Tales From BRAVURA - Part One: Powder

Introduction

If one were to describe something to you, they would do it in familiar terms. For example, they would tell you that a domesticated dog is like a wolf, except less frightening and less woodsy, but just as hungry. If they were to describe a duplex to you, they would tell you that it is like a house in any common neighborhood, except with a great big split down the middle on the inside, and with both sides hoping not to be heard by the other. And if someone were to describe a canyon to you, they might say you should imagine the tallest building you've ever seen, except turn it inside-out and ip it upside-down, and line up all of that inside-out space for miles and miles. A description is never quite adequate, because our minds must do a lot of the painting. We take the pieces that we know, the pieces we're familiar with, and then do a lot of squeezing and stretching and in the end have a sort of patchwork quilt of an idea of the thing. Only when you actually meet a dog do you realize that you didn't quite imagine how its breath would smell.

Imagine then, how difficult it will be to describe to you BRAVURA, for which you have no frame of reference, and the insides and outsides and in-betweens of which you will only have a fleeting understanding. What makes matters more difficult is that even if you see it, you might not know that you've seen it. BRAVURA and its inhabitants do a very slick job of that. So instead, rather than tell you what BRAVURA is like, I'll try to tell you what it's not.

BRAVURA is not a circus. Don't be fooled into thinking that its wandering spotlights, death-defying performers, and hungrily yapping barkers are all sure signs of the traveling troupes you've seen pass through your town. Its festive calliope songs and fire-leaping lions might ring bells of your first time walking into a big top, but I assure you that if you had walked into a Tent of the kind I mean, there would have been differences.

You might have noticed, had you been paying more careful attention, that the Bears were whispering back to their Tamers between acts, promising to swipe more closely at their Tamers' heads next time so that the Audience would be more terrified. You might even have noticed that the Lions and miniature Elephants drink their coffee at the same table while they gamble for rations.

While you laughed at the Clown's obscene antics, you likely didn't notice that despite dunking themselves in water and spraying each other with their fake flowers, their makeup didn't run. That's because it isn't makeup. You surely saw the Clown walk sadly away from you once you lost interest, and assumed that its theatrical slouching was part of the show, but you didn't see how it gathered with a good dozen or two of its kind as they marched together into the distance, where there are no tents to hide under.

When you walked into the Big Top, you probably saw the out-of-place lightbulb, monstrously huge and hanging from the rafters, and disregarded it as having a bad fuse. You were so distracted by the stunts of the Acrobats, the eerie concentration of the Magicians, and the melodious trumpeting of the Elephants that you never saw the empty lightbulb fill up with a swirling mist, changing colors with each performance and billowing like an electric storm cloud by the climactic finish. If you had seen the lightbulb -- which isn't a bulb at all -- fill up with this strange mist, you most certainly didn't see the labyrinth of cables connected from its tip to a figure hidden by rigging and shadows.

BRAVURA is not a place on a map. If one day a friend were to run into your home and interrupt your breakfast, and between heaving gasps do her best to convince you that she had just seen the most incredible feats, heard the most otherworldly music, and if only you would go with them right this minute down that old dirt road through the oak trees just past the city limit you could see and hear it, too -- well, you'd be disappointed, and perhaps a little concerned for your friend, to discover that nothing was at the end of the road except for the same ramshackle cabin that had been abandoned years ago.

You'd have no reason to know, of course, that an entire hemisphere away, a schoolboy would insist the same thing to his soccer team about rounding the fifth hilltop near the old banana farm; or that way up north where night lasts longer depending on the season, a grandmother would insist to her grandchild that she saw a colorful tent looming between two glaciers, and no it was not the aurora borealis. But these lucky ones would have no way of letting you know where BRAVURA would be next, because it almost never comes back the same way it came -- almost never.

BRAVURA is not a person. It sleeps like one, has a brain and several organs that do what they must to keep the body alive like one, moves around like one, and could most certainly die if left to starve. It's hungry, in fact, for food that we wouldn't be one bit alarmed to give up. When you laugh, when you cry, when you cheer, when you scream, when you applaud... you wouldn't even know that BRAVURA is feasting. Why, you might even be tempted to think that BRAVURA loves you. But, that would be a grave mistake indeed. Because once you fall in love with it, you would be a fool -- or most courageous -- to follow it wherever it goes.

These tales belong to those who found it, those who pursued it, those who loved it, and those who were ruined by it. Perhaps, like many blind men describing an elephant from the parts only they can touch, and therein discovering the whole picture in slices of shared perspective -- perhaps you will come to understand BRAVURA bit by bit.

Promise me one thing: If you happen to enter its gaudy tents, are cheered by its dazzling inhabitants, or if you are swept off of your feet by the grandeur of its spectacle... don't go looking for it the next day. It won't be there. But be very careful. It may decide to find you.