Lily Scherlis

Winter 2018 - Noise

Friendship as a Way of Life

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.”

Winter 2016 - Danger

Hoopla

I was out of shape when I showed up. I had kind of thought I was done. I had already made it through the hoop that counted, the admissions hoop. I had stuck my landing; now I could relax. They don’t tell you when they accept you that hoop-jumping is the official sport of the College. Especially at the beginning, I had this sense that I was in fact a hoop-jumping recruit, a scholarship kid. I had to keep jumping to earn my spot here. I would later talk about the sport in terms of the fix: that dopamine rush as your toes have cleared and you realize *you’re through*. In those first monthswe were all obsessed with recreating the experience of that first successful jump.

You get the sense that you have to join a cult to make it here. There are a lot of options for what cult to join, but you have to join *one* or you’re never gonna have a Real College Experience. Unless you have really great roommates. If you have really great roommates, you’re exempt.

To join a cult, you have to jump through that cult’s hoop. When you meet people here, you look at their bodies. You look at what muscles they have where, whether it looks like they could make a particular jump.

The cults recruit every semester. They run training programs that last most of the semester and culminate with the Jump where you either make it through the hoop and into the cult or you don’t. Sometimes there is a preliminary hoop that happens halfway through training, and if you don’t make it, you aren’t allowed to try to make it through the final hoop that semester. Every cult has its own hoop—different shapes, different heights—and each training program is tailored specifically to the cult’s hoop. Sometimes training for one can make it very hard for your muscles to learn to jump through a different one. Some hoops are easier for certain body types.

It’s a big deal. At the very end of College there’s always the prestigious Hoops prize which I think is for the senior who has jumped through the most hoops. If you get that you can do whatever you want. Then you definitely don’t have to jump through any more hoops.

       I knew pretty early on which cult I wanted to try out for. I went to the Intro Training meeting. I was shaking a little bit when I walked into the culthouse—it felt important and intimidating, like the very wood was charged with gravitas. I looked at all the older affiliates and thought they looked much cooler than me. They were sitting around a heavy wooden table, with the Big Kahunas sitting in the middle looking important, looking out at us. All the jumpers were on the floor. All the affiliates spoke with the same cadence. Perhaps they spent so much time around each other that one had adopted another’s distinct manner of speaking in turn until everyone spoke with the same unified nuances. This was true of a lot of the cults: You could tell who was in what by how their voice sounded. All these affiliates made it through the hoop, I thought to myself. This terrified me. I imagined their bodies tensing up with nerves, sprinting and vaulting and *clearing the hoop*, muscles taut. I imagined the smiles on their faces when they stuck the landing. Some of their bodies had since gone to seed. Once you made it through the hoop, I guessed, you didn’t really have to stay in shape. You didn’t have to worry about much at all: In a cult, you had it made. People *respected *you.

       At the training meeting, we watched all the old videos, in which famous old affiliates, long graduated, cleared the cult hoop with *style*. I felt my toes pointing in my boots. I was anxious to prove myself. I was on *fire *with it. At the end of the meeting, the Big Kahunas looked at each other and took the big group of us jumpers into a small locked room in the basement of the culthouse. We were all huddled in the doorway—I went up on my tiptoes to see over the group in front of me. And there it was.

       “Of course, it will be higher,” said the Big Kahuna. It was old and made of a warm brassy medal and extensively engraved. It was a small hoop—not more than three feet in diameter—but I heard they kept it relatively low down. This was good, because I was not very tall. It seemed like it would weigh a lot and hurt a lot if you messed up your jump and crashed into it. I looked back at the other jumpers. They were all shiny-eyed. Some of them were already in very good hoop-shape. I was going to have to train very hard, but I really wanted it.

       I spent long hours doing the calisthenics the cult’s trainer recommended.

There are rumors that affiliates lower the hoop for jumpers they like, for jumpers who look like they would belong in the cult. I didn’t know whether to believe them or not, so I tried to dress like the affiliates and try to get the cult trainer to like me, just in case it helps. I got to know some of the other jumpers during our training sessions and we would laugh in hushed voices about the vocal tics of the cult trainer or the Big Kahunas’ pretensions during the Intro Training meeting. I felt connected to these other jumpers.

A couple days before the preliminary hoop, I cried over lunch with an older friend who had cleared a number of well-respected hoops. Sometimes around here it feels like everything's about who's jumped through what hoops. I asked why we even needed cults. If there were no cults, I told him, we could just*spend time together *and get to know each other in the normal way and not spend our time sniffing out who was worth knowing based on what cult they were in. He nodded patiently and told me that all of these things had occurred to him when he was a young jumper. This complacency made me terribly angry: Once you were enfranchised, once you were in, there was obviously no motivation to do anything about it. I imagined myself, suddenly, years down the line, a complacent affiliate, watching all these freshmen making the jump they’d trained for months for and missing the hoop and knowing they would spend another semester on the outside. Don’t let me be that person, I told myself. A small voice said, *But if you make it, of course you will be. *

       I made it through the preliminary hoop, which was just like the final one but larger, easier, made of a flimsier and more forgiving material, and kept training hard. I watched my body change. I woke up to aching muscles I didn’t know I had. I dreamed about that final hoop. There it was, dusty, winking at me from the basement of the culthouse.

Final hoop day was less of a big deal than I thought it would be: They hauled the thing up into the big main room on the second floor of the culthouse and you waited in line until it was your turn to jump. You made it through or you didn’t, and then you landed.

When you're looking at a hoop—even a low hoop, even a hoop that everyone makes it through eventually—you're thinking a couple of thoughts. You're thinking that this hoop is the measure of your worth as an individual. You *know *that this isn’t true—you know that there’s a lot of chance and variables you can’t control that go into whether you make it or not—but you inadvertently can color the result as the ultimate reflection on your innermost self. Do I deserve this, you’re thinking, or you’re not, because you’re focusing too hard on the jump itself.

I made it, and I stuck my landing, thank god. The cult trainer and a couple of other affiliates marked notes on clipboards. A Kahuna carefully measured my final distance from the hoop, which was discouragingly small. Other jumpers had jumped further. There was some polite applause, and I was ushered into a room downstairs to wait with the other jumpers who had made it.

Because I was a freshman the cult swallowed me pretty cleanly—I didn’t have many strong attachments. After I became an affiliate of my cult, I saw those other jumpers—the ones I’d gotten to know who hadn’t make it—around the College. They didn’t really want to talk to me. It was okay: Suddenly I had a place to go, somewhere I felt a little bit special every time I walked in the door. The culthouse felt like it was a place of magic. It radiated out from the hoop stored in the basement, permeating everything we did and said inside the culthouse. I felt lucky to be a part of all of it.

A week or so after I made it through the hoop, a Big Kahuna mused that he was jealous: He wished he could be a new affiliate again. I stared at him, wide-eyed, and asked why he’d ever want that. Big Kahuna smiled and said that as a new affiliate, everything felt so magical and shiny and new. Over time, he said, with more responsibility, the magic wears out. I have a song for you, he said, and hooked up his phone to the speakers to play a song which repeated a single lyric to an infuriating beat. “You can normalize,” a voice said over the sound system, “Don’t it make you feel alive?”

I thought about that glowing hoop in the basement. I couldn’t imagine normalizing any of this. We have this notion that we can reach out and grab the self-assurance of affiliation and hold onto it forever. Really we can only take validation in doses. The feeling always fades, and then you need a little more. You find yourself another hoop, but there are always diminishing returns: Suddenly the same dosage won’t do it for you anymore. It’s like when you get stronger and suddenly the ten pound weight doesn’t make your muscles burn. You get something heavier. It seemed like if you wanted to feel like a real part of the cult, you had to be a Kahuna.

Becoming a Kahuna meant another jump—this time through the separate intracult hoop, which was a different deal entirely. This one was very large but was some kind of a polygon, a scalene triangle, they said, so it would be easy to guess the angle wrong and get stuck. The Kahuna hoop was set out annually and the jump was set to happen about a month after I became an affiliate. Luckily for new affiliates they kept the hoop pretty low. (It was higher, of course, if you wanted to be a Bigger Kahuna). I was still in good jumping shape and made it right through.

As a little Kahuna, I had new responsibilities.

I could play my own music over the speakers in the culthouse. Suddenly I couldn’t hear the different cadence in the voices of the Big Kahunas and couldn’t tell if I’d adopted it or not—it just felt normal. At first, cult-ural acclimation is confusing and weird and stilted, and then it’s natural, and then it’s just like breathing, and then you can’t imagine *not *doing those things. You can’t remember a time when you didn’t know to play this song or drink that drink. I *was *starting to normalize. There is something really satisfying about feeling like a part of a place just by knowing its little customs.

But that humming golden hoop in the basement just felt like an old hump of metal. For so long I had felt I was catching a glimpse of something furtive and beautiful that belonged to all of us, partaking in a set of customs and aesthetics decided by a Big Kahuna long ago. Now, another little Kahuna and I would play a certain song and then someone would ask for that same song a couple days later. We could do things that had never been done before, and affiliates might like them, affiliates might do them with us.

This was exciting, but it was also hard to be in awe of something we were making. I wanted that reverie back.

Suddenly I was on the other side of the Intro Training meeting. I was very conscious of this reversal, but it didn’t really feel like a big deal. It felt hollower from the other side: The affiliates at the table were all familiar faces. I wondered if we seemed intimidating and cool to the jumpers. I couldn’t imagine we did. We were just goons.

I was put in charge of training a couple of jumpers that Spring. I turned to older affiliates for training programs and held as many extra practice sessions as my jumpers wanted. I cared about them. Not one of my jumpers made it.

And then there are the would-be affiliates who were told from a young age that hoop-jumping isn't for them. Their bodies weren't built to jump through hoops, affiliates used to think. Moreover, maybe the hoops weren't made to allow their bodies through. This is a complicated problem which can't always be solved by changing the shape of the hoop (the shape of each cult's hoop is sacred, so sacred). From the inside, I badly wanted to believe that mystique and inclusivity were not mutually exclusive.

At the College, the absence of a cult can feel like a deep insecurity that leaves you open to a kind of death: the death of being just like everyone else. Or at the very least, it’s like being the only vegetarian at a BBQ restaurant or the non-smoker on the smoke break, except instead of cigarettes we’re talking about achievement-crack. I admire these people who do the College without it.

Sometimes I worry that one day I will be old with all of the spoils of my hoop-jumping career sitting around me and wish I had spent my life on something other than the stupid sport. I consider the arthritis some long-term hoop-jumpers get from the repeated exertion. I’ve already had one bout of this arthritis.

But the spoils can be sweet: the feeling of communal self-worth; a kind of special inclusion in something magical and secret; a humbling sense of one’s own privilege to be a part of the group. I think some of it also really does come from all those good things we talk about in our pre-jump speeches: from having a community in which to invest your energies, a thing you have come to care about altruistically, for its own sake. The big old world, from inside of a cult, was whittled to a manageable size.

I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive—the community-mindedness and the validation —but I worry that the latter is addictive.

I decide to go for a bigger hoop. A lot of people expect that I’ll have no trouble making it through—I’ve never missed, have I? I’ve done a lot for the cult and the Big Kahunas will recognize that and put the hoop lower.

I don't make it through the hoop. A tie on my jacket gets caught on one of the odd polygon’s corners and I hang there, half in half out, for much too long before they figure out how to get me down.

       People normally don't get stuck. When they take me down, everyone’s sympathetic. It’s okay, they tell me. We’re still your family.

The other little Kahuna makes it through and becomes a Big Kahuna. I feel a little bit left behind, and then again, I’m happy for him. I’m happy for the cult; I know he’ll do great things as a Big Kahuna. But I’m sad that I won’t get to do them with him. I didn’t know how to look at this: The cult was in great hands, but those hands weren’t my hands. It didn’t need me.

These things are really fucking messy psychological experiences. They never sound good politically: In this article, I inevitably come across as overly ambitious or a traitor to my cult or allegiant to a problematic power structure. We talk about all this in such sanitized terms: Are cults objectively *good*, or objectively *bad*, for the College community as a whole? I think the real answer is much more nuanced—the structure as it is has oscillated between giving me a home and a sense of magic and breaking hearts (mine, others’). My time as a jumper and then as an affiliate and then as a Kahuna—an absurd trajectory which is completely illegible outside of the College—has given some meaning to my subjective and individual experience. I think there are conversations about these groups that aren’t making it into the discourse (the politically-incorrect, subjective, biased experiences of people inside and out, which get sterilized into strong political statements). I think we too often conflate ambivalent subjectivity with emptiness, uselessness.

Let’s end with a tally. I have gratitude for the strength I gained from jumps, successful and not, and gratitude for the family the hoop gave me. I worry about the way that love for the sport itself can tear this family apart. I worry about cult-ures of exclusivity and the lines (perhaps arbitrary) they draw between the inside and the outside. We dance across these lines (which make all of us uncomfortable, inside or out) with buzzwords like “inclusivity” and scathing op-eds and small acts of kindness toward our hoop-trainees. I think there are fulfilling ways to be in and around this cult-ure without hoop addiction. I am still trying to find them.

Fall 2015

Monocult

Nebraska is a sea of land–flat and stretching in all directions like a Monsanto ocean. At dusk, hot orange radiates a full 180 degrees along the horizon. We are here to work, to raise this season’s crop of art, which will be fully organic, insufficiently subsidized, and only half-ripe when they cart it off to market.

I live with four artists—Raluca, Z, Lindsay, and Aimee—in a house that hardly even qualifies as a building. The living room is on the second floor, or the first depending on the part of the house you ask. There are leather recliners and floral couches salvaged from all over eastern Nebraska and an ancient heater. “Sassy Nebrassy, you’re one classy lassy,” someone has scribbled on the wall, “May I put my silo in your chassis?” A constant stream of moths floats between the single naked fluorescent light, and the great wilting marijuana plant hangs from the ceiling. (A hex on the fauna, says Z, but if you touch it after dark a veritable cloud of insects you didn’t see will abscond in a rustle of wings and leaves). We roll great dried leaves into amusingly weak spliffs and take big drags in the second floor studios. The freezer is full of Tupperware containers of eggshells and squashed grapes and wilted spinach. The sink has stopped working. At night I climb out one window or the other onto the still warm tin roof and try to feel things about the stars. The house is named Victoria and has a life of her own.

Vicky, having more holes than walls, makes you wonder about the difference between inside and outside. She is leaky and lovable, mother to generations of budding artists, a family of raccoons, a menagerie of birds and snakes and mice. She has a door on the second floor that opens into thin air. She has no foundation at all and can’t protect us from the incoming tornadoes, but she can protect us from ourselves. In a week, the dusty film on your skin and the bug bites are comfortable staples.Their absence would feel disorienting, sanitized, inauthentic, like too-white teeth.

They call this a residency. We work for three hours a day keeping the farm in good shape—putting in shelves, unclogging drains, moving a barn ten feet to the right or a house five miles to the west. In return, we get free accommodations and studio space. I meet Ted, the guy in charge. He has a habit of quietly turning up behind you unexpectedly and then evaporating into thin air. He stands at six and a half feet and speaks softly and sparsely, as if compensating for his massive physical presence. It takes two days for me to notice he’s missing half a finger. “Don’t ask,” someone tells me. One of the other buildings on the farm was supposedly his childhood home, a leaky frontier house with something mysteriously called a “birthing room” where he may or may not have been born.

While we work, Ted mumbles instructions under his breath, ominous things like “use the table saw,” and, in one worrying case where I got a brown fluid all over my hands while rewiring a lamp: “that chemical causes nerve damage.” When I stab a rusty nail halfway through my thumb, he plants me in a very comfortable chair that looks like it was salvaged from a minivan and calmly pours out the rubbing alcohol. Ted is all quiet experience— standing in the shadows of the barn behind us, always carrying the right drill bits in his pockets and giving us the right tools before we know we need them. None of us has much experience with construction, but he forgives us when we screw up time and time again. He forgives us when we fall off roofs, get arrested stealing hemp plants from other farmers’ fields, when it takes all eight of us to carry a twelve-foot beam. “When I was thirteen,” he whispers to me, glowing, “I could carry two of these a mile by myself.”

***

Last September a friend and I went on a day hike in the Blue Hills outside of Boston. We had no cars, so we took the subway and then the bus, which dropped us off a stop too late on the side of a highway. We began our hike trekking through parking lots and under overpasses, with monster hotels like trail-markers, trying to find the safest way to scale a clover junction. “No one has ever loved these spaces,” my friend said. She could very well have been right. For the roadtrippers and commuters driving through, it’s just another gas stop on the way to somewhere else. Employees at the hotels and restaurants probably see it as just another 9-5, a stop en route to the American dream where you can own a chain of these joints and never have to actually come to places like these.

This is why the farm was so special. The corn is a sea, and the farm is an island, an oasis of cathexis in a big world of nothing. These days you hurtle through the sky in a metal canister, disappearing from somewhere and plopping down somewhere else. You can drive, and the highway stretches for eleven hours, eight days, three months, but do you feel the distance from the raised interstate, the channel from A to B, lifted up and over everything in between?

Are you ever really anywhere? The states are full of neutral buffer-zones, airport terminals, strip malls, the kind of anonymous territory that could be Anywhere, USA: Huffington News, CVS, TGI Fridays, Au Bon Pain, Brookestone, Home Depot, JoAnn Fabrics, Walgreens, Subway, Kohl’s. You tell where you are from the local variations: Pittsburgh has the supermarket chain called Giant Eagle; I hear rumors of something called a “Higgly Piggly”; Nebraska has a fast-food chain called Runza that sells what are basically the mutant children of corn dogs and hamburgers. Middle America has a lot of sincere enthusiasm for the suffix “and more.” Waffles and more. Espresso and more. Corn and more. Life, and more.

***

Here in Nebraska, Monsanto is a local god. It brings the seeds that germinate and, year after year, turn magically into corn. It brings the chemicals that rescue that precious crop (and the American economy) from pests and demons. Monsanto is a god of science, of progress. Bigger, it says, and better: more ears to fill more mouths, better genes to fight better pests. Life scientists are engineering soybeans that deliver omega-3s to fight heart disease, nutritionally enhanced broccoli, disease-resistant vegetables. The rhythm of life: sow, till, harvest; every four years pull out the nitrogen-sapping corn and plant soy to restore nutrients to the fields.The irrigators—raised, snake-like metal structures on motors and wheels—crawl through the fields of their own accord, forward and back. From our vantage point, the corn seems to grow itself.

Non-believers say the name like a curse. You hear those three syllables whispered in the car, speeding through the infinite grid of corn and soy.Their accusations: Monsanto “plays God,” meddling with things that oughtn’t to be meddled with. Monsanto Corporation has a long history as a civilizing force. The word culture itself comes directly from crop cultivation. A chronological survey of ominous-sounding products: Artificial sweeteners morph into PCBs which become plastics, Agent Orange, bovine growth hormone, LEDs, DDT, and most recently, the herbicide glyphosate and corresponding glyphosate resistant seeds. Their products work hand in hand to give life and take life away, two processes that in modern day agriculture are all but inseparable. I’m reminded of the plethora of mythologies where the god of fertility is also the god of death. Culture, specifically monoculture, will triumph over nature—but are they really that different?

The problem is that plants aren’t docile. We underestimate anything rooted to the spot. Plant genes, encased in spores and pollen and the like, are meant to move because plants can’t; plants can change rapidly, genes crossing from species to species and flowing wildly. Even monoculture crops don’t exist in a vacuum. Genes for pesticide resistance can flow into weeds, like viruses that develop resistance to antibiotics, breeding aliens from within. There are stories of invincible horsetail weeds eight feet high. Farmers react in the only way they know how—by spraying more, which only breeds bigger and badder monsters.

Monsanto isn’t omnipotent, but it is pretty damn powerful. Of the corn planted in the US, nearly three quarters is genetically modified and controlled by Monsanto. There’s corn for ethanol-based energy, corn for animal feed, corn for human feed. When you include calories from corn-fed meat products and corn syrup, it’s easy for a majority of your bodyweight to be composed of re-purposed corn. There’s a lot of money flowing around the industry: money to farmers, money to corporations like Monsanto to make crops cheaper to keep people buying them, too-big-to-fail money flying this way and that, money for corn-based energy to ease our dependence on oil.

Here’s how this looks if you’re a farmer: organic agriculture is labor-intensive and expensive. The more you produce, the more you get subsidized, so you get paid more per pound for more pounds overall. So you go big or you go home: You pick crops that promise enormous yields, you band together, you grow big crops on big acres. You buy

more seeds and plant more seeds and use more pesticides to prevent more crops from more pests. Farms merge into other farms, and the heart of the states becomes one great Monsanto ocean where you can’t tell where one farm ends and another begins. The seeds themselves are copyrighted as intellectual property, and Monsanto is known to sue farmers who replant seeds from last year’s crop to avoid purchasing new ones. Their license to use those seeds has expired, so to speak. Monsanto is working to bring “Terminator” seeds to the market—seeds which effectively self-destruct after a year, automatically enforcing the licensing. The big fear is that Terminator genes, in a plot twist eerily reminiscent of the film franchise, will flow into conventional and other crops, assassinating plants of all kinds and wreaking havoc on ecosystems. But hey, intellectual property is intellectual property.

The thing that worries me the most about monoculture is how it edges out complexity on both ends. Advocates of Monsanto are fiercely defensive, perpetuating a rhetoric of better plants, stronger plants, feeding more people. None of the concerns have been adequately proven, they write. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Critics talk about intense political pressure to suppress the science, of potential famine and farmers struggling under legal bondage to a corporation that charges more than they can afford for the only seeds they can grow. And everywhere is an either/or: You pick one creed or the other. Either the corporation is the benign bringer of a worldwide harvest, made possible by ingenious science, or a monstrous, hungry, and potent blight on the possibility of healthy and ethical agriculture.

I imagine the real Monsanto sits somewhere in between: a corporation trying to grow food for the whole world and grow itself in the process, blundering along like the rest of us, unable to fully account for all the effects—social, medical, ecological—of its innovations once they leave the lab, under economic pressure to not stare its dark underbelly directly in the face, and convinced, perhaps rightly, that the nutrients it provides on an unprecedented scale to the people who urgently need them more than make up for any ethical quandaries. Nobody likes talking about controversy on an empty stomach.

We, the Art Farmers, are the anti-Monsanto. We are here to raise a crop of art which will grow so tall and fast it can skewer a cloud by July, while the corn is only waist-high. We are the alien weeds in the fields. We are monstrous stalks of horsetail, growing more and more resistant to monoculture every day. And we will flow into you, if you give us the chance.

There’s this weird cliché that artists, by definition, are psychological crack-ups, masochists of the highest order. “I’m just not talented enough,” I whined at one point on the farm. All of my college friends were off making money and saving the world while I stared at my navel in the prairie. Writers my age suddenly had work in all kinds of major publications. I was feeling deeply unprepared for The Real World. “You picked this,” Lindsay said. “Being an artist means constantly flipping between total egotism and absolute soul-crushing self doubt,” she said. Of course, Western culture prefers to call this borderline disorder or bipolar disorder and make it go away. Let’s fix that chemical imbalance.

The choice to make things often involves rejecting these narratives—the productivity Kool-Aid that keeps Monsanto plugging away—and diving headfirst into the crazy. One’s prerogative as a creative is to dip across every line and then come back to the safe side, but I’m scared of one day not being able to get back across. I don’t know which causes which—whether making art allows you to reject these narratives or rejecting the narratives leads you to make art, but the two almost always go hand in hand. Something about near-psychosis allows you to question the clichés and purported realities of societal life enough to give your work a strong jaw and sharp teeth. I like to think that the madness and discontent is not just destructive but productive, compelling you to produce out of emotional necessity, out of a need for the feelings and chaos and confusion to drip out of your head and into the world. Of course you run the risk of fetishizing a mental condition that makes you deeply unhappy. And of course, you run the risk of diving too deep.

On my first day of work, we drive Ted’s pick-up to another anonymous Nebraska town, stopping in front of a rundown old house. A man arrives in a silver van, gives Ted an enthusiastic hug, and unlocks the place. We carry all of the furniture— dressers, desks, a bike, an easel, sports equipment—out into the yard and then hoist it into the

truck. The man hires a couple of us to help him clean out the place for a few hours. “Who said they needed a dresser?” Ted asks in the car.

Days are hot and dry and sticky with our sweat, or torrential. When it storms, you can see the twisters forming in the sky. The rain beats down on Victoria’s tin roof and, despite the leaks, the unfinished house somehow feels safe. By morning the farm is a great swamp and we hop across trails of pallets and hydroplane down the muddy roads.

The town is twenty minutes away by car: twelve silos, a post office, a water tower, a bank, and a bar called the Don’t Care Bar. Understaffed, they hire Lindsay, who has waited tables before and gets measly tips from the local wannabe biker gangs.We sit in the corner booth during her shifts and try to slip dollar bills into the back pockets of her jeans and get hit on by the locals.

“Whatever happened to old Ted? Is he still running that hippie cult?” a gruff man in overalls asks his friend.

“He’s gotta be seventy by now. I don’t think he’s got any kind of a plan for retirement, now that his wife is gone.”

“Wife? Another? Where does he find them?”

The four-dollar gin and tonics become beers become a cider for the road, half off because it’s to go. We drive home with the radio on, the fields sparkling with dense hordes of fireflies. The roads are straight and fast. You can do ninety and not get pulled over unless you have plates from a blue state. On my third day on the farm I stumble into the barn, which is actually four barns salvaged from all over the state and stitched together. In the midday heat the inside is pitch black, but I can feel its size even in the dark. I fumble for the light and poke myself on a nail – the walls are raw wood. When I find the switch, I see the heaps of stuff: paper, construction supplies, old wood. The ceiling is high and seems to go on forever. An infinite warehouse. Narrow walking trails edge through the chaos as if they were hiking paths. The quantity of miscellanea is so massive that it’s hard to pick up any one thing. A hacksaw balances on a canvas stretcher, leaning precariously against a doorframe. Piles of Folger’s jars from the past fifty years are filled with nails and drill bits. At one point, the floor drops off, revealing a carpet of dirt about five feet down. (“We’re working on it,” says Ted.) Cans of congealed paint and rusted out bits of cars and unidentifiable fluff have grown together into uselessness. A brightly decorated bandsaw hangs out in the middle of the floor. An enormous Hy-Vee sign hangs from the ceiling, dusty neon watching over us all.

Things accumulate here, piling up in the barn until it becomes a cavern of thing that once seemed useful but now just take up space. They’re like comfort objects, there in case you need them, though you couldn’t find them if you did and likely won’t remember they exist. “Let’s just say it,” Aimee says, “Ed is a hoarder.” The term, while accurate, feels derogatory, like we’ve relegated a man we all respect to a category of people including those whose dignities have been sold by their families to reality television. Or it feels pathologizing, as if we have accused him of having a personality disorder. All of my capitalist sensibilities are telling me this guy is a wacko and the whole farm a little shady. I put a lot of energy into suppressing that particular judgment.

It’s not all bad. Character accumulates here, too. It hangs in the air, in the murals and graffiti and the meadow where sculptures grow like trees.Thirty years of artists have loved this place. You show up, and you can feel it in the bones of the buildings—affection has soaked into the ground and found its way into the limey water and makes the mulberries so sweet and the grass so vigorous. It tells us to be reverent. It’s message is twofold: This is your place to love and do what you will with as many have before you, but you will leave, and your love will be piled onto the rest, your art will become another layer to be painted over.

The state of the barn feels more like a misguided attempt at practicality than a pathology. Everything in it is hypothetically useful, and, considering none of us can pay for board, if Ted needs any one of these things, having to buy it isn’t practical or ideal. In the work of feminist theorist Lauren Berlant, hoarding is explained as the inevitable response to the unstable nature of the consumer. Capitalism promises satisfaction through consumption, but that satisfaction is never lasting. Hanging onto objects, to the rest stops that are supposedly the vehicles of this satisfaction, feels like a way to make that happiness permanent. But to hoard comes at the price of isolation, of choosing possession over being in circulation. “In circulation,” writes Berlant, “one becomes happy in an ordinary, often lovely, way, because the weight of being in the world is being distributed into space, time, noise, and other beings… In [the fantasy of hoarding] one is stuck with one’s singular sovereignty in an inexhaustible nonrelationality.”

***

I’m talking to a Finnish guy in a Lao hostel. It’s the winter of 2013. He’s wearing elephant-print pants with a hole in the crotch and enough bracelets to count as training weights. I am eighteen and have been miraculously liberated from my parents for long enough to backpack the Banana Pancake trail alone. I don’t know much about backpacker culture, but I’m quickly assimilating. I’ve learned the routine: hi-where-are-you-from-where-areyou-going-next-oh-I’ve-been-there-there’s-a-reallygreat-hostel-how-long-have-you-been-travelling.

Normal lives are taboo: For the backpacker, home is the tangled network of hostels and single-serving friends that stretches across most of the world like a chart of a phone carrier’s coverage or an airline’s seasonal magazine route map.

“I want to see the real Laos, you know?” he says. I do know. What he means: he wants a nice old lady to invite him back to her house where she’ll serve him authentic tea and introduce him to her shy and beautiful daughter and they’ll all laugh and smile and come to love each other even though they can only communicate through body language. He wants to chop off a piece of something secret and take it home and show it off.

I doubt the impulse to see the marvels of the world with your own eyes has the same power in an age flooded with images: You’ve already “seen” the Taj Mahal; you’ve already “seen” the Eiffel Tower. They say seeing them in person is different somehow, but I’m not sold.

Imagine a matrix-esque simulation where you can go anywhere in the world and have a full sensory experience of that place. I’m talking goggles, electrical nodes, that scary Matrix tube of wires that plugs into the back of your skull, whatever you need to believe it. You can run a five-mile loop around the gardens of the Taj Mahal if you’re so inclined, and even go inside. It’s all HD. We’ve programmed in the smell of the ginkgo trees, the chipping in the marble beneath the nice Quranic script, the way the fog hangs in the morning and then evaporates with the rising of the sun. Hell, we’ve programmed in fifty years of accurate weather predictions, adjusting for climate change. Do you still feel the need to go to Agra?

*I don’t just want to see it, you protest, I want to feel its presence, its aura, to stand in the same place as thousands of years of tourists who found it even more awesome than I will. *On some level, I believe in this nugget of reality, of authenticity—a badge of real-ness that can’t be imitated. But I can’t decide whether this claim to “real-ness” has merit.

When traveling, we like to think of the developing world as encased in some sort of resin that keeps it in stasis. We romanticize this cultural subsistence agriculture as an alternative to our monoculture of productivity. We want to go to these places and be voyeurs, to watch them from the panopticon of our Western-ness and come back with stories and artifacts that will give us a leg-up in the perpetual struggle for social and cultural capital. And yet by observing these places we are changing them; the influx of enough backpackers makes the whole culture gravitate around a tourist economy. You can’t have an authentic tea with that nice old lady, but you can share a beer with her son who has just moved to a town with more tourists than locals to open a tour bus business because it’s the only real way to make a decent profit around here. We are mutating cultures, “contaminating” them through our wish to experience them before they are so contaminated they become absolutely nowhere.

The reality is that backpacking creates a culture that isn’t tied to a specific location. It was born as a diaspora without a homeland, existing in the network of hostel common rooms and tourist bars where the customs are identical and the people are the same across continents. Through this culture of observation, you can go anywhere you want and never really feel out of place. This may not be a good thing.

I’m not sure why we still do it.

***

One role of mythology, writes Joseph Campbell, comparative mythologist extraordinaire, is to sanctify the land, to claim it. The term sacred, before it swelled to encompass its current meaning, is a derivation and amalgam of two Latin term: *sacerdos*, meaning a priest or priestess who guards a temple or sacred space, and *sanctum*, the space itself. The sacred hung in the relationship between human and space, space embodying the spiritual energy of some deity, the person watching the space, acting as spectator and container of that energy.

Plotinus describes the sacred space as designed to “capture” the deity, as if he or she is a flighty thing who may otherwise evaporate into the ether and never be seen again. The space needed to be an “appropriate receptacle.”

But if you catch her, will she stay? I imagine getting attached to a place somewhat literally: you wrap your thread around the person beside you, pulling it taut and making a double half hitch around your own waist and then you send it out again, to catch another and come back to you, as always. With each stitch your needle plunges through the air, the dirt, around a sapling, under a set of purple covers or through a crevice in the drywall, weaving the netting of your attachments into the fabric of the space. Soon you can’t walk anywhere without tripping over the threads.

These days the people are scattered. People I love are in San Francisco and London and Boston and Delhi and Greece, and my net of attachments spans the whole worldwide. The string knots around something here, something there, but largely places are forgotten entirely: To reach from here to India without getting stuck on the top of skyscrapers or tripping up airplanes, your strings have to be pretty high off the ground.

The word “temple” only dates back to ancient Rome, but its etymological roots had connotations of being literally “cut off” from the space around it, as if the ground was suddenly discontiguous.There had to be a line of sorts, a demarcation of where normal earth ended and the sacred began.

I spent countless hours this summer searching for the modern equivalents. They’re hard to find in a secularized world. I found them in galleries, white and stark like giant ice cubes, great museum complexes designed to eliminate all distractions from the pieces. The power of art, writes Marcuse, begins when “all links between the [art] object and the world of theoretical and practical reason are severed, or rather suspended”—cut off from hard-knocks materialistic, utilitarian reality like the temples of old. All that austerity makes galleries hard to love.

Art Farm is the alternative, I guess. It is a space made sacred by being cut off from circulation, like a hole punched out of Monsanto land, an incubator for a culture entirely separate from the surrounding sea of corn like a hostel in a Lao village.The farm has its own mythology, rich with the legends of heroes, demons (i.e. the possibly rabid raccoon we live with), and personal familiars. Ted tells the story of an artist from a couple years back who sliced his thigh open while clearing part of the prairie grass with a machete. He insisted on sewing himself up on the porch of the farmhouse with embroidery thread and a bottle of whiskey. And then there’s the resident who, en route to the farm, got slammed with a traffic violation so extensive that he had to complete extensive hours of community service before he could leave the state. Every year, somebody gets arrested.

We make our contribution. On my first day of work we plant trees. The holes are already in the earth, which is brittle from the direct prairie sunlight. It will become softer now in their shade. I keep each sapling straight as Z sprinkles dirt around its little roots. I hold it delicately between my index finger and my thumb and she pours in water and packs the mud down with bare palms.The ground around the tree gets denser and denser but I can’t imagine the baby cedar will manage to stay rooted through the June tornadoes. The prairie plains don’t get along with trees so well.The sun makes our hair hot to the touch and dirt cakes around our ankles. Decades will have to pass before incoming artists will have shade. I will be at least forty by then. The tree doesn’t care; he won’t hurry for me.

“I feel like we’ve given birth to a child,” says Z, dusting off her hands.

“It needs a name,” Raluca says. We look at it.

That night it storms. The wind slams shutters and Ted ushers us onto the prairie to watch the cyclones form in the sky. Hot and cool air, fluttering this way and that. In the morning the tree, hardly a twig, is still there. Larger ones, planted by residents decades back, have lost limbs. We call him Saint Cyclone, because he made it. He had worked his first miracle. We sanctified him as the permeating spirit of the place, dumping him onto the heaping pile of Farm lore.

I think in order to make riveting work these days, you have to worship your own gods. Campbell applied his theories of ancient shamanistic mythologies to explain the role of the 20th century artist. “The shaman is the person, male or female, who in his late childhood or early youth has an overwhelming psychological experience that turns him totally inward,” he tells Bill Moyers on PBS. “It’s a kind of schizophrenic crack-up. The whole unconscious opens up, and the shaman falls into it. This shaman experience has been described many, many times.” Spiritual authority, the power to interpret, fell on the shoulders of a single initiate, who drew wisdom and magic from personal familiars that spoke to him and him alone.

When ancient societies made the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, cultures rejected the old shamanistic way of life. This made sense with the hunter lifestyle, which prized and depended upon individual prowess, but in a planting society success was dependent on external factors, like rain, but also on the hard work of every member of the group, with no place for virtuosos. Myths had to have the ability to bind families and villages together in a cohesive unit for shared survival. Spiritual life fell to the people, who shared a pantheon of communal gods, often masked and distant, never appearing to the individual. Planting is about the link between life and death, the way the seed falls to the ground and grows the food that keeps the people alive and then dies, leaving seeds which will grow again. Campbell retells a planting-culture myth that encapsulates this shift, in which the individualistic shamans, in their arrogance, piss off the sun and the moon, which desert mankind, leaving the world dark and barren:

The shamans say, oh, they can get the sun

back, and they swallow trees and bring the

trees out through their bellies, and they bury

themselves in the ground with only their eyes

sticking out… But the tricks don’t work. The

sun doesn’t come back. Then the priests say,

well now, let the people try… [The people]

stand in a circle, and they dance and they

dance, and it is the dance of the people that

brings forth the hill that grows then into a

mountain and becomes the elevated center of

the world.

The dance of the people brings back the sun.The shamans are “lined up, fitted into uniform, [and] given a place in the liturgical structure of a larger whole.” Once assimilated into the rules of a society that has no room for magic, the shamans are faced with a choice: liturgy or interiority.

***

At seventy-two Noah Purifoy left for the California wasteland to build his world. In 1989 the desert was still arid and empty, teeming with potential for solipsism. Joshua Tree would have been a blank spot on AT&T’s coverage map, a gap in the spreading virus of constant connectivity that nobody bothered to fill or think much about. It was a mythical barren wild where art couldn’t be contained in white cubes and preserved for posterity.

The critics call this his Environment. The capital-E denotes that the term encompasses all of the sprawling little-e “environments” included within. Each environment is wonky assemblage, so-called junk dada composed of desert trash. If Purifoy’s work is any reflection of local demographics at the time, your average resident was a toilet married to a bowling ball. Driving your truck fifty miles from civilization to dump is almost universally cheaper than paying for waste disposal. A friend of a friend of a friend once found a mountain of ties twenty feet tall out there. Under mass-consumerism, everything is buried alive. The afterlife, for all manner of unwanted miscellany, is located in the extreme conditions of Joshua Tree.

Purifoy’s isolation sustained him through the turn of the century until his death in 2004. He died surrounded by the artifacts of his internal landscape, made material through his hard physical labor. In the years since the extreme climate has gnawed away at the structural integrity of the environments: pieces which once supported human weight have grown too dangerous; dust, wind, and heat have worn away details. He wanted it this way. His artistic remains are, like him, becoming the desert.

I had a friend who told me not to be a writer unless putting words to the page felt like shitting. Don’t follow it, he said with a little too much gravitas, unless it has to come out, one way or the other. As Purifoy aged, his work ethic became frenetic, colored with the increasing urgency of the ultimate deadline. Nine years before he died, he shared lunch with an interviewer in his mobile home. “It’s been said that if you don’t accept death as an equal part of existence you’re in for trouble somewhere down the line,” he said. “I’d never given much thought to any of this because I thought I’d live forever, but I’ve come to realize that’s not the case. That may have something to do with why I push myself so hard now to finally get the work out that’s always been in me.” His hardy body: a little metabolite, a machine for the translating the blueprint of his mental space into the physical sphere, pulling image and idea out of his head and into the physical world to save it from the decay of his flesh.

Isn’t this what we’re all doing when we create? We slide our hands, wrists, and forearms down our throats and back up through our nasal cavities to cup the base of our brains, unraveling the tangle of electric pink matter. We pull it out, in one long strand, through our mouths and proffer it. Look at this, we say. Somewhere in that string of you is a whole solar system. I think of the way scholars refer to Kafka’s “universe,” as if each work of fiction was a different episode forming a singular plotline, the genealogy of another reality discrete from our own, as if writing was a wormhole, sharing the particular timbre and hue of the artist’s interiority with the rest of us. I imagine Noah Purifoy’s ghost wandering the environments by night, haunting the labyrinths built to contain it.

For the contemporary artist-shaman, the price of the magic of creation is pretty steep. Insanity, Foucault explains, is a societally constructed malady. We made up the line between sane and insane. Reality within civilization isn’t necessarily some hard and fast objective truth about the world, but simply the code of conduct and set of beliefs to which we all subscribe. A loss of connection to reality isn’t a loss of connection to the world, but to other humans. It’s a loss of the common language of culture that binds us all together—the rules of your world are not the rules of everyone else’s anymore. The ultimate goal of art, I suppose, is to chart the unfamiliar territory beyond the scope of that language, to translate the untranslatable into something that can be digested and shared. I’m not sure if this is possible. When I think about Noah Purifoy I think about someone who sacrificed community and the possibility of happiness among other people for work that deeply fulfilled him. Maybe he gets all that missed connection posthumously, when disciples trek out to Joshua Tree for communion with his work. Me, I’d like to feel that before I die.

***

Art Farm is a cult: it’s isolated, it’s insular and out of circulation, but it’s a living culture like anything else. We just operate in a different kind of currency. We don’t talk in pounds and pesticides and profits, but in citronella candles and brushstrokes and hickeys. It’s not stabilized against the dollar, and its so-called value fluctuates wildly.

Another of my favorite myths that Joseph Campbell tells to Bill Moyers on that PBS program is the story of the young boy who has a vision in which he realizes “the central mountain is everywhere.” Campbell explains:

The center [of the world], Bill, is right where

you’re sitting. And the other one is right

where I’m sitting… What you have here is

what might be translated into raw individual-

ism, you see, if you didn’t realize that the cen-

ter was also right there facing you in the other

person. You are the central mountain, and the

central mountain is everywhere.

The middle of the world is at the heart of a Nebraska barn piled with thirty years of accumulated debris. The middle of the world is in every ear of glyphosate-proof corn that has ever graced the Earth, in every Monsanto executive, in the amputated tip of Ted’s missing finger. It is here, with you, as you read this, and it is here with me as I write this however many weeks prior. It’s not going anywhere.

Winter 2015 - Possession

Their Party

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

Winter 2017 - Cell

Three Garden Clubs

*“The very word culture meant ‘place tilled’ in Middle English, and the same word goes back to Latin colere, ‘to inhabit, care for, till, worship’ and cultus, ‘A cult, espe- cially a religious one.’ To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufciently intensive to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly,”*

*– Edward S. Casey, via the Wikipedia article on “Culture”*

Garden of Collective Knowledge

Somewhere in your neighborhood lives a lonely nerd with a big old brain and a big old monitor and no one to see in his spare time. This is the kind of guy who felt his identity ossify when he picked the username that suited him just right – the one that would stick – and created his first account with it. He likes the experience of logging into any given site, feeling his fingers migrate of their own accord to those familiar keys to tap out his well-loved moniker and the dopamine rush when the software recognizes him. Once inside, his otherwise unstable sense of self calcifies into a solid eggshell of persona. The shell does not encase his soft and fleshy body but instead wraps around the window of his web browser, bringing him enough protection from the trolls and the flamers that he might step out into the wide world of the world wide web and offer something of himself to it and procure some small satisfaction in return. There are other people there and he doesn’t have to deal with their bodies. Bodies are a lot for him: they require facial expressions and gestures and tones of voice and socially appropriate words that flow free on the spot. People reduced to text on the screen – bite-sized chunks of interaction and maybe intimacy – are a more comfortable alternative.

I’ve edited Wikipedia once and only once: last spring I found myself scrolling through the Advocate’s page, which has a long list of the organization’s one-hundred and fifty-one past presidents. The list was missing the 2016 president. He’s the kind of guy who would rather die than be added to a public list of old powerful white men who attained collegiate power; therefore, I was trying to figure out how to add him. “Does anyone else think that the ‘past president’ page should just be turned into ‘notable past presidents’ and only those who have a page of their own should be included?” someone wrote in 2011 on the talk page, “This seems like self-promotion by the club” (as if writing down a bunch of dead white men’s names qualies as advertising, which, to be fair, I’m not entirely sure it doesn’t).

Last week I wound up back on the page looking over its editing history, trying to gure out who the hell spends time updating a page about an undergraduate literary magazine. Someone does: it’s gone through about twenty edits in the past year. We clicked around a bit. If you haven’t created a Wikipedia account your IP address gets slapped on the records of your edits in lieu of a username, so it’s easy to figure out where you’re from. In the past year editors have hailed from the University of Wisconsin; Gaithers- berg, Maryland; and Brookline. One username – 22hayden22 – looked like it could be someone I knew, so I clicked on the profile. It was blank, so we clicked on the talk page, a virtual bulletin board where other users can leave messages. There was one note.

“Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! I appreciate the work you are doing on our page about The Harvard Advocate. Please always feel free to get in touch with me at my user talk page any time that you have any questions about editing here. --Tryptofish (talk)”

This other user – Tryptofish – has been consistently adding edits to the Advocate page since 2008. He was the one who came up with the idea of hiding the list of past presidents unless a user clicks the “show” button. Months ago Tryptofish had posted on the talkpage requesting that anyone adding to the list of notable alums on the page (“students, I’m pretty sure,” he’d said) cite their sources and 22hayden22 had responded. The post on 22hayden22’s page followed shortly.

You have to wonder why this Tryptofish guy feels personal responsibility for welcoming unknown users lightly editing extremely marginal articles to Wikipedia, as if the space is somehow his to offer. He described the page not as “The Harvard Advocate page” but as “our page”: “our” as in the Wikipedia community of which he considers himself a part. We are Wikipedia, Tryptofish seems to feel.

***

Tryptofish joined Wikipedia in August 2008. He began by performing extensive edits on the “Crucifixion” page. Next, he added a box to his profile indicating that he had a PhD in Biochemistry. Since then he’s made more than forty-four thousand contributions to articles on topics ranging from “Inward-rectier potassium ion channel” and “Aquascaping” to “Urination” and “Homosexual Transsexual.”

A quick google takes me to a thread on a site called “Wikipedia Review.” The whole point of the site is to provide a forum for Wikipedians to vent about editorial conicts “without the possibility of censorship by the Wikimedia Foundation[’s] openly-undemocratic administration.” On this particular thread users are discussing a conict between Tryptosh and another user, Crum375. Tryptofish is lauded for “slowly whittling away a lot of the POV” on an article about PETA despite “baiting and pushy behavior by some of the other editors” like Crum. POV, short for point-of-view, refers to subjective or biased information – the mortal enemy of the true Wikipedian. Crum had started stubbornly defending edits he made on the article about PETA, edits which had been removed for their lack of objectivity. When the argument, in which Tryptofish has been quite vocal, stopped going his way, he allegedly began to mount an argument to get the wiki’s administrators to take mediatory action against Tryptosh. In the face of the potential injustice of an undeserved ban, “Tryptosh has been a model of decorum and civility,” writes one Wikipedia Review user. “Sad.”

Smells like politics. A different article about Trypofish’s work mediating an editorial conict on the Monsanto page takes me to a site called “Wikipediocracy.” Wikipediocracy’s mission is to “shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia,” where editors have supposedly “been left battle-scarred after troubling personal encounters with the world’s most popular encyclopedia.” It’s clear that Wikipedia isn’t always a happy place where friendly folks post welcoming messages on each other’s talk pages and contribute their own humble understandings of the world to the grandest reference work the web has known. Wikipediocracy makes it sound like the site is full of white knights and dark horses, renegade factions trying to cloak their one-sided opinions in the expectation of objectivity associated with the Wikipedia name and valiant heroes stem- ming the rot. More moderate Wikipedians seem to feel everyone at least has the site’s best interests at heart. In any case, editors clearly feel there’s something weighty at stake.

The thread on the Crum375 debacle devolves into a lamentation of the so-called “asymmetry of wikipower,” or the steep hierarchy of the site’s administration. It has two branches – professional and amateur. The former is called the Wikimedia Foundation, or WMF, which has about 280 paid employees who run the site and set up all those pleas for donations. Though Wikipedia Review has its doubts about WMF’s integrity, the Foundation supposedly never touches content or intervenes in the editorial politics. There’s a hard line between the employees who craft the framework of the site and han-dle its money and the hyper-zealous hobby editors who work on a volunteer basis to fill in the blanks of WMF’s product. The unappable WMF people sit quietly in an ofce somewhere wearing ill-fitting suits while editors in pajamas kick and scream.

The anonymous volunteer side of Wikipedia has its own internal hierarchy – the most experienced editors are promoted to various administrative positions which give them the coveted Powers of Moderation, such as the ability to ban other users or to access the IP address of any given anonymous user, and hence a piece of the user’s actual identity. Wikipedia holds annual elections for the “Arbitration Committee,” or ArbCom, which is responsible for “conducting arbitration to resolve serious disputes between editors of the encyclopedia,” such as overriding editorial decisions and dishing out discipline. The elections themselves seem to create said serious disputes: election ArbCom is the mark of a true Wikipedia elite. A lot of people want the honor and afrmation of holding of the position, and many more have strong opinions about which users deserve this kind of power.

Many thousands of words have been written on voting processes, in which the editorial community at large – every registered user who’s made at least a small handful of edits – is eligible to participate. Tryptofish himself has a personal page where he provides heavily-disclaimed analysis of the electoral system and the pros and cons of each can- didate for the 2016 ArbCom election.“Editors are real people, and users with advanced permissions need to treat editors with exibility, not like algorithms,” writes Tryptofish on a talk page. Jimbo Wales, WMF Chair Emeritus and the site’s so-called “Benevolent Dictator for Life,” reserves the right to intervene with ArbCom election outcomes, but largely the editors are left to tussle amongst themselves. At one point an Arbitrator got written up in the New York Times for having resigned from ArbCom on the basis of hav- ing lied about his academic and professional qualifications, despite the site’s anonymity.

***

Past think pieces about Wikipedia tend to focus on the shift from individualistic knowledge – the academic building a world around himself – to collective, crowd-sourced, diffused forms, where no one in particular gets credit and objectivity is generated by the editorial work of the masses, who can eliminate the discrepancies of subjectivity with their numbers. Wikipedia compresses the polyphony of individual voices into a single frequency to make the Ultimate Reference Source. It promises near-absolute inclusivity in the production and distribution of information. Even Jimbo buys into the weird Utopian rhetoric: “Commerce is fine,” he writes on the donations page, “Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia.”

These pieces tend to ignore the site’s dark underbelly. For me the politics attest to something else, which is possibly even more troubling: the site is undeniably a source of social fulllment for its users. There’s reputation on the line. The ongoing skirmishes between vandals and heroes are “essential to Wikipedia because it allows the hierarchy of established users to give new, less-talented writers and ‘editors’ a means of in-game reputational development,” writes someone on Wikipedia Review. Wiki-squires need chances to prove themselves. The forum has sub-categories for individual editors who have become frequent topic of discussion, created after it became clear that “a select few Wikipedia personalities were being discussed far more than others.” The so-called game has prizes: respect and fame, or animosity and infamy.

Likewise, Wikipediocracy compares the wiki “to [a] waterhole in the animal world – [it] attract[s] species of editors with opposing agendas who have to somehow coexist, despite the tensions between them, in order to access the social resource that Wikipedia represents to them.” Meanwhile the Review and Wikipediocracy and I take turns play- ing David Attenborough. But the point is clear: users get to know each other. No one wants their work to exist in a vacuum: editors are here because it’s a venue for building reputations and relationships. You care about the cause and then you start to care about the people and the culture and how you fit within it.

This is the simple answer to the question of why individuals with busy lives (many of whom have PhDs) are so highly motivated to spend so much of their time on anonymous editorial work: virtual social capital. Like a church’s congregation, the community finds common ground in the worship of a shared ideal – in this case collective knowledge – and also provides occasions for personal pats on the back, like election to ArbCom or praise for good editorial work. It depends simultaneously on the subversion of its members’ individuality to generate objective content and on facilitating personal recognition to coax emotional investment. This reductive framework of capitalist incentivization suggests that users are being psychologically duped: virtual social capital has no tangible real-world value. I imagine the WMF people grin slyly at one another as Jimbo touches the tips of each of his pairs of fingers together in turn. Somehow it feels too dead-eyed and utilitarian. I believe there’s more to it.

Wikipedia has an article “Wikipedia Is A Community.” The page was created in 2007 by a user named “Alexandria” who has since defected. Her user page – I’m assuming Alexandria is one of the 12.64% of Wikipedians who are women – has a single sentence, which reads: “I could go on some rant about how this place has gone to hell, but I won’t. Enjoy your drama kids, I want none of it anymore.” The very editor who cared enough to consecrate the social side of the site with its own article was swallowed by its relentless political undercurrents.

We associate the anonymity of these online spaces with social arson: Give people a mask and the whole social contract is up. I think it’s more complicated. Fierce debates catalyze better content. Users’ emotional investment in their own reputations turns differences of critical opinion into personal attacks, but also prompts commitment to

good editorial work in the first place. To me these undercurrents are a testament to the devotion users feel to this community. Anything to protect it and, failing that, to protect one’s place within it.

In a testament to the soundness of the community it vouches for, the article was adopted and eshed out by other hands. The page has Wikipedia’s characteristic hierarchical topic structure, including categories like: “Practical reasons for community” and “A healthy addiction.” The page reads:

“We realize that while we’re technically supposed to be only an encyclopedia, and that while technically we’re supposed to be all professional and such, we realize that if that ever happened, we’d break our addiction to our community and our friends, and the site would fail.”

There is a sense that the site’s social element is somehow indulgent: relationships between editors, Wikipediocracy claims, are frowned upon as they threaten the impartiality of edits. The article disagrees: you can’t not get to know your collaborators. Without the impetus of social obligation, without emotional investment, the project will collapse.

The work of a Wikipedian is primarily the glamourless rote pruning that keeps the garden of knowledge looking effortlessly prim: the vast majority of edits are small fixes to content that breaks the rules or could be more cogent, which editors call “gnoming.” Everyone has a common devotion to the glamourless weeding that keeps the site intel- lectually inhabitable. It’s a climate of caring. Somewhere in the midst of all the shared responsibility people started to feel things about each other.

***

My high school’s required course on Research Methods tried drill the long screw of skepticism about Wikipedia’s reliability and authority as a reference source into my head but couldn’t get it through my thick skull. I am still partially convinced that the many, many anonymous users who edit Wikipedia are in fact three wizened and highly credentialed Experts in a dark chamber at the top of an ivory tower, churning out an ab- solutely objective and accurate guide to the world. Alternatively the information might be compiled by a giant and brilliant computer which is sometimes a little bit buggy. But under no means is this major reference work powered by the feeling of community.

“Wikipedia is a Community” provides a cogent regurgitation of the site’s ideology: “We are the ones who must accurately and without undue bias describe existence, itself, as everyone experiences it, while being sure to avoid the temptation of simply siding with that which one point of view thinks it should be or worse: that which another

group thinks it absolutely must be,” reads the page. “It is important that you take care of the common good and not edit disruptively or recklessly.”

We – Tryptofish and Alexandria and I, should I choose to edit – are supplicants to the ideal of this unbiased description of existence. We are the first line of defense against ignorance. We are the place the masses first turn to begin to see the world about them. We are the eyes and ears of the internet-connected world. We are not only a website but a site: digging through the substrata of page revisions grants unprecedented access to a high-resolution time-lapse cache of each notable discovery, event, birth, and death of the past fteen years. The most minute update in our knowledge of the most peripheral of topics has been recorded in this great ledger sheet of communal understanding.

Editors, day in and day out, devote energy to the often dry work of maintaining the integrity of the ultimate catalog of objective understanding like monks copying out the scripture. I’m not saying that Wikipedians are religious fanatics; not all of them believe that the god of Collective Knowledge will save mankind from ignorance and bias. The main thing is that the intellectual gardening provides a simple kind of relief from isola- tion and banality. It offers the chance to feel included in the shared pursuit of an ideal. Maybe, if an editor does good work, he will garner the community’s regard. Despite its anonymity and virtual location, the community is no less real. We take the chances we get to escape our personal ideological vacuums. We’re all looking to feel a little less small.

Garden of Common Arcana

At thirteen, I was highly susceptible to cult indoctrination. Like many rising ninth-graders, I went to and then came home from a camp. This was one of those camps where they mail the top 10% of state standardized test takers an invitation to take the SAT at age eleven and then, scores pending, to apply for their “very competitive” “accelerat- ed” “college-preparatory” courses. I’m giving it the alias CAMP – Center for Ambitious Maniacs’ Progeny – because these places exist primarily to assuage the nervous antics of college-conscientious mothers and secondarily to give college students mediocre sum- mer jobs. I was a sucker for brochures.

The state of the camp when I arrived seemed to suggest a long-past coup which had not exactly favored the adults. A pseudo-cult of forty kids had total cultural control. They called themselves the Alcove, so-named for the small round part of the dining hall that was their dominion at all meals. They were the clear and cohesive social center of the ve-hundred-student camp, and they were calling all the shots. It sounds a bit like some kind of high school popularity contest-type social dystopia but, see, these were not normal shots getting called. The Alcove controlled all the music at camp dances, but the playlist perpetually included a lot of Peter Gabriel and B-52s and New Order (quick

reminder that we were eighth graders and this was the late 00s). They insisted time be provided for the so-called “Afterdance” which was an extended sing-along where thirteen- through sixteen-year-olds belted out such numbers as “Cows are freaky when they look at you.” The Alcove got the required Sunday social activities ofcially renamed “Mandatory Fun,” and then, the next year, got them eliminated altogether. Though any remotely sexual contact was strictly banned, members were perpetually making out with each other in public (Nice to meet you! Are you sad? Let’s kiss for a bit!) and getting away with it.

At first I watched the Alcove from afar. I was fascinated by my own intimidation: at thirteen I put serious energy into cultivating normalcy and was chronically insecure about my failure to do so. It was unclear how people so weird could have so much social gravity. I was used to (if not fluent in) the logic of Abercrombie and Fitch and 808s & Heartbreak. I recognized that analogous rules existed here – stringent rules – but they were beyond recognition, free of mainstream rhyme and reason.

The Alcove’s absolute concentrated weirdness seemed to promise radical freedom from my social failings in middle school, but at a potential price. There was a ticker in my head perpetually keeping track of my Coolness Points. I had always assumed the pretty girls at school were the ones metering them out and broadcasting my worth to the world. When I went away to CAMP, I felt, one of these pretty girls would make a call to her CAMP equivalent and let that person know my deal, and that person would disseminate that information amongst the CAMP community. But was that person in the Alcove? I couldn’t imagine the pretty girls of school on the line with the Alcove elite. Maybe instead they’d deployed someone to lurk in the shadows and keep tabs on me in lieu of anyone competent to do it here. If the Alcove liked me and included me, would it count towards or against my total social capital?

On day three I had a flash of uncharacteristic social abandon. I took my tray with my shitty quesadillas and chocolate milk and stepped over the clear line where the tile ended and the carpet began – the line which divided the Alcove from the rest of the dining hall. The Alcove is a small circular space lled with standing-height tables. The members sat on the floor. Everyone seemed to be wearing at least one article of clothing not proper to their apparent gender, and anywhere from two to fteen lanyards of various colors. There was a lanyard for each year they had proudly attended CAMP plus, as I later learned, those bequeathed to them by old Alcovians. I lowered myself to carpet-lev- el on the periphery of a clump of Alcovians. They seemed to be speaking a language a little bit different from mine. Their network of inside jokes had grown so dense and rich that its opaque vocabulary punctuated each sentence at least two or three times. I ate self-consciously. Halfway through my second quesadilla I got noticed.

“Hello! Who are you?”

“I’m Lily.”

“Is this your squirrel year?”

“What?” I asked. He explained: A squirrel is a newcomer, so yes, you are one of those.

There are many other words to learn. A “nomore” is a sixteen-year-old and will be too old for CAMP next year: I am fourteen and thereby a twomore. “Blammo” is a multi- week round-the-clock game that involves plastic spoons, and it starts tomorrow, and yes, I should play. It’s clear that knowing the terminology, here, is the real line between who is in and who is out. No one needed to make a list of Alcove members. If you meet someone new you know in a sentence. I was learning a lot already.

There were also bits of the cultural lexicon which you cannot learn on the spot and will have to pretend to understand for now if you want to feel like a part of the group. I had never seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and this was a problem. I wasn’t familiar with the work of Orson Scott Card, and this was a problem. It takes about a month to learn the rules of Silent Football properly, and I had two-and-a-half weeks left at CAMP. I had never noticed the glaring omissions in my cultural repertoire.

I did my absolute best to appear assimilated and mostly failed, but people were warm to me. They would explain patiently with bright eyes, nostalgic for their own weeks as a squirrel when all of this was fresh and thrilling. I went for long walks with the oldest and best respected members, who for some reason wanted know how I am feeling and what I was thinking about things. They liked to share small tidbits of their own multi-year impressions and critiques of the dense cultural ber of Alcove life. I felt important and welcome on these walks.

The rst dance was scheduled for the Friday of the rst week. There were whispers of anticipation: dances, here, were no small deal. Someone explained the Canon to me: there are a set of sacred songs which have been played for the last hour of every dance since the 80s. They are divided into a hierarchy ranging from the High Holy songs to those included only unofcially; at the dance they’re played in reverse order of holiness so that the ultimate song is always the unspeakably sacred Don McLean’s “American Pie.”

The Alcove held down the center of the gymnasium closest to the speakers. They showed up late and didn’t move much until the Canon hit, and then did they ever move. Everyone knew every lyric: I blushed a lot and avoided eye contact because I didn’t (and wound up spending most of the next week memorizing them on my iPod touch). Different songs had different rules: “Dr. Mario” had a particular dance. “James Brown is Dead” involved people twirling glowsticks like poi. When “Mr. Brightside” played, Alcovians of both genders kissed platonically. When they came over to kiss me their mouths tasted sweet like how I thought being liked and included would taste. When “American Pie” came on we moved to the edges of the gymnasium and made way for the position-holders.

The position holders are the cult’s elders, the most immersed and fanatical and respected senior members. There are maybe a dozen positions of varying importance, almost all named for the minor characters peppering the lyrics of “American Pie.” For example, when Don McLean croons that “the jester sang for the king and queen / in a coat he borrowed from James Dean” the Alcovians who hold the (minor) positions of King and Queen stand before the serenading Jester. The Jester is the oldest position, and like many positions has associated relics – in this case a coat and jester cap passed from one holder to the next. Soon James Dean, appointed by the Jester, materializes holding the Jester’s coat and helps him get it on, which is always a challenge – the coat is stiff and tiny and the movement must be fluid. The choreography is tight but holding a position is an honor. Everyone has practiced.

***

The last morning of the summer everyone goes up to the quad in the damp post-dawn with their bathrobes and pillows for what’s effectively CAMP graduation. Every senior position-holder gives a speech, and then hands off his position and its associated artifacts to the next generation of culturally inundated senior CAMPers. This ritualization of the passing of the torch reies the continuity of traditions. The positions are not owned by any individual, it says. None of this is. Positions are here to provide continuity from one generation to the next.

They also offer a small morsel of personal recognition: you scratch the culture’s back and it will scratch yours. As a young CAMPer I coveted the positions. We sometimes made a game of the politics, speculating who would get what each year. Here was a tangible mark of personal worth amidst the emotional wasteland of early high school. Getting a position was like having some ultimate social authority put his hand on your shoulder and say you are valuable and valued, you understand the culture and are understood by it. The Alcove immortalized itself by explicitly bestowing social capital on the best caretakers of its traditions. It worked: everyone came back year after year.

I have to wonder how this stuff got started. It’s a lot harder to build social solidarity around radical quirk than around the pre-packaged kitsch of goths or preppies: you have to create, implement, and perpetuate unknown social codes without precedent. Creating lasting culture in a space with rapid turnover (even the kids who attend every possible year are perpetually aging out on a three- or four-year cycle) is an interesting project. People need to be indoctrinated quickly and thoroughly to keep traditions go-

ing. The mantle hardly has time to rest on any particular pair of shoulders. Up until now we’ve been considering culture as a tool for incentivization, something with an aim. But what if we think about it as a thing in itself: rather than discussing why it exists, I want to consider how it comes into existence and stays in circulation. CAMP culture, like any organism, had no real goal except to survive. Over the years it came to employ an assortment of mechanisms, like the last morning ritual, to ensure the genetic material which codes for its values survived and spread.

CAMPers have had this down to a science for decades. The Alcove is the most recent incarnation of a series of core culture-bearing societies: before them came The Land of the Large Round Tables (which had, since 1993, occupied a now-closed room at the far opposite end of the dining hall). LLRT had coexisted with something even older, a group mysteriously called Digiclan, until the two rival cohorts merged in 1998, ulti- mately metamorphosing into the Alcove circa 2000. Many of the positions, relics, songs, and terms are pre-Alcovian.

By 2000, with the birth of the Alcove, the culture had congealed into its own entity, dependent on individual CAMPers only to the degree that a cell needs to take in nutri- ents and expel excrement to go about its processes. Particular personalities added their own air and content: new positions, fresh songs consecrated in the Canon. But the culture’s backbone – a particular core-group lunch spot, the Afterdance, an extensive cultural lexicon, the passing down of positions – remained – and remains – the same.

***

I didn’t notice the crucial commonality between nearly all of the best-respected Alcovians until CAMP was over. Everyone who mattered lived in the New York area. After CAMP ended there were reunions almost weekly for the remainder of the summer: everyone would go sit in big circles in Central Park and keep doing what we’d done at camp. None of it ever ended for these kids: CAMP friends were their primary friend group year-round. Some of the New York crew had long ago aged out: there were college kids still hitting up the reunions.

NYC is an eight-hour drive from my hometown. I had lost the ability to form sentences around words that were not part of the insular and impenetrable CAMP vocabulary. Most of the time when a kid comes home from a camp there are a lot of tears. I sobbed until I triggered my gag reflex and then dry heaved for a solid hour.

My immune system was not equipped to fight off a cultural virus. I was saturated with social values that were no longer relevant to my surroundings: my self-esteem was dependent on ghosts. Alcove culture had entirely supplanted the previously unshakable paradigm of middle school normalcy. CAMP values were managing the part of my brain that generated self-esteem. They had lodged themselves there and now, of course, I would take them to the grave. I was appalled at the notion of having to physically occupy a space where no one had heard “American Pie” and being expected to assimilate back into the bland normalcy of midwestern high school.

My big mistake was thinking that I didn’t have to. I started making multi-hour phone calls to various CAMP friends every night under the guise of taking my dog for a long, long walk. Those of us who lived too far away for reunions learned to lean on each other. As I understood it, we were all nursing an addiction to the sweetest inclusion we’d ever known. It was never enough, but at least we could give each other a little bit of a x just by touching the call button. After a week and a half my parents were close to hiring someone to deprogram me.

In 2004, what had previously been oral history was reified in wiki form. I revisited the site while researching this piece: If you look through the wiki you find posts by the 1996 cohort of CAMPers. “CAMP isn’t just a smattering of geniuses or a blissful community; it’s the part of life that makes the whole thing worth living,” reads one page. “You are CAMP, and CAMP will always be yours.” I learned some new things. There’s a term – “neverwas” – for individuals who “belatedly learned of the program and fell in love with the culture and traditions” despite never having actually attended. There’s a story about the time in 1988 when staff refused to play the Canon and campers subsequently refused to leave the gymnasium until staff conceded. In 1995 Digiclan and LLRT had extensive deliberations which led to the concretization of the official Canon. There’s a note to parents about how to manage a child experiencing post-CAMP withdrawal: “due to the incident-based nature of CAMP Withdrawal, it is likely to be medically accepted as a form of minor depression.” I found my own user page, almost incomprehensible due to the density of Alcove jargon I have since forgotten.

Some CAMPers used to feel that the wiki was sacrilege, damaging the integrity of the community’s boundaries and the reducing the potency of the oral tradition. It’s not quite Wikipedia – there’s a small militia of enthusiastic gardeners, but the wiki is primarily a supplement to broader CAMP culture. It’s a virtually-located, organic and continually re-generated scripture for a culture that exists apart from it. And yet one of the site ad- mins – someone I had met briey at a post-CAMP reunion – still edits the wiki multiple times per week, nine years after aging out. The position lists are still fully updated, and when I click through some of the usernames on the Recent Changes page many of them are current CAMPers, planning to attend in summer 2017. The Alcove’s still alive and well, perpetuating itself without me.

Nobody likes this: we don’t like that we as individuals are not the culture. We want to matter and not to be forgotten. Mostly we feel we will move forward stained by its character and do not want to be the only one marked – worse, we are afraid we will go on needing it. Needs always look as if they’ll never change or go away. There is nothing more banal and unattering than a need that sticks around unreciprocated. But there’s always that sour-sharp knot in your chest when you register that your own need took its leave when you stopped paying it mind and that CAMP could need you or not, what the heck. The inevitability of mutual letting-go is touchingly impersonal, and if we’re lucky it happens fast. Eventually we are all just, at best, lines on the list of position holders on a wiki.

Garden of Transmigration

At worst it could be heartbreak in eternal return. To last, a culture has to maintain a balance between giving individual attention and keeping detached autonomy. It should individuals the personal attention they need to make sure they take care of it, but it should also maintain enough independence from particular personalities to move on and incorporate a fresh generation. At its most effective, it avoids the Sisyphean helix of falling for then watching go through covert indifference. It’s ruthless but a culture isn’t human. It needs to be entirely impersonal while feeling fully personal. If you look hard enough at the cold underbelly of your culture, you’ll go blind.

Two weeks out, when CAMP was still fresh, a friend pointed me to another online resource that existed for people like me. There was a forum called PCAMPD, which stood for Post-CAMP Depression. Like CAMP itself, it had a core crew of respected regulars. Sadly very few of them were Alcovians I’d known personally – many of them had aged out before I arrived or attended a different session. Soon it was clear that PCAMPD was kind of its own community. The PCAMPD regulars I knew had largely been socially tangential at CAMP itself, but here their proles were marked with special badges denoting their elite status. When they posted, dozens of us replied. Of course, everyone shared that same familiar Alcove vocabulary. Almost all of the PCAMPDers lived far from New York and its reunions as well, which may be why they weren’t in the Alcove inner circle. In the process of mourning their cultural isolation they seemed to have successfully shifted the site of their emotional attachment from CAMP itself onto PCAMPD. Virtually located and always in season, the forum and its denizens were ac- cessible when CAMP and NYC were not.

I soon discovered the private chatroom where a lot of the PCAMPD kids hung out around the clock. There were maybe fifteen regulars and I quickly became one of them. We knew each other primarily by username but functionally spent hours a day in each other’s textual presence. On any given evening ten or twelve of us would stay up late playing Never Have I Ever and sharing the gossip on mutual friends. Sometimes we would log off the chatroom and open up a website called Omegle, the predecessor to the notorious Chatroulette. Omegle would randomly form pairs of anonymous strangers out of the hundreds of users online at any given moment and place them in a private chatroom together. If you didn’t like your stranger, you could end the conversation and open a new one with someone else. We would all go online at once and keep requesting new strangers until we found each other in the haystack of anonymity. It was a surprisingly intimate activity, like running into a good friend on the streets of a large city. There was affection in the practice of forcing our way through the noise of random computation to find someone familiar.

Six months after CAMP had ended a bunch of us from the chatroom met up in Boston. It was uncomfortable. Aural communication eluded us. I tried to facilitate conversation but the lively and talkative friends I’d made online did not seem to actually in- habit these gangly teenage bodies. (I hadn’t realized that I’d been forming assumptions about the physical appearances of the bodies behind the usernames, but I had been, and in all cases I had been wrong). Maybe the awkwardness shouldn’t have bothered me – the meat of our friendships wasn’t located in the physical world – but in-person contact had been the phantom endpoint of chatroom connections all along, at least for me. I’d inserted myself here to supplant the pain of my geographical seclusion and it had worked by making me forget the physical world by subverting it to the virtual. These kids I’d gotten to know had been totally swallowed by their online lives a while back. I got scared. I’d learned how to store my subjectivity in a username, to feel an avatar’s feelings, to inhabit a screen. I feared that if I forgot the cadences and body language of in-person connection I might never get them back. I didn’t return to the chatroom after that.

***

In the early spring I decided not to return to CAMP. Without PCAMPD I had enough distance to recognize that the values by which I’d lived were only important because they bound me tightly to the people who shared them, both online and in person. In the dining hall on the rst day my obsession with the culture had come from the abstract sex-appeal of ritual. Within a week, as it became personal, the traditions had become the physical manifestation of my obsession with feeling connected to the people around me. The values that had given me a taste of belonging – the staunch commitment to a specic brand of radical quirk – were keeping me from any chance of getting that feeling back. By March I had shaken them just loose enough to be remotely present and at least partially at ease in my normal life at my normal school with my normal friends. I would have had two more summers, but also two more years of total isolation. CAMP didn’t need me and I didn’t want to need CAMP, but mostly I was just stunned and overwhelmed that I apparently now had the volition to choose the values against which I would measure myself. I never did get to hold a position. Though I can no longer quite empathize with the part of me that coveted them, I still feel like I cheated a past self out of something dear to her.

I was there for three weeks but for about two years afterwards about half of my close friendships (both on the internet and in real life) came from the broader CAMP community. I’m not really in touch with any of them anymore: most have since gone to and graduated college. I have mostly forgotten but some of them haven’t: I still see Facebook posts between old Alcovians. Some of the couples who got together during my time there are still dating, six years later. There are still reunions.

One of those PCAMPD kids did rematerialize last summer. He and I had exchanged over five-thousand text messages in the months following CAMP and then lost touch entirely. He was going to be in town the night of my 21st birthday party at the Advocate’s headquarters, so I tossed him an invite. He made an appearance, but we didn’t really talk. Someone told me he took a lot of nitrous oxide and passed out. I haven’t seen him since.

While researching this feature I found out that PCAMPD had died. It passed in 2013, two years after I stopped using it. The site creator, who had aged out in 2009 after the single session I’d attended, had started a thread: “It’s time to break radio silence and address the fact that, like all single-generation CAMP communities, PCAMPD has fallen out of use,” he wrote. I read a note of incredulity into his tone. The thread was populated by the same group of regulars I remembered from my time on the site almost ve years earlier, incredulously debating whether or not to take the site down. “I always assumed that as the original group of members went off to college and stopped posting regularly, later generations would continue to join and keep the forum alive,” an old acquaintance wrote. I had assumed so as well: the site had implicitly promised that these feelings of ours were universal and eternal. Someone would be there to care for our traditions once we no longer cared, and until then, the site facilitated our caring by reminding us that other people cared too.

As it was the community had undergone a kind of cytokinesis. The genetic material of CAMP’s culture had replicated, offering up a copy for PCAMPD’s utilization, and then the communities themselves had split entirely in two. PCAMPD now consisted mainly of people ve or six years too old to attend, some of which were still employed as TAs or RAs but socially insulated from the current version of the culture.

“All of us have moved on,” wrote the site creator on the funeral thread. Old regulars remembered how the PCAMPD community had supported them far beyond CAMP itself, throughout the transition from high school to college to professional life. For all our fears of being forgotten, superseded, the culture continued to make room for us in some capacity until we ceased making room for it. We’re older now and we know how this goes. Those of us who successfully moved on from CAMP and then from PCAMPD have learned through trial and error how to let go of communities. I like to think we can slide into spaces and fall out of them again without the friction of having inadvertently used them as armatures for identity.

Coda

It is easy to spend hundreds of hours reading Wikipedia with no knowledge of the fierce and stratied community behind its content. It was equally natural for all of PCAMPD to forget the dear old forum for long enough to push it past resuscitation. Some sites contain pockets of social intensity, hotspots of cultural action, while others bear the marks of worlds since dismantled, now-defunct spaces that served as affective habitats for years of users’ lives.

In the physical world societies have long enough lifespans that the chance of catch- ing one’s own culture on its own deathbed are not so high. On the internet these lifespans condensed. Wikipedia is younger than I am. For now, it’s a stable behemoth of an empire, an army of fierce gardeners devoted to an ideology of preventing the slightest disrepair. PCAMPD was created in August 2006 and lived seven rich years until it was unable to culturally stretch to incorporate the new generation it needed to maintain its rites. Its best gardeners watched it get swallowed by the fog of their own inattention.

These short-lived virtual cultures crop up and build codes and customs at rapid speeds and eventually collapse under the weight of their own rituals like especially heavy stars. It’s a pretty thought: the online world contains innite miniature pockets of social potential into which one might insert oneself when immediate reality won’t provide. These communities are virtually located but emotionally real. The web is a vast network of perpetually inchoate mini-cultures, any of which might be a home if we know where to look and learn how to act.

In 2015, two years after the funeral, someone came back to PCAMPD: “oh my god this forum has imploded,” they wrote. “Came on here for the rst time in months. There are pages and pages and pages and pages worth of spam.” One of the old users replied: “I’m weeding.”

After we moved on, the forum decayed into the virtual equivalent of an abandoned asylum. Here is a space which clearly bears the markings of past habitation and care: moldy box springs, closets of dusty cleaning supplies, toothbrushes. But the paint can’t hold onto the walls, grass is growing out of the foundation, caterpillars metamorphose in the crumbling drywall. Parasites creep in: vines that sneak up and strangle trees, the kind of plants that go where they please and take what they can get. The tight protective seal of the windows and walls gives way to the wind and the rain. The remnants of past habitability and the stains of impending cultural decay clarify each other’s contours.

So much of human culture is carving out a space for ourselves by pushing back against the natural processes of decay: “destruction here is the realization of a tendency inherent in the deepest layer of existence of the destroyed,” writes Georg Simmel. Our world is constituted through resistance. Sweep the floor. Repair the wall. Pull the fallen tree out of the crushed roof and replace the rotten beams with fresh ones. This rebellion is reinforced through social obligation: make the lawn look nice so the neighbors don’t think you’re synthesizing meth in your basement. Keep your hands clean so you don’t spread germs. Hold the walls of civilization against invasion.

I tried to ask how small or virtual or idiosyncratic cultures are born and where they go to die. The more pertinent question: What do they need from us and we from them? And most of all: how much of ourselves should we give them? The internet is plagued by the ora of spam. Wikis and forums, left alone, are prone to decay at the hands of trolls and bots. Death, in the context of the web, is effected by those shady gures we imagine in basements around the world coding the worms that take advantage of neglect, of a culture’s failure to devise mechanisms to self-perpetuate. They nd the cracks in our abandoned rewalls and overrun the virtual spaces we once carefully cultivated.

But nature is also at play in their inverse, in the way that an independent and self-per- petuating culture organically emerges out of the soil of a fertile social environment. We are here to plant the bulbs and pull the weeds until we cannot do so anymore, and then we step back with our hands open. We yield our fruits.

Lily Scherlis

Lily Scherlis

Art

Summer 2018

A Headspace

Winter 2017 - Cell

Interstice

Spring 2018

Masks (Communication)

Winter 2017 - Cell

Object Relationship

Winter 2017 - Cell

Window

Editor's Notes

Fall 2017

Editor's Note: Fall 2017

Winter 2018 - Noise

Editor's Note: Noise

Features

Winter 2018 - Noise

Friendship as a Way of Life

Winter 2016 - Danger

Hoopla

Fall 2015

Monocult

Winter 2015 - Possession

Their Party

Winter 2017 - Cell

Three Garden Clubs