memorial day nostalgia: holding complexity

Video 1: trigger warning/framing

Video 2: Somatic practice for working with ambivalence

Gregory Pardlo, “For Which it Stands”
For a flag! I answered facetiously. A flag of tomorrow,
fluent in fire, not just the whispers, lisps, not just the still there
of powdered wigs, dry winds. Who wants a speckled
drape that folds as easy over smirch as fallen soldier?
This is rhetorical. Like, “What to the Negro
is the fourth of July?” A flag should be stitched with a fuse.
 
Jefferson said for each generation a flag. Maybe
he said Constitution. I once raised a high-top flag
of my hair, a fist, a leather medallion of the motherland.
I studied heraldry and maniples (which are not
what you might guess), little sails and banners
down to the vane of a feather. Because his kids were
rebel cities my father loved like Sherman. Because
I wanted history I could touch like the flank of a beast.
 
My wife’s people are from San Salvador. They sent us
with a guard, his AK shouldered like a mandolin, among
anil-tinted shawls and jerseys, across tiled and pocked
concrete, and the gated stalls of El Centra. I felt sacred
as a goat there, too, as I did below the Mason-Dixon
where our only protection was the Fourteenth Amendment.
 
Afraid our Yankee plates would be read aggressive as a Jolly
Roger we rented a compact in Atlanta. Charleston, Savannah,
Montgomery, and after Birmingham we were broke.
Skipped Selma. Slept at B&Bs where my dreams power-
washed layers of footnotes and Februaries, revealing
the surreal sheen of Apollo Creed’s trunks, the apocalyptic
Americana of Jacko moonwalking around a tinfoil Buzz
Aldrin planting the corporate ensign. Years passed. I grew
 
youthless in my dad-pants, but still puffed at pinwheels
and windsocks, launched glyphs of grillsmoke and one day
it came to me, as if commissioned, Theaster Gates’s Flag
from old fire hoses, a couple dozen, like vertical blinds, no,
like cabin floorboards of canvas colored rusty, brick dust, some
cheerless drab-and-custard, beside a medley of vespertine
blues, hoses evoking landscapes of sackcloth and gunny,
texture of violence and tongues inflamed by shine, holy ghost.
 
Ross, Duchamp, Johns, et al., are integrated here with officers
of the peace, their dogs, and, in evidence, their pretend
tumescence Gates has hung to cure like pelts
or strips of jerky.
 
How did it feel to shield spirit with flesh? I mean,
what did it do to the body, water furry as the arm
of an arctic bear? What thirst did it ignite?
 
Gates’s salute is a torch song, a rhythm
of hues marching over a pentimento of rhyme.
I approve its message, its pledge to birth a nation
of belonging and to teach that nation of the fire
shut up in our bones.
 
Gregory Pardlo, “For Which it Stands” from Digest. Copyright ©2014 by Gregory Pardlo. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books, www.fourwaybooks.com.
 
 
Maggie Smith, "Accidental Pastoral"
I must have just missed a parade--
horse droppings and hard candy
in the road, miniature American
flags staked into the grass, plastic
chairs lining the curb down this
two-lane highway, 36 in the open
country, briefly Main Street in town.
When I was small, I sat on a curb
only a dozen miles from here, my feet
in the ashtray-dirty gutter, and watched 
stars-and-stripes girls wheeling
their batons, slicing the sun-dumb
air into streamers. I can still hear
the click of cellophaned candies
on pavement. I didn’t want to
leave town, not then, and I never left.
I am not a parade, my one car passing
through Centerburg, Ohio, too late.
The chairs are empty. The children
are unwrapping golden butterscotches
in the cool, shuttered houses.
But look up—the clouds are stories
tall, painted above Webb’s Marathon,
and flat-bottomed as if resting on something
they push against though it holds them.
 
“Accidental Pastoral” appears in the collection Good Bones, published by Tupelo Press. Copyright © 2017 by Maggie Smith. Reprinted by permission of Tupelo Press.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            Memorial Day—the unofficial start of summer. The flavor of summertime is the taste of nostalgia, the season of childhood. No one (no, not even teachers) experiences summer freedom the way kids do. Kind of like a Memorial Day parade, which is as much about childhood memory as it is about who died for us… and also why. This is a holiday named for remembering, re-membering the lost—but without any formal recognition in the rites and rituals of our country’s military history. Nostalgia is a funny thing, etymologically rooted in the ache of homesickness (from the Greek nostos, to return home, and algos, pain). The tension between joy and violence, aggression and play, vitality and death, is a kind of ambivalence that colors memory itself. We remember the sounds and smells and thwonking hard candy of the parades from our childhood, alongside freedom from school, beach and pool openings, and the promise of summer hijinks. (Charles Wright somewhere describes helicopters “thwonking” back to marine bases, and that verb somehow for me captures the buzz and chaos of the parade and re-invents it darker.) That’s what happens, over time: as we learn more, our experience of childhood, like the Memorial Day parade… changes.
            Gregory Pardlo’s poem is really written for July Fourth, and its governing theme of fire depends on it. He asks, “Who wants a speckled / drape that folds as easy over smirch as fallen soldier?” He refers to another seething critique of “Independence Day” given by Frederick Douglass (which flatly declares, “your celebration is a sham”). But many folk feel that whether it’s in the heat of July or on Memorial Day, “A flag should be stitched with a fuse.” Like a tick-ticking time bomb, the poem marks the passage of time, held in the holiday, grilling along and puffing at pinwheels… until suddenly it catches the spark of a new, more appropriate national flag. Pardlo hits on Theaster Gates’ seminal artwork from 2011—eerie, dark flags made of decommissioned fire hoses, linked to the violent treatment of civil rights protestors. He refers to Gates’ work as a “torch song,” apt for a poem like this one, so “fluent in fire.” Memorial Day 2020, Minneapolis was in flames in response to the murder of George Floyd. In 2021, American support of Israeli military efforts contributed to the exploding violence in Gaza. In 2022, twenty-one people were killed in yet another school shooting in Texas. Nineteen elementary school kids blasted away. 
            So when did you catch on to the mythos of 'Murica and who it's harming? Some of us have privilege, unlike Pardlo, where we don’t have to pray to the Fourteenth Amendment below the Mason-Dixon Line. “Accidental Pastoral” (which is actually also written about July 4th) is a nostalgic trip back to the childhood scene of a midwestern small town the poem’s speaker hasn’t felt the need to get far from—a dozen miles, to be precise. It’s unclear whether it’s ghost-town-creepy or sweet. The poem’s solitary car passes by horse droppings, empty plastic chairs, and “ashtray-dirty gutters,” while the kids suck on butterscotches and the houses are cool. Inside the hints of emptiness, there are multisensory echoes of the child’s jubilant view of summer: hard candy hitting the pavement and, perhaps the most beautiful line, the batons “slicing the sun-dumb / air into streamers.” The clouds at the end of the poem, “stories tall,” offer a pretty apt analogy for memory itself: we push against our stories, and yet they hold us (down? back? accountable? in tender embrace?). What is the fall from idealism when we try to recreate a moment from our childhood and find it changed, textured differently? Reading Smith’s poem after Pardlo’s, one might wonder—can flags staked into the grass and stars-and-stripes girls ever be innocent? If we are disenchanted with America’s story, do we, inevitably, also come to disbelieve the innocence or sweetness of our own?
 
 
PRACTICE
            Is our childhood self attached to us, like some creepy Peter Pan shadow? Or is it an endless regress within us like so many Russian dolls? Or are we held in its atmosphere, like Maggie Smith’s flat-bottomed cloud? Where does memory live in the body? Does nostalgia share the same home, or is it different? How do we hold childhood memory alongside subsequent awareness of suffering? How do we hold space for ambivalence, for complexity, for our own contradictions? Is the pleasure and/or violence of remembering not something that can be housed, but instead an action; and if so, how does it move? Does re-membering something broken in our “inner child” ever fix her? What is the gestural language of that tender tending?
            Some different possibilities to explore in simple hand gestures:
—squeezing out the dregs of memory, like squeezing out a toothpaste tube
—holding, molding, parsing, blending (test the QiGong practice of separating the hands to feel for the energy between them, as if stretching bubble gum between the palms, feeling opposition - and then perhaps blending it by stroking the skin of your hands)
—pushing away what doesn’t serve and gathering in what does (or supine crunches: extend head and limbs upward, then ball yourself up and clutch them tightly)
—touching our history like the flank of a beast (experiment with a pillow—how do you touch your history? Do you honor its danger? Soothe its wild side? Or do you climb on to ride to battle?)
—honoring with awareness the subtlety of body temperature: start simply by touching hands and feet and perceive whether there is hemispheric balance in your body temperature. Progress through simple self-touch to explore where you feel cool, shuttered safety and where you feel heat. Is this simply circulation, or does it correspond to areas of injury, associations with experiences of comfort or safety, or movement patterns that have built particular strength? Is there fire shut up in your bones, and how does that buried history relate to the tensions and contradictions wrapped up in Memorial Day?