Fall 2019 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

The party was impenetrably
loud and in motion.

A while later, the rooms thinned.
It started to snow. A train

roared past like a redaction.
The great writer played his stereo low,

and I sat on the couch
between two aging professors

and pretended to know who he was playing.
It became clear to me

he was as weak and terrified as anyone.
When it was just the two of us,

he took down some brandy
and offered the spare room. Now wind

drags over this house
he must have left while I was sleeping—

where I’ve woken to find myself alone
with all his things.

At some point
I had a swollen muscle
)or a body
that pretended to be
one swollen muscle)
Loaned to me by a tuft of sugar cane
I don’t know how to hold sweetness
or vastness the right way
Like a poacher caressing dirt
before cutting for some long absent bone
What I’ve been able to hold has long
been lost in a hole of the white
porcelain of one whole universe’s heirlooms
Cartography is just the
impulse to jump
off of things
The righteous have since discovered
a black hole with its maw wide open
Who can compete
with that kind of devotion?
I certainly can’t
My stomach
Won’t hold any more of
The universe’s ash
I’ll cough it up in the yard
Next to the ire and the musk
and the citrus tree
While the man across the street
gives audience with pillaging eyes
At my wither
at my pinked failure
Who will hold my hair
when that love escapes
my mothering tendon
Who will hold me through
All my wretched

Honey locust and the fishing rod.
Hook silvered creek.

You say a river baptized your grandpa.
And from the canopy of branches,

you step into this purl of rain
to hold a bream like a sheet of copper.

Gods change things all the time.
Your feet into cattails, fingers ox eyes—

tomatoes lipped on spun vines.
Hold one, cut one. Who knew light could do that?

Each summer, you are one chalked fir
snagged on a feral green hill.

The heavy rust rattle of cicadas.
Three hawks in the brush.

If not the moon,
then a word for it.

Who knew what sons we might have in spring?
Mine, the warm glide of his hair.

I should have said that I am on the brink of emotional disaster, sitting alone at the
end of a rustic dock unsure if whitecaps from the lake sways us, or if it is turmoil
from within. There have been no ducks, perhaps never any at all. Every morning, a
hummingbird dipped in white and black before the garish flowers.

I should have said that ants are a way of looking down instead of looking up, that
leafcutters in particular, form the largest, most complex societies after humans. I do
not think there will be much left after us. On Earth — where traveling against the
flow of migration leads me to indigenous cultures, revealing one privilege of the
place where I was born.

And when a woman from Michigan on la lancha shared with me her amazement at
how the Mayans suffer poor vision but never go get glasses, that she sends money
each month to the family of her adopted child, that she hopes the local boys fishing
with spools can grow up to have “good lives,” it is because I am practicing restraint.
In watching the ants, my footsteps had razed part of their trail and they frantically
skittered around the intrusion. Guilt, I think, is dangerous to act upon without long
consideration.

I don’t know how to tell you where I am, a place my mind grasps at. Volcán San
Pedro: where tourists hire armed guards to flank them on their trek to the top. Do it
for your safety, do it for peace of mind, the forums say. “Tourista Policia [sic] armed
with 9mm Beretta pistols,” and the beaming, damp-faced selfies, panoramas of Lake
Atitlán from up top — shared thousands of miles back home with captions like
“Living my best life.”

I should have said the staring from men in trucks as I walk the rocky path between
villages feels more menacing when we don’t share a language. What am I doing
here?

I should have said that back home, I lived in a house with a man and his guns. That
a lawyer told his wife how cases of rape and domestic violence skyrocket after major
sporting events like the SuperBowl.

I’ve been avoiding you. Stray dogs cry into the tropical valley below. I should have
said: a woman travels to a lake with her lover, then alone and she wakes up from a
nap to the dark. The lake is unmoving, it doesn’t reflect anything. She leans out over
the dock — is she alive? Is she alive?

<pre>

i only ever promised to lay there

           brown babies

under the mosquito net

kept squealing until i

quiet as a bird could sleeping with a god

pulled up my socks for them

over her head all proud & puffed up but

all the way to my knees

i made such a mess in the bed

y volví a casa

had to get out of the muck

without any boots or silver or romance

asquerosa

untouched by anything but dirty asphalt

i’d guzzled the mango nectar

i wanted for someone to douse me

in the fridge without permission

in my island’s holiest water

unlocked the bolts of my need

to make me grown

como un tamborito, piel abierto

tell me a thing or two

tell me,

about what it feels like to eat yourself up

if the bachatero doesn’t

wailing in sing song &

roll the güiro down the alley

as ripe as the sorrow

all night did he ask for enough

underneath my pillow

forgiveness? if i walked out into the

i put my hands to work &

street wearing my childsclothes would

hid my girlcharms

someone write a song about me

my stink of youth that

as if i were a woman? my stomach

offends the god, chokes the bird,

went tiktikatik & i became a grand band;

tucks me in, & i can tell you it sings

the men in their wifebeaters & the dogs &

it sings my need like a fable, like a howl

</pre>

The patrolman approaches slow, scared                              I will jump.
                                                            He is so young.
                                                            His hands tremble                              like the word please.
                              But I have no intention today of leaving my body.

I’ve paused                               only to watch the surfers collide with the Pacific.
                              Such strange symmetry:                              what the wave gives,                              what it takes.
                              Where one bails beneath the break,                              another glides to shore.
                                             See, I want to say.
                                            We live.
                              

In the early 1970s, several construction workers uncovered three ancient tombs on the side of a hill in Mawangdui, Changsha while building an air raid shelter for a nearby hospital. The construction halted, archeologists were summoned, and an excavation proceeded that revealed what was to become the crown jewel of our hometown: Xin Zhui. We called her Lady Dai, the wife of Li Chang, the Marquise of Dai, the Ancient Hag. We saw the 2,100-year-old woman in a makeshift museum exhibit later. Her breasts, chalky white and full of craters, reminded us of the moon. Her tiny nose hairs—still intact thanks to the acidic, magnesium-rich preservation liquid that soaked her body—looked like either the legs of the flies that we regularly caught or the hairs that were beginning to sprout from our own armpits. Her face was the shape of a sunflower seed and her mouth, gaping open with the tongue protruding like a tiny white fish, suggested that she was laughing in her moment of death.

The archeologists said Xin Zhui was a noble woman who enjoyed fine musical performances and had a taste for imperial foods. They had found 138 melon seeds in her stomach, from which they deduced that she had eaten a melon two hours before her death, and that she died during the summer when the fruits were ripe. She was buried with over 1,000 pieces of vessels, tapestries, and figurines. Her tomb was adjacent to the tombs of her husband and her son, who had died years before her and whose bodies were fully decomposed.

When the museum opened the makeshift mummy exhibit for locals (the actual exhibit, the one the whole world would come to know, wasn’t completed until we were in our twenties), we went every afternoon. We pressed our noses against the glass case and fogged it up with our breaths. We agreed that the Ancient Hag must have been, once upon a time, very beautiful. How could they have wanted to wrap her dead body with twenty layers of silk cloth otherwise? Her skin must have been luminous and pale, her eyes double-lidded like those of a true Chinese beauty, her cheek charmingly sunken with dimples, or wine nests, as we called them.

In public, we made sure to pair these compliments with derision, for we knew that it was improper to praise pretty things. It was an era in which we scoffed at skirts and cut our hair short like boys, a place in which the ugliest peasants were lauded. We had burnt our silk handkerchiefs and jade jewelry in a great fire that lasted for three days and three nights. Our books, too: translated copies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pride and Prejudice, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Complete Sherlock Holmes wilted in the flames. The fire had kept away mosquitoes as we danced around it, chanting songs praising Our Great Leader. So, even as we admired the mummy’s silk wrapping and richly colored robes, we denounced her as a capitalist. Even as we fantasized about her alabaster skin and soft pink lips, we called her the Ancient Hag.

On the walk back from the museum, we’d stop by a street stall and get popsicles. We licked and sucked on them until the cold sweetness broke into small pieces that we tucked under our tongues. Sometimes we held competitions to see who could insert the greatest length of popsicle into their throats while neither choking on nor breaking it. The trick was to tip our faces toward the sky and pretend that we didn’t have gag reflexes, that our bodies were no different from those of long, brown eels that had a straight tunnel from mouth to anus. In fact, we pretty much were eels. Our limbs were always covered with fine brown dust. We only wore earth-toned clothes. Whatever accumulated under our fingernails was the color of shit. The only bright hue that disrupted our brownness was the red scarf we wore around our necks. Yet despite our eel-ness, whenever we held our popsicle-eating competitions in the humid Changsha afternoons, men smiled at us in the streets and called us tongzhi, comrades.

Because there had not been school in years, because our older siblings had left to work in communes in remote parts of the country, because our parents had been reassigned from their college professorships or editorial jobs to faraway factories where they made matchboxes or envelopes by hand, we did whatever we wanted that summer. One day we walked eight kilometers to the only pond in Changsha that still had wild frogs and speared them with sticks. We were too young to remember starvation in the way our older siblings did, but we craved meat. We roasted their bloody little legs over a fire and ate the charred pieces with our dusty fingers. One day we wrote dazibao denouncing our old English teacher as a Rightist and pelted him with stones until he died. He had once humiliated two of us in front of the whole class for mispronouncing the word sandwich. One day we met up with boys who used to be our classmates and went swimming in the Yangtze River. When we emerged from the brown water, our shirts soaking wet, our hardened nipples pointed at them like fingers.

Every day we went to visit the Ancient Hag in her glass case. Every day she seemed to grow younger, her cratered skin smoother than it had been the day before, her sinewy arms leaner and stronger. At that point the museum had been open long enough that most locals had already seen her, so we had the room to ourselves. What a disgusting member of the bourgeoisie, we’d say, loud enough for the guard to hear. But silently we compared her to the beautiful Chang’e, the goddess of the moon who achieved immortality when her husband did not and lived for an eternity in her chilly palace, accompanied only by her white rabbit. Such must have been the case for the Ancient Hag, too. The plaque by her body explained how she had died years after her husband and remained widowed, never remarrying. She was the emblem of a virtuous woman, a loyal wife. Now her body, touched by no one besides her husband until its unearthing, was alone behind this glass while his had long returned to the soil. On our walk back, sliding the popsicles up and down our hot throats, we concluded that she was buried with such riches not only because she was beautiful, but also because she was chaste. Didn’t our fathers tell us about our great-grandmothers who were honored with tall stone arches for refusing to remarry, keeping their bodies untouched for thirty years? Didn’t they build wide white bridges over rivers in the countryside for the women who had killed themselves to follow their husbands into the afterlife? Surely the Ancient Hag was rewarded, too, for her chastity.

We didn’t think of chastity in terms of sex, of course. Sex was bourgeois, individualistic, dirty. We never thought about sex (we only thought about sex when we saw dogs doing it in the streets, but that was before they were all eaten along with the cats and rats). We believed chastity was like loyalty. Devoting your body to a person and a cause. Our Great Leader told us that a revolutionary should be loyal to the Party and free of vulgar desires, so we strove to be chaste. We purged ourselves of all but the most necessary wants. Aside from the popsicles—the only thing that stood between us and heat strokes—we ate one meal a day. We allowed ourselves to smile only when we discussed revolutionary activities. We never wanted the boys with whom we went to the river; the only man we found handsome was Our Great Leader. Although he was in his seventies by then, most pictures of him showed a man with slick black hair who looked younger than our fathers. Didn’t our mothers tell us that the big yellow star on the Chinese flag represented Our Great Leader, and the four little stars surrounding it represented the flock of women who wanted to marry him? Wouldn’t it be an honor to keep our bodies pure so that one day, we might be worthy to bear for Our Great Leader the foremost spawn of the revolution?

With that logic, we assuaged the guilt we had once felt for admiring the Ancient Hag. After all, she was a role model in her own way: an embodiment of chastity and loyalty, even if she was a capitalist. We began to adore her openly. We admired out loud her snow-white burial robe and the cloud-shaped designs on her red lacquer dinnerware. We argued boisterously about which one of us might one day be as beautiful and chaste as she, our voices shrill and insistent in the empty museum chamber. By August we had ceased to be afraid of the guard, a stooped old man who stood still as a Buddha statue while eyeing our brown limbs.

Inspired by the Ancient Hag, one of us suggested a vow of chastity. It seemed like the logical next step for our aspiration toward complete purification, a process in which our brown bodies would be scrubbed and made precious. It was the year in between years when we had no school, when our parents had stopped speaking to us out of fear, when our siblings had disappeared. We belonged to no one and strove for nothing (we were told that we must lay down our lives like bricks in the building of our Great Socialist Society). But we’d rather be vases, emptied and refilled with crystal-clear water. Or even better, arrows. How lovely it would be to shrink into skinny lines with sharp points, possessed by someone and held tenderly at the bow, something that can never deviate from the path dictated by its owner.

We enthusiastically agreed, but we asked, chastity for whom? There was no boy whom we loved, no one whom we waited for.

For Our Great Leader, of course, she said. You dumb eggs.

Suddenly it became clear what we must do. Yes, we would keep our bodies chaste for Our Great Leader. Wasn’t that what we were all supposed to secretly want? We loved him more than our parents, more than our siblings, and certainly more than the smelly boys we played with. We vowed to save ourselves for Our Great Leader and never to touch another man. Sometimes we saw the years of our lives stretching before us like an eternity, so we imagined ourselves wearing flowing white dresses and living alone in a chilly palace, like the immortal Chang’e. Other times we craved the day of our death, for on that day we would sure to be buried with great fanfare, like the Ancient Hag, or have stone memorials erected in our honor, like our great-grandmothers. The only difference was, we would not want to be buried with anything except our little red books. We would accept nothing other than the simple wooden coffin of a peasant.

We should reiterate, though, that we did not think of any of this chastity stuff in terms of sex. Sex was bourgeois, individualistic, dirty. We believed chastity was like loyalty. We were devoting our bodies to Our Great Leader and the Revolution. So, imagine our horror when we discovered erotic excerpts from one of our comrades’ diary published in an anonymous dazibao, taped to the front door of her home! Someone had stolen her diary (her younger sister, we suspected) and copied the very yellow scenes elaborated over pages and pages in big black characters on white paper: I opened to him like a soft red peony and a drop of blood stained the white sheets… His hands roamed over my body, those small hills and streams… Our Great Leader’s seeds flooded me at last…

After we recovered from our initial shock and shrieks, alternating between feeling scandalized and giggling behind our hands, we realized that we had been surrounded by a group of our former classmates. Some were the boys we saw at the river every week, some were boys and girls we had not seen for years. Like us, their necks were collared with red scarves, but there was not a trace of amusement on their faces. The author of the diary, a mousy girl who wore her hair in pigtails and ate her popsicles so slowly they’d often melt into thin white paths along her fingers, was nowhere to be seen.

“How dare she write about Our Great Leader using such disgusting language!”

“Who does she think she is?”

“That unclean bitch!”

We stayed quiet even though our hearts felt like ants crawling atop a hot stove. What should we say? What should we do? If we agreed with the others, our friend would surely get into trouble. At best she might be dispatched to do hard farm labor in some rural region, permanently losing her city hukou and never able to return. At worst she might die right there. But if we tried to defend her, we might be seen as counter-revolutionary. After all, weren’t her words denigrating to the Party? Wasn’t it akin to smearing a big pile of shit on Our Great Leader’s name? Didn’t he teach us that we should place Party righteousness above even our families? As we caught the faltering in each other’s eyes, the boys in the crowd spat angrily on the ground, each splat landing like a bullet.

Fortunately, we did not have to make a decision. At that moment, the mousy girl pushed her way through the burgeoning crowd and anchored herself next to the dazibao like a dog guarding her bone. Her pigtails were lopsided, and strands of wet black hair matted to her forehead. It was hard to tell whether she had just cleansed herself in the river or whether she was sweating profusely.

“Comrades!” She shouted to the crowd, raising her arm like a general. The dreamy look she usually wore on her pimply face was contorted into an inscrutable mask. “You are all making a mistake. These words are proof of my untainted and unsurpassable love for Our Great Leader. I am willing to devote my whole body and my whole soul to him. I am willing to bear his child and carry the seeds of the revolution—metaphorically or literally! I am willing to not look at a single man for the rest of my life out of my enduring love for him! I am willing to throw myself onto his funeral pyre because my loyalty to him lasts beyond this lifetime! Which one of you can say that? Which one of you can say you love Our Great Leader more than I? Which one?”

We all fell silent. The ants within us crawled at a more frantic speed. Could she be right that she loved Our Great Leader more than any of us? We had never encountered this strange situation before, so we could not fathom how we should react. If we accused her of being counter-revolutionary, we might have to prove that we loved Our Great Leader more than she claimed she did. It was one thing to take a secret chastity vow; it was an entirely different thing to publicly proclaim that we desired to have sex with Our Great Leader. Plus, if she was indeed a loyal revolutionary, it would be a crime to punish her.

The crowd’s collective hesitation gave the mousy girl more strength. With her chin tipped toward the sky, she peeled the dazibao from the door in a single, swift motion and folded it eight times into a small square. Transformed into that compact size, it suddenly seemed precious, like a love letter. “Whoever posted this is clearly a counter-revolutionary,” she yelled, waving the square in her hand. “I will find them and report them to the Party.”

With these words, the mousy girl turned and entered her house, slamming the door behind her so hard one of the hinges dislodged like a broken tooth. We shuffled in uncomfortable silence for a few seconds. Someone said they were thirsty. Someone said it was too hot. We were all relieved to have an excuse to disperse.

While we were glad we did not have to pelt her with stones, we also never spoke to her again. It would have been too dangerous to be associated with such an individual. Who knew what else she had written in her diary that could get her in trouble? And why was she writing, anyway? None of us had written a single word in our diaries for years. Even though we thought only revolutionary thoughts and said only revolutionary words, we were afraid of what might happen if we pried too deep into our consciousness.

She seemed to deliberately avoid us, too. After that day, she never set foot in front of Old Chen’s popsicle stall again. Nor did she show up to look at the Ancient Hag in the afternoons, or catch flies with us in the dried-up reservoir. That fall, rumors circulated: Some said she volunteered to do farm labor up north in the wintery region of Heilongjiang, where the ground froze solid by November. Some said that, after having heard about her supreme loyalty to Our Great Leader, the local Party committee had nominated her as an exemplary youth. Out of curiosity, we changed our route so we could pass by her family’s home every day, hoping to either catch a glimpse of her or confirm her disappearance. From a certain angle, crouching behind the willow tree across the street, we could see through a tiny opening in the newspapers crudely patched over a makeshift window. Only once, during a thunderstorm, did we see a swath of soft white gown flit past the opening. We were shocked—where had she obtained such a gown? Or had we seen a ghost?

We never walked past her home again. It was old-fashioned—perhaps even counter-revolutionary—to be superstitious, so we pushed thoughts of the mousy girl out of our minds. In the middle of that winter, sometime after the first snowfall we had seen in eight years, we heard from an old woman in our neighborhood that she had indeed been approached by high-ranking members of the regional Party Committee. They thought she had demonstrated exemplary devotion to Our Great Leader during the dazibao incident. Because of their nomination, she was now attending the prestigious school for revolutionary thought in Wuhan, training to become a full-fledged cadre. Outwardly, we applauded her meteoric rise; inwardly, we applauded ourselves for having the foresight to not pelt her with stones.

To everyone’s relief, we, too, went back to school the following autumn. By that time, we found ourselves eager to receive homework, for even the Ancient Hag and all the lore she had inspired had ceased to entertain us. We heard that without us, the exhibit sat empty day after day. In fact, it was not until years later—after they had finished excavating the site and added a number of additional artifacts to the original exhibit—that foreigners from all over the world started coming to see it.

When we started classes again, we noticed how the boys we had swam with were taller and darker, how the place where their t-shirt sleeves ended and their upper arms began bulged. We passed them notes folded into tiny squares and sometimes tasted their mouths in the twilight-lit alleyway between the school and the field. Eventually, enough seasons had passed that when the mousy girl did come up in conversation—as she did when we reminisced about that unusually hot summer—we no longer spoke about her in hushed tones. We agreed that in hindsight, what she had done was an ingenious political maneuver. She had escaped from the tiger’s jaws so effortlessly that we could not help but admire her cleverness. In fact, we began to think that she had devised the whole scheme from the beginning, knowing that it would help her accrue revolutionary credentials. A few of us seemed to remember that it was she who had proposed the vow of chastity in the first place.

By the time Our Great Leader passed away, she was the last thing on our minds. With the announcement of his death, we cried until our voices went hoarse, and tear streaks etched our cheeks like claw marks. Every street stall was draped with black strips of cloth. We felt directionless in this world without Our Great Leader, a heap of sand suddenly blown loose, arrows with their heads chopped off. In school, we turned in nothing but eulogies for Our Great Leader and skipped class to take turns reciting them on the field.

The third morning after we learned the horrible news, we saw a woman with gray hair running through the street, beating her chest with her fist and weeping. She wore black cloth slacks that hung to her ankles and a black shirt with only three of the dozen buttons fastened. As she approached, we could see the lumps of her breasts occasionally jump through the shirt like unruly animals. We assumed that like everyone else, she was mourning Our Great Leader, so we paused to admire how sincere her self-beating appeared, how heart-wrenching her shrieks sounded. Suddenly, as she passed by Old Chen’s stall, she began crying, “My daughter! My daughter!”

It was September, but we suddenly felt faint. We ran after the woman, pushing past the walls of black cloth that brushed coldly across our faces like rain. When we reached the one-room house, we saw the mousy girl we had once known dangling from a ceiling beam, wearing a soft white gown. A piece of paper resting on the fallen chair beneath her contained big characters written in black ink that read, “Bury me with Our Great Leader.”

We stared at the words as the wails of her mother and father shook our bones. The woman blubbered about how her daughter had returned home the previous night for the first time in years. Burying his wet face between his wife’s breasts, the man emitted a howl-like sound, one that echoed throughout a room that was empty except for two small beds in the corner, a coal stove, and three metal pans hanging by the newspaper-covered window we had once peeked through. Something about the acoustics of the room—perhaps an attribute of its emptiness— amplified each noise they made as if we were in a museum. At last we brought ourselves to look at her face. Even though her cheeks were the color of eggplant and her tongue stuck out from her swollen jaws, we couldn’t help but notice that the white dress made her look beautiful and timeless—just like Chang’e, just like the Ancient Hag.

We tried our best to honor our friend, we really did. We wrote letter after letter to the Party about her devotion to Our Great Leader. We beseeched them to bury her next him, or even near him—anywhere within a three-kilometer radius will do, please, it was her dying wish. We recounted her untainted revolutionary spirit, her bravery, her unflinching loyalty to the Cause. Even as the leaves began to fall, we continued writing with a passion that we hoped was fiery enough to burn away the vines of our own guilt. But sending off those letters was like dropping paper into a deep well; there was not even an echo to be heard. By then her body had begun to rot in the makeshift coffin. We told her parents that maybe we didn’t have the right address.

In the spring, a few months after the mousy girl had finally been buried, one of us returned from a trip to our nation’s capital bearing incredible news. She had seen the body of Our Great Leader in a glass case, perfectly preserved for the next thousand years as if in a deep sleep. The line of visitors who wanted to grieve him was so long it wrapped three circles around the mausoleum. He looked so serene that he must have been smiling in his moment of death, she said, and his skin was smooth, like he had died a young man. We shook our heads at this news, remembering the mousy girl and how beautiful she had looked in her white dress. This time, rather than imagining her in a simple wooden coffin next to Our Great Leader, we imagined that it was she, not he, who lay in the glass case.

My mom told me I should give a gift to the downstairs neighbors. My apartment was on the second floor, a one-bedroom with big windows and a stink bug problem. It was an old suburban house, converted into a duplex. When I first moved in I stood outside, looking up at the stone walls and two floors, imagining that the whole thing was mine, the back porch, too, and the garden.

A young couple lived downstairs. I ran into them only casually and said, “Hey, guys!” in that way I have, already pulling faces and doing a little dance with my arms. They’d nod back. It was a guy in his early-thirties with some sketched-looking tattoos on his forearm but an otherwise straight-laced demeanor, and his girlfriend who was so beautiful I started fantasizing about her privately. She didn’t smile much and had reddish hair. When I ran into her alone I’d say, “Hello there!” and she’d raise an eyebrow. The boyfriend wasn’t much friendlier, but seemed to enjoy patronizing me. “It’s pretty hot out,” he said once when he saw me coming downstairs in black jeans and a long-sleeve. I considered dropping trou then and there to see how he’d react. I figured he’d sort of nod and hold the door open for me gallantly, not looking at my hooha.

On the phone with my mom on a Saturday evening I said, “I think they hate me.”

“Everyone hates you,” she said. “You think you can just say anything.”

“I mean it, Mother.”

She told me to bake them cookies. I asked if she was making fun of me, and she was. I’d never baked cookies in my life.

“Write a little note,” she suggested.

I bought them a box of grocery store sugar cookies, the kind that always feel cold against your teeth and are decorated with a thick layer of too-sweet icing dyed bright blue. I sat on the kitchen floor, smoking a j out the window, shuffled some girly pop and wrote them a note: Hey, neighbors! Maggie here, from upstairs. You can call me Mags. Been too busy with the move-in to actually introduce myself. Enjoy some of these sweet treats. Looking forward to talking soon!

I wrote the note and read it twice over, thinking how very strange it was that I’d written this. I thought of the downstairs neighbors reading this note and thinking of me as the type of person who went out of her way to buy “sweet treats” for her new neighbors. I was pretty high by then. I went downstairs, dropped the cookies in front of the door, rang the doorbell, then ran back into my apartment, my heart vibrating in my chest.

The following Monday on my way to Parks Elementary for teacher meetings before the school-year started, I saw the neighbors had hit me back with a gift of their own. It was a bag of baby carrots, with a note that read: Maggie — we’ve talked it over, and decided we’d like to invite you for tea in the backyard. We know the backyard is ours, but we want to give you the opportunity to use it.

I brought the note with me to work, and the bag of baby carrots, which I made everyone pass around the room at the morning meeting.

“Nobody wants baby carrots for breakfast, Mags,” Dana said. She thought she was a big-shot because she taught fifth grade. I said, “Is that so?” and started eating my way through the bag. I made chewing noises so loud that Principal Gutierrez asked me to quiet down. He had to ask me twice because I was looking out the window, thinking about the downstairs neighbors and wishing I could tell my ex-girlfriend Taylor about them.

“Stop being discriminatory, Gutierrez,” I said.

“Don’t push me.” He had no irony about himself, the type of man who called us “ladies” when he told us to quiet down, even though there was a handful of men on the teaching staff.

During lunch break I stood across the street from school, smoking a cigarette. There was no smoking on school property. The fourth and fifth grade teachers always busted me. Emilia, my classroom assistant, crossed the street to join me. She was a sophomore at Wheelock College, where she studied elementary education. Her hair was in lots of little braids down her back, dyed purple at the ends, and she had perfect skin.

“Smoking’s bad for you,” she said, leaning on the tree next to me and rummaging through her 7-Eleven bag.. “Cigs are so 2007.”

I blew smoke into her face. She coughed artificially and waved her arms around until the air was clear. “It’s gonna be a long year,” I said, “if you keep that up.”

Emilia shrugged and pinched the black nub off her banana. “I’m just saying.”

Late in their resignation, the ones who are driven rarely sleep. Eventually, it is said, the long hushed noise of the road lulls them into a kind of perpetually half-awake state, where translucent dreams arrive and depart as something in between thought and phenomenon. Even on the precarious turns of a mountain road, where the edge of the car is almost flush with the edge of the cliff; even on the long straightaways of eastern Montana, where you can still encounter gas stations by the long asphalt straightaways; even in the gridded clog of the streets in southern Detroit, you can find these half-dreaming passengers, head against the window, looking but no longer seeing, moving but no longer traveling, breathing but no longer speaking. The NIH, in fact, nowadays classifies this as an addiction. I don’t remember the name they gave it. Nobody really uses it. I think we’d all prefer to believe that the ones who are driven aren’t sick or diseased or crazy or anything like that—just trying to get somewhere, but haven’t figured out where that somewhere is yet. I asked a friend of mine the other day: How are they different than any one of us? And then he said, Listen to yourself. Enough. Enough of that. This friend is tired of me talking and asking about these cases. Obsession is the word he uses. You’ve been obsessed with these cases ever since your mother passed, he tells me. It’s just an interest, I tell him back. She was interested in all this too. And I want tell him, Let me alone, fuck off, but I know that’s just my angry streak. He’d helped out a lot with her, especially toward the end.

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



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



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



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



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



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



*This conversation has been edited and condensed.*



***



“For each gay kid whose adolescence



was America in the forties or fifties

the primary, the crucial



scenario



forever is coming out—<br>

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



(Excerpt from “Queer,” 2012)

***



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



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



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



Openly gay?



**Yes.**



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



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



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



**What part of it?**



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



**Were you surprised?**



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



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



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



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



**Was that clear from the outset?**



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



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



**What about people like Roy Cohn?**



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



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



***



“Once I have the voice



that’s<br>

the line



and at



the end<br>

of the line



is a hook



and attached<br>

to that



is the soul”



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



***



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



I think that’s very true.



**Is that a deliberate choice?**



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



***



“I love sweets,—<br>

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

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

...<br>



But my true self<br>

is thin, all profile<br>



and effortless gestures, the sort of blond<br>

elegant girl whose<br>

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



(Excerpt from “Ellen West,” 1977)

***



**Do you read contemporary poetry?**



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



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



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



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



Or would.



**Is that a concern for you?**



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



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



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



***



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

undergraduates I was madly in love with you<br>

you say you<br>

knew. I say I knew you<br>

knew. You say<br>

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



(Excerpt from “Half-Light,” 2016)



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



***



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

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

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



(Excerpt from “Love Incarnate,” 1997)



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



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



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



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



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



I think that's true.

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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

<br>

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

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

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

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

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

*––aber du bist nicht gekommen*<br>

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

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

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

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

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

*––ich suchte*<br>

*(I sought)*<br>

<br>

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



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



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



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

<br>

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

<br>

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

<br>

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



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



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



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



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

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*Oh–– unser Garten* … <br>

*Oh–– our garden* … <br>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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



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



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



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



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

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

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

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



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



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



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

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

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

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...<br>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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No. 3, Langsam (Slow)<br>

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

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No. 4, Schwungvoll (Spirited)<br>

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

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

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

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No. 5, Walzer (Waltz)<br>

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



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



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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<br>

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



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



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



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



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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The audience laughs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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***

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

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


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

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

* * *

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

“Right,” he agrees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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***

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

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

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