Plain Plane Talk By Janet Joyner

Plain Plane Talk

By Janet Joyner

It was September 1998, and Harriet Jordon had just spent the Labor Day holiday with friends in Deer Isle, off the coast of Maine. Harriet’s friends had rented a large house there for the entire summer and had invited a life-time of friends to come visit according to a schedule of bi-weekly arrivals, carefully chosen to always include at least two good cooks for each “session.” HJ, as she was called, was passable in that category, but she also suspected her friends had a kinder, more compassionate motive in inviting her. It was her first trip alone, her partner of over twenty-five years having found the relationship no longer adequate.

And indeed, the trip had been good for HJ. Two weeks of digging for clams, mucking about in rubber boots and the pluff mud, rowing the boat, and even the bracing brief swims in cool Atlantic waters. Along with the good fresh seafood, excellent wine, great storytelling and laughter—especially around the “coming out” stories, the one experience they all had in common. There had been trips to Bar Harbor, numerous stops for sampling lobster rolls, and terrifying drives along the curvy, narrow coastal roads. And the camaraderie was so genuine that none of them seemed to have minded that part of the deal of which the invitées all seemed unaware, the part that involved painting the exterior of the rental house. Which was how their hostesses could afford the extravagance of an entire summer on Deer Isle. And after two weeks of this kind of “rehabilitation,” HJ was indeed improved, both mentally and physically,

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when her friends took her to Bangor to board the aircraft that would take her first to Philadelphia where she would change planes for the flight to her home in North Carolina.

HJ boarded the return flight, found her seat and settled in for the duration. For the long hours involved on board and in multiple terminals, she had brought 2 with her the kind of professional, but off-putting, reading she often reserved for this kind of long journey. This time was Michel Foucault’s “L’archéologie du savoir” (The Archeology of Knowledge) which she had often attempted but each time abandoned as simply so much voluminous verbiage of which only academics, especially male ones, seemed capable. Volumes, for example, devoted to the notion that first Kant, then Herder, and now Foucault were attempting to tie knowledge to language. Endless discussions of Descartes’ “cogito,” the“I think” which grounds his notion of existence. HJ took out her pen, underlined, and commented in the margin, as she often did as a way of “conversing” with an author: Really guys: It’s elemental. Do we think in anything BUT language?

HJ was about to comment further, when she was interrupted by the arrival of another passenger who had the seat adjacent and to the right of hers, so HJ rose, moved to the aisle to give the woman easier access and both passengers then settled in and buckled up for the flight. HJ resumed her reading, or had attempted to do so, but the young woman now beside her could not, or did not, pick up any social cues that reading a book would seem to indicate. This passenger just babbled on. She had been away for the wedding of a college friend and the event was a sort of reunion with many of those

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women friends. She, herself, was married she said, had two children (her husband was keeping them). HJ thought to herself: “There is a way women talk to each other when their males are absent, a way that seems to free even perfect strangers to divulge the most personal information.” Perhaps these women feel a kind of universal, universal at least to them, kinship—a kinship of what, oppression? Or perhaps is it precisely a different sort of woman, and is and isn’tone, who can sense this deep level of desperation?

As the flight took off and progressed, the more HJ’s neighboring traveler talked, and the more she talked, the more she seemed troubled by the wedding, by the reunion with her college friends. She was questioning so many things, especially the nature of love itself. Was it only narcissism? It seemed not to have occurred to her that it isn’t love, but loving, that is transformative. Moreover, HJ wondered 3 if the woman’s questions didn’t indicate a deep interrogation of her own self, as though she might be searching, longing for, something so much more than what she actually had ever had, or felt?

Finally, the woman did notice that HJ had in hand a book, and that in between her own talk, in the moments of silence, HJ would read. She did eventually ask what HJ was reading, and wanted to know about Foucault, who he was, and the ideas he wrote about–as if HJ could actually tell her, actually bring herself to now admit that she was readinga two-hundred and seventy-five page treatise on the relationship between language and knowledge—which she herself barely understood— when clearly this woman was disturbed, was so worried about her own mind, and whether, as she said,

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principally dealing only with children was making her stupid.

At this point, the flight captain announced the descent into Philadelphia and the two women would deplane, never to see each other again. And thirty-two years later HJ would discover in one of her little Cahiers Bleus, the closest thing to a journal she ever kept, her notes about this encounter. And having had language, a way to transcribe it, bring back the memory and therefore the reliving of it, her sadness for that woman’s sadness, someone she had encountered only once on a plane flight from Bangor to Philadelphia made her contemplate the stupendous power of the word… and of a prehistoric bison on a cave wall in France.

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