems laughable.
I don’t know how else to explain it except to say that it reminds me of the imaginary golden bird that distracts the thin men of Haddam from what’s real around them.