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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here.
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Signs of Something Else (in conversation with Lia Purpura’s essay, “Sugar Eggs: a Reverie”)
Steven Church
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(All italicized quotes are taken from Lia Purpura’s fantastic essay, “Sugar Eggs: a Reverie” from her collection, On Looking, which everyone should read immediately before midnight. )
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Let me crawl up to the light for a moment with hands and pockets full .
When I was growing up, my family owned a cabin in Winter Park, Colorado, a twelve-hour drive from our hometown in eastern Kansas. We often spent Christmas and my birthday there combined with yearly trip in the summer to escape the midwestern heat and humidity. My dad and my uncles built the cabin by hand in the 60’s and, for decades it was a welcome retreat for my extended family as the resort town grew around it. It sounds fancy, but it was a rustic place with tiny bathrooms, dirty carpet, and old lumpy beds. The washer and dryer were in the kitchen/dining room. The kitchen cabinet doors and drawer faces were painted in colors of red, orange, yellow, green, purple and blue. All the furniture was old or broken or both. But I loved the place like you love a dream.
A house lit from within at a distance—no. A house lit from within at a distance, in winter—yes.
We are a family of signs. Kitschy sayings and silly jokes, dad jokes. Language humor. The humor of puns and word play, mostly innocent and often dumb or just confusing. For example, if we were staying at my grandparents’ home, when I’d awaken in the morning and emerge from the basement bedroom I favored, my grandfather would always nod and say, “Good morning. Son’s up.”
Regarding light: fireflies—not in a jar, traditionally, but their bodies in air. Leaning close, looking fast makes the whole yard a jar.
Above the doorway to the staircase at the family cabin hung a wooden sign that said simply, “Quit yer bellyachin’,” which was something of a catch-phrase and zeitgeist for my grandfather—though it strikes me now that I’ve made a career out of bellyachin’ and navel-gazing. I pretty quickly shed those family expectations, making noise where there’d been so much silence. The staircase in the cabin was wallpapered in maps of the United States and the World; and my family had traced their various road-trips and vacations on them, drawing red paths over the highway lines, x’s marking the sites of settling and exploring. As a child, I loved to linger on the cabin stairs, tracing the lines of family history, all the journeys, all the stops and starts. Somehow these maps spoke more than most of my decidedly stoic midwestern family. It told me where they’d been before they got here.
It is colossally extravagant, of course, yet intimate, the way the sadness at the heart of any family is jeweled over.
But the sign I remember most from the family cabin, perhaps for its odd visceral surprise, for the way it shouted at me. The one that never failed to delight me was the warning sign, printed in a sans serif font on a black background with a bright red border. It hung on an orange cabinet door, next to the kitchen sink.
In big bold red letters, it said, “Dry Paint.”
And there it is. Like a sharp intake of breath, a gasp of thought. Every single time. I’d read that sign and pull my hand back from the cabinet. I’d feel a delicious confusion, a tingle at the base of my skull, like losing your mom for a minute in the supermarket when you were a kid. Both familiar and frightening. It’s not funny. But it’s something. I’d feel myself drifting in a liminal space between sign and sense, that ineffable gap between what we read and how our brain and body respond. I think this is part of what made me a writer. Chasing that confusion, that wilderness of language, that flinch of consciousness at some simple word play. It is not necessarily a physical space, though you can feel it in your body, too. You register it subconsciously and respond physically, almost like a laugh or a sneeze.
Not crystals, but geodes. In a geode’s split, crystally center: that jagged, purpled cave where you could live with tiny crampons and ice picks, hunkered down, the light exploding all around.
In the Fall of 1996, much of my days working at the Meteor Crater Natural Landmark in Northern Arizona were largely spent standing behind a counter in the gift shop or the rock shop where I’d mostly just let my mind wander. When they banned me from reading at work (unless I read books from the gift shop) I started journaling and doodling to pass the hours. When things got exciting, I might get to crack a geode for a kid with the weird chain-winch contraption. We never really knew what we’d get inside a geode. There were no guarantees of beauty, so it was actually pretty fun to open up those stone orbs, each one a tiny planet, and see what was beneath the surface. It was definitely better than having to refill the nacho cheese at the snack-bar.
If I was really lucky, I got to spend a few hours a day guiding tours along the rim of the largest meteor impact crater in North America, delivering that odd mix of fact and fiction that so enthralled the tourists and got me outside, from behind a counter and out of my own head. But it was now Fall and starting to get cold in the high desert above the Mogollon Rim. The days were getting shorter. Fewer and fewer tourists were making the drive from I-40. One slow day, when my manager offered me the job of painting all of the handrails outside and the pedestals inside the museum, I jumped at the opportunity.
I gathered my painting materials—the brushes and tape and drop cloths--and quickly made up my signs, “Wet Paint,” and “Dry Paint.” As I moved around outside and inside the museum, working on my job and avoiding talking to the few tourists who milled around, I moved the signs around, taping them in easy-to-see places. The “Wet Paint” sign would hang near whatever I was painting while the “Dry Paint” sign would hang on anything I wasn’t painting; and, as I did my work, I’d watch people approach the signs and I could see their brains working in real-time.
No matter what was written on them, they’d usually flinch and pull away or take a step back, afraid of the paint, whether it was dry or not. They’d read it as a warning and their bodies, too, seemed to respond independently of their brains. I felt like I was conducting field work as I watched them flinch and tumble into the gap. What is it about the form, font, and style of a “warning” sign that causes our brains to skip the content, to react simply to form and design, to the interplay of color, negative space, and positive space? Or perhaps more to the point for this essay, what is that peculiar delight I derive from reading and making such signs and how does it sustain me?
In the head? No. That won’t do. I mean to be literal here. I mean the actual space between mind and work and how that slows, how that constitutes when one is at work, is working in the space. And I mean, too, the space art clears for us all—that place of density, interiority.
My father told me recently that he thinks I’m “constantly processing the world around you,” as if this is something that other people don’t do. He said he thinks that’s part of what makes me a writer. I think he means that I’m constantly reading the world around me, looking for stories or signs of something deeper. I think he means I distrust the surface of things. This is true, I suppose. I’ve already written one essay inspired entirely by my trying to understand the ubiquitous “No Loitering” signs we see in our everyday lives and rarely think about. I feel like we’re constantly awash in puzzles of language if we only pay attention.
Ships in bottles.
The upstairs bathroom in the family cabin, tucked in under the roof between two large bedrooms, had a bathtub but no shower and a small electric space heater built into the wall. There was a sign above the tub that read, “Save water. Bathe with a Friend” and above the space heater was another small handwritten sign that read, “Do Not Touch Heater While in the Tub. Remember: Water and Electricity Mix Very Well.” The word “very” was underlined.” This was my family’s way of warning you and keeping you safe from death by electrocution. By making a joke. And it often had the same effect on me as the “Dry Paint” sign. I remember sitting in the tub, reading that sign over and over again, and still having the distinctly irrational urge to touch the space heater. It was the words. The warning wrapped in dry humor. Like a tug at my gut.
It needn’t be pleasant, the space. And it is not necessarily beautiful. Connoisseur, you know it when you see it . . . Not a neat scar, but a boil, inflamed.
I think one that started it all for me, one of the first safety signs to really confuse and, frankly, excite me was “No Standees Permitted” emblazoned in Helvetica font across the inside top of the school bus. It seems to be a requirement, a warning against a dangerous and forbidden identity—that of a “standee.” I found it both confusing and exciting.
I knew enough to know that “standee” wasn’t a word I’d seen used in any other context besides the school bus, though it is indeed a word in the dictionary and all of that. It, perhaps unsurprisingly, refers to someone who stands, typically in a place where they would otherwise be expected to sit--as in a moving vehicle, a dentist’s office waiting area, a therapist’s couch, a roller coaster, a surgical procedure or a school bus. Standee is an identity, an embodied behavior. Most of us can’t help being a standee. And it is a person, not the activity, who is forbidden. It is also an identity that, as a perhaps overly observant child, seemed to me to be entirely dependent on the contextual space of the school bus, a space fraught with its own hierarchies and conflicts. On the bus, you could be a standee. But as soon as you stepped off the bus, you were no longer a standee. You were just a person who is standing or walking or sitting. I remember sitting there on my green vinyl seat, puzzling over the sign, tumbling into the gap again, and trying to imagine the opposite of a standee and whether they’d be called a “sittee,” as in “Sittees Permitted.”
Bubbles. Only, briefly.
Perhaps in the 70’s, schools were worried about a recent trend in nonviolent protest and how it might play out in the barely controlled and already chaotic environment of your average school bus. What if everyone was just standing around all the time? It would be a breakdown of the social order. They had to reach us when we were young and impressionable, easily wooed by narrative authority and oddly comforted by sans serif fonts. So, someone made the decision to put that warning sign in every school bus. Someone took that word, “stand” and turned it into something else. I felt as if they were speaking directly to me, inviting me into that space again, that language space where “Dry Paint” and other signs lived, a place I often liked to visit.
I could take that sign and turn it into something else, something like a fever dream. I could imagine that, in our kindergarten classrooms, to further indoctrinate us on the dangers of standing on school buses, we were made to watch one of those classic 1960’s-era safety videos featuring twin brothers, Stanley and Andy Standee, a couple of misbehaving children, bad boys who suffer all matter of wounds and indignities because of their unruly and rebellious behavior on school buses. The Standees are inevitably shunned by society, not allowed on buses or hay rides or in theaters or standardized testing because standing is dangerous.
But that one time, the Standee boys managed to sneak on to a school bus with the other normal children. It was a day like any other in middle America. And then the movie voice, the voice of Helvetica if the font had one, interjects to tell us that in this scene we will see what happens to the Standees when the bus has to brake suddenly for a child chasing a ball into the street or an elderly woman slowly crossing an intersection with a cart full of groceries or perhaps an opossum prostrate on the pavement. And this is when the space opens up and my mind runs wild, romping over the possibilities.
Pressing a knuckle into a closed eye for the bursts, as I did when I was a child before sleep, so all kinds of time would collapse.
Sure enough, when the bus driver hits the brakes, Andy Standee rises up from the rubber matting, flies down the aisle in slow motion. I see his face twisted in horror, his arms pinwheeling all the way until he slams into the bus dashboard like a bug hitting a windshield. Then the film speeds up and time follows. And right behind him Stanley Standee, the brother of the damned, comes sailing past the horrified faces of seated children, over his brother’s crumpled body, and he bursts through the front windshield of the bus in a cataclysmic climax before landing in a crumpled heap at the feet of the child with the ball, the old woman and her groceries, or the opossum possuming.
The Standee boys are dead. Again. And all the children are all screaming. The bus driver has fainted over the steering wheel. And we’ve long ago left the form and content of a safety film and the rhetorical context of a school bus behind and drifted into the unruly territory of my imagination, that kind of place, just beneath the surface of things, where an odd boy on a school bus in Kansas often lost and found himself, a place conjured by language, born of a simple sign, as he habitually and obsessively processed the world around him.
What is gazing into a sugar egg? . . . A way of being a child reading under a sheet with a flashlight. Half-moon shadows on the page. Finger eclipses over the words.
Tomorrow, or the next day, I will drive to my favorite coffee shop and I will pass a small square building not far from Fresno City College. I will note the colorful plastic playground equipment behind a tall fence and the cartoon characters painted on the windows. It has a sign, too. But I will try not to look too long at it this time. I’ll try not to fall again and drift into that gap when I read the words, “Hansel and Gretel’s Daycare,” because I’m sure there is a perfectly simple explanation that I can barely imagine.
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Steven Church likes Chex Mix and raccoons and the way he and his daughter can imitate the BBC radio guy, Jonathan Frewin in the mornings on their way to school. He's also a founding editor of The Normal School and teaches in the MFA Program at Fresno State.
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