Joanna Siwiec Response: M. Pinard: "Hep"

[Anonymous]

#595

Mary Pinard’s piece starts off with this unfilled childhood desire, that made me stop at the end of the one sentence that consist of paragraph 2, and prepare myself for a climactic truth. And then, I was lost. And then, I questioned why would she throw in a page of historical data right after telling us that something made her take a plunge after 40 years? The aesthetic beauty and the precise technicality she wrote about the history and art of trapeze heightened my interest in where she was going with it.

The symbolism of flight is one almost too easily picked up on in this piece, but it’s the mentality of flight that I think Mary is sharing with us. Her reminiscence of her childhood desire to fly reminds us of the limitless nature of the child’s imagination: “Ever since I can remember, I wanted to fly. And not with the help of anything mechanical or pharmaceutical–I wanted my body, on its own, to fly. I understood very early on that this is presented certain obstacles, and I began to imagine ways to overcome them” (26). I was reminded of 6 year old me wearing my grandfather’s army hat and pretending I was a pilot. Having the opportunity to experience planes at such a young age, I marveled at the lift off, at the wings cutting through the clouds, at the mountain peaks that protruded under the belly of the plane, and was entranced by wanting to fly these machines. Of course, I never became a pilot–nor a tornado hunter like I once aspired to be. But the childhood fancy of wanting to experience suspension in air, is a freeing and pure ideology. Mary asks, “Why I want to fly? And where did I think I was going, or what, to ask it another way, was I leaving?” (27) Seeing flight as a means of escape always brings us to the root of what we are escaping from. The hesitation and wait that Mary makes us experience before she tells us of her flying act is purposeful and places her psyche alongside the act of trapeze.

Mary’s use of language paints images for us to make us visualize her in the moment, and nothing more. As she climbs up the twenty-four-foot ladder we expect her to be flying in the next few sentences. That is when Mary hits us with what she has been building up to, her mother. Mary’s description of losing her mother is one that undoubtedly impacted her psychologically as a child–from the lies she was told about it, and her father’s remarriage. What was eerily parallel to Mary’s desire to fly was her mother’s death: “In fact, years would pass before anyone told me the details of my mother’s death earlier that day, how she had been thrown from the car, literally flown out of it as it flipped over and over in air, and how she was found underneath it, mortally injured” (31). We are shown that, and then Mary tells us of her plunge-which is magnified in intensity more than it would have been if the riff of her mother’s death was not squeezed in between that platform and her launch. The reader now knows that this is the moment that Mary has mentally been preparing for 40+ years, and in a way, she has finally found freedom in herself.

Lastly, something that spoke to me was Mary’s “other mode of flying, which is writing” (35). She describes a tension she feels when she writes, and how “it must be just the right balance of lilt and meter, image and story to survive a leap into the sky of the empty page” (32). She describes the page as a “white blankness” and the “risky rush” of being in its presence (32). Whether it is physically flying, or the flights of thoughts onto that blank canvas, one feels a certain freedom and satisfaction that they take so long to prepare for. Just as Mary prepared for her trapeze flight for decades, she does the same with her writing. The mentality of taking actions in writing is burdened by the execution but completed through the freedom that exudes once she jumps onto the sky of that empty page.

[Website Services Admin]

#599

Joanna, I think your personal connection to the text is a really powerful way of thinking about a point Marguerite brought up in her response – the freedom to imagine. But maybe pushing that a little further, the power in imagination.- Maybe the power to escape, to learn, to heal.

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