on literary theory
8-year-old-Riese delivers an ultimatum.
"Draw Andro Sphinx by next time."
To be sure the directive is understood,
he pencils 6 large letters.
Y-U-G-I-O-H.
"Yu-Gi-Oh. Take my card. But if you lose it,
you owe me 20 bucks."
He stuffs the other 49 from his collection
back into a small box. I slide his card
contained-in-its-oversized-red-plastic-case
into a pocket.
"Never-EVER put it in your pocket! What if it gets bent?!"
So I carefully lay it in between the pages of Dante's Purgatory
which I just happen to have brought to the studio.
He leaves with a satisfied smile.
The following week is busy. Days pass
and the book remains unopened.
But the day before I am to see Riese again,
I reopen the page to find an empty red plastic case.
The card is gone. An hour of searching and general panic
leads to a short trip to Conspiracy Comics.
It is early evening and already the storefront space
is filled with experts, all under 16 years of age.
The guy behind the glass counter tries to locate
a copy of the card even though I no longer remember
the e x a c t name.
"It starts with an A and the character has big green hair."
This is all I can tell him.
We search various series and general listings,
but unsuccessfully. He conducts an internet search
while I rescan the glass display cases for rare cards,
just as two boys enter the shop.
I hear one confide to the other,
"Wear black. Black is good because black is defective.
Anything defective is good.".
Both nod. After an hour of chance encounters,
I finally locate Andro Sphinx in a shadowy corner
of the glass display case near the two boys;
it costs a mere 10 dollars.
The next day, I return the (new) card to Riese
and explain what happened. He replies,
"If I had known,
I could have picked out a different character."
After reopening my book to the page where his card fell out,
I find Paul Claudel's comment,
"The mystery of history
is that God writes straight
with crooked lines."
Claudel refers to the style manifest on Mount Purgatory,
as Dante ascends. But it somehow applies to
andro-sphinx-knights bereft of ideals, the sweet beauty
of the troubadours and their tender songs destroyed
by toil, anger and general expressions of woe.
All part of the yu-gi-oh crusade.
With no gap between thought and deed,
just like Columbus discovering land
and Galileo finding a map in the stars,
allthewhile hoping it also applies to me,
I repeat to myself,
'anything defective is good.'
posted by name of the rose at 8:47 p.m.
4 Comments:
curious tale ... I had to look up 'yugioh' for it to make a bit more sense ... though the end to a large extent summarizes it all, and could be true and applicable on any number of levels
yes. not only the inherent kid-subculture with its built-in vernacular, but the 8 year old collector @ $10.00 (+) per card
...perhaps the buy-and-trade of these cards approximates the adult world of
commodity investment...not to mention all the other implications...
implications that are fascinating, of course ... lessons learned - that money doesn't grow on trees, that one might consider taking out insurance on things of value that are lost, misplaced, misappropriated or otherwise go missing etc - and various other pearls of wisdom.
yu.gi.oh. who'd have suspected?
and perhaps he did take out insurance in the sense of charging twice the price of the card, if it went missing...was he unaware of its current market value or was the $20.00 replacement fee an 8-year-old profiteering strategy?
...and all the philosophical implications therein...
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