Symbols

As a writer working so intensely on a visual art project, I often have a learning curve.  Really, before I started volunteering for One Million Bones, my last experience with clay was probably pinch pots in elementary school. I had to look up the word bisque, and I spend a lot of time letting people know that I’ll have to get that particular information about art materials for them. I have lots of empathy for people who want to participate in the project by making a bone who say, “I’m not an artist.”

One thing I did bring with me though was a familiarity with the role that symbols play in artworks.  This is one of my favorite authors, Flannery O’Connor, on symbols in fiction:

 “Now the word symbol scares a good many people off, just as the word art does. They seem to feel that a symbol is some mysterious thing put in arbitrarily by the writer to frighten the common reader — sort of a literary Masonic grip that is only for the initiated …

“I think that for the fiction writer himself, symbols are something he uses simply as a matter of course. You might say that these are details that, while having their essential place in the literal level of the story, operate in depth as well as on the surface, increasing the story in every direction.

“I think that the way to read a book is always to see what happens, but in a good novel, more always happens than we are able to take in at once, more happens than meets the eye. The mind is led on by what it sees into the greater depths that the book’s symbols naturally suggest. This is what is meant when critics say that a novel operates on several levels. The truer the symbol, the deeper it leads you, the more meaning it opens up.”

Many people have a visceral reaction to bones. Some people who hear about One Million Bones are entirely put off by the idea of using bones as a symbol, but many, many others see the beauty and power of it.  One Million Bones is a multi-faceted project operating on different levels. The educational component uses the activity of creating bones to engage students in conversations about mass atrocities and genocide and also for younger students to talk about values, ethics and respect in their own communities.  The fundraising component allows the creation of bones to generate funds to support our beneficiary organizations work providing direct aid and advocacy. On still another level these bones on the National Mall, made by a million people, testify to our common humanity.  There is no denying that we are all united by our physical make up. And ultimately this project is a reminder that we belong to each other.

All of these unique layers are held together by the symbol of the bone. Bones are the physical evidence that individuals, people ever existed. We ask ourselves what it would have meant to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of the disappeared children from Argentina’s dirty war to uncover the evidence of their disappeared children, children whose bodies and whose bones were never found.  What would a single bone mean to these women? We wonder what would have happened if the bones of those murdered in Rwanda had been piled on the streets of Washington D.C.  In the face of that evidence would our Nation have been brave enough to call it genocide?  What would we have done then?  Would we have acted?

There is more happening when people participate in the One Million Bones project than meets the eye.  The connection they are making to the symbol of the bone will undoubtedly impact them on a deeper level.

This is what poet John Ciardi said about symbols, ” … a symbol is like a rock dropped into a pool: it sends out ripples in all directions, and the ripples are in motion. Who can say where the last ripple disappears? One may have a sense that he at least knows approximately the center point of all those ripples, the point at which the stone struck the water. Yet even then he has trouble marking it precisely. How does one make a mark on water?”