Spring 2015 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

American Queen Elsa might sing, “The snow glows white on the mountain tonight, not a footprint to be seen,” but on the other side of the Atlantic, her French counterpart prefers a less literal image of the scenery. “L’hiver s’installe doucement dans la nuit, la neige est reine à son tour,” she sings, cleverly evoking the larger themes of winter and sovereignty in Frozen. Farther south on the same continent, Elsa continues to make it snow, but her voice is now that of the Spanish singer Gisela, who proclaims either “suéltalo!” (literally “let it go” in Spanish) or, in the Catalan version that Gisela also sings, “vol volar” (a slightly riskier translation meaning “it wants to fly”).

I called it my porta-potty. That rectangular prism next to my mailbox. The contractor left it one day, wrapped in the excuse that every building under construction in the state of California must support a portable toilet if the project lasts longer than three days. A quick online cross-reference revealed there is no porta-potty-law; it’s just a practice in decency, courtesy, and efficiency to leave a monolith out there as a temporary outhouse.



The workers used it, I guess. I never saw them use it, but they probably did.



I only saw one man open the door, let it swing shut behind him, and then open it again from the inside. His name is Man-with-red-Toyota-Tundra-who-noticed-the-incriminating-hole-in-my-cowboy-pajamas-and-waved-at-me-before-he-entered-the-space. He didn’t ask permission to use it, and I didn’t stop him.



After a porta-potty is used, there is no sound of completion, that clear end marked by a flush. There’s just silence, until the door opens and the slam comes. Quiet returns, and the man walks away, back into the seat of his truck, and you have to watch him drive off, around the curve of your cul-de-sac, as the breeze blows through that hole again and reminds you some man just used your porta-potty.



The exact name of these boxes is unknown. Even the voice behind 1-800-TOILETS, a service with an “unmatched selection from basic Porta Potty Rentals to best-in-class portable toilet rentals,” will admit they have no set title. Some people at the company call them portable restrooms, others will just talk about them as lifeless “product.” She’ll tell you this after you tell her you’re writing an essay about them, and remind her three times it’s not a humor piece, but a serious exploration of porta-potties. 



That’s probably the easiest thing to call them, two conjoined words infantilized by cutesy endings, tied together by alliteration and the power of the p-words that happen within.



Although, once you say the word, the object builds itself in your mind. Walls of plastic connected by a few rivets, under a white roof that contains what is within and keeps away the without. There’s a logo on the front door, and on the sides, and on the back, to advertise the brand to those who pause and notice. The lock abides by the green-go, red- stop convention and will change with a click from empty to occupied.



I brought the story of the porta-potty back to school with me, sharing those two minutes as a response to “how was your summer?” It all stretched out into around a three minute anecdote, beginning with the sun caressing the lids of my eyes, preparing me for a bright day, a happy few hours spent sipping coffee and flipping through the Times, when suddenly a slick man rips up my street, slams on the breaks, penetrates my porta-potty, and leaves it violated.



That’s the word I said. Violated. It seemed to match the listener’s response to the story.



The story of the summer didn’t stop when the heat chilled. It was to continue into the semester, when I said I wanted to write an essay on violation in relation to porta-potties: on these layers of plastic as false constructs of safety from the outside world, when anyone from anywhere can come, apply pressure from one side, and watch them fall to the ground.



***



CHRIS1 So, are you a government concentrator?



SAM No.



CHRIS Maybe political aspirations in his future, eh Nori?



NORI2 Oh, yeah, yeah.



*(laughing, forced)*



CHRIS Why did you shake my hand?



SAM I learned it was the polite thing to do.



CHRIS If not politics, a future in what then? Consulting? Go on, take a seat, don’t just stand there.



*Sam wants to say “writing short stories.” He wants to reveal himself. He wants to accept his wants and place them on the white table. But he says something else, not something that exists inside him, but a title that will look good placed against the small, white magnets across the wall.*



CHRIS Screenwriting? Interesting.



I wanted that word to stick to the white walls. In that half moment the interviewer gives an interviewee to formulate an answer, I saw that empty space surrounding us and threw myself against the wall, once. That version of me slipped down, slowly returning to the pool of bcc’d applicants. So I made something up, rather than reveal anything about myself.



I was put on the course’s waitlist. End Scene.



***



A difficult part of the porta-potty journey has been keeping life clean of the puns that stink up every day.



Each listener who hears the story for the first time grins and tells me how shitty it is.



What a load of crap I’m full of.



Why I can’t smell the roses.



I feel shitty.



How can I just dump this on them like that.



All their comments are worthless piles of crap.



But at least they’re talking about it.



I told Chris the story during one of our introductory classes together3, with ten other potential laughs listening.



Down the hall, there’s a restroom. It has three stalls, one of which is handicapped. The entire space contains the distinct smell of a bathroom. You know that smell. It’s strong, inside the pockets of your nose as soon as the door opens; it embraces your body, attaching itself to the holes in your skin. You worry it’ll follow you out of the restroom, back to class where everyone watches the slides move across the screen:



A black mastiff, caught running through the snow on a country estate at night.



A pregnant addict using her blue arms to pump heroin into the man who will become her husband and is the father of her unborn daughter.



A bus, with a sliding scale of white to black as the windows move from front to back.



The last slide is blank, an absence of an image that leaves a square of light on the projector screen. In the restroom, when there’s another person, there’s silence. There’s often a wall between you, one that ends at your chest or the top of your head, depends if you’re seated or standing. The space is stocked with amenities, and the entirety of the visit can pass without conversation, one of the few spaces where small talk is not forced into the air, but instead overpowered by the precise frequency of the Dyson Hand Blade.



But I’m still next to that guy with his South Park Christmas underwear bunched in the seam of his jeggings, and two feet from my right ear there’s a man who I can’t even see peeing on the image of a bee. Underneath my butt is the warmth left by someone else. On a bad day I can smell him, and on the worst days you can see him etched into the bottom of the bowl. The walls leave spaces at their seams for any eye to scoot into and see your legs spread. Listen to the sounds around you, everyone engaging in a personal, private movement. It’s a communal act now, a violent shift into society that mom never mentioned in potty training.



And to get to that point, where you can exit a swinging door in the process of zipping up, you must wait in a line, behind the backs of their heads, all facing the same throne, for their own ends.



***



Coprophilia is the derivation of sexual pleasure from feces. Somewhere in the world, at some time, that interest became a reality, a moment of visual, visceral, olfactory intensity.



I don’t have any photographs of that, but I do have five hundred of porta-potties:



Along the River during the Head of the Charles, lines of the same shade offering a uniform experi- ence in any slot.



Touching the side of church undergoing renovations.



On the corner of an intersection.



By the Northeastern boathouse.



At the top of the hill behind the baseball field.



Under the arches of the football stadium.



Inside construction sites.



In backyards.



Behind fences.



And in many front yards, unique, solitary objects, standing guard over houses, the only figure in a scene under construction.



I found them wandering the streets of Cambridge. That sentence has a confusing subject-object-verb arrangement, so let me clarify: I was the wanderer; they were stationary, each planted on the ground for a low fee of $110.00/billing cycle.



Before I photographed portable toilets, there were two motifs in my work: scraps of food and the backs of others’ heads. They were linked by two trends, one being they both did not happen in the restroom, and two being they avoided the completed subject, showing a piece to finish the original object. Placing a whole orange in front of camera overwhelmed me: That was a complete sphere, something whole and orange, and I was just me, taking a picture of one half of its surface content; why would anyone look at my picture if they could just pick up an orange?



I understand the ridiculous nature of that metaphor. And I like hiding in metaphors. But that sentence, with its colons and commas and questions, is not a figure of thought, but an actual thought I had. 



***



RON4 Hello.



SAM Hi, Ron. I’m a student at Harvard researching a paper on porta-potties, and I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions?



RON Okay, yes, we’ll do that. I’m busy this week, let’s talk next. What’s your first name?



SAM Sam.



RON Last name?



SAM Reynolds.



RON Town of birth?



SAM*(pause)* Glendale?



RON What you studying?



SAM English?



RON Okay, goodbye, call back next week.



*Five minute pause.*



*The cellphone buzzes; it’s Ron.*



SAM Hello?



RON Hello, what’s your name townof birth and major?



SAM This is Sam Reynolds, fromGlendale, the English guy.



RON Okay Sam, just checking in. I



know my buddies, and they like to fuck with me. I don’t want to be scammed. Call back nextweek and we’ll set up aninterview.



*End conversation.*



A voicemail doesn’t mean someone will call you back. And if one recording of your voice left somewhere in their files doesn’t do it, I’ve found two or three more approach a marginal effectiveness of zero.



The Throne Depot told me to “talk to your school, they’re the ones who will know.5”



The toilet psyche happens to be something peo- ple don’t want to talk about to another person, so they offload their information to a webpage, where a family-friendly sanitary slideshow advertises the three-word structure of trust, needs, and support, all concepts that will ensure a pleasant user experience:



A construction site with one blue porta-potty much larger than a swinging crane.



Lines of mobile restrooms with a man’s profile glancing at them.



Some people in groups.



It goes without saying the photographs are awful; the upload quality on most is so poor that even the company’s phone number is illegible. The only part that’s clear in every image, even when the sky lacks depth and the writing melts into an out-of-focus mass of pixels, is a monolithic toilet always present in the background.



When a face does make an appearance in the photograph, it’s tucked in the background, far away from anything remotely personal. Streaming through all these slide shows, it’s as if the companies don’t want to sully their porta-potties with any sort of humanity, even a smile6.



The average consumer might not notice the absence of smiles, but as someone whose most fre- quently visited websites all contain the word “toilet,” the lack of humanity is draining. It makes you wonder if they’re saving their smiles for when they’re inside, away from the watching cameras and noise of others, alone to look at the back of a door.



***



When I was small, my family shopped at Costco. Now we buy groceries and toiletries or electronics at separate stops, once a week. They ride on the back seat, a few paper bags transported on the cushions of my childhood car.



One time at Costco, I needed to poo. I told my dad this when the sliding doors let us into the store, before we reached the aisles but after choosing a cart. He told me to hold it.



This is the sort of story that’s inappropriate for a nine-year-old. Had I been seven, or younger, we could excuse this to preschool anxiety/a lapse in training/life before memory. And if I were a teen, or a tween, maybe I could call it rebellion, or add it to a bout of high school illness. Dipping into a younger age group would also have allowed my mommy to take me into the ladies restroom, avoiding the conflict entirely. Older me could have popped in by himself at any time. But I had to wait for dad.



This incident has no real excuse, except that it takes approximately two to three hours to navigate Costco, select the correct brand of wholesale pick- les, diverge for samples often, and reach the check- out. I kept saying, “Dad, I need to go poo.”



He told me to hold it.



In the checkout line, I watched each box fill with items, bread, peanut butter, rolls of toilet paper covered in that mocking Kirkland shoving double-quilted irony in my face. Check the bill to make sure it’s correct, and wait while dad swipes, then argues about a double charge, then swipes again.



When we finished there, he took me to the restroom.



In an empty one with two stalls, you always choose handicapped. The extra square footage adds to the illusion of privacy: more room to move, more power to pretend you’re not in a superstore that sells baby-grands and cabbage inches from each oth- er and that there’s not thousands of people eating while you’re trying to not eat.



I didn’t think about that then. All I could think about was that toilet bowl, right there, in front of me. All I had to do was turn around and sit.



Here’s where the memory becomes a story, so stop and skip to the final section, please.



I drop my pants, but before I can sit, I shit a pool up to my ankles. It covers the tops of my white socks and completely obscures whatever underwear I had been wearing. Have you ever seen a brown figure eight, a warm infinity loop wrapped around two small, pale legs?



SAM Dad.



DAD What?



SAM Come here.



Obviously the door’s locked so I shuffle over and



let him in, careful to hold everything within the confines of my shorts. It’s important that the bath- room remain clean, so no mark of my presence remains when this is done.



DAD Oh Sammy.



SAM I said I needed to poop.



DAD Uhh, I’ll be back.



*Exit Dad.*



I waddle back and finally take my seat. Everything slips off, and I form a pile with it in the cor- ner, where it sits against the wall as I wipe my legs and feet.



A line starts to form outside. Other people, on their normal day, wait in the silence of the restroom. No one speaks, but they can smell, and they know that I’m in the handicapped stall naked wearing my new gold wire glasses that I think look cool when I’m alone but dumb in public. And that’s a pile of shit in the corner.



*Silence, suggested five minutes; maybe longer? *



*Dad returns*



DAD Sam, open up.



*Sam waddles/walks like a duck; up to dir. inter- pretation.*



DAD Here.



SAM These are your shorts



DAD I wasn’t going to buy you a new pair



SAM Okay



I leave there with a 38-inch khaki waistband bunched in my right hand. The pile was still in the corner as I walked by the three balding men waiting for a stall.



*At the car.*



DAD Wait. Don’t sit.



*Lays a towel.*



DAD Okay, now sit.



*They drive home. This is the same car they use today.*



*They like talking about shit. For years their conversations will blend bowel movements with “what’s for dinner?” and “did you see last night’s episode?” This story will never come up, except as “Costco,” one word to push Sam back into a nine-year-old moment of terror.*



Often, sensational topics invade conversation as a stand-in for sincerity. When you’re comfortable in your space, with the people you’re with, you’ll say anything to watch it bounce off the walls because you know at any moment you can stick out your hand and grab it.



This story, however, happens on blank pages, to a reader I do not know, as I pull my nine-year-old self out of his room with his pants off.



It’s not the same as twenty-one-year-old me writing with shit between his legs, but it’s as close as I’ll get right now, closer than I’ve been before.



***



None of my images enter the porta-potty. The toilets stand in for the people, portraits themselves. It wouldn’t be right to open up their doors and expose them to the world. That would be exploitive of their interiority, right?



On my final day of shooting, I walked through the football stadium with a friend and came across a new crop of toilets in just the right overcast light. I needed to take this picture, to continue manufacturing my story, and to finish it with a few final shots.



But then there was that urge for something else. I opened the door, slid behind the metaphorical curtain, into my subject. And I peed, all without taking one breath, but still feeling the smell inside my nose, and bearing with the grimace that spread over my face before I could pump the hand sanitizer, slam the door, and leave.



We want the safety from being vulnerable transferred to whatever space we stand or sit in, a moving set of walls or stalls that follow my steps and protect me from that which lies out there. When something “violates” you, attacks your presence in that mo- ment, it defamiliarizes the most familiar places, the home, classroom, restroom, and leaves you exposed, even if your clothes are literally on.



Who would want to be conscious of this change? To look at others looking at them naked? I really don’t. But I will continue to do so because otherwise I’ll still be nine, somewhere in an aisle, needing to, but not having, pooped.



Once I let the door of the porta-potty shut behind me, this wasn’t just something happening to me. I was doing it; I was active, engaged, peeing! I don’t think I’ve ever written an exclamation point before. There’s been someone who wanted to exclaim this entire time hidden in my cuticles, and he’s glad he spoke up.



Writing violates your vulnerability. You’re not just leaving yourself exposed for someone else to stop and dissect; your goal should be to strip away every last piece of cloth and present yourself chipped away by words. It’s scary to tell a story about anything because it presumes what I’m telling is valuable and the listener will enjoy spending their time listening. Filling the minutes with myself increases the stakes, as I’m now the subject tangled with the tale. It’s not so strange that dinner parties fill themselves with stories of “my crazy uncle” and “my friend’s summer vow of silence” rather than stories of ourselves; it’s easier to hide behind others, or other things, than present who you actually are.



But power comes when you swing out the doors on your own restroom and poop with them wide open. We often read in the restroom; I recommend writing there sometimes, too. It shows, not just tells, the world you’re okay to exist without the walls of safety up at all times, that vulnerability is welcomed. Yes I am human, yes I poop, come shake my hand. There’s joy in self-consciousness, just letting it lie there, while you converse with the reader, showing them your stories and admitting, yes, those are my porta-potties. 



 



 



1 “Chris Killip (born 11 July 1946) is a Manx photographer who has worked at Harvard University in Cam- bridge Massachusetts since 1991, where he is a professor of visual and environmental studies. Thank you Wikipedia for writing one sentence for me in this sea of hundreds of others; perhaps I should have read it myself before applying to his introductory photography class



2 Nori isn’t on Wikipedia, but he is a wonderful TF in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department, whom I would like to thank for his help and patience and presence in this piece



3 I got off the waitlist; turns out that does happen, sometimes.



4 Ron, the regional New England Manager of United Toilets, also known as 1-800-TOILETS. Can be reached direct: 508-245-4410



5 “Hello President Faust, I’m a junior at the college writing an essay on porta-potties. Is there someone in your office I could contact that could set up an interview/photo-shoot?”



6 Consumers tired of the impersonal webpage and interested in both good conversation and customer service should dial NSC Restrooms, who surpass their motto of “the difference is in the Toilets” and provide a standard of care unprecedented in my experience with the industry. Brenda, their general line responder, provided most of the stats on porta-potties: $110/toilet/billing cycling (28 days), with the guarantee of a weekly service of the restroom, which involves the company truck driving around Boston, sucking sludge from each toilet, and pumping a few gallons of clean water back, with a blue tablet added for color and cleanliness. When the chemicals stop functioning, the mixture turns green. 



* *

*What do we do now, now that we are happy? *



–Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot



 



 



You have to be meticulous, reverent. Strip the brittle stem and crush its leaves with the flat side of a cold fifty-cent coin. Now tear careful cardstock rectangles and wind them into tight spirals with your fingernails. (It’s best to use business cards. Steal them from local haunts, and choose carefully: The origin of these neat little scrolls makes a tangible difference in sentiment.) Temper the weed with a precise measure of tobacco, which should be soft and stringy and smell sweet and earthy. Two even piles of grass and wood: Fold them together and halve the heap again. Two rolling papers, side by side. One heap, sifted carefully onto each. Gum in the back, roach on the right side (careful to do this backwards for good luck). Roll between your fingers lovingly until the spliff begins to cohere. With your thumbs pulled all the way down, tuck with care, starting with the roach, twist up twice, salivate, lick, and seal. Once more now.



Mary Jane and I did all this two or three times a day, in a little room in our second floor apartment. It was not more than forty square feet, with a door to the balcony and cold white walls. Our church.



At the beginning we thought we were really cool. Well, I did; she had done it all before. We met on this island where the hilltops sprouted neon yellow flowers, and from every inch of our world you could smell the sea. The island is a way station for people in transition: lost twenty-somethings, recent divorcees, high school dropouts. You come for as long as you need to get your feet on the ground and your mind on the right track (as if neurons were little trains of thought, a whole railroad network inside of our heads), and then you leave. On the island, before doesn’t matter and neither does after.



You don’t understand: Everything here is perfect. We live in a beautiful place with no commitments except to cultivate the crispest possible appreciation for the present. Here is where the little green leaves come in: They spill onto the table from the backpack of a local friend. These are supposed to augment our experience. We breathe them in quickly, without savor, because we don’t know any better. The windows are open, and the wind is floating in. Green hills stud the skyline. We can feel the world turning around us, hugging us with great centripetal arms, pulling us along with it.



When they’re gone, the table looks empty. We look at each other. We decide to make a call. “This is a bad idea,” one of us says over the dial tone. We both laugh.



***



You probably visualize time as a line, with the future way out to the right, moving ever forwards and the past stretching backwards and left- wards. The present is a point, an infinitesimal differential, something and yet nothing. I have a very aggressive case of Spatial Sequence Synesthesia—in my head the months stretch around in a complete circle, with summer at the top and New Year’s at the bottom. With each year I go around and around, circling back over the previous February, March, April, and so on. It feels like a loss, a complete over-writing of the past.



As we slip into the rituals of worshipping these little green leaves, this becomes the central dogma to our two-person religion: Motion is pain. I mean time; I mean being pulled through the fourth dimension without brakes or acceleration. Moments are slippery, infinitesimally small and impossible to inhabit. We want to hold each one in our hands like a ceramic pot and examine it from every angle, but the past is melting into the future without pausing to catch its breath. Hours are viscous and lethal. Luckily we have built a sanctuary.



In the traditional sub-Saharan concept of time, there is no future. Time centers around two foci—zamani, the past, and sasa, the present. Events slowly fade from present consciousness into ancestral memory, belonging to an extensive repertoire of oral history and distant legend. Things that will happen, like next winter or tomorrow’s sunrise, belong in the sphere of potential time, occurrences that may soon become the present. All you can think is now.



Unlike the sub-Saharan, we had an end point. Each of us would leave, and most of us would leave soon. That ending, with nothing beyond it but a great unknown, squeezed the present into cover photos and Instagram, into attempts to make tangible and preserve ephemerality itself. The island’s beauty could only be appreciated through the hopeful awareness of future memories; the present existed for the sake of becoming a sweet past, and a sweet past was little consolation for a monotonous present becoming a past. You can drown in this paradox.



Which is worse? An ending or none? I think of Dante’s Limbo, where virtuous yet unbaptized souls flounder in perfectly pleasant conditions, crushed beneath the weight of forever. And yet, the anti-aging industry thrives on more than 80 billion dollars a year. 



I’m not even sure it’s a valid question. Someone once told me that in your last moments, your perception of time follows a similar path to Zeno’s arrow, halving and halving again its distance from its target ad infinitum. You never arrive.



***



If we did have a past, it would be something like this: both of us sprinting at equal velocity in opposite directions. I was running towards being something, accelerating through college admissions toward the foggy endpoint of “success.” I ran hard sprints, crammed between myriad commitments. She was running to become nothing: three-hour jog sessions in baggy clothes, grasping for some kind of control over her body, her mind.



MJ and I arrive to the island separately. We are both at the edges of our respective cliffs; we have both recently decided to try stillness. We imagine we can subvert the pain of growing up by subduing our attentiveness.



Little baggies come from off-island in kilo-packs, we soon learn, traveling impressive distances to spill onto our table. We start to share tobacco and laundry detergent and mental space. Quickly we stop needing to talk to communicate and start forgetting to spend time apart. We propose a merger: No sensation will go unshared, no thought without voice, no spliff unpassed.



I go on a couple dates with an island bartender. He is twenty-six, with a septum piercing and a tattoo for Led Zep (John Bonham is my god, he says when I ask).A few nights a week I go to see him on his graveyard shift, after MJ is asleep.



The winds are rising, hissing in the valleys and shattering windows against their own frames. They carry chalky red dust from the Sahara and turn the white houses orange. The waves break over the roads, and everyone forgets where the sea is supposed to end and the island is supposed to begin. People who have been here long enough to know say the wind makes people crazy. They call it the scirocco, and when it blows for longer than five days “weather-induced insanity” becomes a legitimate legal defense.



We are attempting to recreate the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment in my living room, testing how far we can delay gratification as if it can predict our future life success. Our dogma is one of pleasure optimization. Once upon a time this was about getting the most bang for our buck, but now it’s obsession: How far can we push ourselves? The grown-up version involves fewer marshmallows. Instead, we sew hand-bound sketchbooks, set chickpeas to soak, scrub some shine into a week’s worth of dishes, pre-roll enough cigarettes to permanently steal a voice. We have nothing to prove: There’s no way to win and no way to lose because it always ends the same.



We cave. Everything we do we do for this moment—your thumb on the sparkwheel, spliff in your teeth. But it has to pass: the gas flame hits the tip, and something that was once a living plant transmutes itself into light and heat. It hits your lungs.



It feels—wait, what does it feel? Good? Relaxing? It feels like I am doing a desperate breast-stroke through a lap-lane of honey. What was I expecting? Sweet harmony, bliss, perfect serenity where all of my past selves wrap their arms around me into a tight warm knot, or yellow blossoms shimmying up my spinal cord and whispering you are okay, you are okay, you are okay.



I keep smiling until it’s down to the roach because if I don’t MJ won’t. We could stop smoking, I think. But these days with every drag of a spliff we inhale not just THC and toxins and additives but also each other, our secret love club running on biofuel. I want to burn in her throat.



We put the roach to bed. I press a hand over the ashtray so it can’t breathe. I think about all the things I could do now, all the directions in which my fourth dimensional self could branch. I list them in order from hard to easy. Hard: painting. Less hard: taking out the trash. Easy: going for a swim. Even easier: lie here until it feels appropriate to roll another.



Why do we do this? Remember: Our model of time does not contain a concept of future. There is nothing to fuck up. There is no lung cancer, and there are no brain cells. There is now, and maybe there is tomorrow, and there is the end that is always on its way. Then, nothing.



The wind blows slightly stronger with each passing minute. Classes are cancelled indefinitely; we take refuge in my little living room, faces sinking into pillows, our bodies splayed still and horizontal. Initially we make the occasional trip for fresh produce, liquor, bags of brown rice, and tins of olive oil, but mostly we stare at my ceiling like it has something to tell us.



As it turns out, our basic calculus is wrong. One plus one makes one. We become lonely in eachother, wrapped so tightly around the other that we have become a single entity. The angsty corners of our barely-adult brains have fused to become one mass of routine. With this greater mass we like to think we have gained gravity, with which to give weight to the day-ins and day-outs that make up the bulk of our lives.



The scirocco reaches hurricane speeds. Shops close; the radio advises us to leave our dwellings only in the case of emergencies. We find ourselves irreversibly implanted in my apartment in absurd meditation, rumination, chewing our mental cud. The sensuality of the whole ordeal is thinning quickly: Any anticipation evaporates, and our angst goes gray, losing its glittery sheen. We continue to roll the same perfect spliffs and light them purely out of habit. We don’t stamp them out but let the flames run their course in the ashtray. Let them have their fun.



As one of these roaches smolders, we hear rap- ping on the balcony door. MJ groans and buries her face in a pillow. I stand up and open it, ushering Sisyphus out of the scirocco and into our self-inflicted haze.



Sisy is our new friend, slowly replacing the bartender as the winds make the pre-dawn walk unthinkable. He is broad shouldered and smiles with yellow teeth and is probably some kind of shared hallucination. We can’t play music with him around: Every song winds him up. He sits at MJ’s feet and hums to himself under his breath. “Cig?” MJ offers, pulling one from the pack and tossing the lighter. He takes one miserly drag and, losing interest, stamps it out. The ashtray is full of these abandoned beginnings.



He hulks over us, filling a full quarter of the room. He seems to haul the air in and out of his lungs. He won’t look you in the eye, but he’ll stretch his lips into the widest of grins, a smile full of ecstasy and absolute death.



“When was the first time you smoked,” MJ asks me. We’re slowly working on merging our memories. I answer:



In a pulsing, boozy basement several years away a boy places a hand in the hollow of my back, guiding me out the fire door and up the cellar steps, into a small alcove full of skulking teen-age boys. He claps a lanky kid on the shoulder. The boy pulls a joint from the inner pocket of his fleece and holds a palm out to the skinny one, who swiftly provides a light. The yard fills with opaque smoke. The joint is a bad roll, mostly down to the roach by the time it makes it around. I clamp it between two fingers and drag hard, taking it swiftly into my nose without really meaning to. The lanky boy eyes me sideways.



“Did you just French that?” he asks. It was exciting, feeling cool.



Sisyphus smiles at me. I’m suddenly not sure when this memory happened, or if it has happened yet at all. I don’t feel very cool here. MJ pulls Sisy’s cigarette from the ashtray and reaches for a lighter.



***



The scirocco dies, and the silence is somehow more oppressive than the wind’s howls and the slamming shutters. I go to the bar, and the bartender is gone. Two of his friends have died in a drunk-driving accident, I hear from a friend. He returned to his hometown.



A lot of my best thinking during this period of time occurred lying on that couch in our living room and staring at a lighter flame, thumb pressed snug over the fork. Sometimes I thought about wasting lighter fluid, climate change, etc. Occasionally I thought about the quality of light. In 10th grade Chemistry, my disgruntled teacher taught us about wave-particle duality. Sometimes light acts like a particle, a contained and centered quantity of matter with mass and weight and volume. At other times, it appears as a frenetic wave, a disturbance, an oscillation, continually in tran- sit. The wave ferries energy to and fro, defined by constant motion, constant transfer: It is the physical manifestation of change itself. We were taught that, as usual, the answer hangs somewhere in between: Most situations can be accurately modeled through the combination of classical wave theory and a particle model updated with quantum mechanics. But the models have limitations. Light is simply light, and it does not care if we say it ought to act like this or that.



The end comes. Mary Jane gets on a boat that takes her away from the island. I lock up the balcony and tape the door to the living room closed, leaving a dusting of green leaves strewn across the table. I think I hear Sisyphus knock while I lay in bed in the early mornings or as I chop the vegetables for a late-night single-portion stir-fry. I keep the door closed and don’t enter the living room again.



As I board my own boat soon after, I think about the idols hidden behind that door: papers, a full ashtray, empty plastic baggies, an assortment of lighters infused with varying quantities of luck.



I should mention I changed MJ’s name for her privacy. It doesn’t really matter though, does it?



Sisyphus did like one song: Irene Cara’s “Fame.” When I remember him, I remember him bellowing on the balcony, voice drowned in the scirocco: I’m gonna live forever / I’m gonna learn how to fly (high!) 

*Man is a god when he dreams and a beggar when he thinks.* –Friedrich Holderlin



 



 



I



In the early morning hours of January 12, 1963, a coup took place on the island of Zanzibar. It was a small, relatively silent uprising; those over whom the hand of government had switched in the middle of the night awoke none the wiser. As day broke, insubstantial rumors began to trickle in. The sun climbed in the sky like a fiery balloon, and with it rose the tide of hearsay.



A name began to circulate. It hummed in the narrow, shaded streets, along the brilliant beaches and quays where bobbed the boats of ragged fishermen. It ran through the fields of corn and cassava, beneath the coconut palms and clove trees. Soon a message, freshly composed by the revolutionaries, quaked over the radio.



John Okello, a warrior, had apparently given Zanzibar, until so recently ruled by a minority population of Arabs, back to the Afri- cans. He cut a magnificent figure, the listeners were led to believe and until quite recently had been a high-ranking officer in Kenya. He could construct, with his own two hands, 500 guns in a single day, 100 grenades in an hour, and a bomb with a blast radius of three miles—and he had been planning the liberation of Zanzibar for months.



But very little of this, as it would later emerge, was true. Seizing the opportunity to reinvent himself, Okello had disseminated a stream of fictions so rich and vermiculate that it would be months in the disentangling. The madness, turmoil, and attendant void of information associated with the revolt provided an exceptionally fertile launch pad for this reformation.



The man who post-revolution would pompously deem himself “Field Marshal” of the military was, in reality, a semi-literate laborer—variously a bricklayer, a housepainter, a stonecutter—who had raised himself after being orphaned at ten. Furthermore, he was a spiritual man, in his own mind a prophet. God spoke to him of the righteousness of the revolution, whispered at his ear in the dark night hours. Sometimes he was so bowled over by these inspirations that he retreated to the forest to contemplate his dreams in silence.



He had had no hand in planning the revolution but had merely been the firebrand, the instigator. At first a rank-and-file rebel, it was during the actual fighting that he had distinguished himself, his singular confidence and viciousness exalting him to the position of military hero and, eventually, to figurehead of the revolution.



Immediately following the revolution, Okello held great sway in Zanzibar. What followed was a confusing period of about two months. Though he had no formal position in the new government, Okello was essentially running the country, while more legitimate leaders—those who had actually planned the revolution Okello had usurped—tried to mitigate his power.



Okello made daily radio broadcasts during this period, claiming, outrageously, that 11,995 people had died during the revolt. He made strange threats, such as:



“We, the army, have the strength of 99 million, 99 thousand...Should anyone be stubborn and disobey orders, then I will take very strong measures, 88 times stronger than at present.”



He would cut, drown, burn, and shoot dissidents. The foreign press was banned, and he began to make insane demands. Off the radio, he strutted about, gussied up and armed to the teeth with pistols, knives, and a Sten gun. He burst in on private meetings and proceeded to act the buffo. He posed for an endless number of photographs.



In short, he was an embarrassment. Fortunately for his opponents, Okello’s violent Christian rhetoric, combined with the ravenous looting his armada of ruffians undertook in regular waves, was beginning to alienate his less zealous supporters. On March 8, on returning from a trip to Uganda, Okello was met at the airport by a host of guards. Unfortunately, they explained, he would not be allowed back into Zanzibar.



He was set to wandering. He still felt the desire to liberate; he still retained his taste for grandeur. With only a handful of loyal men, he halfheartedly stomped around East Africa, dreamily plotting uprisings in Rhodesia, Mozambique, even South Africa.



In 1971, he dropped off the map entirely. Speculation has it he was assassinated by a president or warlord who felt vaguely threatened by his high volatility. Regardless, his misbegotten plans, his synthetic past, the tentative grandeur of his future all disappeared, swept briskly under the rug of history. The magnificence of his illusions dissipated, their energy spreading ineffectually across the whole geography of his wanderings. He burst forth like a flame and petered out, underfed



 



II



It was during his exile of the late 1960s—before his disappearance—that Okello began a correspondence with German filmmaker Werner Herzog, then a relatively unknown director. Okello wanted Herzog to translate a book he’d written on the Zanzibar Revolution into German, while Herzog simply wanted a chance to film Okello, whose grandiose antics he’d followed closely as they’d trickled into the western media. The two never managed to meet, however; Okello, having learned little from his ostracization and still inclined to boil over with vitriolic language, had landed himself in jail.



Even a cursory understanding of Herzog’s filmog- raphy would seem to justify his interest in Okello. As Dana Benelli notes in his essay “The Cosmos and its Discontents,” Herzog’s films, particularly the early efforts, tend to focus on “central characters out of synch with, if not in open rebellion against, the societies within which they live” (89). The “re- bellious response” subsumes the individual, and the revolt escalates, self-augmenting, until the characters are revolting against the universe itself: Stroszek in Signs of Life (1968) demands that the sun cease its constant rising; The President in Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) runs into the desert and orders a branch to quit pointing at him.



These Herzogian protagonists tend to be characterized by their mythopoeic strivings, by the attempt at self-reinvention through a reckless and mad grab for power—elements found abundantly in Okello that no doubt attracted the director. Okello’s absurd and unsustainable demagoguery, marked by a penchant for flagrantly impossible threats, was in itself a bid for transcendence. As Herzog recalled in a 1971 interview:



Okello delivered these incredible speeches from an airplane. He circled around Zanzibar...and before he landed, he had the aircraft’s radio switched to the local radio station and delivered a short speech: “I, your Field Marshall, am about to land. Anyone who steals so much as a bar of soap will be thrown in prison for two hundred and sixteen years!”



The figure of John Okello—mad revolutionary, boastful weaver of absurd fictions—would come to influence not only Herzog’s style of filmmaking, but also the themes he undertook to excavate, most prominently in his 1972 feature Aguirre, the Wrath of God, a film which includes a character named after Okello and which marked Herzog’s first collaboration with another mad, transcendent person- ality: Klaus Kinski.



The wonderfully strange, frequently violent, and wildly germinative relationship between Herzog and Kinski has become a bit of a commonplace in cinema history. Herzog himself has emerged as a weird wizard of cinema, with various anecdotes attesting to his eccentricity; Kinski, the blonde powder keg, has always remained a larger than life figure, renowned for the shortness of his temper, the force of his outbursts.



At the time of filming, Kinski, in his mid-forties, had a respectful though stunted career. He could act, all agreed, but his frequent and vociferous tantrums—which often bled into the physical realm— had garnered him a foreboding reputation. Many directors were afraid to touch him, but it was precisely this volatility that attracted Herzog. He was intent on making a film about revolt—who better than a revolting actor to play the lead?



The film, which follows a doomed expedition down a mid-16th century Amazon River to find the mythic golden city of El Dorado, was filmed in Peru. The jungle was hot, unbearably hot, and Herzog, hoping to draw real performances out of his actors, allegedly kept them hungry and thirsty for most of the shoot. It was nearly impossible to drag the large crew and cast through the often perilously thin mountain paths, through the webs of viridescent foliage that sprung from the soupy ground. Sickness and fever were a perennial threat; the nearest large city was often dangerously distant and only sometimes in communication.



Early in the filming, Kinski, per his wont, began to act up. “His behavior was impossible, and he raved like a lunatic at least once a day,” Herzog later recalled in an interview. “He also wanted to leave the set—he wanted to go home.” Accounts differ as to how Herzog confronted this last issue; the most frequently circulated rumor is that he forced Kinski to act at gunpoint. Herzog denies this, however. He claims, rather, to have simply threatened to kill Kinski, and then himself: “From then on, every- thing went very smoothly.”



As filming progressed, so, too, did Kinski’s antics. At one point, an extra, waiting off-screen in a hut constructed for the filming, spoke while Kinski was filming a scene. Kinski, who carried a functional Winchester rifle with him at all times, “got so worked up that he took his Winchester and shot a hole through the roof.” (Some accounts have Kinski taking off three of the extra’s fingers with his shot.) Herzog—operating on a hunch, a nugget of inspira- tion—encouraged these tantrums; he egged Kinski on, working him into a lather and watching as Kinski’s rage bled into his acting. All of which, it goes without saying, he captured on film. The environ- ment that Herzog fostered was essentially hostile: the actors should feel uncomfortable and Kinski himself should feel transgressed upon, singled out. This displacement—the alienation engendered by being treated cruelly in a foreign land—would ideally result in a purer, distilled form of acting.



Miraculously, the shoot wrapped up, and the film proved a massive success, catapulting Herzog into the spotlight of European art cinema while simultaneously reinvigorating Kinski’s career. Herzog and Kinski, battered by the process though pleased with its results, would go on to collaborate on several more critically acclaimed films, entangling themselves in a relationship that produced marvelous fictions while at the same time being, in a sense, another fiction.



In his 1988 autobiography, Kinski, who had most recently worked with Herzog in 1987’s Cobra Verde, viciously derided his partner, claiming that Herzog was an execrable, self-obsessed filmmaker—a dabbler, a dilettante. Herzog, for his part, later claimed that much of Kinski’s autobiography was pure fiction, crafted retroactively, and that he had even assisted Kinski in penning some of the more acerbic insults on his own person.



It seems fitting that Kinski’s last say on his relationship with Herzog should be undecipherable, an unresolvable entangling of the virile threads of rage and fiction.



III



Aguirre, the Wrath of God plays fast and loose with historical figures. It follows an expedition led by Gonzalo Pizarro in late 1560 and early 1561, despite the fact that the historical Pizarro died in 1548. Herzog places the historical figures on expeditions they never attended, displacing them temporally. They are pawns in an aesthetic game, their very shifts and anachronistic arrangements contributing to the film’s sense of compositeness, of incompleteness.



Early in the film, the official expedition is stalled. A small party, led by Don Pedro Ursua with Don Lope de Aguirre (our hero, so to speak) as second-in-command, is sent down the river on a fleet of rickety skiffs to scout for food or help.



Throughout this developing drama, Kinski, who has donned the armor of his character, a shabby suit of leather with oversized pauldrons, is preoccupied with delivering the most menacing performance he can manage. He fully utilizes his diseased-looking habitus and the thick, Cro-Magnon ossature of his skull; Aguirre struts about vampirically, brooding and scowling and blaring with his wild, sunken eyes. Before long, his treachery is out in the open. Ursua is deposed, and Aguirre establishes the overweight and simpleminded Don Fernando de Guz- man as the expedition’s new leader—while he, of course, retains his position as second-in-command.



From then on, the film charts a general decline in sanity. The doomed party drifts down the river on a large raft that begins to resemble, with its various small additions and substructures, the barest bones of a theatrical stage. No minor significance to this, in fact. In a 1973 interview, Herzog discussed his understanding of the relation between history and theater:



[A]s a theme, this horde of imperialistic ad- venturers performing a great historical failure, this failure of imperialism, of the conquerors, the theme is really quite modern. The meth- od by which history was then made is actually one that can still be found today in many Latin American countries. History there is staged as theater, with theatrical coups.



To echo this sentiment, Aguirre claims in the film’s final moments that he “will stage history, like others stage plays.” And, of course, the platform on which he crafts his fictions is fundamentally destabilized, a portable stage that bucks and trips and in its disturbance agitates its occupants’ minds, their thoughts, and the fictions that trend from those thoughts.



Herzog indeed is interested in the essence of revolt, of rebellion, but he is even more interested in the relationship between revolution and the crafting of fictions. In his early work, he has limned a triumvirate of madness, associating these two propensities with his “out of synch” characters, snipped cleanly from their contexts, historical or other. As John Okello emerged from a dim personal past and found himself suddenly at the head of a revolution, Aguirre was transported into the tropical wilds of South America, torn from his comfortable lands in Spain—and it is no minor joke that Herzog like- wise tore Kinski, a stunningly German actor, out of Germany and thrust him into the unlikely role of a Spanish conquistador. While the other actors display the fine Spanish features so often associated with the conquistadors, Kinski stands out, his lanky blond hair and brutal features purposely inhibiting the authenticity of his role.



For Herzog, the displaced man’s propensity for revolt is irrevocably connected to his greater-than-av- erage ability (or opportunity) to remake himself— that is, his ability to craft fictions. Without a proper social context, the displaced man will expand indefinitely, revolting and creating fictions of grandeur, of power. The revolt begins to feed the fiction, while the fiction in turn feeds the revolt. It this recursive loop that becomes the madness that leads the displaced Herzog protagonist to “rebel against the universe.”



The last 15 minutes of Aguirre, the Wrath of God constitute a subtle phantasmagoria. The crew of the raft, merely a handful of tatterdemalion survivors struck with hunger, thirst, and fever, begin to hallucinate freely. They spot a complete boat—its sails billowing fluidly, dreamily—suspended in the uppermost branches of a tree and declare that it is merely an illusion. The line between fiction and reality, enervated by the crew’s physical weakness, begins to blur. Aguirre, for his part, claims the boat is real; he makes plans to retrieve the boat and use it to reach the Atlantic.



The slave Okello—so named because Herzog owed the revolutionary’s “craze, hysteria, [and] atrocious fantasies quite a bit for [the] film”—lies crumpled on the raft’s floor. With a skyward glance, he whispers, “That is no ship. That is no forest.” In a stunning moment, an arrow sinks quickly and forcefully into his thigh. He reacts calmly, continuing his delirious ruminations: “That is no arrow. We just imagine the arrows, because we fear them.” Meanwhile, Aguirre hurries about the raft as arrows and spears bombard the remnants of his crew; he fires off rifles and makes noise, insisting with supreme confidence that the arrows are real, that the danger exists.



It is then that Flores, Aguirre’s fifteen-year-old daughter, who has been carried preposterously in a sedan-chair through all these rough environs, is killed by an arrow. Aguirre cradles her, staring menacingly off into the jungle whence the missile came. We might expect reality to rush in now like a torrent, to bring Aguirre to his knees and cleanse his mind of any illusions. But, as it happens, Aguirre sets the corpse of his daughter down. He proclaims that he will marry her and in so doing found “the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen.” A procre- ative loop is established; the father will feed off the daughter, just as the fictions will feed off the revolt, the revolt the fictions.



The raft twirls and yaws down the river. It might be going to the sea. 

Consider also desired

things. The currant

in the navel under

my long robe.



A split in the lip

yields its hard red ball

the one in the tip

of a pen and as sore.

Rough and parted.



Coccyx pressing

spine in sidesaddle

I span head to tail

scratching circles

on the scalp to roil.



A small machine

a sphere in the corner

of the room

makes noise’s noise.

Swamps the sticking

swish of release.

Is knowing.





You are here

to carry—pour. 

Cypress scepters in the rocks, paint-green water 



crept like shadows about our feet. Swallows 



ricocheting overhead in aimless cursive like the 



accident of evolution, the calligraphy of the 



wind. An evening is like a postcard so easy to 



cherish. The easy memories. The familiar 



grooves, well-worn, my vision slides into. 



Where are those buried ones, the dusted with 



forgetfulness? There, the untrodden soil 



unstamped by the wheels, still loose about the 



fingers. The time I was nine I told my parents 



every once in a while a moment comes and I 



know I am really alive again, I exist and I know 



it and it is as though I have been unaware all 



this time and there arrives a second so vivid 



suddenly and they said are you okay I get taken 



to the hospital they sticker wires to my head and 



told me sleep why couldn’t that be beautiful. 



Why couldn’t we resist. Wherefore did the 



anxiety arise like dew, indiscriminate. You 



couldn’t forget this now, though the spines 



would crack like whips and the spells would 



pass and the results were inconclusive and we 



all just lived with the symptoms, symptoms of 



nothing like your fabric flowers. The 



arrangement we outlived. The water we could 



not, the fire we could the scissors we could not, 



take me those geraniums break me the cassettes. 



Slurp me like a spool and pin me by my neck. 



The flowerbeds, the furrows were ordained. 

Adrienne Rich was not writing in an age when women could video chat each other while riding their male partners cowgirl-style. But when she wrote about existence as a spectrum of decentralized pleasure—about the hands and the clit and the cunt, about the wrists and the toes rather than the vagina—she might as well have been writing about *Broad City*. 



Season One, Episode One: The opening image of the show. Abbi and Ilana—two young women whose codependent best friendship and stoned New York City adventures star in the Comedy Central series—are video chatting. Ilana bounces to music as the women plan their day. Or we think Ilana is bouncing to music. Suddenly, she adjusts the webcam, and we discover that Ilana is mid-intercourse with a man. 



“Okay,” says an exasperated Abbi. “I don’t want to see you have sex.”



“That was hot. That was cool. That was like a threesome,” Ilana says. 



Abbi and Ilana are partners. They spend each day together. They video chat in the morning and before bed. They are obsessed with each other. They are, for all intents and purposes, in love. But Abbi and Ilana never have genital sex. 



Other characters think that Abbi and Ilana have sex. Ilana wants to have sex. She routinely attempts to glimpse Abbi naked; she suggests they try a sexual position called the “Arc de Triomphe”; her world shatters, momentarily, when she learns that Abbi has made out with another girl. Abbi always turns Ilana down. 



Yet Abbi and Ilana’s relationship is intensely, even grossly, physical. Ilana stores the pair’s weed in her vagina. She manually moves Abbi’s poop when Abbi’s crush is over and the toilet is clogged. Even the more squeamish Abbi likes to call Ilana during hookups: post-sex next to a sleeping man in bed, or from the bathroom mid-sexual encounter to discuss the merits of anal penetration. The women want sex, they have sex, they talk about having sex, and they do all of it together.



The weird physicality of Abbi and Ilana’s relationship—the intensely intimate, yet non genital-sexual physicality—is more than a story of best friendship. It challenges the very dichotomy between genital and non-genital eroticism. In doing so, the show speaks for and to the ambiguous snugglers and the lip balm-sharers, to those of us in wild friendship. *Broad City* opens up new kinds of desire with our friends.



 



 What’s the difference between friends we do and don’t have sex with? 



Despite the moral uproar about millennials being a generation of friends with benefits, our thinking has maintained a fundamental dichotomy: There is friendship, and there is romance, and the two different kinds of relationships are distinguished by whether or not we have genital sex. 



This binary is hierarchical. Yes, we love our friends. Yes, we value them. But what we ultimately want—the climax of every marriage plot; the ordering logic of *Sex and the City*—are “significant others,” as though only our sexual relationships are significant. Or, as though sexlessness leaves us as unfinished Platonic bodies, “other halves.”



But in *Broad City*’s universe, Abbi and Ilana’s obsession with each other is the central story. And it’s pungently physical. Yes, the women have genital-sexual partners. But they are rapt with each other. Abbi watches erotic cupcake-eating videos with Ilana, not with her sex partner. And when Ilana goes into anaphylactic shock from a shellfish allergy, it is Abbi who, in the slow motion of a romantic hero, carries her out.



“We begin to discover the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of the body…as an energy not only diffuse but, as Audre Lorde has described it, omnipresent,” writes Adrienne Rich in her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Rich is one of a coterie of lesbian feminists, including the likes of Audre Lorde and Monique Wittig, who seek to liberate eroticism from the vagina. Though with diverse political and cultural affiliations, these theorists agree on one thing: Decentering the linear and patriarchal logic that privileges genital sex can reorder our relationships with our bodies and each other. This more diffuse eroticism is politically radical. Rich argues that non-linear lesbian pleasure challenges institutional heterosexuality. And in Wittig’s work, eroticism between women can reorder the very logic of the body.



 Abbi and Ilana’s relationship follows this alternate logic. It is not the neutered homosociality of demure lady friends, the female friendship carefully sanitized, the duo in a quest for men. Ilana telling Abbi, as they sip ice coffee on Ilana’s bed, that she’ll watch her give birth even if Abbi poops during the process (“Bitch, duh!”) isn’t exactly *The Lesbian Body*. But it’s close. 



 



In an essay on racialized sexuality published in *The New Inquiry*, Luke Pagarani argues for weird friendship as a political practice. For 2300 words he writes that Grindr culture creates a neoliberal grocery-store model of sexuality. And then he says, screw it.



 



 Forget sex. We live in a time when friendship can be more revolutionary than sex. Society seems to fear the transformative potential of friendship, that amorphous concept of partiality...Perhaps we should take that seriously and see love as that desire to discover new desires with our friends, the base unit of politics.



 



With their pseudo Skype sex and strange codependence, their knowledge of each other’s habits and excrement and hands, Abbi and Ilana challenge the dominance of sexual and narrative linearity. The intense physicality of their desire for each other—the intense physicality of our desire for each other—disrupts the tyranny of the genitals.



*Broad City* tells us that sexless, we are not half-absence, but full to the brim. We are collaborators in pleasure with our friends. 

As a child, I often fantasized about killing Hitler. Many of these fantasies involved gruesomely humiliating him—and this, more than his death, seemed to be their salient aspect. As I remember it, when I felt emotionally paralyzed—beset by an uncomprehending nausea at the magnitude and inventiveness of evil—these fantasies distracted and pacified me. Oddly, in these imaginings I never quite appeared or acted; I pictured the violent scenes in such a way that the perpetrator remained anonymous. This anonymity shielded me from the painful irony that I had unwittingly stumbled upon the same violent fantasies in myself that I detested in others. Perhaps then, the true horror stemmed not from my inability to comprehend the subterranean roots of evil but from sensing these roots in myself and grappling with the possibility that forbidden, half- conscious impulses could be acted on.



Today’s collegiate consciousness suppresses this uncomfortable fact, disavowing perverse fantasies, exiling them to the realm of perverse action. The art of Socratic ignorance and self-questioning is thus abandoned. Certain values and moral judgments are taken for granted, and assumed patterns of thinking and reasoning are confused with thought and reasoning as such. Biased and exclusive modes of consciousness masquerade as objective and inclusive totalities of consciousness. Where we might ask questions, we instead assert unassailable facts of human relations.



Abuse and abuse of power, from police brutality to rape to misuse of privilege, are almost never considered in relation to individual desires and fantasies—in terms of psychological structures present in all our minds. What is thus lost is an awareness of the distinction between natural feeling and aberrant behavior. We (justifiably) vent our frustration and rage, belittle and exclude those with disagreeable viewpoints—and refuse any kind of identification with those guilty of or sympathetic to violent or oppressive acts. Ironically, in doing so, we betray the presence in ourselves of the same impulses that, when outwardly expressed by others, we reflexively disown and condemn.



Would it even make sense, or be conceptually possible, to experience rage and indignation over acts committed by people with feelings and desires utterly foreign to our own? When an animal is killed for killing a human, our empathy tends to attach itself to both the human and the animal, both the victim and the culprit—our psychological distance from the animal allows this. Why, then, when solely humans are concerned, do we recoil from empathizing with the guilty? Perhaps our revulsion obscures the inward injustice we feel upon discovering that, where we tyrannically inhibit ourselves, others indulge.



Our wrath is consistently aimed at institutions and impersonal offenders. We confront the puppet strings of oppression in political, legal, and educational systems—but these puppet strings are anonymous, invisible, difficult to grasp, impossible to control. At Harvard, University policies and Final Clubs are frequently scrutinized for condoning reprehensible behavior—while quietly, imperceptibly, we become unable to stomach the innateness of impulses that deserve censure as actions, not as fantasies. The recent controversial Spee Club invitation sparked a fervent backlash against ‘structures’ and ‘cultures’ that reflect power imbalances and promote the degradation of women. Students are eager to discuss and reform these structures and cultures, but how can such an endeavor possibly succeed if we do not first explore the individual feelings and motives such incidents betray. If the loathsome desires at stake were not shared by perpetrators and condemners alike, I cannot see how Final Clubs would be a problem—no one would attend their parties.



It is likely that an uncanny half-awareness of the omnipresence in imagination of that which we detest in reality defensively directs our scrutiny toward policies and practices and away from individuals—toward an institutional unconscious and away from our own unconsciouses. However, if we cannot acknowledge the existence of aggressive and base desires in ourselves—if we do not dare investigate the repulsive majority that underlies the rational minority of the mind—how can we hope to do more than retroactively address instances where the mind ceases to function democratically and its hostile and unprincipled majority forsakes the lofty demands of socialization? How can we strive not merely to punish and protest but to anticipate?



The rise of political correctness expresses precisely the opposite of that which it purports to represent. Targeting fantasies and impulses that have leaked into gesture and speech but not action, PC dogma also gratifies tamer versions of them. The desire to censor, to include all by excluding some, undoubtedly stems from aggressive feelings. Moreover, unreflective political correctness suppresses a crucial dimension of self- awareness, conflating the natural scope of feeling and desire with reprehensible behavior. Such a paradoxical collective attitude is bound to depress and provoke, alienating us from both our communities and ourselves and exacerbating the same problems it addresses. Where feeling and speech become shameful and forbidden, acting out becomes more likely. Of course, PC dogma is itself a form of acting out, at once prohibiting aggression and indulging in milder forms (i.e. aggressing against the aggressors)—and it thus projects the imperative to resolve this conflict of feelings onto the external world. It requires offenders as fervently as it denounces them.



As Nietzsche observed more than a century ago, when such a vast portion of our inner lives becomes unacceptable and inaccessible to us, we become lost, aimless intruders in our own lives. We desperately need reasons to live, motivation to act, senses of purpose, and causes by which to stand. “When I think of the craving to do something, which continually tickles and spurs those millions of young people who cannot endure their boredom and themselves, then I realize that they must have a craving to suffer and to find in their suffering a probable reason for action, for deeds...These young people demand that—not happiness but unhappiness should approach from the outside and become visible; and their imagination is busy in advance to turn it into a monster so that afterward they can fight a monster.”

Last semester, black student leaders organized a confrontational protest at the start of Primal Scream, an annual Harvard undergraduate streaking tradition. *The Crimson*’s editorial board decided to opine. Typically, the board invites all interested staff members to convene, deliberate, and then vote on a consensus opinion. But when they scheduled this meeting during the March on Harvard—a campus-wide #blacklivesmatter solidarity protest with almost 1,000 participants—they left certain voices outside of the conference room “consensus” and came down against the Primal Scream protesters.



The choice was either ignorant or slyly malicious. The board may have not known about the protest or it may have known about the time conflict and intentionally left participants out of the decision. In either case, the size of the protest, combined with the overwhelming turnout of Harvard’s black community, meant that one side of a divisive issue was unable or unlikely to attend the meeting.*





It’s worth taking a closer look at this decision, which fits into a pattern of journalistic exclusion that often leaves people of color, queer people, and others outside of conversations that directly affect them. At the heart of this pattern is the issue of bias. 



*The Harvard Crimson* strives to avoid bias. When the involvement or opinion of the journalist enters into a purportedly unslanted piece, this bias is known as a conflict of interest. *The Crimson*, like most papers, has a defined conflict of interest policy to help staff handle biases. The paper aims to “recognize that the appearance of a conflict of interest is the same as an actual one,” and, like all such policies, this one’s lines are left blurry, open to interpretation.



Over the past few months, however, *The Crimson*’s management has made decisions about the blurred lines of those policies that consistently leave out those traditionally on the wrong side of Harvard’s ivy-covered walls. They cling to an outdated gold standard of journalism, in which “objectivity” lines up with the perspectives of straight white men. 



 



Walter Lippman, often considered the father of modern American journalism, sought to eliminate the presence of bias by creating a standard of scientific control. His theories can be seen as a possible origin for *The Crimson*’s conflict of interest policies. An excellent piece of journalism, for him, achieves “the unity of the disciplined experiment.” The journalist distills the world through interviews and observations and swirls it around in his test tube, holding it up at arms length to the light streaming through his lab window.



Lippman’s model of scientific uber-detachment is now considered outdated. A recent Poynter Institute publication declares, “Where we once argued for independence, we now advocate transparency.” Concerns about bias can no longer revolve around involvement, for involvement seems inevitable in a connected world. Are you involved if you like an article on Facebook? Tweet at a political or activist figure? The new model sees bias only if these perceived or actual entanglements hurt the experiment. 



On a college campus, complete detachment is particularly difficult, unless the journalist is a monk. Students sleep with one another, they work with one another, they see each other hungover in class. The best we can do, it seems, is to follow Poynter’s new recommendation and be straightforward about those connections. 



*The Crimson* hasn’t caught up to these changing standards. Their current ones are a holdover from a significantly less-equitable past, and over the past few months, it has become increasingly clear that* The Crimson*’s ethical transparency isn’t transparent or ethical at all. 



This February, I had been writing a 5,000-word article for *The Crimson* on black student activism. I wanted to paint a detailed portrait of a new generation of activists that had risen up over the past few years. It was the exact sort of narrative that *The Crimson* and American journalism at large often miss out on, unless protesters are blocking highways and throwing water bottles at riot police. 



I had also attended the March on Harvard, the same massive march mentioned earlier, a few months before. Two nights before the piece was supposed to run, the managing editor and president told me that this violated *The Crimson*’s conflict of interest policy. The piece could not be printed even if it included a note about my attendance, or a brief explanation. All my involvement in the article—hours on hours of interviews and research, countless conversations, trust built—all had to be scrapped.



For many people of color, the decision was none too surprising. Many of my interviewees for the article brought up incident after incident in which they felt *The Crimson* had published material that excluded or hurt their communities. For many activists, a catalyzing moment was a 2012 op-ed claiming that affirmative action “makes as much sense as helping the visually impaired become pilots.”



Many agreed to be interviewed only after I explained that I was trying to include unheard stories and voices in *The Crimson*. They worried that the story would cherry-pick quotes to falsely suggest either unanimity or chaos in communities of color. They worried that I would have no sense of the organizational or social landscape and that I would continue to alienate the persistently disrespected through omission of important details, background information, and context. 



The paper at times has failed to cover even major events that may not be on the radar of white people at Harvard. *The Crimson* never covered the Blacktivism conference, a meeting of hundreds of student-organizers from around the country and world and a continuation of the nationally known “I, Too, Am Harvard” movement. Their newsletter on the first day of the conference featured coverage of The Bach Society’s latest concert and a piece on the Cronut, a New York City pastry fad.



Every person of color I know was at the March on Harvard. If mere attendance at a protest constitutes a conflict, then very few people of color can cover any facet of black activism for *The Crimson*. This forces journalists of color to make a choice: stay on the sidelines, mute, or engage in the most important issues of our time and sacrifice their journalistic voices. 



Uninvolved reporters interested in covering these issues must become explorers, on the hunt for sources and stories in a terrain in which they’re unfamiliar. This comes in the form of longform, purportedly definitive articles on “the Asian American experience,” the life of the “gay and female,” and an article on interracial dating. The last piece used only three couples as sources; the author explains that “other couples that represent many other ethnicities” declined to be interviewed. 



Those trends cannot be chalked up to Harvard alone as an institution that for too long was a cozy staging ground for a narrowly sourced elite. The admitted class of 2018 was made up of almost half visible minority students. Over 65 percent of students here are on financial aid. We clearly have the tools, or at least the stats and bodies, to actively remove barriers to understanding and fair representation. 



It’s up to publications to start using those tools and removing those barriers. Institutions like *The Crimson* must not only adopt policies reflecting the changing journalistic standards, but also ensure those policies do not exclude the narratives and voices they currently do. Undergraduate organizations should be leading the nation-wide movement on this account, not lagging behind it. The March on Harvard should pose neither a conflict of interest nor a time conflict to responsible and well-rounded coverage; readers and writers, publishers and the public alike would all stand to benefit.



 



 



*An Addendum: 



 There was, in fact, a second editorial board meeting a few days after the March on Harvard to allow those who attended the protest to contribute to the editorial. The meeting was a majority-rules, yes-no, vote on the pitch and editorial drafted following the December 12 meeting. Ethnic minorities are just that—less than the 50% majority required to win a majority-rules vote. Unsurprisingly, the majority elected to run the editorial drafted during the original meeting. *This note has been added for accuracy and clarification. *



 

In November of 2014, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art hosted the work of acclaimed Brazilian painter Adriana Varejão, marking the artist’s first major consideration in the United States. Upon entering the exhibit, the viewer immediately encounters the life-sized figure of a nude woman painted in deep steel-blue against an off-white canvas. Right arm wrapped around an oversized war-axe, and left arm outstretched sweepingly, she appears at first to welcome the viewer into the space. But there is a guilefulness in her smile. Her hand, inscribed with the same floral tattoos that traverse her entire form, gestures beyond the columns behind her, not in the direction of the other paintings on display. Between those columns unfolds what can only be described as cannibalistic bacchanalia. Smaller, nude figures dance and cavort around large fire pits over which legs, ribcages, and various other dismembered human bits roast grotesquely. A few of the anthropophagi participants stand apart from the others. Partially obscured by the gesturing woman in the foreground, they plunge their teeth into human meat, backs bent into the action, heads severely ripping flesh from bone.



Scenes like these are common in the homes and meeting places of 18th century Portuguese aristocrats. Like Varejão’s image 300 years later, they are called “entrance figures” and are typically found on walls adjacent to the entrances of buildings. One such figure painted in the Church of Santo Antão do Tojal in Loures, Portugal bears striking resemblance to the nude warrior woman: though he is clothed and male, his right hand clutches the same weapon as hers, and his left extends the same welcoming motion. However, the viewer will find no cannibalistic orgy taking place behind him or any of the other baroque figures commissioned by wealthy Portuguese nobility. For that, the works of the 16th century Flemish printmaker Theodorus de Bry must be consulted. Drawing on narratives of cannibalistic indigenous people such as the Tupí, who ceremonially consumed the bodies of defeated warriors, de Bry fashioned dramatically affecting prints that depict naked men, women, and children gathering hungrily around roasting human limbs. Both of these motifs—the aesthetic tastes of Portuguese colonizers and the accounts of savagery that formed the moral basis for their subjugation of native people in the first place—are profoundly important to understanding modern Brazilian culture. In “Entrance Figure I,” Varejão consumes, digests, synthesizes and reorganizes them. In short, she cannibalizes them.



The importance of this “cultural cannibalism” to Brazilian culture cannot be overstated. First espoused by Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade in his 1928 “Manifesto antropófago,” (or “Cannibal Manifesto”) it arose as a means to construct a coherent national identity. The Brazil of the early 20th century was a land of confused multiplicity. The progeny of Portuguese colonizers lived among (or rather, better than) the offspring of the same groups against which the colonial state had historically perpetrated violence: various indigenous peoples, the five million black slaves brought over in the Middle Passage. Portuguese influences abounded, yet the remnants of colonial-era tropes like the cannibalistic Tupí filtered through the lens of European supremacy and worked to station the modernizing country between worlds: the savage old and the civilized new.



Drawing from the cannibalisms of both de Andrade and the Tupí, Varejão’s work deals with the devouring of influences and cultural barriers as well as the devouring of human life. She accomplishes both by bridging the gap between the literal and metaphorical conceptions of the “body.”  In her 1992, “Map of Lopo Homem II,” Varejão reconstructs a 1519 world map created by Portuguese cartographer Lopo Homem. The oceans are non-continuous, Antarctica wraps dramatically around the basin of the globe like a well-nourished serpent, and Europe is either bloated or Africa deflated, as they both appear to be roughly the same size. Down the center of the atlas, perhaps where the Prime Meridian would sit, runs a long, puckering gash wound. This jarring evocation of human trauma set against the ostensibly inert illuminates how our conceptions of history and civilization—our beloved bodies of knowledge—are just as susceptible to coercion and violent manipulation as we are. Similarly unexpected juxtapositions appear in “Carpet-Style Tilework in Live Flesh.” Using masterful trompe l’oeil, Varejão presents what appears to be a wall covered in Portuguese “azulejaria” tiling (made ubiquitous in Brazil by colonial tastes) bursting with innards and guts. The piece has a decided dynamism. The intended illusion is that the rupture is new and ongoing, that just before the viewer approached, the wall was intact, its bloody secrets held at bay.



Like the cannibals of lore, Varejão recognizes the power gained in the consumption of human life. In doing such, she acknowledges that sources of authority in our lives—narratives, countries, societal structures—all bear the blood and viscera of the bodies broken for their construction. She also recognizes that in post-colonial, post-slavery societies like Brazil and America, a disproportionate number of those broken bodies have been and continue to be dark-skinned. In a series of three self-portraits entitled “Eye Witnesses X, Y, and Z,” she depicts herself in the skin-tones and garb of three racial minorities that have been marginalized throughout Brazilian history. Each of the Varejãos—Chinese, indigenous, and Arabic—is missing an eye. The bloody sockets painted in their lieu suggest a painful extraction process—perhaps surgery, but more likely, brute force.



“Eye Witnesses X, Y, and Z” is the first of an ongoing series of self-portraits wherein Varejão portrays herself, a light-skinned Brazilian woman, as different races. If authored by a contemporary American artist, such works would undoubtedly be accused of minstrelsy and insensitivity, and not wrongly so. However, Varejão’s work betrays an approach to collective history and racial identity that is distinctly anthropophagic and distinctly Brazilian. Whereas much of the current dialogue on cultural difference in America centers on a general desire to preserve it, Brazilian racial self-conception is much more fluid but also much more concerned with the identity of Brazil as a whole. Americans will readily trace their ancestry back generations, but cultural cannibalism and miscegenation has left Brazil with no desire (or ability) to do so. It’s an interesting approach to the type of diversity that the two countries share, one that lies curiously in the space between assimilation and multiculturalism. To be sure, Brazil is not the “racial democracy” that it often claims to be—a quick glance at the demographics of an inner-city slum versus those of a top-tier four-year university will reveal as much. Still, as a culture that insists on marketing itself as a melting pot, The United States can undoubtedly learn from a society that has made cannibalizing difference into a single, syncretistic identity a source of national pride.

April, at 21 South Street, is far from the cruelest month. But melting snow reveals spring breeding: birthing dormant lilacs from our archives, mixing institutional memory with a new, stirring rain. 



Our spring issue resurrects an *Advocate* tradition of engaging with contemporary issues in a new section called Columns, in which members respond to an aesthetic, cultural, or political phenomenon of the moment. The inaugural edition offers a feminist reading of *Broad City*, a psychoanalytic critique of liberal ideology, a review of Adriana Varejão’s art and cultural cannibalism, and a cautionary appraisal of outdated journalistic policies that exclude essential voices under the auspices of “objectivity.”



By contrast, the long-form features address questions of fiction: Their writers wind through rivers and inhabit smoke clouds—always with a small, pea-sized urge to urinate tucked away in their pelvic zone. Everything, they claim, happened this way because they said it did. They revel in the question of whether their lives, and the lives of others, are stranger than fiction.



The Fiction Board, meanwhile, has selected three pieces to be considered under the (unfolding) umbrella of the bildungsroman. “Watch Me” juxtaposes the coming of age of one half of the population with a personal narrative, “The Smut Spectrum,” takes the loss of innocence to new and profane heights, and “At the Edges” depicts a protagonist compelled to grow up fast by circumstances outside her control. The board has decided to ignore the semantic issue that “roman” means novel.



The Poetry Board finds itself in a more fatalistic mood. ‘Cypress scepters in the rocks, paint-green water...’ may seem low on hope, but its Rorschach test of a childhood trauma and agile tonal shifts merit close scrutiny. “Aquamanile in the Form of Phyllis and Aristotle” is an ekphrasis like a slow wink, spoken by a voice both alien and domestic. Read it aloud, slowly. Then look up the original—and the legend the artifact depicts.



The Art Board brings us six pieces by three artists, all of which reimagine and reorient us to process, from evolutionary point mutations to aerial military operations. In *Sap II* and *Volatile*, organic patterns emerge unplanned and unexpected, as vestigial features reappear further up the evolutionary line. Pools of ink present an unsettling illusion of life: slowly shifting, breathing. Out of the grid’s sterility in* Operation I* and *Territory V* erupts a playfully sinister motif of wallpaper polka-dots, while the flesh-colored dreamscape in Untitled distorts otherwise recognizable forms.



In this issue, the Design Board seeks to maintain the Advocate’s traditional aesthetic while simultaneously grounding the magazine in a contemporary context. The cover, illustrations, and designs in this issue are largely process driven, drawing on 3D modeling and simulation techniques to produce a clean, yet relevant design.



Twelve years after the original and for the first time since 2010, the Technology Board has redesigned and relaunched our website: [theharvardadvocate.com](http://www.theharvardadvocate.com). In addition to a cleaner aesthetic, the site includes refurbished donate, subscribe, and shop pages and proves to us literary luddites that the simulacrum of a screen need not pervert the intentionality of the printed page. 



2016 marks our 150th anniversary, for which we have already begun work on a commemorative anthology and launched a Capital Campaign with the goals of: digitizing our archives, inaugurating a financial aid initiative, boosting our endowment, and updating our beloved home at 21 South Street, protecting blooms of generations past and fertilizing the roots of many more springs to come. We hope you enjoy the unfurling of this Editorial Board’s first such bouquet.

Aiden's porn addiction began, unsurprisingly, with porn. For the first fifteen years of his life—or really just the past three, in this context—he'd had to make do with his imagination, a few war-torn issues of *Penthouse *inherited from Uncle Rico, and a copy of Anaïs Nin's *Delta of Venus *that his parents had overlooked in their curation of the family shelves.

In the end, we settled on gingerbread and baked brown rice for Karen’s birthday party. Gingerbread because we had woken to a world alive with snow, the windows flailed by frost and moaning with wind, outside the street and sky identical white. The radiators hissed. We hoarded the heat. We looked outside and watched the street, which could have been from any age. We flicked on all the lamps, not to fight the shadows but to deny the glow of the storm. We gravitated to the halos of lamplight. My parents settled on opposite ends of the couch, balancing their laptops, whose screens gave off the same light as the snow. I found myself under the kitchen’s battered steel hanging lamp, a relic from our apartment’s past life as a factory. I wanted to crank the oven to high and eat all the forbidden things. I said I would do the baking myself, and as I beat the butter I imagined kissing Jakey.