“The Dove and its Reach”

Forty-two years and still no tattoo. Though I’ve always had an idea of what I would do: one of Picasso’s famous peace doves. Simple and pretty cheap, as far as ink goes. Black line, no color. I’de ditch the signature and just take the bird and branch. An image I’ve always found to be elegant and acutely effective in its suggestion. A harbinger, a messenger, a metaphor. Peace. 

I had a poster of the dove on my dorm room wall in college and took it with me for a few years after graduating, though these days the bird is more nested in my memory than on my wall, and still hasn’t found its way onto my arm or ankle. I still seek peace and my life has largely afforded that experience, though these past few years, my household has been challenged with fighting kids and a marriage that struggles with communication that doesn’t quickly default to defensiveness or position-proving. I still seek peace and often muse about biting the bullet and getting the tattoo, crossing over into that increasingly large demographic of folks who ink their bodies with images and words that endure.  Why are we drawn to certain images? Why am I drawn to this one? If Picasso’s dove lands inside my arm, will it bring me some of what I seek? 

**

It’s winter break and my husband Dylan took the kids away for two nights to one of those indoor waterparks where the chlorine is strong enough to wipe out the pink eye streaming down the slides. I have class. My college teaching schedule doesn’t align with the elementary break so I get a pass. I’ll stay home and go to school and feed the cats. Our house is cozy by all means. One bathroom, no closets. Lots of books and toys and hours spent working from home. As soon as they leave, it occurs to me that we’ve lived in the house for over five years and I’ve never spent a night alone. The kids have been away; I’ve been away; Dylan has been away. But I’ve never been here alone for a night and by no means two. After a few hours of tidying, I relax into the quiet. I sit on the couch with my journal and a cup of tea. It also occurs to me that I’ve never felt truly at home in our home until I’ve been alone in our home. I wonder if peace is only possible in solitude. 

**

Dylan has one tattoo, which he’s had for a long time, since he was nineteen, about the same age I was when I decided I would get a peace dove. It’s a Picasso pen and ink. Don Quixote. On the bicep area of his right arm. When I met him it seemed like a sign to me, my imaginary Picasso peace dove and his real Don Quixote. Both done in black-line and highly expressive in their simplicity. In Dylan’s drawing, there’s movement; there’s sun; there’s two men, one horse, and one donkey; there are windmills. When I first met him, I asked him about the tattoo. He told me that when he was a kid, his mom had a poster of the image on the wall and he always liked it. He told me that as a nineteen year old, he related to the idea of a person being misunderstood and detached from the reality of others. Tilting at windmills, dreaming impossible dreams. Two Picassos, two different stories. When I ask our seven-year old son what he thinks of his dad’s tattoo, he says, it looks like a kid drew it. 

**

On my second night alone in the house, I invite a couple of my local moms friends over for some wine and cheese and cabbage soup. The house doesn’t need any more tidying since it’s just been me, and so I put on my preferred music, light a bunch of candles, and rinse the long-stemmed glasses. Soon, my friends arrive with bottles and laughter and chocolate. When one of them crosses the threshold, she says, it feels like a spa. They stay for a few hours and we cackle and talk about kid eye doctors and bemoan the fascist oligarchy. Later, when I call the crew at the waterpark and tell them about my evening, my daughter exclaims, we’re gone for a night and you had a party. I suppose I did, seizing an opportunity to host with a level of quiet control. I chose the music; I lit the candles, I dimmed the lights. No arguments about the guest list or the menu. And unlike most nights, everyone was happy with the cabbage soup. 

**

Picasso was a proud and famous member of the French Communist party and his celebrity was an asset to the party’s agenda. He created a lithograph of a dove for the International Peace Congress in Paris in 1949—and would go on to sketch different doves for future conferences. His peace doves were highly political, an open critique of fascism. They became part of left-wing propaganda, and were images of a European resistance. And this was part of Picasso’s legend, the painter of the famed Guernica. It’s hard to forget the tale that follows it, of the Nazis searching Picasso’s Paris apartment and finding a photo of Guernica. They asked him, Did you do that? To which he replied, No, you did. Whether or not the tale is true matters less than the immense suffering expressed in the oil paint. It was an outcry against the fascist slaughter of innocents—against war and the genocidal ideologies that were shattering Europe. One can almost hear the anguished screams. The world saw Guernica, and the peace dove followed. 

**

Doves are among the most domesticated and metaphorical of birds, reaching all the way back to the Book of Genesis. From the ark, Noah sends out both a raven and a dove. The raven never comes back, but the dove comes back twice. The second time she bears an olive branch, so Noah then knows the waters have “abated” from the earth. And so begins the literary history of the dove as a symbol of hope, the promise of a new world, and perhaps, a peaceful one. In the story, on the first trip off the ark, “the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark.” I’m struck by how the poor dove seems weary and tired—and by how Noah extends his hand and helps her find refuge. There’s no human hand in the Picasso sketch though I suspect that’s where the dove is headed.

***

I don’t know why I imagined that having kids would bring new realms of deep contentment, which I somehow, perhaps mistakenly, associated with peace. I do know that I wanted them, aligning my choices with an intuitive life-long awareness that I would be a mother. I remember sitting with Dylan in a restaurant on Lake Maggiore in northern Italy a couple years before our daughter was born, revealing that I was ready to have kids – ready to be something bigger than me, to relinquish my unattached life-style. I remember thinking it would all be sunshine and roses, unicorns and rainbows. I couldn’t see the bone-tired exhaustion or how our first child would immediately seem to resent the arrival of our second child. I couldn’t see how we would run out of money before we finished renovating our house. I couldn’t see how our child’s strong will would send us scrambling and into therapy, needing to learn how to be parents for the kids we have rather than the ones we idealize. I couldn’t see how the screens and processed foods would find us even as we moralized against them and struggled to keep them at bay. The truth is, there are moments of peace, but there are also many of strife. This makes me realize that shared domestic space is ever and always an experiment, especially when children begin to individuate and fully express themselves. Perhaps it’s that I couldn’t imagine how radically my sense of home would change—that I would rarely be at home, alone, again. 

**

I grew up in a small house, sandwiched between two brothers, and with parents who had a stable, though not always happy marriage. I spent a lot of time in my tiny pink bedroom, cluttered with books and art supplies and photographs and sentimental knick knacks. I largely avoided conflict, got good grades, and found a group of friends who were a hoot and often an exit visa out of the small house. My bedroom was a refuge from my older brother's teenage anger and rebellion. As was the one-on-one time I spent running endless errands with my mother; our temperaments were suited in such a way that we never really argued. And anyway, I could see college on the horizon – and a dorm room eight hours away where I would put my Picasso peace dove on the wall and shape a new life on my terms.

**

Picasso’s life was anything but peaceful. Francis Gilot’s memoir of their marriage taught me that. Her reflections on their life together zapped any romanticized vision I had of the artist who closes his eyes to see. Instead, he was a monster in relationships. I think about how Picasso and Gilot named their daughter Paloma, the dove, which, before reading Gilot’s memoir, seemed to just heighten my attachment to the peace dove drawings. After reading her book, I see that a man might draw an image without embodying it. Just the same, one might tattoo an image on her arm without fully understanding it. It might be an image of longing rather than one of being. 

**

My senior year of college I had my own private room in an old village Victorian in a small college town in Western New York, built into the side of a valley. My tiny room was in the front corner on the second floor, with walls of windows and built-in bookcases, not quite a tower, but definitely a perch. In that perch on the corner of Ward Place and Main Street, I thumb-tacked the dove poster to the wall. And though the other rooms in the house were occupied by my beloved misfit college friends, my tiny window-room was just about as nourishing as the four years I was gifted by my parents to do nothing much more than study literature and history and art. My writerly spirit took root in that room; perhaps the first room where I felt fully myself, fully free, fully at peace. There would be other apartments, some with stark water views and decks overlooking a harbor and romantic partners who would often be busy in their own worlds, leaving me a beloved solitude to read and write. The poster would follow me for a few years, though it’s now long gone, crumbled and tossed in some move along the way.

**

As I work on drafting this essay, my family has crossed two bridges to get back to Long Island and is now on the expressway. Within an hour, they’ll burst in the door and the clean, quiet house will explode with dirty laundry and wet bathing suits and 7-11 snacks and chlorine-knotty hair. I feel a little guilty wishing I had another night with the dim lights and candles. With sitting on the couch and writing in my journal, a cat sleeping in a tight ball next to me. With the experience of peace, which I’ll admit feels long gone in our house of big feelings and strong wills and argumentation. For now, in this last hour, all the legos are put away, the laundry is folded, the candles burn. As I sit in the quiet, I wonder, after all, is the feeling I’m feeling actually peace or just the absence of people and so, of conflict of any kind. 

**

It’s the dove and not the raven that comes back to Noah. The dove opts to stay close to home, to Noah, to the people with whom she endured the flood. Noah extends his hand and she comes back inside. The dove reminds us that peace is relational, something that is created between, by no means an escape from conflict. Although seemingly counterintuitive, one can’t really actually be at peace when alone. Picasso’s image reflects this truth, and if I ever go for the tattoo, I’ll need to remember that the dove is in motion, coming back to its people, bearing a branch to communicate the promise it has found. As I contemplate the difference between being alone and making peace I know that at any moment, my beloveds will burst through the door. They’ll bring complaints and stories, a healthy dose of chaos and just as much excitement. For all the mayhem, I’m bound to these fellow humans and know it’s my duty to speak and act with devotion and kindness. To know that one doesn’t find peace, but rather makes it. 

I remind myself of the wisdom the words themselves reveal; that in the language I speak, dove rhymes with love. 

Jesse Curran is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals including About Place, After the Art, The Arrow, Blueline, and Ruminate. She teaches in the Department of English at SUNY Old Westbury. www.jesseleecurran.com