Commencement 2013 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

 



    In May 1997, Bob Dylan was rushed to the hospital with a life-threatening heart condition. The prospect of his imminent death created a great deal of excitement. “The scary news blowin’ in the wind last week was that Bob Dylan might be dying,” read a Newsweek article. “It sounded like a death knell for the counterculture.” Scores of other magazines ran career retrospectives. The death of the greatest sixties folk singer—what an opportunity!

    In fact, Dylan was fine. “I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon,” he remarked as he left the hospital. What was really “blowin’ in the wind” was a wish that Dylan would die already. Recently, I talked to a friend who had seen Dylan perform at a small, suburban venue, and had found the experience unnerving. “I feel like he should be dead,” he said of Dylan. Another fan told me he sees Dylan as a “museum piece.” If the star can’t actually die, he can at least be treated as an object frozen behind Plexiglas.

    Of course, it would be easy to imagine various appropriate ways for Dylan to have died. Like James Dean, Jimi Hendrix, or Jim Morrison, Dylan could have died decades ago, precisely when his artistic powers and celebrity had reached their supposed pinnacle. A single, shared conception of Dylan would emerge. The “Dylan” figure would translate easily into a coherent set of attitudes and histories. Real life Bob Dylan, however, has defied such slick categorization.

    There is perhaps nobody else in America so widely beloved whose death would be so readily accepted. Many Dylan fans feel that their conviction in albums like *The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan* or *Blood on the Tracks* is mocked by *Christmas in the Heart*, Dylan’s 2009 Christmas music compilation. Even those who do not consider today’s Dylan an affront to their cherished vision of the artist might feel that his relevancy is simply spent. These fans might feel—but never say—that Dylan should have retired gracefully from the world of the living decades ago.



 



 



    Three weeks ago I saw my first Bob Dylan concert. He was playing at the Paul E. Tsongas Center, a stadium that is usually home to the University of Massachusetts-Lowell ice hockey team. Dylan had already played at the space twice before, in 2000 and 2010. As I entered the Tsongas Center, certain mundane details struck me as strange. The persistent beep, beep of electronic ticket checkers; the concession stand display cases of slowly turning hot dogs. I might have felt more comfortable seeing Dylan play in a forest clearing or cathedral.

    This response can be partly explained by my own history as a Dylan fan. When I first started listening to Dylan at age 13, I discovered new ways of understanding myself. Melancholy made more sense to me as “One Too Many Mornings”; restlessness was an empty concept without “Tangled Up in Blue.” I listened to these songs alone in my room and began articulating myself to myself.

    Eventually, Dylan produced for me the outlines of something like a worldview. I insisted to my dad that I could never enjoy music that had no lyrics. When my mom tried to take me to The Frick Museum I refused, on the grounds that Henry Clay Frick had oppressed the American workers Dylan sings about. I’d always had preferences; Dylan gave me an outlook.

    The state of my soul as I stood in the Tsongas Center food court, however, also had to do with the story of Dylan’s fame, what the figure of “Dylan” has meant at different points in American history. At the show I talked to a group of four guys, all button-down types who had gotten the tickets by chance. One of them said to me, “I’m not here for a rock show, I’m here for living history. I can tell my grandkids about this.” Treating Dylan as “living history” is about the same as treating him like a “museum piece.” As a museum piece, Dylan at Tsongas was like the Mona Lisa being shown at a community arts center. As living history, Dylan would only be competing with popular conceptions of his former self. Who would want to live the life of mere “living history”?

    It’s also difficult to understand what this living history of Bob Dylan even means. Popular narratives about Dylan tend to focus on this fact. The trend is most clearly expressed in the movie *I’m Not There*, in which five different actors of varying genders and ethnicities portray different Dylans at different stages of his life.

    This story replicates the Dean/Hendrix/Morrison way of understanding celebrities, except in Dylan’s case it is subdivided into discrete, sequential parts. Fans can lament the death of the Folk Revivalist Dylan, or the death of the Rock Avant-Gardist Dylan, or the death of the Seventies Cynic Dylan. That Dylan lived past all of these avatars—for example, to a Christian Evangelical Dylan—undermines the obvious primacy of any one of them. My friend who wished Dylan had died was wishing that he could take one Dylan of the past as the True Dylan.

    In the Tsongas Center I was certainly wishing something similar. Was the Dylan whom I had studied, followed, and worshipped the same Dylan who was about to play honkytonk to a half-empty hockey rink? I left the food court and headed to the stage, ready to encounter my platitudes in the flesh.



 



    Single-minded fans of Dylan’s early work would be shocked to hear how his voice sounds in 2013. Dylan’s voice has been changing throughout his career, but the most dramatic shift began in the 1990s and culminated in ’97 with the album* Time Out of Mind*. Here Dylan sounds like he has been smoking cigarettes rolled with gravel. The album’s song titles give this sense, materially—“Dirt Road Blues,” “Cold Irons Bound”—and narratively—“Million Miles,” “Highlands.”

    16 years after *Time*, Dylan can’t sing for more than seven or eight seconds in a row. He rumbles through a short section of a song, pauses, then rumbles forward again. There is no harmonic fiber between each lyric phrase; they are connected in the way that swept-up shards of glass collectively make a pile. Dylan’s staccato delivery resembles a gun fight with pistols, in which each shooter rapidly fires his entire clip, stops to reload, then fires again. When Dylan sang “Visions of Johanna” at the concert, he croaked the words: “And these visions! of Jo-hanna! they kept me up! past! the dawn!”

    This rough, cracked sound evinces the wear and tear of Dylan’s career over the past 25 years. This period is popularly referred to as “The Never Ending Tour.” It’s a title Dylan rejects— nothing is actually never ending—but it is useful in giving fans a way to talk about Dylan’s new approach since 1988. The year prior, in ’87, Dylan toured with the Grateful Dead, rock’s most famous performance act. The Dead toured constantly, and in doing so developed a small audience of devoted fans who would travel with them from venue to venue across the country. This audience commitment allowed the Dead to treat each show creatively, playing the songs they wanted to play, how they wanted to play them, instead of replicating studio-packaged hits.

    Since his moment with the Dead, Dylan has adopted this model for himself. According to critic Lee Marshall’s calculations, Dylan played an average of 34.5 shows a year between 1966-1987, and an average of 100 shows a year between 1988-2006. The relentless schedule of the Never Ending Tour is embodied by the destruction it has wreaked on Dylan’s already creaky voice.

    The voice also symbolically enacts Dylan’s aesthetic approach in the Never Ending concerts. At the Tsongas Center show, Dylan played a few of his old hits: “Visions of Johanna,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” and “All Along the Watchtower.” The scenes in each of these songs predominantly take place at night; the characters consist of a “peddler,” a “fiddler,” a waitress “at a topless place,” a “joker,” a “thief.” The similarities between each song can be summed up by the “Tangled” line: “The only thing I knew how to do / Was to keep on keeping on.” These are songs of a restless journeyman who has faith in little but his ability to persist. Songs like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” or “Girl from The North Country” would sound bizarre in Dylan’s contemporary voice, while these other tunes gain new meaning.

    Few of Dylan’s old songs deal explicitly with sex. Even the songs that come closest, like “4th Time Around” or “Lay, Lady, Lay,” mention sex only obliquely. In the former tune, Dylan sings: “And when she did come, I asked her for some / She said, “No, dear” / I said, “Your words aren’t clear.” Describing sex with hints and innuendo is just one tactic Dylan uses to describe fundamental failures to communicate. Clear proclamations regarding sex are just as difficult as clear proclamations of love or fidelity.

    These days, sexual desire and sexual prowess are much more prevalent in Dylan’s music, and at the Tsongas concert Dylan used sex as a symbol of his enduirng vitality. On “Early Roman Kings” off new Dylan album *Tempest*, he sings, “I ain’t afraid to make love / To a bitch or a hag.” Later in the same verse: “I ain’t dead yet.” In concert, the highest emotional climaxes come at these moments of pluck and spunk, self-announcements of a weary but unbroken durability. Dylan’s predatory growl, his bowlegged stance, his hip thrusts at the keyboard, the cowboy hat that covers most of his face: These also contribute to a vision of a man who is held together by sweat and spit and semen.

    Of course there are moments in the concert that evoke a younger Dylan, the one familiar to me from childhood. Dylan’s sound on the harmonica is, like his voice, jerky and dissonant. But when suddenly, in the middle of a solo, he produces a clear-toned melodious phrase, the crowd starts yelping and wooting. I interpreted this response as the product of the audience’s collective vision of a Dylan who might sing, “Goodbye’s too good a word babe / So I’ll just say fare thee well.”

    This revelation lasts for only a moment; Dylan’s voice returns to squash it. This is no failure, however, for the true Dylan fans in the audience who make up the vast majority of the people in attendance. Most people milling around the food court reported having seen Dylan dozens of time since the Never Ending Tour began. Chuck and Angela had both seen Dylan 100 times; Chuck, mostly in 1998, when Dylan played 110 shows across four continents between January 13 and November 7. Chuck, who had an earring the shape of a hand in his left ear, said he goes mostly because “I like the new stuff.” Angela, a tall faded blonde with pale eyes, said simply, “There’s a difference between being a concertgoer and being a Bob Dylan fan.”

    Dylan shows are full of couples. I also talked to Ian and Katherine, who had been to more than 40 Dylan concerts. Katherine’s brother had been named Dylan after Bob himself. Ian, also a musician, said of Dylan: “Interest in his music got me interested in playing music.” Like the other serious fans I talked to, Ian was mildly exasperated when I asked him about preferring Dylan’s sixties-era music. “I’m more excited to hear newer material or what he doesn’t play often,” Ian said.

    Chuck, Angela, Ian, and Katherine are not sublimating a Dylan death wish. The* I’m Not There* model of treating “Dylan” as a succession of Dylans doesn’t apply to their conception of the man at all. To them, Dylan is a fully living artist, continuing to produce new songs with a unique style and to rework old material in ways that make sense with the development of this style. Their Dylan has been freed from the constraints of any static historical or cultural moment. He is something less grandiose than a mythic folk hero: just another singer on the road, trying to entertain an audience and have fun onstage at the same time.



    This understanding of Dylan is intimately bound up with the logic of the Never Ending Tour. The philosophy of the project can be grasped in part by something Dylan said in a 1965 interview with Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston:



     *Great paintings shouldn’t be in museums. Have you ever been in a museum? Museums are cemeteries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men’s rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out.... You can’t see great paintings. You pay half a million and hang one in your house and one guest sees it. That’s not art. That’s a shame, a crime.... All this art they’ve been talking about is nonexistent. It just remains on the shelf. It doesn’t make anyone happier. Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner. It’s not the bomb that has to go, man, it’s the museums.*



 



    By the early 1980s, Dylan began to feel that most of his fans wanted him in a kind of museum-cemetery. One of Dylan’s biographers, Lee Marshall, agrees that fans felt this way for two reasons. First, they were attached to seeing Dylan as he was at some moment in their lives. Their appreciation of Dylan’s music was bound up with the experience of hearing him at college parties or on the radio as they took a road trip cross country. This desire points to Marshall’s second problem. Dylan’s audience was wedded to the renditions of the songs that had appeared on his albums. These versions were canonical, and tinkering with them—let alone replacing whole verses or melodies—would be unacceptable. Dylan could not play a spontaneous, inventive show without angering fans. Dylan began to dislike his own audience.

    The Never Ending Tour solved this problem. Now Dylan keeps his band on retainer. He plays for months on end, takes a break for a couple of months, and then hits the road again. The frequency of Dylan’s shows has made them less of “an event,” and consequently has altered the expectations fans apply to them. The novelty of being in the same concert hall as Dylan the Legend begins to dissipate. The hope to be transported back to a bygone era is disappointed. The people who show up to concerts are not there to bask in Dylan’s aura as much as to hear some good music.

    This shift in Dylan’s concert style is reflected in his new lyrics, his new voice, even the clothes he now wears at shows. A typical example is his take on the blues standard “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” on *Modern Times*. Muddy Water’s classic rendition is lyrically sparse, more a set of images than a short story. When Cream recorded the song, they sang, “We were rollin’ and tumblin’ / Right the whole night long.” It is a fast-paced hoe down. Dylan sings his version from the point of view of the battered traveler having a good time. There is roughness and cynicism—“Some lazy young slut / Has charmed away my brains”—but also vulnerability and remorse—“Well I paid and I paid / My sufferin’ heart is always on the line.”

    You could easily imagine a bar band performing revamped standards like this. Dylan is neither challenging nor advancing the song’s tradition; he’s just providing a new take on it that an audience will enjoy. *Modern Times* might sound like a paradoxical name for an album that is so contained within larger traditions. But the name might also indicate that nothing about “modern times” invalidates Dylan’s beloved folk and rock traditions. Modern times may call for the emphasis of certain features of these traditions—the rambler is more relevant than the miner—but the vocabulary is essentially unchanged.

    Those who wish death on Dylan might disdain the portrayal of him as just another talented musician. It fails to satisfy the real appetite among many Dylan fans for mythos. To say that Dylan is a genius is not enough—he must have had, even for just four or five or fifteen years, some unseen access into a collective American soul, and any Dylan without such access must be a revolting sham.

    If these fans really search for a myth about Dylan, they will find that 100 days out of every year there is a Dylan who becomes onstage the character he always sang about best: the lonely bard, baffled, scornful, but so perpetually unsatisfied that he can’t stay off the road.

*Read the full blog post at [Notes from 21 South Street](http://theadvocateblog.net/2013/09/20/i-wont-watch-no-reruns/).*



After the box office success of their 1999 film The Matrix, the Wachowski siblings released in 2003 The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions and plunged their moviegoers into short-lived existential crisis. That same year, British philosopher Nick Bostrom carried The Matrix‘s threat out of movie theaters and into philosophy departments, publishing “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Looking at the past growth of computing power, Bostrom raises the possibility that we are living in a simulated universe generated by an extremely powerful computer, which in turn might itself exist within yet another simulation, ad infinitum and ad nauseum. This skeptical worry along with a few related variations have come to be known as “simulation arguments.”



Philosophers often compare Bostrom to Descartes, arguing that the simulation argument is simply the dream argument — “Are we living in a dream?” — outfitted in the silicon trappings of the computer age. The similarity, certainly, is difficult to overlook. In a similar vein, we can view Dan Ashwood’s Repeat Viewings as a nineties-era refashioning of Bostrom’s skeptical worry. RV records the simulation argument with a camcorder and plays the tape over and over again until the video itself becomes damaged by the VCR. The acts of re-collection, re-membering, and re-vision are themselves caustic, slowly corroding what they attempt to preserve. In Ashwood’s animation, the anxiety underlying Bostrom’s simulation argument deteriorates and falls away. The characters’ existential angst lies not in the fact that they live in a simulated reality, but rather in a general question of nostalgia: Is it worth satisfying? Is our wistful affection for the past an act of violence that we should avoid? Or are the lines of static that gradually obfuscate our favorite videos like green lines of code, shimmering with the promise of meaning?

*In his new novel, *Harvard Square*, André Aciman revisits the place he called home as a Harvard Ph.D. student in the 1970s and ‘80s. On April 26, 2013, during one of his physical returns to the Square, *The Harvard Advocate’s* fiction editor emeritus, Patrick Lauppe, sat down with Aciman for an original interview. An Egyptian-American memoirist and novelist, Aciman has written numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including *Out of Egypt, Call Me by Your Name, and Eight White Nights*. His most recent novel, *Harvard Square*, was released in April. Here is the transcript of *The Harvard Advocate’s* conversation with him:*



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*    You mentioned in your book that Harvard Square is a much different place than it was back in the 1970s, so could you elaborate on some of those differences and what you think they reflect?*



    It used to have a lot of oldish stores. Sometimes almost bric-a-brac stores. Now, they are very much mall stores. All the stores are nice, chic, and expensive. In the old days, it was more rundown. You had a sense that age had caught up with Harvard, especially in the area around Mount Auburn, which was really dilapidated at times. Now, it’s perfect. The old post office disappeared. It had a bad smell. Now there’s a new post office and it’s absolutely lovely.



*    You received your Ph.D from Harvard in the 1970s, in Comparative Literature. Could you perhaps elaborate on the importance of that degree and of studying Comparative Literature on your career? And how that’s influenced your writing?*



    I started in ’73, but by 1980 I was disenchanted. I never finished in the ‘70s. I taught a lot. I taught in all kinds of places. I taught a lot at Harvard and had fantastic undergrads. But at some point in time I got so disenchanted that I abandoned the Ph.D and went to work for brokerage firms and moved to New York, where I worked in advertising. Then, eventually, I decided to come back to my Ph.D. I had done all the research for it, so the writing was easy. I wrote the Ph.D dissertation in six months. Having an advanced degree, in my case, allowed me to get a job at Princeton, which eventually led to Bard College, and then to the Graduate Center in New York. So having been a grad student at Harvard worked out very well for me in the end. 



    *So you mentioned this disenchantment. One thing that I found particularly interesting and resonant about the main character of Harvard Square, the narrator, is his constant ambivalence toward graduate school and the prospect of academia. He seems to think it’s his perfect place, or the place that’s made for him, but at the same time, there’s **an antipathy toward it.*



    Yeah, it’s a love-hate relationship, if you want to put it in those bleak terms. I came to Harvard not because of Harvard, actually. I came to Harvard because I wanted to study literature. And Harvard and Johns Hopkins and NYU had accepted me, but Harvard gave me more money. So I went to the money; that was the simple answer. Also, I liked Cambridge. It was different from New York, which I knew. I had no idea that studying literature meant that you would end up almost hating it by virtue of what they did to it. In other words, the professionalization of the personal loves of literature, the loves of books, was such that it almost took the soul out of it. So I needed to get away. And having come back to my graduate work a few years after leaving helped a great deal. Writing a dissertation in New York in an environment that was entirely metropolitan, totally divorced of anything academic, was very helpful for me.



    *Why do you think so?*



    Because staying in an academic mode was stultifying and choking me; I couldn’t stand that anymore. And you can see this in the book. Cambridge was extremely hospitable to anything having to do with books, but only if you discuss books in very specific terms. Not in the terms that I wanted to discuss books. So I had to learn to discuss books in a professional manner, which I’m very grateful to. At the same time, being away from Harvard allowed me to rediscover that love of books that I used to have, and that I’ve now made my profession. In fact, it allows me to say things, when I write book reviews for instance, that are extremely pointed in that they are written by a man who is very belletristic but who knows how to discuss literature on an academic level. You find that most people who are academics today do the academic side, but they don’t really know how to handle the belletristic aspect of it, which means finding out whether something is good or bad, beautiful or stupid. Everything is interesting, as you know when you study cultural studies. Everything is interesting. But that’s not the point of literature. Some of it is very good; some of it is just interesting. And I’ve always been committed to finding out how you pass on the love of literature unadulterated, in a highly professional manner.



*    What were the terms in which you wanted to discuss literature originally that clashed with the professional mode?*



*    *I remember being interviewed by the chair of the department, and I saying, “I want to write about the Byronic hero.” I was all into Byron and I was interested in the Byronic hero, not realizing that the Byronic hero is a platitude of the first order. And he looked at me with a pensive look, almost jaundiced, and I said, “Well, what’s wrong with that?” So I went back home and thought, “Okay, well, let’s think again.” Then, I had a teacher called Edward Said who was very smart, although I have lots of problems with Edward Said. I always thought that there was something unfinished [about his approach]. He got the stuff. He *got* it, but he didn’t know how to discuss literature *qua* literature. It was always qua something else. I always thought that was really cheating students and cheating the task of a man of literature. You have to discuss it as literature. What is it that makes it *good*? There’s no other way to explain it. So I was ultimately disenchanted. But I needed to be exposed to this in order to be able to speak about the things that mattered to me in such a way that at least I could give them a greater degree of depth and meaning than they had when I came here wanting to write about the Byronic hero.



    *How did you make the transition between academic writing and an academic context to writing your own memoir and writing your own novels? I feel like that’s often a difficult transition to make.*



    It is. It’s very difficult. Let me tell you what some of the difficulties are. First of all, your colleagues. They hate you. If you write a book that flops, they love you. But if you write a book that’s very successful, as* Out of Egypt* was, in its time, it really made them very envious. That’s the only thing I can say. Here’s a book that’s actually almost a bestseller, and it’s written by somebody who’s decided, as I had when I was at Princeton, that I was not going to write an academic book. I was going to put all my eggs in this book called *Out of Egypt*. I had to make a decision. It was almost suicidal, because I knew what the price was going to be. They were not going to give me tenure. It’s that simple. They didn’t give me tenure, and that was their revenge. Of course, then they became my friends. It was good that they didn’t give me tenure, because I would have choked to death at Princeton. I was very glad that I came back to New York. This was a place for me. New York is a very hospitable place for people who are many things, not just one thing. But that’s only one aspect of the answer you’re looking for.

    Academic writing is fundamentally dead. You can make it interesting; you can make it fun. But it’s dull. Some people cheat this by writing magazine articles. That’s a way of writing as an academic for the popular reader or the mainstream reader, who’s educated, by the way. That’s the only way you can do it. Nobody really cares about three jargon words strung together in a title. Nobody wants that. I just think everybody should be discouraged from doing that. But writing a memoir, or writing a piece of fiction, as a person who is trained in literature, presents new problems and fantastic opportunities. You begin by writing for the classroom. You write stuff that’s deep and complicated because it’s going to be taught in such a way that students are going to discuss it in this and that way, and they’re going to see the symbolism and the patterns and the message. That’s a vow to demolition. You’re destroying yourself by doing that. You also have to step back and say, I’m writing something that is obeying the conventions of fiction, but it may not be fiction. It will sound like fiction. It is going to have some intellectual component that’s never, and should never, be visible, because if it’s visible, then it’s trite and stupid. So it has to be there because it matters. It matters to the writer. Me. But it must not be visible, so there’s never, in anything that I write, I hope, a message or an ideology or something that you can string together and say, “*This* is what the problem is.” I make certain that you never get that.



*    How do you go about hiding the seams, then?*



    It’s not a question of hiding the seams, as much as it is the concept of making sure that you tell a story, and that the story always has prevalence. If I was writing *Oedipus Tyrannus*, I would write it exactly as Sophocles did. There is no message in *Oedipus*. What is the message? Don’t kill your father and don’t marry your mother? There’s no message. Oh, you want to discuss faith. Well, we can do that for a while. Basically, you can’t extract a meaning. One of the ways in which I do that is by thinking of plot, but it has to be plot that’s internalized, because otherwise it’s just story à la anybody. It has to be a story that matters to the narrator. It has to be a story that derives of an experience that has already been thought about and does not need to articulate its meaning because its meaning is in plain sight.



    *The story, in *Harvard Square*, revolves around the interactions between the narrator and the character Kalaj. I found this to be a satisfying center for the novel, similar to the center of many novels.* The Great Gatsby* comes to mind, in which a passive narrator comes into relief through interaction with a dynamic and controversial character. How did you come to realize that that was the kind of dynamic you wanted to develop here and that was what you wanted to use as your vehicle for themes like exile?*



    I was fascinated by someone who claimed he had no regrets. He didn’t understand regret. He was always moving forward, almost scuttling and falling apart most of the time. There was no going back. There was always going forward. I was temperamentally more thoughtful, more meditative as a person. So I would look back, or at least not step forward that far ahead. I was interested in the contrast. I was interested in his [Kalaj’s] success with women. How does someone sleep with a different woman every single night? I want that! Or at least I did want that at some point. I found that he had his feet on the ground, whereas my head was always in the clouds. I was a student of literature. He was a student of *life*. I’ve always envied that. I’ve always felt like I didn’t get life very well. I understood people. In fact, the way I study him is the result of how he taught me to study people. I’m constantly reading how he reads me, but I got that by watching him read so many other people. He’s always reading people, always sizing them up. And he was always sizing them up because he was after something that was fundamentally authentic. He didn’t trust people, and he couldn’t trust anyone, partially because he was paranoid, but partly because it was something about people, that they were always making a compromise with the way things are, and he never did. Not out of heroism: he just didn’t know how to.



    *Do you think this way of looking at people that you’re referring to has taught you how to characterize and make the characters come off the page?*



*    *No, because there’s no craft there. I do have a very jaundiced view of humanity. I never trust anybody, and I always suspect that somebody has, not just some hidden motive, but they themselves are lying to themselves. Half the time I spend talking to people, I’m telling them that they’re not seeing what is happening to them because they’re not willing to see how things are. This ability to see what is actually going on, and articulating what the dynamic is between them and others, them and life, and them and other people is a craft that allows you to understand human beings.



    *You talk about Kalaj as if he were based on a real person. Is that the case?*



*    *Yes.



    *You began your career with a memoir, but this is characterized as a novel. Can you explain?*



     I don’t understand the difference. Because I don’t think there’s any difference between a memoir and a novel. There’s an article I just wrote in *The New York Times* that says more than what I can say here. You move the furniture around to make the story gel. In order to have meaning, you need to have a chronology. Sometimes, something happened way later that should have happened far earlier. If you refashion the order of events, then your story begins to make sense. It resonates with meaning. Ultimately, that’s what counts: the meaning of the story. So yes, sometimes something happens in January as opposed to March and you shift them around and suddenly everything makes sense, because all that needed to change was not the events, but the weather. So, in essence, for me, memoir is a novel. It reads like a novel; it’s supposed to read like a novel. It has the fun of a novel. It basically means that the facts are all real that have been taken from your life, but the order has been changed, or let’s say some things have been removed because they were of no importance. For example, in the memoir, I removed my brother because he really didn’t make any difference. He was a part of my life, but he didn’t really matter as far as the story was concerned. In fact, the story makes more sense without him.



*    You’ve spent many years studying and teaching Proust. I know that Proust is someone who toed the line between novel and memoir.*



    Totally. Rousseau did too; he lied about his own life.



     *Very convincingly.*



     Very convincingly! So did Montaigne. One does that, all the time. We’re not in a court of law. We’re not on trial. We’re telling a story that matters to us. The way I phrased it in my article was: because I’m more interested in the person I am today, thinking of these events, than the person that I was then. I don’t care about myself thirty years ago, forty years ago. He’s not that interesting. But I am interesting to myself right now, and if I’m delving into the person I was forty years ago, it’s because of who I am today. I couldn’t have written that story when I was your age.



    *One parallel I found in *Out of Egypt* and *Harvard Square* is between the characters Kalaj and Uncle Vili. They had a very similar energy as characters. Could you remark on that kind of character? Earlier you said that’s the kind of character that has no regrets.*



    I consider myself a bookish person, i.e. withdrawn, dysfunctional: whatever you want to call it. I’m not on planet Earth; I’m somewhere else. I’m constantly faking being on planet Earth in order to survive on planet Earth. That’s all it is. There are some people who belong to Earth and are committed to Earth and to life and they love it. I envy them. I couldn’t really envy them that much because I would die if I had to be them, but I envy their commitment to risk, to challenge, to the boldness with which they throw themselves into life. The fundamental characters in all my works have always been the Vili type and the Kalaj type. Of course there’s also a character called Oliver, who’s totally in the present. And there’s a woman called Clara in one of my novels: She’d go up to you and shake your hand and say, “I’m Clara. Who are you?” I love people like that. I’m not like that. But I think the contrast is important because it is a contrast between literature and what I consider the opposite of literature: life. I don’t think one has anything to do with the other. Many people will disagree with me. I think art and life are two separate departments, and one imitates the other; that’s about it. But life could care less about literature. Literature is envious of life. People who can’t read don’t care about reading. They’re not losing anything, as far as they’re concerned.



    *I **mentioned exile earlier. I think one of the most interesting parts of the book is watching the narrator navigate his feelings of belonging to the two or perhaps even three nations—counting France—between which he’s divided. Could you remark on that theme?*



    They’re both exiles. Exile is not just a condition of being without a home. It also means that you’re outside your body, too. Your home allows you to have an identity. If you’re not in your home, if you’re not living in a place with which you’ve grown to identify yourself, even if you hate it, then you yourself are in question. You are not in your body. I cannot explain it any other way. So you were brought up in the states, I take it?



    *Yes, California.*



    So you’re totally grounded. You may feel you have some issues with California, with the States: You’re angry at this and that, you disagree with this and that. But, fundamentally, you’re American: This is where you belong. This is where your home is going to be, unless you choose otherwise. When you don’t have the choice, you’re displaced; you’re like a plant that has no roots. You don’t even know if you’re a plant any longer. You’re faking being alive. Basically, they cut your arm off, and then they send you away, and so you’re a body without an arm and you manage to live without an arm. Except, there’s a mistake in the metaphor: You are just the arm. The body stayed behind. You are just an arm trying to do the work of a whole body, and you can’t. I’m sorry that I’m piling on the metaphors, but it’s the only way to do it. So you are deracinated. 

    What I was interested in doing [in* Harvard Square*] without trying to be too sententious about it was to show two different versions of exile. One basically has a ticket in. He can become a student at Harvard. He can become an American eventually. He can have a professional life. He can belong somewhere given his interests. The other person has no ticket. He has no free pass anywhere. He’s just here freeloading, as it were. And eventually he’s going to lose all he’s got. Both of them, however, feel that they don’t belong here. One feels that America is a strange country. It’s not really his home. The other feels that Americans belong to a different order of mankind. Mankind comes in many versions; not just cultures. Versions. So you have two people who don’t belong here, and who have this imaginary home in France. They know it’s imaginary, because one escaped it and the other doesn’t really want to go there because he knows he wouldn’t really belong there anyway. So they’re all free-floating in this place called Cambridge, where they don’t feel welcomed or at home.

*“I can assure you, there is no panic, no fear, no despair in London town.”

**                            **London Can Take It!*, 1940



    “There are terrorists in London.”

    Two Bengali Muslim girls in my class told me this. I laughed. No there weren’t. These girls were always making things up: that Lianna in 8C was pregnant, that our mild-mannered geography teacher had pinched a girl’s bum.

    Even now, they were laughing with me. But something in their giggles was sour. Nervously, one of them pushed onto my desk an article from BBC News, still warm from the library printer.

    “Innit?”

    Innit might be the most frequently spoken word in British slang. It can mean both “isn’t it?” and “it is,” depending on the tone, and therefore has a kind of limitless use. Unsurprisingly, it is young people who say it the most: we who want nothing more than to be approved of, to be in agreement. *Innit? Innit.

*    I looked for signs that the article was a spoof, a prank. There was the BBC logo. The correct date and time. The pictures of ambulances, smoke, panic. The number 30 bus. The Circle line.

    We tried to get our religious studies teacher to acknowledge what was going on. Her cheeks turned red. Yes, something had happened, but it was going to be all right and we were going to continue with the class. This was 2005, two years prior to the release of the first iPhone. We sat there lamely, taking turns to read that one BBC article over and over again. In the background, our teacher lectured on Sikhism.



   * **“London looks upwards towards the dawn and faces the new day with calmness and confidence.”*



    The day after the bombs, all of London was back on the buses and tubes. That’s how the story went, anyway, the one that the politicians told the world—and it wasn’t exactly untrue. On the train I took every day, the 8:12 to Camden Road, I counted off the faces. The white businessman with his copy of the Financial Times: still there. The Serbian schoolgirls in their hideous plaid uniforms: I could hear them in the other carriage. The young professional-looking woman in a hijab with her eyes closed, always listening to her MP3 player: leaning against a window. The old black man in stained clothing who sang to us softly about Jesus: he was there, too. Everyone a different color, everyone’s gaze pointed in a different direction, back on the train that was ours.







*    “London manages to get to work on time, one way or another.”*



    A terrorist attack in a certain place turns all who use that space into potential targets. In hindsight, any of us might have been the intended victims, something we made sure not to forget.

    “I got the Circle line last week at exactly ten minutes to nine.”

    “My dad’s office is a five-minute walk from Tavistock Square.”

    “The 30 goes right outside my house.”

    Almost no member of British society is above riding public transportation. Even the Queen took a spin on the Jubilee line when it first opened. And I have never encountered another city as willing as London to symbolize itself as a subway map.



*    “London is fighting back.”*



 



    In 1940, in the fifth week of the Blitz, the British government produced a nine-minute propaganda movie entitled *London Can Take It!* that was distributed across the UK and US. It begins with scenes of Londoners commuting home from work during rush hour: boarding buses, descending into subway stations, crossing a bridge over the Thames on foot. The narrator describes them as “the greatest civilian army ever to have been assembled.” The film makes other similarly grandiose declarations about London and its citizens. According to the narrator, London is free of panic and despair: there is only “calmness and confidence.” At night, the people sleep fearlessly as the bombs bring their city to the ground.

    Sixty-five years later, the UK government partnered with advertising firms, newspapers, and other private corporations to create an enormous post-7/7 media campaign that ended up costing over three million pounds, called “7 Million Londoners, 1 London.” The idea consisted of a single logo: the phrase “7 Million Londoners,” with the words “1 London” highlighted within it in a different color.

    “London is an urban, multicultural community,” London’s then-mayor, Ken Livingstone, stated in his endorsement of the 7 Million campaign. Straying from the nationalist rhetoric of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, he noted that the campaign was important because it celebrated “the principle of difference rather than unity.”

    And yet, there were those words—“One London”—etched in an uncompromising bright red. Later, the campaign added another phrase, sealing its promotion of cosmopolitan unity: “We Are Londoners, We Are One.” Any Londoner could order a poster, badge, or window sticker inscribed with either of these slogans for free. “7 Million” banners lined every major street; billboard-sized posters could be found on the side of most buses and on the walls of every tube station.

    The campaign underlined a narrative that was already circulating in media and politics on both sides of the Atlantic. Londoners were being described as inherently tough and resilient. Our decision to ride public transportation the day after the attacks was “courageous.” Politicians worldwide praised the city for its “business as usual” approach to a post-7/7 world. Few failed to claim that London’s reaction to the attacks was demonstrative of an attitude of stoicism and defiance that we had all somehow collectively inherited from the Blitz.

    “We survived the Blitz. We lived through 30 years of IRA outrages...” The British tabloid *The Daily Mirror* reminded its readers. “Once again the British people will triumph over evil.”



    *“Do you see any signs of fear on these faces?”*



* *    In the weeks following July 7th, the fact that all four of the suicide bombers were English, or had at least grown up in England, grew awkwardly prominent. Three out of four had been second-generation British citizens, born and raised in Leeds, in the north of the country. None of them were known to the authorities before the attacks. Three were of Pakistani descent; in many of London’s boroughs, the population is around 10% Pakistani. One was Jamaican, as are so many Londoners whose families have emigrated to the UK since the beginning of the Empire Windrush in 1948.

    This wasn’t the Blitz, then; it wasn’t possible to speak of “the Germans” who wanted to kill us, nor to anthropomorphize every bomb that dropped as a manifestation of Hitler’s villainous wrath. These were men who worked in the primary schools that our children attended and prayed at the same mosques as we did and had sat next to us on tubes and buses many times before without ever having blown us up.

    Was there any “One London” united by a desire to preserve our city and “triumph over evil”? London has 7 million inhabitants, which, in the months and years following 7/7, amounted to 7 million suspicious glances. 7 million reasons to get off and wait for the next train. 7 million sharp intakes of breath as someone who didn’t look quite right boarded the bus. The one out of 7 million chance that you, an unassuming 27-year-old Brazilian Catholic man, would be murdered by the police as you tried to get on the tube at Stockwell station.

    A few weeks after the bombs went off, a Muslim Londoner was interviewed on the radio about his experience following 7/7.

    “Well, I take a bottle of wine with me and hold it on my lap when I go on the tube. So people don’t think I’m a fundamentalist.”

    “Do you drink alcohol?” the radio host asked.

    “Of course not,” the man replied quickly. “I’m a Muslim.”



 



*    “Today the morale of the people is higher than ever before.”*



 



    In London, as in countless other cities around the world, we live with the reality that the next attack is coming. For all their praise of our resilience, no politician nor journalist nor news anchor can assure us that there won’t be more bombs, more chaos, more buses with roofs that are blown off through the air. More suspicion, more racism, more accidental deaths of the innocent in a panicked rush to defeat what we don’t fully understand.



    There are terrorists in London.

    Giacomo applies a pen to the paper napkin, sketching a circle and tearing the tissue at the ends of his marks.

    “And like this?”

    “We’d say full moon,” I tell him.

    We are at a house in L’Aquila, and it is the end of the summer.

    “*Plenilunio*,” he responds.

    Giacomo is my host father in Italy the summer I turn seventeen. We are all spending a weekend in a city some distance from the family’s hometown of Rieti.

    Giacomo was not really his name, I should say. I could only remember that maybe it started with a G, so I’ve named him after my father’s grandfather.

    “And this?”

    “That’s a crescent moon.”

    It is a warm evening and we have just finished dinner out behind the house. Maybe the town is not L’Aquila. This morning I asked the old boyfriend from those years if I mentioned the town or the man’s name in any of the emails I sent him that summer, which I’ve lost.

    He said I hadn’t, but recommended the name Giuseppe.

    Giacomo, or Giuseppe, draws another crescent moon.

    “And this?”

    “That’s a crescent moon,” I repeat. 

    He indicates that I had said that about the other one.

    “They’re both crescent moons. They’re the same.”

    “They are not the same.”

    We must be speaking a language between English and Italian. It’s likely that he is speaking English and that I am speaking Italian, except for the translated lunar phases. My host mother would often chide him for practicing his English with me, since I was there to learn.

    The two images look the same to me.

    “They are not the same.”

    The two moons he has drawn are mirror images, a fact I overlook because there is no linguistic distinction between them in common English. I feel foolish when I realize. They had seemed truly identical to me.

    In Italian, the one bowed towards the right is a luna crescente, like ours. The left is a luna calante, or declining moon. We would say waxing and waning. The Italian terms make more sense: crescent, like crescendo or increase, implies that the moon is inflating towards its full circle. *Waxing crescent* and *waning crescent* are respectively redundant and contradictory.

    I double-checked with my father that his grandfather’s name was Giacomo.

    The point of this story is that you can stare at something for a long time and overlook its obvious qualities.



 



*    So, I used to spend a lot of nights looking at the moon, to get a sense of the surface of the moon. You’ve got the maps, but because of the reflective properties of it, you can only see one small section at a time. As it goes from waxing to waning, the line from dark to light moves across the surface, and you can only see it at the line because of the direct light.

    **You had to go out there for two months of the summer to be able to see it.*



 



    In 1961, America needed something to capture its collective imagination. Yuri Gagarin, on behalf of the Soviets, had just become the first human to orbit the planet, and America was flagging in the space race. The next year, Kennedy made his Address at Rice University on the Nation’s Space Effort, in which he famously said, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard...” It was a sweltering Texas day when he delivered the speech, and it was a hot Florida night when Apollo 11 took off, seven years and two presidents later. Not that it mattered past the launch: There’s no weather on the moon, just shadow.

    It was an era of discord, of race riots, a downward-turning economy, and a war in Vietnam. It was easy to argue that the moon project was frivolous—that putting money towards the space program was ludicrous when there was still poverty in America. Other proposed projects for the money included public school lunches. But the moon became Kennedy’s frontier. My father says that his own working class family, with his mother as the notable exception, was skeptical about the whole thing for a while.



 



    *Well, ever since Kennedy in his inauguration talked about putting a man on the moon Before This Decade Is Out, the whole space program was a top of mind thing. There were missions every few months. The sort of anti-Communist thing, the Space Race with the Russians, was less compelling than the idea that this was some kind of prophecy. Manifest Destiny. They used to stop class for us to watch rocket launches.

**    It comes into consciousness with me when Glenn takes off and they interrupt Romper Room and I’m annoyed and my grandmother snaps and says, “Hey, this is history. Watch it.”*



 



    Dr. Abe Silverstein was reading a book of mythology at home in 1960 when he chose the name Apollo for the manned missions to the moon and back. “Apollo riding his chariot across the Sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program.”

    Grand and dangerous, pulling the sun across the sky is no easy task. Take the story of Phaethon. There are many versions, but the one in Ovid’s *Metamorphoses* goes like this: Apollo had a son with a woman named Clymene, and the son grew up without knowing the god. The son, Phaethon, doubted that Apollo was his father, so he traveled to the palace of the sun to ask. Apollo welcomed him, and promised Phaethon any favor to banish his doubts. Phaethon immediately asked to drive his father’s chariot for one day. Apollo tried to dissuade him, arguing that even Jupiter could not control the team of horses or ride against the momentum of the turning sky. Along the track were the beasts of the constellations: Taurus, Sagittarius, Cancer. Apollo feared for his son, and asked that Phaethon look him in the face and instead accept his *patrio metu*, fatherly anxiety, as proof of his paternity.

    Phaethon, however, insisted. Apollo had made a promise, and could do nothing but implore his son to reign the horses firmly and follow the wheel marks in the sky.

    When the horses left the earth, they felt the lighter load of Apollo’s son and immediately strayed from the track, setting fire to normally cold constellations and—when Phaethon dropped the reigns—scorching the fields, cities and nations below. The earth herself implored Jupiter to end the catastrophe, and since the clouds and rain had been burned away, Jupiter’s only choice was to demolish the chariot. He launched a lightning bolt at Phaethon, who then fell, burning, from the sky. He was buried with the inscription:



 



*hic situs est phaethon currus auriga paterni

**quem si non tenuit magnis tamen excidit ausis*



 



Here lies Phaethon, driver of his father’s chariot

which, though he could not manage, he

  nevertheless fell from a deed of great daring.



 



    The technology the ancients used to get to the moon would be like doing it today with pocket calculators.



    *There’s always this beep. The Federal regulation says there has to be a tone every twenty-five, thirty seconds. Finally they open the door, video, you see him taking steps down the ladder. He pauses at the bottom of the ladder and says, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” and then takes a step on the moon.

**    And I didn’t realize at the time: he kind of blew the line. It’s supposed to be “a man.”

    But then they kind of change the camera around so you can see they’re actually on the moon, see them hopping around like bunny rabbits. You can see they’re starting to have fun with it. Pogoing. They unfurl the flag—it’s got a wire thing in it to keep it out. And it was just great.*



 



    That we even have a moon is a peculiar feature of our planet. Moons are uncommon on planets close to their stars, because the massive pull of a sun far overwhelms the rocky bodies that immediately surround it. The moon also has an unusual composition: a rock with no metal, the same density as our mantle, it is larger and lighter than the more common moons of the outer planets, which are often composed of passing solar system debris picked up and looped into orbit.

    The reigning speculation as to why the moon is there is the giant impact hypothesis, which postulates that a large, Mars-sized object hit Earth four and a half billion years ago. A singularly unlikely event. The impact would have been sufficiently powerful to heat the Earth enough to melt its surface and essentially splash planetary material out into space, where it would accrete into a satellite as it circled the earth.

    The presence of this large satellite stabilizes the Earth’s axial rotation; it does not wobble far from its twenty-three and a half degree tilt. This creates the climate consistency that allows for the evolution of complex, multi-cellular organisms. The reliable rhythms of the planet’s water throughout its history are thanks in large part to the moon. Without it, it is unlikely that life as we know it would have formed.



 



*    They’re doing all these collections they had to do. I think the guy hit a golf ball, you know, and that’s it! It was kind of dumb, just a flag and the guys doing a moonbounce. But it was exhilarating, and there was also a sense of peace.

    When I think of it in retrospect, there was a sense of peace that came from it. Deep. An abiding sense of peace.*



 



    On their 1968 mission, the Apollo 8 astronauts were able to take a picture of the whole earth from the moon—the first picture of its kind. The most famous image of the earth though, *Blue Marble*, was taken four years later. In his thesis for Reed College, *Dao of Dasein*, Ahmed Moharram Kabil collected responses to such a perspective from figures such as the Dalai Lama: “The image of a blue planet floating in deep space, glowing like the full moon on a clear night, brought home powerfully to me the recognition that we are indeed all members of a single family sharing one little house.” Or Heidegger: “I was certainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of the earth taken from the moon. We don’t need an atom bomb at all; the uprooting of human beings is already taking place. We only have purely technological conditions left. It is no longer an earth on which human beings live today.”

    Such an image has the potential to be both a totalizing and alien experience. A photograph of the planet from an exterior body, the moon, both unifies and otherizes the Earth. It emphatically declares that it is an object: one of many.



 



    *You just never saw edges like that on earth, you know. There’s something different or beautiful about it. The purity of the color. So that was my **experience of the moon in 1969.

    And you know partly it’s self-referential and partly it was social and partly it was aesthetic. But in the end I think you know the landing itself felt transient and it was a way of focusing on this object that was kind of strange and beautiful.*



 



    My father was eleven years old when Apollo 11 launched. I called him because I was writing about the moon and I wanted to hear a first-hand account of the landing.



 



    *So we’re out visiting my father and his wife Loretta. I loved Loretta because she was very kind to us. It was pretty good living because my mother—my father had this apartment, it was a corner apartment which was cool. It looked out over Great South Bay. It was a hot night. We didn’t have air conditioning, so the windows were open.

**    My father is there, he’s excited, because he was a jet pilot in the sixties, and this was just the ultimate. Like oh God, that could have been me. He was fascinated and excited by it, but also down on himself.

    Loretta’s making us food and keeping things fun.

    We’re all sitting in this big queen-sized bed, waiting for this thing to happen.*



 



 



*    With grateful acknowledgement to Charles Langmuir’s How to Build A Habitable Planet for information about the moon’s formation and planetary effects, and to NASA’s website for details about the Apollo missions. *

“I am afraid that life is a game.”

“What sort of game?”

Our patient’s hands are clasped over his gut. His right heel rests on his left ankle. He is pained by this question. We can observe his memory twitching as he tries to recreate the experience of this life is a game anxiety.

Long red cuts ripple along the contours of Mona’s face as she blows out the ten candles on her birthday cake. Three are extinguished, trails of smoke emerging like fingers. She blows again and the final seven flames collapse.

So this clown Dave buys the house next door to me and now he is my neighbor. Okay.

Until the moth takes

wing light on dark

on your dark eye

I cannot express.



Hold up a flashlight

to things themselves;

separate the body

into day and night.



Across your screen

the moth wings

are many and pressings

wrinkled hands cupping



and dropping the dark.

Overhead a light

aurora performs its

handless weavings.



These are our angels:

the luminous who sing

in light of things

as they truly are.



That your dark eye

wing light on dark

might tear a part

for the daytime



I reach overhead.

I caress the mothlight

and with its dust

I mark my breath.

 



Now I must stray

from appearance or action,

              because there will not be another image of him

              to superimpose upon the rest and sum over histories



 to derive an unwavering

awareness of the person

              inside him. I must now, on my own, perform the re-

              construction while he still blows on the hair



on her neck though

the pursuit is long-

              forgotten and he dead afresh

              has no breath left to dissemble.



He abused

his talent, or,

              misused is more potent a word

              for his use of that naïve ability to reinvent



or be swayed such that

beginnings happened

              everywhere and always for him,

              happened as each flees her own enemy. . .



Despairing of his own

inner construction

              he prolonged himself, not so skilled in self

              -destruction, feeding *sterilem*, futile, *amorem*,



love with his own

destruction or hope, sperando,

              *nutrit*. What patina of desire (of care)

              so often unpolished her skin



that skin morphed

into bark

              with arresting varnish, while she stood

              wounded and rooted to the earth,



and she unmoving,

became the pivot

              about which unreason willed the act of turning,

              dependence made mechanical and fixed,



reflexive even. I am

left to wonder

              will her foliage survive with his death

              or will it fade along with the calculated forms



on his forearms—

artistry, or, willingness—

              perhaps his lyric or quivers (in death)

              habebunt, *will have*, her still. If not,



perhaps in death

he might

              render her in alabaster not laurel

              with sharper touch and blunter brambles



and perhaps then will I mourn.

He beheld her, in that mansion

which is the white sepulcher of itself: her mazy

                liver-spotted face, her hands’ mockery

                                   of hands, which made his—nimble, cultivated—

                                   play with themselves as if reassuringly; and

a smile, he couldn’t help it, a smile which would have been piteous

were it not also motivated by a pleasure in profit,



                 slit his face—



 that such a creature, broken-

backed with the burden of its pride

                 and reeking of desire-sickness, that such a creature so

      self-deceived, to think

her grotesque pallor that of divine indifference,

and her small black eyes the vortices of love,

                should be beheld at all, that she shouldn’t vanish into her own

unreality;







                 and he—painting her! who had fooled

the birds with his delicious de-incarnation, he

                 masking her unreality with extravagant mercies

so as to make her real,

and that his labor: to turn a woman sweet-sickeningly dreaming of herself

                 into pure coherent light. He chuckled, 



                                  as though enjoying the work very much; she blushed to be looked upon

and smiled at,

and was so much the more revolting to behold



The essence of ugliness is labored ignorance.



And so how ugly was he,

he thought as he beheld himself in her blush and her maze:



 



                 overcome with sorrow,

                 he was revolutionized by laughter. 

water hangs low,

rarely falls.

here, our trees and hands

fall victim to it,

vouchsafed by it.

victims, because it erases

cicadas’ footprints

and the army ants’ prey.

peculiar though, this erasure—

with wider aperture

humidity lifts and stays,

footprints are removed

and yet remain overhead

in extended exposure.

a suspension—

retaining multitudes

that ought to slide

like moments off the hands

you live through.

seize this history

in salt and landscape’s

italic interstice: hold.