Reading Hugh Campbell’s La Dynamite in my high school french class — a story about two workers driving a truck full of TNT across a treacherous landscape — I learned something which has always stayed with me. If a question ever begins “Pourquoi…” — without needing to know what has just happened — however lost you may feel in conjugation, vocabulary, or even the question itself — the answer will always be one of two things:
A) Johnny a trop peur.
(Johnny has too much fear.)
or
B) Une explosion est toujours possible.
(An explosion is always possible.)
Not only was this true for 90% of La Dynamite pop quizzes, but I often think of it when at the crux of some existential not knowing. Stumped for an answer to life’s reasons and underpinnings — knowing I can never fully understand it all — I find that I do have an answer. “Parce qu’ une explosion est toujours possible” — a humorous and somber solace. (With poor Johnny and his too-much fear loping close behind.)
Happy July, everyone. I hope some of your toujours explosions were of the beautiful kind — feux d’artifice in sky, or art, or poems.
Which is to say, summer is a good time for looking up and for laying down — the activity of two of my favorite poems by Tomas Transtr??mer —
Launching up into the branches in “Breathing Space July” (Robert Bly translation):
The man who lies on his back under huge trees
is also up in them. He branches out into thousands of tiny branches.
He sways back and forth,
he sits in a catapult chair that hurtles forward in slow motion.
And then landing, warmed in the poem “Summer Grass” (also translated by Bly in Transtr??mer’s collection The Half-Finished Heaven):
But summer, at last.
A great airport — the control tower leads down
load after load with chilled
people from space.Grass and flowers — we are landing.
The grass has a green foreman.
I go and check in.
Yes!
In Sei Shonagon‘s Makura No Soshi (Pillow Book) featuring her lists, verse, and commentary, she writes:
Summer is best at night. That goes without saying when there is a full moon. But when fireflies flit here and there in a dark sky, that too is wonderful. It is even wonderful when it is raining.
For Shonagon, summer explodes with full moon, the cool light of fireflies, and rain — all things sky. (See also her lists for: Winds, Surprising and Distressing Things, Things That Fall from the Sky, Elegant Things, Things That Give a Clean Feeling, Things That Appear to Disadvantage When Painted, and Things That Appear to Advantage When Painted — including “an unspeakably hot summer scene.”)
From my own running list —
Things That Must Explode
The peony (with its attendant pyrotechnician ants)
A wild strawberry (How can something so small fill the mouth so completely?)
A kiss, modern. (“Fireworks had no other purpose than amusement and endured no longer than the kiss of a lover for a lady, if as long,” said Vannaoccio Biringuccio, 16th century, Pirotechnia. Skip forward to today: longer lasting, more booming display.)
Now consider all that goes into the making, you poets and lovers:
Brilliant colours are achieved by combining potassium chlorate and various metallic salts. These salts produce a variety of colours: strontium burns red; copper makes blue; barium glows green; and sodium produces yellow. Magnesium, aluminium and titanium give off white sparkles or a flash. Every firework show is a fantastic display of physics. The pyrotechnist has to take into account the relationships between vectors, velocities, projectiles and their trajectories together with the explosion forces behind burst patterns.
(About Fireworks)
Et pourquoi? You know. And always possible.