Fall 2015 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

Ruby Rae Spiegel’s Dry Land takes place almost entirely in an empty locker-room. Two high school athletes named Amy and Ester straddle and stand on its benches, spread and sprawl on its floor, leaving Gatorade bottles and Hostess wrappers in their wake. They discuss menstruation and athlete’s foot, imagining their blood leaking out of their swimsuits and their skin flaking on the floor. When Amy takes a pill to induce labor, Ester asks her what she will do with the “thing,” and Amy, panicking, suggests that she puts it in a locker.



The abortion is sudden and bloody on the locker-room floor. On opening night at the Boston Center for the Arts, one woman left the theater, hand over mouth. Her companions remained seated but welcomed the excuse to look away from the stage.



Theatre-goers expect the abortion, though. The program has two pages devoted to placing “abortion in context.” The play’s most jarring scene comes a few minutes later, when a janitor pushes an industrial mop down the theater’s left-hand aisle. On stage, he picks up crumpled newspapers and wipes down the set. He scrubs the brown stain in the middle of the floor, until it becomes watery and red, and then disappears.



In the wake of the staged abortion, the janitor denies the audience emotional reprieve. Watching him feels like closing your eyes after looking at the sun, and seeing a yellow sphere burn behind your lids. On the clean, empty stage, the girl’s twisted body remains as afterimage.



The bodies we are forced to imagine stay with us longer than the ones displayed on stage. Early in the play, Ester asks Amy whether she’s ever wondered what her organs taste like—steak, maybe. Another character remembers that after they kissed at a party, Amy asked him to tell the other guests that he came on her face. When the hostess asked her to leave, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Amy and Ester reconstruct their bodies with words, inhabiting empty spaces.



This insistence on female presence comes to Boston at a crucial moment. Last spring, Harvard University conducted a survey that found that one in three graduating seniors had experienced sexual assault while enrolled. President Drew Faust released those results just a week before the opening of Dry Land, calling for an emergency assembly in Harvard’s Science Center. Strangely, though, as students and administrators reckoned with those results, female bodies rarely entered the conversation.



If, after  Dry Land, the female body burned as afterimage, then after the assembly, it faded into white space. David B. Laibson, an Economics professor and member of Harvard’s Task Force on Sexual Assault, delivered a 45-minute PowerPoint presentation. By its conclusion, the central fact of assault had been buried under percentage points, breakdowns and breakouts. In that narrow lecture hall, where students sat on hard metal seats, and clean vacuumed aisles, one could no more see flesh and blood than an elephant squatting on the stage.



The discussion moved from female bodies to gendered spaces. Midway through the presentation, Laibson noted that 14% of reported assaults took place in “single-sex social organizations that are not fraternities or sororities”  That statistic framed much of campus discussion in following weeks. In her e-mail to the student body, Faust proposed four areas of further investigation, including “the locations where [sexual assaults] occur.” Chair of the Sexual Assault Task Force Stephan D. Hyman echoed that sentiment, asking the College to interrogate “the relationship between social spaces and sexual assault.” Though most administrators first responded to the survey with moral outrage, they quickly turned to narrow analysis. Because that analysis focused more on the where of sexual assault rather than the how and why, it lended itself to logistical calculation rather than human understanding.



Students, too, focused their analyses on the logistics of assault rather than the fact of it. Some sought to combat Harvard’s problem by absenting themselves from problematic spaces. A student and a professor published their resignations from exclusive Final Clubs. Several students publicly refused to “punch” those organizations . Others demanded that Harvard restructure those spaces. A Crimson editorial demanded an investigation of the Clubs and one student wrote in to suggest that “the Women’s Center occupy the Porcellian building.” Such arguments implied we can eliminate the sexual assault the way a surgeon eliminates cancer: localize, then remove.



On one level, this approach makes sense. But fighting sexual assault exclusively by fighting Final Clubs offers only a simplified solution to a more complex—and more human—problem.  It’s easy to spot the women slipping behind hired bouncers, tightly wrapped torsos angled sideways. It’s harder to see the flesh and blood under those tight dresses. So, we look at the architecture.



When we fail to consider the presence of female bodies in all spaces, we risk excusing ourselves from dealing with them. Administrators have sidestepped criticism with with vague nods to “inclusivity” and donations to House social budgets. Meanwhile, laying the guilt on certain spaces pardons those who don’t occupy those spaces. It’s the old fallacy of rape—only strong, powerful men could commit such a crime—mapped onto Harvard’s social scene. When one man confesses to the guilt of Final Clubs, those not in Final Clubs can absolve themselves of sin. One resignation letter ended with a plea for Harvard to “rise from the ashes of assault into a new awakening.” If we awaken only to the problem of spaces, and not to the problem of human nature, we might as well just stay asleep.



Fortunately, Harvard women have begun to reinsert their bodies into the campus discussion. Two survivors published bylined narratives of their assaults in the Crimson. The point of such articles is clear: to match names, individual identities, to numbers. If administrators and students respect these narratives, they must not only acknowledge female presence, but see beyond victimhood. The survey defines penetration as “when one person puts a penis, fingers, or object inside someone else’s vagina or anus.” Man as actor, woman as acted upon. One Crimson op-ed noted that “one of every six women who received a diploma last May was raped.” In between the tragedy of rape and the triumph of commencement, those bodies live and breathe in every space on campus. We must meet them in every state, in every place.



Perhaps that what makes Dry Land truly radical. The bodies it forces us to imagine suffer, but they also just exist. Ester sits on Amy’s stomach, and then tickles her, making her laugh until she pees. Amy presses the soles of her feet against Ester’s butt, and shouts “I’m fondling you!” Ester does not take off her swimsuit for a week as a superstitious measure before swimming for a college recruiter. She develops a full-body rash, and triumphs. The play ends as Amy watches Ester’s recruitment video, silent in front of the elegant swimmer on screen. Ester is not beautiful in the way that the girls in the magazines left in the locker-room are. She is beautiful in grossness rather than perfection, in the privacy of the moment rather than in the public gaze.



If Dry Land fills empty spaces, it also imbues moments of pain with triumph. After the abortion, after the clean-up, Amy and Ester practice delivering a presentation about the Florida wetlands. They describe swamps and green ferns that gave men gangrene and malaria and stymied agriculture. Now, the swamps and green ferns are paved over but still present, heavy and throbbing under strip-malls and freeways. They are a reminder of past injury, but also the secret of progress. As Amy and Ester exchange notecards on the now-clean floor, their voices grow louder. They are strengthened by the phantom stains of blood.

A few short steps from the entrance escalator in Boston’s new CityTarget stands a section called Local Pride. It is filled with t-shirts whose heathery fabric gives an appearance of wear and fade—a style CityTarget calls vintage. They are emblazoned with catchphrases, figures, and logos meant to invoke the spirit of Boston: How Bout Them Apples runs overtop a clover, Capt. Carl Yastrzemski surrounds an image of the beloved Red Sox great taking a swing, faded logos of Cape Cod potato chips and Marshmallow Fluff sit just beneath the chest of two v-necks. There are baseballs, water bottles, tote bags, and Moleskines adorned with the phrase Local Boston Pride. Yellow, green, and red foam fingers litter a display stand. Their erect indexes display a #1 and their palms read Local Boston Pride. Yellow drink cozies proudly offer the phrase We Are Boston.

Boston’s CityTarget has hawked this version of Local Pride since its opening on July 26th of this year. The three-floor, 160,000 square-foot retail megacenter is the ninth in a line of Target stores designed to offer, according to a company press release, “customized assortments and services to meet the needs of guests who are increasingly moving into urban centers.” Local Pride is just one fixture of this customization—an attempt to situate CityTarget in a specific urban context.



This attempt at contextualization doesn’t stop at the boundaries of the Local Pride section. The store entryway features several original stadium seats from Fenway Park. In 7-foot helvetica, the phrase hi boston hangs on the wall at the crest of the escalator. The in-store Starbucks features Fenway Park references, listing coffee roasts in the style of the left field scoreboard. There is one red seat in the Starbucks that Sox fans will note as a nod to the marker of Ted William’s longest Fenway home run: a lone red seat in Fenway’s section 42. And there is Fan Central, over which towers a gigantic, shadowbox Target bull’s-eye, filled with baseballs, and within which are sold all things Patriots, Red Sox, and Bruins. Fan Central rounds out the Boston branding, distributing t-shirts, golf shirts, jerseys, hats, baby clothes, ski caps, plush blankets, Pedro Martinez memoirs, helmets, and 30-racks of Bud Light, all branded carefully with Boston sports logos.



The utter inundation of CityTarget with avatars of Bostonian lore suggests that this branding thesis of Local Pride—more than apartment-friendly furniture sets or smaller package sizes—might be what CityTarget is really selling. As the company suggests, the not-so-subtle push to invoke Local Pride ultimately points toward a new demographic paradigm: People, especially young ones with lots of social and economic capital, are moving out of the suburbs and back into cities. For some 40-odd years, the urban center was the recipient of our culture’s most neurotic projections and was largely maligned as a place of crime, drugs, and general decay. However, there has been an urban renaissance of late in which our most colorful and optimistic impressions of America have again become manifest in the symbols and spaces of our cities. Heads of industry are moving corporate headquarters back into downtowns. Retail is filled with clothing branded as “urban” or “streetwear.” People laud the city’s potential for cultural production, as every city we hear about “really has such a cool restaurant scene.” There are tales of blossom in cities like Birmingham or Kansas City and stories of revival in cities like Detroit or Cleveland, all with the tone of: Can you believe this is the new reality?



The suite of analysis of this sociological phenomenon has largely focused on gentrification, the destruction an endemic urban way of life via the suburban interlopers’ attempts to remake the city in their image. In considering the quirks of CityTarget’s presentation—Local Pride, Fan Central, and the like—we are offered insight into a specific component of this dynamic: the suburban émigré’s gaze of the urban.

One imagines that Target’s lifetime guests grew up across the wide expanse of American suburbia. The Targets that dot these suburban landscape are interchangeable, just like the endless subdivisions of cul-de-sacs of two-story vinyl-sided Cape Cod houses in which these guests lived. And now more and more of them are living in places like Boston, perhaps either in school or working their first or second job. They are sleeping in a twin XL in a dorm in Cambridge or under immaculate white sheets in a swanky Back Bay apartment or on the better smelling couch in a friend’s place in Somerville. These émigrés are meant to see in CityTarget what many likely see in Boston: a hodgepodge of symbols that suggest they’ve entered an environment full of distinct culture and history of which they should actually be proud.



To understand how Target has decided to market its new urban shopping center to its moving consumer base is to begin to understand why those same people are moving. It is this suburban-perspective mythologizing of the urban that continues to push many people into American cities. In the coming years, as more and more people continue to hollow out the suburbs in search of the Metropolitan Dream, we will likely continue to see many more spaces like CityTarget that display these fetishized takes on urban history and culture. At the same time, we will also continue to see many new Bostonians will crest CityTarget’s first escalator, turn to the 7-foot hi boston, and feel at home.

Look at the opening of Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” her monument or memorial to the years of Stalin’s Terror:



             No, not under the vault of alien skies,

             And not under the shelter of alien wings—

             I was with my people then,

             There, where my people, unfortunately, were.   



 



“There, where my people, unfortunately, were.”1  Could you write that line as an American poet? Even laying aside the “my people,” could you say “unfortunately”? To say unfortunately about the Terror is to reclaim that word completely—it was not merely injustice, sin, mass murder, but mishap, the utter failure of good fortune—and, by linkage, to make every surrounding word new and real again. American poetry is afraid, I think, of that total, reconstructive accuracy.



This accuracy is not unique to Akhmatova. Nor is it entirely a matter of content: it’s actually part of a style common to translated poems. This has something to do with what Steven Owen described, in his 1990 essay “What is World Poetry?”, as poetry that succeeds “not by words, which are always trapped within the nationality of language and its borders, but by the envisagements of images possible only with words.” But it’s not just portable images, not just poetry at one remove from native verse. Translated work has a linguistic style at the native level of the target language, a blessed awkwardness that we can value on its own terms, even if it is merely the accidental result of “bad” (overly literal) translation.



I’m going to call that style “adjective,” not because poems written like this are particularly adjective-rich, but because they throw themselves at (ad + ject) meanings which may not exist yet. Like noun phrases with a lot of modifiers, adjective poems fail to provide us with exact coordinates, making us triangulate—unsurprising, since translations require words that don’t exist, or don’t quite exist, in the target language. (Adjectives are the opposite of connotations.)  Adjective poems have air in them. They abandon puns in favor of literalism or unfamiliar clichés. Because they stand in ethical relation to their subjects, they are accurate even where they cannot be precise. The bee in my bonnet: why do I feel, reading translated “adjective” poems, that they touch the untouched parts of my language in a way only a foreigner could?



It’s hard to separate this style from the poetry of witness—poems, like “Requiem,” that mark public trauma on time. And we do have a sense that trauma is something that only happens to other people. Consider the following (translated) lines, found more or less by flipping at random through Carolyn Forché’s anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (hereafter AF; all emphases mine):



  



    and in their eyes worms pretended to be

            question marks



There is a literalism to the translation that produces awkward constructions in English, which,



            And in that cry such horror

            and such supplication

            so great was its despair

            that I asked the helmsman



reinterpreted as native poetic choices,



            I saw a man who had been tortured

            he now sat safely in the family circle

            cracked jokes ate soup



exemplify an aesthetic of accuracy, one genetically linked to a reportorial stance.

You may respond, isn’t this kind of witness poetry a twentieth-century practice? Why write about it in 2015? Just nostalgia for the 20th-century left? But look at Kirill Medvedev, writing in 2002 a poem only collected in English in 2012:



            Who’s to blame that

            Leni Riefenstahl remained alive

            while thousands starved to death in Leningrad;

            it’s not clear why we need to

            think about this now;

            tell us about something else,



 



This—witness poetry, adjective witness—is not a naïve or a fixed style, lacking in historical dimension. Medvedev is playing7  here with the history of the politics of memory, and the poetics. This might be how he deals with the commodification of public trauma (which—shocker—happens in Russia too). And others, like Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska, or Israeli national poet Yehuda Amichai, write poems informed by public trauma but not centered around the need to bear witness.

But it’s also not an entirely native style. Medvedev and Akhmatova feel similar in part because the translation obscures the size of the gap between them; Akhmatova writes in fine rhyme and meter, while Medvedev uses free verse and seems in search of what a Slavist friend of mine called a “maximally blunt idiom.” Adjective style comes in part out of the ethical imperative that drives witness poetry, but it’s also created by the translator’s own ethical imperative to render the original as accurately as possible. This is not utilitarian protest poetry—it is the sought-after aesthetic byproduct of ethics, the pearl of translation. If we want to understand what feels like the honesty of such poetry, we have to postmodernly abandon the idea of the poet as the source of their own work.



And yet a lot of what draws us to this translated poetry—and to adjectivity generally—is its feeling of reportorial authenticity, that “total, reconstructive accuracy” which we (Americans, and especially White Americans) are not sure we have any right to claim ourselves, but which we are desperate to hear in others. And there’s something disturbingly imperialistic, or at least hegemonic, about this demand to eat other people’s tragedies. Owen thinks we accept “world poetry” only because we are “assured that the poetry was lost in translation.” But with the poetry of public trauma, we actively seek out the brutal, witnessing voice, and in the broader case of adjective poetry, we crave the blunt instrument of our own language made simple and strange. The foreignness of the poet merely authorizes the consumption of the style we are already hungry for. These, then, are practices of the undeniable, and we support them because we want to feel unable to deny them. A little bent, no?



I’ll end with an (overstated) speculation. Might the problem lie in the outlook of American poets? Far from strutting with unearned authority, we parody that strut. We pun. Compulsively talkative, we are actually too afraid of our own voices, too convinced of having no news to report, no public life to witness. Might this learned helplessness be why we (especially we on the left) try and get our jollies from foreign pain?



No, with a question. How do we get out of this?

Fall finds The Harvard Advocate floating and spinning in good foliar form: physical injuries abound, new locks and lists are rendered irrelevant by infenestrated revelers, and those prone to suspicion let anxieties take the reigns as winter looms. Still, dizziness marks maturation, and a closer look shows our green chlorophyll acquiring elder hues of red and gold.



For columns, in fact, we have three close-readings: the first on representations of the female body in today’s sexual assault discourse, the second on translated poetry’s lauded bluntness, the third on CityTarget as an emblem of the suburban émigré’s urban gaze.



The Art Board, on the other hand, eschews gaze for works that venture into new modes of representation—overlaying and compressing various signals, patterns, identities, and forms. Their experimental consideration of process is the translation of the familiar into the unknown.



Speaking of unknown, it's been a sunny semester for the Poetry Board: Not only do all three poems feature prominent solar imagery, but they are penned by poets new to the Advocate. "Sunset" is generically omnivorous, reedy and ready, tendentious as a spider's web; "hear fell their sinew" is a blood-soaked--or sap-soaked--family narrative; and reading Leah Xue's tiny "Moles" is like watching Nik Wallenda slowly begin to tip over, while beneath him the Grand Canyon sucks in its gut.



 Though they avoid Arizona, the Features Board also grapples with vertiginous journey. Paths wind through cornfields, on cobbled Spanish stones, across Europe’s airspaces. The view from above might be dizzying, but these writers lead us, hand-in-hand, through whatever experience arises.



 The Fiction Board offers two such experiences: one of a birthday party, the other of a man reincarnated as a chicken. The tales seem unlikely to complement each other, but the board views its selections as very much in sync—united by formal ingenuity, elements of the bizarre, and some ambiguity.



Our upcoming winter issue will mark the Advocate’s 150th Anniversary and, in recognition, we will revisit our founding motto, Dulce est Periculum. We find ourselves wondering, at a cultural moment dominated by the question of safety, why the arts and letters have often been oriented, not by tropes of truth or beauty, but by this less examined value: Danger. We welcome contributions that breach habit, cast off comfort’s apathy, or risk a new form of thought. Look for Danger in 2016, as well as other opportunities to help us celebrate our sesquicentennial.

& this sŭn birthed another



with tears in her face -



yellowed or gilded or faded or



green - whatever the sun fancied



for his willowed basement matter



& this sŭn watched another



with splinters at his sapling fingers



from the wood in his veins -



usher three men into the church



where his mother wore her veils



& this sŭn watched her



yearn to flourish when showers came -



unexpected - regular -



and she grew with each one



and she died for so much of each year



& this sŭn saw a boy almost



half the time - through mirrors - weeping



as she had constantly taught him



how to keep the wisps from lighting him



afire - aflame - a glow, distantly



& this sŭn called a meeting



when he was gaunt - taut - white



heat seeping from the crows in her smile



with dreamt messes of unfeeling limbs



- snap - bitten brittle - brittle together



& this sŭn wept



when he raised up the axe to



chop down a mother - child



for the gift of warm space



where new sprouts could breach

moles just want



to have fun can't



wait to see the sun



explode in their



star-shaped eyes



struck like the



child looking in



eyes on the prize:



the mole



a peripatetic



of a whole



network of moles



not quite like



a society of children



in the vicinity of the sun: who



can't wait to have fun



in their hole-shaped eyes



the things they would have found



are not afraid



of the sun. 

Should it still be so
razor-edged & wondrous to see the sacrificial hordes of little men who tarp the sky carve 
vertical welts through the atmosphere, climbing up each gangly axon of ladder, moving—from
what I can see at my post—so diligently at first and then slowing, almost to a stall, seeming 
to dangle in the air, the near-shorn coat of an overgrown sheep swung just below the belly, 
attached by a few strong deluded fibers, or caught in the tropopause, perhaps on a 
malfunctioning glass elevator, gears flooded—

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.



 

I. Destruction and Silence



 



*The accounts of individual eyewitnesses, therefore, are of only qualified value, and need to be supplemented by what a synoptic and artificial view reveals.*



 



In a series of lectures delivered in Zurich in 1997 (and later published in essay form as “Air War and Literature”), the late German novelist W.G. Sebald decries the “curious blindness” to, and willed ignorance of, the truths of destruction that by any logical reckoning should have come to define life in the fractured wasteland of postwar Germany.



Early in the essay he describes a live report, produced by the BBC Home Service, of an air raid conducted, in the midst of the war, on Berlin. The Lancaster bombers take off, soar in broad arcs over the North Sea; the target is reached, and the lethal cargo is dropped. The report, Sebald concludes ironically, “is rather a disappointment to anyone expecting…insight into the event from some superior viewpoint.”



The perfectly German joke, of course, is that the report, given from the vantage of an aeroplane in the sky, issues by necessity from a “superior viewpoint.” Given the purpose of the raid—to raze and reduce centuries of careful stonework, to ignite beams and plaster, to boil streets and the unfortunate traipsers upon them—there could not be a more ideal viewpoint than an aerial one, from which the extinguishing of human lives is made so morally and practically simple.



But Sebald’s real point is that the assumption that the ideal viewpoint for destruction is also the ideal viewpoint for interpretation—a belief deriving from the fallacious assertion that we will see what the aggressors saw, feel what the aggressors felt—is foolish and naïve. It is an approach that ignores the ineffable alchemy wrought by the act of observation.



For many years after the end of World War II, German writers avoided the war, and the Holocaust, as a subject. Of necessity, their moral culpability was likewise elided. As a result, Sebald asserts, they abetted the collective amnesia that had settled like a pall over the German people. Eventually, however, the pendulum swung the other way. The past was viewed with furious condemnation, and an aggressive push was made to view the facts of the war, and the Holocaust, with complete objectivity—as one would view the ground from an airplane. But for Sebald, this was merely another false step, a flight into rhetoric that, in the final analysis, was merely another facet of aesthetic exploitation of destruction.



Yet Sebald is not entirely immune to the temptation of the aerial view. Much of his fiction can be seen as an attempt to salvage it as a metaphor, as an oblique way of discussing historiography—an attempt, in other words, to determine its true applicability. Hence it’s not without reason that readers of Sebald’s fictions often report experiencing a floating sensation, as though they’re hovering above the events and stories described. The first chapter of *The Rings of Saturn* is largely taken up by an essay on the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, a 17th-century English writer that Sebald both admired and emulated. Browne, according to Sebald, “sought to look upon earthly existence, from the things that were closest to him to the spheres of the universe, with the eye of an outsider, one might even say of the creator.” To achieve these “sublime heights,” Browne employed a “parlous loftiness” in his language. Though his sentences are occasionally gummed up by his vast erudition and baroque style, when Browne “does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiraling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air,” Sebald writes, “even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation.”



For Browne, this aerial remove functions counter-intuitively: “the greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity.” When one is looking back at history—when the metaphor is horizontal—this functioning is a commonplace; historical hindsight, we believe, will eventually reveal the truth. But when one views the past aerially—when the metaphor assumes verticality—the paradox becomes clear. Sebald desires Browne’s preternatural magnification—which might constitute the “historical metaphysic” capable of “bringing remembered events back to life” that is sought after in all of his fiction—but it remains a pipe dream. The higher the viewpoint in Sebald’s fictions, the greater the sensation of nausea, of vertigo. All we see is flattened, and objects and structures are robbed of their discreteness: “Such is the dark backward and abysm of time,” Sebald writes. “Everything lies all jumbled up in it, and when you look down you feel dizzy and afraid.”



It is with this bevy of concerns that Sebald assumes the task of creating fictions, turning to the practice with a sigh of impotence. The impossibility of pure history, of the reconstitution of memory, is the dreadful and immanent nausea that suffuses his prose, that forces catalepsy upon his narrators and characters. And just as the constituents of time and history become jumbled together, so, too, do the elements of the work of fiction. In an essay on W.G. Sebald, James Wood writes that though “his deeply elegiac books are made out of the cinders of the real world, he makes facts fictive by binding them so deeply into the forms of their narratives that these facts seem never to have belonged to the actual world.” The warp of fiction is braced by the weft of fact, and the resulting tapestry is a talisman aimed at teasing, from the welter of an obliterated past, a representative view of history.



 



***



 



Memory is a human construction. The world (that is, the natural world) is destined and indeed designed to forget itself, and in the struggle against this constant ablation, as Sebald sees it, we have only the bluntest of reconstitutive tools at our disposal: a language whose inner cohesiveness and epistemological efficacy are to be doubted, and a smattering of vague and half-focused photographs that may depict, but more often seem merely to adumbrate.



It may seem strange to discuss the doubting of language with regard to an author such as Sebald, who incorporates antiquarian syntax into the elegant scaffolding of his prose, but aphasia in Sebald is reserved for very specific themes: language may dance around certain subjects, but it may not spring from them. “The construction of aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects from the ruins of an annihilated world,” he writes, “is a process depriving literature of its right to exist.” As other writers and theorists have asserted, there is a moral obligation not to derive aesthetic effect from supreme destruction. As an extension of this claim, Sebald asserts as an epistemological reality that it is impossible to derive aesthetic effect from oblivion.



Despite this weakness, within Sebald’s fiction, language is still the master of appearances, of surfaces, of phenomena. It may be employed, with sufficient effect, to describe spaces, buildings, landscapes, to painstakingly limn their physical relations to one another. Hence there is little doubt embedded in the narrator’s description, in *Austerlitz*, of the Centraal Station in Antwerp; the spires and turrets and domes are presented as faits accomplis, real and ineffaceable, undoubtable. Otherwise, if uncertainty were allowed to creep into and compromise language’s simplest functions, Sebald’s magisterial descriptions of architectural oddities would collapse beneath an equally grandiose anxiety.



Sebald’s great skill in precisely delineating surfaces, and the power that the framework of his fiction grants to language in this endeavor, sometimes obscures a great, though intentional, failure of his language: It is very nearly incapable of elaboration, of developing images external to the source material or which are not, to some degree, a meditation on ineffability. The black hole of oblivion ever reigns in Sebald’s writing, drawing the fiction into itself and preventing the construction of complex aesthetic effects.



If the typical sentence of Proust—the master of elaboration—is meant to ambulate, to rise and fall in synoptic waves, flirting ever with the achievement of liftoff and gesturing, in these pendent moments, at images outside of the text, outside of language itself, the typical Sebaldian sentence is meant to incorporate and contain—it remains a self-sufficient, closed system. The uncertain tempo of a Proustian elaboration stands in stark contrast to the steady and unrelenting tempo of Sebald’s writing; Sebald’s sentences roll on, devouring details and preserving them in the process, embedding facts (real or fictive) in their elegant, multiclausal construction.



When memory seems merely a cancerous stimulation of oblivion, and language reigns supreme only in the realm of detail, then the main concern of language is clearly dictated. From *Austerlitz*:



*[T]he darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.*



Sebald has set himself the impossible task of the metaphysical documentarian, to collect and preserve the entirety of history via the “places and objects” that bear it, and to lathe it all into some manageable form of representation.



There is a very famous sentence in *Austerlitz* that runs for nine pages and contains an unbearable amount of information about the Theresienstadt concentration camp. What’s remarkable about it is that despite its length, it remains a completely flat sentence, unfolding in segmented regimentation, like a spider testing its limbs. Without devolving into nonsense, and without becoming a mere catalogue, the sentence functions as a precise historical record containing no aesthetic elaborations. It is a beautiful record, but a record still, one that does not attempt to derive aesthetic affect from oblivion, but merely places the reagents of the past in close proximity to one another, in the hopes that, by some obscure process of relation, they will generate an image of the past. The sentence does not so much limn the past as perform the ritual necessary for its appearance (unsurprising, then, that Sebald’s prose is frequently described as “processional”). When a reader of Sebald admits to a feeling of levitation, it is not because he or she has been “borne aloft” by aspiring helices of prose. It is because Sebald has done his best to write flat sentences, which we look down upon in more ways than one, sensing patterns and signs immured within the text.



 



II. Buildings in Time



 



*The noblest claim of modern historiography nowadays is that it is a mirror; it rejects all teleology; it no longer wishes to ‘prove’ anything. All this is to a high degree ascetic; but at the same time it is to an even higher degree nihilistic.*



 



History, perforce, is a function of time, and so it is only natural that the characters in, and narrators of, Sebald’s fictions frequently expatiate upon the nature of time. Given the force of materiality in Sebald’s fictions, and the supernatural tendencies ascribed to the agent of time, it’s unsurprising that these discursions typically aim at the wholesale reification of time—a fortiori, they are characterized by the attempt to convert time into a spatial phenomenon.



“I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all,” Austerlitz opines, “only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like.” Time is a wavering image shorn of one crucial dimension by the feeble reach of our minds; it is the projection into our reality of an ungraspable complex.



Thus Sebald’s abiding interest in architectural oddities, in structures that bear time—that manage, even, to function as time itself. Country homes and train stations and vast stone edifices (memorials, monuments, mausolea) abound in Sebald’s work. Oftentimes they are baroque and nearly illusionistic structures, full of sealed-off rooms and curlicue passages that defy our understanding. Always they have lapsed into desuetude: Windows are broken, and dust has settled in a gauzy integument on the inner districts of the home; hallways designed to channel crowds now abide in silence, bereft of the patter of crossing feet; creepers and liana crowd yards in vicious, encroaching skeins.



In a prosaic sense, as monuments, these structures are historical records, but in the Sebaldian sense, they function as structural allegories—they are physical manifestations of the abstruse calculus of time. In The Emigrants, the narrator inspects a country home designed so that “on every floor hidden passageways branched off, running behind walls in such a way that the servants…never had to cross the paths of their betters.” Like the eunomic reticulation of chambers and paths in a termite nest, these passageways go unnoticed by the average viewer. “Often,” the narrator continues, “I tried to imagine what went on inside the heads of people who led their lives knowing that, behind the walls of the rooms they were in, the shadows of the servants were perpetually flitting past.”



It is out of such “hidden passageways” and dim defiles that the past returns to us in Sebald. Conscious excavation is likely to yield no results because there is no precise point of oblivion around which to focus our work; there are no nodes or images that may be cajoled into revealing their essences. Rather, the return of the past functions by whimsy. It is like a door that swings open unexpectedly and beyond which lies a ramified series of hallways, through which images of the living and the dead flit, generating a wind that reaches outward past the threshold, and which alters our world in fey ways. Voluntary memory is incapable of revealing the past. It merely dredges up artifacts that, on their own, are speechless.



There are subtle instances of this phenomenon of whimsy to be found throughout Sebald’s work. In *The Emigrants*, the narrator reads a journal left by one of his deceased relatives that describes a journey to Jerusalem and the desolation he finds there; in *The Rings of Saturn*, the narrator describes an elaborate matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, a painstaking reconstruction of the vanished edifice. A quieter example: Austerlitz, who as an adult has studied the history of siegecraft, spies in a square “a peasant woman wearing several layers of coats, and waiting behind a makeshift stall for someone to think about buying one of the cabbages she had piled up into a mighty bulwark in front of her.”



Historical images, and those of our personal pasts, return to us, outsize or shrunken. To borrow Sebald’s description of Browne’s vision, “It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time.” It is to Sebald’s great credit that his fictions, and the sentences therein, function like architectural oddities, which, while not quite grasping the obscure infrastructure of time, manage to approximate it, and facilitate its functioning. Sebald’s sentences are themselves the blueprints of ramified hallways. Like intricate diagrams, they allow for the supernatural resonance of past and present, fact and fiction, memory and oblivion—a resonance that offers life, obliquely, to the misremembered shades of history.

You don’t have to hold my hand. Drift through these streets like a dog, if you want, disheveled and exhausted, or waft in and out of the space like the smell of paprika escaping from a copper pot in some grandmother’s kitchen, the smell following you down these winding blocks. Allow yourself some mental space to imagine anarchists as hordes of gothic figures blowing down avenues, bat-bearing teenagers with gas masks and blood dripping down their fists, but remind yourself that this is, in truth, your right brain’s delusion. If you sit tight and behave, all you’ll encounter is slices of words on walls; age-old cadavers, horses and rusty rifles long swept away by time; and no unyielding dust to accumulate underneath your fingernails (this isn’t an archaeologist's dig). Stick your hands in your pockets, or stuff your armpits with them, but the day is going to get stuffy and hot, and you should be warned about personal slime.



Run give your name to Nick Lloyd; he’ll check it off in his little Moleskine notebook. Nick is from Manchester, England, but he’s lived in Barcelona for over twenty years, leads Civil War tours, and has just published a book about the city’s anarchist geography, so that should reassure you. It’s nine a.m., dawn by Barcelona standards, and you’re standing on Plaça de Catalunya, the large square at the heart of the historic center. Boutiques are slowly opening; tourists are beginning to populate the streets, eager to start their shopping days early. Nick is drinking coffee from a paper cup with a plastic top. It might feel like over-indulging, but do lean back into the comfort of a guide. Immerse yourself in your true tourist self, relishing in the plastic smell of souvenirs and the giddy self-consciousness of taking a selfie with your brand new selfie stick. This is not your city, but you can pretend. Walk with elegance and style. Smile. Nod. Don’t turn your neck around in the leash.



Take a moment, now, to pretend you’re George Orwell. Inhabit his silky, foreign skin. You arrive in the city in December, 1936, wearing your English bourgeois outfit, to fight as a volunteer in the anarchist brigade. Suddenly, you feel yourself engulfed in a new world:



 



[In the streets] the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. [...] Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers [...] Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers' shops were Anarchist notices [...]  solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves.



 



You think you’re stuck in an idealist’s fantasy. The city has morphed into a red and black dream, the colors of the anarchist trade union, the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), their huge flags hanging from every window. All shops have been collectivized. Rough, working-class clothing is the only accepted form of dress—as you realize, uncomfortably, noting your incongruity. Social hierarchies have been abolished, and all members of society are to behave as perfect equals. Your assessment is easy and natural: The conflict that has been presented to the rest of the world as a duel between democracy and fascism is, in fact, an anarchist revolution.



Now would be a good time to bite your nails. You might choose to answer your mother’s text, check Facebook statuses, upload your selfie, and remind yourself that at least you’re not a Spanish worker in the 1930s. For Spanish workers in the 1930s, anarchism is a sisterhood, a brotherhood. When the state fails to offer workers proper state education, the anarchists set up cultural centers to offer unofficial teaching. When the urban elite backs an unregulated, capital-driven economic system, the CNT takes to the streets to defend workers’ rights. When a consistently brutal police harasses the so-called ‘criminal class,’ anarchists respond by giving rifles to teenagers, turning the streets into a video-game-like maze of paramilitary traps. They write political pamphlets. They open worker cooperatives, vegetarian restaurants, and popular canteens that allow families to put food on the dinner table. A spider web with no concentric pattern, the CNT becomes the invisible tie that binds the working class together and gives each of its 1.5 million members the right to an identity.



 



Now, I’m going to tell you right away, if at any point you get lost, or feel like throwing up, please let me know, because I’ll want to include that in here. We haven’t come across the smell of raw meat yet, human flesh decomposing in the midday heat with a throng of flies buzzing around as if they were leaking out of bullet holes along with blood and pus, but that’s exactly how the tour starts. On the square, a flock of pigeons erupts into movement, making a racket as they flap their wings. You jump, but Nick forces you into an entirely different time frame: It’s the evening of July 18th, 1936 (five months before Orwell’s arrival), and the smell of gunpowder still pervades the air. On Plaça de Catalunya dead Franco horses and amateur anarchist fighters lie scattered side by side, anonymous. Barcelona is Spain’s only modern, industrial city and today, you discover, it has become a city at war. The anarchists have allied with their visceral enemy, the police; emerged from their hiding places early in the morning to confront the troops that tried to invade the city; stormed the army barracks by the old port; and won. This is General Franco’s first defeat in the history of the Civil War. The Barcelona anarchists have proved their military valor, their Spanish manliness, and their commitment to defend the Republic—for which they still refuse to vote—against a backward, fascist military coup. Lluís Companys, the President of Catalonia, hands over the keys of government to these new “masters of the city and of Catalonia.”



This is absurd, you’ll cry, because anarchists don’t want control. Any authority and hierarchy is a masked form of domination and exploitation! Good point, but perhaps next time you could raise your hand. Throw out your chewing gum, at least. (It’s not necessary for you to show off. This isn’t a competition.) But the anarchists, yes, ultimately chose war over disorganized revolution. They aligned with the united left parties’ Popular Front government, agreeing to share power with bourgeois republicans. Fast-forward to one year later—yes, I see your hand—and that same government, under communist influence, would declare the anarchist movement illegal, subsequently arresting, torturing, and executing any suspected member. Orwell was forced to flee, with his wife, the republicans he had come to fight for.



Have a sip of water, if you were prudent enough to bring some with you. Don’t give in to the temptation of checking your phone. Nick, in his Manchester accent, is your only god. Latch onto him. If you keep your attention focused long enough, until your goggle eyes grow dry and silence drops inside your mouth, coating your teeth and gums like tar, Nick’s words might begin to wriggle their way into the sinewy fibers of your brain. Nick, now, is reading some Orwell passages aloud, showing pictures on his iPad as you walk through tourist-invaded arteries, but you know that if you close your eyes in the midst of the city’s narrow, gothic streets, your feet will stop to moan. Press your palm against the walls and they sweat ice, like medieval stones do. This is where they burned convents, tell yourself. The anarchists looted churches and displayed ancient relics in the open, for everyone to see that bones are just bones and there is nothing holy about putrefaction. On Plaça del Pi they smashed the ornate rose window, turning it into a gaping hole, stinking of darkness.



Nick, in the meantime, is still walking you around like a well-trained herd. A few tokens of history remain engraved in the city’s bones. On Plaça Sant Felip Neri, you visit the remains of an orphanage bombed during the war by Mussolini’s Italy. In the holes left over by the shelling you can imagine fitting the tiny heads of a hundred ghost children, aligning them one after the other. Somewhere else, on a stone bench, Nick shows you a couple of bullet holes from the battle on July 18th, 1936, but there is no commemorative plaque and the only thing that adorns it is some drunkenly scribbled graffiti. Nick mentions the mass graves that are still being unearthed today, and sometimes buried anew in the silent land of Spanish taboos. He doesn’t lead you to the Barcelona Civil War museum, because there is none. On Plaça de Catalunya, the once-glorious communist party HQ, you discover, bedecked with the faces of Lenin and Stalin, is now the city’s largest Apple store.



 



America!you cry, as if this were your home. You have reached the end of the tour, and in your bones you feel yourself plunging deep into your yearning for memorabilia, a desire to stop, to possess, to master the fear of letting this one day—an entire day!—perish unnoticed. It is useless to fight this primal urge. Open your map, and find La rosa de foc. (This is Barcelona. Of course there’s an anarchist bookstore.) It’s not a dank cave but a small shop where they sell Civil-War-era posters; books with titles such as Guide of Natural Medicine: Natural Treatments; black T-shirts with obscure anarchist slogans; and a documentary called The Fourth World War(whose back cover does not mention when the third one might have taken place). In their window they proudly displayAgainst Democracy, a pamphlet written by the Coordinated Anarchist Groups collective, which presents, right after the introduction, a Photoshopped picture of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty devoured by flames in a post-apocalyptic landscape. It’s hard to know what Orwell would say to this—after all, he didn’t grow up in a civilization of McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Coffees—but they do sell his Homage to Catalonia here, in Spanish and Catalan translations.



Present yourself as an American, and the two middle-aged men who work there will love you. Juan has the grumpy attitude of a disillusioned idealist: He’s the let-me-sit-in-my-chair, I’d-rather-stare-at-you-behind-my-desk-than-chit-chat kind of guy. Antonio is skinny and smiles a lot. An intellectual who’s studied sociology, journalism, social anthropology and linguistics, he likes to blabber excitedly about American cinéma d’auteur. (If you nod and smile sufficiently you’ll avoid the Spanish grammar obstacles and your own sixth-art incompetence.) They’re like an old couple, the two of them. You can imagine them rehashing the same arguments: Remember that time when you got us arrested? and I never said that participatory economics would be a sustainable alternative to capitalism, you’re distorting my wordsor You’re always complaining about old people stuck in their ways but you’re getting old yourself, douchebag. I’ll let you figure out who could have said what.



When Juan offers you a copy of a special edition of Solidaridad Obrera (Worker Solidarity), the CNT’s newspaper—and Antonio jokes: “You probably shouldn’t take that on the plane back with you!”—you know they are both eager to share, with an American, their thoughts on American society.



“It’s funny, because the US is really a country of contradictions,” Antonio begins. “You have Chomsky, whom we even sell here, but then you have all those conservatives… And all those people with guns!” he exclaims, his face a mix of dismay and confusion, as if he could never conceive of such a situation in Spain.



Juan, solemnly, nods.



“You also have small demonstrations, with cardboard signs that you hold up like this, in your hand, no? There’ll be a tiny group of people and they’ll just walk around in circles, right?”



Before you can comment on this colorful vision of politics, Juan has resumed talking:



“Here, in Spain, we have huge demonstrations. Thousands of people in the street.” He indicates outside with a wave of the hand. “These streets, here, filled with people. And what’s the purpose?”



He shrugs.



“Well, you’d hope it would have some kind of effect, wouldn’t you? It’s a matter of hope, at least,” you might try to say.



But Juan is gloomy and leans back in his chair.



“Whether here or there, it doesn’t serve any purpose,” he declares.



Antonio intervenes, amused. He points to his friend.



“He’s an anarchistwithouthope,” he says, a large smile on his face.



Exit the bookstore with the newspaper in your backpack. Still drunk on revolutionary adrenaline, you’d be inclined to look around for hooded aggressors, rifle-bearing adolescents and barricade-building enthusiasts, but on this contemporary Plaça de Catalunya, where people are busy staring into shop windows and letting their ice cream melt all over their hands, instead of anarchists, what you can’t help but notice is the pigeons. You don’t know if George Orwell noticed the pigeons. Were there pigeons at that time? They gather in flocks but they seem always to stray a bit to the side, individually, as if moved by some internal gear-shifting device. They look up at you and cock their heads, asking you a question that they can’t formulate and that they know you couldn’t answer anyway.



“You might want to cover your heads,” Nick had warned you suddenly, earlier in the morning, when you’d reached the edge of the square.



Here’s a new kind of danger, you’d thought. You’d almost crouched for protection. But the only projectiles you could see were on the ground: they formed a carpet of perfectly round, little white mounds of poop.



“This is the shit tree,” Nick explained, in his perfect English accent.



You look up and it’s true: like a dream, the pigeons never went away. It’s disappointing, almost. Shooting off when touched, the pigeons know how to congregate, time after time, stubbornly, like meaty rubber bands. They hide among the branches and wait for you to arrive. Imagine them grinning as you pass underneath. If you’re sufficiently paranoid, you won’t need to look up. You’ll trust that, in Barcelona, even the pigeons have learned the trick: Close one eye, aim, and try to hit your target in the face—barely hopeful but consumed by the creative urge to capture someone, break open a hole, leave a mark.

Lucy hasn’t been able to get even a word in with her boyfriend Tom and she’s just about had enough, though of course the birthday boy was always going to be the center of attention, birthday aside, what with the moody indigo blazer and the black button down and bolo tie and the fake golden crown to which he’s glued a plastic eyeball where the center jewel ought to be, with his charismatic conversational virtuosity and his sizable mental library of anecdotes and his appetite for attention. Here’s a little bit about Lucy: Lucy’s got those big eyes that turn heads and inspire double-takes, eyes complexly hazel with droplets of jealous green and melancholic blue mixed in those oceanic irides; her aesthetic can best be described as carefully careless, though tonight she’s paid particular attention to the first part, strutting her stuff in her tea-length shimmering dress with a pattern like the night sky and her bold eyeliner decisions; she’s exceptionally pretty but doesn’t feel that way about herself, and because of this she’s got a complicated relationship with compliments and mirrors, to give you a sense of the girl.

I must not have behaved during my first go around. The half-formed sin from humanhood lingers in my gizzard, curdling like gasoline putty. Truth be told, I can’t recall that life or what I did to land myself here. Now my existences last eight weeks, and they’re coming by the thousands. For instance, yesterday I was born in Gibbon, Nebraska. I am a Nebraskan, and Hell goes by Orlin Ranch around here, or so the canvas feed bags suggest.