Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
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Notes
The purposes of this review are twofold: first, to convey the eminently pleasant though not necessarily intellectually stimulating experience of seeing The Light in the Piazza at the Huntington Theater; and second, to convince you, yes YOU, the member of the Advocate reading this (or honestly whoever else) to take up my mantle of reviewing shows at the Huntington now that I have graduated.
From the Archives
Poetry • Summer 2020
It’s a Friday in New York
and fifty years from ’69.
Though since we’ve yet to meet
or have, and are still looking,
what we’ve said to each other
in photos and films, bars
and basements, returns
with enough echo
to remind us of ourselves.
Those of us who resisted heroes
and sentiment. Those of us
who waited and found neither—
not the promised liberation
in marriage, or the salvation
of laws. How some asked
to carry America’s guns
and did. How others knew
equality was a rumor,
elusive as freedom or sex.
Do you think about dying
every time you have sex?
I still think about dying.
I do think about death.
Or a day in childhood when I saw
the only place I could live
was here. Inside.
So whoever wanted me
had to come through the body.
Which has rarely been beautiful
to me. Too soft and unconvincing.
Too small. I hope the future
is free of god and memory.
I hope the future is
all body, all blood.
And since to be queer
is a way to forgive life,
I’ll take as long as I want
finishing my cigarette on Seventh,
walking up Christopher
and thinking of everyone
who’s yet to get here—
somewhere in a bedroom maybe,
young and bored across
the country, not impressed
by our parades or idols,
all the sponsorship we bought.
I’m late for a drink but wander,
handsome and aimless,
looking for a sign
before nodding to the dead
who always need a light.
Features • Commencement 2013
*In his new novel, *Harvard Square*, André Aciman revisits the place he called home as a Harvard Ph.D. student in the 1970s and ‘80s. On April 26, 2013, during one of his physical returns to the Square, *The Harvard Advocate’s* fiction editor emeritus, Patrick Lauppe, sat down with Aciman for an original interview. An Egyptian-American memoirist and novelist, Aciman has written numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including *Out of Egypt, Call Me by Your Name, and Eight White Nights*. His most recent novel, *Harvard Square*, was released in April. Here is the transcript of *The Harvard Advocate’s* conversation with him:*
*
*
* You mentioned in your book that Harvard Square is a much different place than it was back in the 1970s, so could you elaborate on some of those differences and what you think they reflect?*
It used to have a lot of oldish stores. Sometimes almost bric-a-brac stores. Now, they are very much mall stores. All the stores are nice, chic, and expensive. In the old days, it was more rundown. You had a sense that age had caught up with Harvard, especially in the area around Mount Auburn, which was really dilapidated at times. Now, it’s perfect. The old post office disappeared. It had a bad smell. Now there’s a new post office and it’s absolutely lovely.
* You received your Ph.D from Harvard in the 1970s, in Comparative Literature. Could you perhaps elaborate on the importance of that degree and of studying Comparative Literature on your career? And how that’s influenced your writing?*
I started in ’73, but by 1980 I was disenchanted. I never finished in the ‘70s. I taught a lot. I taught in all kinds of places. I taught a lot at Harvard and had fantastic undergrads. But at some point in time I got so disenchanted that I abandoned the Ph.D and went to work for brokerage firms and moved to New York, where I worked in advertising. Then, eventually, I decided to come back to my Ph.D. I had done all the research for it, so the writing was easy. I wrote the Ph.D dissertation in six months. Having an advanced degree, in my case, allowed me to get a job at Princeton, which eventually led to Bard College, and then to the Graduate Center in New York. So having been a grad student at Harvard worked out very well for me in the end.
*So you mentioned this disenchantment. One thing that I found particularly interesting and resonant about the main character of Harvard Square, the narrator, is his constant ambivalence toward graduate school and the prospect of academia. He seems to think it’s his perfect place, or the place that’s made for him, but at the same time, there’s **an antipathy toward it.*
Yeah, it’s a love-hate relationship, if you want to put it in those bleak terms. I came to Harvard not because of Harvard, actually. I came to Harvard because I wanted to study literature. And Harvard and Johns Hopkins and NYU had accepted me, but Harvard gave me more money. So I went to the money; that was the simple answer. Also, I liked Cambridge. It was different from New York, which I knew. I had no idea that studying literature meant that you would end up almost hating it by virtue of what they did to it. In other words, the professionalization of the personal loves of literature, the loves of books, was such that it almost took the soul out of it. So I needed to get away. And having come back to my graduate work a few years after leaving helped a great deal. Writing a dissertation in New York in an environment that was entirely metropolitan, totally divorced of anything academic, was very helpful for me.
*Why do you think so?*
Because staying in an academic mode was stultifying and choking me; I couldn’t stand that anymore. And you can see this in the book. Cambridge was extremely hospitable to anything having to do with books, but only if you discuss books in very specific terms. Not in the terms that I wanted to discuss books. So I had to learn to discuss books in a professional manner, which I’m very grateful to. At the same time, being away from Harvard allowed me to rediscover that love of books that I used to have, and that I’ve now made my profession. In fact, it allows me to say things, when I write book reviews for instance, that are extremely pointed in that they are written by a man who is very belletristic but who knows how to discuss literature on an academic level. You find that most people who are academics today do the academic side, but they don’t really know how to handle the belletristic aspect of it, which means finding out whether something is good or bad, beautiful or stupid. Everything is interesting, as you know when you study cultural studies. Everything is interesting. But that’s not the point of literature. Some of it is very good; some of it is just interesting. And I’ve always been committed to finding out how you pass on the love of literature unadulterated, in a highly professional manner.
* What were the terms in which you wanted to discuss literature originally that clashed with the professional mode?*
* *I remember being interviewed by the chair of the department, and I saying, “I want to write about the Byronic hero.” I was all into Byron and I was interested in the Byronic hero, not realizing that the Byronic hero is a platitude of the first order. And he looked at me with a pensive look, almost jaundiced, and I said, “Well, what’s wrong with that?” So I went back home and thought, “Okay, well, let’s think again.” Then, I had a teacher called Edward Said who was very smart, although I have lots of problems with Edward Said. I always thought that there was something unfinished [about his approach]. He got the stuff. He *got* it, but he didn’t know how to discuss literature *qua* literature. It was always qua something else. I always thought that was really cheating students and cheating the task of a man of literature. You have to discuss it as literature. What is it that makes it *good*? There’s no other way to explain it. So I was ultimately disenchanted. But I needed to be exposed to this in order to be able to speak about the things that mattered to me in such a way that at least I could give them a greater degree of depth and meaning than they had when I came here wanting to write about the Byronic hero.
*How did you make the transition between academic writing and an academic context to writing your own memoir and writing your own novels? I feel like that’s often a difficult transition to make.*
It is. It’s very difficult. Let me tell you what some of the difficulties are. First of all, your colleagues. They hate you. If you write a book that flops, they love you. But if you write a book that’s very successful, as* Out of Egypt* was, in its time, it really made them very envious. That’s the only thing I can say. Here’s a book that’s actually almost a bestseller, and it’s written by somebody who’s decided, as I had when I was at Princeton, that I was not going to write an academic book. I was going to put all my eggs in this book called *Out of Egypt*. I had to make a decision. It was almost suicidal, because I knew what the price was going to be. They were not going to give me tenure. It’s that simple. They didn’t give me tenure, and that was their revenge. Of course, then they became my friends. It was good that they didn’t give me tenure, because I would have choked to death at Princeton. I was very glad that I came back to New York. This was a place for me. New York is a very hospitable place for people who are many things, not just one thing. But that’s only one aspect of the answer you’re looking for.
Academic writing is fundamentally dead. You can make it interesting; you can make it fun. But it’s dull. Some people cheat this by writing magazine articles. That’s a way of writing as an academic for the popular reader or the mainstream reader, who’s educated, by the way. That’s the only way you can do it. Nobody really cares about three jargon words strung together in a title. Nobody wants that. I just think everybody should be discouraged from doing that. But writing a memoir, or writing a piece of fiction, as a person who is trained in literature, presents new problems and fantastic opportunities. You begin by writing for the classroom. You write stuff that’s deep and complicated because it’s going to be taught in such a way that students are going to discuss it in this and that way, and they’re going to see the symbolism and the patterns and the message. That’s a vow to demolition. You’re destroying yourself by doing that. You also have to step back and say, I’m writing something that is obeying the conventions of fiction, but it may not be fiction. It will sound like fiction. It is going to have some intellectual component that’s never, and should never, be visible, because if it’s visible, then it’s trite and stupid. So it has to be there because it matters. It matters to the writer. Me. But it must not be visible, so there’s never, in anything that I write, I hope, a message or an ideology or something that you can string together and say, “*This* is what the problem is.” I make certain that you never get that.
* How do you go about hiding the seams, then?*
It’s not a question of hiding the seams, as much as it is the concept of making sure that you tell a story, and that the story always has prevalence. If I was writing *Oedipus Tyrannus*, I would write it exactly as Sophocles did. There is no message in *Oedipus*. What is the message? Don’t kill your father and don’t marry your mother? There’s no message. Oh, you want to discuss faith. Well, we can do that for a while. Basically, you can’t extract a meaning. One of the ways in which I do that is by thinking of plot, but it has to be plot that’s internalized, because otherwise it’s just story à la anybody. It has to be a story that matters to the narrator. It has to be a story that derives of an experience that has already been thought about and does not need to articulate its meaning because its meaning is in plain sight.
*The story, in *Harvard Square*, revolves around the interactions between the narrator and the character Kalaj. I found this to be a satisfying center for the novel, similar to the center of many novels.* The Great Gatsby* comes to mind, in which a passive narrator comes into relief through interaction with a dynamic and controversial character. How did you come to realize that that was the kind of dynamic you wanted to develop here and that was what you wanted to use as your vehicle for themes like exile?*
I was fascinated by someone who claimed he had no regrets. He didn’t understand regret. He was always moving forward, almost scuttling and falling apart most of the time. There was no going back. There was always going forward. I was temperamentally more thoughtful, more meditative as a person. So I would look back, or at least not step forward that far ahead. I was interested in the contrast. I was interested in his [Kalaj’s] success with women. How does someone sleep with a different woman every single night? I want that! Or at least I did want that at some point. I found that he had his feet on the ground, whereas my head was always in the clouds. I was a student of literature. He was a student of *life*. I’ve always envied that. I’ve always felt like I didn’t get life very well. I understood people. In fact, the way I study him is the result of how he taught me to study people. I’m constantly reading how he reads me, but I got that by watching him read so many other people. He’s always reading people, always sizing them up. And he was always sizing them up because he was after something that was fundamentally authentic. He didn’t trust people, and he couldn’t trust anyone, partially because he was paranoid, but partly because it was something about people, that they were always making a compromise with the way things are, and he never did. Not out of heroism: he just didn’t know how to.
*Do you think this way of looking at people that you’re referring to has taught you how to characterize and make the characters come off the page?*
* *No, because there’s no craft there. I do have a very jaundiced view of humanity. I never trust anybody, and I always suspect that somebody has, not just some hidden motive, but they themselves are lying to themselves. Half the time I spend talking to people, I’m telling them that they’re not seeing what is happening to them because they’re not willing to see how things are. This ability to see what is actually going on, and articulating what the dynamic is between them and others, them and life, and them and other people is a craft that allows you to understand human beings.
*You talk about Kalaj as if he were based on a real person. Is that the case?*
* *Yes.
*You began your career with a memoir, but this is characterized as a novel. Can you explain?*
I don’t understand the difference. Because I don’t think there’s any difference between a memoir and a novel. There’s an article I just wrote in *The New York Times* that says more than what I can say here. You move the furniture around to make the story gel. In order to have meaning, you need to have a chronology. Sometimes, something happened way later that should have happened far earlier. If you refashion the order of events, then your story begins to make sense. It resonates with meaning. Ultimately, that’s what counts: the meaning of the story. So yes, sometimes something happens in January as opposed to March and you shift them around and suddenly everything makes sense, because all that needed to change was not the events, but the weather. So, in essence, for me, memoir is a novel. It reads like a novel; it’s supposed to read like a novel. It has the fun of a novel. It basically means that the facts are all real that have been taken from your life, but the order has been changed, or let’s say some things have been removed because they were of no importance. For example, in the memoir, I removed my brother because he really didn’t make any difference. He was a part of my life, but he didn’t really matter as far as the story was concerned. In fact, the story makes more sense without him.
* You’ve spent many years studying and teaching Proust. I know that Proust is someone who toed the line between novel and memoir.*
Totally. Rousseau did too; he lied about his own life.
*Very convincingly.*
Very convincingly! So did Montaigne. One does that, all the time. We’re not in a court of law. We’re not on trial. We’re telling a story that matters to us. The way I phrased it in my article was: because I’m more interested in the person I am today, thinking of these events, than the person that I was then. I don’t care about myself thirty years ago, forty years ago. He’s not that interesting. But I am interesting to myself right now, and if I’m delving into the person I was forty years ago, it’s because of who I am today. I couldn’t have written that story when I was your age.
*One parallel I found in *Out of Egypt* and *Harvard Square* is between the characters Kalaj and Uncle Vili. They had a very similar energy as characters. Could you remark on that kind of character? Earlier you said that’s the kind of character that has no regrets.*
I consider myself a bookish person, i.e. withdrawn, dysfunctional: whatever you want to call it. I’m not on planet Earth; I’m somewhere else. I’m constantly faking being on planet Earth in order to survive on planet Earth. That’s all it is. There are some people who belong to Earth and are committed to Earth and to life and they love it. I envy them. I couldn’t really envy them that much because I would die if I had to be them, but I envy their commitment to risk, to challenge, to the boldness with which they throw themselves into life. The fundamental characters in all my works have always been the Vili type and the Kalaj type. Of course there’s also a character called Oliver, who’s totally in the present. And there’s a woman called Clara in one of my novels: She’d go up to you and shake your hand and say, “I’m Clara. Who are you?” I love people like that. I’m not like that. But I think the contrast is important because it is a contrast between literature and what I consider the opposite of literature: life. I don’t think one has anything to do with the other. Many people will disagree with me. I think art and life are two separate departments, and one imitates the other; that’s about it. But life could care less about literature. Literature is envious of life. People who can’t read don’t care about reading. They’re not losing anything, as far as they’re concerned.
*I **mentioned exile earlier. I think one of the most interesting parts of the book is watching the narrator navigate his feelings of belonging to the two or perhaps even three nations—counting France—between which he’s divided. Could you remark on that theme?*
They’re both exiles. Exile is not just a condition of being without a home. It also means that you’re outside your body, too. Your home allows you to have an identity. If you’re not in your home, if you’re not living in a place with which you’ve grown to identify yourself, even if you hate it, then you yourself are in question. You are not in your body. I cannot explain it any other way. So you were brought up in the states, I take it?
*Yes, California.*
So you’re totally grounded. You may feel you have some issues with California, with the States: You’re angry at this and that, you disagree with this and that. But, fundamentally, you’re American: This is where you belong. This is where your home is going to be, unless you choose otherwise. When you don’t have the choice, you’re displaced; you’re like a plant that has no roots. You don’t even know if you’re a plant any longer. You’re faking being alive. Basically, they cut your arm off, and then they send you away, and so you’re a body without an arm and you manage to live without an arm. Except, there’s a mistake in the metaphor: You are just the arm. The body stayed behind. You are just an arm trying to do the work of a whole body, and you can’t. I’m sorry that I’m piling on the metaphors, but it’s the only way to do it. So you are deracinated.
What I was interested in doing [in* Harvard Square*] without trying to be too sententious about it was to show two different versions of exile. One basically has a ticket in. He can become a student at Harvard. He can become an American eventually. He can have a professional life. He can belong somewhere given his interests. The other person has no ticket. He has no free pass anywhere. He’s just here freeloading, as it were. And eventually he’s going to lose all he’s got. Both of them, however, feel that they don’t belong here. One feels that America is a strange country. It’s not really his home. The other feels that Americans belong to a different order of mankind. Mankind comes in many versions; not just cultures. Versions. So you have two people who don’t belong here, and who have this imaginary home in France. They know it’s imaginary, because one escaped it and the other doesn’t really want to go there because he knows he wouldn’t really belong there anyway. So they’re all free-floating in this place called Cambridge, where they don’t feel welcomed or at home.
Features • Winter 2015 - Possession
Last December, the artist Kara Walker delivered a lecture at Harvard on the subject of her latest piece: a 40-foot “sugar sphinx” with an exposed, puckering vulva and a face redolent of Aunt Jemima’s most minstrel days. Attendance was so high that even the overflow hall was packed to the brim. A month earlier, Hilton Als and Jamaica Kincaid had appeared in conversation at the Brattle Street Book Store to considerably less fanfare. The event in November was co-sponsored by The Harvard Book Store and the Advocate and focused on Als’ latest book, White Girls, which had just been released in paperback. All things considered, the talk was fairly well attended, with empty seats sprinkled only intermittently between audience members in parkas and pea coats, clutching ballpoints and Moleskines. Despite the availability of seats closer to the stage, I slid into a fuzzy velvet chair in the furthest corner of the last row—ringside for audience-watching.
Als read a brief excerpt from White Girls, and he and Kincaid perched on opposite ends of a small coffee table, quickly bowing into a discussion that touched on both of their writings, Als’ anxieties about his name forerunning his work, and the Solange-Jay Z elevator incident (at the time, Als messaged Kincaid, “this is what liquor and a tight wig will do to you”). Their conversation was jovial and relaxed—entirely uncorrupted by theatricality or literary pretense. I craned my neck in the back, regretting my choice of seat. Immediately before the question-and-answer segment, Kincaid squinted into the audience before her, knit her brow, and said, “You know, there are no black people here.”
A few perfunctory chuckles and thoughtful grunts followed, but there was mostly silence. Maybe three dark-skinned hands punctuated the otherwise still, white surface of the audience, waving to make their presence known. I couldn’t help but feel unsettled. Why had she gone and done that? What did it matter that we were an audience of almost uninterrupted white, scrutinizing the inner workings of two black artists in Obama’s America? Why the need to redefine our redefinition, meaning: why wasn’t Jamaica Kincaid content to just let us be a bunch of “uncolored” folks with a predilection for “colored” art?
In one of the essays contained within White Girls, Als calls upon us to wonder “what interests white editors (who constitute what we call Publishing) have in hiring a colored person to describe a [black person’s] life.” I won’t hazard a guess, but I doubt those interests include satisfying the desires of a market comprised mostly of other black people (in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a book talk boasting both Jamaica Kincaid and Hilton Als drew maybe four people of that demographic). As Colorlines noted back in May, the “overwhelming whiteness of black art” isn’t limited to literature. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 80 percent of museum visitors are white. In reviewing the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, The American Alliance of Museums concluded that “between 1992 and 2008, the gap between the percentage of white and non-white Americans who visit art museums grew steadily.” This is decidedly symptomatic— in twenty-first century America, the art gallery, the museum, and perhaps even the bookstore are all becoming increasingly white spaces.
My initial reaction to Kincaid’s question was indicative, I think, of the culture in which I live—one where the very contemplation of blackness is often misconstrued as an unprovoked affront to whiteness. Of course Kincaid did not mean to suggest something inherently amiss in white audiences partaking in the consumption of “black art” (all that essentializing bullshit aside). The more salient question, however, is if we can really hope that such a climate doesn’t do something to art, its production, and its reception. Do we, as a culture, gaze at this dark-skinned artistry with a whiteness, demanding that it palletize and yield up to us all those essential parts of the “black American experience”? Or is that art just handed over, delivered to the same culture whose earliest act was to widen the nose and inflate the lips and plump up the ass of the Negro, just to fully establish how Other s/he was? Most importantly, how does a society still susceptible to the malady of white supremacy even allow for the creation of black art that isn’t built to be seized by white audiences, even though, in many ways, it is?
* * *
Looking at “A Subtlety,” Walker’s sugar sphinx, you couldn’t help but wonder what master, if any, she served. With her mammy features and enormous bare ass, she should have been one of those explicits in cultural history: like Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, or like Saartije Baartman, the Khoikhoi woman infamously rechristened “Hottentot Venus” by nineteenth century slave traders and then propped up on makeshift stages across Europe so that white men could ogle her abnormally protruding buttocks and extended labia minora. But when Walker came to Harvard in December 2014 to deliver a lecture entitled “Sweet Talk,” a record-breaking 1,000 people RSVP’d, in part due to the highly public extent to which many in the mammy sphinx’s audience misunderstood—or just disregarded—her explicitness.
In the summer of 2014, Walker was commissioned by Creative Time to create a public artwork in order to commemorate the leveling of the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, a hulking, nightmare-capitalism fuck-you of a building that over its century-and-a-half of operation housed innumerable scores of black and brown “workers.” In addition to the mammy sphinx herself, this slave labor was called forth by Walker in the form of smaller, molasses-coated boys carrying oversized baskets. The piece was titled, in full, “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.”
The lecture in December was full of white people. I sat in front of two middle-aged female writers, one of whom was recreating the experience of beholding the sphinx to the other: “The whole place just smells of sugar and it’s almost like you were there at the time. And her back side was very…suggestive.”
“Of what?” her friend laughed.
To Walker’s credit, I have no doubt that this woman walked out of the lecture hall knowing exactly what the mammy sphinx’s multi-story backside meant to suggest. “Sweet Talk,” as the lecture was titled, took no prisoners. In detailing her arrival at the image of the sphinx, the sugar, and, of course, that blinding white vulva, Walker sped through a series of slides mostly depicting grotesque representations of blackness in American history. One especially potent image was a crude collage of a crouching, dark-skinned woman in full video-vixen form: fishnet tights, revealing lingerie, her ass tooted up seductively. Only, she was just half a woman. Most of her upper body had been carefully ripped away, the head of the Great Sphinx of Giza mounted in its place.
Walker initially turned down Creative Time’s proposal, but reconsidered after she became fascinated by the process of sugar refining, which she described as “dismantling darkness to create whiteness.” The procedure involves the application of high temperatures, immense pressure, and a variety of caustic compounds like phosphoric acid and calcium hydroxide. After the appropriate drying time, it yields not only purified white sugar, but also its darker, stickier counterpart—molasses. In many ways, that process mirrors one in early American culture described by Toni Morrison in her only work of literary criticism, entitled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination. In it, Morrison embarks on a revisionist trek through American cultural history, using figures such as Poe and Melville to illustrate how white authors annexed susceptible black bodies for the purpose of their own self-exploration. By infusing into the black populace all that whiteness was not, Morrison holds that these New Worlders fashioned for themselves an identity surrogate—not unlike a photographic negative—that allowed them to probe the less savory cavities of their beings from a safe distance: “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only to be born again, but to be born again in new clothes.”
The master’s new clothes obscured his lust, his fear of freedom, his yearning for civilization on civilization’s edge, but in order to give him cover, the slaves were stripped bare. In the creation of white American identity, their dark bodies were disfigured, drenched in sticky linguistic trickery, and wrung until they oozed dark gold. Morrison dubbed the result—this byproduct of whiteness, this distinctly American construction—the “Africanist presence.”
It is the specter of this presence that artists like Walker wrestle with to this day. Like the best of ghosts, it hides in plain sight, such as in the stock stereotypes of black females that it has produced and manically reiterated since this country’s inception (including the Jezebel, the mammy, the mad black woman, and many others). Throughout American history, the abuses of the specter and the stereotypes it engenders have sent a byproduct-people scrambling for dignity and reification, perhaps through countercultural outgrowths, perhaps through rosy, pre-colonial recollection, perhaps through coerced identity reconstruction. Ask the exalted phantom to paint for you a portrait of the “black American woman” and it will in no time yield something quite similar to that aforementioned collage—and, more dangerously, it will do so with a straight face.
* * *
Now re-encounter the Marvelous Sugar Baby. What can we say about her, this 40-foot daughter of the Africanist presence? Do we call her hideous? I hope so. Do we call her beautiful? We would be lying if we said she wasn’t. Is she dignified? Subjugated? I imagine that one would assume a position similar to her sphinxly one—low to the ground, ass up, neck craned—if a giant’s thumb were pressing down on one’s back from above. Still, who can deny the whispers of grandiosity and humanity that her iconic form breathed into the space?
But now behold the twentysomethings smiling for selfies in front of her backside. Behold what Nicholas Powers, a SUNY professor who wrote an op-ed entitled “Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit,” claimed that he saw: “a balding white father, posing with his son next to one of the boy statues, his arms folded across his chest ‘gangsta’ style as the mother took a photo.” It hurts—the giant naked stereotype presiding over the room, the smaller, attendant stereotypes peppered throughout, the heavily-white audience members posing for pictures in front of it all. It hurts, and in viewing it, you must wonder, just as Walker admitted during “Sweet Time” that she often does, “Whether I am enabling or critiquing.”
The Marvelous Sugar Baby exhibit became extremely divisive when the white gaze entered the space. What happened was it overtook the entire event. It immediately became clear to those who were paying attention that the piece was in desperate need of reclamation. I assume that’s what Powers was attempting to do when, after witnessing the aforementioned brazen shows of ignorance, he yelled, and then wrote an article about yelling, “You are recreating the very racism this art is supposed to critique!” I know that’s what a group of black New York City artists and art lovers were doing when they donned all white and distributed educational materials to the attendees, collectively calling themselves, “The Kara Walker Experience: WE ARE HERE.” Even the artist herself cast her hat in on this act of repossession, deploying a camera crew to film the audience interacting with the piece on its last day of exhibition. Walker instructed them to focus on black and brown visitors—essentially giving the mammy sphinx eyes of her own, an oppositional gaze, a way of staring right back.
* * *
The problematics that played out on the exaggerated stage of the Domino Sugar Refinery present themselves in subtler ways in the creation and reception of black artwork all over this country. In the same article about yelling in the sugar sphinx exhibition, Nicholas Powers skewered Walker and Creative Time for not foreseeing the firestorm that they would set off, asking, “What do you expect will happen if you put a giant sculpture of a nude black woman, as a Mammy no less, in a public space?” Powers’ frustration is rooted in his thwarted expectation of something that’s perhaps best described as a heightened version of Du Bois’ “double consciousness,” a state of mind capable of foresight in addition to double-vision. Not at all uncommon among critiques such as this, his disappointed incredulity illustrates the extraordinary intersection of pressures under which the black American artist must labor. As artists they must be creative and wide-thinking, as nonwhites they must be pacifying and non-confrontational, and as one of the few “outstanding negroes” invited to “the great cocktail party of the white man’s world” (as James Baldwin put it), they’d better not further fuck it up for the rest of us. Most of the critiques leveled at Kara Walker and other envelope-pushing black artists like her come from other black artists and critics who are wary of just how much can be fucked up at a cocktail party. In 1999, Betye Saar, legendary black artist and active opponent of Walker’s, said this: “I felt the work of Kara Walker was sort of revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and children; that it was basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment.”
But perhaps we could assuage these pressures if we could carve out a space, separate from the cocktail party, separate from that intersection of self-censorship, where black artists could have room to just create. It’s a wish that transcends both space and time for marginalized communities, one that was perhaps most famously articulated by Virginia Woolf in 1929. However, 54 years later, the black writer (can we now see why no black writer would desire this title?) Alice Walker took issue with Woolf’s assertion that in order to write her best fiction, a woman must have “a room of her own.” “What then,” asked Walker, “are we to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself?” Walker held, controversially, that by necessitating the “room” as the place for female writers, Woolf erases the work, lived experiences, and gall of those who have no access to it.
In regards to black art in this nation, it seems that we need to dream like Virginia Woolf but think like Alice Walker. The room is what we must work toward, but waiting until its walls are raised in order to do the things that will make its construction possible amounts to quite a catch-22. How can we hope to carve out a safe space for the unmolested creativity of marginalized groups without first engaging in some painful exorcism—of the Africanist presence from the depths of literature, of racialized violence from our own history? And if art is not a tool afforded to us in the pursuit of bringing darkness to light (remember, the mammy sphinx was cast in blinding white, not molasses), then how do we even go about doing it?
And yet, massive stereotypes placed in gentrified Brooklyn have a potential for immense damage, especially when Woolf’s walls aren’t there to shield us from them (and them from us). The scores of black artists and critics who have censured Walker will understandably warn us about the dangers of trifling with racial typographies in order to deconstruct them. “Fire with fire,” they would say.
During the question-and-answer segment of “Sweet Talk,” a young woman asked, to much applause, if Walker thought that historically damaging images could be reclaimed, and if so, how she perceived her role in rearticulating them. Walker replied that in producing her work, she always envisioned that she was forming “a mercenary, counter-terrorism squad of you and me.”
As Kara Walker, WE ARE HERE, and even Nicholas Powers showed us, our best hope of repossessing black art is to give it eyes, a vision of its own to confront and challenge the privileged, assumption-riddled gazes of the culture in which it acts. Theirs is that “mercenary, counter-terrorism” work of education, conversation, and re-articulation—work that allows the piece to read the people. When the sugar sphinx gawked back, she was brilliant and senseless, inappropriate and thoroughly needed—and like the most deft of teachers, and artworks, she did not linger unnecessarily; in her final lesson, she descended back into nothingness, reminding us that though she could be seen, touched and even smelled, she was, by nature, unreal.
Fiction • Winter 2012
For a while there was only one air-conditioner in our house. It was in the living room, and we put it on during birthdays or the fourth of July. It covered the heat in the kitchen from my mother burning things, like the half-sausages, the hot ones, which had a black crust on the bottom from where they were touching the pan for too long.
The air-conditioner being in the living room was the reason that Lorris slept in my room during the summer, even though he had his own room, because mine had a ceiling fan. It had wooden slats with small holes at the edges so that in the winter we could hang our model planes and cars off the ends. After our mother had dusted the top of the slats, we would set the fan going on a low frequency and the planes and racecars would spin around, getting higher and higher with the centripetal acceleration, until the Lego ones started to break apart, and Lorris ran shouting from the room.
Our parents had been arguing in the living room with the air-conditioner masking the noise a little, and we were building Lego cars in my room, when finally I came and sat on the stairs and started reading a poem I’d written the week before about how cold the pancakes were that morning.
The pancakes, I said, were cold this morning. I was sitting with my knees together on the top step and Lorris was lying on his stomach clutching the two-by-two Lego piece I had asked him to find. I started over, The pancakes were cold this morning.
That’s enough of that, said my father.
I’m just trying to help, I said.
He’s just trying to help, said Lorris.
It’s none of your business, he said. This is an adult conversation. From downstairs we could hear
the kitchen cabinets being slammed shut. Conversation, he repeated.
One day my father came home carrying a second air-conditioner. He was carrying it the way
you carry Christmas packages, as if someone was about to stack more boxes on top. He had to put
the air-conditioner down to ring the doorbell, even though Lorris and I had seen him through the upstairs window, and our mother went to answer it, us behind her, her shoulder and neck cradling the portable phone. She put a hand over the receiver to say, I don’t even want to know.
My father was a driving instructor. He worked at the place on Kings Highway under the train tracks, where the storefronts grow on top of each other until one of them covers up the other. The office for the Kings Highway Driving School was on the second floor, and they were ignoring Department of Health requests to make it handicap accessible. They posted a sign that said, “For handicapped, please call up. Will come down and get you.” So far they’d never had to do it.
I was thirteen at the time, and taking any seconds in the car I could get. Technically I was too young, but if we went in the practice car and lit up the sign on top that said Student Driver, no one said anything. Everyone in our neighborhood was a cop, and they knew me and my father pretty well, so we always drove out to Gerritsen, by the Shit Factory where you could make the widest turns. Sometimes we let Lorris in the back, because he always begged to come, and he took his favorite HotWheel, the red one with the white stripe down the middle. It was always the fastest on our yellow racetrack. He held it in both hands, mimicking the turns and motions I made while I drove.
My mother didn’t like the idea of me driving, especially with my father, because she said thatsomeday we would get caught and it would go on my permanent transcript. That was the kind of thing she was always ragging about, things on my permanent school transcript. Even though I was about to graduate, and I was already in Midwood for high school. She thought that those kinds of things ride on your bumper forever, and maybe they do, but I try to ask as few questions as possible. She wasn’t around when we drove anyway, because she worked nine to seven as a school secretary.
My father lounged around most mornings, doing his shifts in the office three days a week, but other than that he stayed at home until four, when the first lessons were usually scheduled. Sometimes he’d paint the basement just for something to do, or sweep the stoop. I got off the cheese bus from school around three, which left almost an hour for driving. Some days if Lorris was late at after-school program we’d go pick him up. Our mother liked that the least. How could we explain ourselves picking a nine-year-old kid up at school and say this is still a lesson? She was mainly just unhappy because she thought that our father wasn’t a good driver, and that it was terrifying that it was him teaching the whole borough below Fulton Street. Technically she might have been better, but he was confident about it, and didn’t worry about hitting the brakes too hard or conserving gas. She was always stopping at yellows.
When he brought the second air-conditioner home it was April, but one of those hot Aprils that remind you what summer’s like, before it rains again. In Brooklyn that type of weather is always paired with thunderstorms, which is what we waited for. Once our father left for work and before our mother got home I’d get the key for the garage and open the heavy door slowly, hand over hand. Lorris would be drumming on the metal as it went up. We’d pull our bikes out, his fire-yellow, mine blue and white, and race down the sidestreets to Marine Park by the water. At that point in the afternoon you’d be able to feel the heat through the handlebars. We’d make it one lap around the oval, .89 miles, before we heard the first thunder, and then Lorris would yell and dart ahead even though he’d just gotten his training wheels off. The rain came down all at once then, and all of a sudden it would be cold, and this was the best part, when I pulled over by the water fountain and Lorris circled back to me. I pulled the two red and blue windbreakers out of my bike basket and we put them on, invincible against anything from above. We rode two more laps in the zig-zag storm until racing each other home.
Dad put the second air-conditioner in his and Mom’s room. It was just the bathroom and a
closet between their room and mine, and if we had the fan on low Lorris and I could hear the air- conditioning clearing its throat all night. That’s what it sounded like, like it was constantly hacking something up from deep down in its throat. Sometimes if I was awake after going to the bathroom in the early a.m., I could hear our mother wake up and walk over to it, and turn it down a few settings. It took them a long time to get the hang of how high they wanted it to be. It would be too warm when they went to bed, but then freezing by morning, unless Mom got up to fix it. We could tell when she hadn’t gotten up because when we went in before school to say goodbye to Dad, on the days he was sleeping there, he’d have the white sheets all wrapped around his head from the middle of the night.
A few weeks after we got the second air-conditioner it was so hot they started putting out weather advisories over Ten-Ten-WINS in the morning. Stay inside unless absolutely necessary. Mom took this to heart, and tried to get Lorris and me to do it too, but this was the best time for outdoor activities. School was winding down, especially for eighth-graders, so that we didn’t have homework anymore, even from Regents math. My math teacher, Mr. Perlson, had taken to sitting in the back of the classroom and spraying Lysol at anyone if they sneezed too close to him. This was in Independent Math, where we worked at our own pace. We took the tests when we got to the ends of chapters. At this point, everyone seemed to still have a few pages before being ready for their tests. Mr. Perlson didn’t mind. He was concentrating on staying ahead of the sickness wave which always happened the first time the weather changed like this.
It got so hot that the cheese buses broke down, and we had to walk home from school. Dad would have picked us up if we told him, and he did pick Lorris up, but I convinced him that we’d gotten some special buses shipped in from upstate, where the kids biked to school all the time because it was so safe. My friend Harold and I walked towards our neighborhood together, taking everything in.
One of those days, Harold told me that I couldn’t walk straight. I told him he was being ridiculous but it turned out he was right. I’d step with my left foot and fall two or three inches off my forward motion, and then readjust with my right foot, but four or five inches too far. Then I’d have to fix it with my left, but that came off the line a little too. I didn’t know it was happening. Somehow I got wherever I was going, but Harold showed me how, if he was standing pretty close to my shoulder, I kept knocking him, on every third or fourth step.
We were walking down 33rd, which comes off Kings Highway at a curve, and suddenly I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it all the way home. The more I thought about my feet the more inches I diverged right and left. Harold held my right arm and tried to force me forward, but I started breathing heavy and told him I needed a break. That’s when the station wagon pulled by, slowed up, and someone rolled down the window.
It was a high school kid, with a Madison Football sweatshirt and the chinstrap beard that everyone who could was wearing that year. Harold was pretending that the white tuft on his chin counted. The driver also had a Madison sweatshirt on, and I saw him use his right hand to put the car into park.
“Don’t you live on Quentin?” the guy in the passenger’s seat said. “You coming down from Hudde?”
Harold said yes.
“Jump in,” he said. “We’ll drop you off, it’s too hot to walk.” He leaned his arm out the window and reached behind to open the back door.
Once we were in the car the Madison kid in the passenger’s seat turned the music up, and it wasn’t that it was louder than in our car but it was thumping more in my chest. “You like Z100?” he said, smiling, leaning his left hand behind the headrest.
I was watching the driver while Harold answered for us. He was driving with two fingers, his index and middle ones on one hand, his other arm out the window. Somehow we were going just as fast as my dad always goes on side-streets, but we were getting the soft stops that only my mom, at 15 miles per hour, was able to get. At the stop sign on Avenue P, he jolted out to look once or twice, in exact time with the music. His friend was drumming on the dashboard with both hands.
Dad was sitting on the stoop when they dropped us off, and he stood up once he recognized me getting out of the car. The car waved away. I was able to walk again, the zig-zag curse gone. Harold said, “That car was disgusting, huh?” I was looking at my dad’s face. When I got up to him, he grabbed me under the armpit and dragged me up the stoop. Harold didn’t look away. We were inside with the air-conditioning on when he flat-palmed me in the stomach.
“Are you serious,” he said. “Are you serious.”
When Dad came home with the third air-conditioner it was still blistering out. There were tornados in Texas, more than they’d ever seen before, and in Earth Science Ms. Donatelli said it was what we had to look forward to: global warming in America. Someone in the back asked if this meant no more snow days, and she said, Maybe no snow, period.
He had the air-conditioner in the trunk of the driving instructor car. You don’t notice until you’re close to it, but those cars are a little skinnier than regular ones. Dad says it helps the kids who have a bad sense of hand-eye coordination. There’s more wiggle room when you’re trying to squeeze through tight spaces. He says that the first thing he asks a student when they get in the car is whether they played sports when they were younger, or if they still do now. If not, he’d know it was going to be a long day. You can’t imagine how crappy those kids are, especially the Hasidic Jews.
“Why’s that, Daddy?” asked Lorris.
“Because they didn’t play sports as a kid,” he answered, wiping his mouth with his napkin. I had set the table, and we used the white ones with blue borders that I liked.
“This is how you raise your kids,” Mom said. She was twirling her fork in her fingers. She’d gotten home late and he was back early.
“My kids, yeah?” he shrugged. “It’s just true.”
The new air-conditioner was bigger than the others, mostly because it had extendable plastic wings on the side that were supposed to be for fitting in a window. That afternoon before Mom got back from work he put it in the kitchen, balancing it above the heater and extending the wings so it sat snug. He got some blocks of wood out of the garage and pushed them underneath.
When she came back she had immediate problems. They had a session up in their bedroom where we couldn’t really hear what they were yelling. When they came down, she was pointing at the kitchen window. “How am I supposed to hang the clothes out now,” she said. I guess Dad hadn’t thought about that. The clothesline comes out the kitchen window. He moved it one window over.
That was the spring of people breaking their wrists. I had three friends who did, and at least two more from school. Everyone was walking around with casts on their arms and a permanent marker in their back pockets to ask you to sign. It happened to our next-door neighbor first—he was playing basketball at the courts by Marine Park and when he went up for a rebound someone kneed him the wrong way. He fell full on his knuckles. I wasn’t there, but Lorris had been riding his bike and said he saw him waiting for the ambulance, his hand doubled over and fingers touching his forearm.
The one wrist I did get to see was right by our house. Behind the house there’s a thin alley for the sanitation trucks to get the garbage. This way they don’t clog up the avenues in the mornings. Harold was over and Dad was showing Lorris how to skateboard. The alley has a little hill on each end and dips down in the middle. Dad had him getting speed down the hill and then showed him how to glide. Harold and I were on our Razor scooters, trying to do grind tricks off the concrete sides of the alley. Then, after Lorris beat his own glide record and Dad was giving him a high five, Harold decided to come down the hill backwards.
Dad wasn’t watching. He was pretending to shadowbox with Lorris, who was saying, I’m the greatest, I’m the greatest.
“Don’t do it, man,” I said. “They don’t even try that on Tony Hawk.”
“It’s gonna be sick,” he said, and gave it a little hop to get his speed up.
He made it all the way down before falling. I have to give him credit for that. But then he swerved
towards the wall and got scared and fell. He wasn’t even going that fast. All I heard was a squelch like the sound the black dried-up shark eggs make when we squished them on the beach at Coney Island. It was the same sound. His wrist looked bent sideways. He jumped up and was screaming, My wrist, my wrist, and my dad came running over, Lorris right behind, and that’s when the third air-conditioner fell out the window, crashing and breaking into pieces and my Mom yelling from the kitchen, Goddamnit you’re an asshole. Dad and I drove Harold to the hospital first but when we got back we swept up all the pieces.
It wasn’t long after that until it was my birthday, and to celebrate Dad took me out driving with him. It was a weekend, so we had plenty of time. Mom was home with Lorris playing Legos, because in a recent school art-project his portrait of the family had her smaller than the rest of us, off in the corner. She’d been at work a lot. I don’t think Lorris meant anything about it, he was always a terrible artist. But you could tell she was upset.
When we weren’t rushed, Dad liked to pull out all the stops in the driving. First he drove us to the parking lot in Marine Park, and let me drive around there for a few minutes. We pulled into and out of vertical spaces. Everybody learned how to drive in the Marine Park parking lot, and the cops didn’t mind as long as you were being safe. I’ve heard they’re much more careful now—they jumped all over the two underage kids last week who ran their mother’s car into a hydrant—but this was a while ago. We were particularly safe, of course, because we were in Dad’s driver instructor’s car. It had a problem with the wheel so that it lilted a little to the left if you didn’t correct it, but it was perfect and I loved it.
From there we pulled onto Quentin, rode that all the way down to Flatbush, which was heavy six- lane traffic. Dad took the wheel again at that point. I was still getting used to cars on both sides of me. He exaggerated all his driving motions here, the point being for me to observe. Hit the left blinker. Make sure you’re keeping up with traffic. Always check all three mirrors.
If you stay on Flatbush and keep going you hit the water, Rockaway and the Atlantic, twenty blocks from our house, but that’s getting onto the highway, and I didn’t want to deal with that yet. We made a right onto U, and Dad stayed in the right lane the whole way. Then, after passing the public library and the salt marsh where the watermill used to be, where you can still see the foundation coming out of the surface, we were in Gerritsen. Dad ceremonially pulled into an open spot and put the car in park and pulled the keys out and handed them to me when we passed each other going around the hood.
This was my favorite moment, using the key, the throat-grumbling the engine makes when it comes on, how if you do it wrong it kick-starts like someone laughing hysterically. Then the way the wheel shakes a little in your hand, your foot on the brake, everything ready to move.
I pulled out and Dad said, Good good, keep it easy, and I imagined the fake line in the middle of the road like he told me to, keeping a little to the left of it. I hit my right blinker and we were on a one-way street, and my turn came perfectly into the center. I accelerated a little and tried to ease off and onto the break at the red light, completely smooth. I navigated around a double-parked car without my dad saying a word.
When we were little, the only activity that Lorris and I wanted every night was wrestling with Dad. He didn’t like to hit us, Mom was the one we were afraid of, her slaps more damaging than any neighborhood scrape. Scarier too because she’d cry after, holding ice to our cheek, even though we told her it was okay and we didn’t need the ice. But wrestling was something that Dad knew how to do. He’d lie down in our living room on his back, and one or the other of us would run down the hallway and take a running leap and jump on top of him. Then the other would come from behind his head and try to cover his eyes or hold his legs. When we jumped, he made an oof sound like we had knocked the air out, but he always caught us, in midair, no matter what part of him we tried to jump on top of. He’d keep us suspended there for a few seconds, turning us back and forth like a steering wheel, and then pull us back down and wrap our arms in a pretzel. Mom liked to watch this from the kitchen, where she’d be cleaning the dishes, usually Dad’s job but she let him off the hook when he was up for wrestling with us.
Coming down a one-way street like that was the same feeling of being suspended in midair, the windows open and the air coming through, the radio off so I could concentrate, the car on a track, almost, so it felt impossible to deviate. I could close my eyes or shut off the driving part of my brain and the car would keep going forward, where I was willing it to go.
It was the corner, the one with two traffic lights, the one with the old storage warehouse on one side, and the Burger King, where teenagers go after the movies to sky the drink machines and not pay; with the Shit Factory on the other side, the green fence shaped like a wave on the top that goes on and on forever. There’s a gate in the fence with an entrance to the recycling dump. When Dad saw it, it was like he woke up from being asleep with his eyes open. He leaned forward and said, Make a right here, go into there. We’ve got to pick something up. Then the red Chevy came screaming up from behind us and crunched into the passenger’s side.
I sat in the driver’s seat. There were doors being opened and slammed shut. I think I heard the sirens immediately. Police cars are never far away. The Chevy driver went right over to Dad’s side and pulled him out and Dad lay on the floor, breathing heavy, on his back, looking up.
I was in the car. I was out of the car. I was sitting on the side of the curb. My dad lay on his back and groaned quietly, talking to himself. There were people all around him. He kept pushing theair in front of him, up and away. My mom got there. My dad was sitting up. She was screaming the whole time. Another fucking air-conditioner, she said. Driving with your fucking underage son. You’ve got some fucking lot of nerve. Dad was sitting up and laughing. He was shaking his head, I remember that. He’d just gotten a haircut, and you could see red skin beneath the gray. I remember when Dad came to say goodnight to us, later, later, he said, Your mother and I love each other very much. He had his hands on the side of the mattress. Don’t take things so seriously, he said.
It was hot that night and Lorris was in my room again. Mom pulled out the pullout bed. She smoothed the sheets. She kept her hand on his cheek, her other hand on my arm, her feet between the two beds, until Lorris told her that he wanted to turn on the other side. She went downstairs, and she put the television on, but we could hear her and Dad arguing. They were quiet. We only heard the sounds of their voices. It stopped soon and they turned the television off. Lorris got out of the pullout bed and stood in front of mine. He put his hand on the side, and I lifted up the sheet. I faced one way, and he faced the other, because I didn’t like when our breaths hit, but he kept his foot next to mine until four in the morning. Then he got up to go to the bathroom, and I had the bed and the sheets and the quiet room to myself.
Fiction • Winter 2018 - Noise
The world is one of many. It is but one, in fact, in an infinite set of possible worlds. Each world in the infinite set of possible worlds is composed only of an infinite set of propositions; call them p, q, r,etc. Each proposition can be either true or false at a world but its truth value can change from world to world. Every possibility is represented therein. Picture, for example, a hall of mirrors of the kind that reflects an image interminably in time and space. Only in this hall of mirrors, which we may call the universe, each image is identical to the last save for one altered proposition. One image may be of a simple mahogany table. Another, of the same table, only in cedar. The next, the same table with only three legs. And so on. These images are the different worlds in our universe. Every world is real although we may only ever see one.
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