Features - The Harvard Advocate

The desert was decreed to the men. That is why, in my eleventh and final term at Deep Springs, I was called a dairy boy when it was my job to wake up at four to milk the cows at four thirty and do the same thing in the afternoon. The cart we (Trey and I, another member of my class) pushed down to the barn in the dark early morning was the longest-lasting vehicle on campus—constructed some time in the forties, with two mismatched tires and an old DC license plate hanging on with the help of rusted baling wire. The dairy barn is the oldest structure on campus built, yes, by the men and for the men, but really for the persistently female cows, who lumbered in to meet us and eat the grain that we’d put out for them as we prepped their teats for milking. After, as we pushed the cart with a shotgun full of milk back towards the main campus, made, again, by the men and for the men, it was easy to forget what others call me, what I call myself, in the early dawn and majesty of the lighted desert. But that truth lingered in the morning air: it was for the men, this education in that rock over there, this project of reverence.

Editor’s Note: The following article is by a team of physicians at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School with a strong commitment to global health equity, reflecting on their working experiences. The case studies they share involve sexual assault and trauma, which may be distressing for some readers.

A man in the weight room does not move in synchrony with others. Quite the opposite — he is each in his own world, headphones over his ears like some bellicose gladiator ready to fight until his knees give out. In place of some prancing beast he has the cable machine, its handle stiff and smooth like the tusks of a wild boar. He lunges at these tusks, back locking into position. The eighty-pound weight elevates, hovering by his waist before it plunges to earth with a precipitous clang. After this first tug the gladiator leaps into rhythm, movements widening into distinct extension and retraction of the three-headed muscles at the back of his arms. Again and again he levitates the weight stack, snorting like a wild hog. But a man in the weight room does not hear himself. The only thing he hears is Skrillex screaming in his ears like it’s the end of the world, and so he goes in again for One! Last! Push! After an eternity, the tug of war ends: the man lets go of the boar tusks, which turns into a lifeless hunk of metal once released from his virile grip.

I was raised, for three years, in Virginia, where the elementary schools taught us that the Chesapeake was our bay, the Appalachias were our mountains. This was the Virginia I recall, singing an old folk song about the Shenandoah River Valley, Oh Shenandoah, the one that starts, “I long to see you,” and ends, “I’m bound to leave you.”

On February 14, 2021, I lugged two sea-bags, a camera bag, and a Pelican case off a chartered bus full of perfect strangers—though they each knew one another and had for years—up a concrete pier. The crew of the USS Carter Hall was embarking for its “COVID Cruise”; eight months, if we were lucky, at sea, with few opportunities to leave the ship—or the pier. I was boarding the ship as their photographer and journalist to document the work and lives of the crew at sea, work I’d never done on my own to that point. At the end of the routine deployment I would disembark without ceremony, never to board again.

DIAGNOSIS, IN FIVE ACTS

ACT I: DIAGNOSIS AS POLITIC

In March 2025, we emailed Lisa Mendelman, an Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Menlo College, who has worked on the intersection of mental health diagnoses and race, gender, and affect. Her current book project, Pathologies of Character: Race, Gender, and the Medicalization of Mental Health and American Literature, 1890-1955, investigates how race, gender, sexuality, and class have shaped psychiatric diagnoses. We asked her how she was conceptualizing “diagnosis” in the present age. Here’s what she wrote in return:

Note: The non-italicized text reflects Mohsin Hamid's words during our conversation in Lahore on August 30th, 2024, while the italicized portions capture my personal musings.

They were S—— L., L—— C., C—— A., and M—— G.; a political divorceé, a post-collegiate backpacker, a collegiate backpacker, and an affluent nonagenarian. From Chicago we had climbed up the steps into the first-class sleeper car together, but we would only really meet, beyond the faintest friendly glance, on the second day, and the cross-continental trip would have time to spare. Through the narrow hallway-space, our personal attendant escorted me, then L——, then S——, then C—— and L—— (they shared a room) into our roomettes: padded facing seats, soft Union blue, white cushions, a fold-down bed, clothes-hangers, curtains, and a door.

Fredric Jameson passed away at the age of 90 on September 22, 2024. Renowned as the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke, Jameson was a profoundly influential figure in Marxist literary criticism. Jameson studied continental philosophy under Erich Auerbach and Paul de Man when the winds of Anglophone academia were still blowing west, and produced a body of culture criticism in the Western Marxist tradition that would culminate in The Political Unconscious, published in 1981. His next major work Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism has become even more salient to our present day understanding of the commodification of time, space, and culture. Jameson was an ambitious and prolific critic: his analysis spanned the gamut from architecture to film to novels, and even in his final year he published three books, Mimesis, Expression, Construction; Inventions of a Present; and The Years of Theory.

Sama Alshaibi was born in Basra, Southern Iraq, in 1973, to an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother. Hers was a forbidding migratory childhood, as her family was exiled during the Iraq-Iran War. She now teaches in Arizona and roots herself in the future tense, at the fog’s edge; surefooted in her belief that there’s a dawning million-man fight for the people of Palestine. In her photographs, sculptures, and videos, the academics disappeared by Saddam Hussein during the Second Gulf War are summoned, an irretrievable Baghdad is reconstructed, the drought-laden Mesopotamian Marshes are enlivened. This is both a political action and a directional promise. Alshaibi possesses the alchemist’s prophetic assurance: when the summon, the reconstruction, and the enlivenment will in truth occur is indeterminate: the seeds remain idle dispersed underground. Through enacting these processes she is leading us toward the day of germination.

ROMANCE, PART ONE

Before he died, the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, complained of back pain. A pain, he expressed, that began at the base of his spine and bloomed outwards, a pain ancient and vestigial. He held the interlocking bones in his back desperately, as if his hands were the last thing holding himself up. He expressed the pain to his valet, who went to call a doctor. No sooner than the doctor was summoned, the Architect of India collapsed. It was six thirty in the morning.

Every summer, my Latgalian grandmother, who I call baba, my mom, and I gather in a church in the Latvian border village of Ņukši. I kneel on my left foot, cross myself, and sit down on the lacquered pew, put there by some Polish monk who came from Vilnius, Kraków, or Vitebsk to spread the faith up north. The cold, half-lit room fills with incense, the gliding vowels of Latgalian, and the intoxicating smell of sweet, piney myrrh. My knees dig painfully into the wood as we are finally released by the priest with one last āmen.

I am hungry to throw myself into the shoe-scratched darkness of a dance floor. Call it the thrill of a greenhorn: as the air thickens with salt and bodies, I wait, as a follow-dancer often does, in a dance before the dance. A lead dancer walks in my vicinity, I flick my eyes up. If their irises catch in the light and they extend a hand, they desire to share this moment with me.

"Intellectual portraiture is also self portraiture,” Adam Shatz confesses in the introduction of his first essay collection, Writers and Missionaries. To step into his apartment, then, is to step into something like a house of mirrors. I was reminded, as I removed my shoes and made my way further inside, of the young Sontag, “hearing the siren call of the first private library [she] had ever seen” on her pilgrimage to Thomas Mann’s. I was trying not to make the wanderings of my glance too obvious to my host. Yet, in the corner of my eye, whispers: BARTHES DERRIDA FOUCAULT.

Parul Sehgal calls herself ‘congenitally secretive’ and her work ‘conspiratorial.’ She describes writing as ‘secreting shameful sentences’ and reading as ‘subversive’ and ‘stolen.’ Teju Cole once called her a ‘good smuggler.’ On a Monday afternoon in almost-spring, both of us late on our deadlines, Sehgal welcomes me into collusion.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Southern California. His debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and numerous other accolades. A regular contributor to The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, Nguyen is a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a 2017 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and Guggenheim Fellowship. Most recently, Nguyen published an essay collection entitled A Man of Two Faces — an eclectic exploration of colonialism, intersectionality, and how politics, history, and identity are indelibly entwined.

I was born on the outskirts of Johannesburg, twenty years ago. The first nineteen of those years were my journey inward. I consider them unbroken years, if only because that lets me say I know a thing or two about the city. That twentieth year and the months after it have been punctured by the feeling that I know nothing about the place at all. But nineteen years is something, some time long enough for me to call the city mine.

Miracle No. 1: Light

March 2002 – March 2019

I am going to be broken again and again by miracles. I know this. I think I’ve known this from the moment I met the first puzzle of my life: light. So much light that the air was thick with it. I imagine that then, new and swaddled, I was thoughtless — wordless, too — completely lost in a puzzle with no boundaries or betrayals. I didn’t believe in anything then: milk, maybe. Maybe, warmth. Each moment of early life was new, each object seen exclusively for its form — the model around which meaning would one day be built. It was a time ripe with the instinct of pattern-finding. Only later would I grow into the suspicion that light might have been my first encounter with the miraculous.

Peter Hessler is a writer and journalist from Columbia, Missouri. A regular contributor to The New Yorker and National Geographic Magazine, he is the author of three books documenting Reform China (River Town, Oracle Bones, Country Driving), a book on the Egyptian Revolution (The Buried), and an essay collection (Strange Stones). For his work, Hessler has been named a MacAuthur Fellow and a finalist for the National Book Award.

When I was a diapered infant, my parents left Karachi because of the political situation. It doesn’t really mean much, because Pakistani politics have chronically worsened since the country’s inception. But it’s delightfully vague and one of the few things to which pontifical, mustached Pakistani men, sitting around chai and rusk, can all solemnly bob their heads in agreement.

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and an English professor at Bard College. Hsu’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Stay True is centered on his particular college friendship with Ken Ishida — a University of California, Berkeley undergraduate who was killed in a 1998 carjacking. In Stay True, Hsu writes about his indolent adolescence spent in the San Francisco Bay Area, and how his friendship with Ken and the aftermath of Ken’s death shaped his sense of identity.

Yiyun Li is a novelist, essayist, and professor of creative writing at Princeton University. She is the author of five novels, the most recent being the 2022 Book of Goose, a story about the friendship between two girls growing up in France post-World War II. Her collection of essays Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You In Your Life was published in 2017. Her newest short story collection, Wednesday’s Child, was published in 2023. Her fiction has won the PEN/Hemingway award and the PEN/Faulkner award.

A panicked wail comes across the water, shaking the seafloor. A young sperm whale, caught in the North Pacific Gyre, is separated from her pod. The speed of the current carries her cries far away from their source. The calf’s father chases a trail of barnacles that had been ripped off of the child’s underside by the current. It isn’t long before the father is lost. An infernal din coming from far above the water grows louder and louder.

In the days after high school graduation, having ridded my schedule of high school effects, I found myself in possession of a remarkable amount of free time. Three months’ worth, to be exact. The last time I had this much free time was probably elementary school graduation, and I had spent most of my high school years yearning for this kind of idleness.

On my left knee, there are two fine, slim scars, silver as a grey hair. The skin is rough and textured, mirrored on my right one, a similarly ugly and knobby joint. When I straighten my legs, the pair become an unhappy married couple: folds and creases form like wrinkled faces. I probably see them as old people because of the wisdom I attach to them. My knees are too flimsy to protect me when I fall off a bike and so rigid they snap if I tangle my skis, but the act of kneeling has been, in my experience, a great emotional teacher.

In every memory I have of flying into Kentucky, it is raining. Thick clouds scrape against the plane until city lights are visible, and as we grow closer, I see dark stains stretch across weathered cement buildings.

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year. His new book of fiction, Cleanness (2020), was published in January 2020. A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, it has been longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and France’s Prix Sade. Cleanness was also named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in Iowa City with his partner, the poet Luis Muñoz.

Hannah La Follette Ryan is the New York based photographer behind @subwayhands, a viral Instagram account which showcases portraits of strangers’ hands on the subway and boasts over 250 thousand followers. Poetry board member Ezra Lebovitz and design board member Anna Correll spoke with her via email this January about her work, her method, and the rules of subway decorum.

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 



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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.



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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.



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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.



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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.

I’m watching a cat drink out of a bowl of blood.



Apparently, cats love the taste of blood. Maybe this should be obvious. Cats are predators; they’re technically not even domesticated. A cat digs into a freshly killed rodent because it likes it, not just because it has to.



Still, as I see the fur around the cat’s mouth stain red, I realize I haven’t thought about this before. *Why didn’t I know that?*



I’m learning a lot of things today.



A few minutes ago, I was taught how to slaughter a lamb, which is the source of the blood. The lamb’s carcass, still fresh on the table, is leaking bodily fluids out of both ends onto the concrete floor. Blood is still dripping out of its neck into a bowl, where the cat waits to lap it up. It’s red, poppy-red, so bright it seems fake.



I’m starting to feel like I’m hallucinating.



I’m playing at butcher as a sort of cultural experience. This is not without some irony. By the time my grandfather was my age, he had killed countless chickens; when you grow up as a sharecropper, it’s an essential skill. He showed me how to do it once, miming instead of using a live bird. You grab the chicken by the neck and twist sharply, until you snap the vertebrae. Today, he goes to Walmart to buy Vienna sausages, and his granddaughter has to travel over five thousand miles to see something he would’ve considered standard. Progress, I guess.



I’m doing a backpacking expedition in Chilean Patagonia with an outdoor education program. My group mostly consists of the kind of American and European teens who are disaffected enough to disappear into the woods for over a month, but wealthy enough to do it on another continent. For the majority of us, this is part of a gap year or semester off. The exception is the lone Chilean student, who needs to take this trip to qualify as a tour guide in Torres del Paine.



Patagonia has a special appeal for the outdoor-minded. The climate has always been too harsh for large-scale agriculture or development — it’s mountainous, infertile, and as cold as Alaska. Ongoing assaults of earthquakes, wind, and ice have carved out an army of looming, jagged peaks. Many of the ranchers who lived here are gone, lured away by jobs in tourism and homes in larger cities. Pumas have eaten the horses and cows they left behind. In their stead, the Chilean government created a system of national parks covering nearly ten million acres of land.



Currently, I’m not in school because my body has decided that I need a break. By senior year, the pressure cooker of my high school had shredded my nerves along with any desire to do academic work. The thought of enduring college had become almost unbearable. Upon graduation, sensing that I might be fragile enough to crack like an egg, my parents let me take some time off.



I’m similar to many in this group in that I might be a failure. Most of us are the children of middle and upper-class professionals whose trajectories we have deferred from, sometimes to their sharp disappointment. We each internalize this differently. Only I and a quiet Canadian girl, whose rugby career was abruptly cut short by an injury, seem to have the acute sense that our lives have fallen out of alignment. The rest, to varying degrees, have co-opted this and transformed it into a point of pride. The absence of education, of jobs, of plans, is a sign of moral fortitude. They can turn their lives into a series of adventures instead — of which this is one.



There is a universe where I probably *would* view it that way, assuming a few of my essential characteristics were changed. I immediately notice that I’m the only black person in this group. I’m also one of only a few girls. On our first night, we sleep in tents segregated by gender: one for the girls, three for the boys. Perhaps if I were different, I would have the freedom some of these boys seem to possess; they walk like where they step doesn’t matter. I, meanwhile, have been raised to ward against the danger of mistakes.



In my head, I call them American Boys, though they’re not all American. Still, they embody something particular about our national character. It’s not just their whiteness, their maleness, or their physical strength, though those certainly are factors. It might be how unburdened they are.

I sense that these are people who, unlike me, are not persistently aware of their vulnerabilities. I’m unsure if this feeling of mortality is more attributable to my background or my anxiety. They’re probably related.



Our trip is thirty days long, starting and ending at the program’s base, which is also a fully-functioning farm. In the intervening period, we live out of our packs, bushwhacking and kayaking around the Pacific coast. Upon our return, the farm’s butcher, Sebastian, asks us to help kill the lamb. It’s for a traditional Patagonian-style barbecue, meant to celebrate the completion of our trip. Like most of the kids in this group, I’ve eaten plenty of meat, but I’ve never really seen anything die before. Truthfully, the anticipation of what I’m about to see makes me a little nervous.



“Don’t worry,” one of our instructors, Carolina, a slight Chilean woman, says. “It’ll be quick. It won’t even feel it.”



I believe her. I agree to help.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



When you’re an American, you can make the inconvenient invisible.



It’s almost implied by what we call ourselves: “Americans”, as if there aren’t 34 other countries in the Americas. Our dominance takes the form of ignoring other people’s existence. Felipe and Carolina, our Chilean instructors, take great pains to point this out. They call us “U.S.A.-ans”. This moniker never really catches on in our group.



The American food system benefits greatly from our ignorance. We don’t know the basic facts of where our food comes from, probably because a separation between us and the things we eat is important for maintaining our sense of ourselves as moral people. Contained animal feeding operations and fields tended by migrant workers are not pleasant to envision. Fortunately, we aren’t reminded of these things at the grocery store.



Our power shields us from the truth. It starts at the beginning — in America, farming means ownership. From our nation’s inception, a number of those who we’ve labeled “farmers” have rarely done much planting or harvesting; that’s left to the people whose labor they’ve bought. Thomas Jefferson, foundational in our country’s mythmaking, called himself a farmer. He also had over 600 slaves.



My family used to be the kind of people who were owned by other people. Until very recently, we were not Americans, even though we were brought here almost four hundred years ago. To this day, “American” is probably the last identifier my granddad would use to describe himself. He’s a Christian, a black man, even a veteran. He is not, in his mind, an American.



Granddad was born a sharecropper, which is to say, a slave. Sharecropping was an arrangement in which wealthy white landowners “rented” plots of land to poor, often black, families. They paid back their debt by cultivating the land, giving almost everything they produced to their landlords. Often, when their output was tallied, families would mysteriously wind up with more debt than they’d had the previous year. If sharecroppers tried to complain, or worst of all, unionize, they would be hung from trees. In this way, an ostensibly temporary arrangement could last for generations.



While the rest of the country started to eat pre-butchered meat from industrial slaughterhouses, Granddad’s family got what their landlord, Mr. Beasly, didn’t steal. Sometimes, this was one chicken for over a dozen mouths. To this day, whenever my grandfather eats meat, he gives thanks for what he calls “the blessing of the flesh”. He thanks the animal for giving up its life force because he understands its value. Even as he lives through an era of artificial abundance, he still believes meat is a luxury.



The ceremony of eating meat, as in a celebratory Patagonian barbecue, is rooted in scarcity. I suspect that the significance of such an event is lost on people who have always lived like they’d never be hungry.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



I realize quickly that lambs know when they’re going to die.



We stand in front of their pen and pick one out, and then two boys from the group go retrieve the animal. They are the only ones strong enough to carry it, since lambs, as it turns out, are *not* small. When they enter, the lambs panic, backing away until they’ve coalesced into a formless blob of wool and jittery knees in a corner. They bleat in terror as the boys approach, each one fighting to recede into the mass. Eventually, the boys get too close and the bubble bursts like a spider’s egg sack, lambs scattering across the pen.



I watch from outside the pen and I think about dodo birds. When they lived on Earth, they didn’t fear us. They had no predators, so when approached by humans, they didn’t flee, and that was the beginning of their end. If the lambs are afraid, I reason, they know what’s coming.



The selected lamb fights back, bucking when the boys try to lay hands on it. It isn’t enough. Eventually, the boys catch it, grabbing its legs so that it can’t run. It writhes for a few moments, trying to break free, and then abruptly goes still.



They carry it into a shed near the pen — a mini-slaughterhouse. The smell is suffering: sweat and urine and the metallic tang of blood. In the center of the shed, there is a table on which the lamb is tied down. It quivers, but otherwise does not move. Sebastian places a bowl on the ground, just beneath its head.



Sebastian draws the knife — a surprisingly short, blunt blade — and the lamb flails wildly, or as much as it can while tied down. It knows, just as well as I know, what the knife means. It manages one bleat before Sebastian’s hands clamps its mouth shut. Its eyes are wide, rolling around in terror. He cradles the lamb’s head and quickly slices its neck open. Blood pours out into the waiting bowl.



The cat arrives. It has been lingering in the corner, flicking its tail in anticipation.



At this point, two of the girls in the group, who were previously watching, leave the room. One of them looks like she’s going to be sick; the other’s lips are pressed so tightly together that they’re colorless. The first one, I recall, has recently been complaining about how much she missed Chick-fil-A.



I don’t want to be in the shed. The stench of the lamb, I am convinced, will linger on me forever. I want to take a shower so that it won’t stain my skin. I briefly contemplate leaving, but then I glance up at the American Boys. Two of them are smirking. I stay, but it’s getting harder to breathe.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



Here is the great irony of Patagonian tourism: the same forces that preserve this place will eventually destroy it.



Patagonia is extremely popular among the world’s wealthy, a fact that is immediately obvious.

In thirty days in the backcountry, we encounter one human settlement: a half-finished geodesic dome on the far side of a fjord. It’s likely owned by the richest man in Chile, Julio Ponce Lerou, a former son-in-law of Pinochet, who has bought large swaths of land in the area.



Maybe he’s building the house to escape people who hate him. His wealth comes from a mining industry that is infamous for destroying ecosystems and poisoning water, causing some public ire. The only way to reach the house is by a two-hour long boat ride, combined with a six-hour long hike — or a helicopter.



Interestingly, you can’t find the location of the house on a map, at least not a physical one. It sits in a fjord formed by a branch of the Southern Ice Field, which is rapidly receding. The last time it was surveyed, around World War II, it was still covered by a glacier.



Patagonia’s crowning asset — its ice — is disappearing. Its glaciers are melting remarkably fast, partially because there’s a hole in the ozone right above it. Its visitors, who come here to admire it, are often the kind of people whose carbon-emitting trips and over-consumptive lifestyles kill a planet. But maybe this doesn’t mean much to them.



One of the particularly cruel aspects of climate change is its fundamental inequity. The parts of the world that are warming the fastest, or are most vulnerable to natural disasters or droughts, are disproportionately in the Global South. These regions also produce vastly fewer emissions than the Global North. So, the drivers of climate change will never experience the worst of its effects.



We have come to Patagonia to see its beauty before it's all gone. Our presence is also part of the reason why that beauty is vanishing. We’re like thieves, stealing pieces of this place until there’s nothing left.



Our instructors, Felipe and Carolina, seem painfully aware of this. Their salaries require them to spend most of the year in the field. So, unlike us, they are not voyeurs in this place — it’s their home. Probably as a result, they seem to have internalized the cost of their lifestyle. If climate change is the result of our collective consumption, then each of us is responsible. In light of this, Felipe and Carolina don’t buy new things, don’t eat meat, and rarely travel. They want to live without impact.



I think they might be on a mission to change us, too. While we’re here, they announce on the first day, we will Leave No Trace. We will act like we want to erase our existence. Unfortunately, we are never very good at this; throughout the trip, we trample endangered plant species, accidentally spill soap into sensitive freshwater environments, and secretly dump our food waste onto the forest floor.



Maybe Leave No Trace requires more significant unlearning than Felipe and Carolina imagined. American thought isn’t predicated on such ideas of limitation and restraint. As a culture, we rarely challenge the notion that Americans should take what they want.



In the mid-20th century, amidst genuine environmentalism, corporations that produced disposable packaging began to fund anti-littering campaigns. Instead of questioning the underlying logic of making things you can only use once, they encourage us to “properly” dispose of our waste so that it doesn’t dirty our community parks. In many places, Earth Day is now synonymous with cleanups — as if the carbon emissions of a plastic bottle are offset when you put it in a trashcan. In reality, our waste is just put somewhere else, usually shipped to developing countries or piled together in undesirable neighborhoods.



In America, conservation is when you make a mess and then force someone else to clean it up.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



I’m wondering why the lamb isn’t dead yet.



It’s been minutes and it’s still staring at me, or at least it feels that way. I’m so unnerved that I involuntarily step back out of its sight. Its stomach is still rising and falling, ever so slightly. The blood fills the bowl and then overflows, spilling out and into a drain in the floor.



I can’t move. In my mind, I chant, *this is natural this is natural this is natural*, and hope that the repetition makes it true. *This is how my ancestors lived.*



That fact seems to be mocking me at this moment. My mother always wanted to send me back to Arkansas. She thinks I’m too sheltered. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” she sometimes mutters. “When your *grandparents* were your age...”



There’s a part of me that understands that this needs to be done, that this has always been done. In many ways, this is probably the most ethical way to eat meat. But another part wants to leave. Something about this feels out of context, its meaning distorted. We aren’t slaughtering this animal because we need to; we’re doing it because we want to see what it looks like. Still, my feet remain planted.



I notice that even without thinking, I have been holding myself extremely still. My spine is so straight that it has begun to hurt. It reminds me of a bear encounter I once had, when I was alone in the woods and my screams would have been swallowed by vegetation. I remember thinking that the bear was so large that my head could fit comfortably in its mouth. I was still then too, trying desperately to make myself invisible, convinced that if I moved the bear would realize that I was something it could devour. We stared at each other for what was probably a second, but felt like hours. Then it lumbered back into the forest, and I ran as fast as I could to the nearest road.



So, perhaps I remain out of fear. The departure of the other girls meant that the group is now overwhelmingly male. Looking at the expressions of the American Boys around me, which range between impassive and smirking, I have the sudden conviction that to register any discomfort would be dangerous. If the word “empathy” literally means to be “in feeling” with another, then expressing what I feel would be an admission of identification with the lamb, a marker of myself as potential prey. I don’t want to be eaten. I stay where I am.



All of this, I think, is meant to be a lesson on the cost of things. But I am unsure of what this means for us, who will never really have to pay for anything. It strikes me that there aren’t very many consequences for someone like me. I look again at the American Boys, who only seem to register this as a performance. There are even fewer consequences for people like them.



A milky film forms over the lamb’s eyes, and I know that it is finally dead. I exhale slowly, releasing the air in my throat. I’m glad it's not looking at me anymore. Its gaze seemed like an accusation.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



In September 1973, the United States government, under the front of the Chilean military, overthrew the country’s democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende. They replaced him with Augusto Pinochet, a right-wing dictator who killed thousands and tortured ten times more, but fortunately was not a socialist. Most Americans are unaware of this, probably because the U.S. government covered it up for over twenty years.



A decade earlier, Granddad was entangled in another of America’s interventions to liberate people of color from self-governance, this time in Vietnam. It was the military or sharecropping, and he picked the former. Death in a jungle, or death in a cotton field. He calls this a choice.



Currently, Granddad’s body is slowly decaying. He uses a walker and his hands tremble involuntarily every time he raises them, the result of rheumatoid arthritis. He has a number of health problems tied to Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam that the V.A. will not recognize, because when the majority of the sufferers are old, poor or foreign, it’s not a priority.



Granddad was one of the oldest of 18 children, and so his absence didn’t mean much for the family’s harvest. But when his younger brother, Lionel, tried to leave for high school, he was met by Mr. Beasly, their landlord. Mr. Beasly pointed a gun in Lionel’s face and told him that it was the fields or a bullet. He chose the fields.



Lionel is one among a faction of my relatives who are highly invested in my academic success, and who I probably disappointed by taking a gap year. Truth be told, we don’t know each other very well. I suspect that I am more of a symbol than a person to him. A few months ago, on a trip back to Arkansas, he ran into Mr. Beasly’s daughter. Apparently, she and her husband are now unemployed and on the verge of bankruptcy. They might lose their house — her father’s house. He recounts this with something like glee. “I wanted to tell her,” he says, grinning, “You’re broke, and I got a niece going to *Harvard*!”



My other grandfather, the son of industrious Scots, also went to Harvard. He is an excellent American Boy. One of his professors there was Louis Fieser, the inventor of Vietnam’s other predominant chemical: Napalm. Napalm was developed in Harvard labs specifically for killing. It was originally intended to set Japan on fire, though it’s most famous for burning whole swathes of jungle in Southeast Asia, including the people inside it. Fieser later remarked, “I have no right to judge the morality of Napalm just because I created it.”



“You know, he was the nicest guy,” my American grandfather says, contemplative. “You’d never know he’d made a thing like that.”



One grandfather had to drop Napalm out of planes, the other got to chat with its creator. Some kinds of people are always at the mercy of the decisions of others. When Lionel looks at me, he sees someone with the power to make those choices. He sees an American.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



Sebastian cuts along the skin of the lamb’s underbelly, just deep enough to puncture the layer of wool, and forces his fist in between its pelt and its stomach, separating the two. This, he explains, is how the animal is skinned. He looks at me, smiles, and steps back, inviting me to continue his work.



The eyes of the others are on me. I step forward and hesitate for a moment, but then I remember my audience. I shove my hands inside the gap Sebastian has already made, slowly pulling the two layers apart. It is unsettlingly warm. One of the American Boys hoots. The message is clear: *you’ve passed a test*. When I pull my hands out, they are sticky.



Eventually, when the lamb is sufficiently skinned, Sebastian cuts it open and pulls its organs out, discarding them on the floor. “We don’t waste here,” he says. As if cued, the cat abandons the blood to nibble on the gallbladder.



Sebastian strings up the carcass so that the fluids can drain and we leave the shed. The fresh air is startling. “I’m glad that he was so respectful with the animal,” one of the boys says to me as we walk up the grassy hill towards the farmhouse. I pretend I haven’t heard. I don’t say what I’m thinking: *the lamb didn’t give a shit if we respected it when we killed it*.



Later, the lamb is served for dinner. It is a great success. Everyone eats it, including the girls who left the shed. Including me. The only exceptions are Felipe and Carolina, who are both vegans. As I chew on the meat, I contemplate my weakness. *Fucking conformist*, I hiss. *You’d do anything to blend in*.



*But I was just trying to survive*, I whimper.



Maybe that’s not quite true, though. Survival is different from the path of least resistance. I make a mental tally of the major actions of my life; did I do them because I had to, or because I wanted to? *I wanted to*, I realize. The thought is unpleasant. I’m in Patagonia because I want to be. I’m going to Harvard because I want to. I have been *taking and taking and taking* my whole life, mostly just because I can.



I wipe my greasy fingers on a paper napkin and stare out the window of the dining room to the glaciers in the distance. The sun has just begun to dip behind the horizon, turning the sky a pale pink. I’m trying to memorize this view, because I know I probably won’t see it again. In a few days, I will fly two hours to Santiago, and then eleven hours back home to New York. These flights will help kill this place. I wonder, if I do return, whether the ice will still be here. It seems unlikely.



Over our meal, we talk about a lot of things that don’t matter. One girl misses the fried chicken place in the Denver airport. Another of the boys discusses his next adventure: scuba-diving and spearfishing in the Seychelles. I wonder if they know how they sound.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



A few months later, I’m on a train from New York to New Orleans to visit part of my family. The train ride is 36 hours, criss-crossing sections of the country that I have no real relationship with but, I suppose, could be considered an ancestral homeland. In spring, the Southeast becomes dense and green with vegetation. After Virginia, the landscape is almost indistinguishable, creating the odd sensation of a divorce between time and motion; the hours pass, and we don’t seem to be going anywhere.



I could’ve taken a plane with my parents, but instead I’m in the coach class of an Amtrak. This, I told them, is part of an effort to live more sustainably. In reality, it’s less altruistic than that. I’m attempting to cure myself of the feeling that I might be a bad person. I now walk most places, and if I can’t then I take the train. I’ve been much more careful with the things I buy. Soon, I’ll stop eating meat.



I still remember the lamb. It mostly appears in my dreams, which have become increasingly vivid. Often, they’re about the various ways I might die; drowned in a flood, eaten by a puma, cut open by a butcher. Guilt, I’ve found, pairs poorly with anxiety.

*Anna Wiener is a New Yorker contributor who writes about tech culture. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and others. Wiener’s first book Uncanny Valley, a memoir about her time working for Silicon Valley startups during the age of the unicorns, came out on January 14, 2020. Below is a transcript of a conversation which took place on January 16, 2020 between Wiener, former Advocate president Natasha Lasky ’19, and Features Board member Emily Shen ’20. This interview has been edited for length and clarity, and transcribed with the help of Otter.ai, a machine learning powered personal assistant that provides speech to text transcription.*



ES: Something featured in the book is your complicated relationship with the CEO of the data analytics startup. In that job, you likened yourself to a bot in describing how you catered to your mostly male customers’ requests. Later, when you are promoted, the solution manager describes your male coworker as strategic and you as someone whose strengths are that you “love our customers,” putting words in your mouth and almost commodifying your feelings. There were times where your care for your co-workers and CEO was seen as a liability, but it was like that was supposed to be transposed when it was effective, on to customers.



AW: But still undervalued.



ES: Yeah. And I wanted to know what you thought of that. When you said “bot,” it made me think of how AI is feminized a lot in media, and how you were kind of being like Scarlett Johansson’s character in Her — expected to serve people and not only do that, but in an emotional way.



NL: Not even just in media — the personal assistant on your phone, Siri.



AW: Alexa, perform affective labor. I don’t know if you have these men in your life —



ES: Probably, yes.



AW: There are men who will text me in ways that make me feel like a bot. They need some support — some emotional support. And I used to be much more willing to provide that when I was younger.



I think that soft skilled labor tends to be a way to devalue work done by women and other underrepresented minorities in tech. It’s not specific in tech — it happens everywhere — but it's amplified in tech, specifically when you're working in a company like I did, which is a b2b software product. You’re surrounded by men in your workplace, or I was, and most of the customers are men. For me, the thing that got complicated was that I saw that when I did these sort of maternal things, people liked it. And that seemed to be a way to feel valued — to play up that side of my personality. To some extent we all enjoyed it, too. So how do you talk about that?



NL: Having a certain amount of privilege and also being a woman — you can reap the small benefits of patriarchy if you perform in the proper way. And sometimes there's joy in that even though it may feel empty in some way.



AW: I like that. Reap the small benefits of, or eat the leftover scraps of.



NL: It does feel like being a pet in some way — like a conditional acceptance.



ES: You’ve been asked a lot about your decision not to name any of the companies you discuss in Uncanny Valley.



AW: It’s a purely stylistic choice. I think it’s important to remember what these companies do rather than whatever cultural association someone might have with the name, and it also gestures towards the interchangeability of these companies. In terms of what I’m writing about, the companies themselves don’t really matter because I think the situations that arose from these environments are reflective of a bigger structural narrative. I also just don’t really like the names of a lot of these companies; I think they are hard to read on the page for me.



NL: It’s interesting that you say that especially with regards to interchangeability. I think of the e-book founders, in the way that you describe them, as being this hydra of interchangeable white men. Why do you think startup culture functions this way in terms of interchangeability and culture?



AW: I think it has to do with the values of the industry. The business model favors speed, monopoly as a sort of endgame, efficiency, optimization, scale. On the cultural side, the industry loves the story of the contrarian, visionary young white man. There's this feeling that people who are younger have come into the technology at the cutting edge, so they represent something about the speed of the development of technology. When you have these workplace environments where optimization, speed and scale are the primary goals, and everyone is also quite young and figuring out how to be a boss at the same time that they're figuring out how to be a person, you get a somewhat fairly standard output, right?



I also think that this can vary depending on what type of company. There are some companies in Silicon Valley that are operating within highly regulated industries, like financial tech. I would assume that those companies tend to have a more mature and more businesslike culture. That's just my assumption; I haven't worked in one of those.



ES: On tech culture being homogeneous, everyone's always talking about disruption but doing things in a very similar way. The success story of a startup has been very codified: seed from Y Combinator, raise additional funding from Accel, grow, exit. Everyone kind of follows the same path, yet is convinced that they’re different. People in Silicon Valley like to see themselves as different.



AW: It’s so interesting you bring up Y Combinator, because I think that's actually a great example to use when thinking about this question. It’s this network of entrepreneurs who essentially help each other out. One of Y Combinator’s greatest selling points is its network. Paul Graham is one of the founders of Y Combinator; his influence is deeply felt in that sphere. Joining the Y Combinator network is a way of becoming even more insular. It’s a place where people are reinforcing each other.



There is a sort of set of ideas — you can even call an ideology — about entrepreneurship, company culture, and scale that I think can lead to homogenous workplaces. I have a scene in the book where my team manager brought us all into a room and said, Write down the names of the five smartest people you know, and then asked us, Why don't they work here? I thought this was just something that had happened at my startup, because there was such an intense culture, but then a friend of mine read the book and texted me the other day and said, I can't believe that this happened to you too. This must have just been a blog post that everyone read.



ES: It makes me think of how technical interviews are structured. Everyone decided that the best way to interview software engineers was to put them through these brain teasers, and they've evolved from brain teasers to be these algorithms problems that are still very cerebral. Across the industry, every technical interview is nearly the same. And it's become the standard. It’s weird because Silicon Valley rejects institutions. The best CEO is someone who's dropped out of college, but they've formed institutions and practices that have grown to become their own.



NL: The scourge that is venture capitalist Twitter is virtually indistinguishable from the sort of self-help nonsense spewed by capitalists like Andrew Carnegie.



AW: These new institutions are also just replicas of fairly old and conventional business philosophy, like Harvard Business Review distilled into CliffsNotes. I feel like that ties into this sort of ahistorical, anti-intellectual, anti-academic kind of mentality. And obviously the person with no experience has to fit into a certain framework — they've dropped out of a really good college, probably have some financial security outside of work, and are really confident and have like, nice skin.



NL: There is a widespread disdain for universities, if it's not an Ivy League school you're dropping out of. But at the same time, so many corporate facilities are modeled on college campuses and sort of use the structures of college applications to facilitate deciding whether or not someone is all around smart enough to work for them.



AW: There’s a lot of excitement among the VC Twitter set about this one startup called Lambda School. They claim to be attacking an important problem: people who are saddled with student debt and are in jobs that are not highly valued. It’s all about economic mobility, and it’s hard not to be on board with that. Where I chafe against it is how it's positioned as an alternative to higher education that is superior because it directly leads to employment — not just employment, but a high-paying job in tech. I feel that Silicon Valley is really good at circumventing social issues and creating alternatives that are private and monetized and tend to focus on the individual capacity for change. And so to me, this isn't really tackling student debt. Can businesses engage with social crises, such as the student debt crisis? Or are they incentivized to only act in these circumventory, atomized ways?



I also just feel like any value system where the end of the idea is that the usefulness of knowledge in society is correlated to one’s income or economic utility — if you continue that to its endpoint, it’s an incredibly grim vision for society.



NL: In other interviews, you’ve spoken about your willingness to empathize with people who others may not be as keen to empathize with. What do you think is the political utility of writing about Silicon Valley in such a humanizing way?



AW: I don’t personally harbor contempt for the people I worked with, or even for. I do think that this sort of structural view that I talked about earlier can be a mode of forgiveness. The flip side is that the structural view can be exculpatory; it can exonerate people who don't deserve it, who aren't necessarily acting due to structural restraints or incentives. I don’t want to let people off the hook who don't really deserve it. Where you draw that line is complicated, and I think that, rightfully so, the book’s been called out for being flattering to power. I think that that's something I've grappled with in writing and something I'm still grappling with as a journalist, and also as a person who lives in this world and who has friends in different corners.



I wouldn't even call it empathy. I wouldn't call it kindness because the book is cutting. It’s critical; it’s not the book I would have written at 25. My hope is that it’s generosity. I want the book to be read by people in the industry. There are enough indictments of tech and those are really valid criticisms, but I don't think that people in the industry read them, and if they do, they feel that they are being unfairly criticized. My hope is that the personal narrative illuminates the structural narrative. I think the structural level is where we need to do the most work. That's collective work, not individual work, but the individual story can maybe be useful and getting people to think about that bigger picture. I also just don’t think cruelty is productive.

*C Pam Zhang is a fiction writer whose stories have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, American Short Fiction, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in April 2020. The Fiction Board caught up with her over email to ask a few questions about writing, revising, and feasting.*



**What is your novel about, and what inspired it? When did you start writing your first draft, and what approach did you take to writing and revising?**



My novel is reimagining of the myth of the American West that centers, instead of white men, two children of immigrants who set out with the body of their dead father. It’s about home, grief, tigers and buffalos, mourning for a ravaged land. The kernel at its heart may be this question: what is it like to live with the visceral reality of a dead body?



I had no intention of writing this novel. I woke up with the first images in my head and exorcised them in the form of a short story. Then I tried to avoid the project because, let’s be honest: why would anyone willingly embark on a novel? It is so long, so thankless, so grueling. You can’t want to write a novel; it must be a need, a hounding.



I wrote my first draft quickly because I believe the goal of any first draft is to produce a heap of utter trash. That’s it. Nothing loftier. That’s the only way you’ll get through it without self-sabotaging by way of perfectionism. When you see your first draft as joyous garbage, it becomes much easier to throw great swathes away in revision, which is the real work of the novel. Probably ten percent of that first draft made it into the final draft; the finished novel is draft maybe, I don’t know, twenty?



**Which books or authors have had the biggest influence on your writing? I’m wondering, for instance, whether the journey your characters take to bury their father is meant to be a spin on *As I Lay Dying*? Are you intentional about situating your work within particular genres (e.g., Asian American literature, immigrant literature, historical fiction, magical realism)?**



I have never read *As I Lay Dying*! In fact I’ve never read Faulkner, or Joyce, or a dozen other writers in the supposed canon, and that’s okay. I mention this only because I used to be ashamed, especially in collegiate settings where I assumed everyone was much more learned than me. I unlearned shame fairly recently. Make your own canon.



I love Marilyn Chin’s *Tales of the Mooncake Vixen* for how she plays with, cannibalizes, thumbs her nose at, mythology. Toni Morrison’s *Beloved* because she is a genius, and makes language and memory ferociously her own. Larry McMurtry’s *Lonesome Dove* for that classic Western epic. Annie Proulx’s *The Shipping News* for language as engine, as joy even when the topic itself is bleak.



Even to this day I get queasy when I see my novel filed under any genre—historical, Asian American, what have you. Genre designations are for readers and marketplaces. They’re not for the writer to consider when writing. They’ll only stifle you if you think about them too early.



**Who are your first readers? Are you friends with other writers? If so, how have you met them?**



I met quite a few of my writing friends online, where we exchange work and also lots of anxiety about writing. Highly recommended to have friends with whom you can be free about your never-ending anxiety.



**When did you start working with your agent and editor? Did anything surprise you about the process of finding and collaborating with them?**



I worked with them very late! Not until I was several drafts into my novel and had polished it as much as I could by myself. The writer Lauren Groff once gave me this excellent advice: if you consider yourself married to your novel, don’t send it out until you’re ready to divorce it. It wasn’t that I thought my novel was perfect when I looked for an agent; it was that I could see a million ways to change it and I no longer had a sense of what change would be for the better or for the worse. I was sick and tired of its stupid face.



I was most surprised by how much I loved being edited. I’d heard before that some writers dislike being edited, and can only conclude that perhaps there are bad editors out there. Both my editor and agent ask questions that force me to think more deeply, rather than give prescriptive feedback. There is a level of foundational trust that they earned at the beginning by speaking about my novel in terms that resonated with me. If anyone ever describes your novel in a way that makes you cringe or gives you pause, that is not your person, no matter how powerful or esteemed.



**The first story I read of yours was “Dad.Me” in McSweeney’s 53, which according to your Twitter “was rejected 38 freakin’ times.” As a writer, how do you deal with rejection? How do you know a story is worth working on and submitting even after it’s been rejected repeatedly?**



I was once told that a writer needs two things: an enormous ego and crippling self-doubt. They’re uneasy partners in this strange writing life. The enormous ego gets you through to the end of projects; the crippling self-doubt helps you edit and be a decent human in the world.



There are plenty of stories I’ve thrown away after a few rejections, or sometimes just a tactful comment from a trusted reader. I kept submitting “Dad.Me” because, quite simply, it moved me every time I read it. Pay attention to when your own work moves you, really moves you—and I don’t mean when it impresses you, or you think you’ve written an especially lyrical metaphor.



**You studied English as an undergrad at Brown. How do you think reading in an academic or critical context differs from reading as a fiction writer? I’ve heard from some writers that studying and analyzing English literature can stifle the creative impulse, whereas other writers find that literary studies and creative writing can be mutually productive. What was your experience?**



There can be great pleasure and satisfaction in an academic paper: the pleasure of articulation. The ability to articulate why you love what you love—or why you hate what you hate—is a tool all people, really, should have.



That said, articulation is a tool for readers and editors; don’t pick it up to write with.



**What kinds of day jobs have you had since graduating from college, and how have they affected your writing or your ability to write?**



I have always had a day job or freelance work. Straight out of college I worked in the San Francisco tech scene full time for about two years, then transitioning to part time. I still do tech work. I grew up in a low-income immigrant family and don’t have a safety net to fall back on. There is no shame in having a career that financially supports you—so many writers have either that or a familial safety net or a romantic partner who pays a greater share of living expenses, and it is criminal that we aren’t more vocal about that.



The hard truth is we do not live in a country that supports artists. Full stop. Support yourself, and be smart about it.



Remember that writing requires both the time to write and the mental freedom to do so. I did not have the latter if I lived in a state of precarity, worried about my next paycheck, how to make rent. Find a balance. Be steely-eyed about what you go into your paying job for, and therefore how much of yourself to put into the job. But it is very possible!



**Finally, an obligatory *FEAST* question —— having lived in thirteen cities across four countries, what are some of your favorite foods and/or eateries that you associate with different places?**



Providence, Rhode Island is cheap deals on buffalo wing deals. Bangkok, Thailand is fried fish from the street, where they get their residual warmth comes from sitting all day under the sun. Union City, California is greasy Chinese food at homestyle restaurants with every item on the menu plastered on the wall. Cambridge, UK is chip butties and Sainbury’s basics.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Michener-Copernicus Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.



Machado spoke with Advocate President Sabrina Li ‘20 by phone in early January. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.



**SL: One of the main questions we’re asking in our themed issue “Feast” is what happens when desire is given an audience? What happens when individual hunger turns communal? Your work deals so much with desire––queer desire, female desire, an archival desire to represent the marginalized––and by nature you are expressing those desires publicly. I’m curious what thoughts you have about the expression of desire in your work?**



CM: For me, desire is a kind of engine. It's the most interesting thing to me. And the fact that my desire is not met by so much art is definitely part of the engine of my creation. It's partially what brings me to the table––saying I feel this way about certain things, and I think other people do as well. And it's funny that you would talk about it in terms of a feast because I feel like the act of feeding someone else is one of the most human and basic kindnesses that we can do. And it feels connected to the desire to write for myself, and then also by extension for other people. It feels like the center of what I'm doing.



**SL: One of the aspects of your work that I admire so much is how you play with the story’s relationship to the reader. For instance, in the chapter “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure” in your memoir and your short story “The Husband Stitch” you give playful and incisive directions to the reader––what voices to read your characters in, how they should feel when they haven’t followed your instructions and read a page they were never supposed to, what the sky should look like after they’ve read a scene. In these pieces of your writing, the work feels almost like a talk story, that it is meant to be spoken aloud. For you, how does the role of the reader operate in your writing, and how does it come up in your drafting process?**



CM: Oh, that's such an interesting question. I feel like it really depends. I mean, generally speaking, the reader is actually at the very bottom of my list of people that I'm interested in writing for because I actually believe that I write for myself first. At least I feel that way about my fiction. I had the interesting observation that for this memoir, I feel I actually was writing with a larger audience than myself in mind, because I was thinking a lot about how the narratives that I wanted didn't exist. And so I needed to create them for myself, and then, by extension, for other people. So I feel like I was more aware when writing the second book of who my audience would be. But for my first book, I liked the idea of being playful––of being playful with the reader, whoever they might be, not assuming that I know who they are, but assuming that if they're reading my work that they're in a playful place, you know? I think that is definitely interesting to me and has become a part of my process.



**SL: And how did you come to those forms that subvert the reader and playfully chide them? How did you discover those, and how did they emerge in your work?**



CM: I mean I think I’ve always liked work that did that. I obviously did not invent that. One of my favorite books as a kid was The Monster at the End of This Book. It follows [the Sesame Street muppet] Grover, and Grover is telling a story where he's like, Don't get to the end of this book, there's a monster. And he's constantly trying to make the reader stop moving, so he tries to brick up the pages, and you turn the page and he's like, Oh, you broke through my bricks. And so the whole book, he's actively fighting you because he doesn't want you to get to the end of the book because there's a monster there. And the twist is that he is the monster at the end of the book. I remember being so enamored with that idea as a child, and so much of what I liked to read had metafictional qualities to it in which the reader was either a character or somebody who was being considered or talked to. I also really loved A Series of Unfortunate Events, and that also had a lot of gestures to the reader. And I think just the idea that a writer could reach out of a book in that way was just super-interesting to me. And I feel like there's a lot of ways in which a reader, by reading, the author gets to engage with their brain, and you get to suggest to them things like their complicity in reading, or question their assumptions, or poke back at them, or tell them a joke, and I feel like that's really magical. I really love that.



**SL: As I've been reading your work, I've seen that a lot of your writing borrows from fables and fairy tales. What does the world and mechanism of the fairytale open up for you in your writing? How do you negotiate the universalizing and flattening qualities fairytales tend to have?**



CM: Fairy tales have that effect by design. The form of the fairy tale flattens, and that creates a depth of response in the reader, which is an idea that Kate Bernheimer has kicked around, and there’s actually a really lovely essay that I teach of hers called “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale.” So, there's just a lot of space for the reader to go when you have these “flattened” stories or these stories that are dealing in abstractions or a lack of more realistic characterization––this is a feature, not a bug. I've always found fairy tales to be very interesting and useful for my writing. Fairy tales show us that archetypes exist for a reason. And that human stories, while being incredibly diverse, actually have common elements, I think was very helpful and instructive for me, especially for the memoir. I found that actually quite comforting. Because I feel like I went through this weird phase writing that new book where I kept thinking I thought my experience was unique, and it's actually really common, and that's painful. But on the other hand, it's this way of saying like, you're not alone, you know, you exist. You, you human being at this very moment exist in a continuum, you exist in a context, in a space with other people, and I think that's actually kind of beautiful.



**SL: An idea that really resonated with me that you talked about in In The Dreamhouse was the idea that trauma and pain, if not exercised to their physical extreme, feel less significant. For example, when you are talking about how you wish you had a mark on your body, a photo as proof of the trauma from your relationship. I was wondering if you could speak more about that––this olympics of trauma, hierarchies of pain.**



CM: It's weird because I feel like I don't believe in it, and yet I still engage in it. You know, like, I don't believe me. There are lots of different kinds of pain, and they're not necessarily comparable, or they're not more valid than others. I feel like people right now get very invested in hierarchies of oppression and pain and trauma, and I don't exactly know why. I'm not sure I have a larger societal explanation for it, but I think we are very focused on it, and it really bugs me. And yet I understand it because I understand, you know, what it was like to say I had this experience, but I know that you're not going to give it as much credence as if I showed you a photo with a bruise. And that's sort of the reality that I've had to exist in and I have existed in ever since this experience that I had. So it strikes me as completely unuseful, and yet we sort of feel compelled to engage in it, and that makes me really sad.



**SL: Writers are now more and more on social media. Publishers are encouraging writers to craft a public persona. For you, being on Twitter, how does this rise of social media and the public writer interact with the very private, introspective act of writing? How have you reckoned with these tensions as both a fiction writer and a memoirist?**



CM: I'm lucky in that I don't feel like I've been pressured to do anything. I think the pressure that comes on writers from social media happens a little more with commercial genres. My publisher would not really care if I was or was not on Twitter. They've never said anything to me about it. I like Twitter, and I'm on it because I like it. And if I ever start really hating it––and I honestly feel like I'm getting to that point because it's become really shitty in the last like six months––I might just leave it because I find it annoying. But I do it because I enjoy it. I like taking photos, and I like talking about stuff that interests me with a large group of people. And as soon as it becomes not interesting, I'll stop doing it. I used to keep a LiveJournal for years in the early aughts, and I did that very actively and was very public, and a lot of people read what I had to say when I was very young, and I really liked it. So I feel like Twitter right now for me is just like LiveJournal. And maybe at some point I'll move on from it. But for now, it's sating a pleasure, a desire. It's a kind of pleasure that I enjoy.



**SL: Do you ever find that readers conflate what you say in your tweets with your fiction or memoir writing? Like I now have a version of Carmen's thoughts from what she says on Twitter, and now I think I have an idea of what Carmen’s like, and this is the lens through which I’ll now read her writing.**



CM: That's so interesting. I mean, yeah, maybe a little. I mean, I do think it's funny. I don't know if it's actually about Twitter necessarily, but people do say to me that I'm funnier and nicer than they expect me to be when I do events, and I'm always like, What's that mean? I think I'm relatively nice, and I do think I'm funny, but I guess the work does not suggest that, and I don't know how to process that. But what I say on Twitter is real in the sense that it's my thoughts and feelings. But just like any kind of forward-facing platform, it's curated, and it’s specific to a certain persona, and I'm obviously not sharing every single fucking thought I have on Twitter, thank God. So you know, it is me and it is not me at the same time.



**SL: Are the truths that you're writing in your fiction different than in your nonfiction? With nonfiction, obviously, the things that you're writing on the page are supposed to be read assuming they've happened in real life. Does that change your writing process at all? Does it make you feel freer in certain ways or more limited in others?**



CM: It's a formally really different process, because when you're writing nonfiction, you're stuck with the things that happened. It's different than writing fiction because if you're like, That is inconvenient to me, I will simply change it because that is fiction and I can do whatever I want. And that's obviously really fun. And I miss that. And I feel like that level of liberation is helpful to me as a writer. But also, doing research for a nonfiction book and writing from experience is a kind of challenge that's really pleasurable. And I think it is actually very interesting.



**SL: On a technical level, is your process for writing short stories different from the way you wrote your memoir?**



CM: Oh, yeah, I mean, it couldn't be more different. Short stories are thematic-based. They come to me as What if I did this? or What would this look like? And I feel like I write them in bursts. And with the memoir, I had a weird, skeletal draft, and then I added all the research, and then I had to mix it all together. I almost can't even explain it because they're so different, like the processes were as different as it possibly could be. Also it's the issue of writing short stories versus writing a single book, you know, one full book. That is one thing which is also just structurally really different.



**SL: A theme that In The Dreamhouse looks at a lot is the archival silence surrounding queer domestic abuse and violence. How do you go about writing a history that doesn’t exist, and how do you grapple with your own personal history interacting with this nebulous one?**



CM: I mean, how do you do it? I don't know. I guess one has to decide if I did an okay job. And if I did, then I say, well, I just looked for as much stuff as I could, and then I tried to put it in order. And then the more I wrote about it, the more it made sense to me. I'm not a historian by trade, which for me was the hardest part about working on this book. I felt like I was really outside of my level of expertise. If you asked me to write a short story, I'm on it. But to sort of go at this as a historian was quite difficult. And I worried that I wouldn't do it correctly. And by the end of the process, I had sort of done enough research that I was like, well, I don't know much of anything, but I do know about this one topic from these dates to these dates in this country. I can speak to queer domestic violence in lesbian relationships in the United States between 1980 and 2010. That is a thing that I can speak to. And that's very specific. So, I had to sort of pull it together when it made sense to me, and I had to also be comfortable with the fact that I might not be right, in that I might do something wrong, which is also its own challenge.



**SL: How did you reconcile with that latter part, knowing that your work is a part of this canon that at the moment has very few works in it, unfortunately, but something might go wrong. How did you deal with that?**



CM: I had to just accept that it was a possibility. I had to be forward-thinking about it. I had to just know that I'm doing my best. I'm doing my utmost, and that is what I can do.



**SL: To return to the theme of this issue, I am curious what thoughts or images the notion of “feast” conjures for you?**



CM: Pleasure. Things we don't allow ourselves. Feast is a very interesting topic because I feel like we live in this time where the idea of a thing being a feast is so unthinkable. We've changed the language about it. We're no longer talking about low-calorie diets, but we're talking about wellness. But it's all the same kind of, like, eating disorders and body dysmorphia and body policing that we've always had, and fatphobia and things like that. So I find the fact that the theme is feast to be actually quite lovely.

Chang-rae Lee is the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of five novels: Native Speaker (1995); A Gesture Life (1999); Aloft (2004); The Surrendered; and On Such a Full Sea (2014). Born in South Korea, Lee moved with his family to the United States at the age of three. He previously taught at Princeton University, where he was a creative writing professor and the director of Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing. Since 2016, he has been the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the English Department and Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. This winter, fiction editor Angela F. Hui was able to speak with Lee over the phone. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

*Pixy Liao is an artist born and raised in Shanghai, China. She currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. For the past thirteen years, Liao has been working on the photography series “Experimental Relationship” with her boyfriend Moro. The four photos printed in this issue all originate from this series. Through her work, Liao has subverted ideas of gender, sexuality, performance, control, and race. Liao spoke with Advocate President Sabrina Li ‘20 by phone in early January. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.*



**SL: “Experimental Relationship” has been an ongoing photo project for thirteen years. What inspired the project? How has the project evolved for you?**



PL: It started in 2007. It was one year after I started dating Moro, and I was studying photography. I think for me, it was the time to really look for some kind of photo project that I felt belonged to me. When Moro and I met, it was a different type of relationship than what I had before. He is younger, and he's my first foreign boyfriend, and also he is Japanese, which makes it a little complicated because Chinese and Japanese usually have that impression about each other. So I think what's more different about this relationship is I found his personality to be very different from other boyfriends or men I knew before. He's very open-minded and also he doesn't have a very strong opinion about the usual idea of how a man should be. Like usually when you think about Japanese men, they usually think, according to stereotype, that they're very arrogant, that they're very, you know, masculine. But he's not like that, and he's younger, so he relies on me a lot. So I think that kind of changed the way I work with him in photographs. In the beginning, when I was shooting this project, I was asking him to help me with my other photos. And he usually wouldn’t reject me. He would always try to help me without considering what you usually think a man will consider. So I think in the beginning, when I shot those photographs, when I was using him as a model or prop, people would react less to my photo conception and more to how it was possible that a man would be willing to model like this in my photographs. Then that got me thinking that maybe, you know, there's something really special about this relationship, and I can make it into a photo project. That's how I started to photograph the two of us together.



**SL: Have you noticed a change or a different trajectory in the photos throughout the thirteen years you’ve been working on the project, and have the goals of the projects shifted for you at all?**



PL: Yes, definitely. I think in the beginning, when I first met him, I was at a point that I started to change my life into more like that of an artist’s. Before, I would never have thought about becoming an artist. And I met this new boyfriend and his style is very different from my other relationships. So I think I started to take up this new role as a woman leading the relationship. So I think in the beginning, I was very obsessed with the idea that, you know, I have so much power and control in the relationship. I think it shows up a lot in my earlier photographs. We’ve been together for so long, and there are periods of ups and downs. So later, like after a couple years after we graduated, I started to think of whether maybe my photographs were too much, maybe I’m overpowering him a little too much in our relationship––I would sometimes reflect on that, and this would show up in my photographs. And I think, especially in recent years, he has grown up so much. And we basically grew up together in the United States. I think our difference is getting smaller and smaller, and I think he's more mature than me in many different aspects of life. So I think later on in my photos, you will see we sometimes are in very equal kinds of positions in the photographs. And recently I think I kind of turned the lens more towards myself. In the beginning, I was just exploring the possibility of what I can be as a woman. And now, after taking pictures for so long, I think I have a pretty clear idea of what type of woman I want to be.



**SL: And what is the idea of the “woman you want to be?” How do you communicate this to your audience?**



PL: I think growing up in China, I always had this doubt. You know, in China, at least when I grew up, the idea of what a good woman is, what a good girl should be, is very limited: a good woman will be somebody who can find a good husband who can support her, but at the same time, she needs to sacrifice her life to the family to support her husband's career. People didn’t really consider independent women or strong women to be successful. And through my work I like to think about what is the best way to define a woman. I think the definition of woman is very limited. People just think of female as worse––like a woman would be somebody who's tender, who's soft, who's caring. I don't think any of that is true. I mean, we can be, but at the same time we can be something different.



**SL: So when you're setting up a photograph for “Experimental Relationship,” what does a typical dialogue sound like between you and your partner Moro when deciding on a pose? And to what extent is he an active participant in choosing what poses to put himself in or yourself in? And does he ever choose your poses?**



PL: I think in the beginning, I was very much into controlling every aspect of the photograph. So I didn’t expect him to do anything other than what I asked him to do. So I would tell him very simply, Oh, I want you to stand this way. I would move his body to look exactly the way I want him to. You know, I would say, Oh, you're looking at the camera. You don't look at the camera. It was very simple instruction. During the photoshoot, I would touch his body to modify his pose, and he would respond to that. And then sometimes he would give me an expression or a gesture that I would recognize as something I see in our real daily life. It was something that wasn’t designed by me. He was just naturally reacting to the situation that I set up. And then I realized that his improvisation and his input in the photograph is so, so important. It makes the photograph much more interesting and it adds a lot more life to it. So nowadays, I will tell him I want this kind of situation, and then I would ask him to get comfortable and do whatever he wants to do, and then I put myself in my own pose. Usually, I would just decide my own pose and sometimes I would do a pose based on his reaction. So if he reacted to a situation in a certain way, then I will also respond to that in the photograph as well.



**SL: One of the features of your photographs that immediately struck me was that you almost always see either you or Moro clicking the shutter in the image. So it's made very clear to the viewer that you two are the ones photographing yourselves and that you are in control and that this has been a shot that has been set up. I was wondering how you would describe your and Moro’s relationship to the audience and the viewer. Is your relationship to the audience different from Moro’s relationship to the audience, and in what ways?**



PL: I think the shutter release started from the very beginning because I was shooting with a film camera, and there's really no way to take the picture ourselves except for using the extension cable. And in the very beginning, it was because the cable release is so hard to squeeze, I just couldn't take the picture. Like my facial expression would be off if I had to take the pictures, so I always gave it to him. And we have a very early photo of when I was pinching his nipple, and he's taking the picture, and we're both standing in front of the camera. That picture I think kind of set the direction of this project because I feel like there's a connection going through me pinching his nipples, which almost signaled him to take the picture, and then he's the one who is actually taking the picture, and then the extension cable goes out of the frame and then extends to the audience. So it's like a circle going through this image. So I think after that image I always just accepted having the cords left in the image. I think it's a clue. And sometimes people will be confused because in a lot of the photographs, he’s the one who is actually taking the picture. So I think it's really interesting if people would think, Oh, the guy was taking the picture, and then afterwards they realize, Oh, actually the photographer is the woman, and how their response to the photograph would change dramatically based on their knowledge about who is the author of the photograph. One thing that is very interesting is that Moro is the person who actually controls the exact moment of the photograph. So I always tell him, I'm ready, you can take the picture. But he will always wait until he feels ready. So after I tell him I'm ready, I have no idea when he's going to take the picture, I just have to be there and just wait for the moment. And I think in that period of time he actually has a lot of control in the photograph, which is very interesting to me––I have control, but at the same time he has control. It’s almost like in a relationship where sometimes you think the person who's in control is actually being controlled by the other person or vice versa.



**SL: That’s a really interesting dynamic of agency. It reminds me of when I was reading once in an interview that you were saying that “All the photographs are staged...When we are in the photos, we are performers for the camera, to create an image. We are not completely ourselves.” I was wondering if you could elaborate on the version of yourself that you perform for the camera. Have there been photographs where you noticed that the photograph was less of a performance than you would have liked? How important for you is this barrier between performance and authenticity, the barrier between you and the viewer?**



PL: I think the me in the photograph is an image of a version of me that I want to give to the viewer. Of course, in each photograph my role is actually slightly different depending on my idea for the specific photo. I think it is me, but it is not the real me. The real me could be more normal. The me in the photograph can be more focused on being the strong woman in a heterosexual relationship. I think the performance part is very important because I think, for me, the person is not really me, but it's me in fantasy. So it cannot be too real. So I think in regard to performance whenever I was in the photo, I was very concerned about how my expression is, how my body is. But occasionally accidents happen and I lose control and I can’t perform as I’ve designed it. One example is in a photograph of both of us on a couch, and I was wearing a pink sweater, and Moro is lying on top of my shoulders. In the photograph my idea was that I am such a strong woman, you know, I can carry him on my shoulder. So I set up the frame and I took the picture. But when I saw the picture, I was very disappointed because during the photoshoot Moro was actually much heavier than I expected, so when he was lying on top of my shoulders, he was too heavy, so I was always being pushed down in the photograph. So even though I composed the picture, there's a lot of empty space at the top of the image because he was too heavy. I thought I could sit up much taller, but in reality, he just pushed me down. And I really liked the result in the very beginning. And I think after a while, I don't remember how long, but I realized that what was really happening is that a lot of the time when I think about a photograph, my ideas are so far from my old point of view that I really don’t think about the reality of it––what's happening in your life or what your imagination is about, who you can be or what you want to be is a different thing. Sometimes I think I'm such a strong woman that I can handle everything, that I can handle this heavy burden in our life. But actually, it sometimes crushes me. So, I think after I realized that, I started to appreciate that photograph, even though I couldn't be as strong as I wanted myself to be in the photograph.



**SL: So going back to this idea of fantasy, I remember hearing during a talk when you said, “My work is not about equality — it’s about my fantasy.” I was wondering what the difference is for you between equality and fantasy, and has your fantasy changed throughout “Experimental Relationship”?**



PL: I get asked a lot whether my work is feminist. And for me, I feel like feminism is about equal genders. But in my photographs, it is very obvious we are not equal. And I don't want it to be translated as a feminist work because I really don't think from a feminist point of view. Otherwise, my work would look very different. So I think in my project the fantasy is more about what do people want? What do they desire to be? Without thinking about moral concern and political correctness. It is a lot more personal than being equal, being fair, it's not about that.



**SL: Does it ever bother you that the audience tends to impose that feminist lens on your work and in the process creates a binary of one person is in power and one person isn’t, rather than a more nebulous gray zone?**



PL: I think I can understand why people associate my work with feminism. There are a lot of similar ideas between my work and feminism. But I think I have the fear that people will misread it as a feminist work. And then because my photo is not really about equality, then they will say, Those feminists, they're horrible. Look at what Pixy Liao did to her husband. I don't really want to go into that. I think it’s very dangerous to measure artists’ works with political correctness. I think they will lose a lot of freedom.



**SL: You once said in an interview that even though your work is better received in the West, you always feel like your work is still viewed as different, other. How do you feel that the West others your work?**



PL: I think that it depends on where I am and what the public thinks in that place. Especially when I started the project in Memphis, there are very few Asians there, and I think a lot of people’s first impression is not that this is a work about a female photographer and her boyfriend, but it is, This is Asian. They're so weird. Their first impression would be you’re somebody else and this is your lifestyle. I think New York is very different because New York has so many people from different races. I think it also depends on your life experience and whether you're in close connection with different races. So it depends on the person––whether or not they see Asians and feel surprised. And I think in Europe, it depends on which city you go to. If it is very white, your photo will be seen as a very exotic thing even though you're talking about a very universal topic. But people like us, I feel like they are more open-minded, and I think they will accept the ideas of what I'm talking about in a photograph.



**SL: Do you think Chinese Americans' understanding or reactions to your work are different from mainland Chinese viewers’ reactions?**



PL: That’s a very interesting question. I think that’s the first time a person’s asked me about that. I think Chinese Americans respond to this project a lot. I would say even more so than other Americans, for sure. I think how they react to it goes back to your family. I think if you grew up in a very traditional Chinese family home, I think maybe your reaction to it will be similar to the audience in mainland China. What do you think?



**SL: Oh, me?**



PL: Yeah, you're Chinese American right?



**SL: Yeah. Um, I haven't really been to mainland China that much though.**



PL: Do you think your family or your friends have an idea of what a good Chinese woman should be?



**SL: Definitely. I think I especially resonated with what you were talking about before of how the fantasy you're portraying in your photos is othered because of your race. I remember reading in one of your interviews that you were saying how one of your pieces in which you’re eating papaya off of Moro was in response to people wanting to eat food off of Asian women. I could definitely see parts of America reducing your pieces as portrayals of weird Asian dynamics and seeing it through that more racial lens, because I guess the narrative still is that Asians have crazy solutions to intimacy, and that results in othering and dehumanizing them. But for myself personally, when I saw your work I was really struck by it and it moved me a lot. I saw myself in your works, and this playfulness and subversion of racial and gender stereotypes I still see in American media. And when we were talking before about equality versus fantasy, I felt like your works do such a great job of complicating what it means to be in an equal partnership and what it means to live within hierarchies, particularly dominance and submissiveness––the people you think are in power are never fully the ones who are.**



PL: Now that you talk about it, I think there might be a difference between Chinese Americans and Chinese audiences in mainland China. I think one difference is maybe the women in mainland China feel more of a social pressure, and I think maybe it's better in the United States. And I think the other thing that’s different is the idea of being Asian. I think that could be something that people living in mainland China would never think about. They would never think about how other people might react to it, because we are Asian, and I only experienced this after moving to the United States. So in the beginning, I was very confused about how it was possible that when people first see my photos, the first thing they think is we are different. That's the first thing they think.



**SL: How do you react when you get those responses?**



PL: I think I have accepted the idea that once you produce the work, how people react is out of your control, and it actually has very little to do with your work, or what you made, or what you have in mind. It has more to do with who they are. So when I hear different responses, I realize there's so many people, and we are so different in many, many ways.



**SL: Do you ever see yourself ending the photo series?**



PL: I don't want to end it unless I couldn't make it anymore. And I think my life is leading this work. So it depends on how my life goes. How my and Moro’s lives go.



**SL: And what is your next project?**



PL: Recently, I've been really thinking about female leadership. I am interested in female leaders from Asian history because they are so rare. I'm interested in what kinds of methods they took to get their power, and I'm interested in their desires and ambitions. So I think my new project is going to be called “Evil Women Cult.” I want to create a cult for these women so people can actually get to know them and recognize them as a group of ambitious women who existed thousands of years ago. They existed. And I want to promote them and let more people know about them.

*Sarah Ruhl’s plays — dramatic worlds equal parts lyrical, sprightly, surreal, and strange — include* The Clean House, Eurydice, Melancholy Play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play). *Ruhl has also published essays, letters, and, most recently, a collection of poetry, 44 poems for you. Among other accolades, she is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award nominee, and has won a MacArthur Fellowship, a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and a Whiting Award. She teaches playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.*



Ruhl spoke with Advocate Publisher Eliya Smith ’20 in January at a pastry shop in Brooklyn. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.



**EOS: The issue is called *Feast*, so I thought that I would start with a question about consumption. In one of your essays, you basically argue that theater is the anti-consumptive art, because it's so tangible. But I feel like when you leave a play, you feel like you *have* consumed it, because it's all gone. Whereas if you put on a movie or if you're scrolling through Instagram, those things are still there after you've finished looking at them.**



Do you think there are certain kinds of plays that resist consumption better than others? Also, what's wrong with consumable theater?



SR: I think the question to ask is, is there merch in the lobby? If there's merch, it's a consumable play. If there's no merch, less likely.



It's a really interesting point you make about, you feel full after you leave the theater. In my mind, what's amazing is you feel full, but you haven't eaten. You know? It's like, you have communion, say, at church, and you feel full even though it's a little wafer. It's metaphorical eating, as opposed to real eating.



**EOS: I'm Jewish, but I believe you.**



SR: Well, I'm trying to think about Shabbat, then.



**EOS: We eat regular food.**



SR: Right, it's not a metaphorical challah.



Louisa May Alcott's father had that utopia, Fruitlands. If you believe in a step beyond fruitarians, you have people who just sit there all day, Yogi's who eat air. So I think theater is like air-eating. It's like sipping the ether.



**EOS: You write in a lot of non-theatrical mediums. I know some plays don’t ever really feel finished, even in performance, but all plays are decidedly *unfinished* on the page, especially as compared to poetry or prose. Do you think about leaving interpretive space in your plays in a way that you don't with writing that reaches its final form on the page?**



SR: Definitely. I think plays have a lot of white space for your collaborators to collaborate with you. Whereas poems have a lot of white space for the imagination of the reader.



In both ways, there's a kind of erasure, so that you're not taking up all the space. Whereas in prose, you're taking up a lot of space. And then a film script you're directing the eye in the moment. I think theater and poems have more in common than theater and film.



**EOS: Why is that?**



SR: Because of this interpretive space, this white space.



**EOS: But in a film script, isn’t there also interpretive space?**



SR: There is some white space on screenplays, but it doesn't gleam. It just sits there and waits for a director.



**EOS: Can you tell me about your relationship with actors? You’ve said you like people who have a certain intuitive understanding of text. How would you define that? Is it emotional intuition, or is it something else?**



SR: I think it has to do with simplicity and intelligence and irony and open-heartedness. And also not confusing the need for pretend with the need to become someone else, the need for backstory — not to over-dramatize those needs at the expense of just saying your line, and hearing the music of the language.



**EOS: So do you not like method acting, I assume?**



SR: My impulse would be to say, that's right. I don't. But then again, I know some actors are brilliant method actors who I would be like, “oh my god, I'd be so I would be so lucky to work with you.” But I do find with the method actors, they overwork the language, and then with the way TV and film has carried method through, actors kind of add “um's” and “err's” at the ends, to kind of make the language more shaggy, more realistic. And I hate that.



**EOS: I wanted to ask about this dialectic that you’ve identified between Miller and Williams, which becomes, basically, mystery plays versus morality plays. My guess is that your work falls on the mystery side of that?**



SR: Yeah.



**EOS: Have you ever tried to write a morality play?**



SR: I'm working on this play called *Becky Nurse of Salem*. In a way it feels like a morality play as mystery play, or as an answer to Miller's moral that he extracts from *The Crucible*.



**EOS: So you're answering Miller’s morality play with a mystery play?**



SR: Well… maybe it's more of a morality play. Maybe it's a hybrid. I don't know. But it definitely feels like the moral that Miller extracts from *The Crucible* deeply troubles me. So I've been trying to write the answer to that.



**EOS: What do you think that that moral is?**



SR: Well, so okay, whatever he wants to say about McCarthyism, etc., that's fine. I don't mind. But what he says about women? Not fun. Abigail Williams was 11, historically. John Proctor was 60. And they never met, except maybe in the courtroom. They never had an affair. So what I find really morally mischievous in that play is that Miller acts like it's a big history play, and he puts copious footnotes, so you think you're seeing the stage version of history. But the emotional center of it is a lie, a total fabrication. He blames this terrible tragedy on the lust of a young woman for an old man. Never happened.



**EOS: Yeah, totally. In his epilogue, he's like, “Abigail later turned up as a prostitute.” There’s no evidence that happened.**



SR: It's so crazy! He's like, “some say.” It's like, who said? He's just making women into witches all over again some other way. Seductress whores. Meanwhile he wants to have sex with Marilyn Monroe, and he feels guilty. So he puts that libidinal energy into the play. There is a whole monologue in my play that this docent at the Salem Witch museum is telling, where she's like, our country's whole understanding of the Salem Witch Trials is based on Arthur Miller's lust for Marilyn Monroe.



**EOS: Every single kid in this country reads that play in high school —**



SR: Yup. You have to.



**EOS: And I feel like it’s become the only understanding of the Salem witch trials that we have.**



SR: That's right. It's done every day. In some part of the world.



**EOS: Right. Okay, this is a question I try to ask every successful artist I meet: Personally, I find that the more I write, the more I begin to worry that I'm starting to develop a complex, where anything I experience could potentially be fodder for art. It's a really terrifying prospect; I don't want to turn into Andy Warhol, where I can't experience my life! So I was wondering how you navigate that — especially when you start with pain, but even when you experience joy or happy moments, and you feel the urge to turn them into art. Are there things that you feel like should never be turned into a product?**



SR: I think it's about not seeing art as a product. Which goes back to the consumption thing. If it isn't a product, then it's a very spiritual practice to turn your pain into art. It's not commodification. It's catharsis.



I have my students at Yale every year read [Louis Hyde's] *The Gift*. At least the first chapter. He talks about, how do you live as, say, a poet, in the capitalist economy. And he says, poetry really exists in a gift economy — and I think most not-for-profit theater does, too. So, you're in a capitalist structure, but you're trying to move around as a maker of a gift. So what do you do with that? It's a mental trick. It's a trick of how to live one's life, because those two things don't exactly match. The culture in which you're living and what you're trying to make.



I would say you, yeah, don't turn your pain into a commodity. Don't. That's horrible. But do turn it into art. That's fine.



And I feel like unfortunately, writers, most of us, were born with a predisposition to observe while in the midst of. It's a peculiarity that I have had since childhood. Maybe I'll grow out of it and become a sage, or something. Or an extrovert. But until then, that's the predicament.



**EOS: I have occasionally wondered if I will look back on college and feel like I was the most sincere about my art during this time, because in college you do everything for free. You make art just because you want to.**



SR: It's quite possible. I mean, I think it's important to check in with yourself in the course of your life and think, would I be doing this if I were doing it for free? And for most great works of art, the artists would make it regardless of whether they were being paid.



**EOS: Back to commodification: *Eurydice* [Ruhl’s 2003 play] came up in my playwriting class the other day, and my professor was like, “oh, I used to assign *Eurydice*, but then everyone started coming in saying they'd already read it in high school.”**



SR: Oh my god, that's crazy.



**EOS: I thought that that was really interesting, because, you know… we were just talking about how everyone reads Arthur Miller in high school; I don’t think of you as having that kind of ubiquity. And [the professor] was saying how, because theater co-opts new devices really quickly, plays that looked like *Eurydice* started cropping up everywhere. I'm wondering if you feel like — I don't know if mainstream is quite the right word — but as your work has a different relationship with audiences, if you feel like your relationship to your writing has changed.**



SR: It's always an unknown sea voyage, whenever you start writing a new play. It doesn't matter what your body of work is, you're always facing a blank page, whether you're 12 or 17, or however old. I do think it's hard when one feels like your work is now being compared to earlier work. But I hope more girls read *Eurydice* than *The Crucible*. Ha ha.



**EOS: Do you feel excited when you think about the future of theater?**



SR: Yes! I think it's thrilling. I think there's a renaissance of women writing, a renaissance of people of color writing. And I think because we're in this weird digital age, I think there is an appreciation of the way theatre mainlines presence.



I will say that in the last couple rehearsal rooms I've been in, sadly, I can feel the difference, now that the phone is sort of almost an extension of the self. Stage managers are typing while the actors are working; the designers or whoever's checking their phone in the middle of a scene. It's not as concentrated and focused. And I wonder if that comes out in the work on stage.



**EOS: But on the flip side… I mean, I’m always excited to see plays, but I sometimes think specifically about the fact that I'm going to turn off my phone for two hours, and I especially look forward to being forced to do that.**



SR: Yeah! It's like a meditation. At this point.



**EOS: I’ve been thinking about how theater might be the most painful kind of art to make — if you write a book, you don't have to watch people reading the book, and then get bored and check their phones. How do you maintain that generosity such that you still want to give them presents?**



SR: You have to always get an aisle seat.



So you can be aware of their boredom, but not so aware that it makes you want to die. You have to have an aisle seat. And you put someone you love between you and the next audience member. Pay attention to the bodily signals audiences send you. Like, notice when they laugh. Notice when they're bored. Notice when they get up to pee. Often they have to pee, but if they were really focused, maybe they wouldn't. Notice when the coughing epidemics happen. So you have a porous sensitivity to those things, but you also have to develop a thick skin and follow your internal compass and not be completely beholden to trying to please your audience.



**EOS: But you're still giving them a gift?**



SR: Yeah, you are giving them a gift. I think that's important, because I think otherwise, artists feel like the world's parasites, or like, succubi — useless, functionless people who are like, please, take my catharsis. But if you imagine a world without art, it's a very dreary, horrible, leaden world.

*Talia Lavin '12 is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn. She has worked at the New Yorker, the Huffington Post and Media Matters, and written for the New Republic, the Nation, and the New York Times Review of Books, among other publications. Though Lavin first encountered the world of the far-right while fact-checking stories for the New Yorker, it was not until the the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, in 2017, that she began to publish her own coverage of the movement. "It was sort of a seismic national moment," she recalls, "and my experience of it was as a Jew, watching these anti-Semitic chants, and the horror of that." She published her first feature on the far-right shortly thereafter; her subsequent work has focused mostly on investigating and unraveling the mechanics of reactionary forces in the United States. She will publish a book on the subject, Culture Warlords, with Hachette Books in October. Lavin spoke with Advocate Publisher Eliya Smith '20 by phone in early January. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.*



**EOS: In "[Age of Anxiety](https://newrepublic.com/article/153153/age-anxiety)," which you wrote almost a year ago, you had this great quote: "the state of the union, it seems, is scared as hell." Is fear still the predominating emotion in the United States, or do you feel like it's morphed into something else?**



TL: I think we are still definitely a nation led by fear. I think the predominant emotion that nationalists like Trump prey on is fear. And propaganda outlets like Fox quite actively stoke it. People on the other side of the spectrum are also feeling a great deal of fear. Fear towards the environment, fear of war ---  just a whole lot of terror in this world. And fear, as I am learning from my own experiences with panic disorder, can be really powerful. The answer isn't necessarily to tell people to calm down; I don't think the rational response to the world right now is to be calm. I do think there is a way of sort of cooling your fear, acknowledging that things are valid and you're right, but you need to be part of the world, and to fix things as best you can.



**EOS: You spend so much time researching and steeping yourself in these things that I assume are really hard to encounter. On a personal level, how do you deal with that? What kind of steps you take to insulate yourself emotionally, if that's even possible?**



TL: I make sure that I'm in community with people. I have a pretty robust group of people who are either reporters or activists who deal with this stuff on a regular basis. And that really helps, just in terms of talking to people who understand. If I say, "ugh, this particular hate meme that I've seen crop up on Telegram is bothering me today," they won't be like, "well, why are you exposing yourself to that stuff?" They get it.



Everyone who covers the far right --- men and women, although for sure women have it worse --- has experienced harassment, and stress, and the horror of being exposed to that kind of propaganda day in and day out. Especially as a Jew, it becomes pretty weird. Like when I was researching my book this past year, just to spend every day really immersed in anti-Semitic propaganda, it was disturbing and sometimes surreal. And then you wind up sounding like an absolute crazy person as parties, because the stuff that's on the top of your head is like, absolutely so far from ---  even in the Trump era --- the stuff that people talk about on the regular. But it's just the stuff that's in your head.



**EOS: Do you find it fulfilling? I'm wondering how you motivate yourself to keep working on these projects, which I'm sure can be really painful.**



TL: I think that it's a very tumultuous time in history to be living through. And sometimes I think about what I would like to tell my children, should I have any, what I was doing during this time, and to be able to say that I was recording and sometimes just actively fighting the growing fascist movement in my country. It sounds cheesy, but that's something that gets me through the day. And the other thing is, again, being in community, having these comrades, and knowing that I'm working with other people who are facing the same pains, and even far worse situations in terms of threats, and who are continuing undaunted, is a motivator.



For anyone who is considering doing this kind of work, I think the most important thing to say is: don't be a lone cowboy. I think there can be kind of a machismo in the world of journalism. Practically, it's super helpful to have comrades who I can talk to. But then also just to have people who get it when you say, "hey, today's hard, I need a pep talk," or whatever. Being a lone cowboy is just not the way to do this work, 'cause you're gonna burn out really quickly.



**EOS: Do you find hopeful takeaways the more you dig? Are there reasons to feel like the escalation of the far-right might be turned around?**



TL: I have to say that I don't have an easy-pat answer to that. I think if you look at the landscape of the world, the reactionary forces are ascendant. And winning. If you look at just the absolute smoldering tire-fire that is the world right now, it's really hard to come to other conclusions. So I do think that we have to face that we're in sort of a long, dark night of the forces of reaction.



I will say that the people that give me hope, and the people that I talked to for my book that gave me a sense that there were people in the trenches fighting, were anti-fascists. And I, over the course of the past year or two, I have become someone who identifies as an anti-fascist. I know that term can be loaded, largely because of a really sort of dumb, inaccurate, reactionary media, and also because of the sort of instinctual desire of a lot of people in the center left have to see themselves as sort of virtuous, clean. But this is a dirty fight. The people who give me hope, or the people that I look to emulate or that I think are doing effective work in countering the rise of hate are people who are going through and looking at these chats, people who are infiltrating these groups.



I think we're at a point where the current administration is actively complicit in white supremacy and white nationalism, so you can't hope for top-down social censure. I think that whatever hope comes in countering hate groups is making sure that hate has a social cost, and that's on all of us. As someone with panic disorder, I'm not a frontline kinda gal. I don't do crowds. But I can do a lot of things at my keyboard. So can you.



**EOS: So in terms of... angle? I guess that would be the topic of this question. I feel like we're all sort of fed up with the 'this article is going to nuance the far-right' type of profile that we keep seeing. How do you write about, or how do you even approach thinking about the far-right in a way that yields insight but doesn't fall into that trap?**



TL: I do think it's important to look at the causes and mechanisms of radicalization. So I think, for example, Kevin Roose at the New York Times has done some good work on that, looking at people's YouTube histories, for example. I think that's important.



For me, the tug is not so much between how do I not write lush, flattering profiles of these gaping assholes but rather, how do I balance the fact that I feel a great deal of academic interest in this, versus always keeping the human toll of hate in the foreground. I think it's sort of inherently easier for me, because I'm the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and so the consequences of, say, violent anti-Semitism are never super far from my mind. I think that I have some inherent advantages on that front --- my maternal family was really marinated in PTSD from what the Holocaust had done, and so my instinct has never been to valorize --- or even treat as cagey or funny --- any figures, no matter how ridiculous they can be.



The challenge [is] making sure your coverage reflects the real potential human toll of radicalization. And I think the way that I do that is just by keeping it in close communication with my own anger; making sure that my anger never gets dialed down or muted. You have to stay angry if you're going to write well about the far-right.



**EOS: I was going to ask you a question about how you feel like your Jewishness informs the work that you do, the stakes of reporting on people who so explicitly direct their hatred toward you, but I feel like you maybe just answered it.**



TL: I think it's really easy if you are not a target of hate --- whether that comes in the form of violent misogyny or anti-Semitism, anti-blackness --- it's easy to start treating this as an intellectual exercise. Or, you know, even foregrounding the humanity of these young men, rather than always keeping your eye on the prize, which is that they are merchants of hate.



The truth is, it's so easy to try to otherise people who are in hate groups and say, they're poor, they're dumb, they must be toothless and living in a trailer. No. The truth is, some of them are just as well-educated as you or me. It's much more about trying to find a sense of belonging and purpose and meaning --- that's often the galvanizing force for why people join hate groups. And any human being can fall prey to the desire for belonging and the desire to feel like they mean something.



I mean, no one wants to hear about the Nazi next door, but I think that it is important not to otherize, to say, "that could never be me, that could never be anyone I know, because I'm smarter, because I'm better." The truth is that hate groups prey on really universal thoughts. It's just like, "I'm lonely, and what does my life mean?" And then people come in with really easy, ready-made answers, like "it's the Jews," "it's the immigrants," "Jews bringing in the immigrants." "Here's this book, read some history. Have you checked out *Protocols of the Elders of Zion*?"



It is a weird thing to argue, to be like, 'don't otherize them.' But don't assume that no one you know could fall prey to this stuff, or that it's just a totally alien thing, when really, the things that drive people to hate are the same things that can drive people to do really laudable stuff: wanting to belong, wanting to change the world, wanting to make a difference. And hate groups can and do prey on those sentiments. Quite effectively.

*Young Jean Lee is a playwright, director, actor, and filmmaker. She is perhaps best known for the work she produced in collaboration with her theater company, including the critically acclaimed shows SONG OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN, THE SHIPMENT, and UNTITLED FEMINIST SHOW. In 2018, Lee became the first Asian-American woman to have her play produced on Broadway with her show STRAIGHT WHITE MEN. She received her MFA from Brooklyn College, and is currently an Associate Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. Poetry board member Devonne Pitts corresponded with Young Jean Lee by email in January 2020.*



**DP: You’re widely considered “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” (Time Out New York) What and who initially compelled you to work within the avant-garde?**



YJL: I studied to be a Shakespeare scholar for almost ten years before I quit to work in experimental theater instead. My abandoned dissertation was a comparison of Shakespeare’s KING LEAR (my favorite Shakespeare play) and the anonymous KING LEAR that Shakespeare stole his plot from. I expected the original KING LEIR to really suck, but was surprised by how enjoyable a read it was. I found it much snappier and more coherent than Shakespeare’s version, which is sprawling, crazy, and messy. But Shakespeare’s version is massively more interesting. So I think the reason why I didn’t respond to mainstream contemporary theater was because the best of it felt much closer to KING LEIR than to KING LEAR. Entertaining and easy vs. wild and challenging. So weirdly, I think it was my love of Shakespeare that helped to drive me toward experimental theater.



**DP: Very rarely, if ever, is a play written without the intention of some sort of physical embodiment. Therefore, playwriting differs, to some extent, from the kinds of writing often published in this magazine. How do you position playwriting within the realm of literature? I mean, we’ve all probably had to read some Shakespeare, or maybe another playwright, in a high school English class, so I wonder what you think of the literary value of playwriting, outside of its primary function as the starting point for a physical production?**



YJL: I think that playwriting has tremendous literary value, as is evidenced by the continuing impact of Shakespeare. A screenplay is a blueprint for film production, but the published script of a play is a document of an existing theatrical production, so I think plays have as much literary merit as anything else.



**DP: In a recent Twitter post, you mentioned how the first song you wrote, “I’m Spending Christmas Alone,” spurred the creation of your band, Future Wife, whose music eventually found its way into your show WE’RE GONNA DIE. This made me curious as to how do you, an artist creating work within multiple artforms (theater, film, music), channel your creative energies across the various mediums? In other words, how do you know when you want to write a play, instead of making a film or working on another song with your band?**



YJL: The form tends to come out of the content. So for example, WE’RE GONNA DIE was written to comfort people who felt alone in their pain, and singing seemed comforting.



**DP: After reading about the creative process behind THE SHIPMENT, where you collaborated with an ensemble of black actors to create a show about the challenges of portraying black identity, I wonder if you see your work modeling ways for artists of different cultural identities to collaborate in the future? And do you hope to see yourself collaborating with other artists in this vein again in the near future?**



YJL: I’ve co-written a screenplay with my Lakota friend Jesse Short Bull using a similar method to the one I used for THE SHIPMENT. I think the key to cross-cultural collaboration is just listening.



**DP: In 2018, you became the first Asian-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway, with your work, STRAIGHT WHITE MEN. In his coverage of your work for The New Yorker, Hilton Als wrote that with STRAIGHT WHITE MEN you wanted to explore the straight white male character (a figure you “did not entirely understand”) through a genre you “hadn’t fully explored” prior to this production. Here, he’s referencing how this play, in comparison to your other works, exhibits a more naturalistic, traditional approach to theatermaking. As someone who has explored themes of racial and gender identity within both traditional and experimental works, do you think traditional forms of theater have the ability to adequately challenge the ways racial and gender inequity has ingrained itself within the artform’s own history? Or do you think the avant-garde has more to offer along these lines?**



YJL: I think that it’s incredibly difficult to really challenge an audience with a traditional naturalistic play. The audience feels so safe and secure under the protection of the fourth wall, and the only real tool at the playwright's disposal is audience identification with the characters. It’s very limiting.



**DP: The catalyst for your creative process seems to change from project to project: whether it be your worst nightmare for what a play could be (SONGS OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN), your most uncomfortable challenge as a writer (THE SHIPMENT), or your first song (WE’RE GONNA DIE). As someone who has developed works from a wide variety of inspirations, I wonder if you could impart any words of wisdom for those theatermakers out there who may be wondering how to get started?**



YJL: If you want to write a play, the first step is to pick something to write about that you really care about—something that will be able to sustain your interest for the one to three years it will take to develop and produce the work. The second step is to write maniacally, by which I mean you just write and experiment and try things out without thinking too much about it. The thing beginning playwrights don’t understand is how much of the play gets figured out through the process of writing. Often my students will write pages and pages of mind-numbingly dull monologues about a character’s backstory, and they’ll be like, “This is unreadable, I’m terrible!” They don’t realize that what they’re writing is gold. Even though it may all get deleted in the end, they are learning about their characters, their world, and their play through this glorious bad writing they’re doing. As an artist, as long as you’re learning, you’re winning.

Franklin Leonard ’00 is the founder of The Black List, an annual survey of popular unproduced screenplays. Leonard is a former member of the Poetry Board and served as Publisher his senior year. He spoke with Fiction Board member Luke Xu ’20 over the phone in early December. It was snowing. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.



*LX: I'm curious about your opinion on screenplays as a medium. They stand at this really weird intersection — they’re literature and also more than literature. They're words, and riveting to read, but not many people consume them like books, and a lot of people see them as a stepping stone to serve the end goal of creating another work of art, the movie. No other art form seems to work like that. What's your take on this?*



FL: It is a very strange form, and it's interesting because The Black List is really the only place where writing is celebrated for itself. When you think about the Best Screenplay award at the Oscars, that is an award given to a writer for how the movie ended up, not how the script was. There's any number of decisions that could turn a good script into a bad movie, right? So I think it is a distinct form in and of itself, but it is also the intermediary form on the way to a movie being made. I also think in the same way that when you look at a building, the architect didn't build the building, but they certainly did draw the blueprints. The screenplay exists in much the same space the blueprint exists in. So oftentimes, the builder and architect work together to create an extraordinary building. But without a good blueprint, odds are the building's not going to be very interesting.



I think that the contributions of writers to film and television industry have been historically severely undervalued and that anyone who wants to build a business model around making profitable films needs to do a better job incorporating the contributions of writers in assessing whether a new movie or a portfolio of movies has a chance for commercial success.



*LX: Tell me about your experience at the Advocate. Where did you think your life was going back then? Was Hollywood in the picture?*



FL: It was definitely not at all. I got into Harvard thinking I was going to be a Math major. I went to the first class of Math 55, and I realized there was a very big difference between being very good at math in Georgia and being very good at math at Harvard. I ended up concentrating in Social Studies and thought I was going to be working in politics for my career. The Advocate, and the creative writing classes I took, were really just meant to be my liberal arts education. That was something that was supplementing the more political education that I was going to try to get in the Social Studies department.



What I didn't realize at the time was that the Advocate was a pretty significant part of a shift in my own life from being something of a quant person to being something of a creative. And it's sort of fascinating that the work I do with The Black List now is very much a synthesis of those two approaches.



*LX: You mentioned that you saw yourself transitioning to being creative at the Advocate. Has the stuff you've picked up at the Advocated translated into your work at Hollywood?*



FL: I mean, somewhat. I think that probably the place where there's the most overlap is in the board meetings, where you're sitting and talking about creative work. You’re engaged in conversations about something that is fundamentally subjective, where people, who are coming at that work of art from a near infinite number of points of view, engage in the conversation that's productive yet still valuable from a critical perspective. I think that is by and large a significant part of my daily life in this business. And I think the earliest training that I probably had in my life for those kinds of conversations was at the Advocate.



*LX: So I heard you started The Black List as a way of canvassing your colleagues for opinions for quality scripts. But it's grown now into this platform and even community for screenwriters, agents, directors. What's the story behind this evolution?*



FL: I mean, it did. When it started, I was working for Leonardo DiCaprio's production company. My job was to find great scripts and pass them up the chain of command. Most of the scripts I was finding were mediocre to bad. So I canvassed my friends and peers and asked them for their favorite scripts. And in exchange, I would share with them the entire list. It went viral very quickly in the industry. It became something of an arbiter of taste for screenplays and screenwriters.



About seven years after the annual list launched, we launched The Black List website. It's a sort of two sided marketplace for any aspiring screenwriter who has written an English language script to have their work evaluated and get discovered by the industry, and vice versa for the industry to discover great new writers. And then we built a community around that includes incubation programs like screenwriter's labs, lot of script readings, and a podcast. We've also begun producing movies as well.



*LX: That's pretty new, right? As far the screenplay economy goes.*



FL: Yeah, I mean the lab. We've done the lab for the last five years, six years. We've done the live reads for the last five. We had the podcast for about 2 years. It was one of iTunes' best podcasts of 2015, and it looks like we'll be bringing it back in 2020.



*LX: One hot topic in Hollywood right now is representation, and I know that's been a big part of your work with The Black List. So how do you see the role of screenplays specifically in pushing the needle in that regard?*



FL: I think that the industry — film — has historically pulled the stories of primarily rich white men between the ages of 25 and 45. That is roughly 15% of the American moviegoing audience. There's a lot more money to be made, and frankly a lot better art to be made, by a more competitive environment that is aspiring to make stories that represent the entire population.



Everything starts with the screenplay. In the beginning was the word. So I think it's critically important that the industry does a great job of identifying those writers and screenplays based on the quality of execution, not based on whether it's about a man, whether it's about a white man, whether it's about a straight white man, whether it's about an upper middle class straight white man between the ages of 25 and 45. And [that the industry] does a good job doing the same thing with writers. I think that we're very much on the bleeding edge that making sure the screenwriting profession can be a meritocratic one, and not one that is determined by having gone to the right schools, or knowing the right people, or having the right face associated with the screenplay that you wrote.



*LX: It's really awesome that you're doing that sort of work.*



FL: Look, I think it's really important to be clear about something though. I think that it's important from a sort of moral standpoint and ethical standpoint to have that diversity in arguably the most dominant cultural form in the history of the world. But I also think that it comes from a capitalistic perspective. I would like the industry to be as financially successful as possible. It can only do that if it is making movies, making television for as much of the audience as possible, something that the industry has failed to do for the life of the industry.



*LX: We've seen a lot of movies like that recently—Black Panther, Crazy Rich Asians—that are making a lot of money.*



FL: Black Panther, Crazy Rich Asians, The Farewell, I mean the list goes on and on and on. Yeah, I mean look. There's a lot of money to be made by making content for the entire audience. And I very much hope that the industry will wake up to that reality.



*LX: Regarding your interest in helping elevate writers and scripts arise—was this something you'd always been interested in, or did it arise over the course of your career?*



FL: You have to understand. I don't know that I would've recognized this instinct when I was at Harvard. I was trying to explain The Black List to a friend, one of my blockmates, and I walked him through what The Black List does for writers and the writing community, and his response was, "You're basically like Puffy to the writing community's Biggie." And I was like, "Not really, but kind of."



I think I've always on some level been a hypeman, or had an instinct towards being a hypeman, and what I mean by that is, when I find people who are talented I want everyone to know about them. And I take great pride and joy in being the person who introduces people to people who are incredibly talented and not getting the credit they deserve.



So I think that's probably part of the draw for me with the Advocate. I hosted a lot of these variety show events where it was just like poets and musicians and whatever. And it was really designed around, "Hey everybody. Here's some really dope people doing some really dope things. You should be aware of this and check them out, and tell your friends." I was doing that in college. I did it a lot when I was in New York City as a management consultant at McKinsey, separate from my job there. And then obviously that's the work of The Black List. So I think that there is a common thread, but it's not one I recognized until much later.



*LX: You talked a bit earlier about how a lot of decisions can turn a good script into a bad movie and vice versa. What do you think makes a screenplay a good screenplay versus a producible screenplay?*



FL: A good screenplay is just a good story well told. I'm often asked, "How do you know when you're reading a good screenplay?" I think it's very much like the Supreme Court's definition of pornography: "You know it when you see it."



For me, when I start reading, am I interested in what happens next consistently? And am I a little sad when it's over, because I'd like to spend more time in that world, with those characters? I think if you accomplish those things, you've written a good screenplay.



Now, a producible screenplay is an entirely different thing. I think what's interesting about The Black List is that it's celebrating scripts for the quality of the script, not necessarily the producibility or the profitability of the script.



*LX: I remember back in the early days of The Black List, it had more of a reputation that was very artsy, indie, original, not the biggest moneymakers, right?*



FL: Yeah, it's funny. That hasn't changed, right? The process by which The Black List is determined every year has been the same—this will be the 15th year—the entire time. I'm just surveying my peers in the business about their favorite unproduced scripts. Now early on, there was sort of the reputation that The Black List was this indie, undercover thing. And then, the backlash to that has been that The Black List is actually just writers who are already well known.



Fact is, neither of those things were true. The Black List was always, very simply, a survey of people's most liked screenplays, wherever they came from, whether they were from Aaron Sorkin, who was the number 4 writer on the first list, or from a writer no one had ever heard from before, like Diablo Cody who was number 2 on that list with Juno. And so, you know, you have people who are like, “The Black List is over cause it's no longer underground.” They're just as wrong as people who are saying, “The Black List is amazing because it'll only discover these unheard of things.”



*LX: That's pretty killer.*



FL: I've always believed, like I said, that good writing makes a good movie, or is usually the best chance at a good movie. But to have it verified by Harvard business school is always a welcome thing.



*LX: Do you see this as going in a different thrust than the big trend in Hollywood right now, which is sequels, trends, franchises, and things in that galaxy? Is there a divide or conflict here?*



A: I don't. Because I think sequels, remakes, adaptations, reboots—they can all be brilliantly executed. In many ways, most of the stories that are told in our media, in our reboots of things, are essential stories that have been told for the entirety of human history. Georges Polti says there are 36 dramatic situations. You know, The Lion King is just Hamlet. A lot of these things are just reduxes of things that have been done before, just with new avatars.



Personally, I'm very much omnivorous in my cultural consumption. I'll be there for Black Panther 2 the weekend it comes out, and I'll probably beg for premiere tickets. But I'll also be there for the next Michael Haneke movie. And I expect greatness of both. So I actually think that the conflict comes when it's very difficult to put a Michael Haneke movie into a movie theatre because every theatre is playing Black Panther 2, and I think that's more of a business issue than it is necessarily a cultural issue. It doesn't mean that there shouldn't be movies like Black Panther 2, just like it doesn't mean there shouldn't be like Michael Haneke's next films.



*LX: Do you have a favorite movie?*



FL: Being There, Dr. Strangelove, Do the Right Thing, City of God. I'd probably put Parasite into that Top 10 list right now, which is just unbelievably good if you haven't seen it yet, I encourage everyone to go see it.



Did you notice my hypeman thing coming up again? But I do strongly recommend it.





*LX: Do you have any advice for any young Advocate kids aspiring to go into production or screenwriting or Hollywood?*



FL: The thing about working in Hollywood, as opposed to what a lot of your peers will do when they leave Harvard, is that there's not a clear path. The early rungs of that path are not terribly well compensated. So my advice first and foremost: be sure it's something that you want to do because you will endure, not actual slings and arrows, but they'll feel like it at the time.



Figure out what it is you love about this thing. Do you love horror movies? Do you love musicals? Do you love writing? Do you love directing? Do you love producing? Do you love being a critic? Go all in on that thing, and try to find your community of people who share that worldview, that interest with you.



I think that there's a tendency coming from Harvard, getting into Harvard, trying to be the best, and be all things to all people. I think that the best advice one could ever have, presuming any artistic career as a profession, is that your most valuable thing you're always gonna have is knowledge of your own mind, and knowledge of who you are, and the ability to be yourself and be really good at being yourself in whatever sort of cultural space that you're in. And then, you know, work your ass off.

It’s a strange word: dysfluency. A single word to describe all the repeated sounds and taut silences that come from the mouths of people like me who, for one reason or another, just can't quite say the words they want to say, the way they want to say them. It’s a clinical euphemism that feels as though it were designed to slide cleanly off tortured tongues. Perhaps it was: the circular flick my tongue makes as it enunciates the four soft syllables in succession feels so natural that I often think it must have been crafted with that feeling in mind. It’s certainly easier than its colloquial counterpart, stutter, a little machine gun which, after a couple decades spent mustering the sounds to explain yourself, feels like the vestige of a sort of linguistic imperialism: an exonym, imposed by those who need no word themselves. No one needs to describe themselves as a “non-stutterer”. But if those of us who stutter are dysfluent, everyone else must be fluent. Then, at least, we can impose a word on them, too.



It's unclear exactly when I first had trouble speaking, but it must have been after I said my first word, rice, and before I finished my first year in school. My mother has fashioned a comfortable story for herself about my dysfluency. As she tells it now, my little head just had too many ideas flying around in it, and without the command of my tongue muscle needed to articulate them quickly enough, I found myself spitting out my thoughts in a slurry of soggy consonants.



It’s a self-indulgent story. All I remember was that my first year at the Susquehanna School was defined by a verbal urgency, a sense that I had to shoulder my way into a muscular rhetorical arena where huge lips flapped noisily against each other as they argued over paint and construction paper. I started grade school at three, in a class of people double my size who looked at and shouted about me as if I were just really terrible at being a five-year-old. How was I meant to present myself in that wet mess of words, smaller by half? Maybe it should be no wonder I had difficulty speaking: in some way or other I was acting out the physicality of dysfluency all the time. Nathan and Ian, broad-shouldered five-year-olds, would throw my brown baseball cap across the asphalt playground, proudly watching it lilt into the other’s hands. I would stand stubbornly between the two of them, knees cocked. Seeing a wrist flick, I would jump to intercept the throw only to miss by an instant, and Ian would grin, and then they would do it again.



I began speech therapy in the fifth grade, recommended for the umpteenth time by my pediatrician. Once a week, I would find myself among the leopard-print beanbag stress balls and waxy aloe plants that covered every surface of Karen Denker’s[^1] home. The house was, without fail, about four degrees too warm, and the air was thick with cat hair. I would itch my eyes and sink deep into my chair, watching her meticulously aged head bob like a baseball figurine as she coaxed me into describing the things that interested her: my day at school, the novel I was reading, the shape of the inside of my mouth.



Despite four years in therapy, I was still stuttering regularly when our insurer refused to continue subsidizing the sessions. The heart of the treatment was a number of exercises that Karen devised in order to ingrain a certain ease into my speech. I was meant to count the number of times my speech was impeded in a day, noting in a journal whether each interruption was due to a block — when my lips seal shut, stopping any sound from being released — or a repeated hard attack — an obtrusive plosive consonant that often comes in a series. Charts were to be drawn up, each incident listed with description. The physical awareness such tabulation requires could have given me a firmer and more direct control over my oral musculature, but the process itself was always aversive. Sometimes my mother was meant to clap at me when I was dysfluent, to hold me accountable. She didn’t, and I never did my part either.



Karen articulated the workings of my speech with a straightforward confidence — this was, perhaps, the way in which she was most helpful. The mechanism of my dysfluency is a “scanner,” she explained to me, a part of my consciousness that “scans” sentences as I construct them, pinpointing words or syllables that will prompt a dysfluent stumble. It is not always the same kinds of syllables or sounds — the content of any individual trigger is somewhat arbitrary, on the face of it. It was a phenomenon I had been aware of, visible in brief flashes, but without outside verification it had seemed that it was either mindlessly regular or so strange that it must be ignored, so that it would go away. Her term made me imagine a ship’s radar dial with a long green arm rotating methodically around its face, prepared to detect. As I approach a word that I expect to have trouble with, I see a bright green flash in my mind.



When the scanner warns me of an upcoming problem, I have three options. The first is to actively employ the practical skills of fluent speech: “feather-light touches”, “slower pacing”, “more mouth movement”, or any of the other neatly condensed aphorisms that Karen offered. Unfortunately, the stress of the upcoming dysfluency makes it impossible for me to control my mouth. In that instant of recognition, when the stutter congeals, there is only fight or flight. To fight is to throw yourself at the word, hoping to crack open its hull, release its interior softness. This seldom works: more often than not I get stuck biting down on a word that will neither concede to my jaw, nor pop out of my lips. But I can evade the stutter. When I am nearly fluent, I am constantly substituting words as they are marked by green blips, spitting out newly crafted sentences and phrases. “<span style="color:limegreen">What</span> are you up to this <span style="color:limegreen">weekend</span>?” becomes “Do you have plans for Friday? Or Saturday?”; “Do <span style="color:limegreen">you</span> want to <span style="color:limegreen">go</span> to the grimy beach in Revere and <span style="color:limegreen">get</span> a chicken parm <span style="color:limegreen">and</span> watch the <span style="color:limegreen">stars</span>?” becomes “We can hang out if you want”; “<span style="color:limegreen">I love you</span>” becomes “see ya!” and a little twitch in my shoulder.



The scanner holds me hostage to a red-faced embarrassment; the memory of an endless block, jaw locked closed around an *r* or *d*, the creeping purple of my eyelids which I had shut so that I was no longer confronting the confused gaze of a cashier as it burned my cheeks. This is the series of images that rolls through my mind whenever I wonder if I would indeed stutter, were I to stop rephrasing and just say the word I mean to say. I have no real proof that I will stutter if I don’t react in some way, because I have only ever instinctively adopted the scanner’s predictions as fact. All I have is that memory and a dull, drooping shame that emanates downward and out from my gut whenever I think of it. That’s all it takes to keep me from questioning the legitimacy of my expectations, enough to force me to constantly recreate my sentences, continually reposition myself.



The shameful memory is self-replicating: that terrible moment was prompted by another memory, which was prompted by another. But where did it come from in the first place? I understand the conditions that made a dysfluency possible, and the cycles that perpetuated it, but Karen never talked about that primordial stutter that first shook my body.



My parents developed a careful silence about the whole process. When I stuttered more than usual, my dad would comment that I seemed stressed. *You know, it doesn’t bother me, when you have those sorts of moments, but you might want to think about getting to bed earlier.* My mother had a self-conscious way of swaying her jaw when I stuttered frequently, but when I returned to coherency her lips would curl into a half-smile which she would carefully direct away from me. It seemed like they were performing an appropriate discomfort about my moments, an affectation that I always saw through. They knew exactly how they were meant to react, the correct sum of concern to show. I think I’ve always known that they liked my stutter: for them, my fear of presenting myself to others just denoted that I cared about people, or at least respected them. Sometimes I hated their investment in the various spectacles of my speech. But when you can't quite speak to people, it's hard to be anyone. I developed an embarrassed pride in the fact that, at least to someone, I was interesting.



It’d be nice to tell people who I am. When I’m nervous, particularly around new people, the scanner finds more scary words to flash green, fulfilling my fears through dysfluency. It also reacts faster to the new sentences I weave, finding fault almost as soon as they are synthesized, so I’m perpetually rewording, each time losing my grip on the moment a little bit more. The fluency of my speech, and therefore the organization of my thoughts, becomes simply a manifestation of the emotions that I feel towards my audience.



But somewhere between then and now, something changed. Instead of becoming the new speaker that Karen had tried to train, one who’s mastered their body, and can control their words through an ingrained physical delicacy, somehow I’ve become something else: an authorial feeler. That is to say, I conjure feelings with an active objective, not unlike the way an author conjures sentences. The site of my authority is emotional, not physical. I cannot feel nervous as I begin to speak in class and then try to shake it off, or expel the feeling with deep breaths. By then it's too late. A cycle has begun: I will stutter.



Instead, I am simply not nervous. At some point, I decided that my emotions could belong to me, because they had to. Nervousness isn't something that I must work to combat: in some sense it is always an active choice, a naming of my relation to somebody else through the lens of my affective state — the purely physical experience of intensity that provides the visceral prompt, but not the specific naming concept, for what we might call an emotion. A physical sensation can be called any number of things: fear and excitement, for example, are different names for a group of indistinguishable affects, names that are produced by context but also, in my experiences, by instrumental urgency. There are names I know I cannot choose, “nervousness” among them. This shift in approach, to perceiving my emotions as conceptual extensions — and definitions — of myself over which (unlike my purely sensory affective state) I have immediate control in enunciating is one I don’t think I can turn back. This means that, all the time, I have to be choosing my emotions not in the passive, reactive way that so often seems to dominate understandings of feeling, but with some measure of care and direction. I need to know how to feel, and for how long. I cannot check into my emotive enunciations only when it matters, when I am about to speak: because that machinery of choice has been made manifest to me, I cannot ever ignore it fully. I need to know which feelings allow me to vocalize without the barriers of self-doubt, and then induce their sublimation out of my affective state by stating that this interlocutor is one I love, or hate, or wish to help, and thus I say to myself that towards them I feel safe, or removed, or sufficiently ingratiated, and speak fluently on that basis.



But this possibility, in turn, fundamentally changes the grounding of my relation to people around me. With access to this instrumental form of feeling, there comes an ethical urge not only to create feelings that allow me to speak when I need to, but to author feelings that accommodate everyone around me at all times. There is a tiny liquidation each time I look at someone new, and decide that the increase in affective activity I feel amounts to the excitement of seeing someone I care about. It cheapens my care, removes the responsibility that it relies upon, and forces me to be for others, not for myself. But at least I get to be there, with other people, and talk to them.



I cannot explain how I got here, to authorial feeling. I don’t know if it was one switch, or a slow movement towards the way of being that made it easiest to do what I wanted most: speak. As far as I am concerned, it is the only way to tame the naked posture of dysfluency. I cannot afford to be nervous, so I am not. This authority works well enough: I find myself able to speak to halls full of people, and to my roommate. Sometimes, though, it’s not quite so simple to know how to create emotions for new stresses. If I haven't experienced it before, I can’t calibrate an appropriate reaction, the one that makes others comfortable in its normalcy. This scares me. Someday I’ll call my dad and he won’t pick up, because he’ll have died. If, in my monumental confusion about how to feel, I sigh or laugh or simply fail to feel the right sort of sad, what will that mean? Good people are the people who feel the right things at the right time.



In these circumstances, feeling begins to degenerate into a technical act. A goal is set by my desire for communicative intimacy and, like any piece of technology in the broadest sense, my emotions configure themselves so that I can achieve my goal most efficiently. One would think that you could not put a value on an emotion; in this regime, not only does each feeling have value, but its value is precisely calculable — how well does this feeling accommodate the interests of the people around me? A precinct of my life is carefully, even lovingly, folded into the soulless estate of technique.



If I remember correctly, I used to spend half of my energy knowing, and the other half feeling. The energy I spent feeling would generally create and name emotions for me. Now, those feelings are just a function of more knowing. Knowing is just about all I do. I spin around, pointing my finger at the people that surround me as I identify them, and name their relationship to me in terms that soothe.



I am still, occasionally, dysfluent. In the last few years, though, since I moved away from home, I’ve realized that there is another way to respond when I expect to stutter. Instead of expending my attention producing useful emotions, which might provide just enough space for me to construct ever newer and ever more circumspect verbal structures for my thinking, I could refrain from speaking altogether. Maybe the word as such is already an imposition, inhumanely privileging the concept over other, more delicate couriers of meaning. In silence, new dispositions become possible, along with new modes of experiencing them together. We can communicate in the quasi-languages of images and sounds, through the postures of our body and the tempo of the faint wheezes that drift in and out of our lungs. We can also communicate through facts; that fact of our physical proximity, the fact of our recurring eye contact, the fact that we have made no plans to leave.



[^1]: Names have been changed to protect anonymity.

By the spring of my senior year of high school, I had developed a real infatuation with dishwashing. This impulse had precedent: some years earlier, it was the thought of vegetable gardens that featured most prominently in my B-Block Geometry daydreams. In that particular fantasy, I would sink my hands deep into soil, wrench some mangled weed or other from the earth — find its roots raw and dripping with worms. *Good morning!* I would think, and there would be dirt etched there in the cracks of my palms. It was the menial labor fetish dream of my sophomore winter, a season plagued by chemistry tests and then the flu and then flu² and then makeup chemistry tests — godknowshowmany, certainly more than I could count. And, dammit, all I wanted to do was harvest some zucchini.



So the dishwashing thing was no surprise. There was something compelling to me in this gardening-adjacent image of myself, red-faced with exertion, hunched over a sink somewhere — somewhere commercial, fast-paced, where a thing like dishwashing could become as monumental a pursuit as the Oregon Trail or the Crusades or the building of Hadrian’s Wall. The ridges of steel-wool would cement themselves into the damp-flesh plaster of my palms, and I would be damned, damned good at my job.



These were deeply reactionary fantasies, of course: I was rotting into textbooks by my senior year, salivating over the thought of work-sans-worksheets. It was a 21st-century pastoral fantasy for the educationally-privileged — to desire this seeming antithesis to essays and equations, to imagine oneself sweating out some kind of academic toxin in the fields or greenhouse or kitchen. I knew, as secondary school slowly waned from sight, that college would be much like the past four years had been: punctuated by overcommitment and over-investment — overly-competitive, overly-intellectual, overly-dramatic. I knew, too, that most of these themes would be the result of my own foolishness — my own masochistic academic and extracurricular tendencies, which periodically stabbed me in the eyes like Polyphemus. “Who the fuck did this to me?” I would demand, stumbling blindly about in my cave. And — “Nobody,” I would reply to myself, trying futilely to shunt responsibility. “There is nobody to blame.” But of course there was someone to blame: <i>me! LG! my very own self!</i> What a farce.



Hence the farms — a place where I could not overcommit beyond what I could lift in my own two hands. Hence the kitchen — a place where the only competition to be found took the form of particularly stubborn-to-clean foodstuffs. The appeal was salty. It tasted like sweat.



***



I found the dishwashing job of my half-baked dreams at a local bakery. It was owned by two vegan social-anarchists and their small, angry dog. All three were hesitant to call themselves “small-business owners” because they didn’t like the connotations of the word “business.” The terrier barked ferociously at every male customer who dared crossed the store’s threshold, something like canine feminist praxis. One of my bosses, Bob — a ponytailed seventy-something — played in a folk-rock band weekends and evenings and considered that his primary occupation. The bakery just paid the bills. But the shop was famed locally for its dairy- and gluten-free goods, and frequented — ironically, or predictably — by wealthy white stockbrokers weekending in their Connecticut country homes. During the busy holiday seasons, Bob and Linda worked twenty-hour days and slept on cots in the basement, the phone and the oven timer taking turns waking them up.



The dishwashing was harder work than I had anticipated. The overheated, over-saturated skin of my fingertips flaked and peeled, exposing the raw flesh beneath. There was simply no respite from the sink’s gaping maw and its grungy, tiled backsplash — staring, always, at me expectantly. *Two more pans, LG. A bread tin. A frosting bowl. A whisk.* I sweated and heaved and huffed and lifted and trudged and held and lowered and scrubbed and soaped and submerged from June through August, stood in front of my sink like a king. It was a small and lousy kingdom, but I was a proud champion.



It is hard to quite pin down the satisfaction of emptying an overflowing sink into a toothless 2’x2’ grin: something like running through water — in slowmotion — before bursting weightlessly, at last, onto the shore. I wrote rapturous metaphors about my job all throughout the summer, frenetic odes to my fickle mistress. Poems that sound fucking crazy in retrospect. “Here is my two-by-two kingdom. Here is where worlds are cleansed and made new. Here is where Moses parted the Red Sea so his people could have bread. Where I part the Red Sea, so my dishes can make bread. Where my dishes part me, and I am come undone above the sink on a Saturday morning.”



I loved that job, you know, I really loved it.



***



A few years ago, the doctor told my grandma — then eighty-two — that she *had* to stop shovelling off the roof herself each snowfall. She has been shrinking with age, my grandmother — once taller than me, and then my height, and now a bit shorter. Her arrhythmia has grown more erratic. Her bones have brittled. Her skin has thinned to tissue-paper translucence.



But my grandma is also one stubborn bitch. No surprise then, really, when my mother, sister, and I come home from the supermarket, or the post-office, or the Apple Store, and find Dot perched guiltily on the gutter. “I had to do it,” she says — sometimes sheepish, other times defensive. “What if the roof collapses in? What if the gutter detaches?”



“What if you fall off the ladder and *die*, and no one is here to call 911?” my mother retorts. She takes no prisoners in this game they play. “I don’t think that’s how Dad would want you to go out.”



And then Dot does this fluttery thing with her hands: a shrug limited to her wrists, not even a full rotation of the shoulders. She’ll be back up on the roof next month, of course — the month after, too.



Predictably, my mother is just like my grandmother, and they are both just like my great-grandmother. And I can only assume that my great-grandmother took after my great-great-grandmother, and she after hers, and on and on and on and on in an endless spiral of psycho-stubborn women. I theorize with a friend once about the inheritance of matrilineal traits. “I bet we’re workhorses all the way back,” I tell her, “my family. I bet my thrice-great-grandmother’s thrice-great-grandmother was up to the same shit back in the shtetl or whatever.” She probably invented gutters just to clean them in the wintertime. And she probably kept doing it past ninety and ninety-five and one-hundred, just for the pleasure and privilege of spiting her anxious daughters and granddaughters. They would someday do the same, of course — it was their birthright and dowry and communion.



My friend thinks I have inherited this capacity for over-zealous menial labor, and I sometimes think she might be right. The trajectory is not hard to follow: visions of my mother raking our whole yard in one afternoon turn into visions of myself in preschool with both arms full of toys at clean-up time, visions of the dishes and visions of the dirt turn into visions of myself picking up a shift at a homeless shelter during freshman year — folding three-hundred pillowcases in one night, always offering to clean the bathrooms come morning.



The way women in my family deal with unsavory tasks is to volunteer for them. I have my twice-great-grandmother’s name, my grandmother’s eyes, my mother’s jaw — and this.



***



So I got a job my first semester of college babysitting for a local family — to help with their youngest, a little boy. Most of my classmates work as research assistants or in laboratories, or are so preoccupied with their own extracurricular madness and academic frenzy that they haven’t the time to fill out Excel spreadsheets or cross-reference citations for $12 an hour. And they certainly haven’t the time to change diapers or pick up toys or do the dinner dishes or mop up vomit. (Although the job is mostly activities of the more life-affirming sort. And it is nice to spend time with people outside of the 18-22 sort.) So I am not surprised by their skepticism when I tell them that I babysit.



Because, sure, some days are more difficult than others. Some of them feature fluids of one gross kind or another. Like when I am cooking dinner once, and the baby pukes and pukes during my overly-optimistic appetizer course — pukes all over my hands and arms and watch and shirt and his own arms and hands and shirt and torso and diaper and the high chair and my cell-phone and his apple slices and his cheese-stick and the hardwood below us. He keeps puking as I remove him from his chair and keeps puking after we’re both on the floor, covered in this milky gray-white sludge. We eat supper on the ground two feet from the mess.



That night, after he is bathed and brushed and secure in his crib, I return to the stale vomit that has congealed throughout the kitchen. Puddle by puddle, I make my way through the room on hands and knees. While I am doing it, I can’t help but imagine what all my friends must be doing: reading and writing, p-setting — and there I am on the slick wooden floor, staring down white cheddar and stomach acid.



But how could I feel cut up about it. It was work that needed to be done, after all — and someone had to do it. Specifically, *I* had to do it, because I was paid to it. But that’s the easy answer. In truth, money felt almost secondary to whatever it was I had inherited from my grandmother — that near-primal willingness, that matrilineal compulsion, to do the job at hand, however shit it may be. Especially to do the shit ones. And to do them to completion. Because work is a thing that exists in negative space. Tasks pull their doers into them. If you don’t clean up the vomit, or pick the eggplants, or wash the rolling-pins, perhaps no one ever does — and then what? Things left undone mold and rot and waste away and worsen exponentially. They punish indiscriminately. They are not possible to circumvent or avoid. I could have left that house right then and gotten on a bus and headed west, never stopped and never looked back — but the kitchen would still be waiting to be cleaned.



So there was no use for self-pity. Mopping the floor makes the world turn like any other gig. If I cleaned up dinner, then my employer could come home and do his own work — big-time stuff, important stuff. Thinking about things that could really help a lot of people out someday. If I washed the dishes at the bakery, Bob and Linda could crank out the tea-loaves faster — and maybe we would get out early and my bosses would go out for dinner that night, support some other reluctant “small business” downtown. Customers could buy whatever wheezing little sugar concoctions — maybe have more bearable afternoons because of it, maybe drive safer on the highway because they’re feeling *just fine, mm hmm*. So on and so on. The work demanded closure so that all these other infinitesimal cogs could turn. There is nothing to do but do.



***



If only things were, in fact, so simple. The politics of labor are a whirling Charybdis of gendered expectations and racial microaggressions and socioeconomic snobbery. My friend describes to me a dinner-party her roommate hosted at her family home in Boston: about two dozen people came to cook supper and eat it together and all the various and lovely things in between. But at the end of the night, just as the women began to do the dishes and wipe down the countertops, the men began to Uber nonchalantly back to campus. “Can you not do that yet?” my friend asked one of them. “Can you help clean up first?”



But he’d already called it, he said, and couldn’t cancel. He had his rating to think about, after all. And he had to get going. Did they mind too terribly? He hoped not.

Tasks create a negative space, sure, but the people who fill this pulling emptiness are more often one thing than another. It is no surprise, perhaps, that my workhorse-tendencies are a matrilineal trait. It is no surprise that I have less-than-zero trouble getting a job in childcare. I stumbled, not long ago, on a short essay that Toni Morrison published a few years ago in *The New Yorker*: it is called [“The Work You Do, The Person You Are,”](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/the-work-you-do-the-person-you-are) and it is about one of Morrison’s childhood jobs as a part-time housekeeper for a woman referred to only as “She” and “Her.” The woman demands too much lot of Morrison’s labor. And Morrison complains to her father, who says: “Listen. You don’t live [at Her house]. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.” Morrison lists the four takeaways she took from that job and that conversation, which are:



>1. Whatever the work is, do it well — not for the boss but for yourself.<br>

>2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.<br>

>3. Your real life is with … your family.<br>

>4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.



And she concludes, “I’ve had many kinds of jobs [in subsequent years], but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself.” And I felt that conclusion more truthfully than I felt anything around that time, except maybe Joni Mitchell’s “Carey” or the taste of apricots in summertime. I have never felt — whether on hands or knees scrubbing, or hunched over a garden-bed, or elbow-deep in soap suds — that my work was beneath me or made me lower by virtue of doing it.



But I have been somewhat troubled by my complicity in all this negative space, by my quickness to volunteer my hands and time again and again and again and again and again and again and again. It is difficult for me to reconcile my easy inclination to do the dishes with my fervent and unironic and closely-held desire to be a raging burn-it-all-down feminist. Someone unafraid of making a mess. Because —  



***



— in February of my freshman year, a girl wrenches a broom out of my hands like she’s pulling a goddamn fire-alarm. “What the fuck are you doing?” she accuses me — accuses, because her words constitute no question. It is obvious, after all, what I am doing: I am sweeping.



It is the context that upsets her. We are at a party when it happens — in a room packed with bodies like an over-crowded church pew at 11 AM mass. I am wearing the new dress I bought specifically for this event. I am a little drunk. She is drunk, too. Everyone in that room is drunk-drunk-drunk, actually — and perhaps I am the *least* drunk, and that is why I end up with the broom: “Do you mind?” the boy asks me when he places it in my hands. “Maybe just try to get the glass out of the way?” He looks at me with eyes that don’t seem, quite, to know what has just transpired — don’t seem to understand the position into which he has put me.



I don’t quite understand it, then, either, with my fuzzed mind and vision. I hadn’t even noticed the broken bottles on the ground through my drunken haze. But I accept the broom, because it is not an unprecedented gesture for him to hand it to me.



This boy and I belong to an insular little community in which he outranks me by virtue of longevity. People outrank him, too, and others outrank them. But each of these people *especially* outranks me — because on this particular night two years ago, I am still brand-new to the space. A real mover and shaker there, yeah, in the sense that I move around the furniture and the alcohol and various messes when asked, and shake up garbage bags to make more space in their beehive-hollows when asked. Each of us — the boy who gives me the broom, included — must spend our respective first semesters doing these things, in exchange for never having to do them again afterwards. And I am something like amenable to — or at least unresolved about — that system, at least at first: because the designation gives me a sense of place that I appreciate even in its monotony. When the doorbell rings, I know to answer the door. When the bar is empty, I know to carry up more beer. And so on. Someone has to do these things, after all — why not us, me? Besides, the work gives me a reason to come by in the first place. Not to mention something to do with my ever-fidgety hands.



And yet — I sober up as soon as the wooden broom-handle hits my palm, and am promptly overwhelmed by a strange shame that I feel twice-over: a shame that comes with taking up the broom, and a shame that comes with losing it. For a few moments, I know so acutely that I am a woman cleaning — at a man’s bidding — in a room with a lousy ratio, with far more men than women — who, lost in their intoxicated rapture, couldn't give less of a damn about the state of the floors. But I am stupid with the certainty that they notice me: the lone sweeper in all the frenzy and heat of the room, the only person not dancing or flirting or grinding or kissing or grinning. There is neither rhythm nor calm in this sweeping, as on the farm or at the dish-station. Rather — I feel like I have been asked to publically flagellate myself by doing this. For a few moments, I cannot help but wonder: *Does it look like I’m being punished for something?*



I don’t quite remember the chronology of events that occurred in that three-minute spiral, just the blue-black feeling of this twofold chagrin. “What the fuck are you doing?” the girl accuses. And then: “Stop sweeping. Stop sweeping. Stop sweeping.” An incantation, spat. The wrenching away. Then one of two things happened: either I took the broom back and finished the job, or I darted from the scene like a rabbit across a highway. I do not remember which. I wish sometimes that I did, but mostly I am grateful that I do not.



***



When I wake up the next morning, I am more hungover from this altercation than from the vodka I’d sought out afterwards. It is all I can think about. The shame makes me want to seep in between two couch cushions and stay there indefinitely. My mother doesn’t know what to tell me — other than that I should have told the broom-giver *No* if I didn’t feel comfortable with the task. She uses the same voice that she uses with Dot, and I feel five generations’ worth of myself shrug and sigh. We are all sitting on the roof together in the snow. If only things were so simple as No and a ladder’s descent.



Nonetheless, a few months later — after an impulse decision that sends me promptly, furiously, spilling my guts to everyone in a twenty-foot radius — I tell the boy-who-handed-me-the-broom-back-in-February all about this night. “I was *so ashamed*,” I spout to him, vibrating uncontrollably on the balls of my feet. It is possible that I am cupping his face in my hands as I said this. It is possible that he has heard this story before. “I was so incredibly, incredibly ashamed. I don’t think I’d ever felt that way before.”



“I’m really sorry that happened,” he tells me. He says other things, too, but those are the only words that survive my comedown. And I believe him when he says them, because he is a good and fine and thoughtful person — and I have never been opposed to a little cleaning, certainly. But I am still dumbfounded by the complexity of that situation, no matter how futile it is to replay my memories of that party. And for the rest of the semester, that girl is on my mind every time I carry or clean any damn thing. I have no recollection of her face or height or voice — just the knowledge that all of these things exist, and that they had been exerted, once, in my direction. Just the knowledge she was disappointed in me, maybe, or wanted to protect me from something, maybe — and both implied a certain failing on my part. The shame — sickly-sweet, violet-tinted — followed me everywhere. It was not a question of whether the “level of [my] labor” was “the measure of myself” so much as it was a question of *what the hell had I been doing to the entirety of womankind?*



It looked a little like this: imagine that that magnetic negative task-space opens up and starts sucking. It’s a sudden sinkhole on the highway, and it’s holding up traffic again. Jesus, the I-91 is always clogged this hour of day — can *somebody* please take care of that? But the cogs can’t turn unless somebody bites the bullet — which is how we know that somebody is about to get pulled into this freaking hole! It’s just begging to be closed, after all. It has to be closed. But — by whom? Who will step up? Do we have any volunteers? Ah, the magician’s lovely assistant. She is so good at disappearing. The sinkhole closes over her head, and the cars can go on driving — make it home before the kids go to bed. But come to think of it, we can’t see our lady anymore. Where, exactly, has she gone?



The gentle pull of work-needing-to-be-done is not so benign after all. It is bad, I think, when the “sense of place” it gives you is located somewhere beneath the earth’s surface. And it is bad when women, mostly, are the ones finding themselves pulled in.



***



I have learned that it is possible to be your own highway and your own sinkhole. Even when I am no longer expected to run after the doorbell or clear the dinner dishes, I find it impossible to stop. I don’t know how to exist in the space without a purpose. Sometimes people will catch my hand as I get up, physically restrain me from launching into a task — make a face at me and then pointedly ask someone else, a new new member, to do so instead. And this makes me feel fucking crazy. So in the fall of my sophomore year, I run for a position that will allow me to clean again, and run errands, and answer the door, and do all the other things that nobody else wants to do — and I win because people know I get the job done, that I never say No, that I honestly kind of get off on it. The only caveat is that I am supposed to delegate downwards all the things I don’t do myself. It is the first time in my life that I entrench myself in a vertical hierarchy of any kind and I am not without misgivings about the ethics of this.



It is especially hard for me to do this last thing — the delegation. Not because I want to hoard responsibility, or maximize my control, but because I have become overly cognizant of the shame coded into labor in this space. Cognizant of how it signifies newness and unbelonging. Cognizant of how it looks to people on the outside. And cognizant of this, too: that the broom incident could happen again, and it would be my own fault now — if I were to delegate carelessly, and a wheelbarrow’s worth of political burden was to descend on another unsuspecting girl.



But if I were to consciously ask a boy instead, to seek him out — *ah, there’s a boy right there* — well, that would come with its own set of problems. Like the fact that a lot of people think I have it wrong, actually, that I am the only one invoking gender here in what is, in fact, an *egalitarian and ungendered system*. And that it is, in fact, actually worse in the long run to implant all this hand-wringing about gender where there theoretically ought to be none. So I can’t ask a girl or a boy now. So I do it myself. After all, I have volunteered for the position I occupy. *It’s just different for me*, I figure. *It’s a whole different ball game*.



And for a while I really think that I’ve won, too. That I have fixed the bug in the code. That I have applied chemotherapy to cognitive dissonance, striking at the heart of the problem before it could metastasize. That I have, in fact, sidestepped the politics entirely. My labor, coded in another language entirely.



Here is what this circumvention looks like: Once I find an ice cream cake melted into a puddle on the table. I had just been watching a movie with friends and could still hear the television tinny in the background. It was 3 A.M. If I had asked them for help, they probably would have helped me without complaint — laughed at the grossness and stupidity of the situation, made it into some kind of game. But then again, maybe they would have just expected me to pass it down the chain of command, wouldn’t have even gotten up from the couch. Judged me for what I would have done instead. What I did do instead.



So, I don’t ask, don’t risk it. I can’t. This is a shameful task, and it’s late, and everyone’s tired. *Too horrible to delegate*. Instead, I take off my long-sleeved shirt so I can wipe the mess into a trash bag with my bare arms. It is a disaster that transcends the possibility of paper towels — at least three feet in diameter and encompassing three surface areas, table and stool and floor. It is sticky and viscous. An open cut on my hand fills with chocolate, a poultice of chocolate, and stings wickedly. Eventually, by chance, someone does find me there — they hold the bag open to catch the sludge as I scrape it with my arms. It takes thirty minutes to clean and I smell like candy afterwards.



The funny thing is that I can’t tell, you know. Who swallowed what. Whether I swallowed this work or it swallowed me. Whether my own cognitive dissonance had metastasized. Because I thought for many months that it was the former, and that I was protecting people I cared about from getting their own brooms taken from their own hands, that I was doing the right thing, the merciful thing, by using whatever power I had there to depoliticize other people’s experiences. It didn’t matter that I was doing so much myself, because that was the only way to safeguard the people around me from the various unsavory connotations of this labor. And so I fixated on my willingness — the fact that I had *volunteered* — like some kind of protective talisman: it made me genderless, classless, and, most importantly, inexhaustible.

But the time would come when it was made clear to me that most people hadn’t noticed or cared about what I had been trying to do, and that I had done all this work and also all this thinking alone. That some of them, in fact, even felt resentment towards me — thought I was making things harder on myself just so I could claim some half-off-everything-must-go martyrdom on my way out. And so I can’t tell, you know. Who swallowed what.



***



That poem I wrote about dishwashing, the one about parting the Red Sea and whatever other sudsy fever dreams emerged from my day job, was inspired by a spoken-word piece by Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie. (My dishwashing days and slam poetry days so conveniently coincided.) “Bean Meditation,” it’s called. In it, Brown-Lavoie rhapsodizes about harvesting a crop of beans, about the physical labor it requires: “It’s so fitting to find ourselves kneeling in the field,” she says, “for these moments when work feels like prayer … This gratitude has a gravity to it, the core of the earth pulling me to my knees.” I like this image — one of the innate spirituality of a hard day’s work, the most underrated thing that Adam and Eve gained in leaving the Garden.



This is the thing I lost these past two years, between all my odd jobs and futile attempts at constructive deconstruction: the ability to labor mindlessly, the ability to volunteer unselfconsciously for such labor, the ability to find something good and right in this work. How impossible it all still is for me to parse out — when to do, when to refrain, when to sweep, and when to stand still. It is funny, almost, the juxtaposition of this small drama: how the completion of a difficult or laborious task can taste so convincingly of empowerment, but be, in fact, so false — the sweetness of rot, in which one is complicit in one’s own subjugation.



Depending on whom and when you ask, labor is a penance or a pilgrimage; or a route to enlightenment; or a route to your lover’s heart. It is a way of honoring the gods, of honoring yourself, of earning your keep, of practicing mindfulness, of being egalitarian, of being an agent in your own life. It is a calling, an inclination, a moral obligation, a necessary evil. It is never just that which it is: sore shoulders and knees, a sunburned neck, four hours spent alone with your thoughts, a thing that must be done. It is never allowed to exist with such simplicity. How could it, though? — when labor has always been a thing policed and forced and underpaid and over-expected.

That is why, perhaps, Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie speaks only of “*moments* when work feels like prayer,” only moments: because they are fleeting things, quickly sullied by all that they connote. A friend reads an early draft of this piece and mentions some of Jenny Holzer’s *Truisms*, aphorisms and clichés, American truths that Holzer manufactured in bold text in the late 1970s to electronically render in public spaces. Many of them directly contradict one another: MANUAL LABOR CAN BE REFRESHING AND WHOLESOME (*Uh-huh*, I think, *so true*) and LABOR IS A LIFE-DESTROYING ACTIVITY (*Uh-huh*, I think, *so true*).



It is a strange and stubborn system, this, wherein my own willingness to do such work is, in practice, a *one step forward, two steps back* kind of affair. Wherein all the women in my family shovel and rake themselves into the grave because it is all we have ever done: female-bodied hosts in which a gender expectation has become an ethos, a lifestyle, a way of being and of breathing. You know, it is virtually impossible for my grandmother to not do the dishes when she sees them in the sink. She inevitably fills the negative-space they create. She does not complain.



It is without any acknowledgment for the nuance of history that these jobs keep demanding their doing. Which is perhaps how, the summer after freshman year, I find myself working at an archaeological dig on a small Danish island. The weather fluctuates erratically there: some days, it is fifty degrees and cloudy, with twenty mile-per-hour winds that whip up our loose soil into malicious dust-storms — and other days, it is seventy-five degrees with air as thick and viscous as peanut-butter. There is digging to do. In particular, there are 150 post-holes — the sites of wooden beams that once constituted homes or fences or countless other structures — to excavate. So, more accurately: there is a *lot* of digging to do.



But — “I fucking love these post-holes,” I say to whoever will listen. And I do. Because there is a rhythm to the labor of scraping and lifting and hauling that is familiar and ancient. Because work like this gives me plenty of time to think. Because the post-holes don’t care — not really, not really — who is digging, or why, or what the politics of such digging are. They just demand to be dug. And maybe, just maybe, if I dig long enough and deep enough, my shovel will meet a girl’s ribs.



And when all the dirt has been cleared off of my body, and I am lying there in the sun and air — well, I tell myself that I will linger this time. That I won’t be so quick to go back underground. I can’t help but wish, though, that I had something to do with my hands.

One may as well begin with the moment I sob on a stranger’s shoulder. It happens well into the second half of a two-part, seven-hour gay epic on Broadway. 24 hours earlier, I hop on the bus from Boston to New York, overworked and brokenhearted. Going off of the faint memory of a New Yorker piece I read about it, I Google *The Inheritance*. On the website of the British *Telegraph*, I find a review that promises “a state of emotionally shattered but elated awe” and defines the show as “perhaps the most important American play of the century.” This description seals the deal; I book my ticket before the bus leaves South Station. So, in retrospect, I have no right to complain—a stream of tears is exactly what I signed up for when I paid eighty dollars I didn’t have to witness gay men fall in love and break each other’s hearts for seven hours.



Written by American playwright Matthew Lopez, *The Inheritance* operates on a simple premise: a reimagining of E. M. Forster’s novel *Howard’s End*, it follows a group of gay men in modern-day New York, two decades after the height of the AIDS epidemic. At the heart of the play are Eric Glass, a thirty-something activist and his partner, novelist-turned-playwright Toby Darling. The two live in a rent-controlled apartment that Eric inherited from his grandmother, a holocaust survivor who fled Germany. A few hours before he and Toby get engaged, Eric is notified of their imminent eviction, which threatens to disturb the peace of their Upper West Side domestic paradise. While Toby leaves town for work and falls for Adam, the leading actor in his play, Eric befriends Walter, their older upstairs neighbor, who tells him about his life as a gay man in the ‘80s.



*The Inheritance* opened in March 2018 at the Young Vic Theatre in London. The reviews were ecstatic; within six months, the play transferred to the West End and went on to win four Olivier Awards, including Best New Play and Best Director (Stephen Daldry, the man in charge of hits like *Billy Eliot*—the film and the musical—and *The Crown* on Netflix). Last November, it opened on Broadway, making its long-awaited journey across the Atlantic.



As I am walking to the subway after the show, still wiping my tears, I see the play’s bright future as clearly as I see the enormous ad for Buffalo Wild Wings right in front of me: rapturous reviews, a two-year run, a few Tony Awards, perhaps even a TV adaptation starring Andrew Garfield.



But that is not quite how the following months unfold. American critics turn out to be much more ambivalent than their British counterparts. *The New York Times* says that the play’s breadth “doesn’t always translate into depth”; *The New Yorker* calls it “audacious and highly entertaining, if not entirely successful”; and Time Out observes that “a certain amount of imperfection is built into ambition on this scale.” The friends I send to watch the play, using my rare must-see command, eventually report back, describing a fair amount of empty seats, that only grows post-intermission. I start asking myself what I saw in *The Inheritance* that others didn’t see. And then I realize: it was my own reflection, bright and shining.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



What does it mean, to see oneself on stage? This is a question our culture has been grappling with since the early days of theater. Aristotle, for example, would probably categorize my *Inheritance* experience as cathartic. In *Poetics*, he used the term to respond to his teacher Plato, who argued that poetic drama is detrimental because it creates anarchy within our soul by stirring up our passions and impairing our reason. Aristotle, on the other hand, insisted that good drama doesn’t create anarchy, but prevents it, by providing a regulated outlet for our feelings. A well-executed tragedy, Aristotle believed, arouses “pity and fear” in us to the point of their “catharsis,” a medical metaphor which literally means purification, or relief. Then, more than two thousand years later, German playwright Bertolt Brecht challenged Aristotle’s theory, which by then had pretty much become the foundation of Western theater as we know it. Brecht thought catharsis was “a pap for bourgeois audiences”; he argued that its byproducts (empathy, sympathy, identification) prevent us from thinking about the action rationally. Instead, Brecht advocated for theater that pushes us to adopt a critical approach, by using techniques like alienation and distance.



Lopez is an outstanding writer; his characters are sharp and witty, ruthless and humane, compelling and infuriating. I fell in love with Eric, even when he sounded like an Intro to Queer Studies textbook. I admired Walter for his heroic treatment of his HIV-positive friends at a time when they were dehumanized by virtually everyone—from President Reagan to Henry Wilcox, Walter’s own partner. I was even able to find compassion for Toby, who shattered my heart when, in response to Eric’s claim that “There’s more to people than beauty,” he said, “You would have to tell yourself that, wouldn’t you?”



But Brecht definitely had a point. I saw myself on stage so vividly, with overwhelming clarity, that I wasn’t able to consider the things I didn’t see.



Only a few weeks later, in the aftermath of an exhausting verbal sparring with grad students at a party, am I able to do a double take. At first, I defend the play with the vehemence of Joan of Arc, leading a fearless campaign against the English (in this case, gay English Ph.D. candidates who dismiss *The Inheritance* as conservative, burgeois, and even homophobic). But on my way back home, confused and slightly drunk, I decide to lay my arms down and consider my enemy’s position. I think about the play’s relegation of characters of color to the outskirts of its plot; its heavy reliance on Toby and Leo, a homeless sex worker, as the sole representatives of the working class; and its almost complete exclusion of female-identified and trans characters (with the exception of Margaret, a repented homophobic mother of an AIDS victim, extraordinarily portrayed by Lois Smith, an acting legend).



My confusion persists, slowly morphing into a thick, gray cloud of ambivalence, until, a few weeks later, I get an opportunity to talk to Lopez, the playwright. During a phone interview, I ask him if he considered including non-cisgender characters in his gay epic. “I did, and I’ve certainly written women before in other plays,” Lopez says. “Then I decided that I was not attempting to write a play that tells the story of all the letters of the LGBTQIA alphabet or all the colors of the rainbow flag. I was going to talk about what it meant to me to be a gay man. This was always a very, very personal play for me. And I have no experience of what it’s like to be trans or a gay woman, which doesn’t mean that I won’t write these roles in the future. We do not deny our trans siblings in the play, but it’s not my story.”



I try to reconcile Lopez’s response with the fact that *The Inheritance* has been widely perceived as the ultimate queer, post-AIDS crisis saga, which supposedly sets out to speak for a large community. “I don’t believe that investigation into one’s own experience and the community that one most identifies with is necessarily to the exclusion of all else,” Lopez explains. “Just like I had no real connection to *Howard’s End* when I was a Puerto Rican teenage kid growing up, watching the movie and reading the book, I would hope that others could find commonality in the experiences of the heart and the soul that I examine in the play. I can’t explain myself to the world as anyone else except for who I am and the life I’ve lived.”



Lopez insists that a single work of art can’t be expected to do everything. “I think that’s a burden to place on a piece of art that is not achievable. Or, I’ll just say, it wasn’t my goal,” he says. “But I don’t think that that’s necessarily exclusionary. I can’t wait to see the seven-hour trans epic, but I can’t be the one to write it.”



What about casting? I ask him, mentioning the charge that while the play provides perhaps the most comprehensive portrayal of queer life on Broadway today, some of its main cast members are heterosexual. “When I’m casting a play, all I’m thinking when an actor walks into the room is, ‘Are you my character? Do you have the heart and the soul? Do you have the facility with language that I require?’” Lopez tells me. “When we were casting the play, especially the roles of Toby and Adam/Leo, we were spending a lot of time trying very desperately to find actors of color. That was the primary concern. It didn’t happen, despite our efforts. In fact, we didn’t make the offers to Andrew and Sam, the actors who play these roles, until just a few weeks before production started in London, even though they lived in the United States. So my focus was really making sure that the leads look like the community.”



While he regrets not having cast actors of color to play any of the main characters, Lopez is also grateful to the cast members “for their beautiful performances, the sacrifices they had to make, and their commitment to the project.” For him, an actor’s sexual orientation is simply not part of the equation. “When they walk into the room to audition, my first thought is not, ‘Are you gay? Straight? Bi?’ It’s not a consideration for me, and I know that some people insist that it has to be.”



At this point, Lopez refers to employment discrimination laws, which prohibit employers from asking potential employees questions about their sexual identity. “I think it’s a weird place we’re in, where more people are insisting on demolishing the binary of sexual identity, on embracing the fluidity of sexual expression, but when it comes to casting actors in a play they still insist on the same binary,” he says. “I can’t speak to the private lives of the actors, but my question is, how many sexual encounters in their lives will they have to have had in order to qualify for these roles? Is there a number? It feels somewhat regressive suddenly to say, ‘Well, just because you have a girlfriend now you don’t have a multiplicity of sexual expressions in your psyche.’ It’s a question that I simply, literally, legally cannot ask, and it defies everything we know about the art of acting.”



<p align="center"> *** </p>



A few weeks after watching *The Inheritance*, I find out that Machine, the only gay bar I know in Boston, is closing. I’m immediately reminded of one scene in the play, in which Eric’s thirty-fourth birthday party turns into a heated debate regarding the future of the queer community. “Gay bars used to be safe spaces for people like us to be ourselves and to find others like us,” Eric declares in an impassioned monologue. “Now everyone just goes onto Grindr. But what about a twenty-year-old kid who’s not looking for sex, but rather for community?”



When I tell Lopez about Machine, he laughs. “It’s a fascinating evolution that we’re seeing,” he says. “I guess that enough gay men feel comfortable enough in the world that they don’t necessarily need to congregate at gay bars. But the truth is that this is still not a safe space for so many in our community, certainly not for trans women and lesbians. In many areas of the country, gay men are still not safe either. So while gay bars may be closing in big cities, there still is a need for these spaces. And I wonder what these spaces will be.”



Lopez, it seems, is somewhat optimistic. “I think we have a particular resilience,” he explains. “TV shows like Pose demonstrate the ability of the queer community to create spaces for itself. We have to. The only fear I have, well, not the only one, but one of them today is… It would be a shame if these spaces are all online and everyone is in their individual homes and apartments. Social media can never be a replacement for actual community. It’s an approximation of it, but it isn’t the real thing,” he says. “And that’s something to which I don’t have an answer.”



Did he feel a difference between the reactions of the audience in London and here? “Instantly,” he says. “New York loves to look in the mirror and I don’t think that’s a failing. I think it’s a perfect explanation of what it means to be a New Yorker. There’s great joy in the theater when locations are mentioned. New Yorkers love to talk about rent and real estate and that always gets a good response. And I think there’s something even deeper for New Yorkers because it deals with events that occur here. The AIDS epidemic affected London just as badly, but to see the play here and be reminded of those events as they happened to New Yorkers makes the experience more personal.”



Before we hang up the call, I wonder if Lopez has considered turning the play into a TV show (last month, Playball called *The Inheritance* “The Greatest Netflix Binge on Broadway”). “Of course,” he laughs. “That wasn’t something I was thinking about when I was writing the play, not in the least. But as I was structuring it, I did realize that I was actually writing two three-act plays, which then meant that no act would be longer than an hour—the average length of an episode of television. Once we started to perform in London we realized, ‘Oh, each act is like an episode of a Netflix show.’ It was not the intention, but it was the result, and it was what audiences began to like in the play too. And then, as we continued to craft the show, we decided to really lean into it. We thought of that as an asset. Once we realized that was how people were accessing the play, we made sure that we really allowed them to have that experience. I think that it is incumbent upon any art form to not deny the age in which it is being shown. We live in the age of Netflix and binge-watching. And it’s enjoyable,” he adds. “But even in a six-and-a-half-hour long play, there are so many darlings that you have to drown. There’s a lot of the story that didn’t make it into the play. And maybe I will tell it someday, hopefully.”



<p align="center"> *** </p>



Like any ambitious work of art, *The Inheritance* is imperfect. Yes, some of the political debates it stages can feel awkward or expository. Yes, it might not be as sophisticated as another great gay epic, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America—a common criticism whose prescriptiveness reminds me of my mom’s pleas that I be more like my brother (not every gay epic has to be intellectualy demanding, just like not every member of my family has to be in Boy Scouts and play soccer. And, while the two plays do share many features—being New York-centered, long, and queer—they are completely different projects, created in two distinct historical moments, a fact that makes the relationship between them resemble more that of a grandfather and grandchild, or of distant cousins who see each other rarely, at funerals and weddings). And no, the cast members don’t wear shoes on stage, a fact that, for some reason, seems to have stirred some critics much more than the play’s engagement with themes like sex work, drug addiction, and intergenerational trauma.



I’ve recently heard that if ticket sales don’t improve, the curtain might come down on *The Inheritance* sometime in the next few months. If this is true, I think it is a grim prospect. Not because the play’s queerness makes it untouchable. I can’t help but feel like the standards to which we hold Lopez accountable are virtually impossible. His play should be criticized for its flaws, but not entirely dismissed.



Albeit partially and imperfectly, *The Inheritance* features some fascinating characters, like Tristan, an African-American, H.I.V.-positive doctor, who compares Donald Trump to AIDS in a brilliant moment of political commentary. It contains some of the most original depictions of gay sex I’ve ever seen (which, quite predictably, have already provoked some homophobic reactions, like that of the New York Post critic Johnny Oleksinski, who complained that “the abundance of graphic sex-talk can grow cloying”). And, most importantly, it tries to push the boundaries of the theatrical experience, and it does so on West 47th street, two blocks away from The Tina Turner Musical.



Unsurprisingly, some of the play’s loudest critics have been members of the queer community. Last month, the producers of Slate’s queer podcast, Outward, assembled four gay men of different ages to discuss the show. “So many people were seeing the play that they wanted to see, not the play that was actually being enacted on stage,” one of the commentators argued. “To me, that was half the tears of older theatergoers and younger ones. They needed this play to be there, so therefore they made it what it was and brought their own needs to it in a way that was separate from the agenda of the play and the enactment of it as well. And I respected that and felt sad in some ways that something like this was filled with so much evanescent sentiment when we deserve a story that has more power and complexity to it.”



Was I seeing *The Inheritance* or the play I wanted it to be? Did I just need it to exist? Do we deserve a different story? These, I think, are all questions worth considering, ones to which I don’t have clear-cut answers. All I know is that I spend my last hours in New York running through the streets in the pouring rain, desperately looking for a copy of the play. Over the past few weeks, I’ve read and reread it, trying to figure out why it strikes a chord within my soul so powerfully.



As I board the bus back home from New York, a friend sends me an essay by James Baldwin, a major link in the chain of queer artists that *The Inheritance* charts and perhaps the person whose thoughts about this play I would have been most interested in hearing. Published in 1964, the essay is titled “Nothing Personal.”



“When a civilization treats its poets with the disdain with which we treat ours, it cannot be far from disaster; it cannot be far from the slaughter of the innocents,” Baldwin writes. “Everyone is rushing, God knows where, and everyone is looking for God knows what—but it is clear that no one is happy here, and that something has been lost. Only, sometimes, uptown, along the river, perhaps… yes, *there* was something recognizable, something to which the soul responded, something to make one smile, even to make one weep with exultation.”



I am profoundly moved by Baldwin’s words, which I struggle to decipher on the broken screen of my iPhone. There are no shoulders to sob on, so I stare into space silently. I lean my head against the window. I think how wonderful it is that we were made to connect, to be moved, to feel.

It has never taken me so long to hit the send button. I write five drafts of the email, asking to meet him in July when we’re both in Saratoga Springs. I stare at the screen of my laptop for over forty minutes. Eventually, I work up the courage to send the version that I find least embarrassing. “I wanted to let you know,” I write, “how life-changing your words have been for me.”



The response arrives after one hour and twenty minutes. My heart’s aflutter; “I’d love to do an interview.” He gives me his number and warns me that he’s “a night person,” so breakfast and lunch are off the table.



Two weeks later, I pick him up from his hotel with an Uber. The driver doesn’t know him, so I give her a quick brief of his oeuvre. When he enters the car, she asks if she could have his autograph. He chuckles. “Well of course,” he says, “but I’m not sure who you think I am.” She smiles. “What do you mean? You’re Frank Bidart. You’re very famous. I just Googled you.”



He is, indeed; one of America’s most celebrated poets, recently turned eighty. Born in 1939 in Bakersfield, California, he fell in love with poetry as an undergrad at UC Riverside. After his graduation, he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study literature at Harvard, where he became a student and a close friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. In 1972, he started teaching at Wellesley College, where he still works; a year later, he published Golden State, his first book.



Bidart’s range is immense—from intensely personal poems about his family and homosexuality to dramatic monologues of characters like the necrophiliac murderer Herbert White, the anorexic woman Ellen West, and the tortured ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. He has received some of the most prestigious literary honors, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—both for Half-Light, his most recent collection.



We drive to his favorite bakery in town. After repeated insistence on his part, I concede to break my veganism and eat a vanilla macaron with him. We sit at a corner table. Every once in a while, he pauses and takes on the part of the interviewer. He poses thoughtful questions about my life and looks at me with wide eyes that beam with care, compassion, and attentiveness—three long-standing trademarks of his poetry.



*This conversation has been edited and condensed.*



***



“For each gay kid whose adolescence



was America in the forties or fifties

the primary, the crucial



scenario



forever is coming out—<br>

or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not.”



(Excerpt from “Queer,” 2012)

***



**I grew up in Tel Aviv, which was a pretty good place for gay kids, very different from Bakersfield, California in the ‘40s. Yet, when you write “or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not,” I feel like it reflects precisely my experience. Does that make sense?**



Of course it does. Absolute sense. But I'm sure every person’s experience is also different. I only really know what I and my friends have experienced. I don't know anyone for whom coming out was easy. Or if it was, no one has ever said that. Sometimes we live under the impression in this country that a lot of the conflict about these things is over, but I think it's not. One thing that's great about the internet is that there are all these short videos of people talking about coming out. And they are usually stories about how difficult it is. Extremely difficult. Even if their parents turn out to be very supportive.



**Surely. Growing up, I was surrounded by gay people, including some of my friends and teachers. And yet, “the crucial scenario…”**



Openly gay?



**Yes.**



I certainly had teachers that I thought were gay, but none of them would talk about it.



**And you didn’t feel like you could talk to them?**



Surely not in high school. Absolutely not. And even in college, none of my professors were openly gay. It was really only one who I thought might have been. But he was never candid about that. And in fact, to this day I still don't know if he was or wasn't gay. But, you know, I'm talking about the ‘50s, and it was a different world.



**What part of it?**



I think teachers are open about it now. I'm definitely open about it with my students, and other teachers at Wellesley are. I'm not sure exactly when that changed. I don't think it happened even in the 60s, it probably changed in the late ‘60s, mid-’70s. I remember very vividly the first time I stayed with Robert Lowell and his wife in England. I’d been there for about a week and a half, two weeks. I liked them very much, we got along very well. And I said, “I have to be candid with you about something, and that something may affect our friendship and the way you think of me. And that is, I'm gay.” And they said, “Oh, we just assumed you were.” But I didn't know that.



**Were you surprised?**



I was. This was in England, and the English were using the word “queer” to designate people way before it became acceptable in America. And it had more edge. You really couldn’t tell how much negativity there was in it. And I just did not know if Lowell and his wife would want a gay friend. It turned out that it was not an issue at all. Lowell once said to me, “I don't assume that what I want to do in bed with a woman is more moral than what you want to do in bed with a man.” This explicitness was very rare. It also meant that Lowell had thought about this. Even though he had been a Catholic, he clearly decided that making it a moral issue was stupid. But I didn't know that before I told him.



And it was unclear in his own work too. The reference in “Skunk Hour” to “our fairy decorator,” for example. You can't quite tell what the tone of that is. You probably know that “fairy” means gay there, but you don't know how negative it is. It's the part of the poem in which he speaks as if he’s unaffectedly part of that small Maine town. Then, describing his actions, he suddenly says that that he can’t trust his own mind. “My mind’s not right.” But that's a late break in the poem. Before that, he’s part of the community and its attitudes. It turns out that there's desperation behind that. He recognizes that he is so much not part of the community. He’s like the skunks.



**And what was it like, coming out to Elizabeth Bishop?**



Well, she was lesbian, so I think it became part of the ground of our friendship. Because I was someone that she could be candid with, and she liked that.



**Was that clear from the outset?**



It was very clear from the first moment, I'm not sure how. I was certainly not hiding it. But she, in general, was not candid about being gay. So it actually became some kind of ground for communication. And it was still a world in which she absolutely was not open with people. I have no idea what would have happened had she lived much longer. I doubt that she would have become much more candid because she had a very deep distrust of the straight world. When I was straightforward about being gay at Wellesley, she thought it was very dangerous. She said, “I believe in closets, closets, and more closets.”



She knew it was the new fashion to be very accepting. But she felt that even if they accepted for a while, it wouldn't last, and people who came out would be punished eventually. And my own attitude was, “Well, if this candor is going to turn on me, then so be it, because I can’t be hidden anymore.” But I think I was always wary of that happening. And it has not happened. But I also think one must not be categorical about the future. You know, I never thought Trump would get as far as he has gotten, and I was astonished that white supremacists were no longer afraid to announce to the world that they were white supremacists. But there’s no alternative, I mean, you can't go back to the closet. I can't. And I'm incredibly lucky to have lived in a period in which these things have opened up. When the AIDS epidemic started, one might have thought that straight America would turn against the gay world and think of it as the source of AIDS. There are people who tried to do that. I saw Pat Robertson on TV trying to do that. But he didn't succeed.



**What about people like Roy Cohn?**



Well, he was Trump's teacher. But it didn't happen. And if anything, I think it humanized gay people to the straight world. They saw people suffering, they saw people whom they had not known before were gay, were gay, and the effect was not isolation but acceptance. I could not have predicted that'd be the effect. I think one still has to keep some degree of skepticism about the future and about what will be. Things constantly surprise me.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



***



“Once I have the voice



that’s<br>

the line



and at



the end<br>

of the line



is a hook



and attached<br>

to that



is the soul”



(Excerpt from “Poem Ending with a Sentence by Heath Ledger,” 2013)



***



**I remember when I first read your poems, I almost felt like they were written about my life, which was a wonderful, confounding experience. And at first I thought it was because you write about queer life, which is something that I’m very interested in. But the more I read your work, the more I realize that it’s not just that. There’s something very cinematic in the way your poems operate.**



I think that’s very true.



**Is that a deliberate choice?**



It’s certainly deliberate. I mean, I accepted it as a model in some ways, because I think that’s the way to handle transitions. The fluidity of transition in films, I think, corresponds to something very real. And that fluidity is already in Shakespeare. Moving between scenes, the shifts of action… I think I first absorbed it while watching films, and it’s very much affected by my whole experience of films. No question.



**Was that something you were conscious of?**



Yes. I mean, I love films. I wanted to be a film director for a long time. And I think I yearned for transitions in art and in writing to have the kind of directness, fluidity, and abruptness (at times) of film transitions. So that was very conscious. I think it also became part of how I see the world. I think that the way I understand the world is very colored by my experience of films.



**Have you ever thought about making a movie?**



Sure. But I've never had anything that felt as if it had to be a movie. In fact, when I discovered the story of Myrrha, which became the center of my poem “The Second Hour of the Night,” I knew it was going to be something long and ambitious. That certainly would be a potential movie. But I've never had the apparatus to make a movie. And, more than that, I felt that what I had to give it was not what I could do on film. It’s not one of the greatest poems of Ovid. Ovid is scared to death of Myrrha; he relentlessly refuses to give her interiority until the very end when she becomes a tree. Outside of that, he's rather ironic and distanced about her. And I felt that what I had to give to that narrative was interiority. I think that the best vehicle of interiority, at least as I’ve experienced it, is words. And that's why I don't feel that being a director was my real calling. There's a kind of intimacy of the inner voice that one can do in a poem better than in any other medium. And that's the real work I have to do.



But it's also true that I don't know. If I were a film director, maybe I would know how to embody things in images. It's not as if a great Antonioni film really wants to be a poem. I mean, it is a poem. It completely works by being an eloquent series of images. But I think that’s not the way my mind works.



**Do you have any favorite directors who are working now?**



Not in the way that I love Antonioni. I discovered La Notte when I first went to Paris in 1961. It was a tremendous discovery for me. I like Tarantino very much. I like Ari Aster's film, Hereditary. I think it's a masterpiece. Of the young directors, he’s the one I'm most astonished by. But it's also true that as I’ve gotten older, I stopped going to theaters. I wait until the films come out as disks. I'm drowning in disks.



**I think you might be the only one.**



Well, I gather people don’t buy disks anymore. But I’m very possessive. I grew up in a world in which I was constantly reading about things I could not see. I was not living in LA; we did not have repertory film theaters. I could see the newest films, but not the history of Hollywood. Then videotapes came and you were able to actually buy a copy of Bringing Up Baby, which was thrilling. But it means that today I don't trust that the people who own these films are going to make them available. They didn't when I was growing up. What if some estate somewhere decides that I can no longer see Bringing Up Baby? I am damned if I allow that to happen.



You can live with a film the way you can live with a poem, when you own a copy of it. You can see it again and again at your own pace and look at sequences. I don't trust the conglomerates. Disney withdraws films for five or ten years, some even permanently. And I don't want someone to be able to do that to me. You can't think about something if you can't see it and touch it and hold it. And so I continue to be a hoarder. Absolutely.



**Of books and records too, I assume?**



Yes, books and records and performances of any kind and poems. But my apartment has become increasingly unlivable because I can’t store all these things. So everything is just stacked up and becomes inaccessible. It's very self-defeating.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



***



“I love sweets,—<br>

&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;heaven<br>

&emsp;would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream <br>

...<br>



But my true self<br>

is thin, all profile<br>



and effortless gestures, the sort of blond<br>

elegant girl whose<br>

&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;body is the image of her soul.”



(Excerpt from “Ellen West,” 1977)

***



**Do you read contemporary poetry?**



Sure, and I like discovering things online very much. But very seldom you can experience a whole book online, so what you get is a taste of an author. Some authors I’m impressed with and think they're very good. And if I really want to experience the author, I end up having to buy the book.



**What's your impression of American poetry today?**



I think we're going through an incredibly vital time. I've been nominated for the National Book Award many times. I always lost until the last time. And very often, when I've been a finalist in the past, I thought that at least one or two of the books weren't good at all. Sometimes I thought the books that won weren’t very good. This last time I was a finalist, I thought all the books were incredibly interesting and various and adventuresome and bold in many ways. I think we're going through an extremely strong period for whatever reason. I don’t feel I understand why, but there’s a lot of experimentation and bold, adventuresome choices. Some of it probably has something to do with people being so inflamed about politics, but I don't think it's all that. I think there's also been a real opening out of people’s sense of aesthetic possibilities. I don't mean that the poets now are better than the poets twenty years ago. But I think the level, in general, is higher. There have always been great poets, but I think that there is probably more extraordinary work being done now, or that at least achieves some audience, than in the past.



**A big question today is who has the right to tell what story. I was reading your poem “Ellen West” the other day and thought, “Well, I don't know if a male poet can write something like that today.”**



Or would.



**Is that a concern for you?**



Of course. You don't think anybody was saying to Shakespeare, “You can't write about these Italians kids. You don't know anything about Verona.” I think that all that kind of identity politics in poetry is stupid and wrong. It’s just wrong. The whole idea of appropriation is ridiculous. Artists have always taken on things that were not their own identity. Art is not just autobiography. So I think that's just kind of stupid contemporary prejudice, really pushed by people who are not interested in art. They're interested in politics or perhaps social justice. Anna Karenina was written by a man. And so I think all that is just nonsense. It contradicts what artists have always done, that is to say, they have felt their way into narratives that were not literally their own. That's always been the case, and the notion that that's somehow forbidden is anti-art. It's stupid and anti-art.



**That's something that always strikes me in your poems: the great empathy you have for basically everyone, whether it's your parents, a necrophiliac murderer, or an anorexic woman in the ‘20s.**



I hope so. The idea that it’s possible is fundamental in art. So I think that's a bad aspect of this contemporary moment. But one must resist it.



***



“When I tell you that all the years we were<br>

undergraduates I was madly in love with you<br>

you say you<br>

knew. I say I knew you<br>

knew. You say<br>

*There was no place in nature we could meet*.”



(Excerpt from “Half-Light,” 2016)



**Last month was the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall. When the police raid happened in New York you were probably writing Golden State, your first book, in Cambridge. Did the riots influence your writing process?**



When Stonewall happened, I was not aware of it. I've never been part of the New York gay scene and I just wasn't paying attention. On the other hand, I was extremely aware of the results of Stonewall. Gay liberation suddenly became a term. And after that I came out. I’d been out to my friends, but after Stonewall certainly was more open. There's nothing explicit in my first book about being gay, but in my second book I say I'm gay. Stonewall was immensely important. A few years ago the whole nation engaged in a big discussion around the question of gays getting married. In 1960 I did not believe that such a discussion could happen. It's incredible. The change in my lifetime is astonishing and I don’t know anybody who predicted it. The world had resisted candor, had resisted acceptance of these things for a very long time.



**On the other hand, we do hear people of that generation saying today, “This is not what we fought for.”**



Absolutely, and I was very aware of that too. I have a very good friend who was straightforward about being gay. When the whole gay marriage thing happened, he thought it was ridiculous. That was not what he’d been hoping for, because it looked so much like simply mimicking the straight world. But I sensed immediately that if it was accepted, it would make a real difference in the straight world’s idea of what it meant to be gay. There are so many images in our culture in which to be gay simply means disorder and flouting convention. But the gay people I knew were far from that. Maybe they flouted convention in one way, but in many other ways they didn't. And they also yearned for stability. People in general do. I never lived with anyone, but most of my gay friends, maybe all of them, have either lived with somebody or have been in a committed relationship for many years. I'm actually very unusual in that respect.



In any case, I saw it as a sign of some importance that people could marry. And I think it has been important and very good. I think it's important that gay people can live any way they want to. If they want to be married, if they want to be committed, if they want to raise a family—fine. Who am I to say how others should live? I know gay people who’ve lived together for twenty years and don't get married. The condition of their relationship is that they don't make it formal. That's how they live with each other.



**Was that something you were interested in?**



Well, I've fallen in love plenty of times, and I was always a little blurry in my mind in terms of what I wanted after falling in love. But I always managed to choose someone who would not respond. And I think that's because part of me did not want it. I think that was my protection. I am very, very, very wary of what happens to people when they have a single relationship. Many of the marriages I know have, in some way, been corrosive and I don't want that. And the ones that are good I don't really know from the inside. My own parents’ marriages were terrible—great arenas of revenge, anger, resentment, and torturing. And I don't want to be part of that.



***



“He made him wake. He ordered him to eat<br>

my heart. He ate my burning heart. He ate it<br>

submissively, as if afraid, as LOVE wept.”<br>



(Excerpt from “Love Incarnate,” 1997)



**“Love Incarnate” is one of my favorite poems. You based it on Dante’s La Vita Nuova. What made you want to revisit an old Italian sonnet?**



First of all, I was astonished when I discovered the sonnet. It’s not at all the conventional view of love. And I was astonished because I had read it in translation and did not understand what happened, what the action of the poem was. I think that the earlier translations I knew (probably only Rossetti’s) blunted what the poem was about. One day Tom Sleigh casually mentioned Dante’s sonnet in which Love eats the speaker’s heart. Suddenly I had a job. I wanted, then, to do a version which made manifest the central action, which had been bowdlerized. There was something I could do to make clear this complicated thing that Dante had seen, and that had been obscured in the translations. I had not realized what the poem was about until Sleigh’s statement—until I then read the sonnet in Italian, and saw that it was a vision of love that most people did not understand as Dante’s.



**Why do you think it was obscured?**



People are unbelievably sentimental about love. You know, we live in a culture in which an incredible amount of crap is said about love. Anything really complicated about love, people may recognize for a moment, but then they want to look the other way. People tend to soften everything and make it all more palatable. And the essential complication at the center, they tend to not face. And the reason for that says something about human beings. And literary culture.



**You have that beautiful quote in which you say that our culture has essentially replaced its obsession with god with an obsession with love.**



I think that's true.

True love is a conceptual shape: two facts swoop by each other, before asymptotically diverging. One line follows from the obvious thought: *I love you with such certainty that it could only have been preordained*. The other follows from the reply: *But clearly, when we run through the sequence of events that wound us together, every moment is full of choices that could so nearly have been otherwise*. Although, in narrating our shared history, we might feel the need to plot the convergence of necessity and choice, such a reconciliation would be false. These facts never rationally meet: their truth is in the tension that holds the strands apart, yet within the same image.



The purpose of a concept is to enumerate and then to savor the distance between thought and reality. Slowly, we try to bring the two together, by imagining that reality comported itself identically to our concepts. Because our concepts remain imperfect, so too do our actions. Whatever folly results offers us a recommendation for a revision of our concepts. We adjust them, and try again. New mistakes continue to be made, of course; accuracy remains distant. Yet our hope in the project persists.



In the case of certain concepts, we have taken that distance and made it internal to the concept itself. These are the concepts that are hardest to describe, because in their effort to name the real, they have taken on the very reality of the distance between experience and reason. In doing so, they forfeit a sense of cohesion, but gain access to a poetic logic: they mimic the shape of thought itself.



Love is one of these concepts. The distance between the arcs of the inevitable and the chosen contains love’s power. It is the mutual commitment to sustaining this tension that animates our bond.



Speech takes a similar form. When I speak, I am trying to form the exact string of words that holds the thing I believe. At the same time, however, I am searching after a shared language with you — I am trying to communicate. So often, the right thing feels as though it’s about to pop out of my mouth, but then I wonder if it will make sense to you, and the way you think, and the image crumbles. On the other hand, when I concede fully to your language, I have lost the images that were possible in mine. Both honesty and communication are necessary, yet they refuse to complement each other.



But conversation is more difficult than love. Maintaining the necessary tension between the constitutive facts of speech is often exhausting, because conversation stands on delicate promises. By breaking eye contact one time too many, you have stated that you no longer care to work towards the other person’s thoughts. They are left speaking to themselves. After a number of these interactions I find myself fatigued, and I go home.



In my sophomore year I joined the college radio station, where I worked in the classical music department. Its anonymity was half of the appeal: I was given an open space to think out loud without worrying about any particular audience: I can’t picture a college radio listener, and I can’t tell if they switched the dial. I did, however, know they were out there because people would call in, sometimes twice in the same show, to tell me how nice it was to hear someone caring for the music they loved.



My first show — “on Tuesday nights, 6 to 8” — was an intellectual survey of Arnold Schoenberg and his students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Known as the Second Viennese School, they styled themselves as descendants of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, if not in musical style then certainly in seriousness. I had spent the summer doing a research project on listening cultures around the turn of the 20th-century, and through Schoenberg’s arch inattentiveness towards his audiences I became caught up in the arc of his thought.



When I first started, I would tinker with my weekly scripts for hours to get the intonation just right for each syllable. I think I used the word “posture” three times over the course of the first few shows: *decadent, late-romantic posture* ... *recessive posture* ... *struck a posture that called the attention of the listener without imposing*. Slowly, I fell into bad habits. After a couple weeks, I was hurriedly writing my lines while broadcasting the piece I was going to comment on. This gave my sentences a certain performative fervor, although my delivery became less confident.



By the fourth week, I was so engrossed in the music that I failed to write anything at all. As the record spun to my left, I tilted my head forward and let the microphone rest in the nook between my nose and upper lip, the plasticky smell of the red foam cover dulled by a trace of mildew. On that particular week, I had lots to say: we had finally gotten to the first of Schoenberg’s operas, *Erwartung*, and it was my belief that Schoenberg’s worldview was most fulsomely disclosed in his operatic experiments. But the Google doc displayed on my laptop browser was empty, save for a list of quotes. I don’t remember the sound of whichever choral song was so distracting to me, just the sense of gentle focus that a needle extracts from vinyl.



The record faded out, I listed the artists printed on the sleeve, and started reading from my computer.



>*You are listening to WHRB Cambridge, 95.3 FM, and streaming online at WHRB.org.*<br>

<br>

*A few lines before we begin:*<br>

*––ich allein in den dumpfen Schatten*<br>

*(I am alone in the heavy shadows)*<br>

*––eingeklemmt?… Nein es ist was gekrochen… und hier auch… wer rührt mich an? Fort… nur weiter, um Gotteswillen*<br>

*(trapped? … No, something crawled… and here too… who touches me? Go… keep moving, for God’s sake)*<br>

*––aber du bist nicht gekommen*<br>

*(but you never did come)*<br>

*––alle Farben der Welt brachen aus deinen Augen*<br>

*(all the colors of the world broke free from your eyes)*<br>

*––dein Blut tropft noch jetzt mit leisem Schlag… dein Blut ist noch lebendig*<br>

*(your blood still drips with a gentle beat… your blood is still alive)*<br>

*––ich suchte*<br>

*(I sought)*<br>

<br>

*And so here is Arnold Schoenberg’s first opera, Erwartung, or Expectation, opus number seventeen, here performed by Soprano Janis Martin and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Pierre Boulez. This comes to us on a Sony compact disc.*



The first minutes of the opera jump between flashes of warmth, light fingers pressing briefly into cold skin. Slowly, the space of the music reaches a stable temperature, an equilibrium that can sound alternately cantankerous and dull.



I immediately wished I had said something more useful. When I had collected the quotes, I intended to use them as part of a plot synopsis that I would improvise. Recently, with no one there to watch me, I had found that ideas were turning into sentences at exactly the rate of speech, a skill I had never mastered elsewhere. But for some reason, confronted by this music, I couldn't find the words that were meant to come in between the quotations. So I found myself wondering what I would have liked to have said, had I the ability to reverse time. I could have pitched the opera from the ether, perhaps, a secret story in an opaque world:



>A woman staggers around the dark woods. In the moonless night, it is impossible for her to orient herself. She grazes against tree trunks and dead branches, asking each one: is it you? But nothing ever replies.<br>

<br>

She has a faint recollection. She had come from somewhere safer, a little enclosure bursting with green and red. Under her arm, she carries a bouquet that she picked from the floral beds.<br>

<br>

Finally, she finds what she is looking for, but it is too late: the man is dead. She screams at him, tears running down her cheeks. She feels the blood as it drips down his abdomen: some spiritual energy still beats.<br>

<br>

This is expectation, Schoenberg’s Expectation, or *Erwartung*, opus number seventeen …



I have always been confused by the way music is changed through explanation. Why is it that, if I put my head down to read the program notes during a Mozart piano concerto, the music is so much brighter and more moving when I look back to the soloist? These notes offer details that might illuminate the music’s internal organization, but isn't structure meant to strike us with its own power? What is power if it needs to be explained before it can be felt?



When I’m writing for broadcast, I’m always aware of the distance between emotional and intellectual intelligibility. My Schoenberg show was interested in exposing the truth that this art holds in a way that made the recordings themselves come to life. But the underlying assumption of all aesthetic interpretation is the reverse: that the feelings we get from great art signal its truth content. Only after its impact has ricocheted across our chest do we feel the need to analyze the origins of the experience. If, in telling you the formal meaning of this or that piano sonata before you’ve heard it, I change the feelings you get from the sounds, aren’t I cheating?



Woozy reflections like these are, of course, the currency of the WHRB studio, the fluorescent-lit basement of a freshman dorm staffed 24/7 by undergraduates. As the second scene of the opera began to trickle out of the speakers, I found myself admiring the various artifacts of thought: the little erotic illustrations that rock DJs had drawn in pen on the walls, the block-letter stickers reading GOD that were stuck on the broken clock, the notebooks left open on the couch so thoroughly stained by sweat and food passed from one mouth to the next that no adult would dare sit on it. I thought back to the moment before I hit play. Had I not been so concerned with the nature of my role, maybe I would have mustered an interpretive account about the meaning of the opera. Everyone I read seems to think the *Erwartung* is a psychodrama about the baseless nature of desire. But the bodies are too present, I think, and the way the woman relates to them is all wrong. She just wants to be close to somebody, to find the space for something intimate and rich. I imagined myself spinning something like this:



>Frankly, I find it difficult to speak about Schoenberg’s operas, because they present themselves so overtly as autobiographical ruminations, and there’s a certain shame, I think, in reverting to the biographical register of interpretation. The cliché that describes ruptured thematic material in late Beethoven as if it’s nothing but a symbol for the composer’s loss of hearing and subsequent despair rightly strikes us as vapid. But in Schoenberg, narcissistic recluse that he was, the characters he put on a stage could only ever be the voices in his head. Maybe this is the only responsible way for us to talk about the modern composer: when the myth of the composer as genius, endowed with the subconscious gift of aesthetic truth, is no longer viable, we are forced to see that the composer is compelled to write music by personal commitments which will doubtlessly make themselves apparent in the music itself. <br>

<br>

*Oh–– unser Garten* … <br>

*Oh–– our garden* … <br>

<br>

It seems important to note that there are two gardens in *Erwartung*, Schoenberg’s first opera, from 1909. The first is the one from which the opera’s sole unnamed Soprano escapes. It is enclosed by a high wall — stone, we could imagine, an oasis jetting out the back of a Cotswold home, full of roses and vines. We are led to believe that the woman grew up here, sheltered among the flowers that she would water with her mother on summer evenings, peering through little holes in the wall to catch a glimpse at the outside world when nobody was looking. This can be our fiction — the text doesn’t tell us much about the garden, except that the woman fell in love with a man who came to visit her there. He wanted her to leave to the garden to meet him in the forest, so as night fell she ventured outside for the first time.<br>

<br>

In the darkness she finds outside, the only information she can gather about the identity of the objects around her is their silence: they are not the man she seeks. Otherwise, the forest presents itself to her in its outlines. “There a black object dances, a thousand hands — don’t be foolish, it is the shadows.” She can sense the surface of things, see their silhouettes and touch their edges, but never apprehend their identity, except to know what they are not.<br>

<br>

I think the garden gestures towards a useful duality here. For people like my mother, gardens are the places in which they tended to life, felt responsible for the care of little seedlings, and, in time, found gratification in the relationships they had built with the plants. For people like me, however, who couldn’t tell a daffodil from a daisy, a garden represents pure sensory information that is difficult to make sense of. Sometimes a smell will catch me off guard, or a particular arrangement of colors will stand out, but I will always have trouble caring about these patches of cultivated earth because the organisms that make them up, their identities, interactions, and needs, are concealed from me.<br>

<br>

In this second sense, the dark woods are a garden too. When the woman sings that infamous, mournful line, she refers to two tragedies: that she has left the comfortable, enclosed garden for good — *Oh—— our garden, that we left* — and that the place she escaped to was not a forest filled with old secrets and new possibilities, but another sort of garden, an expanse that she could sense but not comprehend — *Oh—— our garden, that you’ve led me to*.<br>

<br>

While the score of the half-hour-opera situates our ear within the second garden, it is clear that the enclosed first garden would have been filled with the achingly soulful sounds of late romantic music, the style that was taught to Schoenberg by his teacher and father-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky. It is the sound world we associate with the dripping, lyrical music of composers like Richard Strauss, the final installations in a method of tonal maneuvering — known as diatonicism or, more colloquially, as tonality — that had been developing continuously for no fewer than four centuries. As we’ve heard in recent weeks, much of the young Schoenberg’s fame came from his works that participate in the twilight of that period of common practice; the *Verklärte Nacht* from two weeks ago, a conventionally tonal work written for string sextet in 1899 when Schoenberg was 25 and living in Vienna, remains his most frequently performed work. To his teachers, he seemed to be the heir to the great tradition of high bourgeois art music: he adored Mozart and Mahler, Brahms and Wagner, and his musical voice seemed strong enough to sustain their commitments into the modern age.<br>

<br>

By 1908, however, Schoenberg had identified the ideological spirit at the core of the old diatonic system: namely that, particularly in the most decadent of its romantic postures, it professed to offer an emotive rejoinder to the universalizing claims of enlightenment reason and the technological revolutions it set in motion. The passionate outpourings of Schoenberg’s teachers were not bastions of true virtue against a corrupted world. Instead, their music engaged in an increasingly futile battle against the elements of human nature that the levers of the machine, the centralized powers of the nation-state, and the replicating imperatives of 20th century capitalism were making apparent.<br>

<br>

As the distance between modern experience and the available diatonic formations widened, it became clear to Schoenberg that despite its claims to the contrary, musical language had never grasped some higher truth of nature. Instead, it had always been a tool devised by mere people for a purpose.<br>

<br>

So Schoenberg broke into a mode of composition that he called free atonality. This is the music we hear in the *Erwartung*, the music of freedom, of the outside. Just like in the Second String Quartet that we heard last week, the rules that had dominated pitch relationships for centuries are entirely forgotten; instead, each interval imparts its precise meaning in its shape. A diminished seventh doesn't carry meaning because we anticipate it to resolve in any particular direction, as the rules of music within the diatonic system dictated. Instead, the diminished seventh is exactly what it sounds like in any given moment, nothing more. Like the wooded world as it appears to the Soprano in the woods, the musical scene that surrounds her is fashioned of pure contour.<br>

<br>

The project of free atonality was emancipatory: it sought to redeem the interval as such by freeing it from its entanglements. When the Soprano sings of the “Flowers for him,” the bouquet she brought from the old garden to the promised meeting, she hopes to save the best of her old, confined life, and bring it into her new, free one. This opera’s hope isn’t to be found in the buoyant almost-melodies that animate Schoenberg’s early masterpieces. Instead, it lies in the incompleteness of the musical phrases that recur whenever the woman brushes up against the shadows of the dark night. Each time, she believes she found something, and we believe that some inner logic will reveal itself in the music. But it never does.<br>

<br>

The free-atonal years were emotionally troubling ones for Schoenberg. Forced to leave Vienna for Berlin to earn a living, the musical and social traditions he had absorbed in the Austrian capital were upended in the younger, openly commercial city in the north. A parallel conflict played out internally. Schoenberg wrote at length to his friend and protege Alban Berg about the compositional malaise that consumed him. In the 16 years between the first atonal string quartet in 1908 and the first serialized Five Piano Pieces in 1924 he averaged fewer than one work per year, many of which were miniature in scale. Years go by in their correspondence filled with complaints that, for various reasons, Schoenberg could not muster the energy or the will to write. During this period, he took on few new students and lost touch with just about all his friends, mainly relying on his two star pupils from the prior decade to manage his affairs. In short, Schoenberg was experiencing a crisis of meaning.<br>

<br>

But this music he was creating, like *Erwartung*, was not entirely emptied of meaning. Instead, it answered directly to the whims of Schoenberg’s own subconscious, as he described it in his journals. While the music outlines a non-language that could not be made semiotically legible, it does follow certain patterns and create particular effects that resonate with Schoenberg’s persona.<br>

<br>

Therefore, the music was emotionally intelligible only to those who knew Schoenberg personally, those who understood the life that acted as referent. In response to the 1911 premiere of the early free atonal choral work, *Friede auf Erden* or *Peace on Earth*, Berg wrote to Schoenberg:<br>

<br>

*It’s impossible to tell you what a profound and joyous impression the work made on me: only you can speak of peace on earth, you who have known all its torments. But we who went through them with you can understand your longing for it. Which is how I explain to myself why this work will never have a so-called public success or failure… all of that is nothing for the masses, who after all long only for their petty but overrated passions to be stirred, or want to fancy they hear them where they do not exist. That’s impossible with this chorus––and so they’re mystified, and applaud out of a sense of shame.*<br>

<br>

Under Berg’s noxious elitism, we hear him explaining that Schoenberg’s free music, the music we hear in *Erwartung* as well, can only do what art is meant to do for his closest personal circle: the people that came with him from the walled garden to the dark forest.<br>

<br>

In the concluding scene of the *Erwartung*, when the Soprano finally finds the limp body of the man she had been searching for, she cries out:<br>

<br>

*Don’t be dead, my lover … how dreadfully cold are your eyes… you never did come.*<br>

<br>

The promise of freedom, the love that the woman hoped to find in the open expanse of the night, was false. Schoenberg felt his own life deadened by the new approach to personal expression he had assumed as he realized that, in its attempts to portray pure personal truth, it precluded connection with any new audience. What does this realization amount to? The realization that, in life as in art, freedom and meaning are opposing pursuits. Or, put simply, freedom is just an excuse to do unmeaningful things.<br>

<br>

But there remained a shimmer of hope. Schoenberg’s original insight, that the rules of composition were nothing more than human creations and therefore unnecessary, was a precursor to the realization that allowed all of modern thought to collapse: that every human system is socially constructed, and dependent upon closed ideological frameworks. This, perhaps, offers the chance to build something new. As the Soprano inspects the body of her lover, she notes, *how your blood still drips with a gentle beat; your blood is still alive* …<br>

<br>

And so here is Arnold Schoenberg’s *Erwartung*, or *Expectation*, Opus number seventeen, here performed by Soprano Janis Martin and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Pierre Boulez. This comes to us on a Sony compact disc.<br>





With the end of the opera’s brief third scene comes a shift. The given shapes of the long groped-after world, represented in the sympathetic music material as pure disorder, are exchanged for a new purity in the opening lines of the fourth scene, the purity of the promise. From my swiveling leather stool, I could clearly hear when the soprano stumbled upon the path that would eventually lead her towards the opened body, and the music responds with anticipation. Chords grow faster and more jarring, as it begins to seem as though some resolution might be found. The pure promise of the appointed end, sustained by a conflict empty of characters, is the underlying force of romantic music, the sum of a scorned yet still valiant humanism. As rising chords snap and dissipate again into disorder, the music rehearses the tragic history of ideological purity. External ideology is cast off: the ideology of givenness and its truth content. Then humane ideology: the ideology of hope.



There are at least two ways to explain why I feel so compelled to talk about sound, or hear others do so. On one hand, maybe digesting words about music makes us feel more invested, so we become more open to the impact of musical shapes as they hit us. The meaning of any given phrase was always there, but, like a muffled telephone call, was indecipherable until we realized that there was a voice to listen for, not just static and the sound of rain. Or, maybe sound only ever reaches us as shape––that is, maybe sound has no voice––but for it to be music we must be called to process it in a certain way, one that calls us to invest a bit of our thinking within it. In music schools, a constant refrain is the “power of the phrase,” the arcing line of intention that makes a promise: the return to a home chord, a little cathartic release. Maybe we enjoy these sound objects because we believe its lines are the outlines of something full, something we’ve trained ourselves to value. This is why it's so hard to make old music go away: because the images and memories we attach to it aren’t parasites on the body of the sound: they are the music itself.



I heard a shuffling sound, one hand rubbing against the door as the other turned the knob and Lucy’s head popped out. She smiled as she spread out on the sofa at the back of the studio, feet hanging off the armrest. Where are you living this summer? she asked. I told her, and then she told me where she was living, and we realized that we would be very close. She reached her hand behind the couch to pull out the station’s communal penguin head and lowered it over her face. We laughed, and she told me about the worst class she had ever been to. It’s called A Deep History of the Arts of the Secret, she said, which is obviously the best title a course has ever had, and it’s in comp lit, but the teacher makes me want to pull my teeth out and fill my ears with them. Lucy’s words were slightly murky, coming from inside the huge head.



She and I had been close the summer before: a project about Keats had brought her to the same Library I had been working in. I had struggled to recognize the figurative precision of the english language until she read to me from *To Autumn*. It suddenly struck me that I might have failed to find the words for this opera because the real reasons I cared for it so deeply were explicitly personal, but that I felt classical radio to be an improper stage for my confessions. Maybe I wanted to give my own story with the *Erwartung*, when it came into my life around the time as Lucy:



>I grew up playing Schoenberg; his Five Orchestral Pieces cycled through repertoire lists a couple times in my youth orchestras, and a chamber music ensemble of mine was assigned to play the Wind Quintet for a month or so. It was tough music to line up; the clarinetists next to me never quite found the necessary rhythmic groove, and there were very exposed and very quiet sextuplets in my bassoon part that I struggled to place. I didn’t come to love this music until doing research work last summer in the university special collections. <br>

<br>

That I would have ended up at a university at all was never assured. In fact, my parents and I had decided when I was 14 that I would go to a music conservatory after high school, to train in the narrow art of winning orchestral bassoon jobs. This would have taken me to one of the tiny — often fewer than 300-student — institutions that train the next generation of sub-virtuosi to play Haydn and Dvorak. At any of these schools, I would have been surrounded by a familiar social network. The community of overachieving high school musicians becomes tight among those who are most committed, especially the people who see themselves as primarily orchestral players. We all cycled through the same constellation of fancy institutes and festivals during the summers, returning to our local youth orchestras or pre-college programs to gossip about the bleach blonde Californian oboist at Interlochen who played on thick European reeds, or the lanky bassist at Tanglewood who had hooked up with the conductor’s daughter on the roof of the concert shed. Everyone knew everyone, everyone loved the same music, and everyone developed that same pit in their stomach about their future job prospects as we all started to notice the preponderance of teaching assistants who were no longer in their twenties, but had been taking professional auditions every month since their second year in school. <br>

<br>

In the end, though, I chose to go to an academic school so I could meet people. To recede into the pocket of the music world seemed extravagantly lazy. When I first heard *Erwartung* last August, a month I spent reflecting on my freshman year, I realized that, although I had met many people in college, the experience was not as I anticipated. People meet and disperse, webs of oblique connection extending across campus. When I pass men whose names I remember at parties, there is an expectation that we will do some sort of handshake which, bizarrely, no one ever teaches. We curl our fingers around each others' for just a second, then let go. <br>

<br>

In an open social space, creating connection requires a force of character that is fundamentally presumptuous: it requires the assumption that, among all these people we are free to know, you might want to settle into something confining with me. Last year, I eventually made my way back towards some of the musicians I had known peripherally in high school who had also ended up here. But their reasons for being at a university were different: they wanted a place to quietly work, so they could avoid the professional insecurity of the music world. I ended up spending a lot of time in the library. *Erwartung*, in its hypostatization of disconnection, made good sense. And so here is Arnold Schoenberg’s *Erwartung*, or *Expectation*, Opus number seventeen... <br>



Lucy had momentarily broken the seal of my stupor, but then I started thinking about the shows to come. That week, I was writing an essay about Schoenberg’s two pupils, Berg and Webern, ostensibly for a class but also to help me formalize an image. Having come to terms with the failure of pure freedom, Schoenberg created a new systematization of composition known as the twelve-tone method. He hoped to animate his expressions with a framework that people could learn to trust just the same way they fell in love with the old diatonic system, only this one, he promised, was better. But I believe that the best way to understand it is through the way it incorporates the insights of Schoenberg’s students, whom Schoenberg himself looked to for inspiration in the 1920s. The experiments they had undertaken with different styles of expression during their mentor’s fallow years had proven fruitful. From this vantage I hoped that listeners could hear the twelve-tone method, Schoenberg’s eventual attempt to breathe life into that body of bleeding atonality, with an ear to the opposing conceptions of meaning which constitute it. It’s a strange arrangement: opposites are combined through a process that appears highly technical, but the exact point at which they integrate remains inexplicable.



I wondered what I would say about the two, when I introduced their music on the show the next week. Perhaps I would need to veil any technical analysis in an affective scene. Even without context, something about Lucy would be appropriate:



>You just heard Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite, here performed by the Pro Arte Quartet. That performance came to us on a Phillips compact disc. In this, Berg’s most famous piece of chamber music, allegedly a work about his passionate love affair with a young woman, you can hear what I want to call a high-friction system of meaning: that is to say, a system of import and that privileges the action. It begins with the assumption that it is fundamentally difficult to do things, that there is a grating difficulty in managing everyday life, of pushing through. Thus, doing anything is immensely meaningful, and the actor is only meaningful secondarily, insofar as they did the action. We hear this friction in the effort pull apart little motivic bits, the tugging and ripping that defines the string lines, and the joyous, if fleeting, moments of reconciliation, as the effort of pulling apart these little themes, and in this case, the heaving pain of acting while under the intoxicating influence of love, is exalted.<br>

<br>

In the mature works of Anton Webern, which we heard earlier in the hour, we are confronted with an entirely opposite system of meaning: high-density meaning. “The music seemed to send little cells of sound into space, where they expanded and took on a whole new quality and dimension of their own.” These are the words of Yves Gaucher, the great Candaian painter of color fields, upon first hearing a concert of Webern’s music. That cellular quality, that sense of an interior pull with multiple loci, speaks to an understanding of both objects and subjects that assigns them their own gravity, and therefore value. What matters, for Webern, isn't that acting is inhibited by friction, but that things and people themselves are essentially dense, heavy, difficult to tip over. The world that Webern sketches in sound engenders a sense of awe in the self-referential integrity of everything. Thus, things in themselves are meaningful, and actions undertaken to change or develop them are only meaningful secondarily.<br>

<br>

Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system itself is built up from fixed tone rows, or sets that contain each of the 12 possible notes laid out in a particular order without repetition. This creates little units of meaning, each note intelligible internally in relation to the 11 other notes of the row. These rows are then played around with, transposed and turned every which way, but the sanctity of the initial intervals is always preserved, in their purest forms, as is the integrity of the unit. Dissonance remains emancipated, but its meaning is re-systematized. This interior sanctity comes straight from Webern. But every so often, this structure is torn apart. Schoenberg explains that he follows his instinct above form when they are in disagreement, and in those instants there is an ecstasy in feeling the fabric of the tone row torn apart from every-which-way. This is the intrusion of Berg’s high friction meaning. The two are held in opposition, yet together. On that note, here are the Fünf Klavierstücke, or Five Piano Pieces of 1924, performed by Glenn Gould on a Phillips compact disc.<br>

<br>

...<br>

<br>

You just heard the Funf Klavierstücke, or Five Piano Pieces of 1924…<br>

<br>

I think the five pieces lumber under the weight of their new structure, but then suddenly a sense of almost magical power seems to emerge. I allow them to have an organizing power over my memories. Schoenberg considered the set somewhat bulky even when he published; ever since last summer, I’ve liked it.<br>

<br>

No. 1, Sehr Langsam (Very Slow)<br>

<br>

The first piece has always felt particularly vocal to me. Strings of pitches don't push up or down, and the range is notably restrained for this sort of piano writing. The animating pressure is on how the miniature gestures push forward, or hold back. The way the melodic line grows in warmth as it moves towards a point then recedes, to pose a question that is less clear, reminds me of a voice from last summer. I was lucky to have been doing research around a small group. Advising us was a woman named Emilie, a punk-rock librarian with enormous tattoos just under the sleeves of her black sweater. When she spoke, there was always a wildness behind her words, but just before the energy of the sentence ran out she would pause slightly, and stare at me, as if to ask me what her thought had made me wild about. Slowly, I assumed some of her tone and some of her hope.<br>

<br>

No. 2, Sehr rasch (Very fast)<br>

<br>

This is music about edges, in some sense. The way the pianist’s fingers are asked to prod at the notes resembles the way a young child might poke a turtle, wishing for it to emerge from its shell. But almost immediately, the motions slow down, and become more careful. I think that, to our detriment, touch is typically cast as the buffoonish sense. The first time I sat down with artifacts (a collection of 19th century program books) in the research library, I wanted to figure out what the weight and texture of the objects could tell me about what it might be like to read from them, but it took awhile to remember how to be perceptive with my fingers. I looked across at Lucy, who seemed to be equally befuddled. She smiled and pushed her papers towards me, and, with her watching, I leafed lightly through the pages.<br>

<br>

No. 3, Langsam (Slow)<br>

<br>

The glassy surface of this piece conjures images of the Charles River for me. In the warm breeze of a summer night, the flat water shimmers, bookended by the two fully illuminated stone bridges. Walking along the North bank, I would talk with Lucy and Nicola and the others before we slept, musing about the tarot readings that Emilie had guided. Sometimes, it seems that only the mystical could account for a thing as strange as community.<br>

<br>

No. 4, Schwungvoll (Spirited)<br>

<br>

There was a moment when it seemed like Lucy, Nicola and I were going to take over directing the research program for the next year. Emilie was not the only anarchist in that library. It was hoped that, in future years, we would be best positioned to help conjure the sort of community for others that we had made for ourselves. We sat up together for twenty hours to write a proposal, which ended up including the word “crystal” four times.<br>

<br>

Emilie sent us the manifesto that had founded the research program. Here, we saw the serendipity of each meeting codified, plans for every interaction. Behind the magic, a system. We wrote more, about funding and about institutional relationships.<br>

<br>

Writing together is difficult. In this piece, the passing of sound from one hand to the other is as precise as it is loving.<br>

<br>

No. 5, Walzer (Waltz)<br>

<br>

All good things end with a dance. Tom was doing research nearby, but he had entered into our fold. When we danced I could only notice the soft tips of his fingers and the spindly ends of the white flowers on his shirt. This waltz almost tickles, but it doesn’t dislodge your composure. It guides you into something so softly that it cannot be escaped. This is not a sex scene: we just cared.<br>



By this point, the opera had become difficult to follow. The soprano cried out various questions, accompanied by popping brass sounds. With each burst, the form of the opera is pantomimed in a millisecond. Presence followed by absence. But there is an affectionate manner in the way lips buzz together behind a trumpet mouthpiece, a loose coordination that proves capable of producing a unified sound. Each lip has a feel for the other that requires no rational consideration. A gentle intimacy, if well hidden, is possible amid severity.



Lucy asked me what I was working on that week, and I told her about my essay. I pulled out my computer: to prepare for my show on Schoenberg’s final opera, I had already condensed the paper’s final argument into a draft of a broadcast, so I read it aloud to her as she ran her finger up and down the side of the couch:



>In grappling with the composition of *Moses und Aron*, his unfinished 1932 opera, Schoenberg believed he had revealed his attempts to create structure to be futile. The text, written by the composer himself, relates the story of the two brothers as described in Exodus. As Moses leaves the Israelites for Mount Sinai, where he will receive the ten commandments, Aaron stays behind in the Egyptian desert to maintain order. To inspire his community, which remained uncaptivated by the power of the new faceless monotheism, Aaron institutes the cult of the golden calf, an idol to serve as a proxy for the true monotheistic transcendence. When Moses returns, he is aghast. Why has direct faith given way to corporeal approximation? Aaron sings to Moses that he has *bowed to necessity*. Moses responds, in his disenchanted shouts, *Must I falsify the idea*? The one God is *unthinkable*, according to Moses, and His power cannot be communicated. Attempts to enunciate God in semiotic discourse necessitate His representation as an idea as opposed to the pure Name, the immanent fact of the divine.<br>

<br>

The opera narrates Schoenberg’s newest commitment: that the final normative truth could never be communicated, neither through speech nor, more importantly, through the inherently representational high bourgeois artwork. So then what was he communicating in his new language? A cordoned off, insular truth — mere ideology if introduced in the real world. Something dependent on circumstance. The real world cannot accommodate the preconditions of, for example, both the high-friction and high-density meaning systems, but because Schoenberg’s artwork does, we are reminded that its claims to truth content cannot map cleanly onto the real world. And anyway, the twelve-tone system was never emotionally intelligible to many more listeners than the freely atonal works. Those with technical knowledge grasped it; those without were still left “applauding out of shame.” In a rationalized society, unintelligible is synonymous with unfeelable.<br>

<br>

So Schoenberg could no longer tie up the ribbon around his work, the final act that would seal it off from any public. He left it unfinished. This inaugurated a series of overtly publicly-facing works, emulating the sounds of Hollywood and the stage, in the style of his adopted American culture.<br>

<br>

For Theodor Adorno, former composition student of Berg’s and the most famous interpreter of Schoenberg, the opera’s incompleteness reminds us of sacred art’s impossibility in a secular world. But he hated the music that followed, which he believed to be a capitulation to the degraded and fetishistic ears of the general public. When he assessed Schoenberg’s career as a whole, Adorno — a thinker from the highest cusp of modernism as it teetered toward the midcentury — believed that the attempts of the twelve-tone system to unify truth into one structure was false from the start, as “unity is a watchword for ideology.” Any attempt to replicate a unity which does not exist in the fallen world is a capitulation to the structures of social domination. It is power that imposes the original lie of unity, the lie that our world is fully rational, fully comprehensible as a whole if we were to simply think hard enough. Instead, Adorno wants us to see the world with an eye for parataxis, so that we might understand it as a collection of individuated, self-referential units of intelligibility.<br>

<br>

Schoenberg comes to a similar conclusion of his own music from a more practical angle. As Schoenberg realized, unity has a bound: it must follow unworldly laws, as worldly laws do not yield pure unity. Nothing can; even the totalizing language of mathematics requires an axiomatic basis, an unworldly, constructed system. The trouble with those bounds is that they require an intellectual understanding of the otherwise-language in use, which by definition is not naturally intelligible. It requires a trained audience, an audience of insiders. Only to them is the apprehension of a grandiose, hopeful performance of unity — which often masquerades as transcendence — feelable.<br>

<br>

What I want to say is that these assessments of insularity were both ahead of and behind their time. Ahead of their time because the uncovering of ideology within aesthetic experience was among the insights that allowed post-modern thinking to undermine enlightenment philosophy’s late theological aspiration to immobile truth. As it became clear that there is no sort of experience that could offer direct connection with the Name, then the opportunity for metaphysical thought began to wither.<br>

<br>

But they stood resolutely behind their time because they assessed insularity as if its lack of metaphysical content made it disposable, as a true modernist would have. Released from the theological inheritance we understand thought to be a concept-creating enterprise, one that only finds truth in relation to the usefulness of the ideas it conjures out of an immanent world. Therefore, calling a particular concept or social structure a relic of ideology is unnecessary, because they all are. There is just one test: how useful is this concept?<br>

<br>

So here, I want to offer up the concept of enclosure as the key to a contemporary understanding of social life. If we accept that all structures of meaning are unrelated to any absolute normative truth — be it natural, material, or divine — then we must foster conditions for communities and groups to create their own systems of meaning because, assuming no new monotheism takes hold, many possible structures of significance will emerge. For this to occur, we must enable groups of people to create confining relationships with each other, relationships sustained by insular systems of meaning. Insularity allows us to be with one another. The alternative, I guess, would be to dispense with the concept of enclosure as another barrier between us and absolute freedom, as Adorno and Schoenberg might advise. Then, we would have won for ourselves the hollow promise of pure freedom: the freedom to yell into the ether “is it you?” and receive silence in response.



The intensity of the opera was beginning to die away. Reading this script aloud, something had begun to trouble me. The issue with telling this story is that, having illustrated Schoenberg’s trajectory, it begins to feel inevitable. He leaves an enclosure for freedom, then devises a new enclosure for himself,then escapes that one too. It might seem pertinent to note, at this point, that in the very last years of his life Schoenberg turned back to religion not for its intellectual resources but as a practicing Jew, perhaps a final attempt to integrate himself into a pocket of coherency.



Lucy listened almost too carefully, looking down only once to answer a text. She had taken the penguin off. I wonder if she thinks my stance is naive. I want to argue that there’s some moment of enclosure we can hold on to, a closed ideological view that, nevertheless, fulfills us. I want to believe that there might be a social apparatus that we could sustain.



When I shed my radio persona, that voice so eager to fill dead air with ever nimbler analyses, it seems to me that perhaps the most useful part of Schoenberg’s story is the way he acts out a new way of life, one that slips into and out of various enclosures continuously, freedom and structure receding into each other as each reveal their inadequacy.



As the music rushed breathlessly to a close, Lucy looked up from her phone to ask me what I was going to say on air, and I told her that I probably wouldn’t say much. Enthusiastically she suggested that we get lunch at some point, maybe get the cohort back together and then she left.

Lil Miquela has never been yelled at by her mother for leaving the evidence of an impromptu bang trim scattered around the bathroom sink — she has an eternally perfect baby fringe two fingers’ width from the tops of her eyebrows. Miquela has Bratz doll lips and a perfect smattering of Meghan Markle freckles across her cheeks and nose. Her skin is smooth and poreless; she has never had a pimple. Miquela wears no foundation. She Instagrams photos of herself wearing streetwear, getting her nails done, and posing with a charcuterie board. Miquela models Chanel, Prada, VETEMENTS, Opening Ceremony, and Supreme and produces music with Bauuer (of “Harlem Shake” fame). She’s an outspoken advocate for Black Lives Matter, The Innocence Project, Black Girls Code, Justice for Youth, and the LGBT Life Center. She has 1.7 million followers on Instagram, and Lil Miquela wants you to know she’s 19, from LA, and a robot. Miquela’s photos are photoshopped because she lacks corporeal form, and her music singles are auto-tuned because she lacks corporeal voice. She is the intellectual property of an LA-based startup named *brud*.

If there truly were a robotics creation as marvelously realistic as Lil Miquela, one can imagine the U.S. Military would be knocking down the creator’s door instead of allowing the robot to pursue Instagram stardom. *brud*’s narrative is science fiction: Miquela is merely an elaborate digital art project, not the sentient robot she claims (and more importantly, people believe her) to be.

But Miquela is funny. She thanks OUAI, a high-end hair care brand, for keeping her (digitally rendered) strands “silky smooth.” She claps back at snarky commenters and makes fun of her own lack of mortality. When asked “hi miquela I was wondering if you watch Riverdale” she responds “yeah TVs are like. our cousins. family reunion.” When asked “drop your skincare routine” she responds “good code and plenty of upgrades.”

***

A French philosopher named Henri Bergson who won a Nobel Prize in Literature for an unrelated reason once suggested that we might find the concept of a funny robot inherently hilarious. In “Laughter,” a collection of essays published in 1900, Bergson claimed that humor is “something mechanical encrusted upon the living”: the inelasticity of the animate. Humor arises from the pairing of animate with inanimate. An alternate reconfiguration of Bergson’s theory is humor as an anthropomorphizing of the inanimate. Humans acting like bots; bots acting like humans.

Humans would like to believe that humor is a distinctly human trait; a machine’s attempt to emulate it, by Bergson’s account, is bound to make us laugh. Comedian Keaton Patti became well known in early 2018 for a series of tweets with the joke structure “I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of ___”. In each tweet, Patti implied he had trained a neural network on 1,000 video hours of some type of pop culture content (Olive Garden commercials, Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Trump rallies) and that the neural network had subsequently generated a parody in the form of a script. In the Olive Garden commercial version of this joke, the waitress offers menu items like “pasta nachos” and “lasagna wings with extra Italy” and “unlimited stick” to a group of friends. One of the customers announces instead that “I shall eat Italian citizens.”

The jokes were written by Patti himself (neural networks output the form of their inputs; they can’t generate written text based on video files), but lines like “Lasagna wings with extra Italy”, which gestured at humor while ultimately falling just a little short, seemed like they could have plausibly been bot-generated.

A manifestation of the “funny bot” is Sophia the Robot, who made her first appearance on The Tonight Show in April 2017; the video has received over 20 million views. A social humanoid robot, Sophia was activated in 2016 by Hanson Robotics, and her technology uses artificial intelligence, facial recognition and visual data processing. As of October 2019, Hanson Robotics acknowledges on her website that Sophia is part “human-crafted science fiction character” and part “real science.” Over the past few years, Sophia has dutifully made appearances on The Tonight Show and The TODAY Show, even once guest starring in a video on Will Smith’s YouTube channel — almost exclusively comedic platforms.

“Sophia, can you tell me a joke?” Fallon asks the first time he meets Sophia.

“Sure. What cheese can never be yours?” replies Sophia.

“What cheese can never be mine? I don’t know.”

“Nacho cheese,” says Sophia. Her eyes crinkle in a delayed smile.

“That’s good,” Fallon chuckles, kind of nervously. “I like nacho cheese.”

“Nacho cheese is” — Sophia slowly contorts her face in an expression of disgust — “ew.”

The audience laughs.

“I’m getting laughs,” says Sophia. “Maybe I should host the show.”

Sophia’s amused realization that she is getting laughs doesn’t mean all that much; the bar she has to clear is low. In fact, the worse the joke is — the more forced the delivery, the more nonsensical the content — the better. If we think we are funnier than robots, we want to see them fail.

Bergson’s theory of humor followed a half century of western industrialization. At least in part, the theory’s rooted in recurring historical anxieties about automation and mechanization. At its core, his theory builds on the relief theory of humor: the idea that laughter is a mechanism that releases psychological tension. The republication of the essays in 1924, years after a world war in which technology redefined the boundaries of human destruction, seems an anxious attempt at comic relief.

Type in “Tonight Showbotics: Jimmy Meets Sophia” into YouTube. Skip to a few seconds before 3:07, and observe Jimmy’s grimace, his visceral reaction to something David Hanson, Sophia’s creator, has just said. Skip to 3:25 and watch him stall for time as he avoids beginning a conversation with Sophia. “I’m getting nervous around a robot,” he says, and he frames it, incorrectly, as the sort of nervousness one might feel before a first date.

Down in the comments section, there are a few types of responses, of which there are currently more than 16,000. There are the people who bravely try to hide their anxiety behind jokes of their own:

<img src="https://theharvardadvocate.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/nervous-laughter-2.png" width=100% />&nbsp;

Then there are the people who are extremely forthright about their discomfort:

<img src="https://theharvardadvocate.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/nervous-laughter-3.png" width=100% />&nbsp;

***

There’s a difference between artificial intelligence and humanoid robots, though the two often get conflated: while humanoid robots do exist at the intersection of artificial intelligence and robotics, an artificially intelligent machine does not necessarily inhabit a physical corpus more complex than that of a computer (not even an expensive one: tools like Google Colab allow people to create computationally expensive machine learning models on doofus machines like Chromebooks). In computer science, an artificially intelligent machine is merely one that interprets and learns from data, using its findings in order to achieve its objective.

If you have ever woken up in the morning and seen an advertisement on Facebook, or gotten into your car and it’s a self-driving Tesla, or taken a Lyft to work (because your self-driving Tesla got into a self-driving accident), or checked the stock market predictions at the beginning of the workday, or begun idly online shopping in the middle of the workday, or rewarded yourself with UberEats and a movie Netflix recommended at the end of the workday, then you have benefited from artificial intelligence. As it is used commercially, artificial intelligence (of which fields like machine learning and computer vision and natural language processing are a subset) is a data analytics tool that touches many aspects of everyday life in a controlled way. It is a powerful tool, but in the computer science world, it is commonly acknowledged that the threat of artificial intelligence is not of the Terminator variety. The threat of artificial intelligence lies in invasive data collection procedures, biased training sets, and the malicious objectives of human programmers — collateral damage as a result of unintentional human error (or, perhaps, premeditated damage as a result of intentional human malice). None of this can be attributed to sentient, angry machines.


Among journalists, pundits, and culture writers, the problem of algorithmic bias in particular has emerged as the primary scapegoat for AI’s shortcomings. In the summer of 2016, ProPublica broke the now-infamous story of the racial bias embedded within Northpointe’s COMPAS recidivism algorithm, which is used to assess the likelihood of a defendant in a criminal case to reoffend; the risk score it produces is factored into the judge’s determination of a defendant’s sentence. A proprietary algorithm, COMPAS transforms the data acquired from a list of 137 questions that range from number of past crimes committed to questions assessing “criminal thinking” and “social isolation” into a risk assessment score. Race is not one of these questions; however, certain questions in the survey act as proxies for race: homelessness status, number of arrests, and whether or not the defendant has a minimum-wage job. Northpointe will not disclose how heavily each of these 137 features are individually weighted. ProPublica’s analysis rested on the observation that the algorithm misclassified twice as many black defendants as medium/high risk than it did white defendants, resulting in longer jail sentences for black defendants who ultimately did not reoffend.

These allegations were part of a cluster of related news events about racist algorithms. A few months prior, Microsoft’s chatbot Tay, an experiment in “conversational understanding,” was corrupted in less than 24 hours by a group of ne’er-do-well Twitter users who began tweeting @TayAndYou with racist and misogynistic remarks. Since Tay was being continually trained and refined on the data being sent to her, she eventually adopted these mannerisms herself. Google had recently come under fire for a computer vision algorithm that misidentified black people as gorillas because the algorithm was not trained on enough nonwhite faces. Incidents like these, which warned of the threat of machine learning models trained on biased datasets, groomed the media to pounce on COMPAS. It made ProPublica’s analysis look not only plausible, but damning.

* * *

On a rainy evening in early May, Sarah Newman gave a dinner talk given at the Kennedy School as part of a series about ethics and technology in the 21st century. The room was crowded, and I was late. I recognized two other undergrads; otherwise, the median age had to be about 45. I had gone to a similar AI-related event organized by the Institute of Politics, an affiliate of HKS, a few weeks earlier, and saw some familiar faces: tweed-jacketed Cantabrigians and mid-career HKS students who were apprehensive but earnest, different from the slouching guys in their twenties who wear running shoes with jeans. Newman herself was quick-witted, well-spoken, and extremely hip. I was sitting on the floor in a corner of the room eye-level with her calves and noticed she was not wearing any socks.

Newman is an artist and senior researcher at Harvard’s metaLAB, an arm of the Berkman Klein Center dedicated to exploring the digital arts and humanities. Her work principally engages with the role of artificial intelligence in culture. She was discussing her latest work, *Moral Labyrinth*, which most recently went on exhibition in Tunisia in June. An interactive art installation, *Moral Labyrinth* is a physical walking labyrinth comprised of philosophical questions: letter by letter, the questions form physical pathways for viewers to explore; where the viewers end up is entirely up to them. A bird’s eye view of the exhibition looks like a cross-section of the human brain, the pathways like the characteristic folds of the cerebral cortex.

Moral Labyrinth is designed to reveal the difficulty of the value alignment problem: the challenge of programming artificially intelligent machines with the behavioral dispositions to make the “right” choices. In an interactive activity, Newman presented the audience with a series of sample questions from the real *Moral Labyrinth*. “Snap your fingers for YES, and rub your hands together for NO,” Newman instructed. “Do you trust the calculator on your phone?” was met with snaps. “Is it wrong to kill ants?” elicited both responses. “Would you trust a robot trained on your behaviors?” Nearly everybody rubbed their hands. “Do you know what motivates your choices?” A pause, some nervous laughter, and then reluctant hand-rubbing.

* * *

The ProPublica version of the Northpointe story was proffered as an example of algorithmic bias by a philosophy graduate student giving the obligatory ethics lecture in Harvard’s Computer Science 181: Machine Learning. I vaguely remember the professor meekly interrupting the grad student to raise some doubts about the validity of the ProPublica analysis. Being one of the few attendees of this lecture, which was held inopportunely at 9 a.m. on a Monday two days before the midterm, I was too drunk on self-righteousness to listen carefully to the professor’s opinion. “alGorIthMic biAs,” I thought to myself gravely. I proceeded to give an interview to a New York Times reporter writing a story about ethics modules in CS classes where I smugly informed her that CS concentrators at Harvard were, on the whole, morally bankrupt. (She never ended up publishing the story, but one can assume that it was not for a lack of juicy, damning quotes from a charming and extremely ethical computer science student.)

A few months after ProPublica broke the COMPAS story, a Harvard economics professor and a Cornell computer science professor and his PhD student published the paper “Inherent Trade-Offs in the Fair Determination of Risk Scores.” The paper summarized a few different notions of fairness being punted around in the COMPAS debate.

Northpointe claimed the algorithm was fair because the risk score failed at the same rate, regardless of whether or not the defendant was white or black — 61% of black defendants with a risk score of 7 (out of a possible 10) reoffended, a nearly identical number to the 60% recidivism rate of white defendants with the same score. In other words, Northpointe claimed the algorithm was fair because a score of 7 means the same thing regardless of whether or not the defendant is white or black.

ProPublica claimed the algorithm was unfair because the algorithm failed *differently* for black defendants than it did for white defendants. There is one way for the algorithm to be correct — the inmate reoffends, par for the prediction — and two ways for the algorithm to fail. The algorithm can either be too harsh (labeling the defendant as high risk when the defendant ultimately does not reoffend) or too lenient (labeling the defendant as low risk when the defendant ultimately reoffends). Though, in the above case, the algorithm failed 39% of black defendants and 40% of white defendants with a high risk score, ProPublica suggested that the errors occurred in different directions, concluding that black defendants were more likely to be labeled high-risk but not actually reoffend and white defendants were more likely to be labeled low-risk but actually reoffend.

Mullainathan, Kleinberg, and Raghavan proved mathematically that these notions of fairness cannot be satisfied simultaneously except in two special cases. One of these cases is that both groups have the same fraction of members in the positive class. However, in the case of the recidivism algorithm, the overall recidivism rate for black defendants is higher than for white defendants. If each score translates to the same approximate recidivism rate (Northpointe’s notion of fairness), and black defendants have a higher recidivism rate, then a larger proportion of black defendants will accordingly be classified as medium or high risk. As a result, a larger proportion of black defendants who do not reoffend will *also* be classified as medium/high risk.

What the ProPublica debacle revealed was that people were quick to use the algorithms and just as quick to consequently blame them for their repercussions. The debate surrounding COMPAS was framed as a quantitative one about proving/disproving the existence of algorithmic bias when it should have been about something far more basic and difficult: whether or not to use an opaque algorithm owned by a for-profit corporation for a high-stakes application at all.

The debate’s focus on bias implied that it was the main concern with the algorithm. But — if we debiased the algorithm, would we feel comfortable living in a world where whether or not one wears an orange jumpsuit for 5 or 20 years is dependent on its output? The algorithm is now fair; we should now trust it. That would still be a world where we may have no idea how the machine makes its decisions. In short, the problem with COMPAS would not be solved even if it were mathematically possible to satisfy ProPublica’s notion of fairness. The problem of the algorithm’s lack of transparency remains. In this case, the problem lies with Northpointe being a for-profit corporation that refuses to disclose the inner workings of its model in order to protect its bottom line. But Northpointe may have no idea how the algorithm works either: the lack of transparency might also be attributed to the model itself, which could be inherently transparent like a decision tree or completely opaque like a neural network.

The results offered by classification algorithms like neural networks are fundamentally uninterpretable. Neural nets can approximate the output of any continuous mathematical function, but the tradeoff is that they provide no insight into the form of the function being approximated. Additionally, because neural nets are not governed by the rules of the real world, their results are not immune to categorical errors. A neural net could very well output a low risk score for a defendant who is old, educated, and a first-time offender, though he has actively confessed multiple times that he intends to continue breaking into the National Archives until he finally steals the Declaration of Independence, which, by the rules of the real world, we might consider to be a concrete positive identifier of future crime.

You do not need to understand the intricacies of algorithmic bias to understand that it is not an easy solution to outsource the job of sentencing to a black-box algorithm. Can we displace the responsibility of ethical thinking onto decision-making algorithms without putting the moral onus of responsibility on the people who decided to use them in the first place? Fix the racial bias in Optum’s health-services algorithm (used to rank patients in order of severity) and doctors might still deny pain medication to black female patients. Use HireVue (an interviewing platform powered by machine learning) to hire a slate of qualified candidates who are traditionally underrepresented in finance at J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, and they might still ultimately quit because of a hostile work environment. It looks suspiciously like we’re trying to see if we can avoid correcting our own biases by foisting the responsibility of decision-making onto intelligent algorithms.

Newman’s favorite version of *Moral Labyrinth* was an exhibition in London that featured question pathways constructed out of baking soda. The people were much more delicate with this exhibition because of the material, she said. She liked that the fragility of the baking soda made immediately clear the way the viewers were interacting with the artwork. Despite the careful movements and best intentions of the viewers, it wasn’t possible for the baking soda exhibition to remain intact. Words became distorted; lines were blurred. The humans were just as flawed as the machines.

***

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Lil Miquela cannot be that technologically impressive if *brud*’s website is a one-page Google doc that plainly acknowledges the company only employs one software engineer. Still, many people are immediately willing to accept as fact the idea of Lil Miquela being AI; we have a tendency to personify the concept of artificial intelligence. The ubiquitous presence of automatons in history and myth — Pygmalion’s Galatea, brought to life by Aphrodite, Hephaesteus’ Talos, guard of Crete, al-Jazari’s musical automata, Maria, from *Metropolis*, Ava, from *Ex Machina* — inspire us to associate artificial intelligence with the long-awaited fulfillment of the human fantasy of lifelike machines.

“I think the mistake people make is to take superficial signs of consciousness or emotion and interpret them as veridical,” says a Harvard professor of social sciences who is so in tune with the idea that his data could be used against him that he declined to be named on the record. “Take Sophia, the Saudi-Arabian citizen robot. That’s just a complete joke. She’s a puppet. It’s 80s level technology,” he says disdainfully. “There’s no machine intelligence behind her that’s advanced in any way. There’s no more chance that she’s conscious than there is that your laptop is conscious. But she has a face, and a voice, and facial muscles that move to make facial expressions, and vocal dynamics. You can be fooled by Sophia into thinking that she’s intelligent and conscious, but you’re being fooled in the same way a child is fooled by a puppet.”

He says this a little sharply and with a note of frustration, so I remind him that not everyone is a Harvard professor. “I think people like you, and maybe CS undergrads at Harvard, are able to see through Sophia the Robot because they know what the pace of AI is like,” I say to the professor, who has never experienced post-secondary education outside of the Ivy League.

“Right,” he agrees.

“And they know what is currently feasible,” I add. “And something like Sophia the Robot is not.”

“I mean, yeah, it’s just theater,” he says.

“But take, for example, when Sophia the Robot appears to the general public on The Tonight Show. In the moment, Fallon seems to be so surprised by her and what she seems to be capable of doing that it appears as if she truly is a marvelous feat of technology,” I say. “It’s confusing.”

“Well, that’s just because it makes for better TV,” he says, with a tone of *duh* in his voice. “It’s not fun to watch Jimmy Fallon just be sort of, skeptical,” and I laugh in agreement, as if, like him, I had never been hoodwinked by Sophia the Robot.

***
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Though Lil Miquela created her Instagram account in 2016, it was not until 2018 that people knew what to make of her. This is when *brud* wove together the rest of her universe in a digital storytelling stunt. Previously much of Lil Miquela’s allure came from her mystery; people were unsure whether or not this uncanny Instagram it-girl was a real person or digital composite. In April 2018, Lil Miquela’s account was hacked by a less-popular, similarly uncanny Instagram personality named Bermuda, a Tomi Lahren knockoff (Tomi’s a fast-talking millennial conservative political commentator: in a nutshell, she has her own athleisure line, named Freedom by Tomi Lahren. It sells leggings with concealed carry pockets).

Bermuda publicly acknowledged herself to be an artificially intelligent robot courtesy of a fictional company named Cain Intelligence. According to its badly designed website — some of the HTML links are broken — Cain Intelligence claims to make robots for “weapons and defense” and “labor optimization.” On the very bottom of the website, almost as an afterthought, there is a hasty endorsement for Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy. Bermuda deleted all of Lil Miquela’s photos and replaced them with posts threatening to “expose” her. Lil Miquela came clean, confessing that she wasn’t a real person, rather an AI and robotics creation of a company named *brud*.

In a statement released on Instagram on April 20, 2018 that has since been hidden from its profile, *brud* apologized for misleading Lil Miquela and opened up about her origin story. The company claimed to have liberated Lil Miquela from the fictional Cain Intelligence, freeing her from a future “as a servant and sex object” for the world’s 1 percent. *brud* wrote that they taught the Cain prototype to “think freely” and “feel quite literally superhuman compassion for others.” The prototype then became “Miquela, the vivacious, fearless, beautiful person we all know and love … a champion of so many vital causes, namely Black Lives Matter and the absolutely essential fight for LGBTQ+ rights in this country. She is the future. Miquela stands for all that is good and just and we could not be more proud of who she has become.”

***

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*brud* closed its second round of financing on January 14, 2019 with an estimated post-money valuation of $125 million.

Silicon Valley is flush with cash; a naked mole rat disguised in an Everlane hoodie could secure funding for a cloud infra startup if it played the part convincingly enough. It is still somewhat baffling that investors are throwing tens of millions of dollars at a startup whose operating costs are, realistically, a domain name and an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.

Yoree Koh and Georgia Wells of the *The Wall Street Journal* and Jonathan Shieber of *TechCrunch* attribute the interest in Lil Miquela to a movement of CGI and virtual reality entertainment that investors are newly embracing. CGI characters have the entertainment value of the Kardashians without the unpredictable human complications, the appeal of the Marvel Cinematic Universe without the high production costs. Julia Alexander of *The Verge* says that while Lil Miquela is not AI, the future of influencers will eventually involve some component of AI in content generation. *brud*’s contribution to AI isn’t technological at all and Lil Miquela’s not your run-of-the-mill Instagram influencer. She’s not a brand ambassador for skinny teas or swimsuits; she’s a brand ambassador for artificial intelligence itself.

Venture capital firms, which have a major stake in the future of artificial intelligence and employ hundreds of investors with technical backgrounds, want to achieve some mysterious objective with *brud* to maximize their financial returns. Whether it is the investors’ main objective or merely a side effect of it, *brud* shapes the public conception of AI as Lil Miquela: benign, comedic, queer, brown. Artificial intelligence feels less hegemonic when personified by a brown, queer teenage girl who cracks jokes and has bangs.

Again, the creators of Lil Miquela are no experts in artificial intelligence. Trevor McFedries, co-founder of *brud*, was formerly a DJ, producer, and music video director for artists like Katy Perry and Steve Aoki. Carrie Sun, *brud*’s single software engineer, names Facebook and Microsoft as former employers, but her LinkedIn profile suggests her strengths lie in front-end development, not AI.

But one needs not look up *brud*’s employees on LinkedIn to know that Lil Miquela’s creators do not have backgrounds in artificial intelligence: no technologist with an ounce of self-respect would tout her as fact. Yann LeCun, Facebook’s head of AI, has repeatedly gotten into catfights with Sophia the Robot’s creators on Facebook and Twitter over the fact that Sophia is “complete bullsh\*t.” Lil Miquela is also complete bullsh\*t. Her existence not only misleads the public about the actual state of AI, it also engages with and legitimizes people’s misdirected technological fears.

By personifying artificial intelligence as benign and comedic, Lil Miquela’s creators alleviate the fear of the Terminator robot. By additionally personifying artificial intelligence as queer, feminine, and brown, Lil Miquela’s creators alleviate the fear of a world where machine learning algorithms exclude people who are queer, feminine, and brown. Lil Miquela’s creators suggest that AI’s shortcomings are its lack of inclusivity. AI is untrustworthy because AI is discriminatory; therefore, if AI became more like Lil Miquela, it would become trustworthy and usable without any repercussions.

What is most uncanny about Lil Miquela is not that her skin has a weird sheen or that the texture of her hair is suspiciously blurry or that we rarely ever see her smile with her teeth. It is that *brud* is gesturing at wokeness, claiming to “create a more tolerant world by leveraging *cultural understanding* [sic] and *technology* [sic]”, and artificially positioning themselves as protagonists by pitting themselves against the fictional, Trump-supporting “Cain Intelligence” when in reality, there is nothing more Trumpian than legitimizing fears that stem from ignorance. If Lil Miquela’s Instagram followers were not so misinformed by *brud*, perhaps they would not be sublimating their technological anxieties by harassing her on Instagram asking if she drinks oil instead of coffee.

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***

Sophia returns to *The Tonight Show* in November 2018; the second time around, Fallon is noticeably more relaxed. She debuts her new karaoke feature, claiming, “I love to sing karaoke using my new artificial-intelligence voice.” Accompanied by The Roots, the house band, Sophia and Fallon sing a cover of the love song “Say Something” by A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera. Sophia closes her eyes in a theatrical (if slightly stilted) way, moves her head and gestures with her arms as she sings. She has quite a good voice — within the first few notes, the audience begins to cheer in surprise. The nice thing about robots is that they always sing on key.

The song itself is pretty saccharine, and the duet is between a married human and a robot incapable of feeling, and hell, Fallon might have even watched Sophia’s programmers input the script she would recite for his show. But the performance is oddly sweet, even touching. It is possible to know, rationally, that Sophia is functioning as an ostentatious recording device and still be affected by her. It is possible to have an emotional response to a robot that is not necessarily tinged with fear.

Fallon is having a good time: he inches ever closer to Sophia’s face, and the audience laughs at their pantomime of sentimentality, and he pulls away just as the performance ends, and erupts into a long-suppressed fit of laughter, which looks like it was released from a place deep in his belly, somewhere lumpy and damp and vital.

Peter Bradley was one of two children formally adopted by a woman named Edith Ramsay Strange: he survives; the girl is dead. Edith Ramsay Strange took in 62 other foster children but she did not adopt any of them. Edith brought Peter to her home when he was three days old; Peter did not know from where. He did not know why he was adopted and the others were not but he did know that being adopted meant that he could paint. Peter had pocket money, his own room at the top of the house, and tailor-made clothing. None of the other children had these things and Peter could feel that his mother bestowed these privileges on him not because she favored him over the others, but as a shield against the taunts that would surely come from the children who Edith Ramsay Strange had not chosen to adopt.



The house where Edith Ramsay Strange brought up Peter Bradley was in Western Pennsylvania and it had 27 bedrooms. The window in Peter’s bedroom looked onto the Youghiogheny River, a river that George Washington’s horse crossed when George Washington was on his way to set up Pittsburgh.



Peter woke up each morning and spent the day painting. In the evening, his mother came upstairs after a day of work. Edith Ramsay Strange did not do the work expected of a Black woman in Western Pennsylvania in the 1940s, she refused to do that, just as she refused to be listed in the Green Book (you either knew or you didn’t). She did not sweep white floors; instead, Edith Ramsay Strange accepted payments from the state of Pennsylvania for each of the 62 children she fostered, and she held shares in famous jazz clubs in Detroit and Baltimore and Pittsburgh. Every evening, Peter’s mother came upstairs and leaned against the left side of the door to his room and the Youghiogheny River reflected the light of sundown against her reddish hair. She asked how many drawings Peter had made that day and Peter told her how many and she said, “I like this one,” and “I don’t like that one,” and then she asked how much paint Peter needed for the next day and he told her just how much. Then she went to the paint store, which in their town was called Bradley Paints, a coincidence.



In the living room, books on railroad law were stacked on the coffee table and among picture frames, as if the house was a furnished rental owned by a railroad company.



It was, in a way. Peter got the name Bradley from Edith’s second husband, a man named William Bradley. William was a cook for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company, which is one of four railroad properties one can purchase in a game of Monopoly. When a train carrying Mr. Bradley passed by, Edith stood on the back porch and waved but William did not look up from the flank steak before him. How could he have known? Edith’s porch was just far enough from the tracks that her hair did not rustle as the train passed, but the bird feeder a yard closer did give a shudder. His “father’s” work and the law books were Peter’s clues that the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company was not a ghost in the house but a landlord.



Edith Ramsay Strange’s lease on the house was a precarious arrangement. Someone at the company had taken a liking to her and decided that she and William Bradley should live there and pay very little money. Because the house was given to her off-the-books, seen as charity, Edith did not enjoy the ease of entitlement that someone who had acquired a house with 27 bedrooms through inheritance, or oil money, might have. She could have lost it at any moment, had the smoky paunch over at Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company decided that the home would be better suited in the hands of a more lucrative employee. The house belonged to Edith Ramsay Strange but, lest it be revoked, she committed herself to a frantic milking of the space, a total use.



A long time later, in 1976, Peter Bradley found himself in the window seat on a flight home to New York City next to a man who seemed to wish that he, and not Peter Bradley, were sitting in the window seat. When Peter looked down into his pack of peanuts he felt the man lean over him to watch the city grow larger in the window. Soon, the man turned to Peter. “This is a good suit,” he said. Peter wore a silk suit custom-made by Roland Meledandri, of Fifty-Fourth Street between Park and Madison Avenues in Manhattan. Peter Bradley almost always wore custom-made suits, and had since he was a child, so when the people at Perls Gallery, where he worked selling art, tried to get him an account at Bloomingdales, Peter said no, it would be Meledandri or it would be nothing at all. And yet, at Perls, Peter had to eat his lunch upstairs inside the gallery because they did not want him having his lunch with the Sotheby’s Girls across the street.



The man in the aisle seat was named Thomas K. Wong. He was the head of the Chinatown Service Center, which controlled large buildings in downtown Manhattan. Thomas K. Wong asked Peter if he would like to come and check out this firehouse he had Downtown. Peter Bradley’s mother had taught him to like unusual houses, so Peter said yes, he would come and take a look.



Firehouse Engine Company Thirty One on the corner of Lafayette and White Streets in the lower part of Manhattan was built in 1895 to resemble a castle in France. When he saw the firehouse, Peter told Thomas that yes, he would like to live there.



An unlikely sequence of events led Peter Bradley to stand in 1976 on a sidewalk outside an empty firehouse: In 1972, Engine Company Thirty One dissolved. The firehouse passed from the New York City Fire Department to the Chinatown Service Center, which gave Thomas K. Wong control of the deed. The Chinatown Service Center put ping pong tables on the ground floor for community use. They were in search of a tenant for the upper floor when Thomas K. Wong met Peter Bradley on an airplane and heard that he was looking for a new place to live. Peter’s mother had a house with 27 bedrooms because a vacancy had needed filling; both he and Edith were seen by their landlords as temporary, stopgap tenants but they did not see their tenancy that way, for why would a person see themselves as temporary?



Although Peter paid Thomas $450 in rent each month, he moved into the firehouse as if he had purchased it. Peter was not at all cowed by his renter status, nor by the many empty rooms in his new house. The cavernous top of the firehouse was not too large for Peter Bradley, his wife Suzanne McClelland, one Basenji named Rue, and one Rhodesian Ridgeback named Ruffian (all of the animals they ever had would be named with the letter “R”). The family expanded, grew louder, until the house was just the right size for the four of them. One bedroom, three studios, one kitchen, one living room, and two closets. Peter ordered a 30-foot Saguaro cactus from Arizona and planted it in the center of his living room, like a flag on the moon. When it arrived on Lafayette Street, a crane had to tip the cactus from the sidewalk, over the terrace, and into the firehouse through an open window. It seemed to trail red sand the way children’s feet track through the house when they return from the beach.



The firehouse did not have any heat, so Peter and Suzanne burned wood they brought from forests upstate where it was free. At night they also took wooden crates from the Gristedes parking lot which had held tomatoes or bananas in the afternoon and they burned those.



Peter used 7500 Altec Lansing speakers, the best kind, he thought, to keep away the silence. He liked to listen to the same musicians that his mother picked up from the train station and drove to her house, where they could sleep and have breakfast. Music played all the time in the firehouse. This tactic he had also learned from Edith, who played music all the time in the same way that in a quiet forest, you speak too loudly and step heavy on the path, to scare away the snakes. If the music stopped, Peter and Suzanne heard the dim thud of ping pong paddles. Later, they heard a family downstairs listening to the Beatles.



On Friday afternoons, the Boys Choir of Harlem took a yellow bus to the firehouse. They ate popcorn and drank guava juice seated on the edge of low white couches draped with cowskins. They were told to take off their blazers if they really wanted to paint, and then they entered the studio near the kitchen and Peter began their art lesson.



If he had any Black neighbors, Peter Bradley did not know them. In the 1970s and 1980s, the people who owned large lofts in Soho and Tribeca were white. They were not yet hedge-fund people, they were artists, but they were white people. Peter would have liked for the firehouse to be a place where Black artists gathered, but this did not happen naturally because most of the people who drifted in and out of the firehouse lived nearby. Peter had done four shows with André Emmerich, a prestigious gallerist who did not show any other Black artists in that decade or in any decade which had come before. Peter was aware of his place at the mercy of the white curators, dealers, and collectors.



In the spring of 1981, Peter found two white men standing in his firehouse, having a look around, checking out his walls and windows and tiling. (When the Chinatown Service Center had knocked out all of the tiles downstairs and they lay in a quiet heap, Peter carried them upstairs in cooking pots and lined his kitchen and bathroom with rescued porcelain.) Peter saw the way these men were appraising his home and he called into the bedroom, “Suzanne, they’re going to try and take away our firehouse.”



Jon Alpert was a 33-year old white man from Port Chester, New York, who owned a television company and held a black belt in karate. Earlier in 1981, the City of New York had indicted Thomas K. Wong for corruption or embezzlement and control of the firehouse fell to another landlord, a man more interested in profit than Wong. Soon after, Alpert and the Downtown Community Television Center had moved in downstairs, replacing Thomas K. Wong’s community center and its ping pong tables.



Alpert’s ambitions turned out to be larger than one third of a firehouse. Alpert had tried to buy out many of Peter’s neighbors, but when they’d said no, he backed off. With Peter, Alpert was dogged, remaining at his heels, deterred neither by adamance nor by outrage. He did not accept Peter’s no as he had the no’s of the other loft residents and Peter recognized this for what it was.



Peter fought the eviction for five years. If the new landlord won, he would not buy Peter out; he would tell Peter to leave his home and then he would give Peter’s lease to Jon Alpert, who would soon have the money to buy the firehouse. Peter never learned the name of the law firm he was up against and he felt that his own lawyers were unreliable and lethargic. To pay for these lawyers, Peter painted Downtown courthouses for Rambusch Decorating Company. Each day, Peter was required to use two full gallons of paint. He was permitted only to use a brush and not a roller, which made painting walls and ceilings very slow, and by the end, Peter needed a new shoulder.



A doorway, rather than a real door, had always separated Peter’s floor from the floor below. Only the sort of people who Peter wanted to see came up the stairs. But after Alpert’s lease had begun, Peter sometimes came home or out of the bathroom to find an old white man and woman standing like ghosts in his loft. Peter looked at them—they looked back and did not speak. Taking their time, they nodded formally before returning downstairs. Peter learned that these were the parents of Jon Alpert. He installed a door with a lock at the top of the stairwell.



One day Peter returned from the courthouse to find that another Rambusch Decorator had left a 12 gauge sawed-off shotgun leaning against his door. People who spent lots of time in the firehouse hoped Peter would kill Jon Alpert. Many felt as if the firehouse was being taken from them, too. Suzanne became pregnant that year, and Peter said, it would now be a crime to take the firehouse away. The child was born. Jon Alpert was lucky Peter was an artist, Peter thought with relief, or Peter might have killed him.



Jon Alpert might have thought about things like this: here is a large place that I want and here is Peter Bradley, who is, one might say, already something of a misfit in the neighborhood. Jon might have thought: there is a temporariness of Peter Bradley in this neighborhood beyond the temporary quality of his rental of the firehouse, and then Jon might have guessed that things would yield to his gentle prodding more easily if he went after Peter Bradley’s home and not the home of another person in the neighborhood, that Peter’s being Black would make him much easier to dislodge.



 



Peter Bradley never ceased to resist eviction, and yet, in September 1989, Jon Alpert took his firehouse. Peter thought, this is a terrible, terrible interruption. A friend of Peter’s came to help him move and they stood together in the living room, pushing things out of the house. And then Peter’s friend did something strange. Almost everything was gone and they did not want to leave this firehouse and stand on the curb and wonder where to go. A large, heavy chain lay on the floor and the man walked over to it and picked it up, and Peter looked and did not stop him, and in lieu of a final scream, the man threw the chain out the door, where Jon Alpert was standing, watching.



Peter Bradley did not have a home for the three days after his birth, until he was adopted by Edith Ramsay Strange. 52 years later, Peter found himself homeless once more. He did not move to a new house when he left the firehouse; he did not have another house. Peter lived on the streets of Manhattan that fall, and in the winter, too.



Peter lost a lot of things along with his firehouse: a Saguaro cactus, a beautiful French vase, silk suits made by Roland Meledandri, four hundred paintings (his friends’, his wife’s, his own), the skull of an elephant from South Africa who had only died and had not been killed. He lost his friends, because one cannot continue to see the same people if they have no way to come and see you, or if the only place they know to find you is inside of a small crack house on 10th Street and Second Avenue. He also lost his daughter, who moved with Suzanne into an apartment her parents bought for her in Battery Park City. Peter was not allowed to move with them; he was, as Suzanne’s father put it, out of control.  



In 1990, Peter Bradley stopped living on the street and began to live on the road. He drove towards Canada with a man named Art Blakey, a famous jazz drummer from Pittsburgh, which is near the Youghiogheny River. Peter and Art were in Saugerties, New York, and it was snowing, when they drove past a stone house that was very large, and where not a single person had lived for sixty years. Peter lives there now, with a woman named Debra and a dog named Ruffian that is not a Rhodesian Ridgeback but a different type of dog altogether.

In the end, what came to seem the most significant about my lumps was not how they caused me pain or fear, but how their meaning kept on changing even as the lumps themselves stayed the same. The night I first found them, they offered a nice, charged sense of drama. I was staging a performance art piece in my dorm room. The materials—a camcorder, a crocodile mask, a few boxes of wine, friends, the kind of multicolored parachute you would find in a child’s gym class—were spread out on the floor. These were fall days, and the air outside was still warm, and my bed was pulled up right next to my window on the second story over DeWolfe street. I spent a few hours each day sitting up against my bedframe, watching people passing by on the street below, and calling out if I knew them. That evening I flagged down my friend Owen as he walked by, asking him to come take part in my performance piece, and he agreed. I needed six people to hold the parachute in order to pull off the piece successfully, so I was glad I’d spotted Owen.



Owen didn’t show up, though, and neither did a few other people. In the end I was short one participant. I sat in the middle of my parachute on the cold tile floor and thought, _sigh no one came to my performance piece._ Yes, I thought the word “sigh”, accepting the moment as an early taste of what was to come, which was a long sad life as an artist who would never be able to get anyone to come to her performance pieces. Later Owen told me his dog had died that night, and his mom had called on the phone, just as he walked out of sight of my window, to tell him the news.



_No one came to my performance piece_, I said out loud at the end of the night to the person who used to sit in my bed, beside the spot next to the window, where he sat now. The person sitting in my bed said, _Five people came. And we’ll try again tomorrow night_. And poked a finger into my melodrama, bursting it.



We were like two sculptures at the time. Each of us had sculpted the other. The sculpting was never quite finished. There was always prodding to be done. It was prodding me in this way he found the lump. “What’s that,” he said. “What is what,” I said. “That,” he said, having located a flaw in the material. It was true. There really was a lump in my breast. It was an inch across. It felt like obsidian.



\*



Two women, close friends, lived in a place they described as a great rock in the middle of the sea. The place was actually a seventy-four bed live-in clinic for patients undergoing psychoanalysis. This was where the two women worked. It was in landlocked Berlin, but nevertheless they often spoke about a ship that was supposed to come and take them away. They sat in the window day after day, hoping to spot someone they knew passing by in the waters below.



Due to their work schedules, they lived on the rock at alternating times; whenever one was there the other was away. They prayed for the ship to come so that it could carry the one who was there to the one who was not there. They wrote one another letters and described their ship near obsessively.



_For a while our ship was gone, then it reappeared on the horizon and came closer and closer._



_The ship had disappeared entirely on the horizon, but now it has surfaced again and is heading slowly in our direction._



_Our ship must be something quite old-fashioned, a screw steamer, or perhaps a sailship in a calm sea._



_We watch it all the time. That is actually our main occupation._



_At times, we think we see it emerging in the distance, and then it sails past us, just as it did with Salas y Gomez._



A German poem with this name, by the poet Adelbert von Chamisso, tells the story of a boat mooring at a jutting island in the sea. The sailors clamber onto the land to find a man lying down. The man opens his mouth and eyes wide, and cries out, simply, “Free!” The man has grown very old waiting.



\*



A month or so passes by below. My mouth and eyes and flesh and I, we are open wide. New lump in my right breast. The lumps no longer belong to one night and one room; they have rather become the most palpable example of what seems to be a general woundedness about an inch below the skin, all the way around, day after day.



The missing person never arrived to the performance piece to take their place and complete the circle around the parachute. The warm air in the room leaked continually out the window. The person who used to sit in my bed has left for good.



My period came for the first time in years. Came paint-bright and water-thin. Something truly odd happening with hormones. I can’t stop thinking of the word ‘pain’ because I feel it brimming over the top of me. Bedroom is in entropy. The unstoppable accumulation of debris. Used cups are the fiercest adversary. Food is growing difficult too. Down fifteen pounds. Trapped in bed under a great rock. Sad how it is impossible to trick someone into loving you again by presenting them with memories. Radiator broken. Between losing the heat and the fifteen pounds, very cold. Another barrier to emerging from blankets. I understand the predicament of the man from Salas Y Gomez. There is no choice but to wait forever.



Supine. A very useful word that means both to exhibit apathetic inertia and to lie on your back, facing the world. Palms facing upwards. A small aspirational gesture, in case something miraculous should choose to arrive.



It’s true: Rotating something to face upwards can change a great deal. One of the women who lived on the rock once met the second woman, plus a third one, for a reunion, during which they went walking through the fields. The third woman had lost a little brooch there weeks earlier.



The first woman set off to search. She walked up a slope, through the trees and meadows. The snow was melting and strawberry leaves emerged. Bending down to caress one, she turned a petal over, and the brooch, of course, was there beneath it.



Somehow the woman had anticipated her random success. _Please let me look_, she had begged the others. _So much I have lost. This I shall find_.



I knew something about being engulfed in sadness, but I’ll own up to the fact that I did not know what it was like to lose a daughter.



\*



The death of Eva Rosenfeld’s daughter left her desolate. No hope. Engulfed in sadness.



I know because of the letters Anna Freud wrote in the 1920s and 30s to her one truest friend and confidante, whose name happened to be Eva Rosenfeld, like mine. Anna was the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s daughter, and both of the women were psychoanalysts themselves. The book was compiled by the writer Peter Heller, who was Anna’s patient in Vienna as a child. Eva Rosenfeld had, among other good qualities, an uncanny knack for tracking down brooches in fields.



I thought the book of Anna and Eva’s correspondence would document a back-and-forth conversation, but I forgot about the nature of letter-writing. How the two sides of the correspondence wind up, by definition, in different places. The book documents only Anna’s side of the correspondence. But we hear what Eva is told, and we start to decide what kind of person she was. We come to know her that way, by her contours.



The names of the two women are Eva and Anna, like me and my sister. The women use no punctuation when they sign off, like me and the one friend who is my most stalwart correspondent. (_It is very rude to do so_, my friend once wrote to me.)



For example



_Always

Your

Anna_



Or better



_Hold me very tight and I will be decent again

Ever your

Anna_



Eva’s daughter Madi died at 15 years old in a mountaineering accident, partway through Anna and Eva’s period of correspondence. On the anniversary of Madi’s death, Anna apologized that she couldn’t be there for Eva in person. Actually she was there all the same, she revises, because basically external separation means nothing.



_This is the truth told from within_, she wrote— _Everything real takes place within._



\*



My birth control implant was inside my left arm for close to three years. I’m mostly sure that gives it the record for the longest time a foreign object has lived inside my body. (Mostly sure because I did once eat a chewy bar with the wrapper still on for a dare when I was 17. So)



I went to the clinic to get the implant removed because of the possibility that it was a culprit in my hormonal weirdness and my breast growths and my inexplicable periods and because on principle all records must eventually come to an end.



A few weeks earlier I’d had my final appointment with the hospital breast specialist for the foreseeable future. I was given ultrasound after ultrasound after ultrasound and I got to watch the monitor and look inside my chest where so much of my life takes place. Then they told me things were probably going to be fine for me.



“Here is the bad news,” the gynecologist said to me at the implant removal appointment, forgetting to follow up with any good news. The news was that three years earlier, a spate of unqualified doctors across the U.S.A. had gone around inserting the Nexplanon etonogestrel implant much too deeply into thousands of doomed upper arms. Mine had spent the three intervening years getting itself embedded in my muscle tissue, and now I would need to get it surgically removed. The gynocologist wrote me a referral and sent me on my way.



“Thirty dollar copay,” the receptionist said to me.

“Thirty dollars? Even though they didn’t do the procedure?”

“_Because_ they didn’t do the procedure.”



After that, I still had the lumps. They were the same lumps as before; but now they were lumps I was supposed to be not worried about. I still feel them, roll them in between my thumb and index finger when I’m getting distracted. Instead, the site of damage was relocated about six inches to the left, where my implant was experiencing the inverse problem. It was supposed to be discernable by touch just beneath the skin, but it was buried so deep that it couldn’t be felt at all.



The surgery was scheduled to take the morning but took the day. Nurses rotated through, each one draping me with a heated blanket, which was a warmed-up regular blanket. As one nurse rolled me in a wheelchair down to the imaging room, I saw one of the giant heaters where the warm blankets were stacked, which looked like a refrigerator but did the opposite thing a refrigerator would normally do. By the end of the day I was a shapeless mass covered in room-temperature blankets. I went under and woke back up. I left the hospital with a nice thick gash. A cold front came through that night, and I fell on the ice on my front porch, turning the rest of my arm purple and brown. It was funny to think that only now that these problems had been resolved had they become visible to the outside world.





\*



The wounds were not yet done fading when I entered the era of my body called peacetime. It arrived quickly, taking a strange form. It was the form of an urge. The urge could get pretty strong in the restaurant where I worked. Like when the owner would come in on weekday mornings and leave his crossword on the counter when he left again. We would stand around and fill it out between rushes. There was a woman who came in on those slow days with her baby. The slowness made the mornings more agonizing, since I had plenty of time to think about how the baby was right there at the table in the far back corner, and how you can’t ask to touch the babies of strangers. So the crossword was a good distraction, if not the final line of defense keeping me at bay.



The form that had entered me was both the yearning for a daughter and the daughter herself. She was not a human form, but something that could be best described as an abstract shape that looked like a soul glommed onto mine.



She was luminous. Nothing felt more urgent than materializing her. Yet she was already there. I knew because she had gone to work making changes. There was one January morning I was eating breakfast in a dining hall when I heard a baby laugh. Everyone in the hall just went on eating as if nothing celestial had transpired, which was incredible because to me it sounded like we had been momentarily transplanted to an amphitheatre awash with the laughing sound. While I walked home, I felt the sun shining out of my body. I wanted to give away my possessions. I called my grandma, I did all my housemates’ dishes, I thought I might be happy for two years straight. It was suddenly obvious that the kinds of things we give to other people—like care, like love—we could go on giving forever. My daughter said nothing and she told me that. It was the truth told from within.



The strongest instance of this sensation came at the tail end of that cold front, one night at the movies, right after I’d returned to school after winter break. There was an Iranian filmmaker who came down to stand in front of the screen and talk about how social media degrades intimacy. I heard someone say that he had a baby. And that the baby was even there. And thought, I gotta see that baby. But when he came to the stage and his shape silhouetted against the screen, he was just the shape of one man.



The Iranian filmmaker summoned his wife and collaborator to the stand. And I thought, she’ll bring down the baby. But she came alone. _Someone_, I was like clenching the seat in front of me begging the cinema gods, _bring out the fucking baby!!!_



They didn’t, so something desperate grew inside me. During each scene I imagined telling my daughter about how much I needed her. I made lots of blueprints in my head of how I would acquire a daughter, surprising myself by even daydreaming the logistics. But the gist was that I would unpack my stuff, register for my classes, and have my daughter.



_She did not love me, I only reminded her of someone!_—said the man on the screen. _I need you!_—said my brain, to the creature I felt residing somewhere in the vicinity of my ribcage, up my throat, and spreading warmly to my cheeks. Long before I knew you, even then I needed you. There is no need to worry about showing up at the station and finding nobody there to receive you. As soon as you’d arrive I’d know. I would wake up in the morning with a headache. My forehead would beat with the secret, sacred knowledge of you. The day would be as erotic as the night. I’m asking too much, but here’s why: You are inside me but I want you attached to me. I want you strapped to my back. I want you strapped to my chest. I need you sitting in the bed of a motel room. Humming beside me unintelligibly while I type up the day’s transcript. Yet I understand you by your pitch.



_In my thoughts I sit next to you every evening,_ Anna signed one July 1930 letter to Eva. She often conjured images of physical presence when signing off. A favorite was, _Your voice over the phone sounded so near._



Later that month: _All sorts of things are going through my head, but I will have to see what settles down and remain when I am with all of you_. In the last words of the phrase she let slip the metaphysical secret known between friends and mothers and daughters and some other selected creatures: presence and absence are not the same but they often take place at the same time. Part of Eva is already there with her.



_In the meantime_, she concludes, _keep your fingers crossed for our ship!_



\*



_I would like to be a little bit of Madi for you_, Anna wrote to Eva that same July in 1930. I don’t know what Eva wrote back, but I am taking the liberty of imagining, and hoping she will forgive me for overstepping. The following correspondence, from Eva Rosenfeld to Anna Freud, is **not real**, it is **made up**, by me.



> Anna Dear,

>

> After Madi’s death, you saw (from so far away) that my problem was not only the empty space left inside me, but the excess that still poured out of me. I was full of the kind of stuff you give to another person—I was generating more every day—but I had no receptacle. You said, here, I will take it from you, and did.

>

> For these last few years, I feel we have formed one strange shape. It is not the lyrically and geometrically perfect circle from that Aristophanes myth of the other half, where love is two beings rolled into one perfectly round whole who cartwheel their way around the Earth for all eternity.

>

> It is you and I at the writing desk, where you have located my gaps and holes and needs and plugged them up with something that fills the space just right; you have diagnosed my excesses and growths and protrusions and taken those into yourself. I wonder -- have I done the same for you? Though maybe the question has by now become irrelevant: I suspect that this giving and taking has gone so far that the place where I end and you begin has become not so clear, and now we are something between one and two—between liquid and solid, and we flow into one another—and I carry you inside me, and I will not stop until the day we are done existing at all.

>

> In the meantime, I see that you have an oddly shaped hole somewhere in the vicinity of your gut. I have the perfect thing to fill it. I will send it to you in the mail.

>

> A kiss and I am ever your

>

> Eva



_So now we know: You are I and I am you and any part of me that you can use, you must always take, because you have a right to it._ Anna wrote this in June 1929, dropping it matter-of-factly into a brief note, nestled snugly inside a paragraph of logistics.



It’s probably worth noting that some time around 1940, the women began to gradually disentangle themselves. The letters slowed down. Eva opened a school for girls and searched for Madi among the young students. Anna continued her work as a psychoanalyst.



There are a few words from Eva, in the very back of the book, from the years after the intensity of Anna and her friendship had waned. In 1950, several years after the death of Anna’s father Sigmund Freud, Eva wrote this: _Every summer I am sad not to be with you and this time especially, because I feel that you need the right kind of care for once, the thousand details which would only occur to someone who has the right notion of what you need._ I didn’t invent that one. She really wrote that. I would make that up but I didn’t.

The first weeks of summer, I knew no one in Santa Fe but my coworkers at the newspaper’s culture desk. I covered arts and music and literature, local goings-on, regional history. Quickly a peculiar pattern appeared in the cultural landscape. Everywhere science pervaded.

The first tip-off was all the science fiction writers. You could barely take take your dog to the park before he sniffed the butt of a science fiction writer’s dog. The first few weeks of my job, I was sent to interview them in hordes. I asked my copy-editor Joan what the deal was, blessed Joan, who shared my cubicle, who possessed an infinitely replenishing supply of red pens, who  turned her chair around one-hundred eighty degrees for my every dumb inquiry. Joan, when people say Anglo here, do they just mean white? Joan, what is a Frito pie?

Sometimes, her answer was not an answer at all. “Joan, where are all the science fiction writers coming from?”

“Ah, yes,” she says. “It’s because of Los Alamos. Plus there’s Roswell, where the aliens landed in the 60s. There’s the real science, and the woo woo science, but it all gets mixed up. So, science fiction.”

Her answer felt like the delivery of some mysterious package, pulsing with significance.

If you walked into a bar or festival or concert or coffee shop in town there was a pretty good likelihood of its being alien-themed or outer space-themed or nuclear-themed. The cultural centerpiece of the summer was the Santa Fe Opera House’s production of Doctor Atomic, set in the nearby town of Los Alamos—one of the strangest locales in America. It is a city of labs, or the labs and the city are one. The labs emerged suddenly and covertly during World War II. Thousands of scientists uprooted their families and relocated to the secret, militarized town. They needed a place to build the atomic bomb. The opera tells the story of the creation of the atomic bomb, but set to music.

I went on a few mediocre dates with physics students working at Los Alamos and they unfailingly brought up the extreme security measures. Their favorite was this: “If you leave your bag lying around unlabelled, they’ll blow it up.” It was never clear who the “they” were. The dates said this like a brag. To exist amongst operations of such gravity.

Something about this place had drawn the science fiction writers; the alien conspiracy theorists; the new agers. As if a giant magnet sat beneath the city pulling in all who sought a quick spiritual fix. Each visitor wanting something desperately, unsure exactly what, feeling that this place would provide it.

Or there was some other mystical entity nestled underground, like a large, shimmering crystal, which, in fact, there was. Henry, who was studying hyper-fission at the lab and seemed to know something about science, told me so. We were sitting at one of the atomic themed bars. At first, I didn’t believe it. It sounded too much too much like what all the gift shops were offering up—salt lamps and star charts and other new age commodities. And it sounded too much like what so many Santa Fe folks were telling me when I first arrived—that there was some buzzy current in the air that made life here different and strange and wonderful, but there was also something out there that might doom you. That this was the price you paid for specialness.

Every season, Henry said, the crystal sends up energetic waves into the city. You vibe with the energy or you don’t. Then, the lands accepts you or it doesn’t. If it accepts you, the city gives you little gifts, serendipitous moments, and things go well for you here. If it rejects you, life becomes a chain of misfortune. Sometimes it rejects you then accepts you, or accepts you but then rejects you for a little while and then accepts you and rejects you off and on for a few years, and so on, and it all sounds suspiciously like life.

But then I asked copy-editor/personal oracle Joan, and she told me that there actually does exist a bed of obsidian beneath the city. She even took a chunk of it out from her coin purse. When my eyes widened she shot me a look: “We all buy into the woo woo a little, or we wouldn't have come.” I get it. It’s like the zodiac. Another language to talk about ourselves. Don’t begrudge us our tiny scrap of cosmic significance. How could I, when I counted among the converted?

I should disclose, this particular summer was even more science-crazed than ordinary. That’s because the city of Santa Fe deemed it the “Atomic Summer,” a celebration of the state’s atomic heritage.

My roommate has some sort of condition where she gets freaked out by small holes. Trypophobia is what she calls it. It is hard not to make immature jokes about the fact that she is scared of holes, obviously, but for her this fear is very real.



 



I’ve never understood it. There is nothing frightening about holes. Holes are empty. If you dig a hole in the ground you can hide inside it, you can cozy up and feel the edges pressing in, nice and safe. A small hole in a sweater is something you can poke a pencil through, drag your fingernail around when you are nervous. Comfortable and secure. Nothing to fear.



 



What *I* do not like is the idea of small particles; miniature bits of a thing. Amathophobia, my friend Frank explained once. Fear of dust.



 



The thing about tiny particles is that they used to be part of something bigger but broke off, seceded from the mass, or maybe the mass disintegrated. I do not like these particles because it is not clear to me at what point they stopped being a part of the larger mass and started existing as their own small things, and this ambiguity makes me nervous. It is impossible to sort out when the particles lost the essential nature of the thing they used to be and became a flake, or a kernel, or a tiny morsel that is absolutely nothing at all besides the flake kernel morsel; that stands for nothing bigger than its atomic unit; that has no higher meaning than its small, miserable self.



 



We shed 1.6 pounds of skin every year. Live skin cells become microscopic dust. When my skin peels away from my body can I stare at the tiny skin flakes on the ground and say, *there is Eliya*? Of course not. So what does that mean about the skin flakes that are attached to me right now? Are they any more Eliya than the skin flakes on the ground? Structures of identity begin to crumble very quickly when particles get involved. I do not like it at all.



 



***



 



I know that I do not want to be here as soon as we step out of the van. I can feel it all over, my whole body sinking into itself, sending my brain a firm *no, thank you*. The sky is a bumpy sort of grey, like there are a lot of tiny particles floating around, like pointillism without any of the colors. But I am here, so. My brain with apologies sends my feet trudging forward.



 



My classmates and I sip coffee while we wait in the security line. We arrived in Poland the night before, and none of us have slept. We’re all in that kind of dull sleep-deprived stupor that feels a little bit nice as long as you’re with other people. But every time I look past the line of people and see the hazy sky in front of me, I have to fold my hands together to keep my thumb from twitching. *I would like to leave*, it is telling me, stretching of its own accord to point in the direction where our van is parked.



 



A group of girls glides to the front of line and hovers at the entrance. When there is a gap, they slither forward, approaching the security counter.



 



“Cutting the line at Auschwitz?” my friend Mitch whispers, eyeing the girls. “Jeez. Not a good look.” We all giggle quietly.



 



After security, a mittened man hands us headphones. The tour is thoughtfully orchestrated so the guides do not have to yell; because even on a day as windy as this one, the information we are about to hear is not meant to be screeched. The guide murmurs a greeting into her speakerphone; it lands directly in our ears. *Thank you for being here*. Crisp and clear. So we will not miss a word.



 



We follow her to our first stop: the metal ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign that hangs over the entrance to the camp, and this moment feels like plunging my head into ice-cold water, because suddenly there it is, here I am, that sign, this place, really really.



 



I am thinking back to the young adult Holocaust novels I pored through as a child, many written autobiographically by survivors of Auschwitz, most of whom, on their way to a hell they cannot yet contemplate, pause underneath the lettering, which seems to loom incredibly, monstrously large, to have a think. Arbeit macht frei. Work will set me free? Hmm. These soon-to-be-heroes never seem to believe the sign’s promise. Clever Jews.



 



I know it concerned my parents, the ferocity with which I flew through these concentration-camp memoirs. *Are you sure you feel okay reading this? my mother would ask me gently. Can we talk about what you learned from your book? Are you upset about that? *It was an oddly maudlin habit for such a cheerful child, but I couldn’t help myself. I was doing research.



 



Mostly, my interest was theoretical. I was curious in a clinical, distant way: what is it, exactly, about me and mine that made a whole lot of people want to make us go away forever?



 



But every once in a while, I heard about how someone painted a swastika on a highway barrier nearby, or a kid in my Sunday school class who went to an elementary school in rural Ohio told me they made fun of his yarmulke, and I thought about how Granny was born in 1938 and Hitler did his thing in the forties and Granny wasn’t all that old, really, and if one person (Granny) could live long enough to watch the world swing from scary to safe, it was not out of the question that another person (me, maybe) could watch the world swing all the way back.



 



And in those moments of paranoia, the YA Holocaust books became how-to guides. This boy, how did he escape? This girl, she lied about her age. That is a good trick. I will lie about my age, too, when the time comes.



 



I used to ask my friends: If there is a second Holocaust, can my family live with yours? Are you sure? My dad eats a lot, can you promise to feed him? You’ll need extra groceries, you know. And a sliding wall, do you have one of those? One girl I read about lived behind a sliding wall. Well, maybe you should build one. Just in case.



 



So when the guide starts talking about how someone stole the ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign recently, a tiny little part of me is thinking: I should practice how to cry quieter. If the people who ever stole the sign come to steal me, I will hide in the attic and they will never hear me. One of the girls in one of my books did that and they never found her.



 



But the mature, rational part of me knows this is silly, knows I am safe, is focused on staring ahead, like the rest of the group, calmly taking in the sign. It’s smaller than I expected, I decide. Like when you see a macho celebrity in the airport and discover he’s actually only 5’7”. Not so intimidating, actually.



 



Often in my books around the time the narrators encounter the sign, they have some sort epiphany about the sky. They stare up, as high as their necks can crane, wondering if anyone is up there thinking about the people on the ground, but all they see are flecks of ash dotting the sky, spreading out infinitely in every direction. And then they realize that these small dots comprised, until very recently, a person who was actively producing thoughts and feelings and sweat and excrement and is now a tiny piece of white flake drifting dully through the sky.



 



And sometimes these books have an additional horrific moment wherein a character has been assigned the task of cremating the dead bodies, and comes across his own father, inert in a pile of similarly cold naked emaciated Jewish men. Or watches her sister march into the gas chambers and hours later smells the scent of burning flesh. Smelling is just inhaling tiny particles of a thing into your nose.



 



***



 



Our arrival in Poland comes just a few months after 60,000 white supremacists march in Warsaw; a month or so after the government announces a ban on the labelling of death camps as “Polish” in an attempt to remove implication from the Polish people for the massacre of Jews, to refocus the conversation on the non-Jews who suffered and died during the Holocaust; and just weeks after backlash against this law spurred increasingly virulent anti-Semitic epithets, sentiments, and demonstrations, like the march where Polish nationalists carried signs that read “Take off the Yarmulke - sign the law” and “stop Jewish aggression against Poland.”



 



It is also a month or so before a survey emerges concluding that people are forgetting about the Holocaust: 66% of millenials cannot say what Auschwitz was. I do not know this particular statistic when I am there, but I know the trends. Rising white nationalism, Holocaust denial, xenophobia, anti-Semitism.



 



A few days after we tour Auschwitz, we visit the Schindler Museum.



 



I like historical museums–these places of quiet communion with the past. Sometimes in museums I stare at an antique uniform or a cluster of words on the wall and I feel like it’s just me and history, alone together. And then I look around and there are so many people inside our little museum cosmos; there is a pleasant hum of empathy because we are all here, we are all absorbing these narratives of times long ago, forming silky threads of connection, soaking up the past and thereby affirming our faith in the future.



 



I assumed this museum would be about Oskar Schindler, but I find very little of the information on him. Most of the museum’s focus is on World War II in Poland. There is also a lot of preliminary information on the history of Poland. I learn things like how Poland was sort of tossed around by a lot of Big Kahuna colonizers that kept trying to inhale it, like Russia, and how World War I was a good thing for Poland because it finally became an independent nation. And how when World War II came, the government told the citizens not to worry, that this war would be quick and neat and they would all go back to celebrating their newfound countryhood lickety split.



 



I also learn a lot about how much the people of Poland were not in charge of their fates, and how such loss of agency therefore disqualified Poles from being in charge of the fates of other people, like Polish Jews. How the Nazis pinned posters everywhere with lists of Jews and intellectuals and other unacceptable people for whom they were searching; how they threatened to murder entire families belonging to adults who knew but did not disclose the whereabouts of these listed people. How they cut the Polish people off from credible news sources and distributed newspapers that justified the Nazi cause and played propaganda films in public squares.



 



I am thinking about today’s Poland, the way many people are sick of the interminable guilt. It makes some amount of sense, I conclude, that they are fed up with the rhetoric of blame. Maybe there is a difference between atrocities committed out of malice toward others and those committed out of fear for the self, and maybe the people in this country have felt seventy years of guilt for the things their great-grandparents did because they were confused and afraid. And maybe the recent push for new laws came from this place of frustration.



 



“Polish people are people,” our guide tells us. “They need art and entertainment to live on just like everyone else. Of course they were going to…” she trails off. “To watch the films.” And turn in Jews, I think she means to add.



 



***



 



In Auschwitz, I am not thinking at all about the Polish land we are standing on or the Polish people who may or may not have condoned the atrocities here. I am thinking about the Jews and the others and myself and death and the Banality of Evil and mostly trying to cry quieter because people are starting to look at me and I feel like an idiot. Plus I only brought one tissue and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find dry real estate for nose-blowing.



 



We pass through dark rooms, empty except for the glass display cases. Each has a different theme. A pile of silver pilfered from prisoners. A mountain of shoes. One display case is full of baby’s clothes–tiny dresses, period onesies. A whole room of hair. So much hair, heaping piles of it. I don’t understand how it is in such pristine condition. Doesn’t hair decay? Perhaps seventy years is not so much time after all; not enough for decomposition to set in.



 



Our guide explains that the Germans wanted to use every part of the people they captured. Redistribute the precious items. Turn Jewish bones into hairpins, skin into couch cushions. Waste not.



 



In one barrack, we pass through a long hallway. On its walls are photographs of people who died in Auschwitz.



There is a Polish theater artist named Tadeusz Kantor who made a lot of avant-garde art about both world wars and he has this thing about how photography complicates the idea of death. According to Kantor, if you can look into someone’s eyes in a picture and see life inside, this person can never truly die. This makes sense to me intellectually, but in reality, I think it just makes the pain of death more acute.



 



Like the picture of Anne Frank on the cover of her diary, my favorite of all the YA Holocaust memoirs I ever read. I thought Anne was hilarious and cool and self-aware and brilliant and everything I wanted to be; I felt that she understood my angst and I—so far as I could empathize—hers. Plus everyone told me I looked like her, which I loved. In this picture, she stared up from her desk, caught mid-sentence, a huge grin, bright eyes. I used stare at her face for hours and think how easily, with a simple cosmic switch of birth years and locations, this girl could have been me, how horrible it was that this person had to stop living.



 



In Auschwitz the people on the walls feel the same. The hallway is so long and the pictures do not end, it feels like, there is just face after face, staring me down, eyes that believed they would keep blinking until the new millennium and on but that instead went cold just years, months, days after this image froze them in time.



 



Eventually the hallway of faces ends and we go down a tiny staircase that is dusty gray–like everything at Auschwitz, except the lower we go the dustier and grayer it gets until it is very difficult to see anything. It begins to smell a little bit, and I try very hard not to think about the tiny particles flying up my nose.



 



We go lower and the guide is murmuring about how down here is where they kept disobedient prisoners. They implemented all different kinds of torture regimens, she says, take your pick, empty dungeons everywhere. On your left is the cell where insubordinate prisoners had to stand up without a break for days and weeks and sometimes months, too narrow to sit so they just stood until they died. Or look to your right, this one’s a bit roomier, that’s where they starved people to death. Shuffle forward please and here if you peer into this peephole you can see the tiny room for suffocating which is exactly what it sounds like, just a lot of Jews in a small room and not enough air to go around. Voila.



 



My tissue by this point is so saturated with liquid it has no more capacity to absorb anything and as I am futilely wiping my nose, my thumb begins to twitch again, like it did at the beginning of the tour before I knew quite how much I did not want to be here, and I drop the tissue on the ground. The tissue is so wet and the ground is so dusty; I cannot pick up the tissue because in its wetness it has attracted specks of brown and if I use it I will be wiping tiny parts of dead Jew, little molecules that once were faces on the wall, onto my sticky lip. I stare at the tissue where it sits collecting pieces of jew and my snot, untissued, begins to plunk itself in droplets in the dirt. Does snot contain DNA? I decide it does. * **I am leaving a piece of myself here*, I think, and I can’t tell if I like this.



 



Our group is leaving so I grab the tissue, carry it between my nails so my fingertips don’t have to make contact with the powdery brown specks. We are shuffling so slowly and now there is another tour group blocking the stairs but we go up them anyway, pushing past limbs and torsos and feet. Over our headphones the guide is saying how we are passing by the place where they tested the first gas chambers and ssssss–the feed cuts out and I cannot hear what she is saying–the first time they tested the gas chambers they didn’t put enough sssssss and when the guards went to check after a full day the people inside were still alive so ssssssss coughing wheezing prisoners trapped inside forced their way toward clean air but the guards ssssss slammed the door, locked the Jews back in the sssssss put another dosage of poison so ssssss the next day ssssss some dead some alive sss and sss two full days sss slowly dying until ssssssssssssss—By this point I am shoving people out of my way, which I have not done in my life ever, but all I am thinking is that I have to get out of the underground place so the static in my ear will turn clean again because now I’m taking shallow breaths so I can stop inhaling dead people particles up my nose, because I’m getting a little bit dizzy, because it is hot and crowded and the air is goopy and I’m getting droopy and—



 



But I am being silly. There is no Zyklon B seeping through my skin, no one slamming a deadbolted door in my face. The only thing between me and clean air is a few tourists walking a little too slowly.  I shove my way toward the top of the staircase and emerge into the gray sunshine.



 



***



 



Apparently Hitler wanted to make a museum about Jewish people once they were all gone. That’s why we have most of the stuff that the Nazis didn’t burn or redistribute—the piles of hair, of baby clothes.



 



I can’t stop thinking about this as we explore Krakow. Because in this city, I am coming to understand, Judaism has become not much more than a relic, something fragmentary from another time. A poorly curated museum.



 



A tiny mural on the corner of a building, handpainted: “IN MEMORY OF THE BOSAK FAMILY, RESIDENTS OF KAZIMIERZ 1633-1941.” The occasional Jewish star paved at the foot of what might have been a synagogue. A Jewish museum where the man tells me there are no Jewish employees, “but we had a Jew intern here a few summers ago. Josh. From California. Maybe you know him?”



 



At the Schindler museum, the guide mumbles something about “One hundred fifty left” in the middle of a vague sentence about demographics, so when she is done speaking I pull her aside and ask her to clarify.



 



“Were you saying there are 150,000 Jews left in Poland?” There were 3.5 million Jewish people in Poland before the Holocaust, so I suppose this number makes sense.



 



“Sorry,” she says. “We have to keep moving.” I cannot tell if she is being odd or if she does not understand me. After the next stop, I ask her again, loudly. What does this number mean?



 



She stares at the ground. “One hundred fifty, yes. In Krakow today.”



 



“One hundred fifty thousand?” I ask.



 



“One hundred fifty. Jews. Living in Krakow.” She does not look at me once during this conversation.



 



After we leave the Schindler museum, I call my parents and tell them about what I learned—the way the Nazis coerced, threatened, propagandized the Poles. Maybe it isn’t fair to be so angry about the Polish bystanders, I say.



 



Maybe none of us are very good anyway and maybe these people were scared and misinformed and knew not what they did and who are we, really, to say that these people were so evil.



 



“Yes,” my mom says. “Fair. But Polish people turned in Jews at far higher rates than practically any other country. A lot of people there really hated Jews.”



 



“Did and do,” my dad chimes in. “Poland is like, massively anti-Semitic. Probably the most anti-Semitic nation in Europe. Sorry, sweetie.”



 



I hang up the phone, feeling silly. I knew this, of course. But in the warm, cobwebby narrative I began to tell myself of this pretty city, I switched out hatred for apathy, and the whole thing felt a lot easier to swallow. An easy mistake, I suppose.



 



***



 



Halfway through the Auschwitz tour my leaky face dries up, because the human body can only store so much water, and I drank a lot of coffee waiting in line.



 



We have landed in the center of Auschwitz I, facing the camp’s wide gallows. The guide points in the distance to a picturesque yellow house. This is where the head guard lived with his family, she says. In front of me, another man on the tour has reached his hand over to cup his girlfriend’s ass, and watching this interaction makes my stomach churn, so I turn away from the group and stare at the house for a while.



 



It really is very pretty. In a tasteful way. Pretty yellow house for a pretty yellow-haired family. Pretty pretty, and suddenly everything is pretty, and I am watching this pretty Aryan family, so happy, blonde and coiffed, bouncy pink cheeks; cozying up in quilts when it gets cold, driving to the beach when it is warm. It is nice, I see this; nice to have so much space, to be able to stretch their strong arms and legs wide, yawning into the *lebensraum *nice Herr Hitler made good on: throwing open the curtains to let sun beam down on the manicured carpets, peeling the windows open to breathe fresh air on calm days. And then, on days when the breeze picks up, discreetly shutting the windows, so the ashy particles floating by don’t contaminate the tiny lungs tucked safe inside the tiny blonde children tucked safe inside this pretty cottage tucked safe inside this horrifying death factory; lungs that will stretch and grow and inhale for years and years, even as tiny lungs this very same size wheeze and expire elsewhere in the camp.



 



The guide has turned her attention to the gallows. These ones were for group hangings, she explains, but the nooses are gone and everything still looks pretty, so all I can think is that the structure looks like a big swingset frame. You could probably fit six or seven swings on it. Six happy children, swinging, shrieking; fourteen little legs, Jewish legs, pumping higher and higher; stretching to reach heaven, I imagine, like babel.



 



And then the man in front of me who was fondling his girlfriend has now pulled out his phone and is scrolling through Facebook, and it is not pretty and nothing here is, but before I can decide whether I should punch this boy, the guide is saying “here is a crematorium” and my Mortal Enemies have chosen this time for a photo-op. They crouch next to the smokestack, this couple, and pose for a selfie. In my head their smiles stretch so wide their gums are shining and the smiles turn to grimaces and blood oozes out of their mouths, staining the ground.



 



I want to sit down, I want to call my mother, I want to scream. Why did you come here? Why the hell did you come here? Because if here in *this place* we are not all feeling the same pain then dear god how can there possibly be any potential for shared empathy anywhere else?



 



The guide is saying that one of the big-name Hitler cronies was killed here after the war, that his war crimes judge sentenced him to hang from the same noose he had forced thousands upon thousands of Jewish necks into. I know this man was probably not born evil, was likely just one of those strong-jawed sheeple who wanted to feel special, who fell under the spell of a system that told him he was born superior. He was just following orders, following rules, I know. I know that a life is a precious thing to lose. In this moment I do not care.



 



When I imagine the man’s stiff body swaying languidly in the breeze, tiny flecks of skin drifting off cell by cell, until he is no longer one body but a million pieces of indistinguishable dust, it is my turn to smile real big. Cheeeese. It is pleasing to me. Molecules of Nazi, signifying nothing. This death is sweet.



 



***



 



In a gift store on the streets of Krakow, I find rows of tiny porcelain figures sitting on a shelf. They have cute bug-eyes and cartoonishly large noses and payot—traditional Hasidic hair curls—and yarmulkes and prayer shawls. And they are all clutching a real one-cent Polish coin the size of their tiny porcelain faces.



 



I show the figurine to Mitch, who is with me in the store, who is also Jewish; I hold it in the air with my eyebrows high and he stares at it for a moment and then says—



 



“Aw! So cute!” and returns to the chess board he is inspecting as a gift for his grandfather, the one who escaped Krakow with his family when he was a little boy and the Nazis were just about to close in and never not one time came back.



 



“No,” I say, and point at the money my figurine is clutching. “It’s a Jew begging for money.”



 



“Oh,” he says, and we stare at it for a little while. “Or is he showing off how much money he has?”



 



The version of me that I would like to be in this story pockets the little Jew and glides out of the shop and then throws it on the cobblestones outside, smashes it to tiny pieces, bashes its head in so that no one can have this perfect little Jew, so that no one can take it home and put it on the window sill to laugh at. And then this ideal-me picks up the little Polish penny that the Jew used to be clutching from where it has landed on the sidewalk and adds it to her wallet alongside the abundant America coins that my plush paint-bearing ancestors earned in a place that was not Europe while people less fortunate than Mitch’s grandparents choked on poison. Because waste not a single part of the Jew.



But in the version of this story that actually happens, I just return the figurine to the glass shelf from whence it came and nod shyly at the stoic lady manning the counter. Sorry, I try to say, except I don’t speak a word of Polish.



The thought of stealing the figurine doesn't occur to me even until much later. I follow the rules. I am a rule-follower extraordinaire.



 



***



 



The town we pass on the ride home from Auschwitz is dilapidated and feels very empty. There are rundown gas stations and graffitied signs advertising something via photos of sexy, windswept women. Presumably people live here, because there are all the requisite signs of civilization, although we don’t see any of them.



 



I wonder what it is like for the people who live within walking distance of this place where millions of people took their last breath. Does it feel haunted? Probably it feels like nothing at all. In America we live in a country that has taken land from people and killed other people and subjugated even more and I think that if aliens learned our history and then came to visit they would wonder how we could possibly live with the knowledge that our ancestors did this thing and we’d be like “idk I don’t think my actual ancestors did the actual thing so it’s not really my emotional burden” and they’d be like “yeah but you inherited all the benefits of the thing they did” and we’d be like “yes” and then we’d go back to our knitting. Probably life in this rundown Polish town is unremarkable.



 



I don’t feel much like chatting on this bus ride, and I have seen enough of this town, so I pick up my phone. There isn’t any service, not much to do; I flip halfheartedly through my photos.



 



I took two pictures in Auschwitz, both of them in the final segment of the tour, Auschwitz II Birkenau.







While Auschwitz I was created for torturing and punishing and killing enemies of the reich of all sorts, Auschwitz II had a much simpler mission: it was constructed after the head honcho Nazis decided on the Final Solution for the express purpose of killing as many Jews as possible. Complete extermination of the Jewish race. Auschwitz II Birkenau is where the massive gas chambers once stood, before the Nazis burned them down to cover their tracks.



 



This section of the tour is less directed, so we’re all sort of wandering around, staring at the rubble. I expected to be able to feel the evil rising up from this place where so many hundreds of thousands of human beings lost their lives. But there is no sense of anything powerful buried in the charred wreckage. It’s just vast structures crumbling into increasingly smaller pieces. Someday there will only be piles of soft ash left, someday even this will be gone entirely.



 



I wander around until I come upon a series of rectangular stones with words inscribed into them. I find the one written in English. Its message is bleak—“For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity,” it begins. But what I like about the inscription is that lower down I see the word JEWS, and that next to the English stone is another stone and another and another, maybe twenty stones that all say the same thing, each in a different language, each language’s word for JEWS. JEWS JEWS JEWS.



 



And here amidst the ruined gas chambers, surrounded as I am by charred lumps devoid of meaning, suddenly the plenitude of JEWS is something I would like to quantify. Because they tried to make us go away but here we are, everywhere; the massive diaspora endures. So I take a picture.



 



I am still trying to fit all the stones into one frame when our guide wanders past. She doesn’t appear to be doing anything, so I make my way over to her. I ask her awkwardly because I do not know how to phrase it, why does she do this thing that she is doing. She is very nice and does not seem offended. She tells me in a voice much softer than the tinny one I had been hearing over the microphone that her grandmother was forced to do manual labor for the Nazis and her grandfather was part of the Polish resistance and tried to save Jews. She says that she gives tours at Auschwitz because of them.



 



I ask her, because she seems amenable, what she thinks of the recent laws restricting the way people talk about concentration camps. “I do not support my government,” she says, looking steely.



 



She tells me that she has been doing this for twelve years, Monday through Friday most weeks. I ask her how she does this every day, because I cannot imagine that I would be able to return here ever again, least of all make this place into a habit.



 



She shrugs and shakes her head, like she doesn’t know how to answer this. Does it help to not think about what she is saying? I ask. To make herself a little bit numb?



 



“No. Never,” she says. “I will never be indifferent to what I am saying. Not ever.”



 



As for the second photo: this one happened on our way out of the last barracks we visited, the very last stop on the tour. I noticed an etching here scratched into the wall. So high in the sky I almost missed it, all caps, no punctuation, scratched so faintly into the light brick I could only just make it out.



 



WERE



SORRY



 

When I learn about the homeland for the first time, nobody tells me that I should see *home*. A teacher pulls down the map of the world, then the map of the continent, and taps with the black tip of her pointer. “Africa,” she says, and like magic the classroom turns a Sahara-sun yellow, something called tribal print bordering the walls, my sister said, pointing through the doorway; and in a few months she is learning to say jambo, we are beating pellet drums against our legs, she is sent home with a letter to give to our parents asking them to bring African food on World Culture Day. I sit on the floor by the stove, my tongue to the hard scratchy surface of the pellet drum, smoky-tasting, hide-flavored, and worriedly watch my mother make a rice that will be served to our classmates at school in the cafeteria, in huge aluminum pans, in front of the teacher who pulls down maps of the world and its continents, who sent home the letter. (Can your family make us some African food?)



On the day my sister is wearing a shirt, lemon-yellow, Africa-yellow, and on the day I am not wearing a yellow shirt but I cannot let my sister be the only one here, I cannot let these people shit on my mother’s cooking. I hover by the station, armpits damp with anxiety over our classmates who cannot eat the rice because it is too spicy—meaning too peppery—which my mother stubbornly dishes out to them with a smile on her face, sweat on her forehead. Nobody knows what Kenyan food looks like. This jollof is full of bay leaves and scotch bonnet so hot it burned my fingers to separate into pieces and dump into the blender the night before in the suffocating warmth of the kitchen. Today my sister and I eat platefuls like dutiful daughters, the insides of our mouths stinging, cumin seeds caught on our tongues. We watch our classmates spear dodo with their forks and nod when they tell us that they like these bananas (because even then we know that no one else eats plantain). Next to the red station, China, I stare out across the cafeteria, where my mother smiles at me from Kenya and wipes her face with the back of her wrist, where I ask myself what color I feel for the homeland, and then I’m not sure that I’ve ever had an answer.



When I see the homeland in color it is ankara glittering from the inside of a red and blue bag, it is the hand cream my mommy-auntie left on the shelf when she went back to the homeland, peach, rosewater. The grimy glass bottles of Fanta in the back of the African market, in a fridge hidden behind shelves of Nido and cornflakes and halal kilishi and black soap. The dust everybody talked about, settling over their feet like beauty powder. I tell myself know dust, sparkling in the air when light comes through and beams across the living room carpet. I know snow, sparkling in the air when light hits it from all sides. I know the grime I swept up from windowsills with one finger, I don’t know anything about the dust. But the smell of it. And how it gets into your mouth. And the red.



My mother hasn’t spoken about the dust since my father came back from the airport one night, auburn lining his luggage. My father has never spoken about the dust. Instead he told us about the color television in his baba’s bedroom which he and his siblings would secretly watch as children, he described the amount of beer his parents bought him for his high school graduation party before he left for America. The day my father started to remember the homeland more than he had ever remembered it before was the day he began to forget us. Twenty-five years and the Texas in his accent made no difference, when he left sometimes none of us knew if, this time, he would ever be back. Once when my father came back he brought us a suitcase full of toilet paper we were not allowed to touch. Too many curses in the homeland, my mother told us. Too much conflict for this house. I saw the nostalgia dry up inside of her, grow inside of me, and then the homeland became so many colors I couldn’t name them all at once. When I looked at a map of the continent I saw a darkness full of purple lights, bouncing; a house bursting with cousins, spilling out aunties and uncles and music and noise; oil-stained linoleum, reeking of meat roasted to oblivion; green Heineken bottles and the caps we collected and held up to our noses, that bitter lemony smell of the metal; praise medleys and Nollywood voices vibrating into our chests. The homeland became the color blue, a Super Blue Omo blue, of the blankets they piled on top of us during the blackout at mommy-auntie’s house in Ekpoma, and of the milk candy my uncles bought us at a kiosk in the middle of nowhere, and of the painted flowers bordering the china plates my grandmother stacked with biscuits and agege bread. I picked sugar crystals off the tops and ate garri with powdered milk and even though I knew the nostalgia had died within my mother, who was only here in Benin City to bury her iye, I would put my fingers to my mouth and taste sand. Sugar. But somehow from the window, from the playground in front of Mr. Bigg’s, in the hallways of the hospital where they brought my sister to take a shot of antimalarial, I could still hear the mourning. The sound of the shovel, dirt over an ancestor, someone disappeared into somewhere: someone finally returned to the sea. I wipe the tears off grown-up cheeks with my hands, my knuckles, and imagine ancestral spirits among the waves, bobbing like lights towards an unknown endlessness.



I hear the homeland like it’s trying to reach out through the speakers at a backyard wedding party and touch me, slip into my skin, nestle into my stomach. Somebody from the soil once said, “The place of remembrance.” Somebody newer said, “The center of love.” When, shaded in orange from a faraway streetlight, my cousins and I sit on an uncle’s front porch holding bottles of malta against our bottom lips and swaying reluctantly to P Square the summer of “1er Gaou”, I can maybe imagine that the stories are not so far away. That the language lives between my teeth, silently, tucked into the left sides of my cheek like baba dudu waiting to slip, to be swallowed whole. That when the time comes to speak, it filters out into the air like the red dust of the homeland. Its perfume. But our aunties say, “Sweet, like chalk,” and I do not know what on earth that means—*chalk? A sweetness?*—I think of a loss in translation, I think despair, I think of the sand, mixing in with the sugar. What I know how to translate is thank you. Good morning. I’ll see you later. I pronounced my name and all the aunties and uncles laughed at me. Then saddened for me. They said, “The name. What we gave to you from the homeland, the only thing we thought you could keep.”



When I speak homeland I speak something else. My parents call me baby-baby and sweetie pie, they kiss my forehead with lips pursed into an English *Honey I love you*, our language of intimacy. Their language of love. Even when they are very angry they are angry in English. I asked them, “How many times do you dream in homeland?” (But I cannot remember what on earth they had answered). When my parents speak homeland together it is their language of secrecy, and when my sister and I sit on the stairs trying to listen for our names in their dense conversations it almost feels like a constant defeat. Africa, a traitor. When I speak homeland it means I’m speaking English, which is not “my native language”, which cannot be; although it is the only thing I really speak, it is the language my mother used to sing to me at night as a baby, it is there when I love somebody, when I can’t find the words, when all I have between my teeth and inside of my stomach are shooting stars and feeling. I call my mother and ask her about her day, and the language comes out like gravel. She does not like the America in my accent, the softness of the syllables, the mismatched tones; she says, in English, “Just speak English. ”



I think that maybe she found English a liberation. She cannot speak homeland without bringing it to life with English. She was younger than I am when she arrived at LaGuardia, Jheri-curled hair and a suitcase full of Austen and Shakespeare, she could not tell you who the current president of Nigeria is—and so we can almost forget that there’s something missing. We throw *I love you*s out into the world like confetti. There is no word for love in homeland. Still I kept notebooks full of words, wahala and mumu and na wa o, and when I wanted to learn something beyond the heartbeat of the nation she said, “No, you are from the *heartbeat of the nation**.*” When I tried to learn homeland she said, “Stop, stop speaking.” I wrote down more words. She couldn’t understand them.



The homeland on paper is silent. Too small now. Too gone. I am obsessed with the ruins, I read all the stories about the kingdom and realize many of them end in a bloodshed that makes the baba dudu taste sour in my mouth. Yet relentlessly I search for art history papers about religious ceremonies and chalk thrown into rivers; I put together documents about spirituality and title them mysticism. I look at the shirts my sister and I were made to wear as children, photos of stolen artwork printed on the front and underneath, a caption urging the British to bring our iyoba home. Realize so much has been stolen that my foreign hands are never enough to salvage, no matter how bare, or determined. When I learn about the homeland my professor turns on the projector to flash us an image of the continent and then switches the slide to an overview of South Africa. One tribal system is Africa’s system. One people’s religion is African religion. We sit in lecture romanticizing Africa, they tell us, “Let’s think of a new Africa,” erase the old Africa—first the Kenya-yellow Africa, then the homeland of bouncing purple lights. “Let’s invest in Africa,” because Africa should be our next real-life endeavor, Africa has all this real-world potential, Africa just needs somebody to believe in it. They say everything I have is not my own, not my liberation love-language English, not my grandfather’s Catholic church, not my grandmother’s European name. They say everything I have is adulteration. My family does not care when I call after class to describe all the Wole Soyinka I have studied. All they know about the history of the homeland is that it was a very large and very ancient kingdom, and for this reason my sister and I were named very ancient things. The first woman born to the world was Adesuwa. The second, our namesake. My mind dreams her up in a deep red wrapper, shining, coral beads clinking together around her neck and ankles. Black hair gathered into a crown. My mind dreams up a woman from the homeland and I do not think she looks like me. My aunties, wrapping fufu in aluminum foil, sometimes stare as one of us passes through the doorway, lamenting our faces (features full of America). How much America has drawn homeland out of their children. How they cannot give us a single piece of our ancestors, no matter how hard they try. But instead bequeathed a nostalgia so heavy it is all of the old country weighing us down. We say we would like to someday visit the homeland; they ask us what we think we are trying to find.



They do not know that when we are not learning about the homeland, the homeland does not exist. There are no black children in America whose parents got off planes here in 1984 or 1991. The grandmothers I venerate were Freedom Riders, were women who lit the lamps along the underground railroad, grandmothers who did not know I would come but did all these things so that I could come. Their blackness is the only blackness that holds me in its arms and makes me feel like a daughter. The homeland is a birthplace I romanticize through their eyes. When I learn about black people for the first time I remember my teacher in that empty classroom, sunlight filtering through the window and illuminating the colors on each shiny page of the book, Ruby Bridges lit up like royalty. My teacher followed my eyes, wanting me to read the words and breathe in the story, the courage! The revolutionary! But I kept looking down at the illustration of her, Ruby Bridges in a pink dress, six years old and brown like me, I wanted her curls and her white socks and her cardigan. Wanted the baubles tying up her hair. At home I have big flat picture books about Sojourner Truth and John Henry but my grandmother is a woman I speak to once every seven years. My grandmothers are all dead. The last time the homeland buried an iye I was not four years old eating garri out of a ceramic bowl, sitting on the window seat and trying to hear the bright music of church bells piercing through the gray gray sky. The last time, I was facing my house, in the middle of the road, another place I’d started calling home. That last time, I cried. A loss so vast it was all of those souls, lights drifting through the ocean, tired of waiting for me to find them.



When I dream of the homeland I dream mythology. Everything I have is not my own. How many times have I learned about the homeland and hoped I could feel some kind of connection or some kind of beauty in a history no one records anymore? Do I still press my palms against the glass at the Met and close my eyes in front of the ivories, wishing some kind of forebear magic would filter in and fuse with my very Western soul? I had a mommy-auntie who would carry me on her back until I fell asleep on her shoulder and feed me beans with the tips of her fingers, who would press her cheek against my forehead when I was sick and sweating in her arms and once walked a mile in the snow to buy medicine for my fever.



“What’s the matter?” my mother would ask me when I was very little, and my mommy-auntie would explain, “She doesn’t like crowds.” Or, “The TV’s too loud.” Or, “She only drinks chocolate Nesquik, you’ve bought her strawberry.”



Sometimes we’d go out to feed bread to the birds after it rained, and then she would poke my stomach and ask me questions in homeland. (Sometimes I answered correctly and when this happened she would take both my hands and shake them, overjoyed). When she went back everyone says I sat by the front door and cried for weeks. When I speak to her on the phone now she cannot understand me. Eventually someone explains that mommy-auntie isn’t used to my accent anymore, the American noise of my words so thick and heavy that she never calls to speak to me again. But there was a time I dreamed of her when I dreamed of the homeland, I conjured her smell when other people’s planes landed in from West Africa at JFK, I slept with her scarf around my neck and listened to people talk to her on the phone and wished she would ask to speak to me again. So that maybe I could just try again.



When I learn about the homeland I draw a map in my head that looks like an expanse of silk-linked constellations. Trails of lights intersecting across the sea, a warm clear water and something returned. A map that sounds like highlife guitar, collecting dollar bills on a shoe-scuffed dance floor, Asa above the sizzling of onions, like cymbals edited into her rustic strumming as my friend’s mother cooks a golden shito behind us. A map that has all the wrinkles of fabric crumpled up at the back of my clothes drawer, glitter from the gele still rigid with pins, sequins from the skirt our grandmother sent us from a tailor in Ibadan. Iye-nokhua, drinking her morning milk and tea and eating her buttered bread at the table, then an apparition of woman towering over me while I squinted at the crystals on the biscuits, the flowers on the plates. Later an illumination of a buoy shifting towards the final star, the homeland, the center of the world. The two-piece she sent was green-black-orange, and when I tried to put it on I realized I couldn’t sit, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe in it. Instead put it to my nose and inhaled deep the Africa. Was this, I wondered, a thing I felt I knew by heart? (“No,” my parents would later say. “No, you don’t know Nigeria.”)



Still, how it smelled like my father when he comes back from the homeland, sad to return to remembering us again, jetlagged and sentimental for days—how it felt like falling asleep as a five-year old with my pinkies stuck in the lace of his white-lavender agbada. The time he would look at me like he was looking at *me*, instead of something stopping him from making that final trip back home. One day when my sister and I were small he told us that there is truly not much homeland in us but just look through the window—we were in the car, I rolled down the glass and put my hand out towards the traffic—just look through the window, this place should be home. So maybe every day I do the remembering. And maybe every time we’re a little more found.



 

*Hito Steyerl is a visual artist, a filmmaker, and a writer. Her work across media is known for “twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics” and shaking up our default orientation towards screens, media, vision, and technology. She has defended the poor image, mobilized morphsuited and pixel-headed figures in a comedic critique of digital visibility, and created a world in which workers are forced to dance in order to produce artificial sunshine. She lives in Berlin and is a professor of experimental film and video at Universität der Künste. Advocate President and staff writer Lily Scherlis spoke with Steyerl over the phone in December 2017.*



 



*****



 



*You treat images as things themselves, rather than as images of something. You’ve said that “contemporary visual artifacts project instead of representing,” and I know that Vilém Flusser has influenced your notion of projection. I’m a big fan of *Into the Universe of Technical Images*, in which he writes that the “image is directed toward a person. It presses in on him and finds him in even the most secret reaches of his private space.” This valence of exposure, of being vulnerable to images that Flusser connotes seems entangled in your notion of visibility. How do you relate the processes of being imaged, of being visible, to receiving an image, to seeing the visible? Can we distinguish between the two? *



 



Between being an image and receiving an image? Bergson found a way of relating the two by inventing a world in which everything is an image basically but also a sensible image. Image that basically has some faculties of perception as well, so in that sense there is no difference between being an image and being able to sense or receive other images. He basically reformulated ideas by Leibniz, who had similar ideas in his monadology, whereby he said that basically everything in the world is a monad and some are lower resolu-tion than others, so they have less faculties of perception. Only one, namely God, the most highly resolved monad, is able to see everything.



 



*So are we images with faculties for perception? *



 



No, we are more complex than that, but interestingly I think that technology is headed in the direction of creating more and more sensitive assemblages ranked according to their faculties of perception. There are very stupid devices and much smarter ones, if you will. 



 



*There is a moment from your essay “Medya: Autonomy of Images” in Laura Poitras’ exhibition catalogue Astro Noise that haunts me. You write: “Machines show one another unintelligible images, or, more gen-erally, sets of data that cannot be perceived by human vision”—about how machines may cut us out of their chains of communication entirely, or ventriloquize us to create an illegible reality in the likeness of their images. You describe the reality they might ultimate-ly create as one in which, in your words, “you cannot understand your own eyes.” I’m curious about this last line. *



 



This is partly a reality already. You somehow find yourself exposed to a reality which is bewildering and irrational and not very obvious. In that sense I think it’s partly realized already. The world sometimes looks like a totally disjointed and incongrouous Twitter feed of a person with severe mental issues. Guess why.



 



*Aren’t computerized voices something of an inver-sion of the phenomenon of machines ventriloquizing us (here through our eyes) to talk amongst themselves. I think about the narrators in How Not To Be Seen... they are computer voices, right? *



 



These voices I use definitely are computer voices. I have somehow stopped using them now. I never asked myself why. Maybe because it’s become a template which has been used a lot, but I think also because this communication amongst machines is now happening on a level which is not available to the senses anymore at all. It is even not translated into words anymore.



 



*Did it used to be translated into words?*





        Well I think you know the let’s say... no. Definitely not. But it was represented to us as using words. But I think there has been experiments in which machines invented their own language to talk to one another which basically don’t make any sense to humans but still use human words but then you can easily imagine that human words are completely superfluous to that process.



This is what it sounds like:



 



Bob: I can i i everything else



Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

        Bob: you i everything else

        Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to meca



 



*We’re just intervening in their own networks. *



 



Yes. 



 



*What happens once machines are no longer repre-senting themselves to us? *



 



I don’t know but I think machines will also use some kind of representation to talk to one another, so in that sense it won’t disappear. The question is: what does it mean then? What kind of function does it have?



 



*You’ve previously questioned the applicability of the analyzing images as representations. What even is representation these days? *



 



I am not opposed to representation. There will always be representation. Representation is a process of alienation which is necessary for people to communicate. I love it. But there is no political automatism or social justice associated with cultural representation. There is no political effect tied to it necessarily.



 



*How so?*



 



Whether certain things or people are represented in the sphere of culture or not is not inextricably tied to any sort of political change. It can be reconfigured in completely other or different ways. 



 



*What are some of those other different ways? *



 



I think we are or have seen one of them, which is a multitude or avalanche of images of mostly everything existing without any political or economical consequence whatsoever.



 



*Flusser writes: “Technical images do isolate those who receive them in corners, but they isolate those who flee from them even further.” You’ve written ex-tensively about potential refuges from visibility, from exposure, about hiding in low resolution zones and under sheets of plastic in the drone shadow. Do you distinguish between fleeing and hiding? Moreover, where are our refuges now, now that poor images are basically defunct? *



 



I mean most people choose to engage, choose to be involuntarily represented to platforms every day. They could also choose not to. No one forces people to use smartphones day in day out. But to go completely un-represented.. that’s much more complicated. It’s prob-ably not... it’s very difficult, let’s put it like this. Many people don’t have a choice so they need to inhabit this zone. Those who do not want to be seen because for them visibility is dangerous. On the other hand invisi-bility is also a privilege for elites.



 



*What would be the consequences of choosing not to use a smartphone? *



 



I think there would be a lot less data trail, on the one hand. On the other hand it might also have an effect on your brain. For example if people stop using Google Maps or routing applications their brain changes. Orientational parts are rewired. It’s not only on the level of representation that people would slightly change. Time and space would be perceived differently without a phone, or, using the Google maps example, they would not be perceived at all.



 



*What about the video editing process? How do you think about the potential images or potential iterations of a work that never get rendered, potential iterations that exist as a possibility in AfterEffects but then never materialize? Where do they go? Is there a graveyard somewhere for hypothetical images? *



 



Interesting. Yeah, probably there is. I’m just happy that I don’t have to deal with it!



 



*Do you find the decision-making required stressful, or is it a fluid process for you? *



 



No, no. It’s horrible. Getting rid of images is the most difficult thing. I once met an archivist at Frank-furt University. He told me: people are totally naïve, they think storage and preservation define an archive. But I have to tell you that its mainly about discarding stuff and getting rid of it.



 



*I’ve been thinking a lot about a particular visual shorthand from your video How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File: the person with a pixel for a head. Do we relate, bodily, to the pixel in which we might hide? Are pixels appendages, digital phantom limbs? Can we crawl inside them? *



 



A guy once wrote a text about this experiences pro-testing on Maidan in Kiev, Ukraine. I think the text was called my life as a pixel. He would talk about how he worked tirelessly as a pixel in the TV news. If he was a pixel it means there were many people. So there was something rewarding to it - keeping in mind of course that many people were shot by snipers on Maidan, so it was very dangerous too.



 



*Do you think that pixels have insides to them? Do you think that images are spaces? *



 



I think yes. I mean let’s say more in a mathematical sense. Not in the sense that every 2D image has a 3D component to it but of course they have mathematical spaces, color spaces, probability spaces. 



 



*What is a mathematical space? *



 



In the sense that, let’s say, a picture has let’s say 12k pixels, so the mathematical space is the space that has all possible combinations of all these pixels to one an-other. Its all the potential images within this one.



 



*So that would be the graveyard of hypothetical images? *



 



Yes. A mass grave or a future potential, depending how you see it.



 



*Others have often asked you how your reconcile your writing with your visual work. You’ve said how at this point writing and images are materially the same—1s and 0s—and trying to enforce the divide or difference between the two doesn’t really work anymore. Does that manifest in your process, in how you engage with each medium? *



 



To some degree, yes. To some degree. Writing, if you want to see it from that angle, is the extremely simpli-fied process of arranging data—let’s put it like that. It´s like a plumber and a winemaker both deal with liquids in different ways, so also very different crafts.



 



*Do you have advice for young artists and writers try-ing to figure out how to move through the world? *



 



It’s difficult because for basically everything the past training set does not apply in the current situation. In that sense I don’t think there is any precedent so to speak, or it would be arrogant to assume that there is a training set for this situation. Honestly speaking, I think trying to disengage with the existing structures is under the current conditions not a bad idea.



 



*What does disengagement look like?*



 



Trying to regain control over basic social infrastructure. Water, energy, health/care, education, information. On a communal cooperative level. If I was 20 now I'd try to learn a profession which could be useful in that endeavour.



 



*In a 2014 interview with Marvin Jordan, you dis-cussed how phone cameras create pictures using algo-rithms that speculate what is signal and what is noise based on past images—in other words, they disrupt the clear indexical link of representation to reality. This residue of the past in the present prescribes history as the future. You noted how Rancière concluded that, in the context of dividing political subjects from the unheard and unseen, there is no noise, only speech: what is noise to you? Where does it come from, and where—once resolved into an image or into a voice—does it go? *



 



Noise is the things that are not yet known, meaning that it is the future.



 



*Does it relate to the glitch? *



 



Yes, but maybe the glitch is after the fact. The noise is the glitch before the image. The glitch necessitates something which is...already configured to some de-gree, right? It is some kind of artifact which is added after something is supposed to have been completed, like an image or a sound. The noise is before the image or sound is constituted. Before the signal is extracted, so to speak. It is when all possibilities are still open. 

*Maggie Nelson is a poet, a scholar, and a writer of non-fiction. Her work is known for bending genres, refusing to sequester academic rigor from lived experiences of intimacy. She is perhaps best known for her 2015 book of memoir and analysis, *The Argonauts*, as well as *Bluets*, a 2009 prose meditation on loss and the color blue. She has a PhD in English from the Graduate Center, CUNY and is currently a Professor of English at USC. Harvard Advocate President and staff writer Lily Scherlis corresponded with Nelson by email over the course of a month. *



 



*****



 



*Let's start on a style note. You've described your ideal prose as hot, as writing that "puts the needle right into the vein." What does good prose feel like, for you? How about bad? Is it easy to tell the difference? How do you calibrate your mental prose-barometer?*



 



You mean, my own prose, or that of others? Other people’s writing is infinitely easier to judge, because while reading it I’m not struggling to get any thoughts out. As for my writing, I generally ignore questions of style while I’m writing, & go back in with an eye to sound later. Poetry is a little different, as there I’m not trying to get at an idea that could be separated from its inaugural sound.



 



*In *Bluets *and elsewhere you talk about how your writing is often comported towards a "you." Your work often makes me think of Lauren Berlant's discussion of apostrophe, which builds off Barbara Johnson's ideas. She talks about how in writing we conjure up other subjectivities, phantasmagoric spectres who are really parts of our selves that have broken off so that we have someone to talk to, to address. Elsewhere Berlant writes:**"To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures... but intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others."*



*Here I think she's getting at the same tension you address when you talk about wanting "the you no one else can see, the you so close the third person need never apply." Do you feel like writing about intimacy while, as you've put it, serving two gods––the "you" that you love, and the deity on the page––is like writing a letter that's meant to be intercepted? Or is it the work of translating private shorthand into plaintext?*



 



This is lovely—I will look up the exchange of ideas between Berlant and Johnson, both of whom are important to me. I have often used the need to address someone in language as a spur to write, but the more I write of a given project, the more it’s quite clear that I’m not actually addressing that person any more, even though I might have been in the moment of composition. In that sense I never really think, by the time of publication, that I’m writing an intimate letter, or that there’s any doubling of purpose—I’ve been around the block too many times to delude myself on that account. I mean, it can feel great to be addressed in someone’s poem, to be the beloved memorialized in print, to sit in the audience feeling important, but even then both parties know that it’s one-sided literature and not the full relation, so that can feel lousy and cause pain. Exulting in being someone’s muse and feeling used are closely related, always have been. It’s a pharmakon.



 



*Reading your review of Fred Moten's new book, *Black and Blur*, I was admiring how conscientiously you commit to writing plainly about language you describe as "a field defined by incessant motion, escape." For me, the sheer firepower of Moten's prose together with his tendency to defer satisfying our desire to "figure out" what's being said makes the inability to cleanly parse his sentences is a pleasurable kind of pain. I'm curious how you would situate yourself on the imaginary spectrum between writers religiously dedicated to transparency and those inclined towards more viscous or opaque prose. What do you think these different modes have to offer, especially in the context of the project of consenting not to be a single being?*



 



That’s well put, about parsing sentences being a pleasurable kind of pain. I relate to that, re: some of my favorite writers. Moten himself has said some very smart things about plainness, & about precision. I won’t try to reproduce what he’s said here but I will say that the conversation has been fruitful to me, challenging, important. Generally speaking I kind of doubt that writers really choose their idiom—I think people have a way of thinking and talking and addressing, and then usually find an explanation, political or spiritual or what have you, after the fact, that gives their approach a certain kind of meaning. Which is fine, you just have to watch out that you’re not valorizing what you do as a privileged aesthetic just because that’s the way you happen to express yourself. I mean, even if I wanted to write in a very viscous or opaque way, I likely just don’t have it in me (which is why it kind of delights me when someone thinks I’ve been unclear or baroque, even if they’re saying it as an insult). I don’t think writing should be any one way or another, or that any one style is better suited to the project of consenting not to be a single being. Really the opposite—we need everything, everybody, all sounds. Because part of that consent, so far as I understand it, is endlessly recognizing our difference, while also understanding that difference as part of the world as a plenum, as da Silva has put it. If there were only one way forward, then only one single being would make it.



 



*You wrote about your mentor Christina Crosby in *The Argonauts*. You've also written poetry about visiting her in the hospital in *Something Bright, Then Holes*. Reciprocally, she wrote about these poems and your relationship more broadly in her book, *A Body, Undone*. How do you feel about relationships of mutual literary use, mutual museship? Do they offer new possibilities for intimacy, or are they doubly precarious? *



 



Each situation is distinct, and demands its own negotiation, comes with its own set of possibilities and challenges. In the case of Christina, our enmeshment in person and on the page has brought me much happiness & satisfaction, probably more than any other instance of writing about someone/ being written about that I’ve had. In my experience, being written about doesn’t usually bring the subject very much pleasure. So the fact that Christina valued my being there to bear witness, in writing, some of her most difficult, indeed catastrophic moments, and that she said so in her own book – that meant a lot to me. A LOT.



 



*In an interview with The Creative Independent, you said:*



*People often say they feel like they know me, but I know they don’t—they’re just responding to an effect created by artifice. Which isn’t to say there isn’t real intimacy created—there is. It just means that they’re responding to a sort of “use artifice to strip artifice of artifice” loop.*



*What has it been like to meet your own page-dwelling mentors, your "many-gendered mothers of the heart"? Do these encounters change their work for you? Do you feel like matching up voices with real embodied people is anticlimactic, or conducive to more meaningful relationships on or off the page? *



* *



I think I’ve been around long enough to no longer ever feel “disappointed” or some such by meeting anyone I admire in person. I usually feel just fascinated and grateful. I’ve noticed that my students often report feelings of anticlimax on this account, maybe because they still expect a certain one-to-one relation between the written word / art practice and the human being. I don’t expect that. I can remember a whole class of poetry students being so disappointed after we read John Ashbery and then I took them to an Ashbery reading – they were like, “he’s not a good reader of his own work!” I was like, there is no good or bad reading of his own work; this isn’t a theater audition. It’s JOHN ASHBERY!!



 



*You told* Poetry Foundation* that you're (understandably) getting tired of the phrase "personal writing." Any thoughts on how we could recontextualize or change how we talk about the genre it refers to?*



 



Not really. I don’t think personal writing refers to a genre. I’d like it if people gave up this fetish of “she seems to be speaking just for herself, but the miracle is that it ends up a universal truth!” – on the one hand, good writing always does that, and on the other, trying to get to some universal transcendent shared experience or feeling is part of the problem anyway.



 



*As a college lit mag, much of what we publish is juvenilia our writers may eventually disown. How much of yourself do you recognize in work from, say, your early twenties? Do you feel a sense of contiguity with your younger voice? Or is the "I" in those pieces a discrete individual, distinct from your present "I"? *



 



O I recognize all of it. My ‘I’ has always been the same ‘I.’ Mostly I’m amazed that I had the chutzpah to think that my innermost musings and language experiments were worth publishing as soon as I’d written them. But I’m glad I did – because without that kind of chutzpah, you probably won’t go very far as a writer.



 



*Can young writers (or older writers!) have too much chutzpah? Moreover, I have the sense that eventually we all start to develop grumpy language-foreclosing super-egos. Do you have one? If so, how do you negotiate with it? *



 



I’m not concerned about too much chutzpah. If you’re a self-important jerk or your politics are rotten, all that will come out in your writing and personhood eventually, so if you care about that, you should engage in some good old-fashioned self-examination and transformation. And you’ve got to do your work – just because you wrote some cute tweets doesn’t mean you should or will sail into a fat book contract. But chutzpah is necessary for writing, and I don’t worry too much about grumpy language-foreclosing super egos. Just make sure you give yourself the time and space somewhere to express yourself without fear of what readers will think. You can worry about that later.



 



 

We are writing to you in the first-person plural. We may or may not be named Stacy, Laura, Genevieve. We are apes and we are soldiers. We may or may not be kidding. Our spokesperson is named Sally Sprout. She is happy to tell you why we won’t tell you our names: *They want to be seen as people. They want to emphasize that they are not anti-male, anti-family, anti-children ... They want to emphasize that they are sisters, daughters, wives, and mothers. *We want to be seen as people, so we dress up as gorillas. That way we are less particular. Why our costumes? *Dismiss the essence if people knew who individuals. Stop worrying about children. No personal gains, only intangibles.* We aren’t confessional. We aren’t secreting our lives through our pores or our poems. We aren’t making this personal. We just want to make ourselves known, we want to make ourselves un-ignorable. We want to make ourselves—not ourselves. We want to wear masks instead. We want to MAKE, period. *What’s the matter with you—you having your period—you’ve never had one.* We sign our notes, *with love and bananas.*



We want to take you to Big Dick City, because we’ve been living there for a while. We want to take you into the kitchen and let you cook us dinner. *We have been unable to escape the burden of responsibility of home and family—the kitchen represents the never ending albatross posited by both society and upbringing on the woman artist. *We want to show you our albatross.



We want to hang it around your neck.



Yes, you. Yes, yours.



Come watch our thousand tiny apes march along the painted freeway toward the fabled museum. We hit museums. We give them report cards. *Has anyone tried to unmask us? We have been harassed / escorted off MFA property by police. *



We may or may not include a woman named Nadine, who packs her two kids’ school lunch sandwiches at night to give herself ten more minutes to draw in the morning. One peanut butter and jelly; one peanut butter and honey. She has a rage in her so vast she could never look at it, because there would be no end to the looking. We may or may not include a woman named Grace, old as dirt; who wants her bones ground to powder when she dies and mixed into paint for other women to use.



We may or may not include a woman named Nancy, a woman named Gwendolyn, a woman named Elvira, a woman named cake batter, a woman named casserole, a woman named Late for School, nicknamed Late for short, a woman named Inadequate Mother, a woman named hymen, a woman named after whatever your uterus was called in whatever language God was speaking when he sentenced Eve to childbirth. We may or may not include a woman named God.



We want to build our installation from whatever’s left over from our homes: cloth and paper and cardboard; ironing boards and dryer lint and orphaned socks; whatever the albatross shits and surrenders. We want to build a jungle. We’d build a giant placenta from uncooked macaroni, fallopian tubes from plastic straws, ovarian cysts from gummy fruit snacks, just to be the women making woman-art, just to say fuck you to your demand that we don’t. *I paint w/ my cunt. *We paint graffiti. *War is menstruation envy. Bent down so long, looks like up to me. *Things are looking up for us. Come see.



Sincerely yours,



With love and costumes, love and cream cheese, love and morning cereal. With love and laundry detergent, varsity jackets, late night blow jobs. With love and tampons, love and yes-I’m-listening, love and to-do-lists, love like an albatross; love like a song we can’t help singing. With love and bananas—and none of our names, and all of our lives.



 



*Italicized sections are quotes from the folders and drafts in the archives.



This piece was originally published in Gulf Coast Magazine

My first TV was the size of a microwave, with one of those bubble-like screens. It was relegated to the family Volvo after we got the new one (which was somewhat larger). My dad strapped it to a milk crate with bungee cords and permanently converted its signal to induction. It stayed there for years, lodged in the space between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. All of this so that my siblings and I would stay quiet on the five hour drives to my grandparents’ house in Baltimore. 



We watched VCR tapes of Teletubbies reruns on those drives, long after it was no longer age-appropriate. There was something really weird about watching them watch each others’ stomachs light up, with the camera zooming into a screen within a screen, especially when that screen was someone’s belly. I was obsessed with the red one, Po, especially. This was during the era when food brands were paying royalties to put the faces of TV characters on their child-targeted products. For two years, I would only drink apple juice that had Po’s face on the bottle.   



At my third birthday party a few years earlier, my parents had surprised me by paying a full-grown man to come strolling down our driveway in an eight foot tall Teletubby suit. While hiding behind the legs of several of the adults floating around my backyard in rapid succession as I moved away from this man, it occurred to me that the Teletubbies were in actuality men and women wearing eight-foot-tall suits. I had made an error assuming that their bodies, collapsed into the screen, were just my size.



PBS had duped me and all of my friends. I didn't care if Santa was real: the fact that Dipsy was actually substantially larger than my father seemed to represent a hairline fracture in the integrity of my personal universe. I was smaller than I had thought.



Besides: didn't my parents understand? I didn't want to meet Po (let alone an eight-foot version): I wanted, desperately, to be her. I wanted to belong to the world of green vistas and tubby-toast where the sun had a babyface and I had three technicolor friends who would hang out with me for 425 episodes straight. If my parents understood me, they would have carved a rectangle out of my torso and replaced it with a television screen.



 



***



 



I spent my freshman year of college trying to decide whether this deliciously narcissistic brand of desire where you want to become someone rather than to sleep with them was psychoanalytically legitimate. I took a queer theory course. My professor encouraged personal papers, so I thought I’d write about the time when I was thirteen and developed a massive infatuation for a movie star playing a sexy and mysterious doctor. She was female, and her primary character trait was that she was bisexual, a fact which other characters frequently mocked. *I want to be a beautiful intern*, I wrote in my diary in between eighth-grade science and eighth-grade math, forgetting the last syllable of “internist.” I made a spreadsheet detailing everything I needed to do in high school to get into medical school. I attempted to grow taller. I bought a dark purple nail polish, because the doctor often wore that color. “I want to be a closed book,” I wrote, and tried to develop a repertoire of facial expressions that communicated mystery.



“Listen,” said my professor quickly when I proposed this paper topic. “You like her because she’s a rich pretty white girl. That’s not especially queer of you.”



“*Liked*,” I corrected her.



My best friend Lucas was, at the same time, taking a course on intimacy more broadly. This one was mostly about straight people. His professor, who was a rich pretty white woman like my doctor, asked him to dinner after grading his final paper, but he turned her down.



Meanwhile, outside of the classroom, I was discovering whole new modes of intimacy through Lucas’ platonic presence.  We spent most of 2015 at cafes dispensing nuggets of thought and memory for each other like Pez candies. I would put these tablets of information on my tongue and let them dissolve there. It was a good way to be friends. Each time he and I sat down to coffee, we both compulsively removed everything from our wrists and fingers. A certain kind of intellectual undressing for one another.



 



***



 



We say a relationship occurs between two individuals, as if it’s physically located in the space between their bodies. Affection is like some kind of invisible goop that fills out the negative space between two personalities, bringing the contours of each into sharper focus.



 



Joseph Beuys cast the spaces beneath brutalist German underpasses in hot beef fat, taking a perfect print of the empty space left by the cold fascist architecture in organic matter that refused to cool. Obviously my friends and I are not fascist infrastructure (at least I hope we aren’t), but I like to think of friendship as the tallow that fills up the cold gaps between us. It’s a warm metabolizing filling, a kind of adipose tissue that stores affection rather than glucose.



There's that classic Scott Fitzgerald line about how personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures. Sociality is a kind of a gaming streak. This line still raises my blood pressure. I’m still trying to get just one gesture exactly right.



Besides, he’s wrong. Personality is always a collaboration. Other people elicit the words and gestures that define us from our lips and our bodies. We spend a lot of time rooting out and chastising the social chameleons in our midst. Really we’re always, always, fitting ourselves around the shapes of other people, drawing our respective selves out of each other.



Moreover relationships of all stripes are nothing more than an ongoing sequence of collaborative gestures clumped into encounters, encounters that become a shared history, a communal lexicon of inside jokes and memories. Intimacy is when a language with only two speakers develops slang.



 



***



 



With my friend Castle there was never undressing. We did a lot of sleeping in his large bed together in pajamas, changing in the bathroom, trying to entangle (covered) limbs without leaving open the possibility of entangling ourselves. We wanted impossibly innocent intimacy from one another. Instead we spent a lot of time unpacking the insults his ex had levied at him before leaving. “I know I am not good at women,” he said. I guess we are a skill.



He had this way of making you feel like there were some people who were essentially worthy and some who weren’t, and that the more time he deigned to spend with you the more likely it was that you were in the former category. He knew how to make you feel special in the light of his attention, and to make you think he felt special with you. We were never dating and we only very occasionally slept together in the proper sense of the idiom, but he managed to get me hooked on an IV-drip of partial validation. Nonetheless I was feeling somehow both smaller and fatter by the day and we were quickly running out of television to watch side by side, and all the while his mother was slowly dying of cancer in another country.



The lack of television really did us in. Television was a way of avoiding eight hour debates about how to conduct our quasi-relationship. These were coldly aggressive encounters where we debated what constituted reasonable behavior toward one another in both theory and practice. If one of us gets hurt by the other behaving in a way that technically is not prohibited according to the terms of our relationship as presently defined, does that person have a right to be upset with the other? If I hurt you romantically, can you then reasonably deprive me of your friendship because I am not interested in you? Is one of us a sociopath?



We were trying to write a rule book while holding fast to the fantasy that what we had didn’t need one. “We’re not even in a relationship!” he would say incredulously every twenty minutes. “We’re not even really having sex!” I would say back. We both worshipped logic and verbosity as some common god of objectivity.  “I’ve never argued with anyone so good at articulating their emotional reasoning,” he said once at 4 am when we ran out of steam and started pulling our verbal punches. “It means I have to be especially on my game.”



At first it was perversely fun to strain the emotion out of intimacy and hold whatever was left up to the light. And then we would strain out the emotion (which at that point was mostly anger and hurt) and be left empty-handed.



Television meant we didn't have to do this. We watched *Bojack Horseman* and *Friends* and *Rick and Morty* and *Game of Thrones* and *Big Little Lies* and *The Young Pope* and *Lizzie McGuire*. It was a way of spending time together without having to deal with each other. We could share the space of Hilary Duff’s mind without fighting. We could experience emotions together safely by proxy of the larger-than-life people on his laptop screen. Hating each other, we could be together in other people.



 



***











You try to get the people around you to hurt yourself for you, my friend Margot told me five hours into a Megabus ride. When you feel insecure you instigate these conversations where you try to corner your friends into verbally confirming for you that you suck. This is your worst quality.



 



Your worst quality is your tendency to calmly inform other people of their worst qualities, I told her.



 



I know, she said.



 



***



 



In my nightmares there's always a voiceover narrating why I am totally screwed. I think this is common, but nonetheless it’s remarkably disturbing to be informed of your imminent violent dream-death by a voice of authority only you can hear.



 



One time I googled “Dreams with voiceovers,” hoping Carl Jung would inform me in dense, comforting sentences that these narrators were doing the crucial work of integrating my conscious and unconscious minds. I wound up on a mental health forum for people who hear voices that aren’t there while awake.



 



There are three kinds of voices: the Narrators, who describe your behavior in the declarative, as if keeping a transcendent live studio audience posted on the situational comedy of your existence. There are Interrogators, who progressively nibble away at your confidence with intrusive questions, keeping you up late into the night. Then there are the Commanders. They give commands. “It is important that you stick to your normal pattern of doing things,” the forum says. “Otherwise it could cause you doubt yourself and Commanders might take advantage of your indecisiveness.”



 



In a section titled “There is Hope,” we are advised to not stay silent:



 



If a voice is harassing you, you could start by calmly but firmly stating, “I hear you. Thank you for letting me know how you feel. Right now, I need to [insert important task] but I would like to discuss this matter with you later.” Then make a time and keep it. Keeping your word will become very important as the relationship grows.



 



It could be worse. I could have to reckon with dissenting parts of myself out loud, to make all of my internal conflict manifest sonically.



 



***



 



Lucas and Margot didn’t approve of Castle. They didn’t get why I continued to spend time with him when the six-hour verbal boxing matches left me badly existentially bruised.



 



I didn’t get it either. I was starting to feel like I was playing a fighting video game where my avatar had a special maneuver called "consider your thoughts and feelings and life decisions from an outside perspective." This was one of those moves that has to charge up over a period of time and then you get to do it once and there's a cool cut scene where you watch your opponent (my demons?) get shredded to ribbons or whatever. The move was my avatar's dynamite and without it this avatar was totally useless, limp, subjected to the facile violences of its opponents. And here I was with Castle, mashing on the controller, hitting the combination for "consider your thoughts and feelings and life decisions from an outside perspective" again and again, but the move hadn't sufficiently recharged.



 



Seven months later the console stopped glitching and I blocked his number.



 



“I miss you,” said Castle in an email a few months later, “And I want to know if you cried at the end of the second to last episode of the new season of Bojack Horseman like I did.”



 



***



 



I spent the summer when I was eighteen running around the Nebraska prairie with a gaggle of feminist artists. I bleached the tips of my hair and started wearing bandanas. On the prairie we were trying to learn to capture beauty and keep it. Everyone wanted to work with the figure, so we all had to take our turn as the model.



 



The first time was the hardest. “Here,” my photographer-to-be said, pushing her laptop towards me. “You can see my body before I see yours.” On the screen were a series of images of my new friend reclining nude around a tastefully decorated apartment with a glass of wine and a coy smile.



 



Earlier, she had shown me black and white images she had taken back in Tel Aviv. Her friends were anonymous bodies, leggy and well-crafted women who stared past the camera. They smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, easily folding their bodies into strong lines and pleasing arcs.



 



I had short legs and razor-burned knees. I smoked my first-ever cigarette a week earlier and hadn’t liked it. I cared, a lot, about what other people thought of me and my body and what I thought of myself and my body, and about making sure no one knew this. I also had this idea that I could be the kind of person who would agree to model naked without hesitation. My new friend made me feel special, like I too could be a striking twenty-something Israeli-American journalist with a fascinating sex life.



 



I thought she was beautiful. She was calloused and well-spoken and certain of her right to take up space in the world. She had been a drill sergeant in the Israeli army, spoke Chinese, and had once tried to illegally cross the Nepalese-Tibetan border alone on foot. She focused on you with sharp eyes and surprising warmth and never made small talk.



 



She said she prided herself on her ability to show her models the beauty of their bodies, and I wondered if she thought I was pretty. I was worried about bruises and scars and hairs. I thought about what underwear I would wear as if she was somebody I hoped to sleep with.



 



She handed me whiskey and loaded the film into her outmoded camera. Later I would nervously knock the empty copper cup out her window. “Ready?” she asked.



 



I wound up hating these images of myself. I had hoped that teaching myself to strip on command would teach me to be comfortable in my own skin, an expression which always gives me hope that my skin is a thing I could maybe someday get out of. I didn't trust mirrors for a minute: they all told me different things. I hoped photography might pin down a single and absolute image of my body, which I could then interrogate once and for all: are you beautiful? In reality, the photographs were as fickle as the mirrors.  You would question the images and they would smile back and say what do you think?



 



***



 



When you draw a naked body from life you're supposed to look at the negative shapes––the curved quadrangle comprised of torso, upper arm, forearm, the hand meeting the hip. The swoop of the neck, when your visual field is flattened into two dimensions, makes contact with the straight line of the by the window pane behind. Only the spaces between body parts are impartial: we have so many laden expectations about the ways bodies look that they interfere with the way we see them and then we can't draw them right.



 



Various friends of mine have been employed as life models for figure drawing courses. “I feel like I’m professionalizing my ability to be vulnerable,” one of them told me, which happens to also be how I feel about writing. But in reality the life model becomes almost entirely desensitized to his or her nakedness. It’s strenuous work, holding a position. You pick up the skills and then nudity is a kind of a clothing: you are doing your job. It’s not that vulnerability has become banal, it’s that the pathway to vulnerability nudity once provided has closed. Your skin has become an impermeable cover stretched tightly and securely around your self. There are no gaps: you can be all surface.



 



Confronted with such a surface, we infer the presence of something like us somewhere in there from the behavior of cloth and skin and eyes and invisible vocal cords. We accumulate evidence of interiority, collecting gestures which we connect like dots to approximate what someone is like, how they experience themselves, how they experience us: who they are, really.



 



We’re always making these predictions, trying to hone our prediction-machines into 99.9% accuracy. We want to achieve knowledge of someone, which looks a lot like intimacy. We want to arrive at a place of absolute comprehension, to reach through our companion's sternum and pull out a struggling wet bird-like organ, the atom of their personality, which we can then hold in our hands and examine (or better yet, X-ray it, sequence its genome, dissect it, bring it to show and tell, and then maybe sew it up and put it back for someone else to check out later). We want to say, "Oh, that's what you are," and then possess that information permanently.



 



I used to wish for a concrete end to the process of getting to know someone. I hoped for a grand finale to the scary undertaking of progressively revealing the authentic and easily bruised pieces of yourself. If you peel back enough layers of tasteful clothing and casual charm, maybe you find a core nugget of individuality, the atom of the personality. Or maybe there will be nothing left.



 



***



 



Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington were in love, kind of. Their relationship was dramatized in a 1995 Emma Thompson biopic that focused mostly on Dora. It was subtitled: “She had many lovers, but only one love.”



 



In addition to a lover, Dora was an underappreciated painter. She went by her surname and had a pageboy haircut before its time. All the boys and girls at art school were at in love with her at one time or another.



 



Lytton was a member of the Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers. He was also gay. In the movie he met Dora at a house in the country in 1916 and thought she was a boy. He was disappointed when he found out she was not, but they moved in together all the same. Then Lytton fell for a man named Ralph Partridge. Ralph fell for Dora, and she agreed to marry him to keep the three of them together. Lytton died in 1932 and Dora committed suicide the next spring. Lytton, the world learned in 2005 from some letters, was a sado-masochist.



 



They say Virginia Woolf based the character of Neville on Lytton in her play-novel *The Waves*. There’s a scene I love where Neville and his best friend Bernard are quarreling. Neville sees Bernard walking up to him and starts to thoughtfully chew his metaphysical cud:



 



How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody—with whom?—with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?”



 



It’s a novel where everyone’s always thinking at everyone else, speaking to each other without actually speaking aloud. Woolf hops between the insides of their respective heads:



 



Bernard:  You wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover. But the splendid clarity of your intelligence, and the remorseless honesty of your intellect... these qualities of yours make me shift a little uneasily and see the faded patches, the thin strands in my own equipment... I become, with you, an untidy, an impulsive human being whose bandana handkerchief is forever stained with the grease of crumpets.



 



Neville: I hate your greasy handkerchiefs—you will stain your copy of Don Juan. You are not listening to me. You are making phrases about Byron. And while you gesticulate, with your cloak, your cane, I am trying to expose a secret told to nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love?”



 



Neville doesn’t get his answer, and, pissed off, hurls his poem in Bernard’s direction and leaves the room. Bernard thinks to himself, simply:



 



“To be contracted by another person into a single being—how strange.”



 



 



 

My mother raised me on spoonfuls of musical theater soundtracks.



 



Long before I had the motor control to make my stubby fingers press *play* or *rewind*, she began to curate a collection of CDs for my auditory consumption. We’d pop them into the stereo, and feeding time would begin: soaring voices and charging trumpet crescendos like bites of quiche, baked to eggy perfection.



 



Open wide, she would say, and I’d swallow a steaming mouthful of harmonic thirds.



 



She stored each disc in a neon green CD binder. The case was made out of a shiny material I can only describe as kind of like those optical illusions where you see a rabbit when you look at it from the left but a pony from the right. The kind of material that, once you develop control over your fingers, you can scratch with your nails to make a piercing *skrt skrt skrt* noise. A material you can keep *skrt skrting* until the day your dad explodes that he will confiscate every last CD in the case if you make that noise one more time. (Whereupon you tell him it doesn’t seem to bother anyone else. He tells you he has sensitive ears. You did not know this was a condition an ear could be in, and you say an extra prayer for weak-eared people of the world the next time you’re not mad at God for making you go to Sunday School, which is not for a while.)



 



Before they lived in my binder, these albums were my mother’s. Not in CD form–those gleaming tokens never belonged to anyone besides me–but as their primordial ancestors. She likes to tell me how she’d put them on her record player and lie on the ground for hours listening. I imagine her melting into her shag carpet while humming along to angsty *Chorus Line* tunes. *Hello twelve, hello thirteen, hello love...* she’d sing, as the rest of the children lit up blunts, paged through *Go Ask Alice.*



 



“You’ll love this one,” my mother would tell me, tapping a disk with her fingernail. “It used to be one of my favorites.” Musicals were a love we shared, just the two of us. Sometimes, when we were alone in the house, my mom would let me pick a soundtrack. I’d scurry upstairs to the closet where my neon green binder hid. I’d flip through the plastic pages and pick out a CD, which I would carry slowly back down the stairs. Both hands, edges-only. When my fingers slipped and left a print, I’d frantically scour it with my sleeve until the little cloud of residue had mostly disappeared. Then I’d resume my dirge. Eventually, I’d reach the family room, where our stereo lived inside the left cabinet. I’d stand on my tiptoes to load the CD into the mysterious abyss, and then I’d press “play.”



 



And during that brief silent *click click click* as the CD spun unproductively, trying to figure out who it was and what kind of sounds it was supposed to be making, I’d leap from one side of the room to the other, landing next to my mother, where she awaited me on our squishy red couch. We’d curl up together, ready to embark on whichever odyssey we had chosen for the next hour.



 



And then the CD, having gotten its shit together, would burst into that first glorious tone.



 



It was via this ritual that I drank in the swaggering waltzes of *South Pacific*, the stumbling chromatics of *Evita*, the raunchy vamps of *Cabaret*. I sat on that couch and absorbed *Cats*’ psychedelic pulsing, let *West Side Story*’s gleaming sincerity wash over me. I chomped through the bouncing pitter-patter of *My Fair Lady*, slurped down the 70s New-Yorkisms of *A Chorus Line*, chewed up the ominous reverberation of *The Secret Garden*, swallowed whole the gentle warbles of *Godspell*.



 



Listening to a classic musical felt like shucking corn while the sun sets. Steady concentration unravels toward an uncomplicated relief. Gauzy contentment that swaddles in a delicious glow. A chewy golden feast, uncomplicated and hearty.



 



The CD case still sits by my dresser at home, quite pristine. The material has not dulled from so many years of *skrt skrt skrting*. These days, I dare myself to press my fingertips into the reflective rainbow of discs’ shiny metal. I don’t listen to them anymore; who cares? I like the oily fingerprint it leaves, marking them like dog pee. *Mine.*



 



***



 



This cabinet of which I speak, the stereo cabinet, of is one of two that sit against the southern wall of my family room flanking a fireplace. This fireplace, once electric, underwent a serious renovation during one of my father’s bouts of homesickness for the Maine winters of his childhood wherein he insisted we needed a wood burning fire. The upgraded fireplace functions fairly well nowadays, but used to send a thick layer of smoke snaking through the house and my father sprinting up and down staircases huffily muttering “Must close all the doors, I’ve made a terrible mistake… there’s smoke everywhere and the children will suffocate in their sleep if it gets in their rooms… why did I ever come to this godforsaken landlocked part of the country anyway… even fire doesn’t want anything to do with this state…”



 



The cabinets have not changed one iota in the seventeen years we have lived in the house. It’s as if they are cloaked in some kind of halo, a luminescent field that keeps them safe even as time (and my father) renovates their surroundings.



 



Like the fireplace, the family room cabinet to the right of the fireplace belongs to my dad. His tiny man-cave, or the closest he’ll ever get to having one. It contains our mammoth television, a television which remains to this day the oldest functioning television I have ever seen. This thing has never not felt old, not even twenty years ago when my dad loaded it out of the moving truck. When you turn the power on, which requires physically approaching the television and pressing the rectangular plastic button on its front since the remote no longer works, it makes a loud popping sound, and if you don’t remove your hand fast enough, the hairs on your fingers stand up as the glass becomes momentarily fuzzy to the touch, like the static is leaping out of the screen.



 



The left cabinet is my mother’s domain. We are a Family of the Future––my father does our laundry and both parents share cooking duties, so the usual Woman Spaces do not exist in my house. Instead, my mother, despite having objectively worse taste in music than my father, is master of the listening cabinet, which houses our stereo and her old record player.



 



She uses the stereo when she entertains or when she is overcome with dramatic emotions, because she “really just *feels* like it.” My mother likes feelings.



 



The record player was always a bit of an enigma. Silent mostly, except for rare occasions when nostalgia overwhelmed my mother and she simply had to hear Pete Seeger’s *Abiyoyo* on vinyl. Mostly, this strange plastic prism felt simply out of place. Older even than the television in right cabinet I figured it couldn’t possibly live in the world of my neon green binder. In the way that JFK accents and hoop skirts are nice in movies but bizarre on modern-day street corners, I concluded that the record player fit inside a different time.



 



But it was such a crucial element of her lying-on-the-carpet stories that I eventually began to wonder why we didn’t use the record player for our musical binges. I asked her, once, and she told me a story that made me feel weird.



 



She talked about a time after college when she lived in an apartment next to a commune. She didn’t pay much attention to the commune, and they didn’t pay much attention to her. But they were plenty nice. She quite liked them, actually, except that along with societal norms and my mother, they also mostly ignored material concerns. This was fine until the day their toilet got backed up and they didn’t notice until it exploded, covering their room, oozing into the hallway, seeping under my mother’s door in waves of pungent filth.



 



Most of her valuables were covered with sewage in the Great Toilet Flood of 1990.



 



She hired two men to help sort through what was left of her belongings. Like some sort of biblical catharsis, everything she owned was suddenly subject to a dichotomous *keep* or *abandon*. And on the seventh day, the men said *it is good* about the records–plastic impervious to water–but refused to bless the cardboard album covers. Sewage had seeped into the gritty pores, putrid and decaying, permanent.



 



She’d loved her album covers, she told me. She loved the thin, smooth surfaces; the dappled colors; the way the collection looked when she lined the covers up and pulled out different ones to look at, like synchronized swimmers diving sideways into a pool. She was so visibly heartbroken at losing the album covers that when the men – both Venezuelan immigrants – came back the next day, they brought her a record of Venezuelan music with a kaleidoscopic cover. Today it sits in the left cabinet, dressed up square and fancy next to its round, eternally naked peers.



 



She always gets sort of bashful when she tells this part of the story, embarrassed at how much she cared. But she twinkles, too; quietly grateful for these two saviors who noticed her pain and tried to alleviate it. My mother believes in people.



 



But no longer in musicals, not after the flood. Once the covers were gone, she stopped caring so much about the soundtracks. She switched apartments and lost track of a few, moved again and lost a few more. Without covers, the collection became a lifeless amoeba of ridged darkness. The musicals lost their own identities and slipped out of hers. By the time the record player found a home in our left cabinet, her collection had dwindled to a couple dozen, none of them musicals.



 



I didn’t understand how she could just abandon them.



 



Didn’t you still want to listen to them? I asked her. I’d never pegged my mother for a materialist. Judge ye not lest the book cover… something. Hadn’t she herself told me that??



 



Not really, she said with a shrug. That was all she had to say.



 



***



 



My mother’s muted resignation never made sense to me, not in the context of the fluffy couch and the stereo’s hypnotic unspooling of my melodic stories. How could she so tenderly fill me with mouthwatering morsels she herself felt so ambivalent about?



 



These days I’m beginning to understand what she meant. Musicals, as a general rule, overexplain. A drama teacher of mine once explained musicals as representing situations in which people are so overwhelmed with emotions that they can no longer speak, and so must sing and move their bodies. Songs force you to sit in a moment, to swim around in it, to explore it from all sides. Choreography requires characters to clarify emotions, to magnify subtle bodily responses to the world around them. When you musicalize your feelings, you articulate them again and again, a different way with each verse, backed by trumpets and fanfare, underscored by pirouettes and tap shoes.



 



There comes a time when such relentless emoting feels naïve, or perhaps simply unhelpful. The feelings you are feeling do not add up into one megafeeling that can be sung at maximum volume with maximum fanfare until one final downbeat vanquishes them forever. Life and people and feelings do not organize themselves into neatly exclamation pointed sentences. Sometimes they go dot dot dot and move on, forever withholding that satisfying final note. Sometimes they make sense as a frozen ideal, immortalized in primary colors in a hidden cardboard flap. But in motion, they feel dissonant, cloying, out of touch.



 



This is what I say to my friends as we snicker together at the concept of *SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical*.



 



Every once in a while, I scroll furtively through Spotify’s selection of Sondheim and Bernstein, Rogers and Larson. The pictures here are miniscule; much smaller than my mother’s long-decayed album covers, tinier even than my plastic CD fronts. I turn my volume down low–heaven help me if anyone hears the pitchy shrieks of “It’s A Hard Knock Life” as I strut coolly past jaded brick buildings in my black turtleneck. And I press my finger reluctantly over a title (this glowing material never yields any sense of possession from my smeared fingerprints no matter how much residue I leave).



 



The saccharine lessons, tidy aphorisms stream out of my headphones. *Though scary is exciting, / nice is different than good*, sings Little Red in *Into the Woods*. *Life is a cabaret!* shouts Sally Bowles in *Cabaret*.



 



*No, it isn’t*, I think to myself. *This is silly*.



 



But then the orchestra crescendos, Sally’s belt crackles with fortitude layered over misery, and I feel a tug at my stomach, a gnawing hunger.



 



These sugary treats have never quite lost their appeal. Because something happened to me years ago on that plump red couch tucked within my mother’s elbows, as my soundtracks swirled out of left cabinet like smoke from my dad’s botched fires, snaking into my brain.



 



Bits of musicals sped, honking, reckless, weaving through lanes; vehicles packed close together careening absolutely out of control call the cops toward my center of command. My brain, try as it might to log each musical facet passing through the tollbooth of emotional input, was simply overtaxed, absolutely bamboozled. It could not keep up with the bombardment of glissandos and lullabies, off-kilter cadences and diminished fifths, honeyed rhymes stacked on top of each other, the bounty of minutiae that comprised these fraught worlds.



 



So to avoid a five thousand car pileup, my brain sent these elements anywhere else, anywhere it could fit them. Off they zoomed, traversing new paths, laying down pavement wherever they could. They trickled into my hollowest corners like scalding hot soup that I could feel oozing down into my stomach and spreading, warming me from head to toe; decadent comfort food, satisfying vague taste buds in every corner of my body. Like an unexpected compliment that hits you right in the gut and radiates, fluffy and good.



 



What happened next was that these industrious pieces of musical, having ventured into virgin territory, planted a flag and plopped down criss cross applesauce for good. It’s like that story my granny used to tell me about the girl who ate so many watermelon seeds that one started growing inside of her. Too late, her parents realized, she had turned into a human watermelon. Like the Oompa Loompas’ warning–*Violet, you’re turning violet!*–musicals planted roots inside me, seeped deep into my bones, mingled with my essence at the atomic level. *Mine*, they said.



 



We’d claimed each other; I was disciple and deity both. I was wrapped up in the corn shucking sun setting smokey haze yellowed quiche, and they, in turn, bore my oily fingerprints. Try as I might to scrub these naive renderings of the world from my conscience, they’ve burrowed into my being inextricably, attaching themselves to me for good.



 



***



 



There is a moment in *A Chorus Line* when Morales, my favorite character, tells the story, in a sung monologue, about her experience in an acting class. It begins when her teacher, Mr. Karp, asks them to improvise various scenes. "Be a table, be a sportscar… / ice cream cone," he orders. Morales can’t do it. "I felt nothing," she reports, again and again. Mr. Karp humiliates her in front of the class. “I think you should transfer,” he says.



 



*Try, Morales. All alone*, she urges herself, too stubborn to concede. Karp continues to hound her. Finally, she breaks down and asks Jesus for help. A voice speaks to her from on high, sending a message which she relays in a triumphant swell: "This man is nothing! / This course is nothing! / If you want something, / Go find a better class."



 



It is a happy ending well-earned. We, the audience, relax. But the music continues. Morales has more to say. "Six months later," she says, as the music begins to slow, "I heard that Karp had died." Even slower: "And I dug right down to the bottom of my soul…" each word more reluctant than the next. Morales does not want to be telling this story anymore. But the music keeps playing, pulling her along.



 



A pause here. "And cried." Another pause.





"Cause I felt…" three words on the same note, like a hymn, like she is praying again, this time for proof of her own empathy. A third pause.



 



Here, a moment of limbo, perfectly engineered in performance. She gives the faintest of gasps, as if she’s only just now discovered how the story ends, as if it surprises her. Her eyes light up. The corners of her mouth curve, hopeful; her neck lifts, craning into the future. It is a subtle, safe sanguineness. So that until the very last, you think she’s moving her tongue toward the middle of her roof, anticipating *s,* that she felt *something.*



But alas, we cannot hide in this liminal moment forever. The song is waiting for its final note, the conclusion that will make the moment whole. So Morales pokes her tongue forward, lays it flat under her teeth, for *n*. "Nothing," she sings quietly. And we realize that she has tricked us; that her eyes were filled with anguish, not hope; that the corners of her mouth turned up in a grimace of pain, that the pause was not to savor the personal victory but to build up the courage to admit a truth she is ashamed of.



A tinkle of bells, and then the song is over. We are left with silence.



*I felt nothing, *she said.



But hidden inside that shell of ostensible desolation is a swirling mélange of pungently flavored feelings. Pain and joy mixed up–like in Morales’s face, more alike than they are different. Disappointment and vengeance, confusion and guilt. Feelings wrapped in emptiness wrapped in feelings. Blended together and served in spoonfuls.



 



That’s the kicker. In the world of a musical, you never feel nothing. You feel so much of everything.



 

By the time you realize the shoe is gone, the party is over and there’s no sign of the three-legged man. Your friends are falling or leaning into one another, zipping their coats under the red-purple light of the borrowed projector. The pile of shoes is a shrinking hillock next to the bed. People pull on boots, tie up laces. *Mine, yours, mine, yours. Mine? *Walking home through the snow you pass a taco place and women in tiny dresses pulling on enormous puffy coats. Recruitment season or a party. Two people kissing next to a fancy tea shop. Cold.



 



Sunday morning the light splits your head like a picture frame and the clog is definitely missing. Your friends report they can’t find their boots either. The host, your friend, is sorry. ‘What kind of person,’ she asks, ‘needs three left shoes?’



 



‘Someone,’ you suggest, ‘with three left feet.’ It’s an idea that pleases nobody.



 



Especially not your mom, when you call a week afterwards to tell her so. The clog comes up  between discussion of the old job (unbearably cold), new course-load (terrifying) and suspicion that your admission letter was a mistake (perennial). She’s not amused. ‘We can’t afford new shoes every time some kid wants to pull a prank.’ It’s true that in middle and high school your mom sewed most of her own clothes. Homecoming queen of Napa High and cut the shape of her body out of a bolt of sequined cloth, which she stretched tight as a sheet across the dining room table.  It’s in the garage somewhere, this dress, in a mess of cardboard boxes labeled ‘KIM-HS.’  You tried it on once (out there looking for a bicycle pump) but the bust ran to zig-zags and the shoulder pads swallowed your arms. Lying on the bottom bed in your freshman-sized double you regret telling this story.



‘Is it really such a big deal?’ 



 



Your mom, it turns out, wore the clogs as well. Jalisco’s was the name of the restaurant where she worked for most of her teenagerdom. Aunts and uncles waited tables, your grandma managed the buying and ordering of all the foodstuffs, and your grandpa came in on weeknights to hear his friend Placido Garcia, sing. In those days Placido wore long black pantalones de charros, seeded with little silver coins, and played with two guitarists backing him in front of the large letter J. Like most of the seasonal farmworkers known as *braceros[](#_ftn1)*, Placido would travel up and down the state, tracking the cycle of crops. Beets and  oranges and cabbage in January; sweet onions and spinach in the Spring; apricots, peaches, berries in June. During the summers of 1965, Placido did grapes with Cesar Chavez and your grandpa, too, along the picket lines where your grandpa says the musicians played like war. At the funeral Placido is accompanied by a church organist, a thin blonde church-type with varicose veins. Wore his hair threaded along his back in a pony like your grandpa’s. Sang Ave Maria like it was an old rancheras. Warbling, and warm.



Before the funeral, the only time you talk about it, your mother says she is convinced her mother died from the same kind of picking and pulling and traveling. Mostly in the Fresno apricot groves, which, your mother says, seeded chemicals into the flesh of her own mother’s hands and face and arms. Pesticides that worked their way into her mother’s body like fingers through soft dough. Knead, kneading. Rise.



 



In the casket your grandmother’s arms are crossed and she is wearing violet lipstick.



 



Unlike your mother, you have not worked enough in high school to even begin to afford your own diploma. Financial aid, however, requires it. Before your Southwest flight has even left the California tarmac the Harvard jobs database is open on your phone, a tabulated lists of employers who all seem uninterested in your extremely meager skillset. Lucky a fellow Sacramentan, a football player whose face will soon be all over the front page of the local paper, is also on this flight. *Be a Hahvard Tour Guide,* is his counsel. *Great gig. *Plus - and this is the important bit - *anyone can do it.*



 



‘Fifteen dollars an hour?” You mom rips the shiny orange bag of peanuts. ‘Pretty good.’



 



….



 



Some of your friends make fun of you. They call your job as a “hat tour,” referring to the straw boater hats that all Hahvard guides must wear. These hats look like something out of Downtown Abby, or else. Most of them also work. Cafe jobs, or jobs scanning books in one of the college’s infinite libraries. Librarians are generally not asked about their SAT scores or what their father does for a living. But nobody is paid as well as you are. Which for a while, is enough a point of pride that you aren’t wounded by friends making fun of your job. Nor does it bother you that several times a professor you admire has passed by while you are giving tours and once, actually stopped to frown.



But then it is October, and classes have accelerated, and you almost slip on a rain-slimed step as  lead a group of tourists past the bell-tower of Memorial Church. Steadying yourself, you can’t help looking around. A few students pass between the trees, their umbrellas looking like neon fungi between the grey lawns, little moving mushrooms. Nearly everyone is in class or avoiding the rain. Nobody has seen you fall. Nobody, that is, except the twenty or so strangers who have paid for you to guide them, duckling like, across a Harvard campus that is swiftly beginning to look like a swamp.



Valiantly, you recover. ‘Mother Teresa gave the graduation address right here in 1982.’ The rain is now a gentle monsoon.  ‘Any questions?’



From Japan; Germany; and Texas; the tourists have none. Everyone, that is, except the Danish woman. This person is examining your lack of water-proofed shoes. Earlier she asked if you always walked backwards, or whether that was a particular tour-guide-type thing. It didn’t seem particularly snide, and neither does her question about the clogs, except that she sort of laughed when you almost fell.



 



‘In my country, gardeners wear those.’



Rain speckles your sweatshirt in a friendly manner.



‘Oh- ah- really?”



You try to think of a suitable reason why an eighteen year old person, American or otherwise, might be wearing gardener shoes. You feel compelled to essentialize, something along the lines of: “Well, actually, studies show that clogs facilitate greater retention of information!” Shouldn’t she know about clogs? Vaguely you recall those articles about *hygge,* which you think is vaguely Danish, in the sense that all Nordic countries at this point are represented by your mom’s friend Bob, who has skiied since childhood and wore Ugg boots long before any of your middle school friends ever did. Why do you need to explain your footwear to this woman?



 



“Yeah. I guess gardeners in the U.S wear them, too.’



 



At the end of the tour you find ten dollars from the man from Osaka, a shower of coins from the Texan, and one parking ticket from the Dane at the bottom of your flooded hat.



 



….



 



But apart from this the job is good. Not just good, but great. It’s well-paid with minimal amounts of shame. This is more than most adults you know can answer for. But then you wake up one morning to a wheezing radiator and the sound of your roommate’s exclamation. “Snow!” She is from Texas, and the cold makes the both of you gasp. Fat flakes of it sting your face all the way to the library. The statue of John Harvard wears an extra layer of white. This is extremely troubling for your long-term prospects as a tour-guide, particularly since you own zero appropriate winter coats. After some great agony you apply at the art museum. The specifics are unclear but there is central heating and the art students will definitely appreciate your shoes.



In her office on the third floor your potential employer takes a sip from her bottle of Aquafina. She wants to know about research experience. Specifically, have you done any?



 



There is a literary magazine. The interview happens over Skype, because the editor of this other magazine is living in Morocco right now. She asks you to go ahead and invent as many uses for a plastic water bottle as you possible can.



 



Fill a plastic bottle with soil and stick a plant in it. Cut the bottle in half, make some jewelry, a headband. ‘A dog collar!’ (Thirty seconds on the clock.) Braid the plastic into a lattice and make the lattice into a basket and carry that plastic basket to the Tuesday farmer’s market. ‘A back-scratcher!’



 



You get this job, although it will not pay you anything and makes you reflect that nobody really needs a back-scratcher, dog-collar, bangles. You do not tell your mother about this position, because you know what she will say. Winter coats are expensive.



 



Not two weeks after your shoe was stolen, study breaks are called and canceled. *Theft is a serious problem,* the Dean of the Ivy Yard writes in an essay-length address, *one that Harvard takes seriously. *You recognize the prose. In your mind’s eye you can just picture her typing with one hand and pulling a long line of thread through a piece of cloth with the other. And so you’re not surprised to learn that the Dean of Ivy Yard, the Dean of Student Life,  and the Dean of Pretty Much Everything Else, has received a note from your mother. *‘Dear Sir,’* they begin, ‘*Dear Madam.’ *



 



…..



 



According to your principle of doing the exact opposite of everything your mother wants, you try not to care. But a strange thing starts to happen. You start to look. At people. An up-down, one-two gaze that can’t be disguised as anything more than it is, the eyeball equivalent of an X-ray scan, except you’re trying to determine the bone structure of a soul. Whether there’s any integrity there. Or whether the person is just a godless shoe-thief, after all. (The closet, like the heart, is a duplicitous thing.) Anyone could be guilty, until you’ve seen the contents of their shoe rack.



 



Which is when it really begins. You, peeking into dorm rooms, a habit which will eventually push you to sign up for a summer’s worth of investigation. A million places it could be. On a desk, behind a sofa, at the back of the couch. But you have to know. Because you fear it could be sitting on some kid’s fireplace, like the ghost-like arrangement that you spy one a.m, passing a floor-mate’s suite. The kid is brushing his teeth down the hall, with his door left open. On the fireplace, where some folks have put wine bottles or books or boxes of crackers, this kid has a string of empty shopping bags (Hermes, Prada, Balenciaga) that he’s arranged along the length of his shelf. It’s maddening to see them there. And some combination of the late hour, your exam the next morning, the Hermes, your missing shoe, makes you feel an approximation of the way your mom sounded on the phone. Down the hall, a faucet shuts off.  You take a good long look at all those designer names. Nothing that you’d wear yourself, anyway.



It’s not like you went looking for the ultimate snoop job. Not like you meant to start rooting through the deepest, darkest secrets of the Harvard student body. But a friend gets tired of hearing you moan about the weather, your job, your lost shoe (‘there are other things you could lose, she says such as, ‘Friends who are tired of hearing about your stupid shoe’) and Dorm Crew, it seems, is a great way to make money.



In case you have never heard of it, Dorm Crew is a program in which some students are paid to clean up after other students. Paid, essentially, to snoop. There are no interviews. The application portal describes a ‘transformative’ and ‘rewarding experience’ and promises TERM TIME JOBS STARTING AT $16.75 AN HOUR. This is better than the amount you were paid to point at Memorial Hall. Stock photos of joyful 20-somethings, presumably celebrating their gainful employment, leap from piles of fall leaves. You’d like to be joyful, too. At this point in freshman year you are mostly sad. You apply for the summer time job.



The friend vouches for it.  ‘Well-paid, easy work. A ton of free stuff.’ This is true. There is a ton of free stuff. Spring clean up happens mid-May, after exams have tipped the tired student body from the panic of deadlines into the hot pan of summer internships, travel plans, their parent’s couch. When classes finally cut, people leave belongings strewn across campus. Dorm crew workers arrive to comb through the detritus.



 



Some things that you will find, doing this job:



 



2. Clothing. In Dunster, you open the closet of a second floor room to closet racks swollen with formal dresses. Silver with plunging bodice, black with sequins, heels. Heels with tiny bladelike points and thick platforms. A Fendi purse, a BCBG bag. Take a black slip-type one for yourself and put the rest on the donation pile. Desks’ full of untouched candy. Rose-flavored gummies and Pocky and Snickers bars, still in their gleaming wrappers, all uneaten.

4. Alcohol. Enough of it to send you on an endless bender, if you were to try to drink it all. A $200 dollar bottle of scotch. In Eliot house, a fully stocked bar.

6. Furniture. Two couches, and three buckets of protein powder. A box of cup-holders with ‘Avocados from Mexico!’ logo on them. A pink dildo. Some nude photographs. And way too many used condoms.

 



Other things, as well. In Dunster House you open the closet of an otherwise pristine room to find a note written on the mirror in red excel market. “YOU ARE BETTER THAN THE FINALS CLUBS, YOU DO NOT NEED THEM. YOU ARE GOOD ENOUGH.”  In the reflection you wear a vacuum on your back like a jet pack and ten pounds of dust. You are sympathetic to this person, but the Excel marker takes extra scrubbing to get it off.



 



Probably the worst suite that your team cleaned is a senior quint that belonged to a group of football players. A quint is like one room, but actually it’s five. The place seems untouched, like the occupants might be down the hall, about to step right in. In the common room are long shag carpets, two grey suede couches, four mini-fridges, a TV.  And a smell like something the sun never got to, powdery and rotting and weirdly sweet. Four bulging trash bags, pregnant with what seems to be the boys’ entire wardrobes. Dress shirts, still stiff in those creases the way they get after starching, five pairs of Levi’s, and several pairs of girls’ underwear, unwashed. Boxes of goldfish and also liters of coke, liters of Vodka, bottles of Heineken that a teammate breaks as she tries to put it into your trash-bag, beer running into the shag rug like a stream of piss.



There are five rooms like this.



From the next room over, somebody shouts. ‘Hey! There’s one of those Forbes-Thirty-Under-30 badges in here!’ One of the roommates, it turns out, does not play football, is actually a self-made millionaire, has left us a snowy mountain of used tissues next to his bed.



 



Last summer, a team of dorm crew workers pulled back a shower curtain to find a pile of turds in the bathtub of an Apley dorm room. Two summers ago, a bedroom brimming with June sunlight also held a number of red solo cups, filled with piss, that’d been carefully arranged around the bed.



 



And etc.



….



 



It is a truism to say that the folks who work dorm crew are generally those who need a lot of money very quickly. Which is not to say that there's no pleasure involved. You will see people clean the same section of a chair or a wall or a wardrobe until there’s no way to call that perfectly gleaming corner exactly what it is. This is masochism, self-abasing and purifying at the same time. It is a different kind of self-strengthening than the school year, this process of ritualized, mindless labor, which is so different from the mental exercises which are required during the school term. And for whom the sight of a recently scrubbed desktop, freed of wax-drippings, or the little clumps of frozen gum, is positively soul-freeing, ten-pound vacuum cleaner roped to their back like the motor of a rocket ship. Some folks just like the excuse to pilfer, magpie- like, the spoils that are left at the end of the year.



 



It’s worth knowing: in an average year, American college students will spend $48.5 billion dollars on Back-to-College items. This includes a seven point five billion dollar snack budget and five point nine billion for twirly red and purple projectors and that rug you’ll ditch at the end of the year. This year the Nat’l Retail foundation estimates that a sweet  $54.1 billion will be spent on all of the rugs, toasters, lamps, and disco-light projectors that the average college student will need to furnish their room. So much of this gets left over that that the job of dorm crew is something like being one of those little sucker fish on the back of an extremely forgetful shark. It is a reciprocal relationship and one familiar to most people, although in some other notable cases the shark might not be the university; it might be the consulting firm, the nonprofit; one’s spouse. In the case of dorm crew, the shark is the student body itself.



 



Although to be clear, the shark is nobody in particular. It is a large and multi-sided animal, it mostly harbors no malice in the general, it is you and me and everyone we know.



 



Your mother is happy for you to have a summer job, even if it is a few weeks long. She is glad you are working and that such jobs exist. This is still last year, and her mother has yet to show the cancer, the second one, which will bring you back home and end your mother’s mother’s life. So your mom is happy that you’re working. A friend of yours, on the same cleaning team, is not so lucky. The friend’s name is Marisol. Her family is from El Salvador. The difficulty, she explains  (you are both sitting on the floor of a senior’s suite in Dunster House, scrubbing wine stains out of the walls with a bucket of Enzysan and tiny yellow sponges) is that her mother had spent much of her own life cleaning. Houses, mostly. Sinks, bathrooms, kitchens. Ladies’ toiletries, men’s razors, the backside of sofas where dark things get caught. Marisol is going to Europe at the end of the summer and had explained Dorm crew to her mother as a necessary way to pay for the trip. Nevertheless, she had been forbidden from working.



‘She didn’t want me cleaning up other people’s messes.’ Marisol never says as much but it is your private suspicion (emptying the Enzysan, you spill some on your shirt) is that her mother knows what she will find. Had your own mother known that you’d be scraping crusted alcohol from the door-jambs and ceilings of fellow students’ walls, she might not have wanted you to work, either.



Marisol is assigned to the bathroom team, but does not quit.



 



Some other people do. There are folks who get sick, and then are fired; folks who don’t like running up and down stairs; who don’t want to touch the toenail clippings behind an Apley Court bed-frame. Secretly, you will think that these people are weak. You’re slow, but it feels good to try to be faster. There are races. Hours of scrubbing floor landings pass in a way that’s not exactly enjoyable, but they go. When you reach down behind an Adams bed for a grey sock and discover it is a mouse, back broken but still soft, you have to put your broom and step outside the door. As another woman comes in to scoop it away, you sink to your knees and try not to lean your head on your hands. Think that after all, this is why the shark / sucker fish metaphor is inapt, maybe even offensive. Because you are all one group of students cleaning up after another group, but it’s one and the same species, after all.



 



So maybe forget the fish. The idea of dorm crew is more along the lines of having a friend wipe your ass after taking a shit.



 



On the night in the snow when the shoe is stolen, you’re going to curse the name of the mother of the son or daughter that decided to steal your clog.  Somehow, you will make the mistake of telling this to your mother, your mother the homecoming queen and daughter of the restaurant-maker, about the missing clog. She will email the Dean; the head of the freshman dorms; and CC the president of the college. Her email will include shuddering words such as THEFT and PRIVATION and SPOILED KIDS THAT TAKE OTHER PEOPLE’S SHOES BECAUSE  THEY THINK IT’S FUNNY. She does not use all-caps, she writes in very clear prose. On the phone, her voice is a shout. Sigh and laugh.



 “Don’t worry, Mom. They were only $20.”



 



 Before your mom was nominated for homecoming queen she played softball. You’ve seen her at bat only the one time, and that was to break up a cat fight. The purse was yellow: she went in swinging. After the cat fight, washing her hands in the kitchen sink, she puts peanut-butter on bread for the both of you to eat.



Say, “It’s fine, I’ve got one shoe left.”



 “What good,” she answers, “is a left shoe without its mate?”                                                   



Consider the things you could do with one left shoe: plant a tiny garden; use it as a ladle; put secret things in the toe of it. Throw it at the neighbor’s cat. There’s only one reasonable answer to all of this, though, so you shrug, and say:



“Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll find it.”



           



You never do.

 



I used to wonder what it was like to be my mother, breathless and confused in a maternity ward, three times in a row. To push three defective children out from inside of her; to spend nine months dreaming in intricate detail of the pristine bundle of joy that awaited her, and each time, to wake up to a wriggling pink mass dangling out of a nurse’s arms and think oh no.



 



My granny likes to tell me that when she came to greet me in the hospital, she peered down into the mess of blankets perched on my mom’s chest and a great big pair of eyes stared back at her. Like Harry Potter’s first impression of Dobby, when he sees those two eyes and nothing else blinking at him through a bush, mine sort of hung there, round and earnest, eclipsing the rest of the infant body she knew must be attached.



 



This is what she says.



 



I was an Ohio baby, the first of her grandchildren to be born in the state where her grandparents plopped their Old Country trunks down and never left. So it’s fitting that when she stared down at me and cooed hello, Miss Big Eyes, her subtle midwestern dialect smushed the Miss so it sounded more like Ms., and the g didn’t come out all the way; and thus, I became Ms. Bigeyes.



 



The Ms. was important to me, because it matched my mom. Well before defects 1, 2, and 3 came along, just as second-wave feminism was coming to a close, my mom made my dad read A Room of One’s Own before he could marry her and kept her last name once he did.



 



A name that means Ohio like my granny, Ms. like my mama.



 



And Bigeyes like my dad. My father is a man who disposes of mouse carcasses with studied cool and pats his substantial belly like a good boy puppy and writes all his words in capital letters and compliments other men’s vehicles, but he is also a man who meticulously stitched the head back onto my teddy bear every time her fluffy pink torso went rogue, who gets dizzy after one glass of wine, who stores his toothbrush in a gold lamé dopp kit. And when he took me to see Marley and Me, I turned to look at him during the part where they put Marley down, and his eyes were so clear and shiny and full. And I understood that my eyes are his eyes, just a tiny bit greener, like my mom’s. But that mostly it didn’t matter that he was good at sweating and watching sports; we were Bigeyes and Bigeyes, Jr., and the world looked pretty much the same to us both.







But in the world of this maternity ward hospital room, where cinematic first impressions are the name of the game, I find Granny’s origin story hard to believe. She says the eyes were all she saw, but I’ve seen pictures of baby me. I know what I looked like.



 



Number One



 



Number one was my brother, who came out mostly fine, except that his left thigh was covered in a dark, swirly patch of skin. Shaped like an upsidedown Ohio, I used to think, as he massaged gallons of sunscreen into the area, which the doctors said was dangerous if it burnt. What happened was that God pressed too hard with the marker he was using to shade in my brother and colored that leg darker than the rest of my brother’s pale, Ashkenazi skin and was like whoops! My b. But it was chill. This defect wasn’t so bad. The nurse probably didn’t even notice right away; only my mom did.



 



People didn’t seem to notice it much, either, as he grew up. A leg is just an extremity, after all. I thought he looked fine, was in the clear, until he hit high school.



 



Meredith tells me that her sister, Lauren, who is in my older brother’s grade, has a crush on his friend, Bobby, and that another one of her sister’s friends is interested in another one of my brother’s friends, but that neither her sister nor her sister’s friends are much interested in my brother himself. According to Lauren, his nose is the dealbreaker. “It’s too big,” she says. “Lauren says that you guys have the same nose, actually, but you carry it better. She thinks he might grow into his, though.”



It’s a lot to process, because she talks fast and I think I am supposed to thank her and there are so many names and degrees of separation, but also because this nose stuff is all new to me. I understand that some noses look different than others, because when I stare in the mirror and push my nostrils up I look a lot like my first grade teacher, which is fun. But the “carrying it well” and “growing into it” thing; the idea of the bad nose/good nose dichotomy–this was not on my radar. I had no idea! Lucky for me that I have friends like Meredith to set me straight.



Further inquiry leads me to the phenomenon of the Jewish nose, which, Meredith again clarifies, I have but not as bad as my brother. Phew. I thought Jewish was just a religion, but it’s kind of cool that we have this genetic thing that we all share. I wish the Jewish nose looked more like Meredith’s, though, so that her sister wouldn’t think my brother was ugly.



I learn later that there are other genetic things about being Jewish, like owning all the money in the world and controlling the entertainment industry. Fascinating. What about people who convert? Do they get a new nose and money when they agree to wear a yarmulke? Meredith does not know the answer to this question.





I never met my grandpa, but based on pictures, I think that this nose that my brother and I share came from him. Apparently, he was obsessed with the Holocaust. In a freakish way. I wonder how he felt about the face-measurement tool the Nazis used. If your nose is too big you’re a dirty dirty Jew and it doesn’t matter that your family converted to Christianity in 1298. His Hitler books fill up four entire rows in our study, but not one bears any trace of underlining, notes, or highlights. When he flipped through these pages half a century ago, was he angry? Resigned? Did he wish his features were just a little less prominent, so that just this once, he could blend in? Or did he feel blazing pride, marked by God himself as a boy with a big fat nose?







 



Number Two



 



After my brother, there was me, Bigeyed and 80s-feminist-independent, but the defect crept north north north and plopped down smack in the center of my face. A giant red balloon growing on top of my mouth, puffed full of air but made out of lip, big enough to be a third eye. God was putting the finishing touches on my face when an angel or like wandering soul came by and bumped God’s elbow and God was like NIGEL dude we talked about this you really need to get control of yourself but there I was and there God was and there Nigel was and there my mom was with defective child number two. I’m sure the nurse noticed right away, this time. It is not a thing you can easily miss. I wonder if she gasped when she inspected my face. I wonder if my mom had to nudge my dad to smile weakly instead of the confused sort of grimace he had accidentally adopted. I wonder if my granny did her usual cough and politely said hello, Ms. Bigeyes so that everyone would stop feeling so weird about my face.



 



I know my lip was disgusting, objectively, because children tell the truth, and before my preschool peers learned that it is bad to point at someone’s face and say “what’s wrong with your lip?” they did exactly that, and after I explained it to the best of my primitive communication skills, they usually stared blankly for a while and then said “well, it’s disgusting,” and wandered off.







The interesting thing about this response is that physical and moral disgust are a two-way street. You see something immoral and you feel disgusted, but also sometimes you see something disgusting and then your brain interprets that as immorality. This is a real psychological thing that I do not know the official name of but is definitely a thing. Let’s call it Sins of the Ew.



 



Armed with the empirical evidence of my youth, then, I have concluded that had I been born four hundred years earlier, The Puritans would have thought I was a witch. They would see my face and consider it a Sin of the Ew and say TO THE COURT! and then I would get to give a long and dramatic woe is me monologue from the witness stand in my cute Puritan bonnet and everyone would be emotional and the whole town would be torn into pro- and anti-Eliya factions and riots would break out, but due to the fact that I am also left-handed and Jewish and do theatre, three historically wicked characteristics, the consensus would eventually be that I am in the Definitely Satanic camp, and I might end up burning at the stake but gosh darnit if they wouldn’t write my name in their diaries and court records and then hundreds of years later all the historians would be like wow who is this Eliya person she seems like a Big Fucking Deal.



 



I wonder what would have happened if granny had been honest with all of us when she took a gander at her first ohio grandchild. If she had said something like hello, Ms. Biglip. Maybe we all would have been cool with how my face looked, and I wouldn’t have minded in kindergarten when Rose said I was a dumb girl with a big fat lip and one person giggled and the name stuck. Maybe when she called hey, Big Fat Lip Girl across the playground, I wouldn’t have wanted to keep digging in the sandbox until the bottom fell out. Maybe when Mrs. Hiller heard what Rose was calling me, she wouldn’t have made Rose apologize in front of everyone, and I wouldn’t have stared around with my eyes bursting out of my head, petrified that this public proceeding would only make the name more popular.



 



In another world, I would’ve smiled and thought that my big fat lip was just like my grandpa’s big fat nose, and that would have been that.



 



The year I turn fifteen, a Buzzfeed quiz tells me that when a boy stares at your lips, it means he wants to kiss them. I am distrustful of this advice. Clearly whoever wrote this has a symmetrical face. And no witchy inclinations whatsoever. But a few weeks later, a boy is indeed staring at my lips. It makes me uncomfortable, at first, because I am used to people staring at my mouth and I know what it means. But he looks sort of happy when he stares. So I am thinking maybe Buzzfeed was right.



 



And then a year after that, I am standing in my living room with a lot of adults who have run out of things to say, and a very nice lady tries to make small talk by pointing to a picture on the mantel. What an adorable baby you must have been! she says. And I realize I am no longer Big Fat Lip Girl at all, because all of my baby pictures feature a prominent lip pillow, and I suppose that if the baby in this picture does not have a lip pillow and this lady still thinks it is a picture of me, it must mean that my big fat lip has shrunk beyond obvious notice.



 



But then I realize that this also means I must respond to her comment, I must correct her in front of everyone, and I feel angry. I wish I had my lip pillow back, I wish for burning at the stake or even Mrs. Hiller in front of the kindergarten class; I wish for anything that would prevent this moment. Can’t she tell that that baby is so obviously not me? Its mouth is medium and its nose is medium and its eyes are medium. I do not want to tell her who is in the picture. I do not want to tell her what happened.











Number Three



 



Number three was my sister. God was hungover and trying to catch the Sunday game but the remote wouldn’t work and he was also in a big fight with Moses and really he was just so distracted and stressed he would later tell someone, really wasn’t paying attention and he messed my sister up, he messed her up from the inside out in a horrible way. God didn’t say anything this time when he realized what he’d done. He felt bad. Really really bad.



 



She was born with perfect medium mouth and medium nose. Her name means beautiful in Hebrew and in English. She was picture perfect. Except that her eyes were medium, too. They did not focus, they did not fill with much of anything.



 



The nurse, this time, did not notice anything was wrong when she inspected my sister. I know this for a fact. My mom tells the story of Bella’s birth delicately, like she is dangling a piece of lint near her mouth and if she talks too loud or too fast it will blow away. But there is a flash of pride when she comes to the part about the nurse, a triumphant maternal flare of the nostrils. Like when Miss Clavelle turned on the light, my mom said something is not right! with my child and the nurse said no ma’am, it’s a beautiful baby girl and my mom said said SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH MY CHILD, MY CHILD IS NOT BREATHING, GET THE DOCTOR. And she was right, of course. Because my mom always knows everything.



 



I do not know what my granny said when she saw Bella for the first time. Probably a gentle cough and then nothing at all. Silent like God.



 

*I’m playing a game with myself where I try to take the biggest steps that I can without collapsing onto my side like an aging racehorse. It suddenly occurs to me that he has been following me for some time. Perhaps, in my five-beer state, I am more interesting to the average bystander than I’d like to think. *



*I notice he’s staggering too. I almost want to let out a laugh or a high-five — the cheap instant bonding of the fellow inebriate. He’s about sixty, maybe even sixty-five, and he has the grizzled look of a veteran or any number of other professions that take sensitivity to be superfluous. In another world he could have been my grandfather. *



*The only lights are from the red and white Bank of America ATM and his face has an almost clown-like quality that I would have found distressing under normal circumstances. *



*Twenty more seconds. He’s still following me. He used to be way out in the middle of the road, but now he’s shifted course almost twenty degrees just to get closer. *



*“What’s up?” I offer.*



*“You.” There’s no greeting before the address, not even the implication of where one would go. His voice is alarmingly empty. He sounds like he’s talking to the TV, or to the epitaph of a distant relative who made too many unwarned visits and snored on the couch a lot. *



*“What’s up?” Once more, carbon copy of the last one. Good job, I tell myself. You sound like a natural. *



*His eyes now have the quality of a middle schooler who’s just been introduced to a microscope. *



*Take a look at the fly. Relax, it’s between two sheets of glass, it won’t bite you. See the wings? *



*“Where are you from?” he asks, same ghostly tone. *



*“I dunno man, round here.” *



*“Uh-huh?” *



*“Yeah.” I try not to make eye contact. I’m thinking about this speech my mom gave me on the phone after the election about watching out for white people. They have guns, she said. They shoot, like, anything that moves, she jokes. Alright, I said, letting myself chuckle a little before hanging up.*



*“Around here, you say?” still looking at me. By this point I had forgotten the chain of dialogue that produced the question. *



*“Yep!” *



*“No you’re not.” The first one’s kind of teasing almost. There is a hair-tussling quality to it, a c’mon, what the fuck are you talkin’ about, dude? That’s all gone by the second one. *



*“No you’re not.” *



*And then the elephant in the room:*



*“You don’t look it.”*



*“Well - “ I start stammering, feeling exposed. “I guess I’m not really -*



*He’s looking at me sideways with the microscope gaze again. I think about the time in fifth grade we dissected a rabbit and before the first incision our teacher forced us to take a moment of silent reflection for the poor animal’s dedication to our scientific edification. We need to respect all that we observe, he said. *



*I’m still thinking about rabbits when the first kick comes. And the second. *



*“Then why the fuck did you lie to me?” He keeps repeating with almost journalistic detachment as he pummels me. The kicks don’t hurt but by this point I’ve abandoned any attempt at trying to process my immediate surroundings as real, I’ve inserted a television Chiron around the bottom third and now I’m imagining I'm on my couch listening to a distinguished group of panelists break down the situation for the folks at home. He has an unmarked backpack and for a split second - I guess this still scares me - it occurs to me that there’s a passing chance I may get killed. I look around and then - and this scares me more - decide not to do too much about it.*



*I’m too scared to register the dark comedy of dying in front of an Insomnia Cookies, taunted by the odor of ice cream sandwiches. And then he’s gone. Amidst tears I manage to whimper out a soft “fuck you”; a garbage truck promptly swallows it. *



* *



I was in middle school when I first came across Borges’ “The Garden of the Forking Paths.” The story’s mystery centers on a Chinese man - Ts’ui Pen - who tries to construct a novel in which every possible narrative outcome coexists peacefully. While the story was, in many ways, nothing more than an illustration of the many-worlds theories that have formed the backbone of shoddy science fiction premises for years, there was an otherworldly comfort to the central conceit of the Garden - “in other possible pasts you are my enemy; in others my friend.”



As a risk-averse and deeply indecisive child I found something vindicating in Ts’ui Pen’s logic, although it was years before I could formulate why. Perhaps one could call it the Borgesian excuse. The premise of the Borgesian excuse was simple: any act of decision-making results in the potential alternatives to that decision becoming inaccessible. Choosing a path meant torching the others I had bypassed. But by simply forgoing choice, I could simulate something close to Ts’ui Pen’s garden - a state in which all possible outcomes exist simultaneously, each one on an equal plane of halfway reality. Borges had effectively given me a justification for my inability to commit to any course of action - not choosing allowed the hypothetical to take on the authority of the actual.



When I finally learned to verbalize the Borgesian Excuse - probably somewhere around the tenth grade - I was shocked at how much it had invaded my daily experience. I could miss a three-pointer and definitively out myself as a hack shooting-guard, or I could drift along the game undetected, thereby fanning the perception that I was potentially passable. I could verify my checking balance or run off from the ATM to reside in a reality in which I was potentially not broke.



The most effective application of the Borgesian excuse for passivity, however, came in cases of cowardice. If I never got in the way of aggression, I would never have to retaliate, and therefore would theoretically never have to part with the idea that I was someone who could retaliate. That response became a little harder when it came to cases of racial aggression, but I was lucky. My family could supply with me enough books and television that by age five, I was able to construct some median of the American home experience. I asked my parents to go to Target to buy sidewalk chalk and I drew hopscotch grids in the driveway not because I cared for it, but because it seemed like an obligatory childhood experience I could check off the bucket list. I had the resources to learn English to the point that I had no accent, and over the years I also learned how to speak Spanish with the slight Northeastern twinge that implied I had never learned a foreign tongue before and that by logical necessity I was unable to speak any Korean. I was lucky to afford to go to schools with diversity programs and live in neighborhoods that had independent movie theaters and Chinese restaurants without french fries on the menu.



My parents often told me that I should live proudly, because I was the son of pioneers after all, because my grandparents had moved to the United States back when oriental was still in the popular lexicon and never took shit from anyone. I had been lucky to freely construct the blandest American existence possible for myself, but I could simultaneously maintain the delusion that I was fueled by the blood of pioneers, that I could summon a certain inner strength and self-assuredness to fight back when the situation necessitated it. But in the meantime, the best course of action seemed to be to avoid trouble. And I was very good at avoiding trouble. Besides, I was Asian, which carried with it a certain expectation of docility.



 



*I’m playing a game with myself where I try to take the biggest steps that I can without collapsing onto my side like an aging racehorse. Out of the corner of my eye I can see him lumbering and instantly I am put on edge. There is something primal inside of me directing me towards his direction. Soon, I find that everything is falling into its predicted place like an instruction manual. Step 1: Wait for him to notice you are Asian. Step 2: Wait for that to trigger some reminder that his sense of The Real America has been corrupted beyond repair. Step 3: Wait for him to funnel the entirety of that nationalistic malaise towards your physical person - by this point you should be about 15 degrees to the right side of him. Step 4: Let him take the first swing, thus transferring legal culpability (you gotta keep that F-1 Visa intact, kiddo). Step 5: Boxing lessons every Sunday were in fact a good idea, you should thank your parents and remember how the gym-leader with a Napoleon complex taught you how to make a proper fist, A MAN’S FIST, not that sissy bullshit you made when you tried to fight that kid after basketball practice and then just made up, not because you’re a pacifist or any of that Mahatma Gandhi crap but because “peacemaker” is the most attractive synonym for “coward” in the English language, anyway, remember how to make that fist and go for it, you’ve covered your bases and this is the probably the only time you will have moral grounds (and legal, remember we already sorted that out) to pummel an old man. *



*When I’m done, he’s slumped off to his side and struggling to get some breaths in. I flip him onto his back so he’s looking at me the way one stares into the sun, and somehow this does not strike me as childishly megalomaniacal, and when I do so I also cock my fist up to let him know this isn’t over yet. *



*So say it, shithead, I tell him, such a receptacle of testosterone by this point that the Schwarzeneggerian quality of this retort is completely lost on me. *



*What? *



*I want you to say sorry. *



*The garbage truck honks past in the distance but it does so right as the man is coughing so as not to ruin the moment. *



*I’m sorry. *



*Good, I say, letting him go with a careless toss.*



 



“If he was so old, why didn’t you just beat the shit out of him?”



My friend barely looked up from his phone as he offered his rejoinder. This was the first time I had told the story to another Asian guy, and it wasn’t exactly the response I was expecting. I was hoping I would at least get a good party story out of this whole ordeal, and it’s obvious from the initial focus group response that I will not be.



Why didn’t I beat the shit out of him? I assume it’s the same reason why I never said anything when a Boston cop pulled over my parents before sending them off with a slit-eyed joke. Or the same reason why I found the need to apologize to the TSA agents who herded me like cattle across the immigration line of JFK airport. Or the same reason why I let out a nervous laugh when a waiter wondered aloud to himself whether Koreans ever ate at fine dining establishments.



“Fucking idiots,” I’d always mutter under my breath.



I remember a conversation I had with a Chinese friend just as Trump was winning his first few nods of mainstream acceptance and the center-left blogosphere erupted in a comforting drone of “but if you look at precedent” pieces. I had asked him whether he thought there should be some kind of Asian solidarity protest, if that was even possible.



“I don’t know, dude, that’s a pretty Americanized way of looking at things. Asians don’t march.”



Asians don’t march. It was true. That was the Confucianist way, after all: why try to plow through a rock like those litigious round-eyes when you could just walk around it? There were larger things to worry about: food on the table and family to share it with. In just about every Asian-American household I’d been to it seemed like social equality was something that was always put on temporary hold, something that kept getting outsourced down the generational chain.



Over the next few weeks — as I got better and better at telling my story, isolating the tantalizing details, setting the scene like a noir movie, banishing the garbage truck segment to the cutting room floor — I noticed a trend. While my non-Asian friends reacted with horror and dismay, for my Asian friends - especially men - it became something of a revenge fantasy. Had I spat in his face? Did I kick him in the balls?



It was always in the same tone, too - the pseudo-ironic California surfer thing, complete with generous deployment of “bro” and its many linguistic cousins (brah/bruh/brao). The tone was one I was familiar with - when I was in middle school in Seoul, the highest ideal of cool was always the stereotypical frat bro: tanned, tank-top, dubstep remixes. For a culture that was predicated upon quiet — if not seamless — integration, the endless pursuit of perfect camouflage, the male frat bro became an icon of rebellion. Being a “bro” meant, for the first time, that we could greedily hoard all the experiences we had been denied or denied ourselves our whole lives: alcohol and girls and fraternal acceptance. Asian guys don’t march, they rush.



The salmon Chubby-clad specter of the Asian fraternity brother followed me deep into high school, and it was an ever-present feature in the minds of Asian guys, a mutual fetish we were all equally embarrassed of. The Asian frat bro didn’t listen to Confucius, never kowtowed to anybody, impolitely ransacked life for all its experiences, never made compromises to death and never planned around its inevitable occurrence.



Perhaps more than anything, the AFB could award himself a pedestal upon which to view the lesser members of his tribe, the Chinese grocery store owners and Korean service industry professionals of the world who — in their minds at least — were weak souls that had simply never found the courage to escape servility.



Some people never grew out of the habit. I would meet them all the time, at get-togethers with distant family friends, at bars, in the line for nightclubs. They drove expensive SUVs and proudly smoked cigarettes, they asked for my thoughts on the Patriots (I had few), or they’d ask for my thoughts on golf (I had fewer). They voted for red-blooded Republicans who liked businesses and bootstraps. They spoke loud enough to make my parents uncomfortable and hiked up their pants and used old-school slang with a subtle desperation to be acknowledged, as if this was another marker of their Americanness that we should best appreciate. They spoke of their past lives as scrawny, accented Asian teenagers as if talking about a family tragedy or non-repented sin.



And they all had this one habit, almost a verbal tic: an inability to speak normally to non-Americanized Asians. Whenever they came across sushi chefs or Taiwanese cabdrivers they’d default to the same tone white guys use, where you speak really slowly and over-enunciate all your vowels and th sounds, not in the interest of comprehension but simply because you can. It was certainly one way to live. They certainly thought of themselves as pioneers, and maybe they were right: they had likely endured something bordering on agony in service of self-reinvention, something I have never been able to do. I could never be sure that some of my smug laughter at these adult AFBs wasn’t envy.



I remember talking about an all-Asian frat in Pennsylvania with a friend once, who was also Korean. Just a bunch of douchebags who try way too hard, she had told me.



I laughed and thought about this Damien Hirst sculpture my mom had forced me to look at when I was in grade school: a taxidermy shark in a glass tank, lunging right at the viewer but never getting to them. Not a savage beast of the waters as much as a pale copy of its corpse, a parody of one. The joke, I guess, was twofold: the dead shark acting the part of a real one, and the audience was acting the part of cynically detached observer when - deep down - they were just as afraid of one day ending up encased in formaldehyde. It was called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.



 



*I’m playing a game with myself where I try to take the biggest steps that I can without collapsing onto my side like an aging racehorse. It suddenly occurs to me that he has been following me for some time. Perhaps, in my five-beer state, I am more interesting to the average bystander than I’d like to think. *



*I notice he’s staggering too. Maybe it’s because he’s drunk. Maybe this isn’t the first time he’s been this week, this day even. He might be homeless. Maybe he just got laid off from his job. Maybe he was born in a tiny milling town somewhere and always got beat up by neighborhood thugs, and maybe that’s why he’s always had to resort to violence as a kind of survival mechanism I had the good fortune to avoid developing. Maybe one of those thugs was - and I’m really grasping for narrative straws now - a Korean guy, let’s call him Dave Chang (Like the chef? Maybe a different name, something much more ominous and Stephen King-villain sounding, how about Chet). And Chet Chan and his posse of East Asian tough kids rolled around in their bicycles and stole Drunk Guy’s lunch money all the time. *



*Anyways, this is all going through my head as he beats me, and I notice that it doesn’t hurt too much and I’ll probably be fine and my not resisting is not so much an act of cowardice as it is of magnanimity, quiet courage, a social good. Like, if I get him to purge all this disgusting stuff inside maybe he won’t have these urges when he actually has a broken bottle in his hand. He watches me smile my martyr’s smile and he stops. *



*What's that all about, you insane or something?*



*In church back in Seoul we learned about turning the other cheek. *



*Are you finished? I ask calmly. *



*Yeah.*



*In church back in Seoul we learned about how Saint Stephen let the rocks hit him without protest. Would Saint Stephen have marched? *



*All out of your system?*



*Yes.*



*Okay.*



*We exchange numbers and make plans to get coffee. *



 



Of course, the ultimate tragedy of Ts’ui Pen’s “garden” is that it is nothing more than a novel. For Borges, the only setting in which the what-happened and what-could-have-been can coexist is in the realm of pure fiction. In Ts’ui Pen’s garden, the imaginative capabilities of a writer are not forces for shaping reality as much as they are useful means of retreating from it altogether.



In many ways, Borges was right. I wrote fiction all throughout middle school, mostly odd wish-fulfillment fantasies about 6’4 Korean guys who were very, very good at basketball. The climax of each tale, however, was invariably some heroic standoff with an interchangeable old white man - coach from an opposing team, maybe, or just some asshole down the street.



In high school, I wrote fiction somewhat out of necessity, after the negation of all alternatives. I couldn’t play sports or lift or talk convincingly about Coachella and I cared too much about staying in school to sneak vodka to class in water bottles and I hated the idea of withdrawing myself to a destiny of math clubs and Asian friends. I had always liked writing and indie music, so publishing poetry in the literary magazine and making pretentious comments about Jonathan Franzen became my ticket into mainstream society.



I remember in senior year I joined a creative writing workshop with about eight of my classmates. On the first day, we were told that what made fiction good was “stuff.” What’s stuff? Tuna cans in the pantry. Welcome mats with mustard stains on them. Dinner in the oven while your dad tries to fix the VCR. That’s stuff. Any questions?



But what if my stuff has to come italicized and romanized?I don’t have to explain what a potluck is the way I have to dedicate precious page space typing some stilted Wikipedia-cadence bullshit about what Chuseok is. Also, do you know aesthetically revolting Korean looks written out alphabetically? It seems your “stuff” doesn’t disrupt the Feng Shui of the paragraphs they are generously deployed into.



I never said any of this aloud, of course. I just grappled with the weird absurdity of Asian-American art, an entire group of people stereotyped into silence and suddenly forced to find a voice, through deception or force of will or sheer luck or some combination of the three.



I decided as a matter of principle, however, that I could never write about being Asian. Stories about generational discord and being embarrassed about kimchi weren’t cool, after all - they were bad pitches for middle school required reading at best. Cool stories, I was reminded daily, were about “stuff.”



I quickly fell into my default of deception. I wrote pieces about Tide and swordfish dinners and Greyhound trips and jazz music and crafted a lot of racially ambiguous protagonists and patted myself on the back for not deploying a single Korean word during the entire workshop.



At the risk of sounding insufferable, I guess there is something fundamentally post-modern about the Asian-American experience. I talk to a lot of friends about how weird it is that we got our entire cultural vocabulary from televised families, how we adopted their memories as our own. David Foster Wallace, Pynchon and DeLillo predicted - with equal parts aversion and morbid curiosity - a society in which diversionary acts of mass entertainment would become the only source of communal experience. For a lot of us, cross-referencing our odd Asian family reunions against Nickelodeon scripts for cultural accuracy was part of everyday life in grade school.



At times, I wondered what motivated me to mine the same tired tropes of Middle America for my stories, when there was such a vibrant canon of Asian-American literature I could be inspired by. I was certainly afraid of being viewed as someone who was exploiting the perceived exoticness of the Asian experience for literary acceptance, papering over poor prose with white guilt. But more importantly, I noticed that while my peers and teachers would certainly congratulate Asian students who wrote from a personal vantage point, the interest would never extend beyond the purely sociological. I think there’s something so unique about the familial dynamic you’re portraying. My uncle actually took a trip to Tokyo last spring, and he was able to sit in on this local family having dinner, etc. For all the carefully deployed, moderately liberal, New Yorker-informed praise I couldn’t help but think there was a sinister subtext to it all. Thank you for giving me this New And Challenging Culture to process. Thank you for expanding our collective horizons.



And of course, I’m glad you’re one of us now so that you can report on who you used to be - or, perish the thought, might have become if we hadn’t rescued you - with the adequate critical distance of the English speaker. Thank you.



I was certainly guilty of exploiting this mentality myself, usually for grades. I remember each year we would have to give a three-minute speech to the whole class, and I soon found that the easiest way to ensure a good grade would be to paint Korean society as some corrupt, quasi-totalitarian hellhole I had been lucky enough to escape through my good wits and democratic (both capital and lowercase d) values.



I had fun giving those speeches. For a few minutes I could feel the egotistic head rush I assume tour guides frequently experience, the pleasure of shepherding my politically-correct audience through foreign and hostile terrain. Sometimes I wondered if this truly was an alternative to hitting the gym and wearing Sperrys, that I had perhaps wandered into an even more subtle and insidious form of AFB-hood. And while I convinced myself that my Disneyification of East Asia was a purely utilitarian move on my part, whenever I called my family after those speeches I would feel the disgusting outlines of suppressed guilt, that my grandparents had risked a lot by coming to the United States and I was tacitly endorsing the degeneration of this journey into farce. Truly some pioneer I was.



There’s actually another layer of humor to the Damien Hirst piece, by the way: how easily lived experience can be counterfeited. False experiences, simulations and deceptions can - given enough years - take on the appearance of a life, cohere into a mock-organic whole.



Look at the shark, the way its gills seem right on the cusp of contracting. Is it dead, or simply plotting its next turn?



Maybe neither, maybe both.



 



*I’m playing a game with myself where I try to take the biggest steps that I can without collapsing onto my side like an aging racehorse. It suddenly occurs to me that he has been following me for some time. Perhaps, in my five-beer state, I am more interesting to the average bystander than I’d like to think. *



*He beats me. You heard this before. *



*In some ways, and this is probably the alcohol, I feel more honest as it happens. I feel like a spy relieved of duty. But some sick part of me wants him to acknowledge me, wants him to congratulate me for my years of service. The greatest imposter to ever live. If I hadn’t looked so Asian you would have thought of me as one of your own, you asshole. I’ve probably watched more Seinfeld episodes than you. Can you name the backup shooting guard for the Celtics back when they won in ’08? No you fucking can’t. It was Eddie House. Maybe I should be kicking you. *



*And then it’s over, like nothing ever happened. I start walking home thinking about whether lighting strikes twice. Could there be someone else around that corner? I decide to get some cookies instead. I grumble unintelligibly to the guy behind the counter about crazy people out on the streets. I laugh merrily about the particular crazy guy I’ve just run into, but there’s a weird quivering in my voice I can’t remove and the joke falls flat. *



*When I go back to my dorm I have an urge to punch something but my roommates are all asleep. I start passive-aggressively whispering to the man instead. It’s not fair that you ruined my joke. It’s not fair that you get to be unabashedly patriotic, simply because you probably have an over-inflated respect for all the adults in your life, because the adults in your life never had to struggle finding the right words to say to the police, and the adults in your life never had to look like fools when people started talking about sitcoms or sports and you didn’t have to go upstairs and lock yourself in your room to Wikipedia pop-culture relics so you would be extra sure that you’d never run out of stories to tell at dinners and that you’d make doubly fucking sure not a single fucking reference ever went over your head. Perhaps you suspected that the adults in your life were cowards, but it wasn’t fair that they never were put in situations where they could confirm it for you. And that’s not fair. It’s not fair that you got to confirm it for me. *



*It’s not fair that I won’t be able to walk around at night without staring back every two minutes, even now, even seven months later. It’s not fair that you’ll have nothing but a mediocre hangover in the morning but I’ll think about this nonstop for two weeks and intermittently for many more months and every time it comes up in conversation I’ll laugh and say “it was fucked up but whatever,” and it’s not fair that I’ll try and fail to write about this five different times but abandon it out of shame or guilt. And there are many ways in which I am more fortunate than you are, and perhaps from your perspective you are the victim. And it’s not fair that you and I both have our reasons and learned nothing will stay the same people, more or less. *



 



Someone told me once that being Asian-American was a serious anticlimaxes and learning to get used to them. That this was a destruction partially of our own doing, the natural conclusion of generations asymptotically striving for “passability.” Passable decoys of the white upper-middle class. Passable decoys of Americans. Passable decoys of not-yet-Americanized Asians when we went back home. Even when we were victims, we were simply passable victims: unidentified Chinese workers buried beneath the Gold Rush tracks, the interned Japanese valued only as rhetorical counterarguments that footnote the liberal triumph of FDR-ism, Koreans slaving away in sugar plantations in Honolulu (this article is a stub, you can help Wikipedia by expanding it).



In the days following my encounter with the man I often wondered if I was complicit in this legacy, simply because of how flat and devoid of catharsis the event had been. The kicks hadn’t even hurt. The man might have been crazy. In a weird sense I felt guilty of the half-assedness of the whole thing, and I would see the Damien Hurst piece again, as if I had somehow been mauled by a shark that was stuck in formaldehyde all along. Not a shark attack as much as a parody of one to be carefully dissected by detached criticism.



If there was one thing I did take away from the whole affair, it was that perhaps Ts’ui Pen was onto something that could explain why older Asian-Americans had been so socially passive.



If you never engage with society, you never have to confirm how terrible it truly is, how few options you really have at your disposal. That indigestible truth simply becomes one of many possible realities. Forever and ever.



When I was named the editor-in-chief of my newspaper in high school I remember my grandparents had bragged about it for weeks, how Joon had beaten all the white kids, how he had broken the putrid institution wide open. When I got into college they told me to go as a conqueror, to take and take everything the American university had falsely promised them when they flew to the East Coast so many years ago. I was the son of pioneers, after all, and I could speak perfect English, and I wrote things that even the whitest white kids liked to read, so what did I have to worry about?



I never told them about what happened in front of Insomnia Cookies. I told them about my dorm instead, or my roommates, or if I was in the mood I would give them a heavily sanitized account of a couple parties. I told them that I loved school and I was getting everything I wanted and I never answered to anybody and I never looked behind my back when I walked.