At the time my father was living in a barn. Granted, it was a nice barn, squat and rectangular, red with a gambrel roof, and to be perfectly honest he lived in an annex off the barn’s tail end. A cozy room, heated in the winter by an iron stove, it had a couch, a desk, a few makeshift bookshelves, even a small television set that he rarely watched. He slept there alone; I don’t know how he spent his mornings.



I tended to define my father’s relationship to the barn in terms of prohibitions: This was the barn, for example, from which he ran the vineyard that he didn’t own, which produced the subpar grapes that we couldn’t eat, which were turned into a subpar wine we couldn’t drink (and of which, today, there is not a single extant bottle). But more importantly, this was the barn where he’d lived since our parents had separated. (The divorce would come later, after he’d started renting a home on the other side of town.) No big drama, this separation. I would have been eight or so at the time, too young, in a general sense, to understand the vicissitudes of marriage, the mechanism of divorce, and too young again, in our particular case, to have ever witnessed a genuine motion of love between my parents.



My brother, Grady, and I—he would have been eleven or so—spent a lot of our time at the barn. He, responsibly, helped our father with various chores (weeding, lugging, pruning), while I fiddled about errantly, spray-painting rocks or hammering together discarded pieces of wood. I had free rein of the premises, a bountiful prospect, considering that in addition to the vineyard my father also ran a peony field. There was an industrial cooler inside the barn where we kept the freshly severed flowers in five-gallon buckets of water. I’d sometimes ask my father to lock me inside it; I would pummel the inside of the door, half-laughing, half-crying to be let out, and he, playing along, would refuse. I would settle back in faux resignation, allowing the chemically cooled air to envelop me like a wintry cocoon. Alone in the dark, I sensed in my chest a new, dull, nagging sensation, which I couldn’t have known, at the time, was dread.



To satisfy a different taste—it was a business, after all— we also dried the peonies. The entirety of the barn’s attic was devoted to this occupation; a constellation of muted blooms hung from their stems on a haphazard scheme of wires, string, and clothespins. The air up in the attic was dense, dusty, soporific. I can remember inhaling deeply, experimentally, and feeling the concoction settle in my lungs like warm syrup. When I got tired, too strongly steeped in the smell, as I considered it then, of antiquity, I would retreat to the cooler, to the coolness and damp below.



Looking back, I can see that it was around this time—post-separation—that my father started allowing us to flirt more and more openly with danger. He bought my brother a BB gun, whose pellets we loosed at pigeons and the barn’s shingled roof. For me he bought a small sword at a psychic fair. I wasn’t allowed to tell my mother about it. Likewise he allowed a senile neighbor to gift me a rusty machete with a whalebone handle that had, by the effusive geezer’s account, seen action in the Mexican-American War. I sanded the handle down to get some of its old glow back, and together my father and I sharpened the blade with a portable Dremel tool. I held one weapon in each hand and massacred the bushes in my father’s backyard.



One Christmas, he bought my brother and I bows and arrows, neat, springy, lacquered things with bungee strings and real—very real—metal-tipped arrows. We became warriors, little Robin Hoods bounding about and crouching and loosing our deadly darts at trees and bushes, fences and the small animals we occasionally glimpsed: rabbits, mostly, nervous puffballs that lanced spectrally away while our arrows struck nearby earth.



After a while, one week or two, we got bored. We started playing a daredevil game in which we fired arrows straight into the sky, so high that they disappeared against the gray, ghostly welkin. Then we ran about in wide circles with our eyes upflung, trying not to get impaled by the rapidly descending shafts. As we played with the bows we could sense their power weakening, the strings thrumming flabbily and failing to send the arrows any interesting distance at any interesting speed—for two weeks we had forgotten to unstring the bows, and now the wood was slack, recoilless, the string little more than a faintly elastic yard of cloth. A ruined gift.



***



One morning, our father drove us—that is, Grady and I—to the Rural King (a farm supply store) on North Saint Joseph Avenue. He’d often take us along with him on these periodic trips, business excursions, as it were, to gather bags of mulch or spare hoes or other farming supplies. While he wandered about, Grady and I would hurry to the store’s rear, where they kept the chicks and ducklings in corrugated steel tubs bestrewn with woodchips.



Somehow, I think by dint of continual begging, we’d convinced our father to buy us ducks. Giddily, our fingers folded over a tub’s rim, we pointed out the ducks we wanted, and our father directed a bored-looking, lank-haired teenage attendant.



Granted, the precise mechanism of extraction lies outside the purview of my memory, as does the series of actions that took us from the back of the Rural King to the cash register and out, in the parking lot, to our father’s truck. Regardless, I know for a fact that we left the store with six snowy-white ducklings contained in a cardboard box.



A small wonder, that box. Like a dollhouse come to life. There were half-moon holes in its sides through which the sour smell of duck shit wafted and the truncated piccolo of their quacks came to us, fleetingly, along with occasional flashes of pale yellow (a wing), toxic orange (a foot), and blister black (an eye). Phantasmal, these bursts of phenomena. I recall, even then, being under the dreamy impression that the box contained not six live ducklings but an obscure system of wires, tubes, and gears, capable of producing and then relaying these discrete images to my brother and I—like a television, or something more complex still.



Grady held the box on his lap as I plumbed its apertures with fear-hyped fingertips, my pulse stirred to drum-taps by a mixture of anxiety and hope. Beside this minor drama, our father sat driving the truck. His palms were pressed to the pleather of the wheel; he stared ahead at the inrushing pavement; he might have been mildly, comfortably proud of himself. Outside, the sky was grey, the landscape winter-ridden and muted to the point of non-existence—or at least that’s how I remember it: an extended tracking shot of frost-plated cornfields cut with telephone poles, unbearing trees, and uniform homes (low-gabled, white, with aluminum siding). If I tease my memory, the houses sprout chimneys; a cozy smoke chuckles forth, billowing out and bleeding into the sky.



In reality, though, it was springtime—funny the falsehoods that memory supplies. How to describe a Midwestern spring? To be short about it: abundant, terrible, suffocating. A classical scene of renascence, like a pastoral torn from its frame: sweet fields spangled with itinerant beasts, lowing and leaning and loafing, all of them dumbly expectant. The trees become swampy and depressed, over-burdened with foliage and invasive vines thick and corkscrewy as hawsers; smooth wire fences are bent to absurd angles by the crushing weight of waves of honeysuckle; a whole host of hidden insects scores a grand, ear-numbing, dimensionless buzz that radiates along the sinusoidal countryside like an electric knell for the magnificence of the decay to come. High flourishing now, sweet colors, the frilly bunting of rebirth. Only later the fall, decadent, into decay.



We drove to the barn. It had a small backyard enclosed by a black wooden fence. Beyond this fence spread an unworked field full of high grass that swished and fluted drily in the summer winds. It ended in a murky line of trees. In the corner of the fence, we built a chicken wire pale and placed the ducks inside: a temporary structure, slack-sided, held in place by a few slivers of pinewood traced through the wire’s latticework and driven, by a rubber mallet clumsily wielded, into the rich black ground.



That first day was a joy. We named the ducks, chased them about, held them aloft as their spatulate feet flapped wildly. They scuttled here and there, trailing one another about the yard in wide, sinuous arcs, spreading and testing the bright half- moons of their inchoate wings. They quacked without cease—brief, dry, firecracker pops—their beaks seesawing steadily in loosing these bursts, as though crank-turned, wholly mechanical. To me they seemed delicate, clockwork automatons sheathed in fine feather coats.



And while we watched the ducks, our father watched us, the sidelong rays of dying daylight tilting the cast of his ruddy complexion into something more closely resembling bronze. As a consequence of working outdoors nearly all his life, my father had, and still has, very red skin, sun-warped and interlarded with elegant webs of burst vasculature, like the pattern a drop of ink makes as it spreads through the crazed enamel of an ancient vase. Back then he wore coke bottle glasses with faux tortoise-shell frames. He was fifty years old, somewhat thin and tired-looking. He usually smelled, pleasantly, of sweat shed in the open air.



Beyond these details, most of my memories of him revolve around a general impression of senescence, of age overworked. I can’t say exactly where he was as we played with the ducks, how precisely he fit into the scene—in my memories he is mostly a presence: a disembodied voice, for instance—but it seems appropriate, in retrospect, to place him in a folding lawn chair, a beer in his hand (Foster’s) and, as I said before, the dying sun in his eyes. Watching his kids and adjusting his posture. Happy they were happy.



***



A few days after we purchased them, the ducks began to disappear—though ‘disappear’ isn’t really the right word. They left their mementoes: a severed wing, a tuft of bloodied feathers. We saw drops of blood pendent in the grass: rubies spilled by a harried thief.



Some creature, our father told us soberly, was creeping in from the adjacent field, at night, while we, and he, slept. Subtly parting the tall grass, it leapt the wooden fence and took its pick of the frightened ducklings. In the morning, we’d find the remaining ducks scattered about the backyard, huddled and hiding in various nooks and corners, their necks curled and bent fantastically, preposterously, so that their heads rested under their wings. The beast, whatever it was, coyote or fox or wild dog, had disassembled the chicken wire pale, carelessly compressing its walls, uprooting the pinewood stakes. We fixed it, straightened out the skein of wire, and placed the ducks back inside.



I don’t recall any speeches from my father, any half-hearted explications of the circle of life or food chains or any other anodyne ramblings. I do remember that he began to set traps, black wire rectangles with a trip inside, baited with uncooked hotdogs. Hipped on retribution, I recommended that he stay up all night on the barn’s roof with my brother’s BB gun, waiting for the beast to show up. A recommendation he didn’t take.



So things went, the ducks plucked in the night, one by one, until they were gone. My father continued to set his traps. I remember thinking they were dumb, dumb, dumb; he’d never catch anything that way. But I don’t think I told him this.



One day, in the midst of the killings, I climbed up to the attic, hoping, maybe, to gauge the potential efficacy of my BB gun plan. The big loading window was open, and its double doors, angled at the top like those of a chapel, were swung wide to accommodate the breeze: a dry, pure zephyr. Periodically, someone—most likely my father—would open these doors, hasp them into place, and allow the attic to ventilate over the course of a day, allow the stale, baked air to escape. The peonies, as I ducked beneath them, rattled drily on their clotheslines, like bones: a vast, morbid set of wind chimes.



I reached the window and gazed out for a long time at the field of high grass, undulant—waves in the crinkled summer light. The field gave out a grand sigh, disconnected in its intensity from the subtlety of the field’s movement. As if there were an ocean, broad and unarticulated, hidden just out of sight. Natural ventriloquy, I think now, but not then. Then all I could feel was a terrible foreboding, a fear of hidden venom. Somewhere in the thicket’s weave, I knew, our oppressor lurked, biding, poised. Where or what it was we couldn’t know, we would never know, and it struck me, forcefully, as an aspect of fate, that we wouldn’t know. So much so that I felt myself becoming resigned to the mystery.



Then my father caught something.



***



It’s strange to think what dimly stays with you, what reveals itself willingly, at the touch of thought, in all its banal detail. I think of my father’s barn, mapped onto my brain by near-constant traversing and exploration. Strange, too, to find what fades—beyond a few scenes of play and a handful of vivid images, I don’t really remember too much about our ducks. And yet it’s strangest to consider what remains most clear, colorful, and precise, what plays back ceaselessly, like a loop of film.



For instance, I have a distinct memory of my brother and I watching our father drown a raccoon.



The raccoon, a sleek, pursy thing, moon-eyed with fear, is locked in a cage that lies in the bottom of a disused concrete trough. A hose hangs over the trough’s lip. Sharply I spy on the hose’s head an inverted cupola of water, a bright droplet, dangling like snot. Slick and lethal. I watch it drip.



For sound, there is the mad snarling and clacking of raccoon-teeth on cage-wire. For motion, the neutered acrobatics of attempted escape. A punch of red tongue adds color; a gurgly, slaverous, small-dog growl undergirds the soundscape. My eyes, transfixed, refuse to leave this desperation. Somewhere, our father turns a faucet. I hear a dry creak. The hose tenses, hisses, and begins to pump the trough full of water.



The raccoon erupts, turning eel-like in the spreading water, its coat dense and opulent. Soon half the cage is submerged. A black snout pokes periscopically through the cage’s upper lattice-work, searching for air, but no such luck. Up, up, up the water goes, until the cage is completely flooded, and the raccoon disappears beneath a braided surface. There are small agitations in the watery glass, bubbles of air and wavelets, the only signs of submerged struggle. Eventually, all settles. My father turns off the faucet, and the memory ends.



I recently asked my brother about this memory. I was curious about certain details, and half-hoping, at the same time, to revel fondly, like a nostalgic lush, in the absurd antics of our childhood. He recalled the ducks, their various demises. He remembered the black wire traps. He even remembered being shown a raccoon in the bottom of the concrete trough. But the actual drowning, he insisted, was done out of sight. My father, with a bit of prodding, confirmed this version of events.



As sharp as the scene and its details are in my head, I have to admit they’re a complete fabrication. I can’t say exactly when this false memory first took root in my mind, or why it did, or what legitimate memories it might have shoved carelessly into oblivion in the process. All I can say is that, until very recently—until a few months ago, in fact—I had borne this confabulation around, cradling it like a relic, relating it to friends, turning it about in my mind. And not once had I questioned its veracity.



Strangely enough, when I felt the dislodged scene begin to fade from my mind, I didn’t experience the dim, dull, toothy ache of extraction you might expect, nor the clean sting of excision. Instead there was a certain ecstatic liberty about the disappearance—as when a weight or pressure applied to the skin is suddenly lifted and the hitherto depressed flesh bounces back, filling its natural bounds, and then, for just one moment, attempts to move beyond the corporeal, into unarticulated space.



***



One more memory, this one real: We’re zooming through the darkling vineyard in my father’s truck. He; me; Grady. It’s a Sunday night, probably. The windows are rolled down. Outside, the foreign smell of grapes dangles over everything like a lazy stitch in the atmosphere.



In the cab of the truck, my face lit only by the dim fluorescence of the dashboard clock, I feel incredibly small.



We’re driving to the fallow field that lies behind our father’s vineyard, hoping to startle and disperse the deer that congregate there in the night, sometimes inspiring one another, by sheer confidence of numbers, I suppose, to dart into the vineyard and nibble at our grapes.



We don’t do this all the time. It’s a treat. We’ve usually got to beg him, and he’ll say no, no, there’s really no point tonight as we’re driving along, and we’ll crumple into ourselves, portraits of disappointment, until he turns sharply at the last moment, a surprise, and we revive.



We reach the fallow field. My father turns his headlights on high to catch the deer’s eyes, which bloom madly in the outer dark like a constellation of diseased stars. He chooses one with our help, and we buck off in pursuit. We come closer and closer to the singled-out deer, following its balletic dives and jukes with a bloodhound’s determination, closing in so tightly that I can imagine the dashboard and windshield disappearing before the galloping hind-quarters, the intervening material dropping away like so much illusion.



It’s then, at the climactic moment, that my father presses his foot to the brake pedal, the truck’s cabin dips forward abruptly, tipping my unseatbuckled self forward, and the deer makes its getaway, prancing through the waist-high bunches of Johnson grass until it’s reached the edge of the headlights’ range, at which point it disappears, without even a backward glance.



I gasp and turn to my father, who is dimly feigning distress, turning and twisting his hands in the dark, as if to signal something like, I guess it got away.



 

I



Last October, I had this crazy stress dream. In it I’m face to face with Maya Deren, the author of a book I’m reading on Haiti. She’s gorgeous, which makes me nervous. “But you’re dead,” I say. It’s true: After only 44 short years her brain had hemorrhaged, in defiance of a new, improperly-prescribed medication. It was 1961, the same year my mother took her first steps.



I put a hand on her shoulder. Her bare skin is hot beneath the pads of my fingers, almost malleable, and I worry I will damage it, leaving sticky prints on her back. She might have been a sculpture in the works: still raw, still clay. I plunge my hand through her sternum, parting her ribs and holding the hot organs in my palm.



I learned about Maya Deren while trying to understand a foggy and confused memory from 2008. I was in Haiti with a friend whose family was involved with a local hospital. She and I were standing outside a small rural house. An adult pulled us aside and told us we weren’t allowed to tell anyone back home about what was about to happen. They wouldn’t like it, she said.



I don’t remember what happened next very well. In my mind it’s a montage of ringing bells, dark rooms, old picture frames and dirty glass bottles. A low creole voice assigning tasks, which our translator explains in a whisper. I imagine colored beads, playing cards, candles, alcohol. Did money change hands? The walls were very thin wood slats: The only difference between inside and outside was the shadow the tin roof cast over the room. Six months later, the infamous earthquake hit.



Sixty years earlier, Maya Deren had touched down in Port-au-Prince with no luggage and no company. At twenty-nine, she was already a legend of the American avant-garde, with two divorces under her belt, one still fresh.



She was there to gather footage for an ambitious experimental film on the ritual dances of Vodou, Haiti’s primary religion. Though politically unrecognized (and frequently repressed), Vodou’s rituals permeate nearly every corner of the country, melding with Catholic beliefs into an organic and persevering tradition. Deren was a newcomer in Haiti, and didn’t know that Vodou leaves no room for passive observation. To be present is to participate: She was yanked from the role of ethnographer, drawn into the religious life of her subjects.



Deren was possessed, at least seven or eight times, by a Vodou spirit or loa called Erzulie, the embodiment of love. Possession, in its most loose definition, is when a divinity or other external animating force takes over a body. The practice is central to Vodou, primarily occurring during energetic communal rituals, but is also common to cultures from the spirit discos of Melanesia to the shamanism of Native Americans to the Japanese folk misaki. Even Roman Catholic doctrine speaks of demons and exorcisms.



For us, possession is the exclusive domain of the horror movie industry. Something about relinquishing self-control rubs us the wrong way. Possession is sensationalized. I’m thinking of the 2002 live-action Scooby Doo movie: Everyone gets possessed at wild group rituals in an underground cave, and demons almost take over the world. Most Westerners just imagine this stuff is like a giant game of Ouija. It’s convenient to put the whole notion of possession in quotation marks, wagging bunny ears in the air like an entire culture is pretending, like the shamans of the world wink at each other when we’re not looking, in on the trick.



Deren’s direct experience put her in a unique position to translate the phenomenon of possession into familiar language. But this was a nearly impossible task: Vodou is experiential, hard to contain in pictures or words. She never finished her film, scared the footage would only further exoticize Vodou. Like Deren, I’m going to attempt to connect with ideas that have no place in our world, and inevitably I’m going to fail on some level.



The serviteur or practitioner of Vodou would not describe possession as unusual. It’s an integral part of ceremonies, a divine gift to the community. The soul or mind or consciousness—whatever you want to call a person’s animating force—leaves the body, forced out by a spirit which “mounts” the person as if she were a horse. The spirit, now materially present, can talk with the serviteurs and participate in rituals. No one can say where the person’s soul goes, but it’s definitely not controlling the body. The “horse” is not held accountable for things said or done during the possession; food she eats while possessed is not felt to have nourished her body. The experience is not discussed with her. She won’t even remember: after all, she was not present.



Toward the end of her stay in Haiti, Deren purchased a set of drums and commissioned a ritual to have them “baptized.” She was planning to film the rare and complicated ceremony, one which she had never seen and knew little about. From the drummers’ first beats, the spirit Erzulie installed herself in Deren’s head. She woke up to find the ceremony concluded: Erzulie, in Deren’s body, had performed the entire baptism herself.



II



The taxi leaves us in an austere residential neighborhood, half-an-hour from Cambridge. Unlabeled number 19 is squeezed between 15 and 25. The windows are dark.



We’re here to see a possession. It’s Saturday night, and part of the local Haitian community is throwing a party in honor of the divinity of death and fertility. My friend, who spent a year in Haiti, has been trying to get to know the local Haitian culture. She heard about the event from a local mambo, or priestess, who cordially invited us with one caveat: serviteurs aren’t blind to popular opinion. Make sure you have an open mind, she warned.



I’m doing my best. My half-Haitian roommate stopped me as I ran out the door this evening, frowning hard. For a generally disaffected Lana del Rey devotee, she looked more concerned than usual. “Don’t let yourself get too swept up,” she warned me. I asked her what she meant. “That shit is real,” she said, shaking her head.



I already feel like a cultural voyeur, seeing something I wasn’t meant to see. I spoke to my mom about Vodou while researching this piece: “Oh, I have an angle,” she said. “You should write about how they have Vodou because they don’t have science.” My mother is a science writer who occasionally gets hate mail from creationists. In my house, we found PubMed research papers on healthy habits for childhood development on our desks, and went to bed on time without argument. I was raised to discredit everything that didn’t come packaged with empirical proof.



We knock and are greeted by an unsmiling man in white robes, who informs us that the drummers have not yet arrived and deposits us on a couch. For two hours, we sink into the leather sofa, life moving around us. Girls in white dresses are bustling in the kitchen, which is now producing all manner of smells. A woman reclines in the corner with a disgruntled infant. The man who greeted us, who has added a baseball cap studded with skull-shaped rhinestones to his white robe ensemble, coos at the child. There are two more babies on the glass coffee table. A couple eerily reminiscent of American Gothic sits stiffly by the window. The flat-screen television blares Zoey 101 reruns on mute. I discover I’m sitting on someone’s bottle, full of warm baby formula.



This ceremony is in honor of Ghede, a loa who is master of life and death. He’s known to wear a top hat, request cigars and swallow great gulps of a fiery liquor no human can stand.



Imagine your grandmother. Think about her personal quirks, favorite recipe, strangely-shaped birthmarks, matronly wisdom, etc. Now stick all of this information onto a slide transparency, the sort grade school teachers use with clunky projectors. Do the same for your whole ancestry—for every member of every generation that worked and played to hand down their precious DNA to you. Stack your family’s dead in neat piles of slides. When you lift the stack to the light, common forms appear. These are the loa: archetypal personalities, a dynamic cast of distinctive characters representing timeless commonalities. They are your guides and your predecessors, your legacy, your spiritual inheritance, the summation of human learning at the time of your birth. As families encounter each other and cultures blend, the pantheons merge and change, loa appear, change, and disappear to fit the spiritual needs of the communities.



The loa are full of apparent contradictions. They are not gods, but divine intermediaries between the creator and mortals. They serve the people and are served by the people. They are “intelligences,” ways of understanding and appreciating the world inherited from one’s parents. As Maya Deren puts it, “the serviteur learns love and beauty in the presence and person of Erzulie, experiences the ways of power in the diverse aspects of Ogoun, [the warrior loa,] becomes familiar with the implications of death in the attitudes of Ghede.”



Around ten, we’re led downstairs. The basement, a cavern of groaning pipes, is thickly disguised in dense layers of crepe streamers and shiny purple fabrics. Belated Halloween decorations deck the walls. These are for Ghede, and they are definitely scarier in their new appropriation: Cut-out skulls sport three-dimensional neon eyes, and fist-sized furry plastic spiders dangle from the ceiling pipes. A table is laden with offerings: rum in all varieties, breads, cakes, hard candies, popcorn. We press ourselves into an alcove at the back of the room, treading lightly around symbols traced on the floor in powdered chalk, and wait. The serviteurs pile in—cousins, inlaws, and grandparents laughing racously with kids of all ages, quiet first-timers in ‘70s garb, the pale and well-postured couple from upstairs.



By 2 a.m., the ceremony is well underway. The basement is a wild jumble of bodies transfixed by the rhythm of the drums, which seem to realign the beating of your heart so your veins pulse with the beat. A quartet of long-robed initiates float to each of the four corners of the room, arms full of swords, instruments, and offerings, which they raise and lower and then pause, holding their breath, waiting for the beat. I hold mine too. It drops and they spin together in place—right, left, right. The drums push out the noises of suburbia like a barricade of sound, declaring this modest basement a sanctuary. I’m trying not to be self-conscious, hoping to imitate the intricate sway of the women in white dresses. After four hours, we’re still waiting on a possession, and I’m having doubts. loa are strongly tied to the land, the mountains and valleys infused with the spiritual energy of many generations. I wonder: can Ghede find this house, all the way up here in a Boston suburb, surrounded by the clutter and paraphenalia of American life, the discord of migration? This basement is caught between worlds, between Haiti and the States, between the divine and the mortal.



The drums stop. I look up: A man is seizing violently like an electrocuted cartoon character. He does not seem to have control of his body: He dangles from one leg to the other, swerving like a top off balance, but somehow remains on his feet. The crowd parts hurriedly, giving him space as he careens about in great waves of shuddering. And then his eyes are open—too open. His great round whites, dilated pupils, gaze wildly around the room, and then through the room. He careens through the crowd, gripping shoulders, mouthing giddy greetings, and then the drums are up again. He plants himself backwards on the smallest of wicker chairs and drags it with him, hobbling around the room in a wild, jittery dance. The man or god is magnetic, pulling people one by one from the crowd with the slightest gesture. They twirl and curtsy to the drums, then kneel before him. He presses his bare forehead to theirs, skull to skull, and, eyes wild, mouths words I cannot hear.



III



Deren describes the experience of being possessed as terrifying, internally violent, with every echelon of intensity you might expect from having your consciousness ripped from your body. The process is so brutal that the role of the houngan, or priest, is mediative: He “arbitrate[s] between the loa and the human self, which wrangle violently over possession of the bodies like two hands might fiercely compete for a single glove.”



I’m not attempting to glorify or fetishize the often harsh realities of Haitian life. So-called primitive spiritual practices are too often sketched as hindrances to Western improvements. Well-meaning NGO workers ask why the villager spends egregious amounts of money on rituals that are “non-essential,” and complain that she ignorantly goes to the houngan for medical care instead of the distant hospital where many of her family members have died. It’s not that simple: The serviteur divides illness into two categories—“natural,” for which they’ll seek Western medical assistance if possible, and “unnatural,” what we would call psychosomatic. For the latter, they’ll seek spiritual help, which is analogous to what the West calls mental health care.



The Western tendency is to think of spiritual beliefs, especially in the developing world, as an outdated tool, preventing society from advancing to premium efficiency. But Vodou is relentlessly practical: As Deren puts it, most serviteurs’ “immediate needs are too insistent… [Vodou] must serve as a practical methodology not as an irrational hope.” The mythologist extraordinaire Joseph Campbell documents this pragmatism: With agriculture, cultures rejected the old, individualistic hunter lifestyle, which prized and depended upon individual prowess. In their place, they adopted communal, ritual-based religions, which bound families and villages together for shared survival.



For Deren, possession begins here, with the transfixing unity of ritual. She is drawn by “some pulse whose authority transcends all of these creatures and so unites them.” In Vodou dances, each individual hears and responds to the beat separately and independently, turned in, but “moving in common to a shared sound, heard by each of them singly.” The experience overloads our carefully constructed models for handling beauty, and becomes all-consuming. Joining the dance, Deren feels acutely vulnerable: She, too, is capable of losing herself in ritual.



The music is drowning her, and her body will not listen. Her limbs stick to the ground, threatening to ignore the steps of the dance; her muscles contract and the drums beat inside her chest. She internally begs for rescue, for the ceremony to end: Why don’t they stop? she thinks. Then she is calm. She describes a sense of depersonalization, of watching herself dance, of watching the rest of the serviteurs retreat to a distance to watch her dance, of realizing with renewed terror that it is not herself she is watching.



Even for the remarkably articulate Deren, possession escapes description. She experiences what she calls a white darkness. The whiteness: a divine, blinding glory she cannot handle. The darkness: viscous, concentrated terror. It consumes her, and then there is nothing.



Deren describes Erzulie, the loa of love and beauty who possesses her, as the manifestation of the dream, as the “capacity to conceive beyond reality, to desire beyond adequacy, to create beyond need.” She is the loa of the unattainable, a reminder that perfection must remain out of reach, the embodiment of the necessary gap between human and divine. Erzulie is the symbol of the white darkness, so bright Deren cannot bear it. She is terrifying, illustrious, unsurmountable by the boldest stab at analysis.



IV



Anthropologists once earnestly endeavored to understand this so-called “epitome of Otherness.” Scholars sought medical explanations, casting possession as folk psychiatry dependent on the reduced consciousness of the trance state. It’s tempting. I keep hoping to find an article where researchers take an fMRI scan of a possessed person, but possession resists rational explanation. Pre-eminent possession scholar Janice Boddy suggests we flip the question on its head: Instead of asking “why them?” we ought to ask “why not us?”



Think about the last time you saw a magician. Maybe it was your kid brother’s seventh birthday party, where some guy split your friend in half and put him back together, and you can’t, for the life of you, get him to tell you how he did it. This is profoundly irritating: There’s a secret you don’t know, a trick you’re missing. The whole Western world is subject to analysis, to the process of breaking something down into smaller pieces so that it might be more easily digested. We parse texts into symbols, know the precise size and function of each cog in a wristwatch, study the respiratory system in order to feel a little kick of awe every time we inhale. This sort of analytical understanding, in Western culture, is prerequisite to complete appreciation. But to analyze is also to strip the object of analysis of its power over us. Vodou refuses to be divided and conquered: It is bigger than any individual, bigger than every ounce of logic a single person can muster.



Vodou is a different, subjective, and experiential way of knowing. There is no Archimedean point, no objective space safe from the subjectivities of rapture. Knowledge is not arrived at by analysis but through physical experience. What is known (the loa, and through them, the universe) and the knower exist in a dynamic and interdependent relationship, so intimate that that the knowledge literally possesses the knower. Have you ever known anything that intensely? Westerners value self-control, and so we work hard to maintain distance from experiences, afraid to be swept away. Museums and galleries remove art from the real experience of our day-to-day lives and isolate it in the idealized, austere world of the blank wall, filtering out any visceral provocation with white walls and cold distance. But distance, which they claim lets us see objective truth, shuts us out of the full aesthetic experience.



Musicologist Judith Becker claims the Western conception of the self not only prevents possession, but fosters mistrust of the entire practice. Possession requires permeable boundaries between self and environment. To quote Bourginon, “spirit possession is clearly dependent . . . on the possibility of separating the self into one or more elements.” Tellingly, we call ourselves individuals—a word which literally meant “indivisible” up until the 15th century. This is the difference: Westerners have indivisible, concrete insides—personal universes—and an external world analyzed into miniscule pieces. Vodou serviteurs share a single, collective universe and a multiplicity of fragmented selves. Of course Deren was afraid: She was literally splitting herself into pieces.



The serviteur experiences this quite literally: Illness, for him, is discord between the different parts of the self. Its converse, health, is harmony and connectedness with his environment. This is not abstraction: Vodou is immediate and experienced as real physical sensation. Deren explains that existential and emotional despair is channeled quite readily into bodily trauma; psychosomatic illness occurs with much higher frequency.



Deren repeatedly marvels at the physicality of the experience: Her body’s participation in the dance and the drums bridge the material world with that of the loa. Possession is dependent on your ability to engage with your surroundings, on how much of a response music and dance can provoke from your body. Westerners talk about the representative, symbolic, figurative, but serviteurs experience these things quite literally, probably with much more intensity.



Westerners identify not with their bodies, but with the executive branch of themselves that controls and reigns in their emotions, passions, and aesthetic experiences: the particular part of ourselves we must let go to allow a loa in. The Haitians call this the gros-bon-ange, a fusion of the soul, heart, and self. We compulsively and unconsciously hold so tight a grip on our gros-bon-ange that no spirit, if we could fit a divinity into our worldview, would dare attempt to wrench it from our grasp.



Haiti’s language has no word for our notion of belief: As Deren puts it, “a Haitian does not think of himself as ‘believing in’ something; he thinks it it so.” There is nothing to “believe in,” only practice and ritual, and these are indubitably real. You serve the spirits, so by extension, they exist.



Back in the Boston basement, the possession ends as it began. A metaphysical switch flicks, and the spirit is gone. “It was Agwe,” a canzo tells me in a hurried whisper. Agwe, loa of the sea, is supposedly important to a number of the house’s serviteurs. The man, spent, slumps against a white-clad initiate, who grips his shoulders firmly and tilts a bottle of water into his mouth.



We’re also exhausted. It’s time to go. I thank one of the canzos and tell her we’re leaving, and she frowns. “But you didn’t even get to talk to a spirit,” she says.



How far I am from Cambridge, I think. And then I take it back almost immediately. Do Erzulie, Ghede, Agwe, not appear in masked, subtle forms in our own worlds? I think of eating disorders, which Boddy calls “pathological forms of embodied aesthetics.” Anthropologists wonder about the psychological connections between spirit possession and our own pathologized version: multiple personality disorder. And what about falling in love? We aren’t exempt from the divine. But their calls are personal, whispers in our ears. We follow them alone, in our private universes.



Soon we won’t be the only ones. Possession is on the decline, threatened by what Boddy calls the “quiet revolution of capitalist reification.” Deren clarifies: Industrialization eliminates much of the need for cooperation, for the thick social networks co-dependent with spirit possession. In some ways, you could say the reductionists were right: Modern technology eliminates much of the practical need for Vodou. But they miss perhaps the most crucial function of all. Losing possession is losing wonder.



We flee the drums to sit upstairs with sleeping infants and a few canzo while we wait for our ride. Some of them, like Deren, have no Haitian ancestors, but stumbled upon the community and never left. I like to think I can empathize.



“Does it normally take this long for the loa to possess someone?” my friend asks. “Do they ever just not come at all?”



A canzo laughs. “They had better come,” he responds, “It’s their party.”



V



So here I am in the dream again, holding Maya Deren’s liver. “There is enough room in my skull,” I hear myself say. “I have gathered the parts of myself together and slid down into the cerebellum. You are free to inhabit my frontal lobe, my parietal lobe, my temporal lobe, my occipital lobe.”



She smiles, but I’m not sure she’s heard me. My voice is submerged in the whirring of the air conditioner, the mechanical tick of an analog clock, the smack of many pairs of shoes on many distant floors, every leaf crunched under my foot in the past 19 years. She reaches out a hand for her liver. I want to ask how she let go of herself enough to be possessed, how I could do it. After all of this, she’s still a mystery. Maybe it’s better that way.

I. OUR MAN IN NOTTINGHAM



In every photograph of Graham Greene, the author seems slightly startled, his eyes staring out into some distant beyond or into his own soul. A biographical sketch of his early life takes shape as a litany of failure: a miserable boarding school education during which he was bullied for being the headmaster’s son; afternoons spent spinning the cylinder in solitary games of Russian roulette; half a year of psychoanalysis at age sixteen; unsuccessful attempts at poetry and journalism; an unhappy marriage and a series of affairs; a libelous review of a Shirley Temple film for which the magazine in which it was published was forced to fold. Despite this last setback, it was film—the money he brought in as a critic, as well as the royalties from adaptations of his own novels—that made up a large part of his livelihood, enabling him to write. (The other source of income was his espionage work as a double agent for the British M16, an excuse to travel to other parts of the world as material for his fiction.) Pinballing back and forth between the extremes, Green swung from the heights of exhilaration to the depths of depression. He wrote bleak dramas set against a landscape of sin as well as lighthearted parodies of the intelligence community; sought baptism to become a Roman Catholic like his wife, renounced it, and claimed it again; and embraced Castro’s communism with sudden ardor at the end of his life after a career of lampooning it. Medical diagnosis would identify this condition as bipolar disorder—yet his depressed, conflicting tendencies also hint at a more metaphysical malaise.



More than perhaps any other literary form, the novel depends on the prolonged contemplation—and often melancholy—of its author. But the Catholic novelist is more than unhappy: he writes as a way of knocking against the gates of heaven, to which he has been denied entrance. His writing is a transcription and translation of his despair. To make God a mere character is already a transgression, a source of guilt and shame; to write with sincerity about the evils in His world one must have struggled with His absence. “Being a member of the Catholic Church would present me with grave problems as a writer if I were not saved by my disloyalty,” Greene once wrote. “If my conscience were as acute as Francois Mauriac’s showed itself to be in his essay God and Mammon, I could not write a line.” The example was not a particularly accurate one, for Mauriac himself struggled with his dual identity as religious man and writer. To be a truly good Catholic and dissolve oneself in its dogma, he said, “one would have to be a saint. But then one could not write novels.”



Seeking to define himself as a novelist first, Greene rebelled against the label of Catholic writer and all the heavy-handed religious expectations that accompanied it. His prose takes on a self-lacerating quality, rubbing at the raw wounds of skepticism, rather than soothing characters with the swaddling clothes of prayer. (The reader too suffers: how often can one read of doubt without coming to embrace it as a reality above faith?) In *The Power and the Glory*—chronologically the second of the four books most critics consider his “Catholic novels,” which also include *Brighton Rock*, *The Heart of the Matter*, and *The End of the Affair*—a lieutenant lies in his squalid, beetle-infested lodgings and thinks with disdain of the priest he is trying to capture:



 



It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.



 



Greene’s most convincing characters are—like the lieutenant—not those who dutifully recite their Hail Mary’s, but instead those who suffer painfully from uncertainty, or do not believe in God at all. The author’s split consciousness, his divided loyalties, brought him intense misery during his life. But it also allowed him to hear other frequencies, dimly sensed yet ignored by so many.



 



II. THE FULL WORLD



 



Classical Hindustani ragas begin with the drone of a tanpura, a long-necked lute with four strings. This one note, sustained by an apprentice for whom such monotony is an honor, sounds throughout the entirety of the performance. It enters before the plucking of the sitars, the drumming, the vocals that build into a complex wave of sound and subside into nothingness; it is what remains when the musicians cease playing at last.



In Greene’s novels, too, one note hums beneath the action, suffusing all of his work with the timbre of melancholia. “What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery,” says police officer Scobie in *The Heart of the Matter*. “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.” The film noir atmosphere through which the characters wade is one of inescapable unhappiness and sin, Picasso blue stirred with dark violet. American abstractionist painter Frank Stella once wrote an essay praising Caravaggio for defining painterly space through the use of projective roundness and poised sphericality, which had the effect of making a “domed mansion of the void.” Greene’s innovation was to transfer this idea to literature—redefining its space as a heavy, unshakeable mantle of sin, in which every action and word takes on a special weight.



Catholic novelists before and after Greene had thrown stones into this darkness, exploring the consequences of moral crises by single individuals in the midst of an apathetic humanity: “Christians keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it,” wrote Walter Percy in *The Moviegoer*. “There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment in the life of one suffering from malaise is that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human.” Yet Greene went far further. Sin settles like a fine, ineradicable dust into everything with which humans come into contact; so omnipresent is it, and so inevitable, that even God becomes superfluous. In Greene’s books, despite the number of letters and tirades addressed toward the divine being, He never speaks at all. This replacement of God by sin explains an otherwise cryptic comment Greene once made: that his characters can “never sin against God as hard as they try.”



All of this was bound to make his fellow Catholics squirm. Evelyn Waugh couldn’t put a finger on his uneasiness, but he rightly sensed the presence of something deeply profane in Greene’s work, which he would dub a “Quietest heresy.” Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar too criticized Greene for his “mystique” of sin. Even by-the-book Catholics want unity—but not at the expense of their system itself. Stylistically or thematically, most have chosen to traverse the abyss by writing in a manner lofty or abstract enough to bridge these questions: not Greene.



 



III. THE PROJECTOR SCREEN



On a cold April day in 1953, a man from the Paris Review was sent to speak with Greene in his posh flat on St. James’s Street. Having at last made it through the preliminaries of drinks and discussion of his critics—Greene disliked wasting words, and all of his responses are phrased with an urbane and slightly disdainful precision—the interviewer subtly worked his way around to the question of sin. Just then, the telephone rang. Greene “smiled in a faint deprecatory way, as if to signify he’d said all he wished to say,” and took the call to discuss a film he was producing in Italy that summer. The waiting journalist undertook a close study of the collection of seventy-four miniature whiskey bottles Greene kept ranged above his bookshelf; at last realizing that he had been forgotten, he closed his interview with an ellipsis and left.



Greene’s productive relationship with the cinema arguably surpassed that of any other twentieth century artist, outweighing at times even his literary commitments. His own writing lends itself to the screen; over eighteen films have been made of his books, the most recent being British director John Boulting’s adaptation of *Brighton Rock* earlier this year. Part of this “cinematic” quality has to do with the exoticism of Greene’s chosen landscapes: Mexico, Brighton, West Africa. And part of it has to do with the gritty realist style in which he wrote. (“‘Hullo,’ said the somber thin man in black with a bowler hat sitting beside a wine barrel”: a typical line.) Like the pointillist paintings of Seurat, in which thousands of colored dots resolve themselves into a lake-shore, the realist novel is a masterpiece of illusion. Bound and taken together, sketches of a character’s appearance and random snatches of atmosphere resolve into suggestive wholes. Black leafless trees like broken water pipes and rain dripping down a man’s stiff coat are enough to color an entire page sinister, much as in film, multiple static images presented one after another cohere as a single, moving scene. In that sense, his technique has much in common with the work of contemporaries like Vittorio de Sica and other Italian neorealist directors of the ’40s and ’50s.



But, notably, the cinematic adaptations of Greene’s novels are not European art films. They are thrillers, just as his books are thrillers: the realist genre taken to its extreme, a gun once described now fired. Greene always insisted that one’s childhood literary preferences are what most influence one’s technique, and he was weaned on the pulpy adventure stories of Rider Haggard and R.M. Ballantyne. His affinity for the form makes sense, for the thriller also aligns surprisingly well with the novel of conscience; the ticking bomb now applies to nothing less than one’s spiritual life. Greene’s Catholic novels slide down the greased rails of suspense and dialogue: “If you excite your audience first,” he said, “you can put over what you will of horror, suffering, truth.”



Thus the ghosts of Balthasar’s nightmares obtain substance. Moral failure is not only inevitable in Greene’s books; it is also necessary for redemption. The world of sin finds its release in knife pulling, attempted murders, adulterous affairs. And it is here, amidst these sordid exploits—the stuff of movies—that something like divine grace radiates forth.



 



IV. ASHES



 



Can the Catholic novel still exist?



The question presents more grounds for apprehension than the general fretting over the death of the novel or literature as a whole. No modern writer has taken up the heavy vestments assumed by Greene. Most of the writers we associate with Catholicism—Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark, Shusaku Endo, the British and American novelists of the postwar period—have already passed on to the refuge they could not find in prose. And the conditions that the Catholic novel has traditionally depended on—both its particular brand of social realism and its uncynical assumption that qualities like good and evil exist—are slowly vanishing as well. As the main character, a novelist, asks in *The End of the Affair*:







 How can I disinter the human character from the heavy scene—the daily newspaper, the daily meal, the traffic grinding toward Battersea, the gulls coming up from the Thames looking for bread, and the early summer of 1939 glinting on the park where the children sailed their boats, one of those bright condemned prewar summers?







Greene’s “heavy scene”—the use of realist techniques to depict a world already condemned to sin—represents the farthest extreme toward which the Catholic novel can tend. At the heart of every great work lies a great, unknowable mystery: what Eliot calls “the heart of light, the silence.” Like every writer with an ideology, the Catholic novelist is given this mystery ready-made. So assured was Greene of the world’s inherent guilt that he had no need to refer to morality directly, and could keep it as the profound, silent center around which he wrapped his melodramatic plots.



Today’s would-be Catholic writers have no recourse to that kind of certainty, and they sag under the strain. One can still enjoy Greene’s work, but only in the way that one savors a sacramental wafer: as a precious, blessed fragment of something long since departed.