Semantic Susurrus

Walking around downtown, there are so many pious youth with their heads covered in reverence to an unresponsive deity. Hipsters wearing knit hats, cruising from one temple to another, following musicians. Pipers. With all that wool covering their ears, one would think they would be safe.

But-

These ones, the painfully hip adult children, have no idea about the kind of poetry they’re participating in.

As an avid reader, I am never alone. And, though warmth and morning render me useless as a linguist, I was sitting with Milan and Antoine over breakfast and we talked about  semantics and the symbolism surrounding hats.

Kundera and Exupery are the voices I heard in the not quite sleeping hours of the early mornings in my adolescence. A professor told me I had a good literary background when we were discussing Milan Kundera and metafiction, but she didn’t understand that I wasn’t going out of my way at all. It would have been impossible to avoid those whisperings, that semantic susurrus. I feel as if I have never come to anything of my own volition; it’s like changing your point of reference, deceiving yourself that the sidewalk is moving and you are stationary just by shifting perspective. I am perpetually being catapulted towards something, in spite of myself, as an observer. And the great thinkers continue to speak to me despite my will.

I don’t imagine Antoine would have enjoyed sitting with Milan to talk about how children can’t help but to develop sexually so we choose something else. In the morning hours we were all able to agree on one thing: The futility of semantics, given the organic symbolism life lends us, our tendency to create our own definitions for things. They also agreed that hats would never frighten anyone. So this is what we talked about, something benign as hats. It should be so simple, though it has somehow found its way into our long dictionary of misunderstood words. This is what we understand:

Hat- noun; verb, hatted, hatting

Definition 1. Something not to be feared.*
Antoine will never be able to share his Drawing Number One with anyone (At least, not to the point of understanding) but children and the occasional English major who hit her head very hard as a child, permanently lodging a bit of whimsy in part of her brain. Boa constrictors who swallow elephants, when drawn in silhouettes, look an awful lot like bowler hats but, things are rarely what they look like immediately and, well, you know, adults and their first impressions… So, for this reason, hats will always mean disappointment and miscommunication to poor Antoine. And the Frenchman will probably always be bareheaded because of the error.

No one would fear a hat the way you may fear a pachyderm swallowing snake

I imagine I can see desert wind tousling his hair. He’s waiting for something like understanding while I’m sitting here, drinking coffee, living vicariously through the man who saw a yellow haired boy die and all I want to talk about is clothing.

“I want to be responsible for something, I want to tame something.” I say. Antoine is looking at me out of the corner of his eye and I know he knows I am just trying to become part of his creation instead of naming my own.

Next to us, Milan is laughing quietly. He is probably thinking that he could have written a nice little story about the girl who loved everything. He is always laughing at love, or changing his definition of it. He deals in fewer simple terms than Antoine and I’m not ready to deal with him.

“I am not responsible for you,” Antoine says. Because we are responsible for all that we tame, but it isn’t his words that have tamed me. I have tamed myself, made myself a conglomerate of French and Franco-Czech philosophies. And this, more than many things, makes me sad so I leave Antoine to his melancholy. He’s sketching again.

Definition 2.Things belonging to grandfathers, sensuality, kinship between women.**
“When you sit face to face,” Milan says, “with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true.”

He has told me so many stories but this morning I just want to hear the ones about Sabina, hero of my misguided youth. I have heard them many times. Sabina walked in straight lines instead of circles. Her grandfather left her a bowler hat after his death. She did not know him well. A man saw her in the hat once. Aside from the felt-thing, she was wearing nothing but her lingerie and she would allow another woman to photograph her in this same attire on another occasion.

Sometimes I call myself Sabina when I lie about who I am while talking to people at bus stops.(Milan begins to speak but I’m thinking of geology, of conglomerate rocks… Which is really just to say again, I am working from a tradition. I am merely derivative from the great thinkers before me.)

“Doing a stranger’s biding is a special madness,” the Franco-Czech says.

“What?” I ask, absent from the moment.

“You do not really know me, is what I am saying.”

Aside from their use as a sex object and conversation piece, Milan knows the meaninglessness of hats and is more willing to accept it than the literary community at large. Milan quite literally wrote the book on the lightness of being. Essentially, that all this is meaningless and he knows it and we (the Frenchman and I) know it too but are so much more reluctant to give up on it. Still, Milan also knows the value in prescribing meaning to something. He gives Antoine and I this little symbol. I’m wringing a deerstalker*** in my hands beneath the table.

Definition 3. Just an article of clothing, taking modern cultural context into consideration.
This is something that can’t be forgotten. Probably, I’ll concede, once this pretentious mood has passed, and admit that city kids’ caps and snowboarders’ tuques  have nothing to do with childhood ambition, disappointment or sexual identity.

But me and Antoine, we are always wanting more. Milan leaves us. He is feeling a little superior in his knowledge of the lightness.

With the conversation ended, I am able to put another bit of the infinite universe into my pocket; it’s my way of trying to collect all the things I think I understand. Now, this seems just as shallow as my habit of keeping pictures of men, evidence of my conquests, hidden in the recesses of my hard-drive to remind myself that I have indeed known the pettiest of successes. But even these things, I only understand at a surface level. I can tell you the formulaic approach taken in my annexation of new “territory” (I planted my flag on his attractive collar bone) and how men think of hats but all I can tell you about myself is that I’m a hipster and like to wear them (both men and hats).

My head is warm and I can’t see my morning breath anymore. For once, I miss the winter.

At the barber shop, I watch my hairs fall to the floor. I will spend the summer months bareheaded.

*From Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

**From The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

***The kind of hat Sherlock Holmes and Holden Caulfield wore. Essentially, a hat with ear-flaps as well as a visor.