Summer 2020 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

after Mickalene Thomas

When I look back over my life
on how everything played out
it was I who licked the salt from your pillar
neck. Some days I chose to self-sabotage,
some hours I resembled Orpheus, afraid
we would never walk right up to the sun,
hand-in-hand, my fingers stuck beneath your skirt.
I looked to the hills from whence cometh my help.
I lived in the history of the future where
some of us would not die. When asked to keep on
the straight and narrow, when presented
with the lineup of Tom, Dick, and Harry,
I ducked to enter a pink hole.
When I forgot to mind my head,
God looked over his shoulder.

God gave me a man
Who I, in turn, bodied.
Had he lived, I would
Take myself more seriously.
Come what may I will
Get myself together,
I will whip myself into
The shape of a man
Who has put away
Childish things. I will
Take a woman as my toy
And pretend, in doing so,
I’m highly favored.

We fill duffle bags with ripe fruit,

tearing off leaves that feel like human ears.

We put flowers in our mouths,

the two of us whose bodies have no thickness.

We undress in the pink room,

where the blinds are still closed.

Summer is disintegrating, the heat unravels

in the wind. I feel the skeleton inside my chest.

Outside, emaciated dogs bark in German.

The flowers fade like paintings.

Parasites chew the still water

we held our breath under.

Breeze tears through the fibers

of our bathing suits drying on the back of a chair.

Little sister listens,
solemn, to my tap
of egg on silver-lipped bowl.
It cracks the way ice does,
lined as the palm of my hand.
Just beneath the shards of white:
filmy membrane, milk-colored.
Stretches and tears
like a mother
to release the golden yolk.
Never knew it was there,
slick as frogskin.
Never knew how easy
it is to cut into something:
in the grade school science lab,
scalpel and blue
rubber gloves.
Organs like glass beads
glowing in a veil of formaldehyde.
I’m baking lemon cake for my mother.
She loves the tingle
on her tongue, sharp smell
of furniture polish.
Glassy wood of her first bedroom set,
and I, nestled haploid within
like so many white orbs
in pink styrofoam.
The whites drip over my fingers
like spit or tears or breaking water.
I can feel their aching,
as I ached each month
at thirteen, my body so empty
it poured itself out.
My sister holds the bowl
in her bugbitten arms
as I scrape batter into the pan
with its grease-glow.
She, yolk-gold, sun-gold,
our small bright thing. Strawberry
freckle on her nose.
The year my mother birthed her
was the year I learned
of the eggs inside me.
Little halves of would-be daughters,
girls before they’re touched.
Mama taught me their genesis,
growing like grapes within me
while I was within her.
How baby sister,
small enough to shatter,
carries them, too,
already,
in her soft pink abdomen:
womb within womb, echo of blood.

for Allison

All lovers feel like they’re inventing
something. How else would we work
out the kinks? I am in awe of your
pussy. You said it appears like I am
doing an inspection. True. True.
I lift the hood. I study your anatomy
of flowers and fruit. Mixing food with
sex disgusts you. You hate cantaloupe
and the texture of cherries. Once, you
had a nightmare about being force-fed
grapes. Your eyes change colors when
you laugh. There goes the secret life of
green, witch hazel spells of black magic.
You encourage me to keep climbing as I,
a heathen hymn, teach you the taxonomy
of touch. You, a table of plenty, show me
how to paint by numbers. One is never
enough. Two: my lips at your neck. Another
two: the sound of my name—twin flame
of your own. Four: your hands around my
ankles. I present you with pansies and lilac.
This poem is a form of praise and worship.
In years lived, you’re on page twenty-eight,
and I on page thirty-two. I hope that you
survive me, I do not ever want to go without.

We are contemporaries, born in
the worst plague year for our kind.
It is May, locust shells in the screen doors.
The surf is thick with ash. An unnamed man
roams the beach, looking for a place
deep inside himself, like a room lined in silk.
You are a piece of shit, like me.
Between us, three ceramic teeth
glued to our jaws. I leave my hair curly
for seven months. I love you because you can’t be destroyed by love;
we are immune
to one another: my perfect Tennyson, your fingers
tearing the metal strings of a guitar. We stop
wearing underwear, spring lays its dust over everything,
flies climb our naked shoulders.

My grandfather burned fires when we were kids

down by the lake in a structure he made

from stacked stones, the ash

so soft and powdery, almost white.

There were burnt shards of birch

cracked and black as pieces

of a sarcophagus. You can’t witness your own death,

I remember someone saying in a seminar

while we were discussing a Celan poem

in which the speaker is digging

through the ash. It was a Thursday,

I drank a bottle of mineral water with Ronald,

sun on Holbeinstraße, sun on Morgensternstraße.

It’s a Friday in New York
and fifty years from ’69.
Though since we’ve yet to meet
or have, and are still looking,
what we’ve said to each other
in photos and films, bars
and basements, returns
with enough echo
to remind us of ourselves.
Those of us who resisted heroes
and sentiment. Those of us
who waited and found neither—
not the promised liberation
in marriage, or the salvation
of laws. How some asked
to carry America’s guns
and did. How others knew
equality was a rumor,
elusive as freedom or sex.
Do you think about dying
every time you have sex?
I still think about dying.
I do think about death.
Or a day in childhood when I saw
the only place I could live
was here. Inside.
So whoever wanted me
had to come through the body.
Which has rarely been beautiful
to me. Too soft and unconvincing.
Too small. I hope the future
is free of god and memory.
I hope the future is
all body, all blood.
And since to be queer
is a way to forgive life,
I’ll take as long as I want
finishing my cigarette on Seventh,
walking up Christopher
and thinking of everyone
who’s yet to get here—
somewhere in a bedroom maybe,
young and bored across
the country, not impressed
by our parades or idols,
all the sponsorship we bought.
I’m late for a drink but wander,
handsome and aimless,
looking for a sign
before nodding to the dead
who always need a light.

In the fall of last year, I spent a night eating dates, clicking through Google Image results for *baker island maine*. Shot southward off the shoreline, the island is uninhabited year-round. Barely anything but blue opens off its edges. Seeing it for the first time, you'd be forgiven for thinking the world might end here.



At some point in the evening, as a coast of date pits piled around me, I clicked on a photo that made me pause. In it, there are two women — in wide-brimmed hats and pleated skirts, like unbent muffin wrappers. It's 1910. We're on a slab of rock, the ocean ahead of us. Locals, from the mainland, call this spot the Dance Floor. By all available evidence, the two women are dancing. In movement, their arms tuck in the same position: against their hips, chicken-like. For a moment, it seems a mirror has dropped from the sky and made one out of the other.



I can't say much more about the photo and the women in it. I can't say anything about what was making them dance. The photo, as you can guess, is soundless. That's what makes it — and most images of dance — so strange. We want to explain the cause of movement with some sort of music. Lacking this, we start to fill in.



I was skimming through photos of Baker Island because of the experimental musician Arthur Russell. The final outing Russell made with his family was to Baker Island. It was a special place for him. It's not hard to guess why. Arthur was a musician, but he loved the water. Across the top of one of his composition books, he scrawled out, as a potential life goal, "a job where you drive a boat."



Shortly before taking the trip to Baker Island, Russell was diagnosed with AIDS. It was the early 1990s. There was an end in Arthur's world. He sat facing water and, taking the recorder he carried with him often, clicked it on, setting down the waves on shore.



I couldn't find any photos of the island from the 90s, when Arthur would have been there. But, looking at this photo of the two women, barefoot and blurred against the sky, it strikes me at least one thing must have been the same. I can almost hear it: the horizon behind them, each wave breaking. A record-needle set down, striking into its groove.



---



If you google "arthur russell,"  the first song that comes up, via a YouTube link, is "That's Us / Wild Combination." Listen. Listen, mostly, to his voice. The song is all about it — starting in echo, looping around itself. *I just wanna be*, he confesses, *wherever you are*.



The video has 136,462 views — give or take a few, by the time you've heard it. It's not a bad count. Maybe even a good one, considering the relative obscurity in which Russell died in 1993, a few months after sitting on that rock on Baker Island. At the time of his death, he was working on an album for Rough Trade Records, under the working title *1-800-Dinosaur*. His songs enjoyed moderate playtime at New York underground parties — the ones in high and cramped lofts, where the sound of bodies pulled by disco echoed out into the night.



Russell's name wasn't — isn't — a household one. He doesn't have a hit song you might have heard. But, his music turns up in unexpected places. You can find quotes where Allen Ginsberg — poet, infatuated with Russell — compares Russell's lyrics to William Carlos Williams. In 2016, his music was sampled by Kanye West on "Answers Me," a song I often hear bypassing car windows, or leaking out of headphones at coffee shops. In this way, Russell has always been stepping around the edges of fame, peering out behind its contours.



Since passing, he's been caught in its light more and more. The cultural currency Russell enjoys today is far wider than any he enjoyed during his life. Largely, this change can be explained by YouTube, and other kinds of digital platforms, resurrecting his work into a posthumous, qualified fame. It's a fame that is small in its scale, though deep in its intensity. It's an intensity that seems reserved for artists we discover after their death, who we stumble across out of some strange fortune. The kind of intensity you can get a sense of, scrolling through the comment sections of that same video. Listen.



ok i have just divided my life into before I ever heard of Arthur Russell and AFTER i heard Arthur Russell... / first song to make me feel anything in years /  omg i want to live in this song  /  i love him  /  this sounds like the inside of a person's head / he'd been sailing so long, I hope he found the shore / this song found me this morning, Thank you Universe I needed this / if you like this please spread arthur russell's name 



---



Charles Arthur Russell was born Charles Arthur Russell in Oskaloosa, Iowa, in 1951. His father, the mayor of the town, was also Charles Arthur Russell (Sr.) and so our Charles, in a bid for independence, insisted on becoming Arthur.



We know a scattering of things about Russell's childhood. He was a bookish child, with bad acne that scarred his face for life, who had a penchant for putting on magic shows in his spare time. He was a midwestern boy through and through, even after he moved out west to San Francisco, and then to New York, and people would still say there was something about him that made it seem like he just stepped off a tractor. (And it's true: on the cover for his album *Love is Overtaking Me*, he's pitched up in a cornfield, wearing a cowboy hat, eyes drifting past us).



It's easy to marvel at the oddness of his biography, to stumble when squaring how a quiet boy from Iowa could become, as he did, a fixture within the bounded limits of the New York underground music scene. Try to hold all the facts of his life and they seem to push off against one another — mayor's son; radically-experimental cellist; disco-lover; devotee of ABBA; Buddhist; music director of performance space The Kitchen, where Brian Eno, David Byrne, Steve Reich passed by.



Sorting through these bits of Russell's life and work, the biggest question that emerges is one of time: his lack of acclaim then, his sudden appraisal now. Read any of the write-ups devoted to Russell in recent years, and some form of this ask will appear. English music critic David Toop claims Russell was simply "too remarkable and too individual for his time." Others say he is just another example of someone who "never found an audience during life." "There is no market for the music of the future," sums up Olivia Laing, writing about Russell this year in the *Paris Review*. Arthur, it seems, was just ahead of its time.



In a sense, this is literally true. Most of the music we listen to by Russell was never released during his life. Russell was a notorious perfectionist — known to spend hours reworking demos, never feeling they were quite ready to release. He only ever shared one pop album under his own name: 1986's *World of Echo*.



The rest of Russell's material has been exhumed through a meticulous drive through his archive, facilitated by Tom Lee, Russell's boyfriend at the time of his death. It was Lee who took responsibility for the materials Arthur left behind — over a thousand tapes and recordings, scattered around his sixth-floor walk-up in New York City. Since 2004, Lee has collaborated with independent label Audika Records to produce compilations of Russell's music — most recently, 2019's *Iowa Dream*.



These albums join the ranks of a genre that has been given rich life in recent years: the posthumous album. Made by collaging material from an artist's cutting room floor, posthumous albums are usually facilitated, as in the case of Russell, by some overseer of estate and legacy. Thanks to this genre, three years after his death, there could be a new Prince album. Leonard Cohen's *Thanks for the Dance* could be released last year, absent the singer himself. Through these albums, we hear voices — ones gone, but speaking still.



To hear music in this way is perhaps unremarkable. Yet the ability for songs to find posthumous audiences is relatively new. While music today is largely consumed in recorded form, the detaching of songs from a present, performing body only really took off towards the middle of the twentieth century. Before then, live music didn't need an adjective to emphasize its liveness — it was the only kind of music there was. With the advent of high-quality sound recording in the 50s though, live music became, in music historian Leon Botstein's words, "an antique of sorts, an imperfect and outmoded experience."



In the place of live performance, recorded music became standard. Modern sound reproduction provided a pure, objective representation of a musical work, allowing for a piece to be repeated, identically, forever. Because of this technology, music now had evidence of its afterlife. When the body of a musician passed away, their sounds could float into our lives, fumbling towards us across the delay of time.



With Russell's music, this arrival is particularly striking. This isn't a case — as it is with Prince or Cohen — of us hearing a voice that is gone, but that many knew while it was still living. Most of Russell's fans today weren't aware of his work during his life. For them, these songs have only ever been elegy, and Arthur has only ever been absent.



---



When I came across Arthur, I felt like his music had been made for me — me, specifically — to figure out. I can't remember the first time I heard him. I don't think this to be strange. There are friends who are like this: not there, until they are. You can't believe their life once was outside the boundary of your own. You also know this fact to be true. 



The furthest I can go back with him is a January of several years ago. I know it was January, because I can remember the cold. It was a party. The music was loud and hot around us. I met a boy, we spent the night clinging and, later, slouched towards a late-night diner. It's here that I remember the cold. It's here that I remember him. 



He was coming through the speakers of the diner, as I was sprawled out in the booth, scattering a paper sleeve of pepper into my hand. Singing. I heard him then the way I would hear him later, even in the best of recordings: barely. 



It was the first piece of Arthur — a gasp of a song called "A Little Lost" — that I remember falling in love with. I found it later by googling its lyrics, which I fumblingly wrote out onto my lower arm, borrowing the pen used to sign the check. Waking the next morning, the blurred ink on my arm — on my sheets, now, too — was enough to find it. Enough, also, to realize how much I'd gotten wrong.



Not,



*Now I'm &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp not &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp / &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Me, my big, old ways.*



Rather,



*Now it's harder, I'm not on my turf / Just me and those big, old waves / Rolling in.*



I was surprised I hadn't been able to fill in the gaps, but was glad to have found the song, to see that there were more songs to find. I began working through every piece of Russell I could. Mostly, I heard him through a pair of blasted-out headphones, on long runs circling down into the ravines that are etched into the city where I live. 



Before long, Russell's voice was everywhere — plastered up and along my mind. His words became a kind of audiotape, looping endlessly underneath my consciousness. When things didn't work out with the boy from the diner, it was Russell's words from "Our Last Night Together" I heard: *This job is just a one-way street / It's taken you away from me*. After my friends surprised me in the park for my birthday, I unconsciously clicked over to "Habit of You:" *When I opened the door and saw / My orange birthday cake / I felt like crying*!



None of these lyrics described exactly the thing I was feeling — not quite. There was no last night together, no door to open, no orange birthday cake. But,like gas filling its container, Russell's words always adjusted themselves, growing enormous or modest as needed, fitting neatly inside the volume of my emotions. 



It happens a lot — this devouring Arthur into one's consciousness. In a New Yorker profile on Russell, one of the main things contemporary fans talk about is how, when listening to Russell, it feels as though he is "in their skulls." My friend Mathilde tells me when she was driving to Montréal along the Trans-Canada-Highway, and "That's Us / Wild Combination" was playing, it was like the song was saying everything she was feeling. It wasn't Russell she was registering, she says, so much as a perfect mirror, right there on the dashboard, singing out the form of her thoughts.



To a degree, this happens with all the music we listen to. But it strikes me that, in Russell's case, it's particularly easy to claim his music as our own, to view ourselves more than we view him. In part, this is because of the way his work sounds. Even in the best of recordings, you can barely hear him — his voice water-logged and blurry against the melody. His music seems to have been created in fragment. Like breath against you, it's there in the realest sense, but also in the faintest.



In an evaluation by Warner Bros. Music about a demo performance by Russell, an executive at the company, in disparaging terms, points to the weirdness of Russell's music, and the response it asks of us. Scrawled across the sheet:



WB MUSIC 



Artist: *Arthur Russell*



Instrumental Performance: *Uneventful  .*



Vocal Performance: *This guy's in trouble .*



Material: *Who knows what this guy is up to —— you figure it out ——*



So, you do: figuring it out, filling it in, making your own sense of it. When we hear Russell today, the gaps in his work are all the more vast now that he,too, is absent and we are on our own. There's loads of music theory that says it's only through listening to a piece of music that it gains "completion." Taking this idea at its word, Russell's work — every unheard tape crowding around his apartment — was unfinished until its release. Listening to him now, then, means our finishing things without him, giving him an end in our time.  



When I first started listening to Russell, it unsettled me to hear his words coming from nowhere — unpinned from anyone I knew living, unearthed for the first time. *Where did these sounds come from, and when?* I wanted to know. Piecing together the fragments of mirrored sound left behind, I listened for an answer. Once the mirror was whole, its image seemed to belong to me — to now. Before long, I no longer registered Russell's words as his. I would speak his lyrics out suddenly in conversation, as if they had just come to me, as if they were mine.



---



It's hard to know what Russell would think of all of this. He left no directions as to how — let alone if — his music should be shared after his passing. Many say he wouldn't have wanted his stuff out there. (Steve Knutson from Audika Records, who works with Lee to put together the compilations, admits "Arthur probably wouldn't want any music to be released"). 



Others say he would have invited it openly. It's all conjecture.



But certain things are clear about Russell, his relationship to his music. One of these things: he cared massively about the particular moment of each song,the time and conditions when a track was recorded. He had this one idea that, if you laid a tape transfer at the moment of a full moon, the oxide molecules would align, the sound would be different. In other words: you could hear the moon in the song. To produce *World of Echo*, Russell recorded for three years on nights when there was a full moon, believing the evening would be there, just above the melody.



The more I listen to Russell, the more I find this kind of time — *his* time — appearing everywhere. Focus your ear and, often, you can hear the background of his day blurring into the music: the whir of a blender, the drawl of a fish-tank. So many of Russell's songs are suffused with this sense of time, capturing the world as it was — then, for him.



It seems false, then, to claim Arthur's songs were "ahead of their time," that they were sent as recordings from the future, as constant elegies. Truer to say: these sounds were made by someone years ago, on a night with a full moon. They were complete in their time, long before they came to me in the diner. There is a world staring at us through this music. It is not ours.



With the increasing popularity of posthumous albums, there's been much hand-wringing about their ethics — whether releasing music aligns with the wants of the deceased. To me though, the bigger point seems to be, not whether these records should be shared, but what it looks like to play each song and really listen: to pick up and hear, not our own voice, but the one on the other end of the line. 



Russell loved people hearing his work. His perfectionism, his reluctance to release his music, wasn't a product of a hermetic spirit who wanted to horde things to himself. He was known to lurk around the edge of a party when his songs were put on, looking to gauge the size of the crowd brought to the dancefloor, how people moved. Russell took no issue with others listening to his music. He just wanted to be there as they did.



Play "That's Us / Wild Combination" again. Listen. Can you hear it? The white disk, the one he is below, the breath between notes. There is something of Arthur suspended there still, caught in the melody as it arrives. How much better it is to find Russell in his songs — to dance together and not alone. Turn up the volume. There is the moon, full. There is this voice, his.



---



In one of my memories, I'm staying in a small farmhouse in western Massachusetts. I'm there for a dance festival nearby. From where I am, it takes about an hour to bike to the festival grounds, spread through the mountains. By the time I get there, I'm red-faced and late for the show.



Later, after the last performance, some of the dancers and I linger at the open-air restaurant set up for festival attendees. We realize we have some overlapping friends and start talking. The night becomes black, so we leak out to the parking lot where I confess all I have is my bike, and no light, but assure them I would be fine getting home.



They don't have space in their car, but offer, instead, to drive slowly behind me, paving out my way with a milk-white slice of their headlights on blast. They do, and I ride, the world closing off to just this light, everything outside of it pure blackness, save for the slitted stars above.



At one point, I hear a voice calling from the car window. *We're pulling over*. A small lake pools next to the highway, like a fist. The driving dancer — a thin man with a wide back — turns onto the rocks by the shore, leaving the car lights on. Spilling through the doors, the seven of them trip towards the black lake and, quickly, I'm with them, swimming.



Out on a crop of island, we pull ourselves onto the rock. Back on shore, the headlights stretch out towards us. Through the light, I can see a birthmark on the driving dancer's back, as he moves, in the shape of Pangaea. The car radio is still going. Its sounds reach us after the lights do, in the delay across the water. But we hear him. *I just wanna be* — the air hot around us, the eight of us, dancing — *wherever you are*.



And I think that he would be here, if he could. And I think that, in a sense, he is. Looking through the pines, switching on his recorder. Out on the dancefloor, I look up. The night is black. I can hear the moon.

[Note: The following is an excerpt from a novella]


The first one appeared on May 14. The world was approaching its point-of-no-return at the speed of light, proving from day to day how damn right prophet Malachi was (For behold, the day is coming, blazing like a furnace), and Earth was becoming the steaming, racist inferno in which we’ll all perish. In Tompkins Square Park, it was raining like hell.

Before we begin, I would like to preempt any misunderstandings: This is no love story. Nor is it some cautionary tale about the Clash of Civilizations or the Downfall of the West. This is the story of two men who led their unimportant lives in the Big, Rotten Apple. These men happen to be the best friends I’ve ever had.

To avoid any surprises—or, as we call them in the U.S. of A., potential lawsuits—let me give you the full pitch. I’m giving you this pitch as a courtesy, a content warning. Like those small red pepper icons they use in menus of Indian restaurants to warn old, white people that the food could burn their taste buds, so they might as well order some extra chapati with that curry.

So here goes:

A gay couple faces an impossible dilemma, when a mysterious offer appears in their inbox: If they agree to create a homemade pornographic film, they will receive $120,000 that will allow them to realize their long-standing dream of becoming parents.

Norma, third seat on the left at my screenwriting class, says my pitch sucks. I say, let me see the man who thinks that naming your daughter Norma is a legitimate thing to do after 1967.

You have a decent hook, she tells me. Your characters are refreshing and surprisingly well-rounded. But if I may, Jordan dear, you are robbing your pitch of its narrative potential.

And as much as I hate to admit it, she is right. Cause I neglected to mention one crucial detail: this ain’t no typical story. This baby happens to be the living nightmare of any bigot—it’s both homosexual and bi-racial.

The heroes of our story are two men whose hearts lie deep in the cursed ground of the Holy Land. Don’t get me wrong: they’re both Americans, proud residents of the urban jungle known as Alphabet City, Manhattan (Proud? Daud would probably say. I’m not proud of this country, world champion of racism, both overt and covert, 243 years and counting. But he is proud, trust me. You should see his face at our Fourth of July picnics, nibbling his vegan chicken wings all shining. He’s just playing hard to get).

And you know what they say. A Jewish soul still yearns and all that jazz. Although only one of our protagonists is Jewish. The other is—surprise, surprise—Muslim, Palestinian. And that’s the complication in our story. That’s our tragic punchline, our comedic catastrophe, my friends. That’s what makes our story sound like the beginning of a joke that Neo-Nazis tell each other at their underground conventions.

You see, my fellows here in La La Land usually laugh at me. They dismiss my story, calling it a hippie fairytale. They say that if I pitch it anywhere in Hollywood I will be blacklisted—and not in the Let-Me-Buy-The-Rights-In-A-Million-Dollar sense of the term. Producers will avoid my calls, ignore my messages, slam doors in my face.

Thing is, it’s real as shit. And get this: throughout the first week of their dangerous liaison, neither of the gentlemen in question was aware of the other’s ethnicity, or of the tragicomic potential of their entire fling (And let’s face it, it all started as a fling, as they both admit today).

There are other crucial details I left out of my pitch. That was actually on purpose. You see, I’m trying to build dramatic tension. That’s what you should do if you ever want to make a living writing, my screenwriting tutor Seth always says.

I didn’t tell you when and where Daud and Yoni met each other. How they fell in love. And what exactly happened after they received that crazy email.

But have no worries, hevre. You will find out all you need to know in due course. For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven, King Solomon said in some secret dialect of ancient Hebrew, if my memory of Bible Camp doesn’t fail me. Haste comes from the devil and patience from the merciful God, Queen Scheherazade responded in her ancient Arabic, centuries later.

For everything there is a season. Yes. I’m pretty sure that, having lived through the events I’m about to unfold on these very pages, despite everything that’s happened, Yoni and Daud would both agree on that.