Cover art: Marian Luniv “Reflection” 2020, courtesy of Ukrainian painters’ exhibit in Padua
Balloon
Consider the balloon: a two-ply, circular or elongated piece of material, a
nipple protruding from its end. This thing balloon seems to have intrinsic
possibilities for some use. However, if the user has not yet been initiated into
balloon procedures, the object and manner of balloon is mystifying.
The user moves from a toddling, weak-lunged, awe-struck observer to a full-
blown participant, robustly and energetically filling these pliable plastics
with carbon dioxide, then putting their shapes into either use or uselessness.
Later, when balloon newness becomes less engaging, a jaded demeanor sets
in and the ante is increased: new gasses must be infused in order for interest
to be preserved—hot air or helium. These gasses give the balloon a life of its
own and the user a new attitude: let go. The balloon responds, lifts off, goes
somewhere in the room.
Essence of balloonness:
None of the following statements can be proven, but all of them are
incontrovertibly true and each of them patently false, offering only airy
generalities, offering nothing to take hold of, gossamer at best.
•A balloon is a pure idea.
•A balloon is the definition of optimism.
•What says a balloon? “I am without worry.” “Fill me.” “Use sharpness, let
my air free.” “Be dispassionate: watch me.” “Be passionate: watch me.”
•For adults, the beauty in the life of a balloon exists purely by virtue of its
impending death.
•For children, the beauty in the life of a balloon is the nature of the balloon
itself, for children themselves are balloon complicated a thousandfold.
•A balloon is nothing without wind and therefore becomes one with wind. It
agrees with wind, and is rare, in that it agrees with the self it has become.
•No function can be proscribed for a balloon, for if humans try to proscribe a
function, a dizzying number of factors enter to erode the definition: not
simply size or shape, not simply the heaviness of air or the tenacious pull of
gravity, but the velocity of the child moving toward it with a sharp stick, the
joy of the child who sleeps with her first balloon—even the amount of spit
unwittingly blown into its shape.
•When a human concentrates and trains herself, she can, in the afternoon,
make balloons with her mouth, using the liquid this morning’s orange juice
donated to her body.
•A balloon, being inspired, holds an infinitesimal yet profoundly important
part of the spirit: human breath.
•A balloon, mechanically filled with helium then fallen and
unceremoniously run over on a freeway in Houston, Texas, neither
diminishes the spirit of the one who launched it nor is, anymore, a vessel of
optimism.
•Balloon and birds share something in common: they both start with “b.”
Scene: You remember it, from the wonderful French film “The Red
Balloon.” The beleaguered child, Pascal, is lifted by a joyous confluence of
balloons. He flies over the rooftops of Paris.
Scene: You are at a county fair. Leg-weary, it is time for you to leave. Your
daughter, four years old, asks you to buy her a balloon—that one—the big
blue, drum-tight with helium. You do, then tie the thin white string around
her wrist, your fingers fat, fumbling, careful not to bind that wrist so small,
soft. You walk to the parking lot. Her eyes are on the balloon, your eyes
seek out your car in all the balloon-colored cars. You spot the car and head
toward it, when, the loop too large, her wrist too small, “Oh!” she cries, and
powerless, the two of you watch the blueness rise, diminish, converge with
sky. She weeps, the two of you together, still holding hands, and you know:
this, her introduction to grief.
Gerald Fleming‘s most recent book is The Bastard and the Bishop, prose poems from Hanging Loose Press in New York. Other titles include One (Hanging Loose), The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers, San Francisco), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers). He lives in near San Francisco. The first prose poem he published was forty-nine years ago, also in San Francisco.
