Symbols and slogans

The clouds were grey white as if shot through with slivers of ice, Patches of snow from Tuesday's storm lingering in shady spots in Charlestown near Schrafft's. The wind from the east hard and rasping as I went over the Mass Ave bridge. When I stopped to retie my shoes, my fingers were stiff with cold and fumblely. Yet the normal crew of runners had been supplemented with people getting ready for the marathon Monday. One runner stopped me to ask if this beside us was MIT. And was that Boston University over there? Lean men loping by alone looked tough. A trio of Ethiopian (? ) runners looked lithe. Caps were pulled well down.

The marathon, already famous, has become even more of a symbol and we Boston folk have chanted ourselves into a slogan.

Later, I was behind a thick white pillar, sitting on a beautifully shaped wooden pew, gazing down past my shoes at beautiful wood flooring glowing with sunlight, meditating in the white spaces of the service on the words of one put to death by (pretty much) due process. Also a symbol, also a slogan.

We need symbols and slogans, thirst for them when the literal and ordinary--the strong enough (for most purposes) gallumpher that I am, the country-side crowd-gatherer that he was--doesn't inform, doesn't inspire as we require. And, indeed, there is often more to the mundane than appears on the surface.

These examples aside, the weight of symbolism can seem sometimes less a natural transcendence than a mask which feels other to the face, the slogan less real character than caricature. The perceptions of others, even as we accept them, can make us alien to ourselves, formal and false to them. To have real conversation, we can't be symbols and slogans. Symbolism et cetera should be worn lightly, glimpsed fleetingly, known intuitively. In the meantime, hurrah for the down to earth.