Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

T.
54
"How ironic," the man said, laughing. "And now he is going
to become the model for a dove statue."
For a while both were silent, the man's hand moving while
Hand peered intently at what he was drawing.
"Damn! Stop moving," the man said.
"He's a living thing," Hand said. "Can't be helped."
"That's your line of work, isn't it? Can't you do something so
he won't move?" the man asked.
"Impossible."
"In that case," the man said, resting his hand and speaking
suddenly in a serious tone, "you can at least grab hold of him, can't
you?"
Hand blinked a few times quickly, as if calculating something
in the process, and then nodded, "Yes."
The two men began consulting in hushed voices.With wrinkled
brows, fingers drawing circles and lines in the air, and looking
around in all directions, they bargained for a long time. With the
clap of the man's hands and Hand's hesitant nods, mouth shut, the
negotiations seemed to conclude.
Hand grabbed hold of me. Even though I hadn't completed
my daily task he took a bag of birdseed out of his pocket and filled
up my feeder. "Eat up," he said in an extremely kind voice.
"Are you sad?" the man said from behind.
"Of course I am," Hand replied, angrily.
I was put into my box as always. However, the place I was
taken to was not the show tent. Instead, it was to a room with a
medicinal odor in a large, dark building. There I was lain face up,
the feathers on my chest were pushed apart, and, with a sharp
scalpel, I was cut open. My insides were scooped out and, like
taking off a shirt, I was reduced to just my skin. My insides were
at once thrown into a pot, boiled, and eaten. Then my skin was
filled with padding, supported by a skeleton of steel wire. I became
a stuffed bird.
I was put in the box again and then carried to the man's studio.
The man placed me on a model's stand and arranged the angle
of my wings and the position of my head. I passively let him do all
of this. The man kneaded and scraped clay while staring at me.
Judging by appearances, one might think that this incident was
really no big deal for me.=fiut, on the contrary, it was a vast change.
Beside the fact that naturally I had lost my life, I had become an
object; not only that, I had become a concept. No, actually, I was
in the process of becoming solely a concept. In the man's hands I
was being molded into a concept. Isn't that a big difference? My
existence, which had been no more than a sum total of sensations,
was being transformed into one comprised solely of meaning.
The completions of the transformation occurred one summer
day due to the hasty, imperfect preservation job done on me. My
skin began to collapse from the inside as maggots began to devour
me. I was thrown into the stove and burned up but, under his
hands, I had become instead the "Dove Statue." Then, suddenly, I
understood the meaning of everything.
I am now the statue "Dove of Peace." I have a clear meaning;
I am meaning itself. However, I, myself, cannot just be myself, by
myself. Simply put, only through the actions of those supporting
me can I exist. For that reason I was erected at this intersection. I
suppose it was also at a crossroads for power politics.
Anyway, let's go back to where we left off. Hand is about to
finish sawing through my second ankle. However, if I don't say
something about how things got this way, Hands appearance may
seem too sudden, too coincidental. Hand must have been feeling
serious regret over having sold my life for a few dollars. After that
he appeared almost every day at the intersection and, for the time
it took him to smoke a cigarette, he would stare at me. Returning
Hands feeble stare I was able to understand many things. Hand was
having more and more trouble getting by. It seemed that he
became exhausted by the delusion that his daily misfortunes were
due to his having sinned against me. Of course, it was no more
than a delusion. But, from his perspective, it was clearly reality. He
finally couldn't bear to keep this secret to himself. Then he would
tell every person he met about my fate. This was to pull me down
from "a symbol of peace" to the level of his fate.
One day this voice of Hand caught the ear of an antipacifist....but
I'll come back to that later. Hand has finished cutting
through both my ankles.