Looking for VFD
It is known, I think, that my favorite series of childrens’ books is A Series of Unfortunate Events by Limony Snicket. The series, for those who haven’t read it, tells the story of the Baudelaire children, three youths orphaned and adrift in a cruel world. In each installment (of the 13), the children find themselves in the care of a new guardian who promises to raise and care for them; invariably, disaster strikes in the person of Count Olaf, who will stop at nothing to acquire the fortune which the children will inherit when the oldest of them comes of age. In the meantime, the well-meaning adults in their lives are powerless to stop and, more often than not unaware of, the Count’s machinations. The children barely escape the Count’s clutches by their ingeniuity, resourcefulness, and a heavy dose of plot armor.
As the childrens’ misfortunes develop, they begin to discover that underlying their present quagmire is a secretive and elusive society known as VFD, of which their deceased parents, many of their guardians, and Count Olaf are or were members. As the intrigue unfolds, the children delve deeper and deeper into VFD’s elusive and ambiguous legacy: at the same time, its members are the source of great succor and great distress. They learn that the organization was divided by a schism (“schism” is the precise term used over and over in the book) on one side of which were their parents and allies, and on the other side of which fell Count Olaf and his nefarious associates.
As the children bounce around the world of the books, they discover traces and hints of VFD’s former presence, but always too late: destroyed records, burnt ruins, and missed connections are all that link them to the mysterious society that might offer safety or danger to them. VFD is a constant presence in the series but is always no longer actual. It exists as an always-already: it is never directly present to them, but its traces are never absent. Where ever the Baudelaire children are, VFD has always just departed. Often, the ashes are still smoldering when they arrive.
When I was growing up, I wanted very badly to be a member of VFD. Indeed, it was a reference to VFD initiates’ training in the prequel series All the Wrong Questions that originally motivated me to learn Esperanto. VFD, in short, were the guerrilla librarians and teachers who fought the fires of ignorance: VFD stands for, among an endless series of puns, “volunteer fire department”. VFD’s volunteers came when called to put out the literal and metaphorical fires that ravage the homes and hearts of the ignorant. It is never that VFD’s members are perfect (the schism that split the society came from within), but they are volunteers, amateurs in the truest sense, who continually act to preserve knowledge. The central motif of the series is fire: VFD is the association that saves books from being burnt.
VFD’s members move in a dense semiotic web: they communicate through accidental signs such as a coffee stain on a map, olives in a refrigerator, or subtle double entrendres. Everywhere they go, they learn to discern the traces of the volunteers who were there before them and to leave traces for the volunteers who will come after. It is this web in which the children are subtly ensnared and whose patterns they learn to discern throughout the course of the series. The friends they make along their journey, who are all searching for their own place in the confused tangle of life, become the new generation of VFD organically, naturally: they volunteer for and with one another as their paths cross and recross.
Why a sudden book review? Because, as I said, I want to be a member of VFD: those who are here where they are as volunteers, as amateurs, as those who are searching for the meaning of the path their history has set them on. I suppose that VFD is forming around me: as my friends grow up and as I grow up with them, we become and are a transnational web of the interested, the curious, and the helpful. I am, as time passes, enmeshed in a web of friends, teachers, and volunteers of all sorts. I guess that the real VFD is the friends we made along the way. To those of you who are reading and who made it this far, thanks for being a volunteer.
