Been thinkin’ about…Carnival soul

The sunset streaks with orange and purple and the wind is blowing from the Southeast, ragged and fitful and soft to the touch. The wind smells of the South, all hints of loblolly pine and eternal sea and summer memory, of summers long ago, and of forbidden Southern rock beneath the evening oaks.

Towns have souls, strange and crossed and bony souls, crossroads of past and present, of loss and hope, of city fathers and of deep profanities unuttered in dark streets, the things left out of those little history books they write. Those things wouldn't fit in those books anyway. How could you write rational and normal town history and still include all the tears, the loss, the souls left staring wordlessly from the past. There were some of those souls lost in that little doctor's room I frequented as a kid. The room had clinical green walls and a tall, tiny window so high up. The X-ray machine was too heavy to move and so it remained, becoming a clothes rack for castaway men’s suits. The doctor's office was — by my childhood — the Episcopal thrift shop, smelling of mothballs and old books. A polished amber ash tray was filled with those little striped peppermints and sat near where a nurse would have stood.

Just down the sidewalk from the thrift shop, the city park waited in the shade of the big maple trees. There was a stage of concrete blocks painted sky blue, there between the bank and the crumbling railroad hotel — now low-rent apartments where a heavy girl with big hair and a thin, tight shirt sat on the stoop as she smoked cigarettes — and the post office built back in the Depression when post offices meant something and had big inspiring murals of the big inspiring men who built the nation. The dark summer wind was in those maple trees too. And the park was a once-a-year place of transformation, of magic, of carnival.

Carnivals are simple enough things in the light of day. But by night? We are called to crossroads, places between, places that are, for a moment, neither up nor down, neither here nor there. The crossroads call to us, for it is there we make the deals with our souls. And carnivals, so transient and peculiar, form the cross, making magic where usually kids play ball or unpack picnic sandwiches — dark and powerful magic nested where last Wednesday was perfectly normal, and next Monday will just be crushed grass and a few wayward tire tracks in the sun.

The hot wind is in the poplars now, leaves whispering in silver, thick leaves turned inside out from the evening heat and rumors of storm. Somewhere, heat lightning flares white and purple in far-off cumulous clouds, towering giants lit from within, all magic and power like the ancient fist of a god. The full moon is rising, yellow and magnificent, a gate of sorcery watching against the modern.

To a child, the names of those hastily assembled carnival rides were spells all their own — the silvery American Scrambler, the ominous and purple Octopus, the red-and-white-and-blue Tilt-A-Whirl. My sister and I climbed into the Tilt-A-Whirl as night fell and beyond the cage-like boundaries the world spun faster and weirder and my normal everyday town blurred faster and weirder as well. I felt sick. The lights brightened. The row of tents partially hid the all-too-familiar post office that was now somehow changed. Carnivals of childhood blur as well, amalgamated in their own dark small town magic.

In the brightly lit tents forming a boundary against the real world, a big young man blows circus balloons bigger and bigger. He's much older than me, in my memory, but I'm just a little kid. The balloons are magic too, vastly larger than anything from the dime store, all strength and power and fragility, beautiful stars on tautly stretched rubber. Cosmic tension and transience encapsulated in a moment. That afternoon, on the stage, there had been a strongman contest, local men showing off. The idea was foreign to me. My family's men didn't lift weights, didn't go to the gym, and I wanted to watch but we had to leave for a picnic elsewhere. The men — mostly characteristic Midwest farmers but with uncharacteristic gym memberships — continued to flex without my attention.

Magic is the thing that happens that we cannot explain, that we can too often overlook. Magic is the strange thing stirring in the soul, sometimes inspiring, sometimes tempting us to follow far off into the darkness. Will-o-the-wisps are real, no matter what the rational people say. People locked away in clinical, cubical minds cannot sense the magic, not its promise, nor its threat. 

And always, the night carnival in my memory watches, eternal crossroads locked in the forever, the ephemeral re-birthed with each new carnival crushing down the grass in the city park, with each new look of wonder in a child's eyes. Far above, the Black Cherry Moon rises, lighting the night. Whether we like it or not, this is the crossroads of Papa Legba and Hecate, black citadels unseen. And once again, the angels of our intent gather, called by the reflection of our souls, attention drawn like to the moonlight dancing in deep well water. Forever and over, our angels gather, but in the end, which kind of angels do we choose?