An Essay on Film
Students set up their cameras in the parking lot of the Moon Winx Lodge. Scenes have been written to be staged beneath the sign. Actors act, play out their domestic dramas with the goofy sign walleyed in the middle distance. Or at night, the sign provides the only available light, exposes the shadows with its backlighting. The sound of its humming neon, a kind of snoring, has been collected on endless spools of magnetic tape or nowbottomless bits of digital memory. The metronome of its switching valences keeps time, ambient meter pulses beneath the pingpong dialogue of the backlit principles. I like the sign best when it is out of focus, smeared illegible in the background until it is pulled into view, etched in the inky night, a dissolve that resolves the scene, an establishing shot that materializes out of the soft cloud of hovering light. The moviemakers are attracted to the Moon Winx like the moths who can't help themselves. The cameras roll, recording this epic-insect invaders of the moon. It is all so damned atmospheric, this moon. So suggestive. A moody moon. The film crews hose down the empty blacktop, hoping to capture the moon's eel-like reflection in the shimmering pools, the pools already steaming in the hot southern night.
An Essay on Lunatics
She is one of many who walk the streets of Tuscaloosa. They are mainstreamed now from the city's half-dozen asylums. The old railroad tracks curve along the fence line of Bryce Hospital, past the front gate, and then cut through the university next door. A joke often repeated is that a passenger getting off here would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the two state institutions. She follows the old rights of way, her marching cadence matching the verses she shouts. A flock of spondees circles her. She walks each day from one side of the city to the other. As I pass her in the car or as I am walking by, I hear snatches of her ambulatory sermon-a patchwork of damnations, rhetorical questions, ecstatic description, gothic tableaus. Other patients are roped together, mountaineering the arching viaduct, spelunking the underpasses. A city animated by cadres of distracted constitutionals. Old men wander Fifteenth Street, bindle stiffed and muttering, giving directions to themselves and each other while even older men wobble on ancient bicycles, collect crushed cans from the gutters, filling saddle bags made from plastic store sacks. I saw her as I was driving down University. There she was, stopped in her tracks, gesticulating, staring at the smiling moon of the Moon Winx Lodge, silent for once. I watched her in the rear view mirror reversed. The writing on the sign all backwards, her face turned up, trying to think of what to say to that beneficent expression looking down at her.
A Note on Blackbirds as Notes
A blackbird sits on the topmost tip of the crescent moon. Another blackbird perches on the curving point below the bemused cartoon profile of the man in the moon, a bas-relief rookery. A passing horn startles both from their roosts. They become airborne punctuation: a semicolon. For a moment, they form that formation, exponent suspended, the final stroke: a bass clef.
An Essay on Dreams
I like the new evolutionary theory of dreams, of why we dream. An animal more likely to survive is one who can stay still, and sleep keeps one still. Dreams evolved, so the theory goes, to keep the mind busy while the body sleeps. Dreams take the mind's mind off waking, make the mind mind. This sign is a dream itself, a dream of itself-with its flying buttress of articulation, its squareless expressionism askewing every angle, askance glance. In the dark, its various shapes unhinge and float, solid matte slabs behind the wired light, a mobile of rhomboid shadows, polyhedral swatches, interrupted radii. The sign is a dream. The sign is a sign signifying "dream."
An Essay on Attractive Nuisance
There is a ladder leaning against the Moon Winx Lodge sign. It casts its hard-edged repeating shadow on the underlying French curves of the sign's design, striping the moon, a kind of dazzleflage. No one's around. Perhaps this is evidence of routine maintenance. Paint needed to be scraped and touched up. Rust removed with some steel wool. Some glass tubing replaced or reconnected. A bird's nest in a dimpled cranny on the moon's cheek knocked down. The perspective of the ladder is inviting. Sighting up, it seems the side rails slant inward, that somewhere way overhead they will meet, a vanishing point within reach. But the ladder leads only up to the moon. I am reminded of the Italo Calvino fable involving ladders, the moon, and lost love. There are times when the moon seems that close, close enough to climb to, to clamor on. But that is always an illusion, a trick of light, the deficiency of our own limited sensing apparatus. There is delight, though, in possibility. The first rung is beneath your feet.
An Essay on Signs of Signs
I wonder who owns the Moon Winx Lodge sign. Probably the same person who owns the Moon Winx Lodge. The motel itself, brick colonial barracks arrayed on terraces behind the office hut, is worse for wear. A few rooms appear occupied, even lived in, the accommodations now week to week. The place has gone to seed, gone way past seedy. Now, no hourly rates offered for trysts or assignation. No, the house here has the air of flop-buckets with old-style mops and those extruded resin chairs, mismatched, on the shattered cement porches. The owner's let the place go. But the sign out front is another story. It's funny because the instrument for attracting the trade is now the attraction. The crescent moon curls inward, its horns pointing over to the ruined venue. Check it out, the moon urges. It has checked out. But you can't take your eyes off the sign. It looks brand new or, more exactly, brand old, an obvious relic of some pre-interstate motoring past, a past when air conditioning was a selling point, not simply a given. The lights all light. The paint is fresh. From the look of the sign, you would think this is a going concern instead of a place that is long gone. When did this happen? One day the owner awoke from a night of troubled dreams to discover the sign was the principal investment, was worth saving even as the rest of the property decays. Actual kudzu grows up the walls of one of the wings. The pool is fenced and filled in. The sign generates no cash that I can see, and yet it is maintained pristine. Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the South, maybe the whole country is fond of those cast-iron markers. The ones that are erected on historical sites, the ones that preserve memory, the ones that denote some significance. I can't wait for a sign commemorating the Moon Winx Lodge sign to be dedicated next to the Moon Winx Lodge sign. Not in the place where it once stood but right next to it. Perhaps the owner already dreams of this, is not waiting for a committee somewhere to act. The sign has already transubstantiated. It is an existential sign. It is itself. It stands for itself. It is its own memorial.