The Vain Conversation
Page 29
But miracles abound—For what else does it mean to be alive?—and a metaphor for impossible possibilities becoming real can be found in science, namely in the form of a transmutation that has held metaphorical sway over the human imagination for thousands of years. The Japanese poet, Moritake writes:
A fallen leaf
Flew back to its branch!
No, it was a butterfly.
This popular haiku is distinguished by a clear image that excites the mind’s eye and imaginative faculties as well as speaking to a deeply felt human sense of telos and greater purpose. The haiku also echoes a scene in a play by Masaoka Shiki in which a character mourning a dead friend asks whether the soul of his dearly loved acquaintance is like a butterfly, and will return to the branch of life, or is like a leaf, and is forever banished to the afterlife, the land where men cast no shadows?
Certainly the complexities of religion would inform one’s answer when faced with an enquiry regarding the ultimate disposition of the soul, but within the bounds of a single life or the across the historical arc of a single country, is it possible to speak with surety and to say that, Yes, this man’s friend will return?
As we know, the butterfly is not returning per se, but is born of death. The caterpillar, the chrysalis and the flying flowers we so admire share little in common structurally. Caterpillars are born with imaginal discs that hold the blueprints for the butterfly and when those blueprints begin to unfold the caterpillar’s immune system perceives them as assailants, and attacks them ferociously struggling to maintain its terrestrial “caterpillar-ness” until, at last, fatigued, it succumbs to the dream within the imaginal cells and blossoms into the butterfly.
Humans, unfortunately, perhaps, have more say in their transformation. We often resist because that transformation, that symbolic death, is not bodily, but of the ego, which has deep, deep claws. The body may go gentle, but the ego rages always. Is that not its very reason for being? Can the imaginal cells, the seeds of love and possibility planted in all of our hearts, transform a boy conscripted into the role of “white man” in the Jim Crow South? Can the imaginal cells, the seeds of the hope for equality planted in this country’s chartering documents transform a country with a legacy of inequity into a vision of human unity?
While reading The Vain Conversation, which, like the best fiction, resists dispensing easy answers, you ask yourself many questions, the first of which is: At what price race? It is popular to say that “No man is free until all are free” or that “All are oppressed if even one is oppressed.” While these pithy sayings give hope to many, functionally are those adages but mere platitudes meant to console the suffering and encourage the just? Does racism cripple those who wield the whip as well as those whom are whipped? Will four lynching victims live on in the hearts of the murderers, corrosive and stinging; and live on in the hearts of grieving loved ones, calm and soothing? In other words, is Kendrick Lamar right to say that “The one in front of the gun lives forever”?
You will have to answer those questions for yourself. All I will tell you is the conversation in this novel is anything but vain. The question you will most likely ask yourself, reader, having finished this novel is: Am I attacking my own imaginal cells, or am I willing to be changed. Again, a question you can only answer. But as is the case with all good novels, the experience of reading this one illuminates all the right questions.
T. Geronimo Johnson